But I’d never been involved in the murder of a pregnant Russian army officer before; my first and probably best idea was to head to the Kazakh border and hole up for a couple of decades. But Marina Gurchenko’s murder put me firmly in between two of the country’s most powerful men: the Minister for State Security, and a Russian Colonel with enough firepower at his disposal to drive us back to being nomads. Both men wanted their respective victims avenged. Mikhail Tynaliev was expecting to see banner headlines about dedicated security forces hunting down a ruthless killer; Barabanov wanted the whole mess shipped quietly back to Mother Russia, and the case file accidentally shredded. Both men expected me to solve the crime. And failure wasn’t going to be an option. For a moment, I wondered if the Colonel could have organised the whole thing, had a few useless women slaughtered, so that when it was Gurchenko’s turn, it would look like we had a serial killer prowling the land with a set of butcher’s knives.
