But no. The political officer had been in the room barely ten seconds before he drew the consul aside and whispered furiously in his ear. The consul made his excuses and the two men withdrew to the corridor. Three minutes later they were back. The consul was formal and correct. He would, of course, have to communicate with his embassy. He was sure the Strathclyde police would do all in their power to apprehend the hooligans. Would it be possible for the body of the seaman and all his effects to depart for Leningrad on the Akademik Komarov, which was due to sail this day?
Forbes was polite but adamant. Police inquiries and efforts to arrest the muggers would continue. During that period the body would have to remain at the morgue and all the dead man’s effects would be retained under lock and key at Partick police station. The consul nodded. He, too, understood procedures. And with that, the Russians left. At ten o’clock, Carmichael entered the postmortem room, where Professor Harland was scrubbing. The chatter, as usual, was about the weather, the golf prospects, the norms of everyday life. A few feet away on a slab above the drains lay the battered and pulped body of Semyonov.
“Mind if I have a look?” asked Carmichael. The police pathologist nodded.
Carmichael spent ten minutes examining what remained of Semyonov. When he left, just as the professor was starting to cut, he went to his office at Pitt Street and made a call to Edinburgh—more precisely, to the Scottish Home and Health Department, known as the Scottish Office, at Saint Andrew’s House. There he spoke to a retired assistant commissioner who was on the staff of the Scottish Office for one reason: as liaison with MI5 in London.
At noon the phone rang in the office of C5(C) in Gordon. Bright took it, listened for a moment, and held it out to Preston. “It’s for you. They won’t talk to anyone else.”
“Who is it?”
“The Scottish Office, Edinburgh.”
Preston took the phone. “John Preston ... Yes, good morning to you. ...” He listened for several minutes, his brow furrowed. He noted the name Carmichael on a scratch pad. “Yes, I think I’d better come up. Would you tell Inspector Carmichael I’ll be on the three o’clock shuttle, and could he meet me at Glasgow Airport? Thank you.”
“Glasgow?” asked Bright. “What have they been up to?”
“Oh, some Russian seaman who took a tumble off a roof, and who may not have been all he should have been. I’ll be back tomorrow. It’s probably nothing. Still, anything to get out of the office. ...”
Chapter 14
Glasgow Airport lies eight miles southwest of the city and is linked to it by the M8 motorway. Preston’s flight landed at just after half past four, and with only hand luggage to carry he was in the concourse ten minutes later. He went to Airport Information and they paged “Mr. Carmichael.” The detective inspector from Special Branch appeared and introduced himself. Five minutes later, they were in the inspector’s car and pulling onto the motorway leading to the darkening city.
“Let’s talk as we drive,” suggested Preston. “Start from the beginning and tell me what happened.”
Carmichael was succinct and accurate. There were a lot of gaps he could not fill, but he had had time to read the statements of the two police constables, especially that of PC Craig, so he could recount most of it. Preston heard him out in silence.
“What caused you to phone the Scottish Office and ask for someone to come up from London?” he asked at length.
“I could be wrong, but there seems to me a possibility the man was not a merchant seaman,” said Carmichael.
“Go on.”
“It was something Craig said in the canteen at Division this morning,” said Carmichael. “I wasn’t there, but the remark was overheard by a CID man, who called me up. What Craig said, McBain agreed with. But neither of them mentioned it in their official statements. As you know, statements are about the facts; this was the police officers’ speculation. Still, it seemed worth checking out.”
“I’m listening.”
“They said that when they found the seaman he was huddled in the fetal position, his hands clasped around the gunnysack, which was pressed into his own belly. The phrase Craig used was that ‘he seemed to be protecting it like a baby.’ ”
Preston could see the oddity. If a man is being kicked half to death, the instinct is to roll into a ball, as Semyonov had done, but to use the hands to protect the head. Why would a man take the force of the kicks on his unprotected head in order to guard a worthless canvas bag?
