The Best of British Crime omnibus

by Andrew Garve

  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 don
e 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.

  Chapter Seventeen

  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.

  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 w
hich. 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!