A Negotiable Instrument

Chapter Fifteen - Thursday

Tursunov sat at his desk warming his hands on a cup of tea, reluctant to drink it. For some reason that he couldn't explain his first cup of tea of the day always tasted better if it was made by someone else. He was early, but he had still expected to find Dolmatov and Yemelin at their desks. They had both been out of the office when Radostev had finished with him the previous evening, but his head had been too full of the unravelling strands of the Berdichevski investigation to take much notice. He lit a Zefir and sat back in his chair, happy to be out of his apartment. It had felt cold and empty all night, he hadn't been able to sleep, and he was intrigued to see whether Hickl and Fourreé were still tucked up in their cells. As he smoked his cigarette he savoured the anticipation of expectations confirmed, a rare and solitary luxury. After a few minutes of silent contemplation he was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a head around the door.

'What is it, Glebov?' Tursunov asked.

'Sorry, sir, I didn't know you had arrived. Sergeant Boyarsky has been asking for you.'

'What does he want?'

'I don't know, sir. He said something about a problem with one of your prisoners. It was difficult to understand him. He seemed quite upset.'

'Thank you,' Tursunov said and winked at Glebov. He waved the confused clerk away, stubbed out his Zefir, and composed his face. When he got down to the isolation cells he took a brief moment to enjoy the look of agitation on Boyarsky's face.

'One of my clerks said you wanted to see me.'

'Yes, sir. Thank God you've arrived. It's not the sort of trouble I need,' Boyarsky said in a rush, plucking at Tursunov's arm to get him to follow.

'Just tell me what the problem is,' Tursunov said, disengaging himself from Boyarsky's grip.

'We just found him not twenty minutes ago. I wasn't sure what to do for the best, nobody being around to ask. The poor lad who found him is in a right state, I can tell you. It's not the sort of thing you want to find before you've had your breakfast.'

The door to Fourreé's cell was open and a small group of patrolmen were gathered outside. They stood a few paces back from the cell door, unwilling to cross an invisible line that projected out in an arc from the doorway. Whatever it was that was sufficient to repel them physically had also taken a firm psychological grip, as each man stared in fascination through the open doorway. Tursunov and Boyarsky approached the door and the patrolmen shrank back to allow them through.

Fourreé had not been spirited away in the night as Tursunov had expected. He was still in his cell, hanging from the pipework that ran across the width of the cell's ceiling. He was suspended by his trouser belt, fashioned into a makeshift noose. Fourreé's body swung in the draft from the open cell door, and a chair lay on its side on the floor. His face was a deep shade of blue, his tongue poked from between his teeth, and his eyes stared in blind incomprehension at each wall in turn as his body plotted its slow rotation. The angle of his head, forced up on one side by the pressure of the belt, gave Fourreé's final expression a questioning, almost surprised aspect, Tursunov thought, as if he had clung to some false hope until the very end.

Tursunov had studied the theory and practice of judicial hanging and he knew that Fourreé's death must have been slow and painful. The short drop method was no longer used in judicial murders. A more scientifically precise method, the so-called measured drop, had been adopted by governments around the world. It was now considered uncivilised to subject observers to the unpleasant spectacle of instant decapitation, much less the ordeal of witnessing an unedifying hour of the nervous convulsions and muscular spasms that accompanied a slow strangulation. Official "Tables of Drops" had been drawn up to calculate the precise depth of drop required according to the victim's height, weight, and strength. Their aim was to achieve an instant break of the neck, a clean fracture of the cervical vertebrae. He knew there had been little science involved in this hanging.