The Best of British Crime omnibus

by Andrew Garve

  I went to the phone and told Jeff our visitor had arrived. Gain stiffened with fright. ‘You said you wouldn’t tell anyone, Mr Verney.’

  ‘Clayton was here last night when I phoned you,’ I told him shortly. ‘He heard everything.’

  I turned away, not wanting to look at the man. He seemed a pitiful, nerveless creature, and I wasn’t feeling very happy about the

  interview. I had no locus standi in the matter except that I had happened to pick up the letter, and little more than academic interest in who had killed the egregious Mullett. Getting a story was one thing, but personally hounding a creature like Gain was quite another. I was almost sorry we hadn’t let the letter lie, and felt glad when Jeff came in to share the burden.

  He gave Gain one quick look, said ‘Howdy,’ and dropped into a chair. ‘Okay, George, shoot!’

  I produced the letter, which by now was carefully sealed up again, and showed it to Gain. He looked at it with undisguised relief. ‘Yes, that’s it, he said. ‘Where did you find it, Mr Verney?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  His eyes flicked from me to Jeff and back again. ‘Was it in Mr Mullett’s room?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘I thought I must have dropped it there,’ he said. ‘Gosh, I’m glad it was you that found it. When the phone rang at the office last night, I felt sure it must be the police. If they’d spotted it, it would have been all up with me.’

  I couldn’t understand him at all. In the circumstances, his manner struck me as being confidential to the point of naïveté. ‘Mr Gain,’ I said, ‘you gave the impression last night, to the police and to us, that you arrived on the scene after Mr Mullen’s body had been found. You may think it’s no business of ours, but we would be interested to know just how and when the letter got into Mullett’s room.’

  ‘Of course, I’ll tell you,’ he said with an ingratiating smile that was worse than the scared look. ‘You’re English – I can trust you. I’ve nothing to hide, Mr Verney, not from you, or from Mr Clayton. I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking it was me that killed Mr Mullett. I didn’t, though – you’re quite wrong.’

  ‘How did the letter get there?’ asked Jeff.

  ‘I’ll tell you – from the beginning. You see, just after Mr Mullett left our place the record was brought in wrapped up and ready for him, and as I hadn’t to announce for a bit Mr Kolarov asked me to slip over here with it and to bring the letter for Miss Manning at the same time. I got here just after Mr Mullett, and I asked at the desk downstairs for the numbers of the rooms, and then I came up here and knocked at his door.’

  ‘See anyone else about?’ Jeff inquired.

  Gain hesitated. ‘No, the corridor was empty. The room wasn’t, though. I heard voices inside – people talking. Two people, I think. I couldn’t hear very well, but they were English voices, I can tell you that. Probably Mr Mullett and whoever did him in.

  Anyway, I knocked twice but it didn’t seem as though they wanted to be disturbed, because no one answered the door.’

  ‘Were they quarrelling?’

  ‘I – I couldn’t say, really. I suppose they must have been.’

  Jeff snorted.

  I said, ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Well, I thought I might as well deliver the letter to Miss Manning and come back to Mr Mullett afterwards, so I went along to her room. I’d been told to deliver it personally, so I knocked, but she wasn’t in.’

  ‘You mean she didn’t answer,’ Jeff said.

  Gain looked puzzled. ‘She wasn’t there, Mr Clayton. I’m sure she wasn’t. I knocked twice.’

  ‘You couldn’t have knocked hard enough,’ I said. ‘I think you’re lying. Miss Manning says she was in her room all the evening.’

  Gain cringed. ‘I swear I’m telling you the truth, Mr Verney. I did go there, and I knocked very hard, and I listened, too. It’s very quiet there, round the corner at the end of the corridor, but there wasn’t a sound.’

  Jeff said, ‘It wouldn’t have been a woman’s voice you heard in Mullett’s room, would it?’

  ‘It might have been, Mr Clayton. I couldn’t be sure, though.’

  I looked hard at him. He was a slippery, evasive customer, if ever there was one.

  ‘Well, go on,’ I said, ‘finish your story. What did you do next?’

