The Adversary (15 page)

His team had been working relentlessly over the last few days—the usual grind of detailed police-work, driven by the ever-present knowledge that, without some rapid breakthrough, the case was increasingly likely to slip through their hands. Doripalam had overseen all the key activities—
setting up a response team close to the crime-scene, allocating the familiar round of essential duties, holding daily briefing meetings with the core team, fending off the gaggle of news and TV reporters. It was all straightforward stuff, the usual well-rehearsed routine. The kind of activity he could handle without thinking. And that was the trouble. He wasn't thinking. Not directly about the murder, anyway. His thoughts kept drifting elsewhere, pulled away from the task at hand, drawn inexorably by the sense that the true story was elsewhere, that there was some link he was failing to grasp.

But the routines of the investigation went on. The first task had been to try to track down Mrs. Tuya's missing family. It was still not clear whether their departure was linked to her murder—although the abandonment of the
gers
suggested so—or whether they had already moved on when the killing occurred. Either way, the family of nomads had so far proved surprisingly elusive.

In practice, tracking down nomads was never entirely straightforward, particularly if they did not want to be found. These days, many travelers carried shortwave radios, and there were established procedures for sending and receiving messages through the state radio channels. Some even carried satellite phones, although the cost of these was prohibitive to most. The majority of nomads were now registered within a given region for voting and social security purposes, and some would make regular trips into the local towns to collect benefits or for other purposes. Again, there were standard arrangements for leaving
messages through these channels. And, finally, of course, the police and other local services had their own networks within particular regions and could often establish, relatively quickly, the location of a particular individual or group.

Establishing contact with a nomad might be a slow process, but it was usually successful. The message would be picked up by someone locally and, through whatever tortuous means, would eventually make its way to the intended recipient.

In this case, the police had taken all the steps they could to get the message out. The story had been well covered in the press and on the television and radio, and the police had issued an appeal for the family to contact them. They had sent out similar messages through the police and social security networks in the north of the county, with the assumption that, before too long, someone would have identified the party of herdsmen.

But, for several days, there was very little response. There was the usual scattering of crank calls, a few that were well-intentioned but contained no information of substance, and one or two that appeared promising but where the apparent trail very quickly vanished.

They got their first serious lead five days after the body was found. It was a call from one of the provincial police stations up north of the capital, in the rich grasslands in the upper parts of the Bulgan
aimag
. One of the regional nomads had, in the course of reporting some trivial theft, mentioned—with a mild hint of xenophobia—that there were some unknown
herdsmen in the area. The implication had been that, even if they were not directly responsible for the theft, they were nonetheless probably up to no good.

The policeman in question, although skeptical of the claims, had made a casual trip out to visit the camp, making inquiries about where the group had come from and to where it was traveling. It had been difficult, he said. The group clearly resented his presence and his questions, no doubt aware of what the locals might be saying about them. They had responded openly, but coolly, that they had traveled from the south looking for better pastureland, but that they expected only to stay a few days. The policeman had wondered about asking for their formal identity documents but could see no justification for a heavy-handed approach. There was no evidence of stolen property in the camp, and he had no grounds for suspecting the group of any crime.

It was only later, when he was re-reading through the various communiqués sent from headquarters during a quiet morning—of which there were many—that it occurred to him that this group might have been Mrs. Tuya's family. And finally, after a protracted series of calls around the capital's police network, the information had reached the Serious Crimes Team.

Doripalam had decided almost instantly to travel up here himself with Luvsan. But he had quickly begun to wonder whether they were wasting their time. They didn't even know for sure that Mrs. Tuya's family were in a position to tell them anything useful. If they had left, by arrangement, before her murder, then it was quite possible that they were unaware that she was
dead, let alone in a position to shed any light on her killing. If that was the case, then Doripalam's role was little more than that of the junior sent to break the bad news. He doubted that the message would be any more palatable because it came from the senior officer.

And, of course, they didn't even know that this was Mrs. Tuya's family in the first place. Okay, they had come from outside the region, but then these people were, when all was said and done, nomads. Travel was what they did. Most of them tended to travel within relatively circumscribed boundaries, but it was far from unknown for them to travel further afield.

And, on top of all that, it now turned out that, by the time Doripalam and Luvsan reached the region, the camp had already moved on.

Looking round, Doripalam wondered quite why they had decided to do so. This was a beautiful place. From where they stood, the lush grassland stretched ahead of them, rising up into the gentle hills which formed the start of the Bürengiin Nuruu mountains. In the morning sunlight, the color of the grass was extraordinary, a shimmering gauze of emerald, shaded by the shifting patterns of the thin fluffy clouds above. Above them, snaking down the foothills, they could see the glittering twisted cable of a mountain stream, which widened into a narrow river and then a broad pool a hundred or so meters across the plain, before disappearing again, presumably back underground. Away across the hills, there were dark shadows of conifers, the first harbingers of the massive Siberian forests that lay beyond the nearby borders.

But, whatever the beauty of the surroundings, it was
clear that the camp had indeed moved on. As Doripalam had pointed out, it was possible to discern the shadows and indentations that showed where the cluster of circular
gers
had been erected. There were some dark patches in the grass where the stoves had stood, and some cropped and scrubby areas of grass where horses or goats had been tethered. Judging from the marks, it looked as if the herdsmen had not been gone for long—perhaps a day, maybe two.

“So what now?” Luvsan said, lighting another cigarette. He had tossed his previous stub carelessly into the grass. Doripalam had watched its arc and landing with some distaste.

He shook his head. “We've come a long way,” he said. “We can't go back now.”

