Minutes after leaving the safe house, the Hanomag truck pulled up beside the building where Yakushkin and the nurse had been killed. Outside its front door, a partisan stood guard. He was tall and bony, with sunken cheeks, narrowed eyes almost hidden under a floppy, short-brimmed cap, and armed with a German MP40 sub-machine gun. He wore a mixture of military and civilian gear: grey wool riding breeches, worn through at both knees and with leather panels along the inside of each thigh, had been tucked into knee-length lace-up boots. His jacket was a lumpy woollen thing, oddly tight about the shoulders but with arms so long the man had been forced to roll them up, revealing the black and white striped lining. The garment had been cinched around his waist with a German leather belt. The aluminium buckle, once emblazoned with an eagle, a swastika and the words ‘Gott Mit Uns’, had been ground down and polished smooth, and the shape of a red star cut out of the centre, a common modification among the partisans.
‘Good morning, Malashenko.’ Pekkala nodded to the partisan as he and Barabanschikov climbed down from the truck.
‘Good morning, Inspector,’ replied the man. He stood aside to let Pekkala by, but when Kirov tried to pass, the partisan blocked his way. ‘Not you, Commissar.’
‘The commissar is helping us,’ said Barabanschikov.
Malashenko shot a questioning glance at his commander, and for a moment seemed ready to defy him. ‘First time for everything,’ he muttered, as he grudgingly moved out of the way.
Barabanschikov rested his hand upon Pekkala’s shoulder. ‘I must leave now, but Malashenko will remain with you for protection.’
‘I don’t need a bodyguard,’ said Pekkala.
‘Consider it as insurance against your ending up as the next man on this assassin’s list of victims. Use the safe house for as long as you need it. Our patrols will keep an eye on the place.’ With those words, Barabanschikov climbed into the truck and the Hanomag disappeared down the road in a blue cloud of diesel exhaust.
‘Why haven’t the police been informed about this?’ Kirov asked Malashenko.
‘There are no police,’ he answered. ‘Not any more.’
‘Then what about the Red Army? Why aren’t they guarding the crime scene?’
‘Because they haven’t found it yet.’
‘So who reported the incident?’
‘The locals did. To us. We are the only ones they trust, Commissar, and there is good reason for that.’
Now Pekkala turned to Malashenko. ‘Does anyone at the garrison know that Yakushkin is even missing?’
‘They knew he was gone from the barracks last night,’ replied the partisan, ‘but no one looked for him until this morning. They are aware that he had been spending time with Antonina Baranova, the woman who lived in this house. It won’t be long before they find out he was here.’
‘And where is this woman?’
‘Upstairs with a bullet in her brain,’ Malashenko told him, ‘the same as Commander Yakushkin.’
‘How long have we got to examine the crime scene?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Five minutes, maybe less. But we need to be gone before then. Once those soldiers realise their commander is dead, they’ll arrest every partisan they can lay their hands on.’
‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ Pekkala assured him.
In the front hallway, Kirov almost tripped over the body of Yakushkin’s bodyguard, Molodin. No one had touched him. He straddled the narrow space of the hallway, neck bent against the lower part of the wall so that his head was upright. Molodin’s left arm had been dislocated in the struggle and now his hand hung poised above his face, fingers strangely clawed, as if to cast a spell upon himself. The dead man’s lips had turned a livid purple, as had the tips of his fingers and his skin was grey and patched with blooms of yellowish-blue.
At the top of the stairs, Kirov and Pekkala entered the little dining room where the two murders had taken place. The air smelled of the stew which Antonina had prepared. Congealed fat merged with the blood of the victims, staining the bare wooden floor. Lying in among the broken plates, the knives and forks and the remains of the uneaten dinner, lay the bodies of Yakushkin and the woman.
Kirov gasped as he realised she was the nurse who had treated him at the hospital.
Antonina lay on her back, eyes half open and the side of her skull shot away. Her teeth had been stained red with her own blood.
Pekkala crouched over Yakushkin’s body, which lay rigor-mortised like a statue tumbled from its pedestal. The commander lay on his right side, his right arm tucked under him and his left stretched out in front of him, as if reaching towards the gun he had been carrying. The point-blank shot which killed him had done so much damage that if it were not for the insignia on his uniform, he might have been unrecognisable.
‘That appears to be the general’s gun.’ Kirov pointed at the Tokarev lying on the floor. ‘He must have drawn his weapon, but by then it was too late to use it.’
‘Possibly.’ Pekkala lapsed into silence as he stared at the corpse of the woman.
‘Why “possibly”?’ asked Kirov. ‘You think he might have wounded the assassin?’
Pekkala nodded towards the dead woman. ‘Look at the placement of the shots.’
‘One to the head and one to the chest.’
‘Which tells you what, Kirov?’
‘That the woman wasn’t killed by the first bullet that struck her.’
‘Not killed, perhaps,’ agreed Pekkala, ‘but mortally wounded for certain.’
‘I don’t see what you’re getting at, Inspector.’
‘The first bullet struck her dead centre in the chest, as if she was a target at a shooting range. After sustaining that injury, she had, at best, a few minutes left to live. Nothing could have saved her. The assassin would have realised that.’
‘And you’re wondering why he bothered to administer a coup de grace when he knew she would be dead before he even reached the street?’
Just then, Pekkala spotted something. He bent down over the shellac of congealed blood which had seeped out around the corpses.
Kirov clenched his teeth as he watched Pekkala’s fingers reach into the gore.
When Pekkala straightened up, he held in his hand three empty pistol cartridges.
‘Are they the same kind we found in the bunker?’ asked Kirov.
Pekkala examined them closely. ‘Two of them show signs of having been reloaded,’ he replied, ‘but the third one does not.’
Kirov picked up the commander’s gun and removed the magazine. ‘There is one bullet missing from the magazine. The rest are standard ammunition.’
‘Which means that the assassin fired twice,’ Pekkala pointed at the two bodies, ‘and that Yakushkin’s final act was to murder the woman with whom he was just sitting down to dinner.’
‘Why would he fire at her and not at the man who was trying to kill him?’ Kirov wondered aloud. ‘Could she have been the murderer’s accomplice?’
‘The general must have thought so,’ said Pekkala, ‘but what I don’t understand is why the gunman would take the time to finish her off when every second spent at the crime scene increased his chances of being caught as he tried to escape?’
‘He must have chosen not to let her suffer any longer than was absolutely necessary.’
‘Because she was a woman?’ suggested Pekkala.
‘That can’t be it,’ replied Kirov. ‘He didn’t hesitate when he killed those two secretaries in the bunker.’
Pekkala waved his hand over the bodies. ‘Then something else happened here. Whatever the answer, it points towards a weakness in his character.’
‘If you call compassion a weakness.’
‘In his line of work,’ replied Pekkala, ‘that’s exactly what it is.’
Just then, they heard a sound, a scuffling which seemed to be coming from inside a chest of drawers set against the wall.
Both men lunged for their weapons. In an instant, Pekkala’s Webley and Kirov’s Tokarev were aimed at the bulky wooden structure.