THE WHEELS ON the cable car squeaked in regular rhythm as it pulled Yuri and Timur up the mountainside. The steel tracks were enclosed in a wooden tunnel, which was the only thing preventing their faces being lashed by the icy wind. This was the second death in the space of a month of someone Yuri had known. News of the Latvian’s death had come as a shock, but he knew he was not going to shed any tears for Semyon. Still, he had been Yuri’s assistant, and therefore his responsibility, at least to some degree.
Yuri glanced over at his travelling companion, who was staring at him. He wasn’t crying either. Although Yuri couldn’t remember Timur ever showing any kind of emotion. When he had relayed the news about Semyon, he had done so as though it were an inconvenience.
‘Looks like your job is safe then,’ said Timur. ‘Competition out of the way.’
Yuri didn’t answer.
‘I know you sabotaged the heating system, just like he said,’ continued Timur. ‘That was smart.’
Yuri looked away and remained silent. The KGB man tapped his fingers on the side of the metal cable car, to the rhythm of some unknown tune. Yuri had come across many officials like Timur in his time. From experience, he knew it was best not to deflate their illusion that they were the smartest guys in the room. When men like him were feeling confident, they were less dangerous.
The broad, hulking figure of Igor, the mine foreman, gradually came into view at the top of the tunnel. Even from here, Yuri could see that the big man was shaken. Igor was six foot four and as wide as a house. A rampant beard covered half his face, and he was wrapped in the great black overcoat he always wore. The man had not done any actual digging in years. Yet, he was in charge of everything that happened up here. Igor nodded as they climbed out of the cable car, and stroked his beard.
‘This way,’ he said, and led them into the tunnel.
Yuri took a last deep breath at the mouth of the shaft, but regretted it immediately as the cold mountain air stabbed his lungs. Then he joined the others.
They followed the mine’s strip lighting through a bewildering maze of tunnels. To Yuri, every black shaft looked the same as the last. At least Igor seemed to know where he was going. They passed a few miners, who gave them that peculiar, silent nod of condolence usually reserved for family members at a funeral service. Yuri had gotten those looks from his brother’s neighbours the previous month, and receiving them again so soon was disconcerting. On this occasion, Yuri was not a relative, or a friend, and so deserved no sympathy.
After turning another corner, Igor stopped without warning and Yuri banged into his back. Igor stood and waited for his two visitors to start the conversation. The light in this tunnel was dimmer than in the main channel. Yuri looked around but could not see Semyon.
‘Where is he?’ he asked.
Igor pointed to a tarpaulin on the ground that may have been white once, but had now taken on the same coal-stained hue as the rest of this underground world. Resting beside the tarpaulin was a bashed ventilation unit and a small pile of rubble. Yuri looked at the roof above them. It appeared intact.
‘Is it safe in here?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Igor. ‘It’s safe.’
Yuri looked from the body-shaped tarpaulin to Timur, waiting for him to make an inspection of the remains. He was the agent in charge, after all; what passed for the force of law in this Soviet outpost. Igor, he saw, was expecting the same thing, but Timur appeared to have no intention of going anywhere near the corpse. He wasn’t even looking at it. Instead, he started to order the contents of his engraved silver cigarette case.
‘What happened?’ asked Yuri, getting impatient.
‘The ventilation unit. He was working on it and it seems to have come loose and fallen on him,’ said Igor. ‘Part of the wall collapsed too.’
‘So it was an accident?’ said Yuri.
The foreman paused and caught Timur’s eye, before nodding without conviction.
Timur sighed. ‘Get him out of here. I’ll tell the Norwegians.’ And he started to head back the way they’d come.
‘Aren’t you going to check him?’ demanded Yuri. ‘He could be alive for all you know.’
Timur shot him an angry glance. ‘I already did. I want to see you in my office now.’
‘That’s it?’ asked Yuri. ‘I want to see for myself.’
