Good Reasons to Die

by Morgan Audic

Genres: Police Procedurals; Private Investigators; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

***Shortlisted for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger 2023***

'An excellent crime thriller with an explosive climax' Bill Todd, The Sun

'A suspenseful, atmospheric ride' Ben East, Observer

A haunting thriller set in the radioactive Chernobyl exclusion zone, Good Reasons to Die will keep readers hooked to the last page.

In a village close to Chernobyl, detectives Joseph Melnyk and Galina Novak uncover a man's mutilated body hanging from a building. All clues left at the scene of the crime point to a double homicide that took place on the very night that the nuclear power plant exploded.

Doubtful of the abilities of the Ukrainian police, the murdered man's father, a Moscow mafia boss, summons Rybalko, a Russian police officer of dubious morals, to conduct a parallel investigation to find and execute his son's killer. Rybalko goes to Ukraine and recovers the corpse, which no-one has dared to touch because of its radioactive contamination.

Good Reasons to Die is a breath-taking thriller set in a dislocated Ukraine where armed conflicts, economic collapse and ecological demands are interwoven with the exhilarating hunt to find a deranged serial killer.

Release date: January 1, 2022

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

THE CITY OF SILENCE

1

“This must be the worst place to die,” said Officer Galina Novak.

To the north, towards the Belarusian border, black clouds were swelling on the horizon, unleashing cold rain onto the forests of Polesia. Novak took a cigarette pack from her pocket and tapped it nervously on her knee.

“You think it’s murder?”

Surprised by the question, Captain Joseph Melnyk turned his gaze momentarily from the road. With her blonde hair neatly scraped back into a ponytail, her childlike face, and her brand-new, American-style uniform, the young recruit – fresh from the police academy – seemed out of place in Melnyk’s shabby old Lada.

“Do you think someone killed this guy?” she insisted.

Melnyk shrugged. “I bet you anything it’s just a tourist who had a heart attack or some old drunk who fell off a balcony. It’ll be done and dusted in a couple of hours. There’s no point imagining the worst.”

Unconvinced, Novak settled back in her seat and put a cigarette between her pinched lips. She muttered: “All the same. . . What a horrible place to end your life.”

There was a tense silence, broken only by the squeak of the wind-screen wipers. Novak was terrified: you didn’t have to be a detective to work that one out. She was about to get lugged with her first real corpse. Not one of those bodies from the morgue in Kyiv that new recruits were shown during their training. A real one, with a real family. Not only that, but the body was in Pripyat, a ghost town since it was abandoned in 1986 when the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl exploded. It was enough to make anyone want to smoke their way through a whole pack of those cheap, disgusting Belomorkanal cigarettes.

Thickets of pine and birch flashed past the roadside, alternating with vast grassy stretches that had once been fertile fields. Melnyk had to slow down at a junction for a herd of wild Przewalski horses blocking the road, nibbling at the short grass on both sides of the cracked tarmac. In the late 1990s about thirty of those horses had been captured on the Askania-Nova nature reserve in southern Ukraine and brought here. The authorities had hoped to kill two birds with one stone: allowing this endangered species to prosper far away from human beings, and preventing the vegetation around Chernobyl from becoming too wild. The ecologists said it was a bad idea to further endanger an endangered species by putting it in a place like this, but Melnyk liked seeing the horses frolicking in what once were farmers’ fields. It gave him the impression that, thirty years after the nuclear disaster, life was returning to this evacuated zone.

The Lada passed a large Orthodox crucifix and Novak’s dosimeter started crackling furiously. Its screen showed levels of radiation that you might get after a year in Moscow or Kyiv. A triangular red and yellow sign, planted near the cross, warned them that they were entering a highly contaminated area. A radioactive furnace saturated with caesium, strontium and plutonium.

“Turn that damn thing off,” Melnyk instructed her.

He hated the sinister crackles the dosimeters made. His own had been tucked away for years inside the Lada’s glove compartment. It was bad enough working in a place infested with radiation without a machine forever reminding you of the fact. He knew the worst spots by heart anyway, the places that had to be avoided. Other than that, he had no choice but to walk on contaminated earth and to breathe air where radioactive particles sometimes floated.

