The Best of British Crime omnibus (24 page)

Then I began to realise the new possibilities that had been opened up by our discovery of Tranter's duplicity.

‘Look here,' I said, ‘we've been assuming all this time that certain of the delegates could be ruled out as possible suspects because they weren't in Russia during the war. Tranter was one of them. Now we find that Tranter has been taking us all in, and that in fact he
was
here. Well, how do we know the others weren't. Any of them – Cressey, for instance?'

‘Heck!' said Jeff, ‘you're surely not casting Joe Cressey in the role of a master mind?'

‘I don't know. He's certainly not as dumb as he sometimes seems – not by a long chalk. I wouldn't think it likely, but frankly my faith is a bit shaken after this Tranter business. How can we be sure that Cressey isn't another of these undercover men?'

‘I understood,' said Waterhouse, ‘that he was elected by his workmates.'

‘That's what he told me, and I dare say it's true, but you know as well as I do how expert the Party boys are at fixing elections. It might be the old story – a small minority knowing its own mind and a large majority divided. Cressey's rather independent attitude may be just a clever pose. He certainly saw plenty of Tanya when he got here, and all those Russian lessons he had with her and with Mullett may have been an elaborate blind. Perhaps he knows as much Russian as Tranter.'

‘I doubt that,' said Waterhouse. ‘Tranter was very careful not to talk it at all. That should have made us suspicious. Cressey, on the other hand, tries, and makes a shocking mess of it. If he'd been here during the war,

I don't see how his accent
could
be as bad as it is.'

‘There's another thing,' said Potts. ‘Hasn't Cressey a sort of alibi? I thought he was seen leaving the hotel.'

‘It's no better than Tranter's,' I pointed out. ‘Ivan says he saw Cressey going out, but on the assumption that Cressey is an under-cover man and valuable to the Russians, they'd have covered up for him just as much as for Tranter.'

‘Okay,' said Jeff, ‘maybe Cressey isn't quite in the clear, but there's absolutely no evidence that he was here during the war. In Tranter's case there is evidence. Anyway, who else do you want to drag in while we're about it?'

I smiled. ‘If we're to be thorough, Miss Manning. She's been out of the picture for quite a while because we thought she wasn't here in 1942, but again, we've only got her word for it. She'd probably think it frightfully clever to have a secret political life. She'd adore it.'

‘You're not suggesting she wore those pants, are you?' said Jeff.

‘No, but I still say she could have got hold of them. She certainly enjoys the good things of life – with her taste in clothes, some extra money would always come in handy. What do you say, Waterhouse?'

‘Well,' he said with a twinkle, ‘I confess that I find the picture of
la Manning
as a commercial philatelist a trifle bizarre.'

I laughed. ‘You may be right about that. Still, all I'm asking is that we don't neglect her. She's a pretty cool customer, she disliked Mullett, so she'd probably have hit him with gusto; and what's more, being a sculptress she'd have known just where to hit.
And
she lied about being in her room.'

Jeff snorted. ‘She was probably having a cosy time with Islwyn Thomas or Bolting and was too coy to say so. That genteel type never likes to come clean about sex. I bet that's where she was – in someone else's room. Anyway, let's get this over. What about Mrs Clarke, George?'

‘She's the one person who couldn't have done it,' I said. ‘She was heard talking to Mullett on the landing just before he went into his room, so she certainly couldn't have been inside his room pasting up windows.'

‘Who says she was talking to Mullett?'

‘Why – the floor manageress.'

‘Just so – and the floor manageress might have been covering up for Mrs Clarke. Now let me tell you something, since your so darned keen to widen the field of suspicion. As far as I can see, the murderer need never have been in Russia before. He might simply have been the agent of someone who was.'

Potts said: ‘I don't quite follow you.'

