The Package Included Murder (10 page)

‘Here, steady on, Bones!' exclaimed the Hon. Con miserably. ‘You've no cause to go round uttering calumnies like that.'

‘Oh, haven't I?' Miss Jones emerged from the bathroom. ‘And what about her smoking?'

‘Smoking?' echoed the Hon. Con, only too painfully aware that she was on a hiding to nothing.

‘Oh, and while I think about it, that toilet needs looking at, dear. It's just like all the others we've had – leaking. Do you think they're made that way especially for foreign tourists?'

The Hon. Con screwed her face up. ‘Never mind the blooming toilet, Bones! What about the
smoking
?'

‘The …? Oh, well, only that I've heard her say two or three times that she doesn't.'

‘Well?'

‘Well, dear,' – Miss Jones smoothed the Hon. Con's best cavalry twill slacks over a hanger – ‘ when I popped in to give her her passport back in Tashkent, her room smelt very strongly of stale tobacco smoke. Somebody had quite definitely been smoking in there.'

‘Could have been the chamber maid.'

‘Even Russian chamber maids don't go around puffing out smoke like factory chimneys, dear. Besides, the room hadn't been done.'

The Hon. Con forced herself to think, even though she felt more in need of the skills of a defending counsel than those of a detective. ‘What about the ashtrays?'

Miss Jones hesitated. ‘The ashtrays?'

The Hon. Con pressed home her advantage. ‘ If Penny Clough-Cooper had been smoking all that much,' she pointed out triumphantly, ‘she must have used an ashtray. Blimey, the way you tell it, every blooming ashtray in the room must have been full to overflowing – and the wastepaper basket, too, I shouldn't wonder.'

Miss Jones went on brushing the collar of the Hon. Con's best hacking jacket, but you could see her heart wasn't in it. ‘I don't really remember noticing the ashtrays, dear.'

‘Exactly!' The Hon. Con gripped the lapels of her second best hacking jacket like a lawyer clasping his gown and rested her case.

Miss Jones might, somehow, have lost round one, but she had more shots in her locker. ‘ But I did notice, dear, that she'd bought her carton of duty-free cigarettes because I saw them lying in her suitcase. I must say that that strikes me as a rather funny thing for a supposedly non-smoker to do.'

‘Maybe she bought 'em for tips or little presents,' said the Hon. Con, scraping the bottom of the barrel.

‘Oh, anything's possible, dear,' agreed Miss Jones with infuriating restraint.

‘But, why should she lie about smoking? Crumbs, it's not a crime to smoke, is it?'

Miss Jones had an answer for that one. ‘ Men don't like it, dear,' she said in a suitably hushed voice. ‘ They can – er – taste it. I've heard before that it's not a good thing for ladies to advertise that they are addicted to nicotine.'

The Hon. Con was obliged to bow to Miss Jones's judgement in these matters. ‘It all sounds pretty feeble to me,' she grumbled.

‘Well, what about her father?'

‘
Her father
?'

‘Well,' – Miss Jones was ashamed of herself but she couldn't stop – ‘all this rot about him being a Harley Street specialist or whatever it is.'

‘He's an orthopaedic surgeon,' said the Hon. Con.

‘Precisely! Just having an ordinary doctor for a father isn't good enough for her.'

The Hon. Con stared at Miss Jones in dismay. ‘Draw it mild, old fruit!' she begged.

Miss Jones tossed her head. ‘Well, you can think what you like, dear, but I'll bet you anything that her father is a perfectly everyday, run-of-the-mill general practitioner like everybody else. And now,' – Miss Jones looked at her watch – ‘we've got five minutes before we're due to set off on our tour of the town. Don't you think you'd better pay a visit to the bathroom first, dear?'

Bukhara is one of those jewel towns where exotic Eastern wonders catch the eye on every side. It is a magical treasure trove of ancient mosques and minarets, of mausoleums and medersas. There were citadels and summer palaces and narrow, labyrinthine streets lined with blind, white-washed walls. Even the hard-bitten Albatrossers felt their hearts touched by the wonder of it all.

They had an excellent guide in the person of a girl art student called Masha. She was something of a slave-driver but she knew her stuff and even managed to impart some of her own enthusiasm. As the afternoon drew on, though, even the keenest sightseers showed signs of flagging. The town was hot and dusty, the pavements were hard. And, after a bit, one old mosque begins to look remarkably like another. Still, it wasn't all dreary old culture and even the Hon. Con managed to forget her poor old feet for a couple of minutes when they came to the Kalian minaret.

