The Package Included Murder (20 page)

This sixth attempt to shove Miss Clough-Cooper out of this vale of tears came at a time when the Albatrossers' thoughts were beginning to turn towards home and when they were even less inclined than usual to tangle with the Soviet criminal police.

After the exertions of a day which had included both Lake Ritsa and Matsesta, they were grateful that no entertainment had been laid on for them in the evening – though there was an ugly rumour going round that they weren't going to be so lucky on the morrow. However, sufficient unto the day. They sat round over the dinner table and were reasonably happy until Mr Beamish started trying to be helpful. He had been doing some checking and, after a lengthy session with time-tables and itineraries, had come to the conclusion that they would only have four hours in Moscow before they flew home.

‘So what?'

Mr Beamish was sorely tempted to bridge the generation gap with his fist but he restrained himself and even managed to smile at young Mr Smith. ‘We have to change airports, you know, and, if one can judge by past experience, they'll need the whole four hours to get us from one side of the city to the other.'

‘No skin offa my nose,' said young Mr Smith. ‘We seen Moscow once, haven't we? So, what you getting your knickers in a twist for?'

Mr Beamish gritted his teeth. ‘It's simply that, if anybody has any shopping to do, they would be well advised to do it here in Sochi as I doubt if there'll be time in Moscow.'

Young Mr Smith chewed his chewing gum slowly and thoughtfully. Then, without another word, he pulled himself to his feet and slouched out of the dining room.

‘Insolent young pup!' snarled Mr Beamish. He glanced down the table to where, at the far end, young Mrs Smith was sitting. ‘I think even his wife's beginning to get fed up with him.'

The Hon. Con was intrigued. ‘ How'd you work that out?'

Mr Beamish – stubbed his cigarette out in his saucer. ‘Didn't you notice? It's the first time since we've known him that he hasn't been wrapped like a boa constrictor round that girl. It hasn't taken them long,' he added grimly, ‘to exhaust the admittedly over-rated joys of married life.'

Connubial bliss was one of the few subjects on which the Hon. Con did not rate herself an expert so she changed the subject and treated an astonished Mr Beamish to a dissertation on the difficulties of organising matches for her women's rugby football team. It was not long before the whole party decided to break it up and go to bed.

The Hon. Con pulled the top sheet straight. ‘Oh, heck,' she groaned, ‘I've forgotten to do my flipping exercises!'

Miss Jones, who found that sheer hard work kept her weight down, smiled indulgently as she picked up the Hon. Con's hacking jacket from the floor. ‘It's been a long day, dear,' she said.

‘True. But,' – the Hon. Con pummelled the well-inflated spare tyre beneath her pyjama coat – ‘ I'm beginning to lose the battle of the bulge, you know. I miss my twenty minutes a day with the old punch-bag.'

‘You'll soon get back into trim when we get home, dear.' Miss Jones buffed up the Hon. Con's brogues.

‘'Spect so!' The Hon. Con yawned loudly and luxuriously. ‘ Golly gosh, but I feel absolutely whacked!' She sank majestically beneath the sheets. ‘Mind putting that centre light out, Bones? It's shining straight in my peepers.'

Miss Jones didn't mind. What few chores she still had left to do could be accomplished perfectly well in the feeble light of the bedside lamp.

It was Miss Jones who became aware of the commotion first. She switched on her light and saw, with some resentment, that it was after four in the morning. She sat up in bed and listened. Those raised voices out in the corridor – they were English, weren't they? Miss Jones stifled an extremely mild expletive and reached for her dressing gown. This was surely where they'd come in.

Across in the other bed, the Hon. Con snorted and snuffled and thrashed around in her sleep.

Miss Jones sighed. She didn't want to wake dear Constance, who really needed all the sleep she could get, but, if she didn't … well, Constance would be very brusque at times.

Miss Jones chose the lesser of the two evils and the Hon. Con emerged from the Land of Nod with reluctance and in a filthy temper. It was some seconds before she could grasp what was going on but, when she did, her reactions were pretty much the same as Miss Jones's had been. ‘Oh, no!' she groaned. ‘Not again! I tell you, Bones,' – she allowed Miss Jones to help her on with her slippers – ‘if somebody's tried to suffocate Penny Clough-Cooper in her bed again, I'll … I'll …' The Hon. Con searched desperately for some pungent and witty conclusion to her threat but failed to find one. ‘ Oh, come on, Bones!' she concluded crossly.

