Gavin Lyall - Judas Country

He nodded vaguely. 'You see, perhaps Mr Cavitt was the last person to see him alive…'

'Didn't his daughter? – Mitzi?'

'Ah yes, perhaps.' As if he'd forgotten her.

'Didn't you ask her why she thought he killed himself?'

'Yes.' He nodded again and his head went on waggling as if he were too tired to switch it off. Finally he said: 'Yes. She thinks it may be because he had incurable cancer and only two months to live.'

After a long time I said: 'And you still think it would be better if he'd left a suicide note?'

He smiled wearily. 'Yes.'

When I got downstairs again, Mitzi and Kapotas had vanished and Sergeant Papa was snoring steadily on a bench seat by the bar. Ken and Nina sat at a table, each with a small brandy glass, not saying anything.

I sat down. 'Did you know anything about the Prof dying of cancer?'

'Yep,' Ken said, a chopped-off sound. He went on staring at the tabletop. 'Mitzi told me just now.'

'Well, I suppose it must be true, and the post-mortem'11 show it, but…' I shook my head helplessly. 'But if he'd only got a couple of months to go, it must've been pretty bad. Did he know about it in jail?'

'I'm sure he didn't. And the medical checks you got in there, they just about counted your legs and arms and no more. I remember he'd got this sort of hernia trouble, but that was right at the end and he said he'd wait and see a doctor in Vienna. Well, it turned out that was it: they operated and found a secondary cancer in his groin.'

'Where was the main one?'

'It was a… a melanoma or some word like that, sort of skin cancer in the middle of his back. Apparently it doesn't hurt, there. In fact, the docs said it wouldn't hurt at all until near the end and then you go down fast."

Nina shivered and instinctively tightened her folded arms. I may have shivered myself, a bit. I'd stopped knowing what to feel about the Professor, but at least a 9 mm slug through the mouth sounded a bit more reasonable, now.

'If those buggers in Biet Oren had spotted it when he could still be operated on,' Ken said quietly, 'he'd still be alive. They bloody well killed him.'

'Well, not quite that,' I tried to soothe him. 'You should get back to bed; tomorrow's another day.'

'It looks like today from where I'm sitting.' Well, yes, since it was nearly three in the morning. But he suddenly slapped both hands on the table, levered himself upright and gave a long shuddering stretch like a cat. 'See you, kids.' And he'd gone.

Papa snored on. Nina looked at me with solemn eyes. 'Well?'

'I'll settle the account and you get off home, love.'

'I have to charge you for my time,' she said.

'I know. And 1 won't say I didn't end up with regrets, but… maybe another time. Right now I'd be as much use as a banana skin.' I started dealing pound notes from my wallet and grinned suddenly at what Kapotas would have said about Castle's money. At what he certainly would say, tomorrow, when I tried to prise some more out of him.

She said: 'I wouldn't have thought you needed us, usually."

I let that go and kept on dealing. When I'd run dry, there were just sixteen pounds on the table.

Nina said carefully: 'I'D take Suzie's share, too.'

Td assumed that. Ken hasn't got any money anyway.'

'Well… we usually reckon on ten pounds each.'

I nodded and looked around. The bar takings would be locked up and I didn't fancy borrowing off Papa. Then I remembered the desk petty cash box; there just might be something left in it.

The only person left in the hall was a constable dozing in a chair opposite the stairway. He half-opened an eye and watched as I dishonestly appropriated property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it, or however they put it in Cyprus. The box had a pound note, a 500-mil., a new 250-mil., a few coins and even fewer stamps than I'd seen earlier. It came out at just over two quid.

'Can I owe you the last two? They'll have to pay me in a day or so if only to get rid of me.'

'Okay.' She collected up the notes, half turned to go, then turned back and said: 'Something about you and your friend Ken worries me.'

'What?'

'The way you don't take anything seriously, like being broke and this man shooting himself…'

'I thought Ken was taking that pretty hard."

'The idea didn't shock him enough. It's… it's as if you were people in a war and you don't care about tomorrow.'

I frowned. 'That's a sort of shivery idea. I don't think it's like that.'

'People like you frighten me.' And she reached suddenly, pecked my cheek and bounced neatly out of the front door.

I watched the door wig-wag to a stop behind her, then slowly put the cashbox away under the desk and then just sat, too tired to do anything else. And too tired to feel anything, either.

Inspector Lazaros and his team came down at twenty past three. 'We are going now, you may lock up. Tomorrow I shall need formal statements from Papadimitriou and the daughter and you.'

'Not too early.'

'I hope not. Good night, Captain.'

'Just mister.'

I sat on for a while after they'd gone, then went in and woke Papa. 'They've gone, so you can lock up if there's nobody else left on a short-night. What happened to Kapotas?'

He yawned massively, showing a row of big, shabby teeth like a horse's. 'He rang up his wife and then went to bed in 217.' We locked the bar, put out the lights and went back into the hall, and I leant against a wall and watched him lock the front door and tried to think what was nagging at my mind.

He turned and saw me 'still there and stopped, smiling vaguely, just by the wooden postbox, like a big nesting-box, hung on the wall by the bus timetables and rack of airline brochures.

I said: 'Does the hotel have a key to that, or is it a proper post office box?'

He blinked, surprised. 'It belongs to the hotel. Once or twice a day somebody clears it and just posts the letters in the nearest proper box.'

That sounded like Castle's service with style, all right. 'Open it up.'

Now he really did look surprised. 'I think there is nothing in there…'

'So we'll check.'

He found the key on the big bunch and lifted the sloping lid. 'No, nothing.'

I looked for myself. 'All right, hand it over.'

'What?' The surprise was still there, but maybe a little fear behind it.

'The letter the Professor wrote. Hand itover! '

'But what letter?'

That's why he put on a shirt. To come downstairs. And he bought the stamps off you and paid with a new 250-mil. note and it was too late for anybody to post it tonight' but not too late for a fat vulture like you to remember it once the bloke was dead. I'll bet you'd have sorted out his room, too, if that chambermaid hadn't been there. Now either give it to me or stick around until I've got back Lazaros and told him my theory.'

'It is in my room,' he said shakily.

I jerked my head at the stairs.

He brought it down inside a couple of minutes: an ordinary long pale blue airmail envelope with a handwritten address to Pierre Aziz in Beit Mery, Beirut, Lebanon.

'I was going to post it in the morning,' Papa said, trying hard to get a little dignity back into his voice.

The envelope was still sealed so he might have been telling the truth except I was quite sure he wasn't. From its thickness, it probably only held one folded piece of paper. I stuck it in my shirt pocket.

'What are going to do?' he asked.

'Sleep on it. Behind a locked door.'

His expression got suddenly crafty. 'Now why should I not tell the Inspector that you have it?'

'Because you'd still involve yourself. And because, when the going gets rough, you scare easier than I do.'

After that, I knew our relationship would never be the same again. But then, it already wasn't.