‘Yes,’ said Bogaty, ‘I see.’ Aliev had been right: it was important. Not that he would have been irritated if it hadn’t been: given the opportunity to work meant he did not have to go home to Lydia and a diatribe of complaints about the conditions of the apartment and what she could afford or not afford upon an MVD investigator’s salary and when was he going to be promoted to a senior investigator of the homicide division to get the salary increase they need just to exist, let alone live. Without the summons here he would have been drinking in some cafe and lied about a fictitious assignment when he got home.
‘It could have been a panicked reverse to get away, of course,’ suggested Aliev, guarding himself against a mistaken summons.
‘Why reverse?’ said Bogaty. He was a fat but tidy man who cared about his appearance. He’d been oversized since he was a child and long ago abandoned diets: Lydia complained about what he spent on clothes, as well. Once the complaint had been about how heavy he was when they made love. They didn’t any more, which was a small relief.
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Aliev, relieved.
‘Who was he?’ said Bogaty.
‘Important: the reason for calling you,’ said Aliev, offering the investigator the identification documents which had been taken from Malik’s body.
‘Shit!’ said Bogaty. He supposed the KGB caused him more annoyance than Lydia did, if that were possible. There were frequent occasions when investigations in which he had been involved overlapped on to what they regarded their territory – which was everything – and Bogaty resented their arrogance and despised their supposed ability as competent investigators. He said: ‘Have you told them?’
‘I waited until you arrived,’ dodged Aliev.
‘Witnesses?’
‘None.’
‘Who found the body?’
‘A motorist.’
‘What’s he say?’
‘He turned off Oktyabrya and his lights picked up someone lying on the pavement. He was going to drive by, thinking it was a drunk, but then he saw blood. So he stopped.’
‘And?’
‘He halted with his lights on the body, checked that the man was dead and called emergency.’
‘Where is he now?’
Aliev jerked his head in the direction of one of the obstructing trucks. ‘Making a fuller statement.’
‘Could he have done it?’
‘No,’ said Aliev positively. ‘He’s not showing the sort of panic there would be, if he’d done it. His car is not marked…’ The man nodded towards the tyre tracks. ‘… And his tyres are different from those.’
Bogaty sighed, slump shouldered, and said: ‘I suppose it’s time we alerted Dzerzhinsky Square: saw how the big boys operate.’
As Aliev moved away, the pathologist straightened from the body, nodding to Bogaty. ‘Crushed,’ the man announced unnecessarily. ‘Dead almost at once. Back was broken, too. Looks like the poor sod had already suffered enough as it was, before this.’
‘Couldn’t have felt much, then?’ said Bogaty.
‘He felt a lot,’ insisted the pathologist.
The doctor’s departure signalled the end of the technical examination. The photographer started packing up his equipment and the forensic expert tidied small, see-through envelopes into a special wide-bodied briefcase.
‘Anything?’ Bogaty asked the man.
‘Glass fragments,’ reported the forensic examiner. ‘Some paint, too…’ He gestured towards the bloodstained wall. ‘I think the car scraped it.’
‘What about those tyre marks?’ asked Bogaty.
‘Definitely a reverse,’ judged the man. ‘Bloodstained from the initial impact, which registered when it came back.’
‘Could the car had been jammed against the wall so that the driver needed to reverse?’
‘Possibly,’ said the man. ‘But if it had jammed I would have expected more evidence of damage… more glass, more paint. Maybe some broken-off metal.’
‘But there was some damage to the vehicle?’
‘Certainly a broken light and a scraped wing.’
With Bogaty’s arrival, the uniformed men had stubbed out their cigarettes. To one Bogaty said: ‘Get the trucks moved to let the mortuary ambulance in.’
He stood directly at Malik’s feet, plump chin against plump chest, staring down, moving his head left to right and right to left, tracing the passage of the hit and run vehicle. Not simply hit and run, he decided. Hit and hit again. Then run. The bloodied outline and tread of the tyres were very obvious in one direction, but there were no brake marks from what must have been the approach. Rigor mortis was already stiffening the body: the man’s arm was thrown out, hand extended in a pointing gesture, and the lips were strained back from the teeth in a seized grimace of agony. Poor bugger, Bogaty thought: like the pathologist said, he’d been through enough already. Bogaty wondered how he’d suffered the earlier, appalling injury.
What would the KGB response be? Not his concern; he guessed there was very little that would be his concern. Still, excuse enough to avoid the nightly tirade from Lydia. Bogaty, who knew himself to be a very positive policeman, recognized that in his private life he was contrastingly ineffectual. One day, he reflected, he would divorce her. One day. Recalling the name of the corpse before him, Bogaty wondered if Vasili Dmitrevich Malik had been married. It would be the KGB’s job to advise any widow. He would have liked to have known what the man’s position had been in the Committee of State Security. Something further not to be his concern. He supposed most investigators would be grateful for such an apparently difficult case shortly to be taken from their hands, but Bogaty wasn’t. He enjoyed detective work, discovering what people did not want to be discovered, and would have liked to find out why a crippled giant of a KGB man had been intentionally run over and killed. Maybe not so difficult to discover: Bogaty’s guess was someone with a grievance. And there were certainly enough people in the Soviet Union with grievances against the KGB: the majority of the population, he guessed.
Bogaty looked sideways, conscious of someone approaching and expecting to see Aliev but instead recognized the uniform of a KGB colonel. Instinctively he straightened and at once, irritated at the gesture of respect, relaxed again. In self introduction, he said: ‘Investigator Bogaty. MVD homicide.’
The man nodded without bothering to reply, gazing down at the body.
‘And you?’ pressed Bogaty.
The colonel turned and for a moment Bogaty imagined the man was not going to identify himself. Then he said: ‘Panchenko. Security. KGB First Chief Directorate.’
‘He must have been important for a colonel to be involved?’
‘It is none of your business,’ rejected Panchenko curtly.
Supercilious shit, thought Bogaty: they were all the same. He said: ‘He was deliberately run down. You can see where the car reversed over him.’ He saw the uniformed man shiver from the cold: the feeling had practically gone from Bogaty’s own hands and feet.
Panchenko said: ‘It will be a KGB investigation.’
‘I anticipated it would be.’
‘What examination has there been?’
‘Pathological, forensic and photographic,’ listed Bogaty.
‘It’s all to be handed over.’
Why was politeness always so difficult for KGB personnel? Bogaty said: ‘It will be.’
‘Immediately.’
‘When it’s available,’ qualified Bogaty. It was hardly independence but it was something, at least.
‘And all your notes.’
‘I haven’t made any,’ said Bogaty.
‘Anything your officers might have.’
‘The motorist who found the body is being interviewed.’
‘I definitely want that.’
‘That’s all there is.’
‘Sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure!’ Bogaty wasn’t impressed or frightened, even if the man were a KGB colonel.
‘I want everything.’
‘You already said that.’
‘Just so you understand.’
‘He was killed,’ insisted Bogaty.