He had expected Rawls to leave on the morning flight to Petersburg.
Why would’ he have been killed, except to rob him? the Russian had asked.
Agreed — except … why was he out there, in the icy darkbeforedawn without even overshoes and not a suspicion in his head?
Vorontsyev looked al his watch. Turned back towards the ward and Dmitri. It was time to leave. Rawls was a larger matter, like a drama seen in the shapes of clouds; it was perhaps significant, but also illusory, a trick of the mind. The drugs shipment they were expecting that night was real, part of the world of facts which was all that should interest the chief of detectives in a raw town in Siberia. He tapped on the door, then pushed it slightly ajar. Dmitri, roused from his empty contemplations, nodded, then released the expressionless hand, folding it back under the bedclothes. He stood up, picked up his fur hat, paused for a moment, then hurried to join Vorontsyev.
‘Sorry ‘
‘No problem. But it’s three already.’
‘Anything useful?’
‘On Rawls?’ Vorontsyev shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
‘Where do we go from here?’
Their footsteps hurried along the corridor, echoing ahead of them and behind, as if a platoon of soldiers were quick-marching through the Foundation Hospital.
‘Nowhere, I should think. What can we do? The guy was robbed. Everyone says so.’
‘Except you.’ Vorontsyev shrugged. He had, involuntarily and perhaps while he was unguarded, recalled an early visit to Dmitri’s house for a weekend barbecue in summer. Remembered the vivacity of both wife and daughter, their unexpected ease in front of him, the certitude of their family life. Midges had plagued the patch of garden behind Dmitri’s home on the outskirts all afternoon, but it had not seemed to matter. It had not diminished the laughter.
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what Americans think they’re doing?’
They reached the bottom of the final flight of stairs, and the foyer where the Outpatients Department had created its encampment of people with limbs in plaster or patched eyes, loiterers, children who sniffled and roared and ran around shrieking — and, as if the Soviet ethic could never be entirely expunged, lounging porters in brown overalls. But he had been informed that hospital porters throughout the world were similarly ossified.
The day, declined into late afternoon, was bruised with cloud on the horizon. Vorontsyev pushed open the fingerprinted, smudged glass doors and the cold struck against them with a promise of winter violence. Their boots crunched on the freezing snow as they crossed the car park. Dmitri’s bulk slithered on glassy ice, and Vorontsyev grabbed his arm, righting him.
The cellular telephone nagged in Vorontsyev’s pocket. He opened the mouthpiece and said: ‘Yes?’
‘The flight’s on time, sir. The weather’s OK, they should get in more or less on time.’
‘Good.’ He folded the instrument away like the empty wrapping of a toy, and thrust it into his pocket.
‘Well?’ Dmitri had forgotten his wife.
‘It’s in the air — and coming our way.’ Dmitri’s face was as excited as that of a child. He sensed the same pleasure in himself.
He was warm in the car park’s freezing air. The lock of the Car door opened easily, without his having to heat the key. They bundled themselves into the car, as if setting out for a party, and Rawls and Dmitri’s wife, Anna, had never existed.
The aircraft bringing gas workers up from Pakistan would land in a little less than six hours. They’d be at the airport to meet It, would watch the unloading and the passengers filing, ghostly, in night-glasses across the tarmac. They’d follow the bus or taxi back into town, then wait for the Pakistani called Hussain to walk into the glare of their surveillance at the block of flats. How much heroin didn’t matter, it would be something; a satisfactory consignment. It would be real, unlike the cloudy speculations that surrounded the murder of Allan Rawls.
He started the car. Dmitri, beside him, was now tense with excitement, and guilt at the opportunity to forget his wife for a few hours. The engine coughed, then became an assertive roar.
He had wandered out of some abstract drama which refused to make its meaning clear into the last act of a play that offered a genuine climax. They were going to do something, have something to show The telephone drew him slowly up from a deep, dreamless sleep.
The room pounced familiarly as he switched on the bedside lamp. Four in the morning. He could hear rain against the window.
‘Yes?’
There was a moment’s hesitation, then: ‘Do I have Mr John Lock?’
‘Yes? Is this important?’
‘I’m Lieutenant Faulkner, Mr Lock. I’m calling from Mr William Grainger’s house—’
‘Wait a minute, there. Are you police?’
‘Yes … Mr Lock. Washington PD.’ The man’s reluctance worried him. He felt stunned by a detonation he had hardly begun to suspect.
‘What kind of policeman are you?’
‘A homicide detective, Mr Lock.’
He was silent, hearing the rain against the window, the tick of the alarm clock, the breathing of the man on the other end of the line. A solitary car in the street below.
‘Mr Lock?’
‘Yes,’ he said in a stony, gruff whisper.
‘I’d like you to come out here, sir — to help us identify the ‘
‘No!’ It was not his answer to Faulkner’s request. ‘What’s happened?’
‘There have been some homicides. If you could make it now, it would help us,’
‘Bodies?’
‘Yes. There were servants, I understand?’
The ridiculous spring of hope, broken-winged, was down in an instant.
‘A butler. A housekeeper. How many bodies are there?’
‘You’ve accounted for the other two, Mr Lock.’ immediately, he felt the nausea choking his throat as his stomach churned.
‘Hold on — ‘ he blurted, then staggered across the bedroom to the bathroom.
After he had vomited, retching until his throat ached, he stared into the bathroom mirror at a stranger’s face — white, drawn, dislocated. His mind reeled as if he had been awoken from a drunken stupor. His thoughts raced with images of Beth and Billy and of the house, the gardens falling to the Great Falls, the long drive up which his headlights had climbed, Beth and Billy, Stillman the butler, and Beth and Beth …
There was no escape. He was locked in a padded room where the scream, the only activity left to the stranger’s face in the mirror, wouldn’t be heard by anyone.
Beth had been murdered Twenty minutes late, the Tupolev dropped out of the clouds and rushed towards them, Aeroflot emblazoned on its flanks like the desperate cry of a lost cause. Vorontsyev watched it inspect the runway, wobble, hurry and then settle as quickly as a migrating duck onto the strip of darkness between the lights.
He swept the glasses after it as it rushed away again, not appearing to slow until it turned like a wounded animal, slowly and clumsily. A hundred passengers crammed into it, standing room only as was still the habit of Aeroflot, especially with Iranians and Pakistanis and whoever else had been gathered up in Islamabad to fly into winter. The plane nosed back towards them, once more looking like a shark, sleek and purposeful, nosing the darkness for its appointed parking slot. Dmitri twitched and shuffled beside him. On that plane would be handheld heroin, furtively concealed, nestling in clothing or in toothpaste tubes or talc containers. Just enough to keep the streets of Novyy Urengoy supplied until the next flight, a fortnight later.