  ‘I came back to Mr Mullett’s room,’ Gain said, with gathering fluency, ‘and this time his door was open a little and there didn’t seem to be anyone about. I knocked, and when I still didn’t get any answer I put my head inside and there was Mr Mullett lying on the floor with blood all over him. I went right in and saw that he was dead. I was too ruddy scared to tell anyone and I felt like dashing out of the hotel but I couldn’t leave just like that because I’d got the package to deliver. I rushed out of the room and went along to the cloakroom to think out what to do. After I’d been there a few minutes I suddenly noticed that the letter was missing – I’d tucked it under the string of the package, and it must have dropped out. I got in a real panic then, because I thought I might have dropped it in Mr Mullett’s room and that would show I’d been there. I was in such a sweat I couldn’t face going back to look for it, not right away. I – I just didn’t know what to do. Anyway, in the end I did see I’d simply got to risk it and I was just going to leave the cloakroom when I heard an awful shemozzle along the corridor, and I knew that the body had been discovered. After that, I simply couldn’t think at all – I was just dithering, Mr Verney, and that’s a fact. I joined in with the crowd and looked around for the letter, but I couldn’t see it anywhere, and I felt sure the police would get hold of it. And that’s all – you know the rest.’ He mopped his forehead with a grubby handkerchief and looked anxiously at us in turn.

  Jeff stirred. ‘I don’t get it, Mr Gain. It’s a slick story, but what did you have to be so scared about? You find an open door and a corpse – okay, that’s unpleasant, but why panic about it?’

  ‘I thought they might think I’d done it as I was there.’

  ‘Because you’ve known Mullett back in England and had a grudge against him?’

  The scared look crept back into Gain’s face. ‘It wasn’t just that, Mr Clayton. You see, there’d been a bit of trouble at the Radio Centre that evening. I’d – I’d said something to Mr Mullett that he didn’t quite like and he’d complained to Mr Kilarov. I thought they might find out about that and think that I’d tried to get my own back on Mr Mullett.’

  I nodded. ‘How did you come to know Mullet in the first place?’

  ‘He taught at the school I went to when I was a kid,’ said Gain sullenly. ‘In Deptford.’

  ‘And then what? When did he suggest you should come out here?’

  ‘It was in 1931,’ he said, running a thin hand through his untamed hair. ‘During the depression. I was a young chap, a fitter actually, but I couldn’t get a job anywhere. You remember what it was like, Mr Verney – two million unemployed and nothing but the ruddy dole. I got interested in Russia, like a lot of others, and went to meetings, and one day I heard Mr Mullett talking about the place and it sounded pretty good, so as I’d known him when I was a kid I went up to him afterwards and asked him what sort of chances there were in the Soviet Union for a young fellow like me. Well, he said there was a fine life for everybody here, particularly for chaps with a trade – he made it sound lovely. So, to cut a long story short, I came out here to work and everyone was so decent I decided to give up my British passport and become a Soviet citizen. That was about a month after I got here.’

  ‘I see. And yesterday evening, when you saw Mullett again, I suppose you told him it hadn’t panned out so well, eh?’

  For a moment Gain’s eyes glittered, and I thought he was going to let himself go. At some time or other he must have been a man of fair spirit, to take a chance in a new country and burn his boats behind him. Then he glanced towards the door, and the sullen expression came back into his face. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Mr Verney �
�� that it hadn’t panned out, I mean. Things could be worse. It was just that – well, last night I was a bit fed up with everything, being pushed around and so on, and when Mr Mullett started saying what a lucky chap I was to have had twenty years in Russia I told him I wasn’t on a delegation, just quietly, like, and he took offence. But actually things aren’t too bad – I wouldn’t like you to think I was complaining.’

  For a moment I felt profoundly sorry for him. He was too scared to say what was in his mind, but I had a pretty good idea what he thought. I’d seen his type too often. He’d come out in the vigour of youth and the flush of high enthusiasm, full of big ideas about the new Utopia, and by the time he’d found out how wrong he’d been, it was too late to do anything about it. He’d become what almost all these expatriates became once they’d lost the protection of a foreign passport – a sort of half-human, not Soviet and not foreign, not accepted and not rejected, politically just a ‘poor white.’ He’d become disillusioned, frustrated and neurotic, and – I suspected – tortured by the thought of what he’d thrown away. He’d become a creature, and the only thing that surprised me was that he’d said anything to Mullett at all. Usually they were too thoroughly intimidated to raise a squeak, and the bitterness just festered.

