My acquaintance is a big fan of cold weapons. He loves them so much that he even cuts sausage with a double-edged hunting knife, which he has in his kitchen instead of a regular kitchen knife, and he fanatically sharpens it to the point where it can “cut hair.” You should also picture this person as a kind of peaceful giant, weighing around 220 pounds, who remains calm until someone crosses him. His threshold for being crossed is such that he will go to confront the neighbors drilling into the wall with that very kitchen knife or a larger cleaver, of which he has plenty.
It so happened that during the May holidays, his friend from another city came to visit him. The friend had some relatives in Kyiv related to visa issuance for somewhere, and he asked Yura (that’s my acquaintance’s name) if he could stay overnight.
The following two events were key in the whole story. First, Vitalik—who came for a visit, got so drunk he lost consciousness, and showed up at Yura’s place in such a state that Yura just put him to bed. Second, Yura, in order to feed Vitalik, went into the freezer for some fish. Yura’s refrigerator is a two-compartment model, with the freezer on top; the fish was frozen solid and needed to be pried off the surface of the freezer with what? That’s right—a knife.
The knife slips from Yura’s hands and, being well-balanced, falls blade-first, landing between his big toe and index toe. It cuts through the tendons in both toes and could have even severed one of them completely.
A sea of blood. Bloody trails all over the apartment. Yura could barely walk around the house. First, he went to the bathroom and tried to rinse his wound. The drain was closed, and a little water had been drawn — the housing office had threatened to shut off the water, so Yura had filled up a reserve during the day. He rinsed his leg in the bathtub and wrapped his fingers in bandages, cutting the bandage with a cleaver that happened to be at hand, as he had plenty of them in his apartment, as I mentioned. Then, seeing that the bleeding wouldn’t stop, he called for an ambulance and tried to wake Vitalik — to tell him that he was leaving with the doctors. Vitalik mumbled something and passed out again.
We won’t touch Yura for now, as Ukrainian medicine has been passing him around from hospital to hospital almost all night—no one wanted to operate on him when it was the perfect time to drink to May Day and Victory. Night shift workers aren’t there to actually work, right?
Let’s look at the world through Vitalik’s eyes.
Vitalik wakes up to go to the bathroom. On one hand, he doesn’t understand where he is; on the other hand, he realizes he needs to find the bathroom. He wanders aimlessly through the apartment, first finding the kitchen, turning on the light, and seeing that the entire floor is covered in blood, with a good knife lying on the floor. A chill runs down his spine; he’s almost sober now as he heads to the bathroom, and there—yes, the water in the bathtub is a bloody solution that looks very much like just a lot of blood. Moreover, the bathroom is also covered in blood, and there’s a bloody cleaver lying on the tiles.
Vitalik finally comes to his senses, remembers where he is, and also recalls Yuri’s reputation. He tries to find Yuri, but wherever he looks, he only sees bloody traces. He dials Yuri’s phone — it’s out of service. What to do? Right — call the cops!
While the cops are on their way, Vitalik goes to bed and falls asleep again. He wakes up to the sound of the doorbell, still doesn’t remember anything (he’s drunk, after all), and approaches the door in the dark, only to see the cops there! “What’s going on?”
“Did you call for me?”
— No!
— Please open the door!
— I’m not the owner, I’ll call the owner now — he will open the door. He calls out, but Yura doesn’t respond, so he takes his phone and calls Yura. Yura picks up and explains that he went to the hospital and told Vitalik about it. Vitalik opens the door for the cops, says that no one called anyone, it must be someone’s joke, and by the way, here’s the owner of the apartment on the phone, you can talk to him. The cops have nothing better to do than to figure out who called them, and despite their swearing, they are actually relieved that nothing serious is going on, so they leave.
Vitalik sees off the cops, closes the door, and goes to bed. A few hours later, he wakes up to go to the bathroom and… that’s right, he sees a sea of blood, a cleaver, and Yura still isn’t picking up the phone. What does Vitalik do? That’s right — he calls the police again.
