the letters had been sanded by the wind to the point where they were barely legible. Slivka slowed down and then halted, looking to Korolev for a final decision. He looked around them. There wasn’t a clump of brush big enough to call a bush for two kilometres in any direction and the few winter-stripped trees that were visible looked like black skeletons praying to heaven for forgiveness. It was a grim enough place. The Lord knew he’d be glad to get away from here and back to Moscow. And the thought of Moscow, a thousand kilometres away, reminded him of Valentina Nikolaevna and the way she’d put her hand on his chest when the NKVD man had knocked on the door. He wondered what it had meant, that small moment of intimacy. It was something he’d avoided considering in the time since, but now, for some reason, the way she’d looked at him and the feel of her hand pressing against him seemed like something to hold on to. He nodded to Slivka, who turned left towards Angelinivka.
The village itself, when they got there, barely deserved the name – two dusty lines of dilapidated buildings that met at a rutted crossroads. There was no sign of the border guard or the truck Andreychuk had stolen. In fact there was no sign of anyone at all. Slivka drove slowly past the long low peasant houses, with wooden walls more grey than brown emerging from mud foundations and straining under snow-topped damp thatch. A dog with legs as thin as whips tottered to its feet in front of them, baring its teeth but unable or unwilling to muster the energy to bark. Korolev had seen more depressing places, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember when.
‘Where are the people?’ Slivka asked.
‘I don’t know, Slivka, but there’s the church – and that’s what Andreychuk and Lenskaya came to see.’
The church stood about a hundred metres past the last house in the village and around it stood the wooden crosses of a graveyard. As they drove towards it, Andreychuk’s truck came into view, along with two cold-looking sentries, who unslung their rifles when they saw them.
‘Militia,’ Korolev said, holding out his identity card for inspection. A tall youth with an acned face looked down at the card, his brows contracting as he read it. His comrade, another one barely out of his teens but half the other’s size, stood to the side, his rifle held at waist height aiming at a spot just behind Korolev’s ear.
‘Point that damned gun somewhere else,’ Korolev said, and the short boy’s eyes came to life. He turned to his comrade, who handed Korolev’s Militia card back to him as though it was red hot.
‘You’re happy with my identification, are you?’ Korolev growled.
‘Absolutely, Comrade Captain,’ he said.
‘Good,’ Korolev said, opening the door, pleased to see he had at least three inches on the two sentries, and a good deal of weight to boot.
‘When did you find it?’
‘An hour back, Comrade Captain.’
‘I thought your people searched the village last night,’ Korolev said to the taller guard.
‘Yes, Comrade Captain. At eight o’clock and at eleven, but it wasn’t here then.’
Korolev walked over to the truck, noticing the thin even layer of snow on top of the bonnet. It had been there for a while.
‘Are you searching the area?’
‘Two sweeps have gone north and south on a three-kilometre width, Comrade Captain. Men every twenty metres.’ The guard pointed across the fields to where some men with rifles could be seen walking in line some distance away. ‘And we’ve been through the village as well, and the church of course.’
Korolev looked up at the dome of the church. Close up it was clear the facade had suffered since the arrival of Soviet Power, and not just the paint either – bullet holes marked the stone walls in a steady line, on top of which the crucifix was gone from the dome and, to judge from the chipping around the stump, it too had been the target of the machine gunner’s attention.
‘Why is the village empty?’
‘They were moved to the kolkhoz farm up the road last week, Comrade Captain. Soviet Success. It’s about four kilometres away.’ Again he pointed, this time along the road that led away from the village and to a new future. ‘They’re knocking this place down. It will be fields by the summer.’
Clearly no one had told the emaciated dog about the move.
‘We should look inside,’ Korolev said.
The church’s interior was even colder than outdoors – the solid, still cold of a meat locker. Predictably it had been desecrated. Who knew who’d done it? Party activists who’d come from the cities to lead the peasants to collectivization by example, and had ended up forcing them to it at gunpoint? Soldiers? Border guards? It didn’t matter now – the damage had been done. They picked their way through the debris gingerly – to judge from the stench the place had been used as a latrine – but there was nothing to indicate the caretaker had been there, or his daughter.
Stepping outside again, Korolev looked at the two sentries, huddled in the lee of the truck, inhaling warmth from cigarettes they protected with both hands. Korolev nodded towards the worn-looking wooden Orthodox crosses in the cemetery – crosses that were from a different time when such a symbol wasn’t considered to be a political statement. After not more than a minute’s searching, they came across the recently tended grave of Anna Andreychuk.
‘His wife?’ Slivka asked.
‘Possibly,’ Korolev said, running a finger along the wooden plank that spelt out her demise. No cross for Andreychuk’s wife under Soviet Power. So was this the reason for the visit Andreychuk had made with his daughter to this place? A final act of remembrance before the village was bulldozed and forgotten? At least Andreychuk’s wife would still be here when the Lord came looking for her on the day of judgement. Nothing else would. Not the house she’d been born in, nor the church where she’d worshipped. Even the marker on her grave would be removed when they turned the cemetery into tillage.
They were just getting back into the car when a soldier came running from the fields.
‘We’ve found him,’ he shouted breathlessly to the sentries, ‘down by the river. Dead.’
Chapter Nineteen
From a distance the body looked like nothing more than a pile of crumpled clothing, the worn boots only a foot away from the wide river’s bank. The only thing that marked Andreychuk out as anything other than rags was the puddle of frozen blood that surrounded him.
‘Has anyone touched the body?’ Korolev asked the captain commanding the detachment.
‘If anyone has, it was before I got here,’ he replied. ‘I was a Militiaman myself for two years, in Omsk.’
Korolev watched the wind turn the white hair on the dead man’s head. Then he looked across the river.
‘You did well,’ he said after a long pause. ‘Can you get a message to Dr Peskov at the School of Anatomy in Odessa? I’d like him to see the body as it was found.’ He studied the sky – it was clear for the moment. Hopefully they wouldn’t have to cover the corpse. ‘We’ll need a forensics team to come out as well; Peskov can pass the message on.’
As the captain left, Korolev turned his attention back to the river bank, approaching a little closer to examine the dead man. Andreychuk’s face – robbed of life – seemed thinner, the beard more dishevelled. His eyes were open and Korolev resisted the temptation to lean down and close them.
‘Only the crayfish becomes more beautiful with death,’ he muttered to himself.
‘What was that?’ Slivka asked.
‘Nothing. Just a stupid saying.’ He didn’t feel comfortable repeating it and fortunately she didn’t press him. The entry wound was in the nape of the neck, and while there was a revolver in Andreychuk’s hand, it seemed unlikely that he would have shot himself in such a way. This looked like murder to Korolev. He leant forward to look more closely at the gun. A Nagant. Could it be a souvenir of Andreychuk’s fighting days? Korolev had carried a Nagant himself when he’d fought for the tsar, and another when he’d fought for the Red Army in the Civil War. They were still standard issue for the Militia and the army, and Korolev was an exception in that he carried a smaller Walther he’d acquired from a Polish officer back in ’twenty-two – but then there were different rules for detectives. Andreychuk’s weapon looked as though it wasn’t long from the factory, but he didn’t like the barrel one bit. It looked shorter than the army version and, as far as he knew, these short-barreled Nagants were only issued to the Militia or State Security. He pointed it out to Slivka.
