The Package Included Murder (19 page)

Miss Jones skirted round a direct answer. ‘ Even you haven't been able to find any real evidence, have you, dear?'

The Hon. Con was beginning to look as though she'd had all the stuffing knocked out of her. ‘My investigation's been a pretty scratch affair,' she admitted. ‘Perforce. But, drat it all, if she is making it all up, what's her motive? Oh, I know you think she just wants to be the centre of attention, Bones, but she's a jolly attractive girl. She doesn't need to go to these lengths, surely.' The Hon. Con cast a lack-lustre eye over the greenish hemispheres of the ball cock. ‘Do you think she's a nutter, Bones?'

Miss Jones, in the interests of veracity, was obliged to admit that she didn't. On the contrary, she considered that Miss Clough-Cooper was an exceptionally shrewd and calculating female.

‘Somebody
could
be after her,' the Hon. Con said, rather pathetically. ‘There's absolutely nothing to prove that she's lying.'

‘There's nothing to prove anything, is there, dear?'

The Hon. Con tried one improbable piece of plumbing against another. It didn't fit. ‘We've only got what she says,' she agreed. ‘Mind you,' she added stoutly, ‘I believe her!'

Miss Jones should have been a fisherman. ‘Of course, dear,' she murmured gently.

‘The thing is,' said the Hon. Con peering doubtfully into the cistern, ‘that all this detection and bodyguard lark is really rather putting the clappers on my holiday.'

Miss Jones suppressed the joyous leaping of her heart. ‘You do need your rest, dear.'

The Hon. Con straightened up. ‘I was thinking of that book I was going to write!' she pointed out sharply. ‘ Do you realise that I haven't done half the sociological research I wanted to?'

‘I know things have been very difficult for you, dear,' cooed Miss Jones, managing to be both admiring and tactful. She reached across the bath for the Hon. Con's face-cloth and, without really knowing what she was doing, refolded it neatly.

During the long, weary drive down from Lake Ritsa, the Hon. Con had been doing a bit of thinking. The final conclusion had been reached with astonishing ease but the Hon. Con had had a long struggle with the problem of how to break the news to Miss Jones without a total loss of face. Now, in the bathroom at the Intourist Hotel in Sochi, the Hon. Con realised that, somehow or another, she'd found the way.

She opened her eyes very wide. ‘I've got responsibilities to other people besides blooming old Penny Clough-Cooper.'

Miss Jones thought she knew what was expected of her. ‘ Your reading public, dear?'

‘Them, too,' said the Hon. Con, displaying a rather distressing tendency to whine. ‘Drat it all, I am supposed to be here to enjoy myself.'

Miss Jones nodded sympathetically.

‘Do you know, Bones,' the Hon. Con went on, realising at last how hard done by she was, ‘ I don't feel that I've had any blooming holiday at all. I seem to have spent the entire time sorting Penny Clough-Cooper out in one way or another. Well, enough's enough!'

Miss Jones agreed that it was.

‘I mean, I'm not one to pass by on the other side and, if I were sure the girl really was in danger, wild horses wouldn't hold me but …' The Hon. Con stuck her head back inside the cistern as the moment of unconditional surrender drew nigh. ‘Well, the way things are, I've decided that I'm just not going to bother my head about her any more. It's not' – an indignant Hon. Con glared up at Miss Jones – ‘as though she's the least bit grateful.'

Miss Jones knew that one ‘I-told-you-so' from her and the Hon. Con would dive right back into the murky depths of private detection out of sheer bloody-mindedness, so she tactfully changed the subject. She looked at her watch. ‘ I think it's time we were getting ready for our tour of the town, dear. The guide did say she hoped we wouldn't keep her waiting.'

The Hon. Con was quite willing to forget about Penny Clough-Cooper for a while. She gazed, somewhat bemusedly, at all the bits and pieces spread out on the bathroom floor. ‘Better leave this lot for the moment,' she grunted. ‘P'raps I'll have another go at it when we get back.'

Miss Jones's face fell. ‘ That's going to be a . . that's going to be rather inconvenient, isn't it, dear?'

The Hon. Con happened to be feeling quite comfortable. ‘Oh, come on, Bones,' she exhorted her less fortunate pal, ‘ don't make such a fuss. You'll just have to improvise.'

