The Package Included Murder (3 page)

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.

‘You and I didn't get separated, dear,' said Miss Jones fondly. ‘I hung onto the belt of your raincoat. My word, it would take more than the might of the Moscovy rush hour to part us!'

‘Poor old Penny Clough-Cooper wasn't so lucky,' grunted the Hon. Con and decided that bicycling on her back was more trouble than it was worth. She came up for air. ‘By the time she got down on the platform, she said she couldn't see hide or hair of any of us. Couldn't see much of those famous chunks of marble they're so blooming proud of, either,' added the Hon. Con with a snigger. ‘Packed like sardines in a tin, was how she expressed it. Deep in the bowels of the earth and surrounded by a mob of screaming peasants. And she was in much the same boat as us, Bones. No idea where the flipping heck she was going. You would think' – the Hon. Con interrupted her second-hand story to voice a complaint that many a tourist in the Soviet Union had voiced before her – ‘you would think they'd use the same blooming alphabet as us, wouldn't you?'

‘They're a very difficult people,' sighed Miss Jones. ‘Everybody says so. Well, Miss Clough-Cooper reached the platform, dear. Then what happened?'

‘She stood there, surrounded by the plebs, until a train came roaring in. Everybody surged forward, like they do, but Penny Clough-Cooper felt something more. Somebody was deliberately shoving her, hand in the small of her back, as hard as they could towards the edge of the platform. Gruesome, eh? If the poor lass hadn't grabbed hold of a nearby soldier and hung on for dear life, she'd have been forced right in the path of the incoming train. Makes the blood run cold to think of it.'

Miss Jones busied herself opening the writing pad and taking the blue plastic top off her ball point pen. ‘Clung onto a
soldier
, did you say, dear? Fancy!'

The Hon. Con scowled. ‘You've got a mind like a cesspool, Bones!' She climbed back into her own bed. ‘Anyhow, are you ready to take a few notes?'

Miss Jones held her writing pad aloft.

‘Right! Well, I propose to work on a simple process of elimination,' announced the Hon. Con grandly. ‘Don't doubt but that'll drop the murderer into our laps as easy as shelling peas. Now, we can forget this suffocation lark tonight because any one of our group could have done that. But the two previous attempts – well, they're a horse of a different colour because we split up on both occasions.