Timur continued on his way. ‘You can play doctor, and policeman, if you want. My office, ten minutes. Then get him up top, Igor. And I’ll need a written report from you, by tomorrow.’
Igor remained silent and expressionless throughout this exchange, which was probably how he had gotten to the senior position of mine foreman.
‘He was already down here?’ asked Yuri.
‘Yes,’ said Igor. ‘One hour ago.’
Yuri realised that this sideshow had been put on just for him, to see how he would react at the scene. Which meant Timur had put two and two together and had come up with a crime, with his name as prime suspect. So perhaps this wasn’t the accident it appeared to be. At least, if Timur was really convinced he had anything to do with this he would already have locked him up. The KGB man was just fishing. Yuri hoped he hadn’t unwittingly given him any encouragement in his suspicions.
He knelt down and pulled the tarpaulin up with one hand. The sight that greeted him was not pretty. He was glad he had not had the chance to eat much of his second course. Semyon had a deep, open gash on one side of his forehead, and smaller abrasions across both sides of his face. Judging by his pallor, there seemed to be no point in checking for a pulse. Unlike Yuri’s brother, laid out at the funeral home in Moscow, Semyon did not have the expression of someone who was at peace. The man appeared to have suffered in his final moments.
‘Maybe his skull cracked,’ said Igor. ‘Or his neck. That’s usually what happens.’
‘Usually?’ said Yuri.
‘When something heavy lands on a man’s head.’
‘How many mine collapses have you had here?’
Igor looked Yuri in the eye. ‘Since I’ve been here, none. I put the safety of my men first. They know that and they trust me. You can ask any of them.’
‘No one is blaming you,’ said Yuri. ‘So what happened? Did this wall give way?’
‘No,’ said Igor, taking the suggestion as a personal affront. ‘The wall is strong. I don’t let anyone work unless the walls are strong.’ He slapped the side of the tunnel with his large palm to prove the point. The man did inspire confidence. Yuri could see the other miners putting their lives in his hands.
‘How did this happen then?’ asked Yuri. ‘Any of the other men see, or hear, anything?’
The foreman shook his head and pointed at the bulging tarpaulin. ‘He was down here alone. I met him when he arrived, up at the entrance. I offered but he said he didn’t want any help.’
Yuri could well believe Semyon refusing assistance. He was the kind of person who thought he knew everything, and could handle things better on his own. Yuri walked around the body to the ventilation unit, which was lying on the ground where it had fallen. With two hands, he lifted one side of it in the air. He didn’t get very far. It was certainly heavy enough to kill someone if it hit them in the right spot. One bottom corner had a large dent in it, and long scratches in the same place, as if from metal against metal. Igor saw what had attracted his attention, and he nodded.
‘I saw that too,’ he said. ‘To me, it looks like he deliberately pulled the whole thing down off the wall on top of himself.’
Yuri stood up and brushed the coal dust from his hands.
‘You putting that in your report?’ he asked.
Igor stared at him for a moment. It was the familiar Soviet pause. The who-am-I-talking-to hesitation. Gauging how well do I know this person in front of me? Could he or she be a paid informer? It was impossible to tell for sure, even if it was your grandmother.
Igor shook his head. ‘I will write “accident”.’
Yuri was about to leave when a thought made him kneel down again beside the body. First, he went through Semyon’s pockets. Igor stared at him but did not interrupt. He found some keys and money in Semyon’s trousers. At the bottom of the inside pocket of his jacket, he found a miniature notebook, the kind with only twenty or thirty pages in it. He opened it and saw some odd words written at the top of each page, with a list of dates underneath, all within the last year. He had no idea what the lists referred to, but he put it in his own pocket for later. Then, with two hands, he pushed the body on to its side. The dead man let out an eerie breath. Underneath was the usual black mine debris. And stuck to the back of his jacket were Semyon’s glasses, bent and shattered.
Yuri had heard and witnessed many strange things in his lifetime, but suicide by ventilation unit seemed unlikely. It was true that he had never gone to the bother of getting to know the man, but he had not pegged Semyon as the self-harming, defeatist type. He was ambitious, with solid goals in life. And he was still young enough to harbour realistic expectations of achieving them.
