Brian Freemantle: Red Star Rising

“It’s with Mr. Dawkins, sir.”

“You don’t have a copy?” Charlie sighed.

“It’s my understanding it has to come through Mr. Dawkins, sir.”

“Reg,” set out Charlie. “I’ve been sent, specially, all the way from London to investigate a murder that is probably the biggest security situation you’re ever going to become involved in. I know embassies are governed by rules and that you’ve got to conform to them. But I just told you I need your help, and I’m sure you don’t want my having to complain to the third secretary or to London that I’m being obstructed in what I’ve come here to sort out. So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll tell you what I want, and you decide whether we’re going to communicate like adults or whether you’ve got to communicate all the time through Dawkins. I want your report. I want to see the photographs I’m confident you took, before the Russians arrived. I want to know why you summoned the Russians as quickly as you did. I want you to tell me why you let your people trample all over the scene, probably destroying forensic evidence, and why you let whoever did it fill in the hole that was left after the Russians apparently dug out all the earth into which the blood and facial debris soaked, from where the body lay. I want to talk to you in the minutest possible detail, irrespective of whatever’s in your report, about everything that you did before the arrival of the Russian investigators. I want to know the name of the Russian groundsman who found the body and, in the most specific detail, hear everything-and I really mean everything- that he told you, before I talk to him myself. I want to know what went so consistently wrong with the CCTV security cameras-and why it continued going wrong-up to and including the night the body got where it was found. And why and how a man, with his intended killers, got into embassy grounds that you and your staff are supposed to keep clear of any unauthorized intrusion. And when I’ve got all that, I’ll probably want to do it all over again because the first time I won’t get half, even a quarter, of what I want. And in passing, it’s not necessary for you to call me sir. Charlie’s fine. You keeping up with me so far, Reg. .”

There was no immediate reply and Charlie thought he could almost see reflected in the transfixed eyes the slow-moving cogs in the man’s brain. Finally Stout managed, “I thought Mr. Dawkins was handling it all?”

“He isn’t,” corrected Charlie. “I am.”

“I think I should talk to Mr. Dawkins.”

“We’ll both talk to Mr. Dawkins,” insisted the exasperated Charlie. And it was still only just after ten thirty.

Charlie didn’t believe that rainbows always followed rain or that every cloud that brought the downpour had a silver lining, so his satisfaction at London’s insistence on unfettered, unimpeded assistance within the embassy was muted. Appealing both to Aubrey Smith and the Foreign Office had been the very last resort he’d had no alternative but to take against Dawkins’s obdurate determination to be the hands-on controller of every move Charlie made. Sure that the housing officer would have already complained as well, his demand for a liaison ruling racked up two petty but officially recorded disputes in the space of twenty-four hours and Charlie feared Smith’s irritable reaction-“What about the real problem you’re there to sort out?”-was a reaction to the internal pressure in London and not a belief that he needed a bigger boy’s hand to hold, which was the very last impression Charlie either needed or wanted. There was something else he didn’t need or want, either: the foot-aching twinge Charlie never ignored as a warning, that even at this early stage there was something he’d missed or hadn’t realized, which for once he hoped was not its usual talisman but merely the tightness of new Hush Puppies.

“Having wasted the entire morning, are we finally ready to begin?” Charlie asked the head of security.

“Sir!” replied Stout, the parade-ground loudness less belligerent than before. From a desk drawer, the man extracted a file and said, “My report, sir!”

As he accepted the dossier Charlie said, “For Christ’s sake, cut out the ‘sir’ crap, will you? What time were you told about the body?”

“Eight thirty-three exactly, as I say in my report. . ” He just stopped himself.

“I want to hear your account, as well as read it. Who told you?”

“The man in charge of the gardening detail. He called me, here in the office.”

“A Russian?”

“Yes. He told me one of his workers had found a body; that it didn’t have a face.”

“What’s the name of the man who actually found it?”

“Maksimov. Boris Maksimov.”

Charlie nodded to the telephone on Stout’s desk. “Can you arrange for me to speak to Maksimov, as well as the Russian in charge?”

“I’m afraid you can’t. Not speak to either of them, I mean.”

“What’s the problem now?” demanded Charlie, the exasperation returning.

“Neither is here, at the embassy. One of the Russians who came when I raised the alarm told me to put both of them on extended leave, to help the organized crime bureau.”

“Colonel Pavel told you to do that?”

“I don’t know his name.”

Charlie had to swallow hard before he could continue. “You’ve got their home addresses?”

“The Russian staffs are supplied by the Foreign Ministry.”

To which they were supplied by the FSB, as they had been before the renaming of the KGB and before that by the MVD-MGB and before that by the NKGB-NKVD, Charlie knew. Nothing had changed except the titles. And everyone in the West imagining that espionage had been swept away in the flood of the Cold War thaw, worried instead about Islamic terrorism. “You spoke to Maksimov?”

“Briefly. He spoke hardly any English, I speak hardly any Russian.”

Charlie knew-every intelligence professional knew-that local Russian support staff spoke more than adequate English, which was why they were there, to listen and read everything they could. “Don’t leave out a single word, tell me everything you saw and talked about and heard.”

“It really was very brief. He’d started work at eight that morning, he told me. His job was to weed the flower beds around the conference hall. He said he saw the body the moment he finished the first bed and came around the corner to continue on the next section. He thought it was someone asleep or drunk until he got close enough to see what it really was, that it was a dead man. He ran to get his supervisor. He said he hadn’t done it.”

“He said what?”

“ ‘I didn’t do it. He was like that when I found him.’ That was the last thing Maksimov said to me.”

“Who was there ahead of you at the scene?”

“Demin, the Russian team leader, and Maksimov.”

“None of your security people?”

“No.”

“Had the two Russians touched anything?”

“They told me they hadn’t; that they were too scared.”

From the hesitation before the reply, Charlie guessed Stout hadn’t asked either Russian about touching the body. “Tell me, in every detail, what you found.”

The hesitation now was for recall, and the account was punctuated by pauses when the man finally began to speak. Charlie, who was well aware of the psychological peculiarity that few witnesses to dramatic events had the same recollection, was caught by the similarity in Stout’s account to that of Paula-Jane Venables.

“Did you touch the body?” picked up Charlie.

“No!” insisted the man, at once. “I didn’t go through any of his pockets.”

“That wasn’t the question,” persisted Charlie. “Did you touch it? If the clothes were wet, it would give us an indication of how long it had been there, before or after dew might have fallen.”