The Bloody Meadow (7 page)

The conservatory was a high room, dominated by two elderly vines that looked as if they’d seen better days. He stepped inside and shut the door quietly behind him. For some reason he felt
as though he was trespassing, as though the family who’d once lived here might emerge at any moment and discover him tiptoeing through their home.

He paused for a moment, to reassure himself that this was nonsense, that he was here on official business, and, anyway, he was looking for Babel and everything was fine. But still it was
undeniable that there was an atmosphere to the place – the girl had died here, of course, perhaps that was the reason for his uneasiness.

He walked through an open door, passing into a large dining room with a ceiling made entirely of glass through which the natural evening light illuminated the room. At any other time he would
have paused to examine the roof more closely because it was extraordinary, but at the far end an old man with a bushy white beard stood, head bowed, in front of one of the four large cast-iron
candelabras that protruded from the walls and which must have been installed to illuminate the room before the days of electricity. At the sound of Korolev’s step the old man turned, and
Korolev was surprised to see that the milky blue eyes beneath his thick white brows were wet with tears.

‘Are you all right, Comrade?’ he asked, walking towards him.

‘I’m fine,’ the man said, turning away to compose himself.

Which was a lie if Korolev had ever heard one. But it wasn’t his business to pry – not yet at least.

‘Is this where she died?’ he asked, surprised to hear his own voice.

‘Yes,’ the old man said, having turned back towards him. ‘The Lord help me, I was the one who found her.’

Korolev nodded his sympathy, surprised that the old man spoke the Lord’s name so freely. ‘Comrade Andreychuk, is it? The caretaker?’

‘That’s me. Efim Pavlovich Andreychuk. The unlucky Andreychuk. The poor soul who found the dead girl.’

‘My name is Korolev. Alexei Dmitrieyvich. I’m a friend of Babel, the writer. I was sorry to hear the news.’

‘The film people are out in the fields, if you’re looking for them. But they should be back soon.’ Andreychuk turned back towards the bracket. ‘She should have stayed in
Moscow, you see. This place never brought her anything but sadness.’

‘What do you mean?’ Korolev asked, thinking the words curious. The girl hadn’t spent that long on the film – surely not long enough to pack in so much sadness. Andreychuk
looked round at him as though he’d forgotten Korolev was there.

‘She’s dead, that’s what I mean,’ the caretaker said, frowning. ‘Nothing more than that.’

‘But you spoke as though she came from round here. I thought she came from Moscow.’

Andreychuk’s frown deepened, and his voice, when he spoke, was gruff. ‘She was from these parts a long time ago, or so she told me. She should have stayed in Moscow.’

Interesting that she’d been from the area – that information wasn’t in the file.

‘Was there something underneath?’ he asked, looking back at the wall bracket and wondering how she’d done it. ‘For her to stand on?’

Andreychuk glanced round at him, suspicious but also thinking.

‘A chair,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Someone must have moved it.’

Korolev looked at the wall fixture and tried to imagine the girl preparing the noose, tying the rope round one of the metal arms – they looked solid enough – and then kicking the
chair away.

‘A hard way to go,’ he said, stating the obvious – a skill he’d learnt early in his career as a policeman. ‘There are easier ways to kill yourself.’

‘I don’t know why she did it. All I know is I wish I hadn’t been the one to find her. Excuse me, Comrade, I’ve work to attend to.’

The caretaker turned and walked out of the room and Korolev tried to imagine how it must have been for him when he found her – the weight of the corpse swinging, her feet inches from the
ground. No wonder the poor fellow was a little taciturn.

He took a deep breath and opened his notebook and by holding his hand above his head estimated the height of the bracket, knowing, as he did, the distance from the ground of his up-stretched
index finger. Seven foot two inches, give or take an inch or two. He’d measure it properly later on. He looked around – there was no shortage of chairs, but as to which of them had been
underneath the dead girl, it was impossible to tell. He folded his notebook shut and turned to leave the room. If necessary he’d get a forensic team to have a look around, but it was a shame
that there’d been no effort to preserve the scene. Perhaps Rodinov had thought it might be indiscreet to do so.

§

With nothing else to do, Korolev gave himself a tour of the house. At some stage much of the original furniture must have been replaced with more functional pieces, better
suited to the house’s new role as an educational establishment for Soviet youth, but there was still plenty of the finest marble and gilding in evidence and the walls and ceilings still
carried beautiful murals and frescoes.