Novak grudgingly dropped her device into the inside pocket of her parka. He wondered what kind of fuck-up she’d made at the academy to find herself catapulted into Chernobyl for her first assignment. No twenty-something dreams of being sent to a police station surrounded by thirty kilometres of irradiated fields and ruins. You dream of working in Kyiv or on the shore of the Black Sea, in the sun. Seven years before, he himself could never have imagined he would one day end up working in the zone. . . not until his boss summoned him to his office and gave him a choice: resign or be transferred to Chernobyl.

Seven years. . . He looked at himself for a moment in the rear-view mirror. Heavy build, dense bushy hair, pale blue eyes, thick blond beard with a scattering of grey hairs. . . Working in the zone had transformed him into a woodsman.

“Do you have any advice about the. . . the radiation?” Novak said anxiously.

He noticed that she had still not lit her cigarette. She was just chewing on the filter.

“Is there a way to protect ourselves from the radioactivity?” she demanded.

Melnyk frowned as if thinking deeply about this, then said in a serious voice: “A few years ago, when I got here, I asked the same question. They told me: ‘If you’re planning on having kids, you should wrap your balls in aluminium foil.’”

Novak stared wide-eyed at her superior.

“Aluminium foil? Does that really work?”

“Does it work? Ask the other guys at the station. They all do it.”

“You don’t?”

“I already had three kids. That stuff’s for young men.”

Melnyk kept a straight face. The old hands always played the same joke on new recruits, who invariably cleaned out the local supermarkets’ stocks of aluminium foil to protect their testicles. Obviously it wasn’t quite as funny in this case.

A few kilometres further on, the dilapidated towers of Pripyat appeared above the treetops. Melnyk saw a minibus at the far end of Lenin Street. Big stickers on the doors boasted the merits of a tour operator specialising in visits to the zone. He parked the Lada at the side of the road and cursed inwardly as he got out of the vehicle. The drizzle had turned to a fine rain that slipped behind coat collars and froze necks. But at least the raindrops glued the radioactive dust to the ground, making it briefly less dangerous.

A dozen tourists scrambled out of the minibus. They all wore yellow bracelets confirming that they had bought the mandatory insurance before entering the contaminated zone. God only knew which company insured people against that kind of risk.

The official guide – a tall figure in a camouflage jacket – stepped forward from the group and called out in Ukrainian to the captain.

“Ekh! We’ve been waiting here for an hour!” he whined.

“Heavy traffic,” Melnyk replied deadpan. “Are you the one who called? Where’s the corpse?”

“We should go there by car. The body’s–”

Before he could finish his sentence, one of the tourists walked up to Melnyk and addressed him in broken Russian: “When we leave? We not want stay!”

Melnyk glared at him before telling him coldly and slowly: “You’ll leave when I say you can.”

“Here dangerous, not stay, leave quick we want!”

The guy had an American accent and his Russian was not good: two reasons to send him packing.

“You wanted a special experience, right? The thrill of danger? Well, here you go – enjoy! You’ll have a great story to tell your oncologist.”

“What is last word?”

“A cancer doctor,” Melnyk said.

The man’s face turned a shade of green. The other tourists looked anxiously at the guide, who jabbered a few words in English and then asked Melnyk: “Can they at least wait in the minibus?”

“Sure. As soon as they’ve shown my colleague their identity papers.”

The guide relayed this information to the tourists, who immediately held out British, American, Latvian and Lithuanian passports. Melnyk leaned close to Novak and whispered in Ukrainian: “Take their names and their witness statements. I’m going to see the body. Whatever you do, keep the vultures waiting for as long as you can. They came here to get an adrenaline rush, so I think we should give them their money’s worth!”

Then he signalled to the guide to follow him to the Lada. As they walked past the minibus, Melnyk noticed for the first time the slogan in enormous letters on the vehicle’s sides: “The trip that’ll make all your friends jealous.”

“Cretins,” he mumbled into his beard.

Thirty thousand tourists had come to visit the irradiated zone the previous year. All you needed to get in was to be eighteen years or older, to not be pregnant, and to deal with one of the numerous travel agencies in Kyiv specialising in Chernobyl Tours. There, for a few hundred dollars, you could get all the necessary permits stamped by the Ukrainian authorities.

The latest fad was to have your stag party in Cheronobyl. Skydiving and strippers were so passé! For several months now, Melnyk had seen contingents of drunken morons arriving and bellowing their way through the abandoned streets of Pripyat. He was almost nostalgic for the era of Russian tourists. They had become increasingly rare since Russia had annexed Crimea, triggering the civil war that dogged the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

“So where’s the damn corpse?” he said as he got into the Lada.

