Brian Freemantle - In the Name of a Killer

Valentina shook her head again, but slower, sadder, this time. ‘I don’t know about a knife.’

‘What about buttons?’ asked Cowley.

‘Buttons?’ The woman stared up at them, in obvious bewilderment.

‘The sort of buttons on women’s clothes,’ elaborated Danilov. ‘Did Petre collect them?’

‘Of course not!’

‘You’d know?’

‘Of course I’d know!’

‘You clean his room? Look after his things?’

‘Yes.’ She was faint-voiced, obviously lying.

‘Do you look after his room?’ Danilov persisted.

‘His clothes. He won’t let me into his room,’ the woman admitted. ‘But the other officers went in, when they came. They saw it all.’

It was in the report he’d considered utterly inadequate, Danilov remembered. ‘We want to see it again. Now.’

Valentina nodded, dumbly, with no thought of protest. She pulled the shapeless cardigan about her again when she stood up. As she crossed the room to a bedroom door Danilov saw the backs of her slippers were trodden down, like Olga’s, so that she had to scuff to keep them on. At the door she looked back helplessly at them and said: ‘I haven’t got the key. It’s locked and I haven’t got the key.’

‘I have,’ said Danilov, walking forward with the second of the two keys on Yezhov’s ring. It worked.

The bedroom was immaculate, as it had been for the first police examination. As they entered, Cowley commented quietly to Danilov, in English: ‘Everything fits the profile.’

‘I know,’ agreed Danilov, also in English.

Valentina Yezhov hung back as the four men entered her son’s sealed room. Striving for some professional propriety, Cowley said: ‘You must come in as well. See everything that we do: be aware of anything we take.’

Obediently the woman came forward, but still only just put herself inside the door.

They all searched, Kosov roughly until Danilov stopped him and warned they didn’t want anything hidden by the dismissive way the man was throwing things aside. Pavin, the evidence collector, was the one who really led. And it was Pavin who found the secret place — nothing more than a floorboard, sawn through to create a lid over the natural space beneath. Inside were three pornographic magazines, very old and worn, all masochistic, all showing chained and tethered naked women in various poses of apparent suffering. In a lot of the pictures, their breasts were the object of attack.

Beneath the magazines were two cotton purses. They contained, in total, ten buttons of the sort used on women’s clothing.

To Pavin, Danilov said: ‘Parcel up all his clothes, for forensic’ To the woman he said: ‘I want you to come with us. You’ve got to help us talk to him.’

Valentina looked beyond Danilov, to where Pavin was at the wardrobe. ‘Don’t crease his clothes. He doesn’t like his clothes being creased. I have to keep everything pressed.’

Cowley recognized the sort of irrational remark people made under intense, breaking-point pressure. It was also probably very significant.

Refused the lead at Bronnaja, Kosov bustled for control back at his own Militia post, but again Danilov opposed him, accepting the obvious offence although trying to minimize the disagreement as much as possible before the others, his sole concern now to get the investigation properly and professionally concluded. He contradicted Kosov’s announcement that they would resume at once the questioning of Yezhov in his cell, insisting instead that any further interviews had to be in a much larger interrogation room in which the man might feel less constrained and in which Valentina could wait until they were ready. There were other things that had to be set in motion first. Pavin had to contact the Serbsky Institute, to summon the doctor who had been Yezhov’s most recent psychiatrist: the man was to bring with him Yezhov’s complete case history. Danilov himself awoke Leonid Lapinsk, refusing to go along completely with the older man’s instant excitement but agreeing that the circumstantial evidence looked overwhelmingly convincing.

They had taken over the day-room in which Danilov had earlier examined Yezhov’s possessions, to which were now added the clothes, buttons and magazines taken from the apartment. While Danilov telephoned his superior, Cowley sifted carefully through what had been assembled, with a pen tip, not his fingers.

When Danilov replaced the receiver, the American said: ‘The circumstantial evidence against Paul Hughes looked pretty convincing, too.’

‘Not like this,’ argued Danilov.

‘I guess you’re right,’ Cowley agreed. He was still standing by the table that held the exhibits. ‘In Washington the Bureau have specialists on button identification. Have done, for years: buttons are the first things that come off, in violent situations. There’s a pyrolysis test. One using a gas chromatographic mass spectrometer. Another involving something called a Foyier Transformer infra-red spectrometer.’

Danilov nodded, unoffended at the inherent criticism of Russian scientific methods: certainly with the pathologist Viktor Novikov there had been more than sufficient reason for criticism. ‘And DNA?’ he prompted, expectantly.

Cowley nodded in return, then indicated the clothes. ‘We’ve got comparison checks from each victim. Suzlev only from his hair, but from all the rest — Ann Harris, Lydia Orlenko and Nadia Revin — all the trace sources like blood and bodily fluids we could possibly want. If there’s a speck — something so small it can only be seen under a microscope — on any of this stuff, our people in Washington can find it and match it. Match it so that it’s incontestable in any court.’

Danilov stared at the piled possessions, noticing that since he had been there earlier Yezhov’s topcoat, which must have been somewhere else in the building, had been added. It was grey, with an attached hood, and heavily padded: the sort of coat Lydia Orlenko had described. There was what looked to be a smear of blood on the left collar; he recalled the bruising beneath Yezhov’s eye and wondered what sort of scuffle or fight there had been when he had been seized that night on Spiridonievskii. ‘There would appear to be enough to divide between our two forensic laboratories.’

‘I understood your people didn’t use the deoxyribonucleic acid test in criminal investigations yet?’ Cowley challenged, gently.

‘There would have to be a division,’ said Danilov, adamantly.

‘We could be specific about that division,’ suggested the American. ‘The topcoat, for instance. Lydia Orlenko said her attacker wore a padded topcoat.’

‘I think you should have the topcoat,’ Danilov conceded. ‘And all the buttons. The rest we’ll separate equally.’

Like competing children allocating prizes to themselves, thought Cowley, unable to rid himself of the impression of illegal amateurism. Despite which, in the circumstances — always the awkward, conflicting circumstances! — he decided it was the best compromise he could expect. ‘That sounds fine.’

Danilov had tea brought in from the canteen and saw that some was taken to Valentina Yezhov, too. When Pavin returned from another office, from which he had spoken to the Serbsky Institute, Danilov itemized how the exhibits were to be split. It was a further half an hour before Kosov, who’d removed himself from a situation of challenge by disappearing into his own upperfloor office, reappeared to announce the psychiatrist’s arrival. It gave Kosov the excuse to be involved again: Danilov didn’t object.

The Serbsky doctor was a small, fussy man named Aleksandr Iosifovich Tarasov and he was clearly ill-at-ease in surroundings in which he was unfamiliar — probably a psychological failing of his own. He kept patting himself, as if needing the reassurance of a medical uniform instead of the stained and falling-off-his-shoulders suit he was now wearing.