The Best of British Crime omnibus (23 page)

‘It's possible, of course,' he said. ‘At the same time, I've known this hotel for nearly thirty years, and there've been remarkably few
permanent
changes. Once a picture was hung, I'm inclined to think it would remain
in situ
except in the sort of case I mentioned – a special removal for some function. Even then, I think the chances are that it would be put back in the same place afterwards.'

I nodded. ‘Well, it's no good speculating any more. I'll make some inquiries about the history of the picture, and if it seems that it hasn't been moved about I'll do as Jeff suggests and try to get a line on who had Mullett's room during the war. It's a long shot, but it might come off.'

‘If it turns out to be the Welshman,' said Jeff, ‘I'll stand you a bottle of champagne. Now
that's
what we need in this case – to catch someone out in a thundering big lie.'

I spent the rest of the morning chasing chambermaids. I realised that they would probably chatter afterwards about my questions, however concretely I appealed to their discretion, but that couldn't be helped. We knew enough now to go full speed ahead with all possible lines of inquiry even at the cost of secrecy, and there was no other way of getting the information I wanted.

It was Katya, a maid recently transferred from the fourth to the third floor, who proved most useful. She said she was sure that picture of Stalin had hung in room 435 – Mullett's room – ever since she could remember, which was from well before the war. When I pressed her, she agreed that she couldn't really be certain that it hadn't been removed temporarily for a conference or a banquet, but she insisted that if so it had been restored afterwards to its rightful place. Waterhouse's view seemed fully confirmed. Each room, apparently, had its allocation of furniture, its special inventory, and I gathered that the necessity of making any changes always rocked the hotel bureaucracy, to its foundations. I remembered the trouble there had sometimes been over moving a chair from a colleague's room without permission of the management, and the ritual over Pott's request for the hotel cat, and I could believe what Katya said. For once, I felt thankful for such rigidity. I presented her with a couple of cakes of toilet soap and she was so overcome with gratitude that she bowed until her forehead almost scraped the floor.

What the maids couldn't tell me was who had occupied Mullett's room in 1942, and that was now the most vital question of all. One or two of them professed to have vague recollections, particularly when they saw Katya's soap, but their accounts were so conflicting that it was obvious no reliance could be placed on them. Several of the waiters were equally obliging but equally unhelpful. The information would, of course, be buried somewhere in the hotel archives, but short of breaking and entering the manager's office, I saw no way of getting hold of it.

I lunched with Jeff and Potts in the restaurant. Beyond indicating that I had made only slight progress I steered away from the topic, for the delegates were within earshot. The indefatigable Potts had been out with them that morning to a factory meeting where a unanimous resolution had been carried condemning the American ‘aggression in Korea' and where he had made a note that sixty-eight per cent of male workers appeared to shave only every other day. On other matters, he was more usefully informative. It seemed that the delegation's programme was to be completed that evening; that the following day – Sunday – would be devoted to pooling their findings and drafting a report, and that they would be leaving by air first thing on Monday morning. Bolting, who had been receiving medical attention and was still confined indoors, was expected to be sufficiently recovered by then. We had little more than a day left to come to some conclusion on the case.

After lunch the three of us retired to my room and I brought Potts up-to-date with the latest developments. Soon afterwards Waterhouse joined us again, eager to know the results of my inquiries that morning. We talked for a long while and went over a great deal of old ground, but in the end it became clearer that we were doing no more than mark time. It was all rather melancholy.

Jeff gave us a short pep-talk. ‘I reckon we haven't done so badly for a bunch of tyros,' he said. ‘Hell, it's only a few days ago that we were grilling that guy Gain about his relations with Mullett. We've come a heck of a distance since then.'

That was true, of course. I'd almost forgotten the Gain interview. ‘What a chap, eh?' I said. ‘Gosh, he was scared.'

‘I think he must always look rather frightened,' said Potts. ‘I saw him again yesterday – he was just coming out of the Lux Hotel. When he saw me he scuttled away like a rabbit.'

‘What were
you
doing there?' asked Jeff. ‘Collecting bus numbers?'

