The Best of British Crime omnibus (15 page)

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!

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.

My
shuba
would have been dangerously hampering, so I changed it for a polo-neck sweater and a woollen scarf. Then I went out again to size up the job. It ought to be pretty straightforward, I decided, provided I could keep my mind concentrated and forget the space beneath. The iron railings which surrounded the two balconies were hip-high and smooth along the top, and it would be simple to put a leg over. On the outside of the railings there was a rather crumbly two-inch cement coping on which it should be possible to get a toe-hold. After that, it would be merely a question of stepping across. My nerve almost failed at the thought of that moment, and I decided that the sooner I got moving the better.

On the street corner opposite, the inevitable loudspeaker was blaring away, and down the hill from Lubianka Square a squad of Red Army girls were approaching, their uniformed bosoms out-thrust and their shrill voices raised in excruciating martial song. I let them go by, and then took a firm grip of the rail. It was so cold that it almost burned me, but gloves would have weakened my hold. A spot of moisture dripped from my nose and froze solid on my upper lip. I must be quick!

The crossing proved much less terrifying in fact than in imagination, and a few seconds later I stood on Tanya's – now Kira's – balcony, breathing rather hard. I bent to the snow and shone the torch, and as I'd expected, the track continued. I followed it silently to Kira's french doors, and there it stopped. Beyond, the snow was virgin. There could be no possible doubt now. A transit had been made from Tanya's room to Mullett's room across the gap, and the marks of the passage had been deliberately obliterated. I remembered the wet newspaper that I'd discovered in Mullet's basket. Folded, that would have been just the thing.

I was over-confident on the way back and nearly came to grief. As I swung across and put my weight on the corner of the ancient coping a triangle of cement cracked clean off. Just in time I tightened my grip on the rail and scrabbled wildly for a new foothold. The broken piece fell with a smack into the area below and I pressed myself to the rail and prayed that no one had been passing underneath just then. I waited a second or two, my heart pounding, but there was no alarm. A moment later I was safe back in my room, and I must say I'd never been more thankful to see it. I went downstairs to borrow the sticky paper from Potts and stayed to have a drink with him. When I got back it took me fifteen minutes to make a satisfactory job of the resealing, and then I dropped into a chair and lit my pipe.

The events of the previous night looked very different now in the light of this new discovery. It still wasn't possible to be sure what had happened in Mullett's room, but it was possible to have a theory that fitted a lot more of the known facts. For instance, the resealing of Mullett's doors could now be explained. The murderer had presumably entered the room
via
the balconies while Mullett was still away broadcasting, and must have sealed the doors before his return. To do that, he must have carried the paste with him – and the wet tin in the waste-paper basket might well have been the container. Then he had lain in wait for Mullett, with the bottle in his hand – why he had failed to arm himself with a more reliable weapon was still a mystery. Anyway, he had struck his victim down and slipped out by way of the corridor.

I saw now why he had left the door ajar instead of shutting it. Having broken in by way of the balcony, he would naturally seek to give the impression that the murderer had entered by the door. He was obviously no fool.

He? – or she? Reluctantly I forced myself to face the facts, and whichever way I looked at them they were so unpleasant that I didn't know how I'd begin to tell Jeff. Indeed, after a few minutes' reflection I had almost begun to wish that I hadn't poked my nose into the business at all. Jeff's relationship with Tanya might not be very deep – he was much too sensible to get deeply involved with a Russian girl – and in the ordinary course of events he'd have left her with no more than a pang of sentimental regret. All the same, in his warm-hearted way he was fond of her, and his anxiety about her that afternoon had been very real. I awaited his return from the Legation party with misgiving.

He came swinging along the corridor at about eleven, and he sounded very cheerful. He stopped by the watchdog, and I heard him say, ‘It's good to be alive – you ought to try it some time,' with a chuckle and a complete disregard of the fact that the man didn't know what he was talking about. It seemed a shame to damp those spirits, and if he'd gone to his room I'd have turned in and left the revelations till morning. He didn't, though – he came and banged on my door.

‘What, all alone, you old misanthrope!' he exclaimed. He slipped off his outdoor things and dropped into a chair. ‘Look what I've just collected.' He handed me a slip of paper. ‘I guess you were right, George.'

It was a telegram from Simferopol, in English, and it said SORRY I RUSHED OFF WITHOUT SAYING GOOD-BYE AM FEELING BETTER ALREADY ALL LOVE TANYA. It had been dispatched at noon, and presumably had crossed Jeff's own wire.

I read it through twice, very puzzled. ‘Well, that's fine,' I said. Things were getting extraordinarily complicated.

Jeff looked at me in surprise. ‘You sure sound delighted, bud. What's on your mind?'

‘A hell of a lot,' I said. ‘I've been making discoveries.' I went on to tell him about the two lots of balcony doors that had been forced and resealed, and the track in the snow, and the newspaper and the tin. I didn't make any direct reference to Tanya. I just waited, and let the facts sink in.

A look of bewilderment settled on his face, and there was a short silence. He fumbled for a cigarette and lit it and blew smoke across the room. ‘Well, I guess that's pretty conclusive,' he said at last. ‘Mighty smart of you to find out. Some guy obviously got into Tanya's room when she wasn't there and used her doors.' He was mentally stalling, and he knew it, and I knew it.

‘They don't hand out room keys to any Tom, Dick or Harry,' I said. ‘Besides, Tanya was in her room all the evening, working.'

‘She may have slipped out.'

‘She may, yes.'

He suddenly looked truculent, and I thought for a second of the night we'd scrapped about the two Wills's. ‘Are you suggesting that Tanya bumped off Mullett? – because it darned well sounds like it.'

‘If I'm raising the possibility, I'm not doing it for pleasure. Look, Jeff, what do you say we drop the whole thing? We'll be up to our necks before we know where we are.'

‘Drop it, hell! We're going to get it straight now we've started. I reckon you must be as screwy as the Russians. Tanya's not the bottle-bashing type – look at the size of her, for one thing. She'd have had to stand on a chair to hit Mullett, and then he wouldn't have felt it. It's fantastic.'

I puffed unhappily at my pipe. ‘Perhaps so – but Mullett's skull was thin, and if she's tough enough for mountaineering I'd say she was tough enough for anything. I know it sounds damned unlikely, but that evidence takes a bit of getting round.'

Jeff gave an exclamation of impatience. For Pete's sake! – what would
she
have against Mullett?'

‘Nothing that I know of. She must have met him when he was out here during the war, of course. She must have met everybody. I suppose there could have been something between them – though I confess I never heard that Mullett was interested in women.'

‘And I never heard that Tanya was interested in Mullett! What could he have given her that other people couldn't? I just don't believe it. Anyway, look how she behaved. A woman who'd just cracked a man's skull with a bottle wouldn't fall in a faint when she saw the corpse a second time.'