KJE Morton
Writing as KJE Morton, Katharine Morton explores stories based on her experiences as an international financial journalist and editor. Behind the headlines of big numbers and dollar signs, pollution and fat cats there are real and imagined people and places and always and everywhere intrigue. Her crime mystery, Caviar Cat, is set in Russia. Inspector Nikolai Vorakin becomes embroiled in the murky world of caviar smuggling. Her next novel, Full Pelt, forces the same detective to investigate corruption and the world of fur. Katharine lives near Cambridge.
Extract from Caviar Cat
Inspector Nikolai Vorakin is a detective who has come to Astrakhan to find a missing caviar-sniffing cat: but he’s got other demons to deal with.
Nikolai stares at the back of his driver’s thick neck. It’s odd to have a checkpoint so far away from Astrakhan – they must have driven at least 20 miles north. They pass a broken sign bearing the legend: “Wild Egret Hotel “floating pleasure palace”. This must be the start, or the end, of the delta.
‘Just another mile to the checkpoint,’ the driver says, as if answering a question Nikolai will never ask.
A mile. Nikolai’s never paid much attention to directions or distances, allowing them to wash around him after the second or third instruction. He’s never really had to. After all, he hasn’t properly driven since that time in 1984. They gave out licenses with first razors in those days. First razor, first sip of vodka, second sip of vodka, let’s all of us get into your father’s car. Let’s drive! Let’s drive without headlights. Let me drive. Nikolai will drive. Nikolai will drive around the car park. Down the wide boulevard. Up to the Motherland Statue. Round it, scattering the flower sellers. Let’s all shout “faster!” And that lime green Moskvitch 408: what a car. The front seat totally mobile. And Nikolai’s father a welder. Totally mobile. Flying through the air. Flying as 45 miles an hour becomes zero miles an hour against a concrete pillar at the end of the road.
It might not have killed Nikolai, but it hadn't helped his choice of career. His father had fixed it. Steelworkers could, back then. Not fix the car: fix his entry into the Academy. No questions, no choices. You killed a man. You killed your best friend. Flying through the air from the unwelded passenger seat. At least Militsiya officers don’t drive themselves. And it’s been like that, Nikolai not driving, right up until six months ago. Since that other accident; the one that blends in his mind with the whole Gulyegin Incident.