by Joyce Porter
She was a small, tough, wiry woman in her early forties. She looked rather like an engaging monkey with sharp, pale blue eyes. A mop of short, ruffled, straw-coloured hair framed her brown, finely wrinkled face. She wore no make-up at all. She was a very intense woman with a positive greed for life. As an anthropologist, one would expect her to be interested in her fellow men, and she was, rather overpoweringly so. ‘I love people,’ she had declared in one of her books, ‘people are meat and drink to me!’ It was to be hoped that Dover wouldn’t give her indigestion.
But on the subject of Juliet Rugg, Miss Hoppold wasn’t very helpful. She knew the girl by sight, of course, but then-who didn’t? ‘Great overweight slob,’ was Miss Hoppold’s forthright pronouncement. ‘Looked like a cow hippopotamus in calf and had, I imagine, about the same I.Q. rating. How Eve could tolerate her in the same house for more than five minutes, I really don’t know! Oh I know she was supposed to be a companion to Sir John, whatever that may mean – but if I’d been Eve, I’d have booted her out of the place before you could say Gilbert and Ellice Islands. The girl was an immoral slut and that’s the long and short of it. She was whoring around with every available man in the district. When Eve told me she was going to report her disappearance to the police I told her not to be such a damned fool. “Be thankful you’ve got rid of her,” I said, “for God’s sake don’t go looking for her! What with black babies, green nail varnish and stiletto heels, you’re well shot of her! Never mind your father,” I told her, “he’s got his television and that’s more than enough at his age.” Disgusting old scoundrel he is, too. Of course, Eve’s too damned spineless to do anything about him. I’d have had him shut up in a home twenty years ago if I’d been in her shoes.’
‘Yes,’ said Dover sadly. He wished he could get hold of one of these taciturn witnesses some time, the sort that just said ‘yes’ and ‘no’. All the people in this case were too damned articulate for words.
‘Miss Hoppold,’ he went on, ‘we have reason to believe that Miss Rugg was safe and unharmed as late as eleven o’clock on Tuesday night.’
^Yes, so I’ve heard. Colonel Bing saw her, didn’t she?’
‘So she says,’ agreed Dover darkly. ‘Did you, by any chance?’
‘See her? Good God, no!’ Eulalia Hoppold gave a short laugh. ‘I’m always in bed by ten. Get used to keeping early hours in my line of business, you know.’
‘You’re alone in the house?’
‘Yes, and I was alone in bed too, if that’s going to be your next question.’
‘Yes,’ said Dover, ‘of course.’
‘What do the police think has happened?’ asked Miss Hoppold, her eyes boring deeply into Dover’s.
‘Well, it’s early days yet,’ said Dover, feeling he’d said it so many times before, ‘but it’s beginning to look as though she didn’t go off of her own free will.’
‘Hm,’ said Miss Hoppold, ‘and what does that leave?’
‘Murder, possibly.’
‘What about kidnapping? I’ve heard that mentioned as a possibility?’
‘In the police view,’ said Dover firmly, ‘kidnapping is quite out of the question.’
After leaving Miss Hoppold’s lair the natural thing would have been for Dover and MacGregor to call next door to see the young Chubb-Smith couple, but Dover still wasn’t in the mood to do what he thought his sergeant expected, however logical and obvious it might be. With his head sunk well down in his shoulders and his thoughts concentrated on his still tender stomach, Dover plodded on until he came to the bungalow occupied by the foreigner, Boris Bogolepov. He rammed his finger viciously into the doorbell and was furious to find that it was the sort which played a tinkling, insipid tune. Dover didn’t feel that this was a fitting herald of his menacing appearance on a prime suspect’s doorstep. Dover didn’t approve of foreigners, mainly on the irrefutable grounds that they were un-English, and he was looking forward to giving Boris Bogolepov, guilty or not, a rough old time just for the sheer hell of it.
After a few moments the door was opened by a strikingly handsome young man dressed in the top half only of a pair of pyjamas.
The young man had rather bright, staring eyes which peered desperately out of a drawn and haggard face. His dark hair was uncombed and his chin carried at least two days’ growth of beard. He didn’t look any too clean either, but there was no denying his attractiveness in a Byronic-beatnik way.