Potts gave him a pallid smile. ‘I was just interested in the people who live there.'

‘You'd be a darned sight safer scaling the Kremlin wall with a ladder,' I told him. ‘That Lux outfit gives me the shivers.'

The Lux was a small hotel set aside exclusively for the use of foreign Communists. In the old days, most of the Comintern people had lived there, and during the war many of the Party members who were now running the Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe had stayed there during their periods of training. I'd visited the place once, many years earlier, and it had seemed to me more like a prison than a hotel. Visitors had to fill up a form before they could get past the porter, and even residents had to show their passes as they went in and out.

‘It looked ordinary enough to me,' said Potts.

At that moment Waterhouse, who had been sitting with a perplexed frown on his face, suddenly gave a sharp exclamation.

‘I've got it!' he cried, snapping his thumb triumphantly against his fingers. ‘I've got it at last!'

‘What have you got?' I asked eagerly. We badly needed an idea.

‘I know where it was that I saw Tranter.
He
was coming out of the Lux.'

I stared.
‘Tranter!
When?'

‘Oh, it was during the war – early in the war. I
knew
I'd seen him. His hair's much whiter now and he's filled out, but he had that same limp. I can see him perfectly – he was with a man I'd met at some VOKS affair, a French Communist named Leclerc, and that's how I came to notice him.'

Jeff was leaning forward intently. ‘I'd sure like to think you were right, John, but it's pretty queer. Wouldn't other people have remembered if he'd been around during the war?'

‘Not necessarily,' said Waterhouse slowly, as though he were still mentally resolving a jigsaw. ‘Of course, there were some well-known Communists at the Lux whom we all knew about and even ran into occasionally. Leclerc was one of them. But there's no doubt at all that there were others whom we never met – undercover men. That was one of the functions of the Lux – to segregate them. They mixed with the Russians a bit, but mainly they kept to themselves, and the more important the jobs they were being trained for, the less they had to do with anybody. The idea, of course, was that when the war was over they'd be ready to go back to their own countries and take up all sorts of duties in the interests of the Party, and no one would know that they were Communists or be able to say for certain what they'd been doing.'

‘You know, Waterhouse,' I said, ‘I believe you've put your finger right on the spot. Look at the job he's doing – everything fits. He slips back home after the war, gets quietly into touch with the peace societies, appears to be overflowing with goodwill and Christian pacifism, and the next thing is that he's given a big post in the movement. He's doing a wonderful job for the Russians – and this trip he's making now is just a continuation of it. He comes out here, ostensibly for the first time, posing as an impartial, non-political observer, and he goes back and tells everyone how friendly and peace-loving the Russians are, and people listen because they think he's unbiased. And all the time, he's just a professional revolutionary. Wonderful!'

‘He must be a clever man,' said Potts thoughtfully. ‘I suppose all that pretence of not knowing any Russian is part of his disguise. He's certainly kept it up very well.'

‘Hold your horses!' I said. ‘That's something we ought to be able to check. I'll see if he's in.' I went over to the phone and asked for his room number. A moment later there was a click, and a soft voice said, ‘Tranter here.'

‘The hotel manager is speaking,' I said in Russian. ‘Can you please come down to my office at once. Comrade Goldstein wishes to talk to you urgently.'

There was another click, and the line went dead.

‘What's going on?' asked Jeff impatiently. ‘I asked him to visit the hotel manager.'

‘Well, what did he say?'

‘Nothing. He hung up.' I went to the door and opened it an inch or two. ‘Listen!'

Another door had opened and closed at the end of the corridor. Presently we heard the sound of quick footsteps approaching – quick but irregular – the unmistakable steps of a limping man. They turned off towards the lift and gradually died away.

I looked at Waterhouse. ‘That seems to settle it.'

‘The dirty, double-crossing son of a so-and-so!' murmured Jeff. ‘When I think of the stuff he's talked on this trip… !'

Waterhouse was smiling sardonically. ‘Peace on his lips and hatred in his heart? A familiar paradox in these parts, dear boy.'

Jeff looked pretty mad. ‘Anyway, this puts Tranter right in the picture as far as Mullett's concerned. He's a twister, and he was here in 1942. Why shouldn't he be the killer?'