‘In the bad old days,' said Masha, smiling prettily and using the phrase as a synonym for ‘before the Glorious Russian Revolution', ‘prisoners of the Emir were executed by being taken to the top of the tower and thrown down from it. Their bodies landed here on the pavement where we stand.'

Miss Jones wasn't the only one to take an involuntary step backwards.

Later on, the Citadel – once the town residence of the Emirs of Bukhara – proved good for a few laughs, too. As the Albatrossers panted up to this fortress set high on a rock, Masha cheerfully regaled them with tales of stinking prisons and unspeakable tortures. More than one stiff-necked, foolhardy Victorian Englishman, it appeared, had met his death in the Emir's dungeons and Masha didn't resist the temptation to imply that it was mostly their own fault. It was when she led them through into the small museum that she really got the bit between her teeth. The last Emir's sexual proclivities (little boys) were prudishly revealed and then Masha paused dramatically before a glass case containing a long, narrow-bladed knife with a crudely serrated edge. ‘What,' she demanded, ‘do you imagine that was used for?'

Jim Lewcock had long ago appointed himself tour comedian. He raised his hand like a child in the classroom. ‘Cutting bread, miss?'

Masha stared at him for a second or two in complete disbelief and then turned to the others who were behaving decently and disclaiming all knowledge. ‘It is the knife of the executioner!' she announced with gusto. ‘I will explain how it was used.'

‘Must you?' murmured Mrs Beamish, getting out her handkerchief in readiness.

‘The condemned criminal,' said Masha, who had clearly learned this bit off by heart as her party piece, ‘was forced to kneel on the ground and his head was pulled back with the hair. The point of this knife was then inserted into the side of his neck with the jagged edge pointing towards the back. Do you understand?'

‘Only too well!' moaned an ashen-faced Mrs Beamish. She shook her husband by the sleeve. ‘Why don't you stop her, Norman?'

It would have taken more than Norman Beamish to stop Masha now. ‘ The knife,' she went on, ‘having been thrust right through the criminal's neck, was then twisted round until the jagged edge was pointing to the front … so!' She mimed most realistically what she meant. ‘Then,' – the miming continued – ‘ the throat was cut from the
middle
to the
front
! Uncultured, huh?'

Even the Hon. Con thought this was going a bit too far but she wasn't given the chance to make a protest. Masha was off again, describing more and more horrors and it seemed ages before they found themselves outside again, back on the tourist trail.

It was a weary and foot-sore bunch that Masha eventually marched back to the hotel as the early tropical night fell with startling speed. Miss Jones and the Hon. Con were stickily arm-in-arm, each affectionately insisting that she had only assumed this posture in order to support and assist the other. Everybody thought that they were tireder and hotter than everybody else but, such is the resilience of the human spirit and frame, that the whole caboodle of them was raring to be on the go again even before they'd finished dinner.

‘It's not having any opera,' decided Mr Withenshaw, draining his wine glass and refusing coffee. ‘It leaves the evening strangely empty.'

Mrs Frossell thought this was a most profound analysis of their situation. ‘And, of course,' she added fatuously, ‘we can't watch the television here, can we?'

Her son went bright red. ‘Don't be so bourgeois,
mother
!' he begged in an agonising mutter.

‘Why,' asked Mr Beamish, looking almost boyish in his enthusiasm, ‘don't we all go out for a walk? Just a gentle stroll round the town and maybe a cup of tea in one of those tea houses – chaynayas, they call them, don't they?'

‘Something like that, old chap!' said Desmond Withenshaw patronisingly.

‘Would it be safe, though?' queried Miss Jones nervously. ‘Some of the native men we saw today …'

Mr Beamish was now thoroughly sold on the idea. ‘It's only eight o'clock,' he pointed out. ‘And, if we all stick together …' He pushed his chair back. ‘Oh, come on, everybody! Let's make a night of it!'

In the end, nearly everybody did rally round and, feeling very daring without a guide to look after them, they ventured out into the warm, scented darkness. The only exceptions were the Smiths who announced, with perfectly straight faces, that they were feeling rather tired and thought they'd sooner go to bed. The guffaws of the Lewcock brothers could have been (and probably were) heard in Riga.