By the time the Hon. Con and Miss Jones got out into the corridor, things had quietened down considerably. People were now merely screaming at each other and somebody had had the sense to fling all the windows in sight wide open. Most of the smoke had been blown away and the Russian floormaid was able to have her hysterics in comparative comfort. Or, at least, she would have been, had not a heavily built East German woman tourist started marching across to her with a determined air and a clenched fist.

The Hon. Con made her presence felt in the ensuing silence.

‘She's in our room,' Desmond Withenshaw told her, staring moodily at the black and dripping pile of bedclothes that somebody had dragged out onto the landing. ‘ Blubbing fit to bust,' he added as a disgruntled and unkind afterthought.

The Hon. Con pushed past him and surveyed the scene of the crime. The mattress was still on the bed in Miss Clough-Cooper's room. It was soaking wet and quite badly charred round the edges.

Norman Beamish, hopping unobtrusively from one bare foot to the other, put the Hon. Con in the picture. ‘As far as I can understand it, it was that Russian floormaid who first spotted something was wrong. She'd been away from her post for a couple of minutes, getting herself a cup of tea, I believe, and …'

‘Hold it!' The Hon. Con raised a hand in a gesture of which a long-serving Metropolitan policeman would not have been ashamed. ‘How do you know that? 'Bout the tea, I mean.'

‘I was one of the first on the scene,' explained Mr Beamish. ‘I haven't been sleeping too well on this trip, as Mrs Beamish will tell you. I started to get up as soon as the floormaid began screaming and shouting. I was out on the landing even before she'd got Miss Clough-Cooper's door open with her master key. I just noticed the cup of tea standing on her desk. It was still warm.'

The Hon. Con swung round as ponderously as an ocean liner changing course. There was a saucer standing on the floormaid's desk, but no cup.

‘I – er – snatched it up in an effort to help extinguish the fire,' said Mr Beamish, looking foolish. ‘ That's – er – how I knew it was still hot.'

The Hon. Con didn't suffer rivals gladly and, in her considered opinion, one detective at a time was more than enough for anybody. She began to muscle Mr Beamish back out of the act. ‘Just stick to the bare facts, will you, old chap? Now, have I got the sequence of events right – this maid woman gets the bedroom door open with her pass key or whatever and you snatch up the cup of tea. That it?' The Hon. Con's eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘Well, how did you know at that stage that there was anything on fire, eh?'

It was all good, penetrating stuff but Mr Beamish neither trembled nor grew pale. Over the years, Mrs Beamish had done a good job on him and he remained as polite and long suffering as ever. ‘I saw the smoke, Miss Morrison-Burke. It was puffing up from underneath the door. That's how the floormaid realised there was something amiss, too.'

‘Oh,' said the Hon. Con, unable to find any flaw in this logic.

‘By the time I actually reached Miss Clough-Cooper's room, the floormaid had beaten most of the flames out with the bedside rug. I must say, I thought she kept her head extraordinarily well. It's a pity she went to pieces when the emergency was over.'

‘What was on fire?'

‘The bedclothes.'

The Hon. Con blinked. ‘And Penny Clough-Cooper?'

‘She was lying unconscious in the middle of the flames.' Without thinking, Mr Beamish had assumed a matter-of-fact air which the Hon. Con was beginning to find very irritating. ‘ Then some of the others arrived and they helped with getting the last of the flames put out. Somebody very sensibly opened the windows wider and I picked Miss Clough-Cooper up and carried her outside into the corridor. Mrs Withenshaw said we couldn't just dump her there so I carried her into the Withenshaws' bedroom. Mrs Withenshaw said she would look after her.'

The Hon. Con scowled. Jealousy is not a very attractive trait. ‘Had she regained consciousness?'

‘Er-no. Not when I left.'

‘Drugged, I expect.'

‘Oh, do you think so? Well, I'm afraid I wouldn't know about that.' Mr Beamish appeared to be looking for some means of escape.

The Hon. Con caught him by the tassels of his dressing gown. ‘Hang on a sec, old cheese!' she implored. ‘Has somebody sent for the quack?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

The Hon. Con, whose volatile spirits were on the rise once more, waxed jocular. ‘The sawbones! The medicine man! The …' Norman Beamish shook his head. ‘No.'