‘Ah, the Gestapo!’ he said with a slight Teutonic accent of the kind favoured by film stars when playing swinish German officers in war pictures. ‘Come in, gentlemen, but please leave your rubber truncheons in the hall. You will not need them. You have only to shout to me and I confess everything.’
He led the two detectives into the kitchen. ‘I am just consuming my breakfast,’ he said, sitting down at the table, ‘cornflakes and whisky. Perhaps you will join me?’
Dover scowled blackly. He suspected that he was having the mickey taken.
The kitchen looked just like you would expect from a man who breakfasted, half naked, at eleven o’clock in the morning off cornflakes and whisky. The garish cereal packet flaunted its free offers by the side of a three-quarters-full bottle of Black and White.
‘You wish to ask me questions about the disappearance of Miss Rugg? I can tell you all very quickly. I know nothing. Now you can go and interrogate somebody else.’
‘Where were you on Tuesday night at eleven o’clock?’ asked Dover curtly.
Bogolepov shrugged his shoulders. ‘Here.’
‘Alone?’
‘We are all alone, sir, in spite of your John Donne. Each man is an island.’
Much to Sergeant MacGregor’s relief Dover didn’t bother to ask who John Donne was, and not because he knew either. Charles Edward MacGregor eyed Boris Bogolepov curiously. The interest was mutual. The two equally attractive and handsome men examined each other critically. One had the charm of exuberant health, but his rival was equally fascinating with his air of sickness and neglect. Their instant antagonism and jealousy was ridiculous but it was almost tangible. The fat, middle-aged chief inspector didn’t, of course, enter into this masculine beauty contest.
‘Were you in bed?’ Dover plodded on.
‘I cannot remember. I may have been in this room. Does it matter?’
‘What nationality are you, sir?’
‘Oh, I am British, Inspector. So you will not be able to kick me about too much. Only naturalized, of course! I am not a dyed-through-the-wool Englishman.’
‘How long have you been in this country?’
‘I came here first in 1947. Before that I had been in the States for some months. And before that I had been in Germany.’
‘You were in Germany during the war?’
‘Yes’ – Bogolepov waved his index finger loosely in the air – ‘but not, my dear sir, as a soldier. I was in a concentration camp, as a prisoner, you understand.’ He took a drink of whisky. ‘I have had a very interesting life, Inspector. I will tell you of it I have told it so often to so many officials that, now, it is easy. Now it is no longer real. It is just a story – to them and to me.’
Dover didn’t answer. He just kept his eyes fixed on Bogolepov, noting the slight tremble in his hands and recording the increasing bitterness in his gestures and voice.
‘My father was a Russian – my surname is Russian, of course – but I was born in Germany in 1927. My father was a refugee, too, you see. He left Russia after the Revolution and eventually he went to Germany. He was a doctor, a good doctor, but it is difficult to make a new start in a foreign country. However, he was lucky. He married my mother and her family helped him. They were very kind and good, but there was one thing wrong with them. They were Jews. That was a stupid thing to be in Germany when the Nazis came to power, Inspector, a very stupid thing to be.
‘Well, you can imagine what happened. It is a very common story. Things got worse and worse for us. I was sent away to a private school, high in the mountains, wher
e my little friends did not spit at me and beat me up and cover me with filth. Then, in 1937, my father was warned by a grateful patient that the Gestapo were going to arrest him. There was, as you say, no time to lose. My father and my mother and my two sisters got out of the country within twelve hours. They left me behind. There was not time to get a message to me. You find it hard to believe, eh? That a family could leave their only son behind like that, a little,
half-Jewish boy of ten alone in Germany? Oh, of course, I was to join them later but, unfortunately, it was too late.’
Boris Bogolepov gave a bitter, sardonic laugh and slopped more whisky into his glass.
‘So there I was! The only people I could turn to for help were the family of my mother’ But they were dirty Jews, too. When the war broke out they were all shipped off’ like silly cows to the concentration camps, and I was shipped off as well.
