The Best of British Crime omnibus

by Andrew Garve

  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 rattl
ed 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.

  At the same time, though, it left a lot of things unexplained. If the murderer had done that, presumably he’d sealed up the doors again before leaving – because they’d certainly been sealed when I’d glanced at them immediately after the discovery of the body. But how could he have managed that? If he’d been very provident, he might conceivably have equipped himself beforehand with paste and strips of papers, but in the ten minutes or so between Mullett’s return and our entry into the room there certainly wouldn’t have been sufficient time for him to have renewed the seals and cleaned up the mess.

  However, I felt a glow of satisfaction at having taken even one step forward. I switched off the lights and returned to the balcony. There was no means by which I could reseal Mullett’s doors, and I could see myself getting into serious trouble when the police discovered that their carefully-guarded room had been entered, but then serious trouble was an occupational risk in this country. In any case, I was too interested now to care.

  Back in my own room I threw off my outdoor clothes, chafed my tingling ears, and poured myself a stiff drink. The first thing was to get the cracks in my own doors sealed up again, for the temperature of the room had already become unpleasantly low. I remembered that Potts had a roll of gummed brown paper which would do the trick for the moment and I tried to ring him, but the damned phone had gone completely dead. It was always happening, and it was not the least exasperating feature of life in the Astoria, for the phone was one of the few things that prevented one from feeling entirely cut off.

  I flung down the receiver and went to see if Kira was in, and if I could use her phone to call the engineer. It was a long time since I’d seen her, but I had no difficulty in recognising her when she opened the door. She was a little taller than Tanya, and instead of a page-boy bob she wore her hair in close peroxide curls, but she had the same rather sweet expression as her sister and she was the type – an attractive, amenable girl groomed for contact with foreigners.

  I’d expected her greeting to be quite warm, because I’d got on with her pretty well in the old days, but it seemed to me that her ‘Hallo, Mr Verney – how are you?’ was formal and unenthusiastic. She was wearing quite a snappy number in negligées, and when I looked past her into the room and saw of couple of male legs protruding under the table I put two and two together and decided that I’d chosen a bad moment.

  ‘My phone’s gone wrong,’ I said, ‘but it doesn’t matter now, you’re busy.’ Kira didn’t attempt to detain me, but as I was turning away, the legs suddenly moved and I saw, of all things, Joe Cressey’s head peering towards the door. ‘Hallo, Joe,’ I called.

  Kira stepped aside then. ‘Of course you can use the phone,’ she said. ‘Please come in.’

  I said, ‘Well, thanks,’ in a suitably diffident tone, and followed her in. Cressey was sitting on a settee with an exercise book on a table in front of him. ‘We’re just having a Russian lesson,’ he explained. He looked rather sheepish, and I recalled his remark that Mrs Cressey wouldn’t like it. Kira, had evidently taken over where Tanya had left off.

  ‘Sorry to butt in, Joe,’ I said. ‘I won’t be a minute. I can’t even get the operator on my phone.’ I wanted to say something about Tanya but decided that the moment wasn’t really appropriate.

  The telephone was on a little table by the window, and as I crossed over to it Kira rejoined Cressey on the settee. I could smell her perfume across the room, but neither that nor the provocative V of her drapery seemed to worry the stolid Joe. Incredibly he was really concentrating, on Russian. I heard him repeating after her in an earnest tone, ‘Ya znayu, I know; ti znayesh, thou knowest; on znayet, he knows.’ I only wished he was right!

  I lifted the receiver and waggled the hook. The operator was slow in responding, and my eyes roved idly over the french doors. I frowned. It must be my imagination. Here, too, the brown paper seals looked damp! ‘Hallo,’ I said, ‘this is Gospodeen Verney. My telephone isn’t working. Room 434 – could you tell the engineer, please?’ My back was towards the settee, blocking Kira’s view of the french doors. I scratched with my thumbnail at one of the strips of paper and it crinkled up in a moist lump. ‘Thank you,’ I said, smoothing it down again.

  For a moment I stood still, my hand on the receiver. Fantastic ideas were racing through my mind. I recalled the appearance of the long row of balconies. Each was separated from the next by a gap of perhaps three feet – a gap across which an unusually agile and daring person might have passed. With a slightly sick feeling I
remembered Tanya’s mountaineering exploits in the Caucasus. For someone who could negotiate half Mount Elbruz, a three-foot gap fifty feet above the street would have been child’s play!

  Chapter Nine

  As soon as I got back to my room I struggled into my shuba again and went out on to the balcony to examine the snow by the light of a torch. There were no footprints except those which I had made, but there was something just as tell-tale. In a broad band all down the middle of the balcony the snow had lost the smooth, iced-cake look that a virgin fall has. There was a sort of track where the surface had been disturbed, and it stretched right along to Mullett’s room in one direction and right to the end of the balcony in the other.

  I stared across the gap which separated my balcony from Tanya’s. It was not, after all, quite three feet wide, but it seemed a hell of a long way to me. I looked down, and fifty feet below, almost exactly underneath me, there was a spiked iron fence protecting the area. I gave an inward shudder. I have never had a particularly good head for heights, and I’ve always regarded impalement as one of the less attractive deaths. Whoever had made the transit had been moved by no trivial impulse.

  I flashed my torch across the gap, but the beam was not strong enough to show the state of the snow on the other balcony. It was reasonable to assume that it had been disturbed there, too, but there was too much at stake to be careless about evidence. I wanted to be certain – I had to be certain. I also wanted to find out how difficult it was to make the crossing.