The Package Included Murder (16 page)

This appeal to the Hon. Con's better nature fell on sharp ears. ‘Help? What do you mean – help?'

‘Let's have your decision first.'

For someone as unashamedly and blatantly inquisitive as the Hon. Con, it was Hobson's choice. ‘ Spit it out, laddie!' she urged. ‘And not to worry about hidden microphones and such like because there aren't any. I did my wall-to-wall search only this morning.

‘My uncle is a publisher.'

‘You told me that before,' interrupted the Hon. Con, just to show the young shaver that she was right on the ball. ‘You're going to work for him.'

‘That's right. It's a family business, you see. And my uncle's the one who's footing the bill for me and the mater on this trip.'

The Hon. Con nodded impatiently. ‘So you said. He must be a jolly open-handed sort of chappie,' she added enviously.

‘Oh, he's got an ulterior motive, don't you worry.' Roger Frossell smiled a cynical smile. ‘Most people of his age have.' He sighed. ‘Have you ever heard of Stepan Michailovitsch Tschitschagov?'

The Hon. Con had no doubts.

‘Really?' Roger Frossell seemed surprised. ‘Are you sure?'

‘It's not, laddie,' the Hon. Con told him, ‘the sort of name you're likely to forget.'

‘No, I suppose not. Well, you will hear it before long. Or so my uncle reckons. He says that Stepan Michailovitsch Tschitschagov will soon be as much a household word as Solzhenitsin or Pasternak.'

They were not names that were exactly common currency in the Hon. Con's household, but she didn't want to make an issue of it.

‘He's a novelist, you see,' explained Roger Frossell, correctly interpreting the blank looks he was getting. ‘Stepan Michailovitsch Tschitschagov, I mean. Brilliant, everybody says. A second Tolstoy. Of course,' – Roger Frossell got rather malicious – ‘ since all his books are written in Russian, my uncle hasn't actually read any of them. And, since they've never been published, nobody else has much either.' He broke off to explain. ‘Mr Tschitschagov is a passionate and virulent critic of the Soviet regime so, naturally, they see to it that he doesn't get much of a hearing.'

‘Fancy,' said the Hon. Con. She stared hard at the lumpy carrier bag which was now lying on the bed. ‘ So you're smuggling this chap's novels out of Russia so that your uncle can publish 'em in England?'

‘Only one novel, as far as I can see.' Roger Frossell poked the carrier bag. ‘It runs to two thousand, nine hundred and twenty seven pages. Foolscap. Single spacing. We may' – he sighed again – ‘have to cut it.'

Unlike the Hon. Con, Miss Jones had some respect for culture. ‘What's it about?' she asked politely.

The answer was brief. ‘ God knows!'

The Hon. Con had other problems on her mind. ‘This sneezy fellow of yours,' she began.

‘Tschitschagov?'

‘Won't he get it in the neck if your uncle publishes his book in England?'

‘Strung up from the nearest lamp post, I shouldn't wonder.' Roger Frossell seemed cheered by the prospect.

‘He must be a jolly brave fellow,' said the Hon. Con with grudging admiration.

‘Well, Tschitschagov isn't his real name, of course. Just a nom-de-plume. Still, it's a dicey business.'

‘Does he live here in Sukhumi?' asked Miss Jones.

‘No idea. My guess is he does.' Roger Frossell poked the carrier bag again. ‘I can't see anybody carting this lot round the countryside, can you? It weighs a bloody ton. Actually, I don't know much about anything. My uncle thought it would be safer that way. I just knew that somebody would contact me here in Sukhumi and I'd get instructions about picking up the manuscript. There was even,' he added mockingly, ‘a password.'

The Hon. Con considered she had an inalienable right to know all the details. ‘Who contacted you?'

‘One of the waitresses at dinner last night. A couple of whispered phrases with every course. She told me that this woman with her hair in a bun and carrying a carrier bag would be sitting on the seat opposite the hotel entrance at eleven o'clock this morning. When she moved off, I was to follow her. As soon as she was satisfied it was safe and we weren't being followed, she was to hand the manuscript over to me.'

‘She didn't spot us!' said the Hon. Con proudly. ‘We were following you and she didn't spot us!'

‘I just hope that's the only mistake they've made,' said Roger Frossell gloomily. ‘I'm too young to spend the next thirty years carving chess men. Of course,' – he brightened up a little – ‘I've got strict instructions from my uncle to abort the whole operation if anything goes wrong.'

