Brian Freemantle - In the Name of a Killer

Andrews shrugged, pouring them both coffee from the Cona machine by the window. ‘I told you already. Attractive girl. Knew she had Uncle Walt back home in Washington, playing short stop. Aloof. Nice enough kid, though.’

‘Barry, someone was fucking her! And it wasn’t a Russian because there wasn’t a trace of anything Russian in that apartment. So who was it?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it was somebody from another embassy: there’s fraternization with friendly allies, you know.’

Cowley sighed. ‘In a letter the Russians took from her apartment, she calls life here a prison. I would have thought relationships would be pretty obvious to everyone.’

‘It’s not that enclosed.’

‘Tell me about Ralph Baxter,’ Cowley demanded.

‘Ralph? What’s he got to do with it?’

‘I just want to talk to him. About something odd he said. So what about him?’

Andrews sat with his coffee-cup held before him. ‘He’s OK. Baseball fanatic. High flier: already served a lot in Asia. If he had more friends in Washington, I guess he’d have his ambassadorship by now.’

‘He married?’

Andrews nodded. ‘Nice girl. Jane. Great cook. She and Pauline swop recipes and techniques a lot.’ He smiled. ‘Pauline’s still the Goddess of the kitchen.’

‘Would Baxter have been screwing Ann Harris?’

‘Ralph!’ Andrews laughed, aloud. ‘I doubt it. Jane keeps those kitchen knives close to hand: poor little Ralphie is a much oppressed spouse. If Jane suspected he was waving it around, she’d cut his pecker off and put it in the stew.’

‘What about Paul Hughes?’

Andrews put down his coffee-cup, to hold up shielding hands. ‘Let’s ease up a little here, Billie boy. I want to know what’s going on. I need to be filled in on a few things.’

Cowley didn’t like being called Billie boy, but if he expected Andrews to help, he supposed he had to offer some explanation. ‘There appears to have been a lot of telephone contact between him and the girl.’

‘What’s so surprising about that?’ demanded Andrews. ‘She worked for him. Paul Hughes heads the economic unit here. Actually seems to like the place, if you can believe that! Ballet buff. My regular racquet ball partner in the embassy gym; he’s a hell of a player. Always needs to win, every time. Speaks pretty good Russian.’

‘Married?’

‘Angela. Their two kids are at school back home but Angela takes a kindergarten class for the young children who are with their folks here. She was a teacher originally, in Seattle.’

‘What about Hughes? He a special friend of the dead girl?’

There was a gap, before Andrews replied. ‘They’d obviously be closer than Baxter: you think he was the guy in her apartment the night she died?’

Cowley shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Did Ann Harris get involved with the social life of the embassy?’

‘She attended some things … national holiday celebrations, stuff like that. But she wasn’t at the club every night. Lived outside, of course: no way of knowing what she did away from the embassy.’

‘She never talked about it?’

‘Not to me. But then she wouldn’t. I didn’t know her that well.’

‘Who did? What about one of the women here? She have a particular friend among them?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘What about the scuttlebutt? Everyone must be talking about her, since the murder. What are they saying?’

Andrews shrugged. ‘Nothing that helps, I don’t think. Everyone liked her. Can’t understand what she was doing out in the street, at that time of night; street muggings happen in Moscow, but not particularly in that area.’

‘What about Russian male friends? You ever hear her linked with a Russian man?’

Andrews shook his head. ‘It’s not encouraged, for obvious reasons. Wasn’t there any lead, from what the Russians took out of her apartment?’

‘Nothing that amounts to a bag of beans,’ dismissed Cowley. ‘You know what I can’t understand? Everyone keeps telling me that she was Mary Poppins’s doppelganger. And I don’t think Ann Harris was that at all. I think Ann Harris could have gone into business designing bedroom ceilings, from looking up at so many.’

Andrews shook his head again. ‘I still find it difficult to believe she was like that.’

Ralph Baxter’s office was on the same level as the ambassador’s and Cowley guessed the room had originally been virtually as big, possibly a minor reception chamber or annex. But it was partitioned now by ill-matched plasterboard into a series of smaller working areas, practical-sized suites with no wasted space. Baxter’s had a window, overlooking the ring road. The preventative glazing wasn’t as effective as in Richards’s office: the traffic noise intruded, as a low murmur. The sharply moving diplomat bounded across the room to greet Cowley. The man was in his shirt-sleeves but with the waistcoat of a charcoal-grey suit buttoned completely across a diet-hard body. He smiled openly, offered the predictable coffee, which Cowley declined, and asked what it was he could do to help, insisting if there was anything, anything at all, then he would do it. Cowley decided the man’s moustache was peculiar: it moved up and down when Baxter spoke but seemed strangely out of time with his upper lip, as if it were false and tenuously stuck on. Cowley couldn’t understand why the man wore it at all.

‘At least we’ve got the body returned. It’s already gone back,’ announced Baxter, as if declaring a personal achievement.

‘I heard it was being released,’ said Cowley. ‘I want to ask you about her. Did you know her well?’

‘As well as anyone, I suppose. A wonderful girl. Beautiful. An asset to the embassy. It’s a shocking, horrible thing to have happened.’

‘She seems to have impressed everyone the same way.’

‘There was only one way.’

Cowley felt the frustration rise and then dip, as he suppressed it. Staring directly at the diplomat, he said: ‘Why the hell was she like she was? You know what I’m saying.’

For several moments Baxter gazed blankly across the desk. ‘What in heaven’s name are you saying? I don’t understand.’

‘Not that remark? Not “Why the hell was she like she was? You know what I’m saying.”’

Baxter shook his head, bemused. ‘No!’

‘Wasn’t that what you said, maybe the very words you used, when you learned Ann Harris had been murdered?’

‘No!’

‘You absolutely positive about that? That first day here at the embassy, when Danilov came with the photographs and you met him, with Barry Andrews?’

‘That what Andrews says? He tell you that’s what I said? It’s not true.’

‘Didn’t you say it?’ Cowley sidestepped.

‘No!’

‘That’s what I hear.’

‘It’s not true, I tell you!’

‘Why? About what?’

‘Me. What I said.’

‘What do you think you said?’

‘I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters a great deal, Mr Baxter. It seems to indicate something about Ann Harris quite different from what I’m being told by everyone.’

‘It’s all a misunderstanding!’

‘Clarify it for me!’ demanded Cowley. ‘She was arrogant, wasn’t she? Thought she could do anything — behave however she liked — because of her uncle?’

‘She was strong-willed, certainly.’ Baxter fumbled his rimless glasses from his nose to polish them: it was an interrupting, delaying gesture, not a necessary one.

‘Arrogant?’ persisted Cowley, pushing the demands to a limit but believing he was guessing correctly. ‘Upset a lot of people quite a lot of the time?’