The Best of British Crime omnibus (14 page)

‘It
is
a health resort, of course,' I said. ‘All the same, it's queer they should have bundled her off like that.'

‘I think it's all darned fishy. It's true Tanya had a bad shock last night, but she got over it. She was all right when the police were questioning us and she was okay when I stuck my head in last thing. If she'd suddenly felt a nervous collapse coming on after that, surely she'd have come and told me – I was only two doors away.'

‘Doesn't Kira know what happened?'

‘She says she doesn't know any details. She's given me an address in Simferopol and I've sent off a wire, though God knows if it'll ever be delivered. Apart from that, all Kira can say is that Tanya will soon be better, and that there's absolutely nothing to worry about.'

‘I dare say she's right. What exactly is on your mind, Jeff?'

‘I'd just like to know what happened here after we turned in, that's all. The police and

those M.V.D boys must have been around most of the night, working on that phoney story about Nikolai. Well, I wondered – suppose Tanya was asked some more questions, and spoke out of turn. She liked Nikolai – she wouldn't have wanted to believe that story. She may have seen something, or heard something, that didn't square with the official version.'

‘Wouldn't they just have told her to keep quiet about it?'

‘They might have thought it safer to put her on a plane for the Crimea. They'd know that she and I were pretty close – they might have thought it too risky to leave her around.'

I sat silent for a while, thinking it over, and I didn't much like the look of it myself. Tanya had known that Jeff was leaving Russia in a few days' time, and unless she had suddenly become very ill indeed it was hardly conceivable that she would have left voluntarily for the south without saying good-bye. Her abrupt departure by night was unpleasantly reminiscent of incidents that had happened before. The Soviet authorities, of course, cared nothing about personal feelings, and if it suited them they'd move people around like railway trucks. Their girl ‘contacts' would be allowed – indeed, instructed – to develop the closest possible relationships with foreigners, and then without a word of warning or explanation they'd be whisked away to Archangel or Tashkent or Vladivostock, and after that all efforts to trace them would fail. Letters and telegrams would go unanswered, and officials would stall, and finally the anxious – and on occasion heart-broken – foreigner would have to leave the country, and that would be that. It was, of course, a risk that every instructed foreigner knew about and took into account, but that didn't make the severance any more pleasant when it came.

However, it seemed a little early to take so gloomy a view in Tanya's case. ‘You may hear from her tomorrow or the next day,' I said. ‘No point in losing sleep unnecessarily.'

He said, ‘I guess not,' and went off moodily to keep a lunch date.

Directly after lunch the delegation met to discuss its future plans, and afterwards Bolting held an informal press conference in his room, with all present. He didn't look at all happy – the hoarseness that I'd noticed in his voice at the VOKS party had got worse and he was wearing a silk scarf round his throat. The others weren't exactly on top of their form, either. Mrs Clarke was pale and blotchy, as though she'd just come out of the world's worst hangover. Cressey still seemed slightly incredulous that he could have become involved in such a drama, and

Tranter was mum. The Professor doodled remotely, giving the impression that he didn't even know what was being discussed, and Islwyn had a dreamy, faraway look, as though recollecting his love-life in tranquility. Perdita's expression suggested haughty disapproval of the whole proceedings. Mullett might not have been very popular, I reflected, but his death had certainly taken all the colour and vitality out of the delegation.

Bolting began by reading a short prepared statement about the great loss everyone had sustained, which nobody bothered to take down, and then he said that after consultation with VOKS it had been agreed that what he called the ‘educational' part of the delegation's schedule should be completed according to plan, but that the social part should be curtailed out of respect for Mullett's memory. They would be leaving for home in just under a week.

The correspondents were no longer in the least interested in the delegation's schedule, but we were all interested in Mullett and how much the delegation had been told.

‘Are you satisfied,' Jeff asked, ‘with the official version of what happened last night?'

Bolting toyed for a moment with a gold signet ring he wore on his left hand and I felt that plain horse sense was warring with discretion. Then he gave a faint shrug. ‘Presumably the police know best,' he said. ‘I'm not prepared to discuss the matter.'