‘
Abort the whole operation
?' repeated the Hon. Con, trying not to look shocked. She stared at the carrier bag. ‘How were you thinking of doing it?'

‘Doing what?'

‘Getting rid of that lot.'

Roger Frossell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Flush it down the loo, I suppose.'

The Hon. Con was an expert on Russian plumbing. ‘It'd take you a fortnight,' she said. ‘And how are you proposing to get it thought the Customs? Hide it in your luggage?'

Roger Frossell grinned sheepishly. ‘Well, not exactly.'

The Hon. Con raised her eyebrows.

‘Well, as a matter of fact, I was thinking of putting it in my mother's suitcase.' He tried to talk over the gasp of horror which came from Miss Jones. ‘She's got one of those innocent looking faces, you see. They never stop her in Customs.'

The Hon. Con excelled herself. ‘Ingrate!' she hissed.

Roger Frossell got up and walked over to the window. ‘ That book may be a work of art on a level with
Hamlet
or
War and Peace
or Dante's
Inferno
. Any sacrifice would be justified.'

The Hon. Con gave a disparaging sniff. ‘You're a young rat, that's what you are. Well, what are you going to do now?'

There was a pause before Roger Frossell, staring fixedly out of the window, emitted a vague, ‘Eh?'

‘Oh, pay attention, laddie!' expostulated the Hon. Con, marching over to join him. ‘Take the old finger out! I said …' Her voice died away. ‘Is that Penny Clough-Cooper?'

Roger Frossell pulled an astonishingly clean white handkerchief out of his hip pocket and mopped his brow. ‘She's got quite a … quite a body, hasn't she? You sort of notice it from up here.' He cleared his throat and tried to achieve a conversational tone. ‘ They must have come back from the beach.'

The Hon. Con hadn't needed to be perched some sixty feet above Penny Clough-Cooper to appreciate her assets. It seemed that, in some things, she could still give young Frossell a head start.

‘Miss Clough-Cooper?' Miss Jones lost little time in joining them at the open window. ‘ What's she doing?'

‘Sketching, I think.' Roger Frossell leaned out dangerously over the sill. ‘Mm, she seems to be doing a sort of general view of the promenade. In charcoal. Mm, not bad.' He recollected that giving the geriatrics a pat on the back was definitely not his scene. ‘If that sort of thing grabs you,' he added quickly.

Miss Jones dismissed the artistic aspects. ‘I see Miss Clough-Cooper has managed to make herself the centre of attraction … as usual. That's quite a circle of gentlemen she's collected, isn't it?'

The Hon. Con rushed to defend Miss Clough-Cooper's honour. ‘It's only those blooming Abhazians, Bones!' she protested. ‘You know what they're like.'

‘Indeed I do!' retorted Miss Jones with a shudder. ‘Quite uninhibited. I'm merely surprised at Miss Clough-Cooper encouraging them.'

‘Oh, phooey!' protested the Hon. Con. ‘They're just naturally nosey. They'd stand around watching a pot boil, if you gave 'em half a chance.'

Miss Jones had an answer for everything. ‘That simply makes Miss Clough-Cooper's behaviour all the more astonishing, dear. Somehow one would have thought she'd be more fastidious.'

The Hon. Con stared down unhappily. ‘ It's not her fault,' she insisted, oblivious of Miss Jones's tightening face. ‘Anybody with half an eye can see that they're pestering the life out of her.' The Hon. Con's distress made her reckless. ‘Think I'll nip down and give her a bit of the old moral support, eh?'

‘And she could probably do with it!' Roger Frossell chipped in with an adolescent snigger. ‘Have you noticed? She's not wearing a bra!'

Luckily for him, the Hon. Con and Miss Jones were too busy having an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation to pay much attention to what he was saying. The Hon. Con was determined to go down and rescue Penny Clough-Cooper and Miss Jones was just as determined to make the sortie as embarrassing as possible.

‘Oh, play the game, Bones!' pleaded the Hon. Con in a forlorn attempt to get Miss Jones to acknowledge the justice of her case. ‘I'm responsible for that lass's safety, you know.'