“Then,” resumed Carmichael, “I began to wonder about the time and place. Seamen in the port of Glasgow go to Betty’s or the Stable Bar. This man was four miles from the docks, walking up a road toward nowhere, long after closing hours, without a bar in sight. What the hell was he doing there at that hour?”
“Good question,” said Preston. “What next?”
“At ten this morning I went to the postmortem. The body was pretty badly smashed by the fall, but the front of the face was all right except for a couple of bruises. Most of the blows from the Neds were to the back of the head and the body. I’ve seen the faces of merchant navy deckhands before. They are weather-beaten, wind-burned, brown, and lined. This man had a bland, pale face—the face of a man not accustomed to life on the foredeck.
“Then, his hands. They should have been brown on the backs, callused on the palms. They were soft and white, like those of a desk worker. Lastly, the teeth. I’d expect a deckhand out of Leningrad to have basic dentistry, the fillings of amalgam and any false teeth of steel, Russian-style. This man had gold fillings and two gold caps.”
Preston nodded approvingly. Carmichael was sharp. They had arrived in the parking lot of the hotel where Carmichael had booked Preston for the night.
“One last thing. Small, but it may mean something,” said Carmichael. “Before the postmortem the Soviet consul went to see our chief superintendent at Pitt Street. It seems he was on the verge of lodging a protest when the captain of the ship arrived with his political officer. I was with them. The political officer pulled the consul into the hall and they had a whispered conversation. When the consul returned, he was all civility and understanding. It was as if the political officer had told him something about the dead man. I got the impression they didn’t want to make any waves at all until they had checked with the embassy in London.”
“Have you told anyone in the uniformed branch that I’m coming?” asked Preston.
“Not yet,” replied Carmichael. “Do you want me to?”
Preston shook his head. “Wait till the morning. We’ll decide then. It may be nothing.”
“Anything else you want?”
“Copies of the various statements—the lot, if you can get them. And the list of the man’s effects. By the way, where are they?”
“Locked up at Partick police station. I’ll get you the copies and drop them off here later.”
General Karpov called a friend in the GRU and spun a story to the effect that one of his bagmen had brought him a couple of bottles of French brandy from Paris. He personally never touched the stuff, but he owed Pyotr Marchenko a favor. He would drop the brandy at Marchenko’s dacha during the weekend. He just needed to know there would be someone to take it in. Did the colleague have Marchenko’s country number at Peredelkino? The GRU man did indeed. He gave it to Karpov and thought no more about it.
In most of the dachas of the Soviet elite there is a housekeeper or manservant in residence during the winter months to keep the fires alight so that the owner’s weekends do not start freezing cold. It was Marchenko’s housekeeper who answered Karpov’s phone call. Yes, the general was expected the following day, Friday; he usually arrived at about six in the evening. Karpov thanked her and hung up. He decided he would dismiss his chauffeur, drive himself, and surprise the GRU general at seven o’clock.
Preston lay awake in his bed, thinking. Carmichael had brought him all the statements taken at the Western Infirmary and at Division. Like all police-recorded depositions, they were stilte
d and formal, quite unlike the way people actually narrate what they have seen and heard. The facts were there, of course, but not the impressions.
What Preston could not know, because Craig had not mentioned it and the nurse had not seen it, was that before running off down the corridor between the examination rooms, Semyonov had grabbed for the round tobacco tin. Craig had simply said the injured man “pushed past me.”
Nor was the list of personal effects—the “productions”— much more helpful. It mentioned a round tobacco tin and “contents”—which could have been two ounces of shag tobacco.
Preston ran over the possibilities in his mind. First: Semyonov was an illegal being landed in Britain. Conclusion: Very unlikely. He was on the crew list of the ship and would be conspicuous by his absence when the vessel departed for Leningrad.