  Such a history commanded sympathy, but it also put Gain high up in the list of suspects. He might well have hated Mullett. He might have followed Mullett up to his room, nursing accumulated grievances, and delivered the record and struck the blow, and dropped the letter in his flight. Motive and opportunity were both good. If the Soviet police had found that letter he wouldn’t have had a chance. All the same, I was inclined to believe his story, or at least to give it a run. Looking at him, I couldn’t believe that he would have had the guts to hit Mullett. He was too conditioned to subservience. A single bitter retort under provocation – yes, that was possible, but not murder. I certainly had no desire to hand over either him or the letter to the Soviet police.

  I was about to say something of the sort to Jeff when the door flew open and Zina burst in unceremoniously. She had a typed sheet of paper in her hand and she looked ready to explode.

  ‘Mr Clayton,’ she said, ‘they’ve just sent this round from the Press Department. I simply can’t believe it.’

  We all gathered round. Zina translated for Jeff’s benefit and I looked over her shoulders and Gain peered round Jeff’s shoulder. What I read left me gasping.

  ‘As is known,’ the announcement ran, ‘Mr Andrew Mullett, who has been leading a peace delegation to the Soviet Union, was found dead last evening in his room at the Astoria Hotel. As a result of swift and efficient police action, it has been established that Mr Mullett was murdered by a waiter at the hotel, Nikolai Nikolaevitch Skaliga, who attempted to cover up a political motive by trying to make it appear that the object of the murder was theft. This secret White Guard and enemy of the Soviet people has now confessed that he committed this abominable crime at the instigation of Anglo-American agents seeking to disrupt peace and unleash a new war. The vile conspiracy is being unmasked with the utmost zeal.’

  For a moment I was too thunderstruck to speak. It was so utterly, incredibly, ludicrously monstrous! The idea that Nikolai, the mild, gentle, senescent Nikolai, would have hit Mullett on the head with a bottle was just a grotesquerie. Never, in a long experience of Soviet announcements, had I known a more fantastic allegation.

  It was Gain who spoke first. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that seems to let me out.’

  I swung round on him in a fury. ‘You damned fool! You don’t believe this tripe?’

  He shrugged, and it was apparent that he was quite ready to believe anything which removed suspicion from himself. ‘He’s been arrested – he’s confessed.’

  ‘Confessed!’ My fingers itched to strike him. ‘You little swine, have you never heard of the M.V.D?’ I regretted having wasted even a moment’s sympathy on him. ‘And anyway, if that’s you’re attitude you’ve got quite a bit more explaining to do.’

  He took a step back. ‘I don’t see what,’ he said, and swallowed. ‘I’ve told you everything.’

  ‘You told us that when you knocked at Mullet’s door the first time, you heard English voices inside, and that one of them was probably the murderer. Remember? Well, whoever was with Mullett then, it certainly couldn’t have been Nikolai, because he doesn’t speak a word of English. It seems to me, Mr Gain, that you are going to be the leading witness in Nikolai’s defence! You can work out for yourself how long it’ll be after that before the police decide you were a participant in this precious conspiracy.’

  The blood slowly drained from his face, and his eyes glittered in caverns of shadow. He stood stock still, his active, twisted mind groping for a plausible explanation. Finally he found one.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, watching us, ‘what I told you about hearing someone inside the room when I first went there wasn’t true. I made it up because I was afraid you suspected me. The truth is that I didn’t hear anything when I knocked.’

  ‘You rat!’ muttered Jeff.

  ‘What about Miss Manning?’ I said. ‘Did you go to her room, or was that a lie, too?’

  ‘It was true – I did go. Honestly, Mr Verney.’

  ‘And she wasn’t there?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t. There wasn’t a sound. I wouldn’t tell you a lie, not now, really I wouldn’t.’