“You don’t seem too bothered that a man is dead,” the guide said reproachfully.

“The only thing that ‘bothers’ me at the moment is finding the body before the wild dogs start gobbling it down.”

A joyless smile flickered across the guide’s face.

“Don’t worry. Given where it is, I don’t think anything like that is going to happen to it.”

“Why? Is it in a building?”

“Not in a building, on a building.”

The guide pointed to a tall apartment block at the end of Kurchatova Street. The top of the building was decorated with the emblem of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine: a hammer and sickle surrounded by ears of wheat and crowned with a red star. On the second-highest floor of the apartment block, a corpse was hanging between two windows, arms outstretched.

Melnyk felt his stomach heave.

“Blyad!” he swore, shaken.

He started the car and drove up the street, slaloming between the saplings that had grown up through the tarmac. His mind was racing, going through all the steps he would have to take: call the station for reinforcements, call the prosecutor, warn the morgue that a potentially radioactive body was going to arrive. . . In front of the apartment block, he raised his eyes to the corpse and was again stunned by the morbid spectacle above him. Metal cables were wrapped around the dead man’s wrists, tensed diagonally towards the inside of the building. From a distance they’d been invisible because they were the same greyish colour as the building’s façade.

For an instant he had the impression that he saw one of the victim’s legs move. Was it the wind or just his imagination? Or maybe. . .

“Have you been up there to check he’s actually dead?”

“Huh?” The guide shrugged, arms wide and turned his palms upward. “Isn’t it pretty obvious that he’s dead?”

“For you, maybe. Not for me.”

Melnyk looked up at the body again. The slight swaying movement he thought he had detected had stopped. Probably it was just the wind, but the idea that this guy might still be alive had chilled him. He thought about the rickety staircase leading up to where the body was, about the radioactive dust on the concrete floors, about the apartment building that had partially collapsed the previous winter on the corner of the street. He hesitated, then at last resolved to go and take a closer look.

“I’m going up. Wait here.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere,” the guide said.

Melnyk strode to the front door of the old Soviet apartment block. The first floor had been a public library. The books had long ago disappeared. Occasionally you would find a few pages of Russian poetry caught in the branches of trees lining the road.

Once inside, he had no difficulty finding his way. The building was almost identical to the one where he lived in Kyiv with his wife. In the days of the U.S.S.R., the whole country had been littered with these cheap concrete eyesores, from Berlin to Vladivostok. The buildings were so similar that he could have navigated his way around this one with his eyes shut.

When he reached the fifth floor, he took a break. He was out of breath. Not enough exercise, too many cigarettes. While he got his breath back, he listened to the sounds of the abandoned building. The whistling of the wind through the broken windows, the shutters creaking and banging. . . Suddenly he noticed a regular clicking noise.

The claws of a dog on the bare concrete.

He took out his pistol and held it against his thigh. The dogs in Pripyat had long ago lost all respect for humans. The ones that had survived the cull after the evacuation of the city had formed packs that slept in the empty buildings and went out only to hunt. Some of them, with their thin bodies and long muzzles, looked more like wolves than dogs.

He went on up the stairs. On the seventh floor, the air was thick with the stink of wild animals. He heard a muffled growl and realised that the beast’s lair must be somewhere close by. He thought briefly about firing a shot through a window, hoping that the noise would scare the dog and encourage it to run down to the ground floor. But then it occurred to him that he had no way of knowing whether the person who had crucified the man on the outside of the building had left. His weapon raised in front of him, his whole body tensed, Melnyk went on up.

On the penultimate floor, he walked to the apartment where the body was hanging. Outside the smashed front door he froze, alert for the faintest noise: the crunch of broken glass under a shoe, a sigh, the rustle of clothing, anything that might betray a hostile presence. He waited a good minute before deciding to go inside. The entrance hall was empty; he made for the living room. There he was greeted by a sight so surprising that his index finger slipped from the trigger of his pistol.

The room was full of animals. Fifteen, twenty, maybe even thirty of them. Foxes, wolves, lynxes, wild boars. A strange herd, their backs turned to him. It took a while before he realised that all of them were stuffed. Motionless, he waited for his heart to stop speeding, then walked through the living room and leaned out of the window to examine the hanging man. His naked body bore the marks of burns, cuts, bruises. Worse: his eyelids and his lips were sewn shut. Melnyk reached out to the greyish neck, but could detect no pulse. It must have been the wind that made the corpse move.

