The Package Included Murder Read online

  The hotel director resolutely put these quibbles right out of his mind and reached for the telephone. Provided he could raise the night operator, they were home and dry!

  Chapter Two

  ‘What happens, huh?’ Ludmilla Stepanovna who, in spite of a certain florid charm, looked as though she could spit nails, was a great one for asking questions. She was notably less able, though, when it came to listening to the answers but she recognised that this was no time to change one’s spots. She made a quick head count. Thirteen! That meant – slava borgu! – that nobody had escaped. She looked round the room. No signs of drinking or gambling. They must be having a protest meeting. Of all the cheek! The sooner Ludmilla Stepanovna put a stop to that kind of subversive nonsense, the better!

  Now, what was all this they were babbling about? Nightmare? Nightmare? What in the name of all the Supreme Soviet was a nightmare? Ludmilla Stepanovna scowled. Even the best linguists have their off days and for the moment she couldn’t for the life of her remember what a nightmare was. Not that she was going to let a little thing like that throw her.

  ‘To your beds!’ she barked and then, recollecting that she was addressing her country’s honoured and paying guests, added in a slightly modified tone, ‘ Tomorrow is a hard day.’

  The windows stopped rattling.

  ‘Er – yes,’ said Desmond Withenshaw, avoiding everybody’s eye. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s anything else we can do here, is there?’ He pushed his wife ahead of him. ‘Well,’ – he smiled ingratiatingly at Ludmilla Stepanovna – ‘ spakoyni nochi!’

  If he had addressed her in Swahili she couldn’t have displayed less comprehension, and Desmond Withenshaw took his departure in an embarrassed silence. The other Albatrossers didn’t linger. They trooped out of Penelope Clough-Cooper’s bedroom and tried to look as though the word ‘police’ had never quivered on anybody’s lip. Only the Hon. Con stood her ground.

  Ludmilla Stepanovna glanced at the distressed woman on the bed and summed up the situation in one shrewd, experienced and probably actionable sniff. She also curled her lip.

  It was lucky that these subtleties went clean over the top of the Hon. Con’s eton-cropped head. ‘Think I’ll just hang on for a couple of secs,’ she explained blandly. ‘Miss Clough-Cooper’s nerves are shot to pieces, don’t you know? I’ll stay and do a bit of the old hand holding.’

  Ludmilla Stepanovna nodded all too understandingly. The one in the bed was quite pretty, she supposed, but far too thin for her taste. Anyhow – Ludmilla Stepanovna stiffened her back-bone – this was no time for dalliance. She had bigger fish to fry and – chestnoye slovo! – those uncultured hotel imbeciles were going to rue the day they were born. By the time Ludmilla Stepanovna had finished with them they’d think twice before rousting a full colonel in the Secret Police out of her bed in the small hours of the morning for nothing.

  She opened the door. ‘ I wish you a good night!’ she proclaimed formally before closing the door with a bang behind her on a widely grinning Hon. Con and a somewhat apprehensive Penelope Clough-Cooper.

  Down the corridor in the double room which for reasons of economy she shared with the Hon. Con, Miss Jones struggled to stay awake. On the face of it she shouldn’t have had much difficulty, motivated as she was not only by jealousy and loyalty but by abject terror as well. Miss Jones had not one carefree moment since she had set foot in the Soviet Union. The Hon. Con might laugh (indeed, the Hon. Con had laughed) but Miss Jones stuck to her guns. Nobody was safe in that dreadful country and, as a clergyman’s daughter, Miss Jones was doubly at risk. Everybody knew what the communists had done to the Church since the Revolution and it was not the kind of record that permitted an unmarried lady of nervous disposition to rest easy in her bed at nights.

  In these circumstances and taking one thing with another, Miss Jones should have had no trouble in tossing and turning until she was satisfied that the Hon. Con was safely tucked up in the other twin bed. The flesh, however, is weak and the flesh of reluctant tourists is perhaps weaker than most. After a mere two and a half days of relentless sight-seeing, Miss Jones was frankly worn out. Mentally, physically and emotionally. She fought a gallant rearguard action but gradually sleep overcame her. She’d just, she told herself, rest her eyes for a couple of minutes and …

  Russian plumbing is pretty noisy at the best of times.