‘Improvise?' echoed Miss Jones, going quite white.

The Hon. Con chuckled, her natural good humour quite restored. ‘That's right, old bean! It'll teach you to use your initiative, won't it?'

Sochi could (and often has) be called the Blackpool of the Black Sea but the comparison is not a good one. In spite of all its efforts in the direction of vulgar commercialism, Sochi still has a very long way to go. The largest seaside resort in the Soviet Union, Greater Sochi stretches along the coast for nearly twenty miles and contains well over sixty sanatoria and rest homes in which the Soviet workers can recover their health and strength. Other entertainment is a mite thin on the ground.

The Albatrossers were duly trundled round the sights in the bus which had been placed at their disposal. The Dentrarium Botanical Gardens (Mrs Frossell: ‘I always say you can't have too many trees.'), the Ostrovsky Museum (the Hon. Con: ‘Who the heck's Ostrovsky?'), the railway station (Jim Lewcock: ‘Anybody see a bloody bog anywhere?') and then the marble-encrusted halls of the harbour terminal building. It was left to Tony Lewcock to voice the general impression: ‘What a flaming dump!'

Maria, the Intourist guide and amateur weight-lifter, was weak on the finer nuances of the English language but strong on group psychology. She sensed that her audience was less than bowled over by the charm of her native town. These accursed foreigners were always carping about something! Maria took a firmer grip on her microphone as Jim Lewcock, preceded by the pungent aroma of the last of his duty-free whisky, leaned towards her across three rows of seats.

‘What is there to do here, love?'

‘Greater Sochi,' said Maria, sticking valiantly to her script, ‘can accommodate approximately one million tourists. In two years, we shall …'

‘I know, love! You've told us all that rubbish already. Look, what is there to do of a night, eh?'

Maria was lost. Shakespeare, Galsworthy and the Collected Prefaces of George Bernard Shaw had not prepared her for the Lewcock version of the vernacular.

Jim Lewcock spoke loudly and clearly. ‘What do you do in your free time, girlie?'

Maria got it at last. ‘Here there is no prostitution!' she said firmly. ‘Unlike countries inhabited by slaves of capitalist system.' She nodded imperiously at the driver and the bus moved off.

Meanwhile, the Hon. Con had been staring fixedly at the nape of Miss Clough-Cooper's neck. Miss Clough-Cooper was sitting all by herself in one of the front seats, although up till now the Albatrossers had been quite good about not leaving her out in the cold. The incident at Lake Ritsa had, however, changed all that, and the more Penny Clough-Cooper denied that anybody had tried to kill her, the more convinced her companions became that she was lying. And it had, at long last, really come home to them that they were the ones under suspicion, a distateful fact that, hitherto, they had known but not really appreciated. The way things were going now, Miss Clough-Cooper would probably have done better to contract leprosy.

The Hon. Con, never keen on running with the pack, did feel a few twinges of conscience, but managed to stifle them by remembering that nobody had been made more of a mug by Penny Clough-Cooper than she had. Not only had the dratted girl completely ruined the Hon. Con's well-deserved and extremely expensive holiday, but she'd probably deprived suffering humanity of a jolly valuable book of personal observation and pregnant comment. The Hon. Con's eyes all but filled with tears as she thought of what the reading public had lost, but sterner emotions took over as she thought about what a fool the Clough-Cooper wench had made of her. The Hon. Con took her career as a private detective rather seriously, and she liked other people to do the same.

‘It doesn't look very hygienic, does it, dear?'

The Hon. Con turned and blinked at Miss Jones. ‘What doesn't?'

‘The beach, dear!'

The bus was driving slowly along the waterfront and Maria loudly and conscientiously pointed out the sights. It was the tiny public beach which had caught Miss Jones's somewhat critical eye. It was so crowded with people that the sand was completely invisible.

‘Lucky we've got a private beach at the hotel,' growled the Hon. Con. ‘I wouldn't fancy fighting it out for lebensraum with that mob.'

Miss Jones smiled sweetly. ‘Rank has its privileges as well as its duties, dear.' This statement was intended – and taken – as a delicate compliment to the Hon. Con and her elevated social standing.