All right. Second: He was to come into Glasgow with the ship, and leave with it that Thursday night. What was he doing in the small hours halfway up the Great Western Road? Making a drop or keeping a rendezvous? Good. Or even collecting a package to bring back to Leningrad? Even better. But after that, Preston’s options ran out.
If Semyonov had delivered what he had come to deliver, why had he tried to protect his gunnysack as if his life depended on it? It would have been empty of its cargo.
If he had come to pick something up, but had not yet done that, the same reasoning applied. If he had already made the pickup, why had not something of considerable interest, such as a packet of papers, been found on his person?
If what he had come to deliver or collect could be concealed about a human form, why had he brought a gunnysack at all? If there was something sewn into his anorak or pants or concealed in the heel of his shoe, why not let the Neds take the sack, which was what they were after? He could have saved himself a beating, and got to his rendezvous or back to his ship (whichever direction he was heading) with no more than a couple of bruises.
Preston threw a few more possibilities into the food-mixer. Semyonov had come as a courier for a face-to-face rendezvous with a Soviet illegal already resident in Britain. To pass a verbal message? Unlikely; there were a score of better ways of passing coded information. To receive a verbal report? Same applied. To change places with a resident illegal, to replace the man? No, the photograph in his paybook was identifiably Semyonov. If he had been changing places with an illegal, Moscow would have given him a duplicate paybook with the appropriate photograph, so the man he was replacing could go out on the Komarov as deckhand Semyonov. The second paybook would have been on his person. Unless it were sewn into the lining ... of what? The lining of his jacket? Then why take a beating to protect the sack? Would it have been concealed in the canvas base of the sack itself? Much more likely.
It all seemed to come back to that damned sack. Just before midnight, Preston called Carmichael at his home.
“Can you pick me up at eight tomorrow morning?” he asked. “I want to go to Partick and have a look at the productions.”
* * *
Over breakfast that Friday morning, Yevgeni Karpov asked his wife, Ludmilla, “Can you take the kids out to the dacha in the Volga this afternoon?”
“Of course. You’ll join us straight from the office?”
He nodded absently. “I’ll be late. I’ve got to see someone from the GRU.”
Ludmilla Karpova sighed inwardly. She knew he kept a partridge-plump little secretary in a small apartment in the Arbat district. She knew because wives will talk, and in a society as stratified as theirs, most of her friends were the wives of officers of similar rank. She also knew he did not know she knew.
She was fifty and they had been married twenty-eight years. It had been a good marriage, considering the job he did, and she had been a good wife. Like others who had married officers of the FCD, she had long since lost count of the evenings she had waited up for him while he had been buried in the cipher room of an embassy on foreign soil. She had stuck it through the endless tedium of countless diplomatic cocktail parties, although she spoke no foreign language, while her husband made the rounds, elegant, affable, fluent in English, French, and German, doing his job under embassy cover.
She had lost count of the weeks she had spent alone when the children were small and he was a junior officer, their home a tiny and cramped apartment without any daily help, and he away on a course, or an assignment, or standing in the shadows by the Berlin Wall waiting for a bagman to come home to the East.
She had known the panic and nameless fear that even the innocent feel when, at a certain foreign station, one of Karpov’s colleagues had gone over to the West, and the KR (counterintelligence) people had grilled her for hours about anything the man or his wife might have said in her hearing. She had watched in pity as the defector’s wife, a woman she had known well but now dared not approach, was escorted out to the waiting Aeroflot plane. It went with the job, Karpov had said, as he comforted her.
That had been years before. Now her Zhenia was a general; the Moscow apartment was airy and spacious; she had made the dacha lovely in the way she knew he liked, with pine and rugs, comfortable but rustic. The two boys were a credit to them; both at the university, one to be a doctor, the other a physicist. There would be no more horrid embassy apartments, and in three years he could retire with honors and a good pension. So, if he had to have a bit of skirt one evening a week, he was no different from most of his contemporaries. It was better, perhaps, this way than if he had been a drunken brute, like some, or a passed-over major going nowhere but to one of the godforsaken Asian republics to end his career. Still, she sighed inwardly.