‘No?'

‘I thought we'd all agreed that we didn't want to involve the Russian authorities in our little – er – trouble.'

‘Holy smoke!' gasped the Hon. Con with unwitting aptness. ‘But – they
are
involved!' She swept a hand round to embrace the sodden bed, the charred blankets and sheets out on the landing, the circle of interested spectators. ‘Besides, Penny Clough-Cooper obviously needs medical attention. Look, there's supposed to be a doctor in the hotel. It says so in their booklet thing. Let's …'

It was Mr Beamish's turn to raise a restraining hand. ‘I'm sure Mrs Withenshaw can cope. And the other ladies are there, too. My wife holds a certificate for home nursing, you know.'

The Hon. Con was far from satisfied. ‘ But, what about all this?' she demanded, once more encompassing the surrounding devastation. ‘You can laugh all this …'

‘
Smoking in bed
?'

The hotel staff had at last pulled their collective finger out and roused the hotel director. There had been some delay while this particular comrade had got washed and dressed, it not being the policy of Intourist to allow its employees to be seen with their hair down. The director had, of course, already been warned by his colleague at Lake Ritsa of what to expect but had foolishly thought that lightning didn't strike twice.

‘Smoking in bed?' The hotel director's vocabulary may have been limited but he looked, in his well-pressed dark suit and white shirt, absolutely impeccable. Of course, having a Lewcock brother on either side probably made him look a lot better.

‘Smoking in bed?' The hotel director's voice rose higher with each repetition.

Jim Lewcock flashed broad winks in all directions and encircled the director's shoulders with a comradely arm. ‘You've got it, sonnie boy? She woke up – see? – went for a pee and then couldn't drop off again. You know how it is. So – she fishes out the old coffin nails and ignites. Savez?'

The hotel director, fastidiously removing Jim Lewcock's arm, crinkled his forehead as he tried to follow the explanation.

Jim Lewcock's smile was wide, bland and reassuring in that special way much favoured by professional confidence tricksters. ‘Well, what happened next, mate, is anybody's guess. I reckon she just sort of dozed and let the fag end drop on the sheet.'

The director had now attracted a little circle of his staff and they gathered around him admiringly as he poked the pile of bed clothes on the landing. Inquisitive guests looked on from a greater distance. The director was thinking, mostly about his own future. He was nobody's fool and he didn't believe this smoking-in-bed story any more than Jim Lewcock did, but one had to work out all the angles. At last he made up his mind. He turned away from the burnt sheets and snapped his fingers impatiently. Underlings promptly cleared a way through the onlookers and he entered Miss Clough-Cooper's bedroom. Once more he plunged into deep and anxious thought while those Albatrossers not engaged in succouring Miss Clough-Cooper watched him with bated breath.

‘Smoking in bed!' he said for the fourth time, making it a statement now.

‘Disgusting habit,' agreed Jim Lewcock smoothly, ‘but you know what women are like. Always needing something to steady their nerves.' He dropped his voice and gave the director a nudge. ‘She's not married, you know.'

‘You were being present in the room with her?'

Jim Lewcock was delighted with the slur upon his honour and glanced round in case anybody had missed the unsolicited tribute to his virility. ‘Unfortunately, no!' he chuckled.

‘So how you know what she is doing?'

‘Eh?'

The Hon. Con always said that breeding tells. It did now. While Jim Lewcock, a working-class lout if ever there was one, was gaping like a stranded goldfish, the Hon. Con stepped forward and delivered a real whopper of a lie without turning a hair. ‘ She told us!'

The hotel director's head swung round sharply at the sound of this new voice. ‘The lady is not fainted?'

The Hon. Con had no intention of spoiling the ship for a ha'p'orth of tar. ‘She recovered consciousness for a brief moment,' she said. ‘Just long enough to tell us how the accident happened.'

The director nodded and then, careful to leave unturned no stone that might later be used to clobber him with, asked, ‘You are summoned the doctor?'

The Hon. Con realised that she was facing a worthy opponent but she flattered herself that she was more that a match for him. ‘One of our party is a doctor.' She saw the director's eyebrows go up as he remembered that the passports of all the Albatrossers were in his possession and thus fatally easy to check. Without a flicker of compunction, the Hon. Con smashed this bright idea clean out of sight. ‘Mrs Withenshaw,' she added calmly.