Maria ended her conducted tour of Sochi with what she liked to think was something of a grande finale: the visit to Matsesta. It was a fairly long drive from Sochi and the Albatrossers had recovered their curiosity by the time the coach swung round and stopped in front of a large, white building built in the style of several Greek temples. There was some agitated rustling of guide books as the more erudite members of the group tried to find out what they were looking at. Jim Lewcock had been fidgetting about for some minutes. As soon as the bus came to a halt, he got to his feet and headed for the door. Maria shoved him back into his seat. She'd got her little speech all off pat in no less than six foreign languages and nobody – but, nobody! – was going to skip it.

Desmond Withenshaw stared out of the window at the dozens of coaches and thousands of people all milling around. ‘I thought we'd already seen the bus station,' he complained to his wife.

Maria seized her microphone. ‘We are arrived at Matsesta!' she bellowed. ‘The building before you is the Matsesta bath and water house, whither people come eagerly from all over the Soviet Union.'

‘Er–why?' asked Mrs Frossell, taking her courage in both hands.

‘For the curing,' said Maria. ‘ Matsesta is famous for its spa waters. In Cherkess, Matsesta means ‘‘fire-water''. For citizens of the Soviet Union, all curings is free.' Her audience stirred uneasily as they sensed that they were about to be fed some more blooming pro-Soviet propaganda, but Maria was on the health kick this time. ‘Waters of Matsesta may be consumed internally or externally. Externally they cure rheumatism, arthritis, diseases of the skin, diseases of the female gender, arterio-scelerosis, nervous complaints, conditions of the heart …'

The Hon. Con, strong as an ox and hardy as a mountain lion, stopped listening. She found other people's ailments profoundly boring. She stared out at the crowds of the halt and the lame as they proceeded slowly and painfully in one direction or another. Oh, well – there was nothing so queer as folk. There was a gentle touch on her arm.

‘We're going, dear!'

The Hon. Con and Miss Jones tagged along behind the rest of the Albatrossers as they followed Maria up the flight of shallow steps. The halt and the lame shuffled considerately out of the way.

The noise, once they were inside the building, was deafening. Every sound bounced and rebounced off the marble walls.

‘What's going on?' demanded the Hon. Con, shoving a bunch of elderly patients aside as she hurried to keep up with the rest of the party.

Miss Jones, not only British but proud of it, had already taken her place in the queue. She made room for the Hon. Con. ‘All these poor, sick people have come for treatment, dear,' she explained patiently. ‘ Baths and things. Like Buxton or Bath, you know,' she added with little conviction. She had once accompanied her dear father to Malvern and it hadn't looked a bit like this. Still, Miss Jones wasn't the one to burden the Hon. Con with her doubts.

The Hon. Con fended off an ashen-faced woman who was trying to jump the queue. ‘Do you reckon this water stuff does you any good, Bones?' she asked, attempting to peer over the heads of the people in front.

‘I don't imagine it would do one any harm, dear,' responded Miss Jones tactfully, but the Hon. Con was no longer listening.

She had reached the head of the queue now and was staring down in amazement into a marble-lined pit. In the middle of the pit stood a huge natural boulder plentifully supplied with taps. From these taps poured never-ending streams of faintly steaming water. Around the central boulder, a dozen women in white head scarves and overalls were hard at work, rinsing glasses, filling them from the taps and then handing them up to the people waiting in the queue. Everything was damp and the marble slabs and floor were running with water.

Under Maria's stern gaze, none of the Albatrossers felt like refusing the evil smelling stuff though there was a fair amount of spluttering and gagging as it went down. The Hon. Con, surprisingly, came up smiling.

‘Must be good stuff,' she said, trying to unscrew her mouth, ‘if it tastes as nasty as that.' She handed her glass back to the waiting attendant.

Beside her, Mrs Beamish also seemed to be having trouble with a shrinking palate. Eventually she managed a sour little smile. ‘I suppose we should really congratulate ourselves,' she said.

‘Huh?'

Mrs Beamish skilfully directed the Hon. Con's attention to Penelope Clough-Cooper who was waiting patiently in the shade of a potted palm until everybody was ready to leave. ‘That Miss Clough-Cooper didn't get herself poisoned, of course!' she laughed. ‘I must say, I was quite expecting it. Weren't you?'

It is to be hoped that Ella Beamish felt simply awful when, a mere twelve hours later, Penny Clough-Cooper came within an inch of being burned alive in her bed.