An accident was the most likely possibility. Semyon could have discovered that he needed to get the ventilation unit on to the ground in order to work on it properly. At which point he might have found the fixings difficult to dislodge; the humid conditions in the mine rusted metal fast. So then he could have decided to use brute force to get the unit off the tunnel wall, at which point it had all gone unexpectedly and horribly wrong. Tragic but simple. That is what Yuri’s report would say too. An unfortunate accident. No one’s fault, just bad luck.
However, even though this explanation had a degree of logic to it, it didn’t sit easy with him. And the alternative even less so. If Semyon’s death wasn’t suicide, or an accident, that left the involvement of a third party. Person or persons unknown. Part of him knew that was what had happened. Someone had gone to some trouble to try to make this look like an accident. Yuri’s first instinct was to resist the temptation to delve any deeper, and instead walk away from the whole thing. Normally, he would have done exactly that. But if someone had killed Semyon, then there must be a reason. And not knowing what it was would keep him awake at night until he found out.
Against his better judgement, Yuri left the mine and obeyed Timur’s summons. He made his way to his office, which was hidden away down a corridor in the administration building. When he arrived, he found the door wide open. Timur had just made himself a fresh coffee.
‘Want one?’ he asked. ‘There’s enough for two.’
‘No thanks.’
Was he really going to offer him a coffee and then accuse him of murder?
‘Sit down, Yuri.’
Yuri pulled up a wooden chair as Timur sat down behind his desk. He blew on the surface of his steaming cup and sipped. Yuri’s stomach felt hollow and twisted. A combination of hunger and his reflex reactions to the sight of a bloodied dead body. Timur put down his cup and started rhythmically tapping his fingers again, this time on the table.
‘You know why I’ve asked you here?’ Timur asked.
‘Not exactly, no,’ said Yuri.
Timur looked as though he didn’t believe his answer.
‘This Semyon business stinks. If that was an accident, I’ll eat my hat.’
‘You think he was murdered?’ asked Yuri, trying badly to sound surprised.
Timur shrugged. ‘Doesn’t it seem that way to you?’
When Yuri didn’t answer, Timur stared at him for a long time.
‘The doc is going to take a look. I told him to be thorough. If he tells me there’s something to be suspicious about then you and me are going to have a different sort of conversation.’
‘You can’t think that I … I wasn’t even down there. I was in the canteen. The waitresses will vouch for me. You can vouch for me, you saw me there yourself.’
‘When we met he’d already been dead a couple of hours. Where were you before the canteen?’
‘Swimming.’
‘With?’
‘On my own. But I’m sure people saw me about the place. The cosmonaut did. English Catherine. Ask her. I can tell you one thing for free, you won’t find a single person who’ll say they saw me down the mine tonight, because I wasn’t there.’
Timur gave a half-grin and sipped his coffee again. They both knew he could get a dozen people to swear on their grandchildren that they’d seen him dancing in the mine in a red dress, if that’s what he told them to say.
‘He wanted your job,’ said Timur. ‘He made serious accusations against you. And you didn’t like each other. Sounds like a strong enough motive to me.’
‘I didn’t need to kill him to keep my job,’ Yuri protested. ‘He wasn’t good enough to take it off me. And no, I didn’t like him. Did you?’
‘He thought he was better than you,’ said Timur. ‘Maybe you two had a fight. Is that what happened? And you didn’t mean for it to end the way it did? Now would be a good time to come clean.’
‘This is ridiculous, and you know it. I never laid a finger on him.’
‘Sabotage then,’ said Timur. ‘Maybe you did something to that ventilation unit. Left it unsafe, ready to fall. Then you sent him down there. It was you that sent him down there, wasn’t it? I believe you already admitted that.’
‘It wasn’t a confession. It’s my job to tell him what to do. I sent him down with an easy task that should have taken him ten minutes to finish. It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous.’