A pile of clothes lay in one corner of the room. In the pocket of a pair of trousers, Melnyk found a Russian passport in the name of Leonid Vektorovich Sokolov. The photograph matched the victim: the guy had a red birthmark at the edge of his scalp that enabled Melnyk to identify him despite the stitches on his eyes and lips.

There was also a wallet inside the trouser pocket. Opening it, Melnyk found a large quantity of rubles and hryvnia: a small fortune, four or five months’ salary for a Chernobyl police officer. The idea of taking the money for himself crossed his mind. God knows he needed it, if only for his son, Nikolai, who was fighting in Donbas without a bulletproof vest. But he put the money back where he had found it. He had lived his life as honestly as possible; he wasn’t about to start stealing from corpses at his age. He took out his mobile and called the police station.

One of his colleagues answered: “What’s the corpse like?”

“It’s a fucking mess. We’ve got a murder case on our hands. I’ll need reinforcements. Equipment too. The guy’s hanging on the side of an apartment block.”

“Is it a local?”

“No, he’s Russian. His name is Leonid Vektorovich Sokolov. Find out everything you can about him and call me back when you know more.”

He walked down to the ground floor. On the seventh floor, the growling had stopped. In the dust that covered the floor of the building’s lobby, paw prints had criss-crossed the neat traces left by his boots.

Outside, the guide was standing exactly where Melnyk had left him.

“Have you seen this guy before?”

He handed the guide the dead man’s passport. The guide examined it closely, but the man’s face meant nothing to him.

“Think: maybe you saw him yesterday or the day before during one of your visits. He might have been part of another group.”

“I’ve never seen him before,” the guide said.

During the short drive to the central square, Melnyk thought about how much hate you would have to feel to destroy someone like that and to exhibit his body. When they got close to the minibus, he dropped the guide off and took Novak aside.

“It’s a one-fifteen,” he murmured.

In the Ukrainian penal code, Article 115 refers to premeditated murder. He had not wanted to utter aloud the word ‘murder’ because the tourists were spooked enough already.

Novak’s pupils dilated.

“Cause of death?”

“Hard to say until we’ve got him down.”

“Down?”

“He’s hanging by metal wires on the front of an apartment block.”

Novak said nothing for a moment before frantically reeling off the criminal procedure code: “We can’t leave the crime scene without surveillance. . . we have to. . . to create a secure perimeter around the body. . .”

“Calm down, officer,” Melnyk said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Who do you think is going to intrude on the world’s most radioactive crime scene?”

“But it’s procedure. . .”

“In Kyiv maybe. Not here. Did you get anything out of the tourists?”

Novak took out her notebook and read out her notes in a shaky voice: “They all reserved their excursion yesterday in Kyiv, after a visit to the National Chernobyl Museum. The minibus picked them up at seven this morning outside McDonald’s in Maidan. Their drive lasted a little over two hours and they passed the Dytayatki checkpoint around 10 o’clock and did the usual visit: first the city of Chernobyl, the monument to the liquidators, then the abandoned villages, the reactor, and after that they came here, to Pripyat. They had been here ten minutes before one of them, a Frenchman named. . . Gallois. . . noticed the body. You think one of the tourists killed the guy?”

Melnyk dismissed this idea: “No. Just hanging the body must have taken hours.”

His mobile rang. It was his colleague at the police station.

“What can you tell me?”

“I didn’t find much, but I did discover something freaky about his family.” His colleague’s voice wavered between excitement and nervousness. “His mother was called Olga Sokolov. She was murdered nearby. It was really bad: multiple stab wounds, mutilations. . . a horror show. They found her body along with another woman’s body in a house in the village of Zalissya.”

Zalissya was only a stone’s throw from Chernobyl, yet Melnyk had heard nothing about this story.

“Doesn’t ring any bells. When did it happen?”

“That’s the crazy thing. It was in 1986. April 26th.”

Melnyk felt his guts twist.

“Are you sure about the date?”

“Certain,” his colleague said.

Melnyk hung up, staring into space. April 26, 1986. . . All Ukrainians, young or old, knew that date. It was the day that the nuclear reactor exploded.

THE LANGUAGE OF NIGHTINGALES

2

Metallic creaks, wheezing breaths.

