Brian Freemantle - In the Name of a Killer

‘What sort of criticism?’

Pavin shifted, uncomfortably: the smile was apologetic. ‘That the power … the possibility of becoming known internationally … has gone to your head. Affected you.’

Danilov laughed, genuinely amused. ‘What about the risk of failure? Where will the glory be then?’ Lapinsk had warned there would be no glory, he remembered.

‘A lot are expecting you to fail. Making bets.’

‘Any complaints about resources can go direct to General Lapinsk,’ dismissed Danilov, confidently.

‘I don’t imagine any are going to be made officially. Our demands provide a good excuse for failed investigations elsewhere, don’t they? Can actually be useful.’

To add to all the other excuses to shield those receptively open hands, thought Danilov. He said: ‘Keep me in touch, about what’s being said. And by whom.’ It was always useful to know one’s enemies. Was that overly paranoid? No. Just properly selfprotective. He’d need a lot of protection, if he did fail.

Pavin turned first, at the sound at the doorway, ahead of Danilov realizing the presence of William Cowley. The American was big, conceded Danilov, at once: standing as the man was, at the very threshold, he virtually blocked the entrance. Cowley remained where he was, as if waiting for an invitation to re-enter. Danilov provided it by introducing Pavin and identifying the Major as the exhibit officer. Cowley offered his hand first and went through the meeting ritual in Russian, thinking as he did so that if the Major was the exhibit officer he hadn’t really been over-extended assembling what had been set out in the room he’d just left. To Danilov, the American said briskly: ‘Now we can talk.’ He perched himself delicately upon the inadequate chair. ‘How do you want to run it? My impressions to you? Or yours to me?’

Deferring here, too, acknowledged Danilov: providing a way to build bridges between them. ‘No point in lectures, one to the other. Let’s just talk it through, compare points that stick in my mind to those that might have come into yours.’

The Russian had not taken the offer of command. Intentional avoidance, to put them level? Or hadn’t he realized the offer was there in the first place? ‘I’ll follow you.’

‘Why was she out on the street at all?’ began Danilov, rhetorically. ‘You’ll have seen it’s difficult to establish a reliable time of death, precisely because of the cold. Between eleven and one o’clock on the night Ann Harris was killed, the Moscow temperature fluctuated between four and six degrees below zero. She wasn’t dressed for that degree of cold — her topcoat was comparatively thin — so why did she leave a warm bed in a warm apartment to get where she was found?’

‘Assignation?’ suggested Cowley.

‘She’d just had one in her apartment.’

‘Called out, from one lover to another? I don’t know what guidance I’m going to get from the embassy, but from the correspondence and from the paraphernalia you found in the bedside cabinet she was a pretty busy girl, sexually. Possibly experimental, too.’

‘Which could throw up a number of possibilities,’ Danilov chimed in. ‘There could have been jealousy, from the lover she left at Pushkinskaya. Or from the one she was going to.’

‘Or neither,’ Cowley completed. ‘The on-the-scene forensic report made a point of the minimal blood leakage. Could she have been killed elsewhere and then dumped, where she was found?’

‘I think the blood loss was absorbed by the coat. She definitely wasn’t killed in her apartment.’

‘I’ve read the forensic findings at Pushkinskaya,’ agreed Cowley. ‘I just think the possibility of another murder scene should not be overlooked.’

Which up until now it had been, Danilov accepted. ‘The pathologist says the knife was very sharp: minimal bruising around the entry wound. So the wound could have sealed itself, upon withdrawal.’

‘There’s no medical evidence of that, in the report.’

With no intention of further criticism of the inefficient pathologist, Danilov said: ‘He claims no evidence of nail scrapings, where she might have fought. But the written account lists broken fingernails. We have to go back on that.’

Cowley nodded. ‘I was told by our ambassador this morning that the body is being returned to us. I’ve asked for another autopsy in Washington.’ He was possibly coming to the first moment of positive difficulty: it had been inevitable, although he hadn’t wanted it to arise quite so soon. Consciously trying to soften the statement — certainly not to appear condescending — the American said: ‘There’s an analysis procedure we use in America, to confirm death-at-the-scene: blood volume calculated by a victim’s height, weight and body size.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind.’ It would be wrong to let the chill growing between them develop. With a briskness matching that of the other man, earlier, Danilov hurried on: ‘Like you said, sexually she appears to have been a busy woman. But from the correspondence she puts herself in different lights to different people.’

‘Yes?’ said Cowley, curiously.

‘She was particularly confessional to the college friend, Judy Billington. If there’d been any personal contact between them — telephone calls or vacation visits — she might have said even more than she did in the letters: hinted the identity of the lover.’

‘The Billington girl certainly needs to be interviewed.’ He was enjoying himself, Cowley abruptly realized. He was back where he felt he belonged, in the middle of a complicated and at the moment insoluble investigation, the sort of environment he didn’t know any more from an administrative desk in Pennsylvania Avenue. And he wasn’t finding any personal difficulty, with Andrews. The self-criticism was immediate. He’d barely spent two hours in the other FBI agent’s company, so how could he decide there wasn’t any personal difficulty? And there was still the meeting with Pauline. Three years, he thought again. How much would she have changed, in three years? How much had he changed in three years? Virtually completely, he supposed. He wondered how she’d like the transition. Cowley recalled the Director’s remark about distraction, determinedly stopping the way his mind was drifting. He smiled across at the Russian. ‘Anything else?’

It was right to have come this far discussing only the girl, whose murder was the sole interest of the other man, but they couldn’t go any further. Danilov said: ‘Possibly quite a lot, but I don’t think we should consider it by itself.’

Cowley frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Ann Harris wasn’t the first murder victim,’ said Danilov, simply. ‘She was the second.’

Senator Burden had demanded the meeting but it took place at Henry Hartz’s urging, insisting upon the FBI Director’s attendance and further insisting it was not possible so obviously to disdain the politician, which had been an irritated Leonard Ross’s initial intention. Richard Holmes also regarded it as a nuisance having to come into the city from the CIA headquarters at Langley, but not with the same obvious ill-will as his Bureau counterpart. They assembled in the Secretary of State’s suite at Foggy Bottom, again ahead of Burden’s arrival.

‘The more we tolerate his nonsense, the worse it’s going to get,’ complained Ross.

‘We don’t have a choice,’ said Hartz, flatly.

‘Why not?’ demanded Holmes.

‘Burden is playing with a marked deck,’ said Hartz. ‘The President needs Burden’s constant support, up on the Hill. And he’s going to need it through the term. The damned man — and his party — controls Congress. The moment Burden pulls the plug, we get a lame-duck President whom Burden can defeat for a second term, which every incumbent President starts campaigning for from the moment of his inauguration. All of which makes Burden as powerful as hell. And he knows it: every little bit and particle of it.’