The Outcast (19 page)

Only Gundalai seemed distracted, his body hunched into the chair, away from the rest of them, rocking gently backwards and forwards, his hands clutched around his stomach as though he was feeling nauseous. Nergui half-expected that at any moment he might explode in anger and demand an end to all this talking.

“This was nearly twenty years ago,” Nergui said. “I was new to the police service, just out of my intelligence role. Tunjin was working with me. It was a difficult time. The late 1980s. Russia struggling with reform, not far from collapsing into chaos. We'd lost our Soviet banker, but we didn't know what that might mean.” He looked across at Doripalam, catching his eye for the first time that morning. “It wasn't like it is now,” he said. “I didn't really even know what my job was.”

Doripalam returned his gaze, unblinking. “You've always known what your job is, Nergui.” It was hard to tell if there was any undertone of bitterness.

Nergui smiled. “Okay,” he said. “But at that point we were just trying to hold things together.” He stopped. “If it doesn't sound too pompous, we were trying to hold the nation together.”

“Trust me,” Sarangarel said. “It sounds too pompous.”

“Russia was in turmoil, and we knew how dependent we were on her. We were moving towards democracy but too slowly. And there were plenty out there who didn't wish us so well.”

“China,” Gundalai said, unexpectedly.

Nergui glanced at the young man. “Among others,” he said. “But, yes, China has rarely wished us well. China still thinks that, rightly, we should be her colony.” He smiled. “Whereas, of course, for most of the last century, Russia has known that was her prerogative.” Gundalai was still gazing fixedly at the floor, showing no sign of taking in what Nergui was saying.

“But Gundalai is right,” Nergui went on. “It was China we were most concerned about. The country was full of observers. From everywhere. Plenty from the USSR. But they had other things on their minds. And a presence from the West. Mostly interested in our mineral reserves. They didn't much care what happened to us, so long as they were in pole position to stake their claims to whatever assets we might have.”

“Observers?” Batzorig said, suddenly, as if he had just woken up to the conversation. “You mean spies?”

“Spies,” Nergui agreed. “Or close enough. Most were here legitimately. Or semi-legitimately: government representatives; diplomats; attachés; the odd academic, conducting some sanctioned research.” He took a sip of the coffee that had grown cold in front of him. “The one we're talking about was one of those. A very odd academic. Chinese. Wu Sam.”

“You allowed academics in?” Doripalam said.

“If they had legitimate reasons to visit. This one was an expert on Mongol history. An enthusiast for the great Mongol empire. A
bit of an eccentric. Buried in his books, supposedly. He wanted to conduct some original research, to delve among whatever artefacts he could find.”

“And you trusted him to do that?” Sarangarel said.

“Up to a point. We consulted with our own experts and they confirmed that his track record was legitimate.”

“But you said he was a spy?”

“We expected it. It went with the territory. The Chinese wouldn't have wanted him to come here if they didn't think that he might be able to feed something back. But it wasn't likely to be anything of great significance.”

“It sounds like a perfect arrangement,” Doripalam said. “So what was the problem?”

“The problem,” Nergui said, “was that Wu Sam was a genuinely odd academic. We thought he was a homosexual.”

“Which is still a problem for most of our countrymen,” Batzorig said.

“As you say,” Nergui was unperturbed. “And which was even more of a problem in those days. There were, as I'm sure you're aware, no homosexuals in the former Soviet Union.” He smiled. “So I am assured, anyway.”

Batzorig looked as if he was about to speak, but then closed his mouth.

“We're not really sure what happened in this case,” Nergui went on. “We later received some information that our academic had propositioned a number of young male students—”

“But you had him under surveillance?” Batzorig said.

“To a degree. But we weren't really interested in his private life.” Nergui gazed impassively at the young man, as if daring him to respond. “That wasn't the issue. The issue was that there was some apparent falling out between him and one of the young men in question. We don't know why.”