‘But I was one of the lucky ones! As you see, I survived. And the big joke is that my mother and father and my two sisters – they are all dead! Isn’t it funny? They were all killed in an air raid in London in 1940 while I was safe and sound in my little concentration camp. Sometimes I wake up at night and laugh until the tears run down my face at the wonderful irony of it.
‘I spent six years in concentration camps’ I lived because I was young and strong and ruthless. I am only half a Jew, you see. I was not resigned to the extermination of my race, I did not deliver myself up passively into the hands of God! No, I made up my mind to live at any cost! And I did! Do you know what my dream was all those dreary years, Inspector, the fantasy I hugged to myself when I went to sleep? I wanted to be a Nazi! I wanted to wear that uniform, to flourish that twisted cross on my arm, to have a dagger at my waist and those wonderful jackboots on my feet! I did not hate them! I admired them, their arrogance, their power, their superb contempt for human life and suffering. I did not blame them for what they were doing to the Jews. I admired and envied them. If only I could have become one of them, I would have done twice as much!’
Bogolepov’s eyes were blazing fanatically and his voice was hoarse and excited. Dover stirred uneasily in his seat. This chap must be a nut case, all right.
Bogolepov apparently guessed his thoughts because he grinned and said: ‘Oh, do not worry, Inspector. I am not mad. Most boys go through a stage of this kind. I was lucky to be so normal. In fact, you could say I have been lucky all my life, in a way. I was a very handsome boy, and that was lucky. If I had been ugly I would surely have been dead by now. One of the camp commanders saw me and took a fancy to me. You know what I mean’ I did not understand at first, but when I did I was wonderfully happy. At last, for the first time in my life, I had some power, however small it was, on my side. This great and important man in his beautiful colonel’s uniform wanted something that only I could give him. It was a marvellous feeling. And when he was sent away, I found another “protector” and I soon learned to market my talents where they did the most good.
‘Not that my “friends” overwhelmed me with their generosity. I was not suddenly transported to a life of ease and luxury. But a little extra food here, one of the better jobs there – these are the things which make the difference between life and death in those camps. I used to try and get on the burial squad. We carried the bodies out of the gas chambers to the pits near by. Sometimes you were lucky, you found some old Jew had a gold ring or a piece of bread still clutched in his hand-the bread was the bigger treasure, of course.’
Bogolepov paused and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, I am probably boring you,’ he said with heavy sarcasm, ‘all this happened a long time ago, and who cares, anyhow? My cousins in America felt much the same. They got me out of Germany when the war was over and, at first, they nearly stifled me with compassion and sympathy. You know what Jews are like. They are a very emotional people. They felt obscurely guilty because they had not suffered as we in Europe had suffered. They felt that they had missed something! But they got bored with it, too. I was eighteen. They could not understand why, now it was all over, I did not settle down and became a regular, all-American boy. They tried hard but it just did not work. I embarrassed them. After six years in concentration camps, I embarrassed them. In the end I said I wanted to come to England – it was just to get out of an impossible situation. They were delighted. They made me an allowance and booked my ticket. I went to live in London. I was supposed to be a student. I did not need to work, which is lucky because there is nothing I can do. I made many friends, misfits like myself. I drank. I got arrested by the police. My cousin came rushing across the Atlantic Ocean and they put me in a home for a cure. It did not make any difference, but the next time I was arrested for something else, and so was my boy-friend. My cousin paid for psychiatric treatment. Then I started taking drugs. Did you guess I was a junky, Inspector? There is no degradation to which I have not sunk. But Cousin Reuben is always there. He always talks about me being sick, but he is a good man and he tries hard — the bloody fool!
‘And that is how I am living here in Irlam Old Hall. Cousin Reuben fixed it all up. I am well away from the evil company which was leading me astray in London, I am enjoying the fresh country air and, as a properly registered drug addict, I get not quite enough of the stuff to keep me going, under the National Health Service. Every Wednesday morning I go into Creedon and collect a litde white packet from the chemist. The Welfare State provides for everything, security from conception to the crematorium. Now I am all right. I do not drink more than a bottle of whisky a day and I have not got a single boy-friend. So, are you satisfied? Because if you are, you can clear out!’
