The Outcast Read Online Free PDF Page A

mind right now. She was doing what she enjoyed, battling against the odds. She looked tired but also as if she was enjoying life again—as if she was finally engaging with something real, rather than living vicariously through her father’s past or Doripalam’s present. And, he thought with mild satisfaction as he ordered a beer at the bar, the fact that she had taken up smoking again at least meant she couldn’t occupy quite her usual altitude of moral high ground.
    He took the beer carefully across to a table in one of the darker corners and sipped the drink slowly, enjoying the first cold bitter taste after the dry heat of the afternoon. It was turning into an unusually hot summer—days of baking heat, clear blue empty skies. It would be good, he thought, to be somewhere other than here. Somewhere outside the city. Somewhere among the trees, where there was shelter, cooler air. He wanted more than anything simply to get away.
    He was beginning to reflect on the possibility of taking a few days’ leave—unlikely, with the deadlines that Solongo was facing—when he felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. He pulled it out and glanced idly at the number. Batzorig, who was rapidly taking on the mantle of his unofficial deputy. He sighed and thumbed the call button, wondering why he was needed now. “Hello?”
    â€œDoripalam? Wanted to check where you were. I tried the hospital first, but they said you’d left. I just tried your home number.”
    Doripalam paused, wondering what to say about his visit to Tunjin. “I was just on my way back,” he said. “Called in for a beer.”
    â€œIt’s just—well, we have an incident.”
    â€œWhat sort of incident?” Batzorig was, like most of the team, young and inexperienced, promoted too quickly and struggling with the challenges that were thrown at him. But he was bright and honest and enthusiastic—none of which were particularly common characteristics in the service.
    â€œWe have a body,” he said. There was a moment’s pause before he added: “It looks like murder.”
    â€œWhere is it?” Doripalam swilled the beer in his glass, watching the pale foam against the dark liquid. He could see his evening disappearing.
    â€œIt’s at the city museum.” Doripalam could hear his breathing down the line. His own mind was already making the obvious connection.
    â€œThere’s one other thing.” Batzorig went on.
    â€œWhat?” Doripalam could see the evening sky through the large windows at the far end of the bar.
    â€œThe person who reported it,” Batzorig continued hurriedly. “It was your wife. It was Solongo.”
    Â 
WINTER 1988
    The museum was as good a first rendezvous as any. He could spend hours wandering through its largely deserted halls, staring at the exhibits, a notebook in his hand. From the walls, the images of Genghis Khan stared down, grimacing as though to express disapproval.
    He was slightly surprised that the museum had survived through the more stringent days of this regime. But the Party had always had ambiguous views about places like this, just as in his own country and in the USSR. They talked about erasing history, but they were keen to foster national pride and identity, and they recognised where that identity had its roots.
    So the museum had survived, even though its exhibits had seen better days. Labels had become detached, items were missing, the glass itself was stained to the point where it was almost opaque. He suspected that the more valuable items had been looted or misappropriated years before.
    Nevertheless, people were beginning to visit the museum again, a sign of how things were changing. Even now, on this freezing winter’s afternoon, light already draining from the streets outside, there were some visitors wandering purposefully about the dim corridors.
    The contact was standing in one of the galleries on