Luvsan nodded. “We'd look stupid,” he said.

Doripalam smiled thinly. “We wouldn't be doing our jobs,” he said.

“That too,” Luvsan nodded. “So where do we go?”

“Back to Bulgan, I reckon,” Doripalam said, referring to the regional capital. “The police there might be able to give us another lead.” The suggestion sounded thin even to Doripalam, but anything seemed preferable to admitting defeat so quickly.

They drove back across the grasslands in silence, Luvsan maintaining his characteristic high speeds, occasionally allowing the rear wheels of the truck to slide gently across the rough ground as they took a corner. Doripalam closed his eyes and tried not to grip the sides of his seat too tightly. He had long since resigned himself to the prospect of writing off the new vehicle at some point before they returned to the
capital. He could probably cope with that so long as he didn't live to face the consequences, he thought.

Bulgan itself was a small city—hardly even a town, but dignified by its status as the capital of the region or
aimag
. There was little to the place—just the Town Hall, the Government Building, a few functional and commercial buildings, a couple of hotels. There was a tourist
ger
camp to the north of the city, but otherwise surprisingly few examples of the characteristic round tents. In keeping with the surrounding woodland, the scattering of Soviet-style administrative and commercial buildings was complemented by clusters of comfortable log cabins.

Although still some way south of the Russian border, Bulgan looked like a true frontier town. The image was reinforced by the rows of horses tethered along the main streets and around the market. It was this sight, glimpsed as they had passed through the city on their journey north, that had prompted Luvsan's jocular references to the
Lone Ranger
. The city would not have looked out of place, Doripalam conceded, in the Hollywood Westerns that now found their way on to their televisions in the small hours of the morning.

Far from being a frontier town, Bulgan now gained much of its income from the groups of foreign tourists who used the city as an overnight stopping point on their way to the mountains and lakes of Khövsgöl Nuur in the far north. Because of this, it was a more cosmopolitan place than most of the country's smaller cities. People were accustomed to meeting travelers—locals and foreigners—and were relatively comfortable with the ceaseless traffic of visitors. The positive aspect
of this was that the local police were very capable and responsive in dealing with any potential problems on their patch. The downside was that, whereas in most areas outside the capital newcomers would be a source of interest, gossip and possibly anxiety, here their presence would hardly be noticed. Even if Mrs. Tuya's family had passed through here, their presence might well have gone unremarked.

Still, it was never wise to underestimate the perspicacity of the local police, Doripalam thought. Although the initial report about the nomadic newcomers had been filed by a local policeman in one of the outlying villages, it had been transmitted rapidly and efficiently by the police in Bulgan down to the capital. It was possible that in the meantime they had gathered some other intelligence that might be worth investigating.

Luvsan turned into the town and passed by the tree-filled parkland around the Achuut Gol river, crossed the river itself, and then turned left into the main street. He was driving with some care, at least by his own unexacting standards. The street itself was relatively busy in the midafternoon—largely older people dressed in traditional robes making their way through to the market or simply enjoying the sunshine. As Doripalam and Luvsan approached the hotels at the far end of the street, they saw some clusters of tourists—one Western, one apparently Japanese—walking out to view the limited array of city attractions.

At the end of the main street, Luvsan turned right and drew the truck to a halt in front of the Government
Building which, at its rear, housed the local police headquarters. As he turned off the engine, Luvsan lit another cigarette and sat back casually. “Are they expecting you, sir?” he said.

Doripalam nodded. “I called yesterday to warn them that we were coming on to their patch.” This was always a wise move, in Doripalam's experience. However supposedly innocent or uncontroversial the mission, no local officer liked to discover that HQ was trampling over his patch without permission. “I said I'd probably call in on the way back, just to update them.”

Luvsan nodded, blowing his smoke carefully through the half-opened window of the truck. “And to pick their brains.”

“As it turns out, yes. Though whether there'll be anything worth picking is an open question.”

Doripalam jumped out of the truck and strode along the pavement past the Government Building, then turned down behind it to the reception of the police offices. He didn't bother to look back to see if Luvsan was following. From past experience, he knew that Luvsan was smart enough to allow his boss to engage in any formal meetings alone, aware that his presence might cramp the senior officer's style. More importantly, Luvsan was also smart enough to make good use of his own time in these situations, putting his personable charms to use to extract whatever other information he could.

Doripalam guessed that, while he was comfortably settled with the senior officer, Luvsan would have casually ingratiated himself with the juniors in the squad room, most likely through the generous
donation of the cigarettes that he seemed to carry in unlimited numbers. Doripalam was beginning to recognize that Luvsan was an officer with some potential, maybe even a possible successor in his own role. Doripalam could never claim that Luvsan resembled a younger version of himself—partly because Luvsan wasn't actually all that much younger, but mainly because his casual but streetwise sharpness was almost a diametric opposite of Doripalam's more cautious intelligence. But Doripalam was open-minded enough to recognize ability, even when it took a distinctly different form from his own.

As he turned into the gloomy concrete foyer of the police offices, he paused to gaze down the street. There were two or three more administrative and commercial buildings, then the street opened up to a line of smaller timber-built buildings—a few shops and then houses. Beyond that, there was the green parkland and then the gathering darkness of the trees, brilliant green in the descending afternoon sun. They still had several hours drive back to the capital, Doripalam thought. They would need to conclude their business soon if they were to have any chance even of starting the journey before nightfall.

He turned and made his way into the reception. The layout was familiar, a relic of the old days, with its heavily-built reception desk, the official flags and emblems, the palpably unfriendly atmosphere. Designed to intimidate, rather than to encourage honest citizens to seek official help.