“A lover's tiff?” Batzorig said, sardonically.

“We don't know why,” Nergui repeated. “But whatever the cause, the student was killed.”

There was silence in the room. It was as if a light-hearted anecdote had suddenly been transformed into tragedy.

“Killed?” Doripalam echoed. “By this … ?”

Nergui nodded. “Wu Sam. Well, apparently. The circumstances weren't clear. It may have been manslaughter. I suppose it may even have been an accident. The student's head was crushed, as if struck with some heavy object.” He paused. “I am not telling this story very well. It was only later that we linked the death to Wu Sam. And by then there were other considerations.”

“I'm not sure I follow.”

“The student's body was found up in the north-east; in the area reputed to be the birthplace of Genghis Khan. The local militia received an anonymous tip-off. They sent out a couple of officers and their dogs discovered the body. At first, they assumed he was the victim of an accident—that he had somehow fallen from the path and struck his head. But the head was too badly damaged. It was difficult to see how a blow of sufficient force could have been administered by accident, unless the body had fallen from a greater height than was suggested by the surrounding terrain.” Nergui sounded as if he were quoting from some long-remembered forensic report.

“So the tip-off came from the killer?” Doripalam said.

“Maybe. But perhaps just some herdsman who didn't want to get involved. People usually tried to steer clear of the police in those days.”

“So what made you connect this death with Wu Sam?” Doripalam asked.

“Nothing, at first. It took a while even to identify the victim. He had papers with him, an identity card that confirmed he was from the city, but communications were not so good in those days. It was a few days before the locals contacted the city police, and some days after that before he was identified. A university student, son of two low-ranking Party members. No one knew that he had been out of the city. No one had any idea why he was visiting that area, or who might have been with him.”

“I thought you kept close tabs on everyone in those days,” Doripalam said.

Nergui shrugged. “Everyone was paranoid, everyone thought they were under surveillance. But the truth was—”

“That someone could get murdered without you having a clue who'd done it.”

“Quite so. Whatever the nature of the crime, we assumed that the motive would be trivial. Petty robbery or a brawl. Tunjin was the investigating officer.” Nergui allowed the silence in the kitchen to build. “One of his first cases as a detective. He'd recently joined us from the uniformed team. Very capable, of course. And he made the breakthrough, eventually. He went through the usual routine. Tracking down anyone who knew the victim, anyone who might have known the victim. It took us a long while to reach Wu Sam. Their subject areas were different—the victim was a scientist. Wu Sam had never taught or worked with him. But we received some information that the two men had been seen talking. There was a suggestion that the relationship might have been more than simply an acquaintance.”

“It hardly sounds like the basis of a robust prosecution,” Doripalam pointed out.

“It wasn't,” Nergui agreed. “It was just a lead, the first indication we'd had of anything out of the ordinary.” His eyes flickered momentarily across to Batzorig. “But it was little more than gossip.”

“But surely you'd have been keeping some sort of track of Wu Sam's movements?” Doripalam said.

“Up to a point. But we weren't that bothered in constraining his travel out of the city, particularly as he'd shown no interest in visiting the areas that might have given us cause for concern, such as the mineral-bearing regions. He'd made a couple of trips, both sponsored by the university and both to areas appropriate to his work—to Karakhorum, for example. As far as we knew, he'd not left the city during the period when the student had been killed.” He smiled. “Which just shows how pitiful our surveillance was. It's fortunate that our great populace never realised this, or the democratic revolution might have arrived much earlier.”

“So he did leave the city?” Doripalam asked.

“So it appeared, yes. Tunjin eventually uncovered a witness—one of the university's records clerks, someone with an eye for detail—who remembered seeing Wu Sam driving out of the university in the passenger seat of a truck. A truck driven by the student who subsequently became the victim. We identified another student—a family friend of the victim—who had lent him his parents' truck, supposedly for a weekend trip to the mountains. We found another witness who talked about a friendship between the two men—with some innuendo about how close the friendship might have been. And then we found two more students who claimed to have been propositioned by Wu Sam.”