  The Hon. Con emerged from the bathroom and gave a startled Miss Jones a friendly nod. ‘That ball-cock thing’s gone for a Burton again,’ she announced. ‘Hope I didn’t wake, you Bones!’

  Miss Jones gradually relaxed her grip on her heart. No doubt the beating would steady down to something approaching normal. Eventually. ‘What time is it, dear?’

  The Hon. Con consulted Big Ben – her jocular and not entirely inappropriate nickname for her wristwatch. ‘Twenty-five past three.’

  Miss Jones stifled her groan. ‘ Have you been with Miss Clough-Cooper all this time, dear?’

  The Hon. Con stripped off her dressing-gown and stood revealed in all the glory of blue-striped, army surplus pyjamas. She did a couple of perfunctionary physical jerks and then dived into bed. ‘Had to get all the gen, old fruit. And Penny had quite a tale to tell!’

  ‘Miss Clough-Cooper struck me as a rather excitable young woman,’ observed Miss jones sourly, noting the familiarity of that ‘Penny’ but forbearing to comment on it. She plumped her pillows up with some vigour.

  ‘Can you blame her?’ asked the Hon. Con reasonably. ‘ I had the dickens of a time gaining her confidence, I can tell you. Had to tell her all about my experience in the investigating of murders. Must say, she seemed quite impressed.’ The Hon. Con smirked a sort of deprecating smirk. ‘Said she hadn’t realised I was a kind of unofficial adviser to our local CID.’

  ‘You’re not, dear!’ Miss Jones’s affection for the Hon. Con was not allowed to blind her entirely to the latter’s faults.

  ‘Near as damn it!’ protested the Hon. Con. ‘Is it my fault that the police force is so hide-bound and pig-headed? And I did solve two murders, Bones! Even you’ve got to admit that.’

  Miss Jones wasn’t, actually, prepared to admit anything of the sort, which was a wee bit naughty of her as the Hon. Con’s claim was not without some justification. Instead, she tried to change the subject slightly. ‘ Why don’t you just concentrate on writing your book, dear?’

  ‘Book?’ The Hon. Con looked genuinely bewildered. ‘What book?’

  Miss Jones could have willingly shaken her until the teeth rattled in her head. ‘The book you were going to write about life and society behind the Iron Curtain, dear,’ she said through tightening jaws. ‘That’s why we came to Russia in the first place. After you’d decided to become a writer and when you’d reached the conclusion that novels weren’t your cup of tea. Don’t you remember, dear, how you said that you couldn’t write a white-hot expose of the Soviet system unless you’d seen for yourself how they mismanaged things? Your point was that …’

  ‘All right, Bones, all right! No need to go on all night about it!’ The Hon. Con sat hugging her knees while she thought up some face-saving way out of this one. ‘Being an author’s all right,’ she said at last, ‘but crime’s my real métier.’ She made the whole thing sound rather pathetic.

  Miss Jones sighed and reflected that knowing a problem didn’t solve it. And the Honourable Constance Morrison-Burke certainly had problems.

  The Hon. Con had been born not only into the purple but into considerable wealth as well. It would be naive to claim that these two blessings had ruined her life though they were certainly far from having enhanced it. The Hon. Con was a positive powerhouse of energy, inventiveness and intelligence and, if she could have found an outlet for these qualities, she would have been an asset in any society. If she had married, for example, some of the verve and dash might have been soaked up in bossing a husband and kids around. If she had been an impoverished nobody, she could have worked off some of the surplus by carving out a career for herself. But, what do you do when you’re an unplucked rose and already have an annual income many a county borough council would envy?

  Not that the Hon. Con took all this lying down. On the contrary, she tackled her problems with such enthusiasm and violence that the pieces haven’t yet been put together. Plunging into voluntary work, the Hon. Con joined all the right societies and wrecked them in days rather than weeks. Looking for a hobby, she became a member of clubs which had almost immediately sunk without trace and with all hands. Unfortunately, Totterbridge, where she lived, was only a small provincial town and its resources were limited. In a distressingly short space of time the Hon. Con had gone through the lot and there was no cultural, educational, recreational, sporting or charitable organisation which wasn’t left licking its wounds. The Hon. Con, on the other hand, hadn’t changed at all and was still frantically searching for something worthwhile to do. It was during this quest – and really quite fortuitously – that the Hon. Con had found herself involved, on two separate occasions, in the investigation of a murder. The police hadn’t liked what they referred to as the Hon. Con’s unwarranted interference, but she didn’t let little things like that stand in her way. She had learned in the hard school of personal experience that hardly anybody accepted her cooperation except under duress and the realisation that it was her vocation in life to be a private detective lent power to her elbow. A neo-Lord Peter Wimsey – that’s really how the Hon. Con saw herself. An aristocrat of the deductive process, wealthy, courageous, intelligent and completely unhindered by all those mundane considerations which prevent the rest of us from living out our fantasies.