‘Do you think,' said Potts, ‘that a professional revolutionary would get involved in such a disreputable private affair?'

‘Sure – why not? Even among black sheep, I guess some are blacker than others. These guys have their weaknesses like everyone else. Why, only yesterday Zina was reading me an account from
Pravda
about six big private rackets that had just been exposed here. One fellow held down four different jobs and drew a pay cheque at each one without anyone cottoning on. He was a big-shot local administrator, too. Tranter's human, even if he is a Communist. We can't rule him out.'

‘We can if he lived at the Lux in 1942 and not here,' said Waterhouse.

‘We don't
know
he lived at the Lux. You saw him coming out, but he may have been visiting. Maybe there wasn't room for him there at the time. Maybe he was accommodated here, and had Mullett's room.'

Waterhouse looked dubious. ‘It's possible – I wouldn't put it higher than that. In any case I understood he was at the cinema when Mullett was killed.'

‘It wasn't a very satisfactory alibi,' I reminded him. ‘It struck me at the time that the commissionaire remembered everything a damn sight too clearly.'

‘Exactly,' said Jeff, ‘and it's not difficult to drop
that
piece into place. If Tranter did it, and the Russians found out, isn't he just the kind of guy they'd be most keen to cover up for? He's right in the centre of an important propaganda campaign – they just couldn't afford to discipline him at this moment. I reckon they found out the truth, and that between them they concocted this story about him going to a movie and told the commissionaire to say “Yes” to it. Whereas Tranter, instead of being at the movie, was in fact hanging around the hotel waiting to carry out his plan.'

‘When
I
saw him,' said Potts, ‘he was hanging about the second floor landing. Remember, George, I told you? Considering all we've found out about him, I'm just wondering if he might not have been going to that meeting some of the big-shots were holding.'

‘Potts could be right,' I said. ‘The Russians would want to cover up for that just as much as for a murder. Suppose he was at the meeting and came out knowing nothing about Mullett. Naturally he'd be asked where he'd been. He couldn't tell the truth, because his association with the Party had to be kept secret, so on the spur of the moment he'd say he'd been to the pictures. Then he'd get in touch with his bosses and explain the awkward situation and the M.V.D would fix the commissionaire.'

‘It's all pure supposition,' Jeff objected. ‘He could just as well have been doing the murder.'

I was about to agree that either of the theories would fit when suddenly I remembered Tranter's disability. ‘We're a lot of dopes,' I said. ‘Of course he couldn't have done it. With that stiff leg he couldn't have made the transit of those balconies in a million years.'

‘Hell!' exclaimed Jeff. He looked quite deflated, and subsided gloomily into the depths of his chair with his hands in his pockets and his legs thrust out. ‘I was sure looking forward to getting that guy.'

‘At least,' said Waterhouse, ‘we haven't been wasting our time. I should think that when you get back to London, George, you'll be able to damage Mr Tranter's non-political position quite a bit.'

I was just going to assure him that I should leave no stone unthrown when Jeff shot out of his chair with a look of jubilation on his face.

‘You guys think you're smart, don't you? Tranter couldn't have done the murder because he couldn't have crossed the balconies, eh? Well, suppose he didn't need to? Suppose Tanya climbed across and broke into Mullett's room and fixed the latch from the inside so that Tranter could walk in from the corridor, and then went back to her own room the way she'd come? Well, what about it?'

We all paid him the homage of silence. We'd been pretty dumb.

For about ten seconds, it seemed as though we had found a reasonable answer to all our questions. Here was a man whose very profession was plotting and scheming; a man of nerve, accustomed to taking risks. He had been in Moscow in 1942 and could certainly have known Tanya. After the long asceticism of Party work, he might well have been tempted by the prospect of big money. He, more than anyone, would have needed a go-between, for he would have suffered more than most had he been found out. Some act of Party discipline – moving him suddenly, perhaps, from the Astoria to the Lux – might have prevented him from collecting the stamps. He had a dubious alibi for the material time, and he was physically capable of having done the deed. He was, to say the least, right back in the running.