Timur sighed and rested his chin in his hand, rubbing his day-old stubble with his fingers. To Yuri’s relief, he seemed to have run out of questions. For the moment, there was no evidence of a crime, unless the autopsy threw up something.
‘If there’s nothing else, I’d like to go now,’ said Yuri, standing up.
‘Sure,’ said Timur, without looking at him. ‘Thanks for dropping by. I’ll be in touch.’
Back in his apartment, Yuri leafed through Semyon’s notebook. There was nothing in it other than what he had seen in the mine. One word, at the head of each page, with dates underneath. All the dates were since Semyon’s arrival in Pyramiden. But the words made no sense. Fox. Bears. Spider. Eagle. Elk. Was he some sort of a wildlife enthusiast? If he was, he’d kept it to himself. He stared at the pages a while longer, but gave up trying to figure out what they meant.
The next day, Igor told Yuri that the doctor had found nothing to indicate foul play. No signs of a struggle. Just one single blow to the head, consistent with the ventilation unit falling on top of him. Case closed. Yuri still found the explanation hard to believe. And the doctor was not a crime scene specialist. He was young and had probably never encountered a murder in his life. But for the moment, Yuri was happy to be off a potentially nasty hook, and he wasn’t about to go causing a fuss. Luckily, he had never gotten too far on the wrong side of Timur. If he had, he suspected this incident could have cost him more.
Where they were, Spitsbergen island in the Svalbard archipelago, was Norwegian territory. Russia only had mining rights here, which were enshrined in the 1920 Svalbard Treaty. And since it was their house, technically Norwegian law applied to all who lived there, whatever their nationality. As Timur had said, the Norwegian authorities would have to be informed of Semyon’s death. But Yuri knew they were not going to cause any trouble over one casualty in a Soviet mine. One of their own Norwegian mines on Svalbard had recorded so many accidental deaths, seventy-one in twenty years, that the scandal, known as the King’s Bay Affair, had brought down an entire Norwegian government in the sixties. Needless to say, in Semyon’s solitary case they would not be throwing stones.
Yuri wondered if this was why Timur did not seem too eager for a serious investigation. His own interrogation had been half-hearted. There were reasons why Timur might be pleased to leave this alone – a suspected murder would demand a Norwegian police investigation. And the KGB man would certainly not want foreigners snooping around on his patch. Especially foreigners who were members of NATO. NATO equalled America, only nearer.
The bad news spread quickly around the town. Some people were naturally upset. There had been deaths in their small community before, over the decades, and they had built a small graveyard on the edge of town. But friendships here were so transient that few people would have had the opportunity to get to know Semyon well. By rights, as his boss and co-worker, Yuri should have known him the best. The other residents assumed he had, and for the whole of the next day he was offered unwanted sympathy, and confronted with concerned enquiries about Semyon’s family back home. Yuri did not know any of the answers, so he made up some good lies, giving people the replies he figured they wanted to hear.
Two days later, a pair of tall blond Norwegians arrived by helicopter. They all saw the lights approaching through the darkness, long before the tak-tak sound of the propellers reached them. As a reception committee, Timur brought together the same trio who had been there on that fateful night – himself, Yuri and Igor – plus one other. The Norwegians spoke two languages perfectly, their own and English, but not Russian. Yuri had no English and Igor certainly did not. Timur had a couple of standard phrases, but being sent undercover to London was not on his career horizon any time soon. Yuri knew for a fact that Grigory spoke English, or at least understood it, because he had seen him reading English books in the library. But when Yuri suggested that he might help them out as an interpreter, he had offered them Catherine instead.
It had seemed a good idea at the time, and she was eager to help.
‘Did you know him well?’ she whispered to Yuri as they waited beside the helipad for their guests to disembark.
‘Not so well,’ admitted Yuri.
‘Poor man. Such a horrible way to go.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
‘Can you imagine a death at a space station?’ said Catherine. ‘Do you think it would be like this?’