Partick police station is not the most glamorous edifice in the fine city of Glasgow, but Carmichael and Preston were not on an architectural tour. They were interested in the “productions” from the previous night’s mugging/suicide, which had entered the station’s routine. The duty sergeant handed the desk to a constable and led them to the rear, where he unlocked the door to a room stacked with filing cabinets. With no expression of surprise, he accepted Carmichael’s card and his explanation that he and his colleague had to check the productions in order to complete their own reports, the dead man being a foreign seaman and all that. The sergeant knew about reports; he spent half his life filling them in. But he declined to leave the room while they opened the bags and looked over the contents.
Preston started with the shoes, checking for false heels, detachable soles, or cavities in the toecaps. Nothing. The socks took less time, as did the underpants. He had the back off the shattered wristwatch, but it was just a wristwatch. The trousers took longer; he felt all the seams and hems, looking for new stitching or a thickness that could not be accounted for by a double layer of the fabric. Nothing.
The turtleneck sweater the man had been wearing was easy; there were no seams and no hidden papers or hard lumps. He spent much longer on the anorak, but it yielded no fruit, either. By the time he got to the gunny-sack he was more convinced than before that if the mysterious Comrade Semyonov had had something with him, the answer lay here.
He started with the rolled-up sweater that had been in it, more for elimination purposes than anything. It was clean. Then he began on the sack itself. It took half an hour before he was satisfied that the base was just a double-stitched disk of canvas, the sides were of single canvas, and the eyelets at the top were not miniature transmitters or the drawstring a secret aerial.
That left the tobacco tin. It was of Russian origin, an ordinary screw-top tin that still smelled faintly of pungent tobacco. The cotton was cotton, and that left three metal disks: two shiny, like aluminum, and light in weight; the other dull and heavy, like lead. He sat staring at them for a while as they lay on the table; Carmichael looked at him, and the sergeant looked at the floor.
It was not what they were that puzzled him; it was what they were not. They were not anything. The aluminum disks had been above and below the heavy disk; the heavy one was two inches in diameter, and the lighter ones, three inches. He tried to
imagine what purpose they could possibly serve, in radio communications, in coding and decoding, in photography. And the answer was—none. They were just metal disks. Still, he was more than ever convinced that a man had died rather than let them fall into the hands of the Neds—who would have thrown them into the gutter, anyway—and rather than let himself be interrogated about them.
Preston rose and suggested lunch. The sergeant, who felt he had wasted a morning, put the productions back into their bags and locked them in a filing cabinet. Then he showed them out.
During lunch at the Pond Hotel—Preston had suggested they drive past the spot of the mugging—he excused himself to make a telephone call. “It may take a while,” he told Carmichael. “Have a brandy on the Sassenachs.”
Carmichael grinned. “I’ll do that, and I’ll toast Bannockburn.”
Out of sight of the dining room, Preston left the hotel and walked over to the BP filling station, where he made several small purchases from the rack of parts in the adjacent shop. Then he went back to the hotel and made his call to London. He gave his assistant, Bright, the Partick police station’s number and told him exactly when he wanted to be called back.
Half an hour later, Preston and Carmichael were back in the police station, where a plainly disgruntled sergeant led them once again to the room where the productions were stored. Preston seated himself behind the table facing the wall phone across the room. In front of him on the table he built up a rampart of clothing from the various bags. At three o’clock the phone rang; the switchboard was putting the London call on the extension. The sergeant took it.
“It’s for you, sir. London on the line,” he said to Preston.
“Would you mind taking it?” Preston asked Carmichael. “Find out if it’s urgent.”
Carmichael rose and crossed the room to where the sergeant held the phone. For a second both Scottish officers were facing the wall.
Ten minutes later Preston was finished for the last time. Carmichael drove him back to the airport.