He woke in darkness: green and blue lights flashed across his vision every time he blinked. The air was heavy, thick with the bitter stink of unwashed bodies, antiseptic and alcohol.

Where am I?

His eyes adjusted to the dim light in the room and he made out a row of beds against the opposite wall. They were occupied by shapeless, moaning beings that slowly moved their limbs the way half-crushed beetles wave their legs before dying.

Get out of here!

He tried to stand, but his wrists and ankles could not be raised from the mattress. Horrified, he realised that they were strapped to the bedframe. He pulled with all his strength, trying to free himself, but the effort made his head spin so that he thought he would faint. Disorientated, his body bathed in cold, greasy sweat, he tried to remember how he had got here.

Dry mouth, aching head, throat scorched with the aftertaste of alcohol: apparently he had drunk too much. Each time his heartbeat suddenly accelerated, he felt as if the bells of St Basil’s were pealing inside his head. Stabbing pains in his ribs, the tang of metal oozing from his split lips, a burning sensation in the knuckles of his fingers: he hadn’t just been drinking, he had been fighting too. Fragments of the previous night came back to him. Zenit St Petersburg had been playing against Spartak Moscow. In a bar, he had yelled at the Zenit supporters that they were goat-fuckers, or something like that. Or had it been the other way round? Maybe he had insulted the sacrosanct Spartak team, may God forgive him! In any case, the result hadn’t been long coming. When he left the bar, three men had jumped him. Skinhead ultras with a black-white-gold crest sewn onto their khaki bomber jackets: the flag of imperial Russia. The kind of morons who usually attacked Chechens or Dagestanis or basically anyone with darker skin than their own.

With his mixed features, he was the perfect prey. The ultras must have thought they’d found an easy target. Big mistake. Elbows to their eye sockets, roundhouse kicks to their ribs, knees in their balls, head-butts: he had given them the full works. In a rush of drunken pride, he thought to himself that his attackers must be feeling a lot worse than he was right now.

The sound of footsteps in the corridor.

A door creaked open, then the fluorescent ceiling lights came on, clinking sharply, blinding him. He closed his eyes against the dazzle while a man’s voice speaking Siberian-accented Russian exploded in his ears like a firecracker at the back of a cave: “Which of you is Alexander Rybalko?”

The light. . . the fluorescent lights were burning into his brain. He leaned to the side and squinted. A young guy in glasses wearing a white coat.

“Alexander Rybalko?” the man repeated.

Another explosion inside his hangover-racked brain. He groaned and the doctor walked towards him.

“Are you Alexander Rybalko? Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you speak Russian?”

“Not. . . so loud,” he said. His tongue was heavy, clumsy. The sound of his own voice made the bones inside his head vibrate. Even thinking was painful.

“Where. . . am I?”

“In hospital. Are you American? European?”

“I’m Russian, mudak.”

The young doctor looked shocked. Rybalko wondered if it was surprise at the idea that someone of mixed blood could speak Russian, or simply the fact of being insulted in his native language.

“Why. . . I. . . here?”

The doctor’s face quickly resumed its expression of arrogance and weary resignation.

“The police picked you up near the station last night,” he said stiffly. “You were lying in the street, totally drunk.”

Rybalko raised his head a few centimetres to look around. The other beds were occupied by pathetic, wild-eyed alcoholics, hairy guys with dirty fingernails, red cheeks and purple noses: human beasts. He hoped – without really believing it – that he did not look as they did.

He seemed to be the only one strapped to his bed.

“Why. . . tied up?”

“Because of your attitude when you were being undressed. You tried to bite one of the nurses.”

A new memory came to him: he was in the corridor, being dragged by three men struggling to subdue his almost two-metre-tall, eighty-eight kilo frame as clumsily he tried to shake them off. He felt a pain in his arm, the cold floor pressing against his face: they’d put him in a shoulder lock to calm him down. He’d shouted: “I don’t have time for this shit! I don’t have time!” They undressed him down to his underwear. He spent a long time yelling. Then he fell asleep.

The doctor began undoing one of the leather straps.

“Before letting you leave, I’m going to examine you to make sure everything’s alright. O.K., Mr Rybalko?”

He did not like being spoken to as though he were some kind of backward child, but he nodded all the same.

“Please sit on the edge of the bed.”

