Gavin Lyall - Judas Country

Breakfast ran long and late the next morning. I got down around ten and Kapotas was already having his first coronary of the day over the desk cash box.

'They steal everything! ' he wailed. 'Even a few-'

'Don't worry, that was me. I'll pay you back when you pay me.'

'I keep saying that I am not responsible for-'

'It's only money. And not even ours.' I ducked into the dining-room.

Ken was the only one I knew there; no Mitzi, no Suzie and there'd been no sign of Sergeant Papa. I sat down with Ken and ordered three poached eggs and enough coffee to swim in, then started on the last of Ken's coffee to bridge the gap. A half hangover, not the sort where you've got broken glass in your veins, always gives me an appetite like an opera singer.

Ken wasn't looking so hopeful of the day. His eyes were puffy and red – youdo lose your alcohol capacity – and he was morosely scratching a new pattern in an old gravy-stain on the cloth.

'What's the matter?' I asked. 'Wasn't it like it is in the women's magazines? You're just getting old. Lucky to be able to-'

'Ah, shut up. I got my wick trimmed all right. It's Bruno.'

'You really liked him?'

'He was a pretty nice bloke, though the competition wasn't high, in there. I just don't see why… and cancer patients just don't kill themselves, anyway. Once you know you've only got so long to live, it seems too sweet to waste. Have you ever heard of anybody committing suicide in the condemned cell?'

'Yes: Hermann Goring.'

'For God's sake… he doesn't count. Anyway, he only beat the rope by a few hours, didn't he?'

'And he was a pilot.' I don't know why I was sounding so cheerful about it, except that it was too early to feel suicidal myself. Then my eggs arrived and I got noshed into them for a minute or two. 'Anyway,' I said finally, 'he wrote a letter last night. Posted it in the box in the hall and Sergeant Papa nicked it and I nicked it off him.'

Ken was staring at me with more than the puffiness narrowing his eyes. 'Who to? What's it say?'

'Bloke in Beirut. And I haven't opened it.' I nudged my jacket with my knife handle and the letter crackled in my pocket.

'Keep your voice down,' Ken said quietly. 'The bloke at the next table's a plainclothes jack.'

I didn't ask how he knew, just waited for a reasonable excuse to glance sideways. A nice clean-cut thirty-year-old in a fresh white shirt and not a hotel guest unless he'd come aboard this morning. Well, it figured. If I'd been Lazaros I'd have sent somebody around to drink a few cups of coffee and keep his ears wide open. The Inspector might not think there was something behind the Professor's death, but he'd be quite sure there was something behind the Professor.

I said gently: 'It could just be the suicide note the Inspector wanted him to have left. I suppose there's no law about posting one instead of sticking it on the mantelpiece.'

'To somebody in Beirut? When his own daughter's next door?'

'Are you looking for logical behaviour in a suicide?' I finished my last egg. 'I suppose it'd be more proper for Mitzi to read it than for Lazaros, and he'd certainly open it, but then again – if it is a suicide note, it might cause her unnecessary grief, right?'

'You're achieving new standards in logical hypocrisy.' He poured himself some of my coffee. 'So what now?'

'We wait until we're alone, Josephine.'

He half grinned. The puffiness was fading and his face was taking on the old lean, shrewd alertness. He nodded briefly and leant back in the chair. 'What happened to that girl at the Gat-wick pub…'

It took five minutes before the cop decided he couldn't go on reading his future in the bottom of the little coffee-cup and wandered out. I twitched my chair to get my back to the glass doors and slid the envelope across the table.

Ken shook his head, barely a quiver. 'Pierre Aziz? Don't know him.'

'Nor me, though maybe I've heard something… Anyway, Beit Mery's no refugee camp.'

'It's that hill with the fancy great hotel, isn't it? The Al Boustan.'

'That's the place.' I worked one fingertip in under the envelope flap. 'Well, jog my elbow.'

He grinned, reached and bumped my aim. The envelope ripped open. 'Dear me, it seems to have come undone…' I unfolded the single piece of good-quality ten-by-eight writing paper with the single line Professor Doktor Bruno Spohr engraved across the top. No address; a professional travelling man. And underneath… a big slab of type-written German, ending in two signatures, one of them Spohr's. I don't read German much beyond'Bier' and'Flugplatz' and I was pretty sure Ken still didn't either. The sheet had a slightly lop-eared, worn look; certainly older than last night. I shrugged and passed it across.

Ken frowned down at it. 'Oh Christ, why didn't we think of a German speaker writing in German… Das Schwert das wir in der Gruftin Akkaentdeckt haben… Ohhell. Akka must be Acre, but what'sa Schwert anda Gruft?'

'Dunno. What's the other signature?'

'Franz Meisler.The Prof's assistant, maybe, it's dated eighteen months ago; before Bruno got pinched.' He skimmed down the rest of the text. 'There's some dimension in here, too… what does 1003 millimetres sound like?'

'Like just over three feet. Maybe it's a treasure map in words: one metre north-west of the lonesome pine…'

'Well, a suicide note it ain't. And we'll have to show it to Mitzi. How do we explain how it got opened?'

'We blame the Sergeant, of course.'

'Stupid of me.' He held it up. 'You or me?'

'You know the lady best.'

But Lazaros and his band of merry men turned up before Mitzi did. They set up at a bar table and took our formal statements in chronological order: the chambermaid finding him, Sergeant Papa confirming the finding, me arriving to reconfirm andtell Papa, to get his finger out and into a telephone dial.

When I'd finished, I asked Lazaros: 'Was it cancer?'

He thought for a moment before answering. His shirt was clean now, but his long face still looked weary. 'Yes. The patho-logist's preliminary report says it was well advanced.'

'So now we know.'

'Yes. Read the statement over, please, and sign if it is correct.'

Mitzi got back from wherever as I was reading, and Lazaros called her in. She was smartly but quietly dressed in a mid-length charcoal grey skirt, short-sleeved white blouse and what looked like a small antique gold coin on a chain around her neck. She gave me a polite, pale smile as we passed in the doorway.

Ken was leaning on the counter outside; Lazaros hadn't wanted anything formal from him. 'Half past eleven. When's it respectable to start drinking in this town?'

'When the cops are out of the bar. It's an old Cypriot custom.'

'I was thinking more of strolling round to the Ledra.'

'Well, unless you do it for the exercise, stop thinking. We're busted after last night. We can't pay for what we drink so we'll have to drink it here.'

Kapotas came out of the office in time to get the tail-end of that, and glared at me. 'It is all being charged in the end! '

'Sooner or later it's going to get cheaper to pay me and let me fly home.'

He waved a piece of paper. 'I can do nothing until Harborne, Gough tell me… And what about the Professor? Will his daughter be able to pay? All that champagne and caviar! '

'Delicious it was, too,' I said, just to cheer him up. Then, to Ken: 'How was the Professor fixed, moneywise?'

He shrugged. 'Middling well, I'd guess. He didn't talk about it, but I'd say he was used to living well.'

'He'd had a year without income.'

True, true…'

A woman came up to the desk and said in an American accent: 'Good morning. Is this where Professor Bruno Spohr was staying?"