‘No,’ said Yuri. ‘I don’t imagine any Norwegians would come.’
He heard her take a deep breath, getting herself ready for what lay ahead. On her face was a look of exaggerated determination. She caught him smiling at her.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine.’
Catherine’s first job was to translate the doctor’s report for the two visitors. His autopsy had revealed a skull fracture caused by a blunt-force blow, leading to massive bleeding on the brain. Death, he said, had been almost instantaneous. Well, at least the bastard didn’t suffer, thought Yuri.
And then they all viewed the body, after which Yuri held Catherine’s hair while she threw up her breakfast in a hospital sink.
‘I’m sure we can manage from here without you,’ Yuri offered.
‘No, I’m fine now,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘I can do this. I said I would help.’
‘You’re sure?’ he asked. ‘You’re a little green.’
‘A glass of water and I’ll be fine,’ she insisted. ‘No need to make a fuss over me.’
Next they made the trip to the scene of the accident, with everyone now more concerned about Catherine than about poor Semyon’s demise. The location where he had met his end had been cleaned up since Yuri had last been there. And why not? No one had publicly admitted that they considered it a crime scene that ought to be kept intact. At this point it was showtime for Timur, who took to his stage with relish. He gave the visitors a verbal and theatrically mimed performance of Yuri and Igor’s reports into how the accident had most likely happened, all with simultaneous translation from green-faced Catherine.
Suitably impressed with the thoroughness of what they had seen and heard, along with assurances that such a thing would never be allowed to happen again, the Norwegians declared the case closed. They rubber-stamped the death certificate, which Timur immediately took possession of. He folded it and put it in his inside pocket.
‘You must be pleased,’ said Yuri. ‘No outside investigators meddling in Pyramiden.’
‘Like the paper says, it was an accident,’ replied Timur. ‘Nothing to investigate.’
‘And you’re just going to leave it at that?’
‘For the moment,’ said Timur. ‘If I was you, Yuri, I would be pretty relieved at that news.’
It was a relief, but Yuri expected that he had not heard the last of it.
Just as the two Scandinavians were on the verge of departing, Yuri made the mistake of inviting them for a drink in the glass bar. They wanted to leave, he could see, but politeness made them accept. Yuri caught Timur’s incredulous gaze. Obviously, the official policy of the day was to get rid of the foreigners as quickly as possible, but Timur had neglected to mention this to him.
The glass house was the closest thing to a tourist attraction that Pyramiden had to offer. Built entirely from empty red, green and white glass bottles, it had been erected by the residents as a special place to unwind. Inside, the motley group drank a glass of vodka and toasted to their mutual cooperation, and regrets were expressed that their visit had to be under such tragic circumstances. Then the Norwegians gave up on second-hand conversation, and spoke exclusively in English to Catherine. Yuri could see that she was enjoying being the centre of their attentions.
Timur opened his silver cigarette case and offered one to Yuri. From the look of them, they were definitely not the usual Bulgarian tobacco. He lit both Yuri’s and his own with a gold lighter that had a military insignia engraved on its side.
‘What are they saying?’ the KGB man asked as the three foreigners talked and laughed together.
‘I believe she is telling them about her space study,’ said Yuri. ‘And the taller one, I think, is chatting her up. But I’m just guessing. I really have no idea.’
Finally, to everyone’s relief, the two men boarded their helicopter again and left.
The list of people who might have killed Semyon included every adult in town. Pyramiden was a peaceful place, and violence here was extremely rare, but lots of the men had killed before. Yuri himself had killed three men. It was not a fact that he boasted about. He had been thirteen in the dying days of the Great Patriotic War, and the men he had shot were German soldiers. The first one had been armed, and it was a case of kill or be killed. The other two he had executed in cold blood as they tried to surrender to him. They had been in a pathetic state, shoeless and starving. But by that stage of the war, Yuri had lost all pity.
Many of the miners had a similar story to tell. The older you were the more Germans you had killed. And killing a man was not something you forgot. The first one was the hardest. After that, it was not such a leap.