  I went and opened the door for him. He gathered up his things. ‘What about the letter?’ he whined.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘If it isn’t delivered, I’ll get into trouble.’

  ‘I’m sorry for you,’ I said. ‘As sorry for you as you are for Nikolai.’

  He made one last effort. ‘You won’t let the police know – please, Mr Verney.’

  ‘Get out,’ I said.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘I guess we need a little fresh air,’ said Jeff, and opened the fortachka. ‘Okay, Zina, thanks for the good tidings!’ He gave her shoulder a friendly slap of dismissal and she went out looking unusually subdued.

  I sat down, feeling pretty sick. The thought of those thugs carting off old Nikolai in the middle of the night and getting to work on him in one of their underground cells just about turned my stomach.

  ‘If he was a sensible guy,’ said Jeff, seeming to read my thoughts, ‘he’d tell them what they wanted to hear without arguing. Maybe he’s not come to much harm – not yet.’

  I wasn’t reassured. ‘They don’t like things to be that easy,’ I said. ‘They like to beat it out of you.’

  I picked up the announcement and read it through again with mounting indignation. It wasn’t merely the contents but the tone of it that made me see red – the laconic way in which it stated outrageous improbabilities as though they were established facts – the contemptuous ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ attitude, as though it had been prepared by cynics for morons. Finally, I threw it aside in disgust. ‘The damned effrontery of these people! Why, they don’t even take the trouble to make it sound likely.’

  ‘They don’t have to,’ said Jeff, ‘while they’ve got the four-letter boys to persuade doubters.’

  But this is for the outside world as well – they expect us to swallow it. It’s probably been put out on the radio already. Why, the thing’s an insult to the human intelligence. Who do they think we are?’ I paced up and down, hardly able to control myself. ‘God, I wish there was something we could do about it.’

  Jeff gave a wry smile. ‘I guess there’s nothing short of war, chum.’

  I flung myself back into a chair. ‘It’s such a bloody shame to pick on Nikolai. Why, you wouldn’t find a gentler old boy if you searched for a year. “Instigating a new war… !” What claptrap they talk!’

  ‘The whole thing’s screwy, if you ask me,’ said Jeff. ‘What do you suppose is in their minds? What’s the idea?’

  ‘God only knows. I suppose they’re sore at having Mullett bumped off on their territory and they’ve pulled in the first
handy person as a scapegoat.’

  But why all this baloney about a conspiracy? Theft would have sounded a darned sight more likely.’ I shrugged. ‘I suppose they found out that Nikolai was tied up with the old régime and they couldn’t resist the temptation to make political capital out of the case. I don’t know – perhaps I’ve got it all wrong, but I can’t think of any other explanation.’

  Jeff got up. ‘Well, I guess I’ll go down to the Press Department and see if they’ve got anything to add. Are you going to file?’

  ‘Not now,’ I said. ‘If I wrote what I’m thinking I’d be given forty-eight hours to leave. Besides, what’s the use? – you know they won’t pass a line.’

  ‘Okay, bud – see you later.’

  I lit my pipe and wandered over to the window. I don’t think I’d ever felt more depressed. It was the sense of helplessness that was so hard to take – the knowledge that an unspeakable injustice was being done and that there was absolutely nothing that we or anyone else could do for Nikolai. He’d ‘had’ it – and if I knew the ways of the Russians, it wouldn’t be long before his son Boris and Boris’s family were roped in too. Even if we’d been in a position to produce irrefutable evidence that some other person had done the murder, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nobody would listen now, because nobody wanted to listen. For reasons of their own, they’d decided that Nikolai was the man, and Nikolai it would have to be. Unless they needed a public confession from him to bolster up charges against other people, or decided to stage one of their demonstration trials, he’d probably never be heard of again. As far as the Russians were concerned, it seemed likely that the Mullett case was closed.

  That didn’t mean it was closed for me, of course. I no longer felt academic about the murder – I felt violent. I might be able to make a bit of trouble for someone, even if I couldn’t help Nikolai. Nothing would give me deeper satisfaction than to be able to confront the real murderer with solid evidence of his guilt. At least I might as well make a few inquiries.