Brian Freemantle: Red Star Rising

“I didn’t touch it,” repeated the man. “His jacket looked as if it might be damp.”

“How much blood was there?”

“A lot, from what I could see.”

“Soaked into the ground?”

“Yes.”

Charlie thought that Stout was telling him what the man imagined he wanted to hear. “After the body was removed, the Russians-a forensic examiner-dug up the soil where what remained of the head had been, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“How big, wide as well as deep, was the hole?”

“I don’t know.” Stout frowned. “Why’s that important?”

“The size might have given an indication of how much blood there was, which in turn might have told us whether he was shot there or somewhere else. How deep it was might have suggested whether the bullet was found.”

“There was no sign of a bullet being found. It was a deep hole, maybe two foot round.”

Again what the man thought he wanted to hear, decided Charlie. “The forensic people took photographs?”

“I think so,” said Stout, immediately correcting himself. “Yes, yes, of course they did.”

“Didn’t you take photographs?”

“By then Mr. Dawkins had arrived. He told me it was a Russian investigation and that we should leave everything to them.”

Now it was Charlie who hesitated, unsure if there was anything to be gained from questioning any further. He wouldn’t know unless he tried, he reminded himself. “Tell me about nighttime security.”

“The gatehouse is staffed. Two men.”

“What about ground patrols?”

Stout shifted, uncomfortably. “No.”

“There used to be,” Charlie remembered.

“There hasn’t been, not for a long time.”

“London’s decision? Or local?”

“I was told by Mr. Dawkins.” As if in sudden recollection, Stout added, “There are ground sensors now! And CCTV.”

“Which, according to what I’ve heard, don’t work?”

Stout’s face clouded at Charlie’s awareness. “There have been some technical problems recently.”

“Like what?”

“Some of the cameras have blanked out.”

Could it possibly be? wondered Charlie. It should have been inconceivable. “These cameras that blanked out? Would they have covered the area where the body was found?”

There was a pause before Stout’s reply. “Not all of them.”

“Reg! Stop fucking about and answer the question!”

The man swallowed, a sheen of perspiration pricking out on his face. “Two of them do.”

“The two covering where the body was found? And the area between there and the gatehouse?” easily predicted Charlie.

The man nodded but didn’t speak.

“Were they out the night the body got to where it was found?”

“Yes. But it was happening for several days before the body was found.”

Of course it was, thought Charlie, although with the mentality here it hadn’t really been necessary to make it appear accidental. “Why weren’t they fixed?”

“They were. Electricians were called in and the cameras were okay for a day. Then they crashed again.”

“Technical electricians from London?”

“They’re due in the next day or two,” said the man.

Charlie’s pause this time was one of total, incredulous disbelief. Spacing his words when he did speak, he said: “Who was brought in to do the repairs that failed?”

“It wasn’t considered a difficult job, technically.”

“Answer the question,” insisted Charlie, his voice still hollowed in despair.

“A Russian contractor, recommended by the Foreign Ministry,” finally admitted the security manager.

“Were there two men on duty in the gatehouse the night the body got into the grounds?”

“Yes.”

“British?” The answer should have been obvious but Charlie had given up on anything being as it should have been.

“Yes. Hoskins and Jameson.”

Charlie nodded toward the desk telephone again. “I want to see them”-he looked at his watch-“in half an hour’s time. You got a spare room?” There wasn’t space for more than one other person in his contemptuously allocated office.

“No.”

“Here then.”

While Stout telephoned around the embassy to locate the two men, who were that week on day duty, Charlie sat, head bowed, anger burning through him. This was an out-and-out, all-time fucking nightmare of incompetence and ineptitude on an unimaginable scale demanding an internal investigation quite separate from that to which he had been assigned. But not yet, came the immediate halt, for several reasons, the least of which was escalating any hand-holding impressions in London. Feeling again the warning twinge in his left foot, Charlie reminded himself that nothing that had already occurred could be undone or rectified. Better to leave everything as it was but use it to his benefit.

“They’ll be here at a quarter to,” promised Stout, replacing the telephone.

“What was the duty period of these two men, Hoskins and Jameson?” resumed Charlie.

“Twenty-two hundred to six hundred.”

“No break?”

“One spells the other for half an hour, working it out between them. Not a lot to do except be there at that time of night.”

“What was in their log for that night?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember the log of the night a murdered man was found in the embassy grounds, the security of which you’re responsible!”

“It’s because of that I don’t remember anything else!”

“What about noise?”

“Noise?”

“A gunshot sufficient to blow off a man’s face would have made quite a noise, wouldn’t you think?”

“I wasn’t told about any unusual noise,” insisted the man. He finally took out a handkerchief to wipe his sweat-shined face.

“You still have the log?”

“We should have.”

“Should have!”

“There’s a loose-paged filing system. It’ll be there.”

“While I’m talking to your two night-duty men, I’d like you to find that particular log reference. And all the others in which the faulty CCTVs are recorded and individually identified. They are individually identified, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

Uncertainty echoed in the man’s voice and Charlie decided that when he did blow the whistle, he’d recommend the sweating Reg Stout undergo interrogation to determine whether the man might have been suborned and actually be a security risk. The contradiction against his being so was that Stout was blatantly too stupid. The caveat to that dismissal came just as quickly. Unless, that is, Stout was the eminently qualified buffoon to conceal the person reducing the embassy to a security farce. That led inevitably to the question overhanging all others: What the fuck was going on?

Both William Hoskins and Paul Jameson wore campaign ribbons. Both had the backbones of career soldiers and Charlie abandoned any resistance to the word “sir” as verbal punctuation. They told him that because of their blank CCTV screens they’d taken turns to make short patrol walks, although not as far as where the body was found. For just two men to maintain any sort of proper security was virtually impossible without closed circuit television, particularly when the majority of the embassy’s outside illumination went off at midnight. There were no automatically triggered movement or body-heat activated burglar lights. Ground sensors sounded an audible alarm by tread or passing movement, with no visual screen display. There had been nothing on the night of the body discovery that sounded like a pistol or automatic weapon report.

“Which we would certainly have recognized,” offered Hoskins, the plumper of the two ex-soldiers.

“Even below the rest of the noise that there was that night,” added the mustached Jameson.