Eventually Korolev found himself in the large entrance hall, the walls of which were hung with Ottoman weaponry, presumably from when this part of the world had been taken from the Turks. The
front door was now mysteriously open and so he walked out through the splendid porch towards the stables, where the Ukrainfilm vehicles stood on the cobblestoned yard.

It had been one of the ironies of the tsarist times that the oppressing classes had looked after their horses better than they had their workers, but now the horses had been kicked out and the
stables turned into classrooms. Light yellowed the panes of a window in the far corner of the three-sided yard and he walked towards it and opened the corresponding door marked Production Office
without knocking. A bank of three female typists paused, their hands held above the keys like pianists, while behind them a young man with close-cropped brown hair and a pleasant face looked up
from whatever it was he was reading.

‘Excuse me, Comrades,’ Korolev said. ‘I’m looking for Isaac Emmanuilovich. You know, the writer? Babel?’

‘Babel,’ the young man said, rising from his desk. ‘Of course, but I’m afraid he’s out with the crew. They’ll be back soon though, the light’s gone now.
Pyotr Mikhailovich Shymko,’ he said, advancing with his hand outstretched. ‘Production coordinator.’

‘Korolev, Alexei Dmitriyevich. I’m a friend of his.’

‘Welcome.’ Shymko looked at the girls as though considering whether to introduce them.

‘Larisa.’ He addressed a pretty blonde after a moment’s pause. ‘Would you take Comrade Korolev over to the house? Make him comfortable while he waits?’

Larisa frowned as she stood to her feet, but Korolev waved her down.

‘Please, Comrades, I can see you’re busy. What with the tragedy, you must have your hands full.’

‘The tragedy?’ Shymko echoed, and Korolev noticed that Larisa’s eyes had filled with tears.

‘The poor girl who killed herself.’

Larisa sobbed and ran from the room.

‘I apologize,’ Korolev said, surprised to discover an unlit cigarette had appeared in his mouth. One of these days he’d give up – aside from anything else he
wouldn’t be able to afford it if he’d reached the stage where his hands were feeding the things into his mouth without conscious thought.

‘Excuse me,’ Shymko said as a telephone began to ring, but Korolev had spotted a black car approaching the house and, deciding it must be the Odessa contingent, made his own excuses
and left. When the car stopped, however, it was Belakovsky who climbed out rather than Militiamen and his welcoming committee consisted only of a distraught typist.

‘Larisa, is it true?’

‘It’s true, Comrade Belakovsky, it’s true,’ Larisa wailed, and Korolev, following behind the girl, saw her bury herself in Belakovsky’s overcoat.

‘Hello again, Comrade Belakovsky,’ Korolev said and Belakovsky nodded a greeting, before turning his attention back to Larisa.

‘Mikhail told me. I didn’t believe him.’ Then he paused, looking back to Korolev, recognizing him yet again, with a look of surprise.

‘Comrade Korolev?’

‘Yes, a coincidence. I’m a friend of Babel’s. I’d no idea we were visiting the same place.’

‘You have to understand – a colleague has died unexpectedly. She was one in a thousand. A vital part of this production, of course, but more than that. Much more than
that.’

Behind him stood a sorry-looking man whom Korolev deduced was Mikhail, the bearer of bad news. The other occupant of the car – Lomatkin, the journalist – was leaning against the car
door for support, as pale as the dead girl’s ghost. It seemed as though Masha Lenskaya had made quite an impression during her short life.

‘Korolev,’ Belakovsky said, as though thinking aloud. ‘Didn’t you say you were a detective – from Petrovka Street?’

‘I didn’t. You did and I’m on holiday,’ Korolev replied, perhaps a little too quickly.

Belakovsky glanced at the house, and if it wasn’t to see where Mushkin was, Korolev would have been most surprised. The NKVD definitely had a thing or two to learn about secrecy, even if
they were always asking it of other people.

‘On holiday?’ Belakovsky repeated slowly, probably remembering how that fellow Bagraev had been booted off the plane. ‘What a coincidence. And perhaps fortunate for us. What
did you say your specialization was?’

‘Petrovka Street normally handles the more serious crimes. And I’m an experienced detective.’