He obeyed, taking his time. His muscles ached and his movements were awkward. The doctor asked him question after question and he answered them with monosyllables. Do you often drink that much? No. Do you drink regularly? No. Do you remember last night? No. Or the one before? No. Does your head ache? Yes. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain? Eleven. Does your stomach ache? Yes. What triggered your excessive drinking?

Rybalko stared at the doctor.

“I killed someone.”

The doctor froze.

“Someone? How? Who?”

He paused before replying, with a mocking smile: “Some quack. He was asking too many questions.”

The young doctor blushed and angrily strapped the cuff of a blood-pressure monitor around Rybalko’s arm.

“You shouldn’t joke about things like that. Last month, a guy in the same state as you fell asleep on a railway track. The driver didn’t have time to brake. That could have been you. We have a group therapy class for alcoholics that meets twice a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I would advise you to sign up.”

“I’m not an alcoholic,” Rybalko said.

Ignoring this, the doctor gave him the usual long-winded speech about the harmful effects of alcohol, like a preacher trying to convert a heathen. Thankfully the rest of the examination took place in relative silence. Finally the young doctor told him he was free to leave. As the doctor left the room, Rybalko closed his eyes and sank into a restless sleep for twenty or thirty minutes before being shaken awake by a female nurse. She had brought him the crumpled clothes he had been wearing for the previous several days. He tried to stand up to get dressed, but felt so dizzy that he had to sit down again.

“I can find you a wheelchair if you need one,” the nurse said kindly.

I’m not a fucking invalid, he thought, his pride stung.

But all he said was: “I’m O.K.” Each word was so painful to articulate, and getting angry only made his headache worse.

With difficulty, he somehow put on his trousers, while the other drunks watched with amusement. After that, he put on his socks, his still-wet shoes, his T-shirt, his sweater with its stale beer stench, and his parka with its torn sleeves. The nurse gave him some pills, which he swallowed with a glass of water so cold that it made his teeth hurt. She left the room then and he limped after her through the tiled corridors, breathing in the smell of iodine. At each junction, she waited a few seconds for him to catch up. He had the impression that she was walking along the edge of a swimming pool while he was at the bottom in a diving suit, trudging through the water.

It was humiliating.

“Are you sure you don’t want a wheelchair?” she said.

He mumbled an inaudible insult. Another ten metres at least and they reached the lobby. The nurse left him at a counter, where a bored-looking woman gave him back his coat and a black plastic bin-liner containing his belongings. The bin-liner was tied shut, but his fingers were too clumsy to undo the knot. In the end he angrily tore the plastic open, spilling its contents onto the countertop: a wallet, car keys, metro tickets, and in the middle of it all. . .

An MP-443 pistol.

The woman stared open-mouthed at the weapon.

Rybalko knew what was going through her head: dark skin, gun on the counter. Just as she looked about to scream, he said: “It’s my service pistol.”

The receptionist gave him the same incredulous look that the doctor had given him earlier. Rybalko searched through the mess of his belongings on the counter, found his police card, and showed it to her.

“Do you see that? Moscow police.”

The woman inspected the card with the scepticism of a supermarket cashier examining a 5,000-ruble note. While this was happening, Rybalko stuck his pistol into his belt and lowered his T-shirt over it. The receptionist decided at last that the police card was genuine and handed him a stack of documents including his bill, various forms, and – slipped between the pages – a brochure advertising group therapy for alcoholics. He shoved all this paperwork into the pocket of his parka and unblinkingly paid the bill for his hospitalisation.

Before leaving, he went to the men’s room to splash some cold water over his face. In the mirror above the sink, he almost did not recognise himself. His cheeks were covered with a three-day beard, his coffee-coloured skin had turned an earthlike tone, and his pale blue eyes were bloodshot. The doctor’s words echoed in his head: “Last month, a guy in the same state as you fell asleep on a railway track. The driver didn’t have time to brake. That could have been you.”

It could have been him. . . Asleep on the train tracks, killed by the morning’s first suburban train before he even woke. . . Maybe that would have been better for everyone, he thought, pulling up his jacket collar.

He dried his face, walked out through reception and left the hospital. Outside, the air was crisp, the sun weak. An aspirin-coloured taxi was waiting, double-parked. He climbed in, showed the driver his police card, and was about to ask to be taken home when he spotted the police car on the other side of the street. He instantly recognised the man inside: cropped black hair, hooked nose, physique of a bodybuilder running to fat, looking as though he was about to burst out of his leather jacket. He, too, had rings under his eyes and his cheeks were darkened