  There was one snag in this scheme which will not have escaped the discerning reader. Small country towns (even including the outlying
villages) don’t have all that many murders. Almost before she knew what had happened, the Hon. Con found herself back with her perennial problem of under-employment and after her last murder case (for the solution of which she received not one jot of credit from the local police) she was forced to turn back to sport again and for a time had tried to organise a ladies’ rugby football league. She had not succeeded and from sport she finally descended to rock bottom and announced her decision to become a writer.

  With this sort of background, it was fairly obvious that the Hon. Con wasn’t going to let Penelope Clough-Cooper slip through her fingers.

  ‘Can’t just pass by on the other side, Bones,’ she said in a quasi-religious appeal deliberately calculated to wring Miss Jones’s tender withers. ‘That girl’s in deadly danger.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘I made her tell me all about these two previous attempts on her life.’ The Hon. Con’s eyes sparkled. ‘Jolly fascinating!’

  Miss Jones sighed and wrapped her mohair bed jacket tightly round her shoulders. ‘Are you sure it’s not all her imagination, dear?’

  It was the opening the Hon. Con had been angling for. ‘ Well, now, it just might be, Bones,’ she lied easily. ‘Listen, I’ll tell you just what she told me and see what you think, eh?’

  Miss Jones acknowledged that it was a fair cop with a martyred smile.

  The Hon. Con came and sat on the foot of Miss Jones’s bed. She had already searched the room for hidden microphones without success but she didn’t believe in taking needless risks. ‘Both the earlier attempts,’ she began, ‘took place in Moscow. The first one was the very day after our arrival and it happened in that GUM department store place. Remember GUM, Bones?’

  ‘Of course I do, dear! It was that huge place on the Red Square opposite the Kremlin. Like a bazaar. Oh, it was horrible! All those dreadful crowds, pushing and shouting. It wasn’t a bit like Harrod’s.’

  ‘Penny Clough-Cooper claims that somebody tried to shove her over the railings on the first floor. Funny way to try and bump somebody off, don’t you think? Well, what with all those milling crowds and everything, she naturally didn’t see who it was. Just felt somebody trying to push her over. She struggled a bit, seemingly, and whoever it was sort of got the wind up and cleared off. Anyhow, there didn’t seem to be anybody looking guilty when she finally managed to turn round. Well, she got out of the place as soon as she could and, when she’d cooled down a bit, she began to think that her imagination was running away with her. Basically she’s a deuced level-headed lass, you know.’

  In spite of several good resolutions to the contrary, Miss Jones found herself getting involved. ‘But not everybody in our holiday group went to the GUM stores, did they, dear? It was after we came out of Lenin’s mausoleum. Now, somebody – Mr Beamish, was it? – said he wanted to go and see the History Museum and …’

  ‘All right, all right!’ interupted the Hon. Con rudely. ‘Already worked that out for myself, old girl – thank you very much! Still,’ – the Hon. Con didn’t overlook the chance to improve the shining hour – ‘glad to have you on my side, eh? Now, if you really want to lend a helping paw, how about taking down a few notes for me?’

  ‘Oh, Constance dear, must I?’ Miss Jones shied fretfully at the thought of moving out of her warm and comfortable bed.

  The Hon. Con placed one foot on the floor. ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ she said, taking care not to move too swiftly. ‘Just tell me where I can find a pencil and a bit of paper and I’ll manage for myself.’

  Miss Jones was naturally across the room and opening a suitcase before the Hon. Con had finished speaking. The thought of having all her careful packing tossed to the four quarters of the globe lent wings to Miss Jones’s feet. ‘Go on with your story, dear!’ she called back across her shoulder.