The police, seeing that this is a) the second call and b) clearly a case of murder, this time sends the right team instead of the patrol officers, who arrive just as Vitalik passes out again.
Vitalik, as he walked to the door this time, turned on the light and… saw a sea of blood, a cleaver, and the absence of Yura. He approached the door slowly and saw the worst he had feared — a squad of OMON ready to enter.
Vitalik quietly, as he thought, went to the bathroom and locked himself in there with his mobile phone, trying to call Yura and still hoping that the blood on the floor and in the bathroom wasn’t his.
The cops, realizing that they wouldn’t be let in, heard someone sneaking around outside the door. When they looked through the peephole and still didn’t open up, they decided it was time to break the door down. They ended up having to break down more than one door, as Vitalik also refused to let them into the bathroom.
From the police’s perspective, the scene looked like this: There was a sea of blood in the apartment, a cleaver, and some guy who couldn’t string two words together and claimed he didn’t live there, yet he had locked himself in a bathroom full of blood. Apparently, a body had been dismembered there, concluded the most educated cop, and this guy was left behind because he had been knocked out during a fight with the apartment’s owner and then abandoned by his accomplices to fend for himself.
Such cases should be uncovered while the trail is still hot, which is why the mumbling Vitalik is taken to the precinct, where he faces an intense interrogation that, from the investigator’s perspective, looks like stubborn resistance and requires the use of coercive measures. It’s important to understand that “murder cases” are handled carefully, and brute force is not employed to prevent lawyers from later getting the murderer off the hook. However, there is enough “non-brutal” force in the form of a straitjacket, tight handcuffs, a lamp in his eyes, and “barefoot on cold cement” to ensure that Vitalik eventually cracks and agrees to cooperate with the investigation, but only if he can get some sleep because he has a terrible headache. To solidify this success, the investigator asks Vitalik to write a “full confession,” which he does, inserting fictional names of accomplices and describing where he thinks they took the unfortunate Yura’s body. The outcome was also aided by the investigator explaining to Vitalik in simple terms that he was already facing 10 years regardless, and the best thing he could do was confess.
At that time, the police had set up an ambush in Yura’s apartment. They weren’t actually inside the apartment—there was no point, as the steel door had been kicked in and lay on the floor. However, they were hidden in the stairwell, ready to arrest anyone who entered the apartment. They suspected that Vitalik’s accomplices would return for him after getting rid of Yura’s body.
Somewhere around dawn, after visiting various hospitals in Kyiv, Yura returns home with a leg in a cast. He steps out of the elevator and sees… No, he doesn’t have time to see anything clearly, as he’s thrown face down on the floor, handcuffed, and dragged back into the elevator, then taken to the police station.
Yes, in about 14 hours, by the evening of the next day, everything will fall into place. Yura will be interrogated, they won’t believe him, they’ll check, and then they will believe him. They will show Vitalik. Vitalik will be doubly happy—he won’t have to serve time and Yura is alive. When Vitalik pipes up about police abuse, the investigator will remind him about “full confession” and offer him a choice of what to serve time for—admission or perjury. The happy friends will leave the police station and somehow make their way home.
They still didn’t know that during the time they were both at the police station, Yura’s girlfriend had come to visit him, worried because he wasn’t answering his phone. She saw… yes, a broken door, a pool of blood, a cleaver, and the absence of Yura. When she asked the officers there (fingerprints, forensics, etc.) what had happened, they “reassured” her by saying that the killers had already been caught and that as soon as they found the body, they would call her for identification.
The girl turned out to be responsible and decided a) to watch over the apartment and b) to call Yura’s parents. Thank God she was unable to reach them—they were at their dacha and never “found out” that Yura was “killed.” Otherwise, I would have had to write about the parents as well.
When Yura and Vitalik got home, the cops were already gone from the wrecked and bloodied apartment, and on the steps sat his girlfriend, still trying to reach Yura’s parents.