‘You may be responsible for protecting her from a murderer, dear,' Miss Jones pointed out sweetly, ‘but I doubt if anybody could protect her from her own worst instincts. If Miss Clough-Cooper doesn't care for being
devoured
by all those men and their glowing eyes, all she has to do is pack up her ridiculous sketching equipment and come indoors.'

Roger Frossell tried to sort things out in spite of the fact that he hadn't the least idea of what was really going on. ‘Oh, you don't have to worry about the Clough-Cooper wench,' he asserted with all the ripe wisdom of his tender years. ‘She's built like an athlete. She could brush off that bunch of flabby old pot bellies with one hand, if she wanted to.' He shook his head admiringly. ‘Why, she's got muscles on her like an Olympic weight-lifter! Talk about whipcord!'

The Hon. Con dragged her eyes away from the pink faced Miss Jones. ‘ Muscles like whip-cord?' she demanded in an ominously calm voice.

‘Or finely tempered steel,' agreed Roger Frossell obligingly.

The Hon. Con drew in a deep lungful of warm, magnolia scented, Sukhumi air. The picture which flashed across her mind's eye was heart-stoppingly vivid. This revolting, unlicked cub and … ‘How do you
know
?' she screamed.

And that was how young Roger Frossell returned to the Hon. Con's list of prime suspects. One could forget the penknife and the typescript of the book, but the possibility that Roger Frossell had actually handled Penny Clough-Cooper could not be overlooked.

After all these alarms and excursions, it is not surprising that the rest of the day proved to be something of an anticlimax. Lunch had, of course, been missed by a mile but the Hon. Con consoled herself by pointing out to Miss Jones that they would have all the more meal tickets to spend at dinner.

‘We'll have a real blow-out!' she promised, eyes sparkling.

Which only made it doubly disappointing when they found that they were obliged to go without their dinners as well.

‘Not
another
blooming opera!' wailed the Hon. Con when the news was broken to her. ‘Good grief, I've seen more flaming operas in the last few days than I have in the rest of my life put together.' She came to a momentous decision. ‘I'm blooming well not going!'

Miss Jones sighed. Although a keen devotee of art and culture, she wouldn't have minded being spared that evening's offering but she knew from past experience that the Hon. Con was inclined to get nasty if she thought that not all the facts had been placed before her. ‘ I'm afraid we've already paid for the tickets, dear.'

The Hon. Con feigned an ignorance which sat ill on one who didn't let a ha'penny fall unnoticed. ‘Have we? When?'

‘Back home in England, dear.' Miss Jones sighed. ‘It seemed such a good idea at the time, you remember, what with the discount and everything. I'm afraid I hadn't quite realised how many operas were involved.'

‘Not your fault, Bones,' rumbled the Hon. Con, which was generous of her as she was the one who was addicted to the economies of bulk buying.

‘Maybe we could have a sort of high tea, dear.'

‘The flipping dining room doesn't open until half past seven.'

Miss Jones took her courage in both hands. ‘I was wondering about one of the ordinary Russian restaurants, dear. I know we can't use our meal vouchers there but …

The Hon. Con knew all about ordinary Russian restaurants and the prices they charged. She ignored the suggestion. ‘We've still got some chocolate left, haven't we, Bones?'

The opera (Boris Goudonov in what seemed like ninety-two acts) was of such a nature that it left the Hon. Con feeling jolly refreshed in the intervals. It was during one of these that she found herself marching round, shoulder to shoulder, with Desmond Withenshaw in the relentless parade that took the entire audience up and down staircases, through bars, across anterooms and along corridors. Desmond Withenshaw, unbeknown to the Hon. Con, had been fortifying himself during the performance with several swigs of his duty-free whisky and had now achieved that nicely mellow condition in which everybody was a friend. He was even prepared to be reasonably polite to the Hon. Con.

‘Are you enjoying the performance, Miss Morrison-Burke?'

The Hon. Con took the precaution of crossing her fingers behind her back. ‘Super!' she declared. ‘Top hole! And you?'

‘Oh, well,' – Desmond Withenshaw grinned ruefully – ‘it's not,to be painfully honest, quite my line of country.'

The Hon. Con nodded understandingly, as well she might. ‘We can't all appreciate everything,' she observed with sickening sanctimoniousness. ‘Suppose art's more in your line, eh? Pictures and things.'

Mr Withenshaw good-humouredly agreed that was so. ‘I popped into the local art gallery this afternoon,' he said, ‘ when we got back from the beach. Quite interesting.'