  The Hon. Con sank back contentedly, confident that the day had not yet dawned when she wasn’t at least a couple of jumps ahead of poor old Bones. ‘The next attempt on Penny Clough-Cooper’s life took place yesterday.’

  ‘Our second day in Moscow?’ Miss Jones looked up. She had been carefully removing a number of packages from the suitcase and laying them equally carefully on a chair. Every package was neatly wrapped either in tissue paper or in a transparent plastic bag. ‘Fancy!’

  ‘Our second day in Moscow,’ agreed the Hon. Con. ‘Though, if you remember, we spent most of our time out at that flipping old monastery place.’

  ‘Zagorsk!’ sighed Miss Jones whose mind, being totally uncluttered with the problems of social survey authorship, was free to retain things like the names of what they’d seen. ‘The Trinity-Sergius Monastery!’ She sank back on her heels, still lost in wonder. ‘ Wasn’t it simply marvellous?’

  The Hon. Con couldn’t see anything marvellous about a collection of mouldy old churches but she wasn’t going to be outdone by Miss Jones in aesthetic appreciation. ‘Smashing!’ she said. ‘ However, it was when we got back to Moscow that the trouble started.’

  ‘Oh, you mean that argument at the railway station, dear?’ Miss Jones stared in bemusement at an oddly shaped bundle. What on earth …? Her face cleared. Spare bedsocks! Of course! ‘When the guide told us we’d got to find our own way back to the hotel by underground? I must say, I thought it was a bit of a cheek but I didn’t think there was any call for Mrs Beamish to fly off the handle like that. After all, the underground system is supposed to be one of the sights of Moscow.’

  ‘Hm, she did get a bit airiated, didn’t she?’ The Hon. Con had a quiet snigger to herself as she recalled Mrs Beamish’s outburst. ‘Mind you, Bones, we are supposed to be on a conducted tour. I mean, you don’t expect to be abandoned in the middle of a hostile city while the blooming guide slopes off home for an early evening, do you? And old Ma Beamish really was worn out. All she wanted was to get back to the Metropole as soon as poss and get her shoes off. That’s why she made her husband take that taxi. I don’t know why she bothered coming out here,’ the Hon. Con added righteously, ‘if she doesn’t want to see things.’

  ‘Oh, it was her husband’s idea,’ said Miss Jones, who attracted gossip like a magnet attracts iron. ‘He was very keen,’ she said. ‘Ah!’ She pounced triumphantly and seized one of the bundles. What a silly old thing she was! Fancy forgetting that she’d packed the writing pad with the box of Auld Tam’s Homemade Scotch Oat Cakes! It was a good thing that her head was fastened on! Now – a pencil! Oh, yes – in her handbag, of course! She began to replace the things she’d taken out of the suitcase. ‘ Miss Clough-Cooper didn’t return by taxi though, did she, dear?’

  ‘She jolly well didn’t!’ said the Hon. Con, waxing somewhat indignant at this slur on Penny Clough-Cooper’s character. ‘She’s like us – dead keen to see every aspect of Soviet life.’

  Or too mean to pay for a taxi, thought Miss Jones – and then blushed fiercely at her disloyalty. To cover her confusion she relocked the suitcase and scuttled back to bed. ‘Was Miss Clough-Cooper attacked on the underground, dear?’

  ‘She certainly was, Bones! Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to, doesn’t it? I mean, in England you’d expect it. Any woman who ventures onto the tube in London takes her honour in her hands, so I’m told. The whole network’s positively riddled with those disgusting men in dirty raincoats who …’ The Hon. Con remembered Miss Jones’s susceptibilities in time. ‘Well,’ she concluded lamely, ‘you’d think things’d be different in Russia.’

  ‘The underground was very crowded,’ remembered Miss Jones unhappily. She had not enjoyed her first abrasive contact with the ordinary people of the Soviet Union. Not that anybody, she acknowledged rather sadly, had actually tried to … ‘Er – what happened, dear?’

  ‘To Penny Clough-Cooper?’ The Hon. Con was doing a few push-ups to while away the time. ‘ Well, you know how we all got split up even before we’d gone through those stupid turnstiles where you have to drop your money in. It was worse than a blooming rugby scrum,’ added the Hon. Con – and she spoke as an expert.