“An unreciprocated proposition, presumably?” Batzroig said.

Nergui shook his head. “I've no idea. We were only interested in Wu Sam. We had taken our eye off the ball. We had not taken him seriously as a spy. We had not taken him seriously at all.” He stopped, his eyes staring into the far distance, as though his mind was replaying the events of twenty years before. “Which was a mistake. A serious mistake.”

“He was the killer?” Doripalam said. “He'd killed the student?”

“We never knew for sure. The evidence was there, but it was purely circumstantial. He'd been seen leaving the city with the student. It was presumed they'd been together when the student was killed. But it was little more than anecdote. Even the one who'd seen them couldn't be sure if they were really travelling together, or if they'd just encountered each other leaving the campus. There was no forensic evidence to link them. We didn't have access to DNA analysis in those days.” He spoke with evident regret. “So we never knew for sure. We interviewed him, but he claimed to have no idea what we were talking about. We couldn't prove otherwise.”

“But you were sure?” Doripalam said. It was the curse of the policeman's life. The instances when you knew—you knew with absolute certainty—who the perpetrator was, but lacked the evidence to substantiate it.

Nergui shook his head. “I can't even say that. But all of that was superseded in any case.”

“Superseded?” Doripalam repeated. It was a perfect piece of Nergui terminology—formal, precise, euphemistic, undeniably ironic.

Nergui's eyes were sharp, though Doripalam still felt that they were focused on something he would never see. “You remember the murders that winter? Two years ago?”

It was an entirely rhetorical question. Neither of them would forget that tortuous sequence of events.

“At the time,” Nergui said, “I said that that was the first real serial killer I had encountered in this country. But I still don't know if that was true.”

“And it wasn't quite a serial killer,” Doripalam pointed out. “Not in the sense that people would normally understand.”

“Not a straightforward psychopath,” Nergui agreed. “Whereas Wu Sam—”

“Was a straightforward psychopath?”

“I don't know what he was. All I know is that, too soon, we had another corpse on our hands.”

Doripalam was staring at Nergui, his brain belatedly making the connections that had been implicit in the narrative from the start. “Another corpse?” he prompted, already knowing and dreading what Nergui was going to say.

“Another student, barely out of his teens. An exchange student. He'd come here from one of those eastern republics—Turkmenistan, I think. Had hardly been here long enough to make any friends.” His voice faltered, as though even he was struggling to make sense of his own memories. “But you know how he died. Twenty years ago. He was wrapped in a carpet and kicked to death.”

There was a protracted silence. And then Gunlundai dropped his head into his hands and began to weep.

 

No one had warned him.

But it was worse; more than just a sin of omission. Out here in the frozen night, the truth was suddenly clear to him, and it chilled him more than the biting wind.

He had been set up.

He had thought that he was so clever, that he had spotted an opportunity others had missed. He would forge new alliances, build a new world. A new empire. But they were laughing at him all along. They had spotted his pretensions and taken the steps needed to steer him here.

This man was behind it all. A man with certain predilections. And, to keep him sweet, from time to time they would feed him a young tidbit. A young man who would do what he was told, go along with it for the sake of his career.

He could see exactly how it worked. It kept the contact happy, made him feel valued. But it kept him vulnerable, too—engaged in acts that were illegal here. Exposure would be devastating for one of his seniority. It was like feeding heroin to a user. It kept him dependent, kept him wanting more. It meant they had the contact exactly where they wanted him.

The contact was smiling. “They really should have warned you,” he said, again. “Although perhaps then you wouldn't have come. And that would have been a pity.”

He had no words to respond. Repulsion was rising in him, like bile in his throat. He was repelled by the prospect of acts that he had been taught were abhorrent, that were illegal in his own
country as here. And he was angry and resentful at being used in this way.