Once they were outside, the Albatrossers soon found their eyes growing used to the dark. They formed themselves into a sort of untidy crocodile and, with Norman Beamish and his lady wife at their head, set off.

‘Isn't the sky a simply
divine
colour!'

Since the remark emanated from Penelope Clough-Cooper, the Hon. Con experienced an instant conversion to the appreciation of natural beauty. ‘Scrumptious!' she agreed eagerly. ‘And look at all those smashing little stars twinkling away up there!' She tried to sidle across to join Miss Clough-Cooper but, somehow, Miss Jones always seemed to be in the way. Still, on such a glorious night as this minor disappointments were soon forgotten.

Desmond Withenshaw called from somewhere at the rear. ‘Anybody know where we are?' He seemed temporarily to have chummed up with the Frossel boy, while his wife was walking with the lad's mother.

From time to time turbanned figures in cotton kaftans slipped past on soft, sandalled feet, disappearing into the darkness almost before they had been seen. It seemed strange to find this Eastern mysteriousness in the Soviet Union.

‘We're in that big, open square – you know!' shouted Mr Beamish, obviously confident that he'd got the situation under control. ‘ Look, there's the Citadel up there! You can just see that throne thing that old devil of an Emir used to sit on. Er,' – he was simply brimming over with bright ideas that evening – ‘ how about a short rest, everybody? There are some benches we could sit on.'

They sat, chatting desultorily and enjoying the fresh air, for five minutes or so. On two separate occasions little dark-eyed, importunate boys came rushing up, begging for cigarettes. Jim Lewcock good-naturedly doled out a ration of half an English cigarette per child and accompanied it with a lecture on how smoking stunted your growth. Across the square, at a safer distance, older girls – teenagers – stared in shy fascination and giggled melodiously amongst themselves.

It was all very pleasant and relaxed.

Afterwards, of course, nobody could quite remember who had made the first move but, at a given moment, almost as though responding to a signal, they all got up and began drifting aimlessly back towards their hotel and bed. The Hon. Con was deep in conversation with Mrs Frossell, discussing of all things education in the Soviet Union. It was not a topic that either of them knew much about but a recent television programme proved of great help and they both had a great deal of fun blinding each other with science.

Mr Beamish had drawn Miss Jones in the general post and he was finding the going hard. Miss Jones commented timidly on the apparent scarcity of doggies in Bukhara. ‘ Pet doggies, I mean, of course.'

‘Of course!' Mr Beamish searched around for something else to say, preferably something less banal, and eventually proffered the opinion that the shortage might somehow be due to the heat. No sooner was the word out than he deeply regretted it. Would Miss Jones think he was making some kind of indelicate … Oh, hell! He tried again. ‘Er – has anybody seen Miss Clough-Cooper, by the way?'

‘Not to worry!' The Hon. Con's voice boomed comfortingly out of the darkness. ‘ She's up in front with Mrs Withenshaw. I'm keeping an eye on her.'

‘With Mrs Withenshaw?' Mr Beamish shoved Miss Jones out of the way. ‘Are you sure? No, no,' – he shook his head angrily – ‘that's my wife!' She's the one walking with Mrs Withenshaw.'

‘Your wife?' The Hon. Con squinted through the gloom. ‘Are you sure? For one who frequently claimed to have the eyesight of an eagle, it was jolly galling to …

‘I can recognise my own wife when I see her!' snapped Mr Beamish.

Miss Jones saw which way the wind was blowing and rushed in to pour oil on the troubled water. ‘Actually, they both look extraordinarily similar – from a distance. I've mistaken one for the other several times.' She twittered on. ‘ It's the dark hair, you know, and the way they wear it. And their stature. Then, of course, they are both of them wearing pink cardigans tonight … Such a sweetly pretty pink, too! A mistake in identity is all too …'

‘Oh, stop blethering, Bones!' The Hon. Con was busy counting heads as the other Albatrossers, attracted by the noise of battle, came rushing back to see what was going on. The Hon. Con counted again. It was still one short and nobody remembered seeing Miss Clough-Cooper for simply ages.

‘I'm sure she was with us in the square by the Citadel,' said Zoë Withenshaw, producing one of those totally useless remarks that people are prone to in a crisis.