‘
I'm
perfectly satisfied,' put in Perdita, and there was a murmur of acquiescence from those around her. ‘I hope they hang him,' said Mrs Clarke, viciously. The Professor continued to doodle.

We tried several more questions, but it soon became apparent that Bolting knew as little as we did about the circumstances of Nikolai's arrest and his present whereabouts and what the next steps were going to be, if any. Only in one respect was he informative. Waterhouse asked him if there had been any medical report on Mullett, and Bolting said that as a matter of fact it was all rather tragic because it had been found that Mullett had an unusually thin skull. But for that fact, the blow with the bottle would probably not have killed him.

That was all, and soon after we dispersed. I gathered from Cressey, whom I managed to nobble in the corridor, that the earlier discussions about plans had been very bad-tempered. No doubt nerves were pretty raw all round. He himself would have preferred to pack up and leave right away, and so would Bolting and the Professor, but Tranter and Perdita had argued strongly that they'd come out to do a job and that they oughtn't to go before they'd finished it. As the VOKS people also had been most reluctant to see the delegation break up, this view had prevailed.

There was a telegram waiting for me when I got to my room. It was from my Foreign Editor, and it said: ‘MOST INTERESTED ALL DETAILS MULLETT AFFAIR.' It was the sort of daft telegram that Foreign Editors do send to correspondents in Russia – a worthy successor to such classics as ‘INTERVIEW FIRST LADY OF KREMLIN' and ‘SEND DETAILS RUSSIA' S NEW SECRET WEAPON EARLIEST.' I walked gloomily across to the Press Department and sent off a reply: ‘SO AM I.' Several correspondents from eastern European papers were dispatching lengthy cables enlarging on the vicious record of the waiter Skaliga. It seemed that poor Nikolai was to go down in Iron Curtain history with the great assassins. It was pitiful.

When I got back to the hotel, I found that the guard on Mullett's room had been changed. The new man was a short, broad-shouldered, moronic-looking type, with a lugubrious countenance. He was seated on a chair just opposite Mullett's door, and he gave me a jaundiced nod as I passed him. I went and tried Jeff's door, but got no reply.

‘He's gone out,' said the watchdog mournfully.

I nodded, and went in to have a sleep. The past twenty-four hours, with their tension and frustration, had been exhausting. When I woke up, I rang Jeff. There was something wrong with my telephone and I had difficulty in getting through, but I heard his bell at last. He didn't answer, though, and I remembered that he'd been going to a party at one of the Legations. A long evening stretched ahead.

I tried to settle down with a book, but I couldn't concentrate. My thoughts kept reverting to frail old Nikolai, who was probably on his way to some labour camp in Karaganda if he was lucky, and to the possibility that Tanya was in some sort of trouble, and to that room next door, and to what had really happened there the night before. The case was becoming a mental treadmill. The more I pondered, the more I felt not merely that the
official
story was ridiculous but that the whole episode as we knew it somehow failed to carry conviction. I still couldn't see how anyone could have got hold of the bottle and taken Mullett unawares. What were we to suppose that the victim had been doing at the time? – sitting at his table, taking no notice, with his back conveniently turned? Yet if he'd been paying the slightest attention to his visitor's strange behaviour he'd have seen the attack coming, and a raised arm could easily have warded off the fatal blow.

As I dwelt on the case, I wished again that I had had more time to examine Mullett's room. There might well have been something there that I'd overlooked. There might still be something there. Why else, at this stage, were the authorities maintaining such a careful guard over the place? I turned over in my mind the possibility of luring the guard away and getting Mullett's key from the floor manageress by some subterfuge, but the prospect was poor, and I certainly couldn't do it without help.

I paced up and down restlessly for a while, and then stopped by the french doors and looked out upon the square. Dusk had fallen. The windows were steamed up and dirty outside, so that all I could see was the glow of the street lamps opposite and the intermittent flashes of the trolley-buses.