‘Why, it's easy. There's a guy somewhere back in England who was in Russia during the war and worked this stamp racket with Tanya and for some reason had to leave the haul behind. Well, he reads or hears that a delegation's going out, and he approaches one of the delegates with his story. “Somewhere in the Astoria Hotel,” he says, “probably in room 435 which is where I lived, there's a packet of stamps behind a picture, worth £50,000. They belong to me. If you can get hold of them and bring them back to me you can have a fifty per cent cut in the proceeds.” Wouldn't that tempt anyone?'

‘It would have been a pretty difficult assignment for a stranger,' I said. ‘Getting Tanya's co-operation, for one thing.'

‘Not if the stranger had all the facts at his or her fingertips. Tanya could hardly have refused to co-operate, anyway, with so much known against her. She was wide open to being blackmailed into helping. Besides, she'd have got something out of it, too. Once Mullett was settled in that room, I reckon the job would have been pretty straightforward for any resourceful person.'

I felt disheartened. We'd been making good progress eliminating people, and now we'd been set right back on our heels. Personally I still thought the idea of the murderer being a commission agent was less likely than the other, but it certainly complicated everything.

Waterhouse seemed to feel the same way. ‘Now that our suspicions are spread impartially over the whole delegation,' he said, ‘what is the next move?'

I couldn't think of a thing. Even the trousers seemed to have lost some of their potential value as a clue. Nobody else had any ideas, either, and soon afterwards we dispersed.

That evening I had supper down in the restaurant, and the delegates were all there. I watched them with a kind of helpless fascination. One of them – and I had to keep telling myself or I still wouldn't have believed it – one of them had killed Mullett, and now had the secret locked away inside him. But which. There was nothing in the outward behaviour of any of them to give a hint of such a thing. Bolting looked very peaky, but he was listening attentively to something Tranter was telling him and neither of them showed any sign of that preoccupation which might have been expected to go with the consciousness of recent crime. Schofield, thoughtfully scraping out his pipe, could have been looking back on murder, but then he always had that rather absent air when he wasn't talking. Perdita and Islwyn Thomas were bickering playfully, Mrs Clarke was telling Cressey about a speech she'd once made at a Labour Party conference, and Cressey was listening with his customary politeness. Murder? It seemed ridiculous. But after all, I reflected, it was probably only a very unusual sort of murderer who would show his feelings afterwards. A clever one would hide them with artistry and a cunning one with satisfaction. A calloused one would have none to hide. It was really a waste of time to watch faces and behaviour.

What about the characters of these people? I mentally listed some of the qualities that the killer had shown before and during and since the crime, and tried to measure up the delegates against that list.

First, the initial interest in philately – the expert knowledge that had made the stamp racket possible. Well, it was impossible to be dogmatic on that. All sorts of people had a passion for stamps – kings and schoolboys, judges and explorers, men of action and men of letters. Some collected for pleasure, and some for gain. Of the seven at that table, Schofield, Bolting, Tranter and Cressey seemed the most likely. Perdita would surely have been too superior; Thomas too impatient; Mrs Clarke too busy.

Second, the inventive skill that had been needed to think out that complex and ingenious method of approach. Schofield, certainly – he'd have worked it out like one of those price-graphs in his textbooks. Perdita, too – she was calculating, and she must have something of a creative imagination as well. Perhaps Cressey – he was slow, but skilled mechanics often had ingenious minds. And Tranter had certainly shown no lack of inventiveness and resource!

Third, ruthlessness, to crown a man with a bottle. Bolting perhaps – he'd always impressed me as a man who wouldn't easily be stopped if he'd set his mind on something. Schofield, Tranter, Thomas – almost all of them were possibles. Even Perdita. You didn't line up with the Soviet Union these days if you hadn't some ruthlessness in your system. Not, I would have thought, Cressey.

Fourth, a heartless realism, a complete indifference to the fate of others. Thomas, I thought would have been too chivalrous, unless a cause had been at stake. But Perdita wouldn't; basically, she cared only for Perdita. Tranter. Perhaps Schofield.

