Brian Freemantle - In the Name of a Killer

Danilov forced himself on, through the dead man’s file. Suzlev has been a gregarious, well-liked man with no enemies. He’d drunk with three other drivers the night of his death, having found a liquor store with supplies near the Belorussian railway station. It had been a pleasantly drunken evening — they’d sung, according to the other drinkers — with no arguments or disagreements. He had not been robbed: when he’d been found he still had ten roubles in his pocket and his watch was on his wrist. He had no criminal record. His wife was sure he’d loved her and she claimed to have loved him: there was no extramarital involvement. He’d been a doting, if strict, father, although there was no complaint that he’d ever actually beaten either of his children, both boys, one fourteen, the other sixteen. The autopsy had discovered he was suffering a hernia his wife hadn’t known about: there was the beginning of cholesterol build-up in the arteries but it would not have become a health factor for possibly another ten years.

Danilov straightened again, still looking at his file but not focusing on the details. An ordinary man leading an ordinary life until one night, a month ago, he stopped being ordinary and became a murder victim. So why Vladimir Vasilevich Suzlev, a Moscow taxi driver? And why Ann Harris, a pretty, successful, presumably high-earning American whose life was so different they might have come from separate planets? Virtually did come from separate planets. Where was the connection, the link he could logically follow to make the arrest and prevent it happening again? There wasn’t one, he conceded, hopelessly. And it was hopeless: depressingly, emptily hopeless. Murders were committed by people — men and women — who knew their victims. They were husbands and wives or lovers or acquaintances: investigations were routine, plodding back through the lies and deceits and evasions until eventually it became obvious, usually accompanied by a tearful, apologetic confession. This case — these murders — weren’t going to be solved that way. Danilov wished he knew how they were going to be solved.

Found . The one word suddenly seemed to come into focus from the rest of the unseen blur and Danilov concentrated forward, trying for a connecting factor. Ann Harris had been killed just off Ulitza Gercena. The body of Vladimir Suzlev had been found in another badly lit alley, running off the Ulitza Stolesnikov. Close, Danilov decided. Possibly the first positive common denominator, the comparatively compact area in which the killer was operating. Danilov wrote down the two street locations, drew a circle around each and joined them, with a single line. Above the line he put a question mark.

Danilov spent another fifteen minutes with both files, moving from one to the other and back again, but could not find anything else to join with a connecting line. He reassembled and closed the file on Vladimir Suzlev, intending to remove it completely from his desk, but stopped, uncertainly, with the hard-topped folder in his hand, unable to find anywhere to put it. Danilov’s office was a filled up box of a place, enclosed in the very middle of the Militia building and therefore without even an outside window. One of the three bulbs which had to burn permanently, for illumination, had failed a week before and maintenance insisted there wasn’t any more in store to replace it: they’d been expecting a delivery for a month. Danilov was uneasy because the bulb in the desk lamp had started to flicker. Every drawer in the two filing cabinets — some half open as if in proof — was jammed with past case files and documents that Danilov retained for reference, along with the books in the three crammed shelves, and the tops of both cabinets supported more precariously lodged files threatening an avalanche at the slightest vibration. There was more paperwork on the only visitor’s chair and a growing wall stacked to the left of Danilov’s desk.

The appearance, of completely disorganized chaos, was however entirely misleading. Danilov knew the location of every record, file and book and usually found his research facilities better — and certainly swifter — than the official basement archives staffed by uninterested clerks resentful of any inquiry.

Remaining uncertain, Danilov stood, the Suzlev case record still in hand, seeking space that didn’t exist. Finally he heightened the wall of folders beside his desk: it was, after all, something he was going to need as close to hand as possible.

Ann Harris, the neat and tidy economist, had kept her correspondence meticulously: Danilov realized, the moment he unfastened the first bundle, that she had packaged them in their elastic bands strictly according to the date of receipt, creating a consecutive record of every letter she had received since her arrival in Moscow, eighteen months earlier. He sorted through, placing the packs in their proper chronological order, reading from the beginning. There seemed to be four main correspondents, her parents, who lived in Hartford, Connecticut, being the most regular. There was a man, John, who wrote from a New York address and whom it took Danilov some time to identify as a brother. Judy Billington, who lived in Washington, DC, emerged to be a fellow economist and former college friend. Senator Burden’s letters were always typed — Danilov guessed by a secretary, because there were none of the mistakes of an amateur, twofingered effort — and signed with a flourish of curlicues, a signature intended for posterity.

Although the correspondence was necessarily one-sided, nearly all a response or reaction to something the girl had written from Moscow, it soon became clear to Danilov that Ann Harris presented a different persona to different audiences. To her parents in Connecticut she was a polite and caring daughter, solicitous about their well-being, an eager reporter of the unusual experiences and pleasures possible in Moscow. It’s good to know how much you like it , her parents had enthused, in a letter six months earlier. There seemed to have been plans for the elderly couple to visit. The girl had assured her father, who suffered from angina, that there was an excellent embassy doctor: she had proposed trips to the Bolshoi and the State Circus. Everyone was going to have a great time.

The letters from Senator Burden continued to reflect an unqualified enjoyment and a grateful awareness of the career benefits of the Russian posting, although more stiffly expressed, just as the politician’s letters were stiffly typed. Although, from the way some of the letters were phrased, it was obvious Ann Harris was giving the necessary guarantees, there was frequent urging from Burden for her always to be conscious of the political influence being exerted on her behalf. Those urgings were invariably accompanied by assurances that back in Washington the man was monitoring and guarding her career. Iam proud , Burden recorded in one letter. You’re rightfully earning the chance to the highest promotion, which I am going to see you get insisted another. A third said, pompously: It gratifies me to hear you have positively decided to subjugate all personal feelings and thoughts to repay with success the efforts I have made on your behalf .

With the brother and the college friend, the tone changed dramatically.

In repeated promises from New York, John Harris undertook never to tell their parents or their uncle of her unhappiness in Moscow and its insular diplomatic environment. It can’t be the virtual prison that you describe , the brother had protested, within two months of her arrival. It seemed to be a consistent complaint, because prison was a word that appeared in several letters. There were also inquiries about her social life. In a June letter the man had written Sorry about the man shortage . In July the reference was A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, but I would have thought there were enough eligible bachelor diplomats to go around .