Suddenly I had an idea, and it jolted me right out of my gloom. A slim chance, perhaps, but worth investigating. Anything was better than inactivity. I slipped quickly into my
shuba
and fur hat, grabbed a torch, and took a firm grip on the handle of the french doors. It would mean resealing them afterwards, but that was a minor matter. I braced myself, turned the handle, and gave a couple of sharp jerks. At the second pull the brown paper strips over the cracks came away with a tearing noise, and the door stood open. The outer doors were not sealed and presented no difficulty, and a moment later I was standing on the balcony.

It was devilish cold outside, but what I saw warmed me. On this side of the hotel there was one balcony to every two rooms, and the one I was standing on also served Mullett's room. I was in luck. A couple of steps, and I was outside Mullett's doors. The frozen snow crunched under my feet.

I felt a little conspicuous, as though a hundred eyes were on me, but in fact I was fifty feet above the street and there wasn't really much danger of being spotted. I turned the handle of the outer of the double doors, which again wasn't sealed, and slipped into the space between them. Then I gripped the handle of the inner door and shoved hard.

It opened so easily that I almost fell into the room, and for a hectic moment I feared that the watchdog out in the corridor must have heard me. I listened, holding my breath, my heart beating madly. I thought I heard the sound of a chair leg scraping, but nothing happened.

It was eerie, standing there alone in the darkness of the murder-room, and my pulse leaped as the curtain by the bed stirred and rattled on its rings. I told myself it was only the draught blowing in through the open doors, but my nerves tingled in the guarded silence. I closed the doors softly behind me, tiptoed across the carpet, and switched on the light. It was with quite absurd relief that I satisfied myself that the room was empty and that there was no one waiting for
me
with a bottle. I'm no hero, and I've never pretended to be.

At first glance, the room looked exactly as it had done on the previous evening, except of course that the body had been taken away and the broken glass removed. No attempt had been made to wash out the big bloodstain on the carpet or to tidy up Mullett's belongings, which were scattered about the room just as he'd left them. The waste-paper basket was still half-full of rubbish – though when I probed deeper, in almost idle curiosity, I found that the copy of
Pravda
had gone, and so had the tin. That made me think a bit.

I prowled around for a while, hoping that I might have the luck to come across one of those little objects that detectives always seem to find – an unusual coat button or scarab brooch or an initialled handkerchief. There wasn't really a chance, of course – even if the murderer
had
left any personal traces, the police would surely have discovered them. Afterwards I went quickly through Mullett's personal possessions, thinking that I might stumble upon some better indication of motive than that unconvincingly exposed wallet. Again, there was nothing of interest. I riffled through the papers on his desk – mostly notes of the various trips the delegation had made. There was one rather odd thing amongst them – an envelope with a Moscow address on it in pale green ink and a Ceylon postmark. I couldn't quite fit it into the Mullett picture, so I slipped it into my pocket for later consideration.

Otherwise, the room was disappointingly barren. I was just going to switch off the light and return the way I'd come when I noticed that the velvet curtain which hung down on the left side of the french doors had been torn from two of its wooden rings. I didn't think I had done that myself, during my entry. Any suggestions of a struggle, or marks of a possible disturbance, were of interest, so I went over to examine the curtains more closely. As I did so, my attention was suddenly caught by the brown paper strips that had been used to seal the doors, and that I'd broken on my way in. They looked damp! I ran my finger along one of the strips, and it
was
damp.

Fascinated, I went and examined the paper strips which sealed the cracks in one of the other window frames, thinking that for some reason the whole room might have been freshly sealed that day. But they were tinder dry. There was no doubt about it – those french doors had been specially opened and resealed during the past twenty-four hours. I realised now why they had swung back too easily at my push. The paste was still tacky.

I thought at first that the police must have opened the doors during their investigation, though I couldn't imagine why. Then, as I dwelt on the puzzling details of the murder and tried to fit this new discovery into the pattern, a more interesting idea occurred to me. Here, surely, was a possible explanation of how the murderer had managed to strike that fatal blow without arousing Mullett's alarm? Suppose he'd succeeded in slipping into Mullett's room – taking advantage, perhaps, of a door temporarily left open – and concealed himself in the space between the two sets of french doors, having first armed himself with the bottle. Then, on Mullett's return after the broadcast, the intruder would have been in a position to catch him completely off-guard. That at least made more sense than any alternative we had thought of so far.