Fifth, nerve, physical and moral. The murderer had quite probably climbed across the balconies. He had behaved with swift competence after the murder. He had sat tight since and shown not a glimmer of fear or panic. A tough character, the murderer! Bolting seemed to qualify, in part – the man who made reckless ski runs. Schofield, too, perhaps his nerve was probably inhuman. Islwyn Thomas? – well, courage, yes, but of the hot rather than the cold variety. Tranter, certainly – plenty of nerve there. Perdita, too – she was as cool as any woman I'd met.

Well, it was interesting, but the method didn't help much, I decided. Apart from Mrs Clarke, who didn't seem to me to have the necessary intelligence, and Cressey, who was a dark horse but appeared humane, I could imagine any one of them having the calibre and qualities to make a murderer if the circumstances were right.

As snatches of their conversation came wafting across to me, I suddenly felt a deep hatred of the whole lot of them. Not because there was someone sitting there who had killed Mullett for personal gain – that wasn't my special affair. As Perdita had said, I wasn't a policeman. Not even because Nikolai and Tanya were having to pay the penalty – I'd had my moments of savage anger on their account, but once you started knight-errantry on behalf of these poor devils of Russians, it was a job without end. No, what made my gorge rise was the thought that once again Moscow was going to put a preposterous story across, and get away with it. One more lie was going to be established, and we were all going to have to swallow it even though we knew it was a lie. The delegation would go back to England with its smug fables, and Mullett's death would be shot and shell for them. The very person who'd killed him, the person with the loot in his pocket, would probably be the most vocal in denouncing the killing as a monstrous political assassination. I'd have done anything to put a spoke in that wheel.

The real trouble, of course, was the utter impossibility of coming to grips with the delegates individually. A hard shell of political unity covered them all, and they clung together beneath it. I didn't know them, except in the most superficial way, and I couldn't know them, for they had no desire to make my closer acquaintance. I could make no contact, have no impact. I hadn't the right to question them, or even the opportunity to quarrel with them. A little anger might have produced a little truth, but they were self-satisfied and not easily provoked. They would slip away, barely aware of my hostile interest and certainly indifferent to it.

At that point in my reflections Perdita caught my eye and it seemed as though she must have read my thoughts, for she gave me one of her mocking smiles. It was the last straw I
couldn't
leave things as they were. I'd
got
to force a showdown. I sprang to my feet and walked swiftly to the fourth floor bubbling with anger. Jeff's door was open and I banged on it and went in. He was mending the handle of one of his suitcases.

‘Hallo, George,' he said, swinging round.

He stared. ‘My, what's eating you? Has someone been unkind?'

‘Look,' I said, ‘if we're going to break this case we've got to do it before those people get back to England and disperse. Jeff, I'm going to confront them with the facts we've got. I'm going to give them the whole works, and see if they can still smile. That's what the police would have done in any country, and that's the only way to jolt them.'

‘Now
just
a minute,' said Jeff. ‘Cool off, will you. You need a drink.'

‘No, thanks. All I need is a flaming row.'

‘Look, bud,' he said, ‘a day or two ago you were urging me to clear out of Russia to save my skin. You're a swell sort of adviser.'

‘You didn't clear out,' I said.

‘That was different. The danger was pretty vague – this isn't. One of those guys is a murderer, don't forget, and he's not likely to sit tight and do nothing if you stick your neck out.'

‘That's the whole point. There's just a chance he may give himself away if he's rattled enough. Anyway, it's the only hope we've got. I'll be on my guard, don't worry.'

He looked at me for a long time and then gave a shrug. ‘Okay, when do we start?'

‘We don't – this is something I'm going to handle alone. I just wanted you to know before I walked into the den.'

‘Heck! – I might as well come along too.'

‘Much better if you don't,' I said. ‘If we're going to provoke our man into action, things have got to be made simple for him. He's got to have one person, one target, to concentrate on. If I get into a bad spot I'll be glad to lean on you, but honestly there's no point in your sitting in at the conference.'

He was only half-convinced, but I didn't give him the opportunity to argue. I went back to my own room and waited until I thought the delegates must be out of the restaurant, and then I rang Bolting.