‘I see – bank robbery, that sort of thing. Murder perhaps?’ The fellow was putting two and two together and making four, so Korolev nodded politely, and felt in his overcoat
pocket for his cigarettes, pleased that at least this time it was a deliberate rather than instinctive action.

‘Yes, I’ve handled the odd murder or two,’ he said, lighting the cigarette off the one in his mouth.

Another black car hove into view as they stood there weighing each other up, and when it pulled to a halt disgorged a stocky Militia colonel, who looked at them anxiously. He was followed by a
tough-looking young woman in a leather jacket and a bald man carrying a doctor’s case. No sooner had the first car been emptied of its occupants than another arrived and three uniforms under
a sergeant’s command scrambled out. It was turning out to be quite a party, and right on cue the guest of honour arrived.

‘Did you hear, Comrade Mushkin?’ Belakovsky said. ‘Korolev here is a Militia detective from Petrovka Street, visiting Babel.’

‘Indeed,’ Mushkin said, with a sliver of a smile, and Korolev deduced that the Major wasn’t too burnt-out to appreciate the humour inherent in the play they were all acting
out. But for whose benefit, God alone knew.

KOROLEV had never been in an ice house before. Of course, he was aware that before the Revolution the rich had tried to preserve some of winter’s bite to relieve the
summer’s swelter: he wasn’t uncultured after all and he took an interest in the wider world – as any Soviet citizen should. Indeed, in any other circumstances he would have found
it interesting to stand in this small, brick-lined cave and to be lectured on its construction and significance. But this was not the time, in his opinion, or the place.

Shymko ran a hand along a line of bricks, his voice barely a whisper but clear in the silence of the artificial cave.

‘Two hundred peasants worked for an entire summer under the direction of an Englishman – shifting the earth to build the hill in which we stand. They say he laid each brick himself,
the Englishman,’ Shymko said in his quiet voice. ‘Look how careful he was, Comrades.’

It was true, the brickwork was indeed a curious relic of that previous phase of society’s historical evolution, but the dead girl was the reason they were all here and Korolev found it
difficult to look at anything other than her white face. They’d laid her out on a trestle table, her head supported on what looked like a sandbag, her skin stretched over the cheekbones where
death had pulled it taut. She could have been sleeping, and her features wouldn’t have given the lie to it, were it not for the raw marks on her neck where the rope had caught her. As always
in the presence of a corpse, he found himself struck by how fragile life was, and amazed that such an intangible thing as consciousness should cause such a change to the physical appearance of a
person. The characteristics that had seemed to colour the girl’s photograph were now absent, as if paint had been rubbed from a picture to reveal the plain canvas underneath.

‘Captain Korolev?’ Mushkin said and Korolev found himself the centre of attention. Major Mushkin, Marchuk the Militia colonel, Peskov the bald Odessa pathologist, Shymko and the
thin-lipped young woman in the leather jacket were all waiting for him to do or say something, and he wasn’t quite sure what.

‘I’ve seen him work before, Comrades. He spends a lot of time just looking, but the things he sees, the things he sees . . .’

And Babel, of course. How could he have forgotten Babel? How the hell had he managed to wangle his way in here anyway?

‘Seeing as we have a comrade from the famous Petrovka Street with us so fortuitously,’ Mushkin said, pronouncing the last word ironically, ‘perhaps he might look over the body?
I’m sure Dr Peskov won’t mind. Dr Peskov, you don’t mind, do you?’

The bald pathologist shook his head so hard that his round spectacles nearly fell off.

‘I’m no pathologist, Major,’ Korolev began and wasn’t surprised to see a muscle in the major’s jaw clench with irritation, ‘although it’s true
I’ve seen a few dead bodies. Maybe the Comrade Doctor should carry on with his preliminary examination as he would normally and I can observe over his shoulder. I’m sure his experience
in this area is far greater than mine, but an extra pair of eyes is always useful.’

Peskov glanced at the colonel, who, in turn, looked towards Mushkin just as a nervous gundog might to his master. Eventually Mushkin nodded his agreement, but not before giving Korolev a long,
thoughtful look which the detective was unsure how to interpret. The doctor stepped forward and stood at the end of the table, picking up the dead girl’s head in both his hands, leaning
forward. His fingers felt underneath her neck as though searching for something. Korolev also approached the body and bent forward to look more closely.