Dover was still gazing moodily at Bogolepov. Talk, talk, talk, he thought crossly to himself, I must spend three-quarters of my life listening to other people yapping away. He sighed wearily once again.
‘Why have you told me all this, sir?’ He made no attempt to keep the exasperation out of his voice.
‘Just to prove to you, my dear Inspector, that if you are looking for the murderer of Juliet Rugg, it is no good looking at me. I no longer have enough interest in the human race even to kill one of them.’
‘What makes you think Juliet Rugg has been murdered?’ pounced Dover sharply. ‘We haven’t said she was.’
‘My dear Inspector, do not try to spring your little traps .on me! It is logical enough to suppose that Juliet Rugg may have been murdered, otherwise why are two such distinguished, high officers from New Scotland Yard spending so much time here at Irlam Old Hall? I was merely putting, as you say, two and two together, not confessing my guilt.’
Dover grunted. ‘When did you last see Juliet Rugg?’
‘I do not remember. I see her passing by sometimes, but I do not make a note of when. A man or a woman walks by. As long as they do not come near me, I can endure it. And Juliet Rugg, all that fat and bouncing flesh – it was revolting! Nature at her most nauseatingly generous! And such sagging, lifeless flesh it was too. She looked like an enormous Egyptian mummy-the body tightly wrapped in corsets and brassieres to stop the flesh disintegrating, and the face painted into a grotesque semblance of life, the green eye-shadow, the red lips, the pink cheeks, the black eyebrows, the hair stiffened into formalized designs. Only a resolute necrophile could have had any interest in her! And that is a little variation which, as yet, I have not tried.’
‘You weren’t on friendly terms with Miss Rugg, then?’
‘My dear Inspector, the thought of touching a woman, any woman, makes me physically sick! Apart from what we may call my early “training”, it is generally recognized by those who know about these things, that it is beyond the masculine capabilities to cope with both women and drink and drugs. I would have thought that you in your profession would have been aware of this. Of all men, I am the least likely to have lusted after that colossus of a girl. And I understand, from the gossip, that her attraction lay in the body alone, I do not think anyone loved her for the qualities of her mind. No, my dear Inspector, you will have to look somewhere els
e. I did not kill Juliet Rugg.’
‘Well, that’s very reassuring, sir, I must say,’ growled Dover, annoyed at being reduced to cheap sarcasm but using it none the less.
‘Ah, but I do not want you to think that I am not capable of destroying human life,’ Bogolepov went on in a mocking voice. ‘I have fought frail old men, old enough to be my grandfather, for a leaf of cabbage and I have tried to kill myself more than once. It is only that I would not be bothered with murder on such a trivial scale. One fat girl with red hair-there would be no satisfaction, no point in that. When I decide to deal with humanity, my dear sir, I shall use a machine-gun, or a bottle of prussic acid in the local reservoir. Murder does not interest me, but a massacre, to wipe out a whole village, a whole town – that is an idea which might attract me!’ He laughed, and with a defiant gesture tipped the remains of his whisky down his throat Dover didn’t find this kind of childish cynicism either amusing or useful and he stared suspiciously round the kitchen to save himself the trouble of finding a reply. The room seemed to be crammed with a surprisingly large number of status symbols. There was an enormous electric cooker with an infra-red grill, a washing machine, a spin dryer, a large refrigerator and an even larger deep freeze, a complicated waste disposal unit mounted on a stainless-steel sink and several other shiny, sleek appliances whose purpose Dover couldn’t even guess at.
Bogolepov saw him looking. ‘All presents from my cousin in America,’ he explained with a contemptuous wave of his hand. ‘Most useful for a man who lives almost exclusively on whisky and dope, don’t you think? Of course, Cousin Reuben is in the trade so he gets them at cost price. When I get a little short of money I sell a piece or two of American culture to my neighbours. I sold Sir John Counter the very latest electric shaver only the other day. Would you believe it, it has six separate speeds! Who in God’s name wants to be able to shave at six different speeds? But then, I think our civilization is wonderful, don’t you?’