Yuri wondered if Semyon had any enemies in Pyramiden, apart from himself. Maybe he secretly owed someone money, or a grudge had followed him here from his home town in Latvia. Or perhaps his death had really been an act of God after all, and Yuri was just being paranoid. But he didn’t believe in God, or anything else.
He decided to give himself the rest of the day off. He thanked Catherine for her help. She nodded, proud of herself for what she had done. For him, it had just been something to get out of the way, but she had viewed it as a challenge.
‘You know I am more than happy to do anything like this any time,’ she called after him. ‘All you have to do is ask.’
He made his way back to his apartment block. Two deaths in quick succession had given him too many reminders of his own mortality and had taken a toll on his mood.
As he passed a parked snow truck, three men appeared from behind it and grabbed him. They pulled him to the side of his apartment building, out of sight. With one man in front and one behind, they proceeded to punch him repeatedly in the abdomen. The third one watched. All the breath left his body and he crumpled to the ground, gasping for air. Yuri recognised these men. He had seen them recently at Semyon’s table in the canteen.
‘Semyon was our friend,’ said one, pointing his finger down at Yuri.
‘Really?’ said Yuri. ‘How long did you know him?’
‘One month,’ said the other, before kicking him in the ribs. ‘We are Lithuanian, so he is our neighbour. One of us.’
‘We know you had something to do with it,’ said the first. ‘He told us you weren’t to be trusted.’
‘Listen comrades,’ said Yuri. ‘He was my friend too—’
Another kick hit him just below the sternum.
‘Don’t call me comrade, you Russian pig,’ said one of his attackers, he wasn’t sure which.
Just then a vehicle noise nearby disturbed them and they decided to leave.
‘We’re not finished with you,’ said the first over his shoulder as he walked away. ‘We’ll be seeing you. It’s not like you have anywhere to hide.’
Yuri staggered to his feet and continued his journey home. Once he was safely inside his apartment, he collapsed on to his bed. He held the ice-cold bottle of vodka in his hand, for pain-killing purposes, both inside and out. The Soviet dream of diverse nationalities working together under one communist banner had obviously not taken hold in the Baltics. But at least he wasn’t the only one interested in Semyon’s death.
That night, when all was quiet, Yuri exited his room and made his way up the stairs to the next floor. He had never visited Semyon’s apartment when he was alive, and he felt bad about breaking into it now. He wished to avoid any visible damage, so he slid a thin piece of wood into the doorjamb and prised the lock open. Home security was not an issue in Pyramiden. There were zero burglaries. Few people had anything worth stealing anyway. No one would know he had been in here, unless he was seen going in or out.
He guessed Timur would already have paid this place a visit, so perhaps he was wasting his time. He started with the bed, checking under the pillow and inside the bedclothes. Under the mattress he found a magazine with black and white photographs of naked middle-aged women, which he put back where he had found it. Kneeling on the floor, he saw a suitcase under the bed. It was heavy; he had to slide it out with both hands. He clicked open the locks and found it full of engineering manuals. The poor guy really did want to better himself. Some of the volumes were beyond even Yuri’s level of expertise. Inside them, passages had been underlined, with handwritten notes in the margins.
Next, he tried the chest of drawers. Assorted clothes, socks, T-shirts. On top was a wallet, which he opened. There were several hundred rubles and a photo of a woman in her sixties, presumably Semyon’s mother. Yuri could see the family resemblance. Beside the wallet was a half-full bottle of red wine. He inspected the label. Georgian. He was tempted to take it, but then he noticed a scrap of paper stuck to the bottom of the bottle. He pulled it off and saw that the handwriting on it was the same as the notes in the engineering manuals.
‘8 o’clock. The whaling house.’
The note did not say what day the rendezvous was to be. Yuri wondered if it could mean a day that had yet to come. The rest of the apartment revealed no treasure, and Yuri slipped back out the door as silently as he could.