Andrews shook his head. ‘It’s not encouraged, for obvious reasons. Wasn’t there any lead, from what the Russians took out of her apartment?’
‘Nothing that amounts to a bag of beans,’ dismissed Cowley. ‘You know what I can’t understand? Everyone keeps telling me that she was Mary Poppins’s doppelganger. And I don’t think Ann Harris was that at all. I think Ann Harris could have gone into business designing bedroom ceilings, from looking up at so many.’
Andrews shook his head again. ‘I still find it difficult to believe she was like that.’
Chapter Sixteen
Ralph Baxter’s office was on the same level as the ambassador’s and Cowley guessed the room had originally been virtually as big, possibly a minor reception chamber or annex. But it was partitioned now by ill-matched plasterboard into a series of smaller working areas, practical-sized suites with no wasted space. Baxter’s had a window, overlooking the ring road. The preventative glazing wasn’t as effective as in Richards’s office: the traffic noise intruded, as a low murmur. The sharply moving diplomat bounded across the room to greet Cowley. The man was in his shirt-sleeves but with the waistcoat of a charcoal-grey suit buttoned completely across a diet-hard body. He smiled openly, offered the predictable coffee, which Cowley declined, and asked what it was he could do to help, insisting if there was anything, anything at all, then he would do it. Cowley decided the man’s moustache was peculiar: it moved up and down when Baxter spoke but seemed strangely out of time with his upper lip, as if it were false and tenuously stuck on. Cowley couldn’t understand why the man wore it at all.
‘At least we’ve got the body returned. It’s already gone back,’ announced Baxter, as if declaring a personal achievement.
‘I heard it was being released,’ said Cowley. ‘I want to ask you about her. Did you know her well?’
‘As well as anyone, I suppose. A wonderful girl. Beautiful. An asset to the embassy. It’s a shocking, horrible thing to have happened.’
‘She seems to have impressed everyone the same way.’
‘There was only one way.’
Cowley felt the frustration rise and then dip, as he suppressed it. Staring directly at the diplomat, he said: ‘Why the hell was she like she was? You know what I’m saying.’
For several moments Baxter gazed blankly across the desk. ‘What in heaven’s name are you saying? I don’t understand.’
‘Not that remark? Not “Why the hell was she like she was? You know what I’m saying.”’
Baxter shook his head, bemused. ‘No!’
‘Wasn’t that what you said, maybe the very words you used, when you learned Ann Harris had been murdered?’
‘No!’
‘You absolutely positive about that? That first day here at the embassy, when Danilov came with the photographs and you met him, with Barry Andrews?’
‘That what Andrews says? He tell you that’s what I said? It’s not true.’
‘Didn’t you say it?’ Cowley sidestepped.
‘No!’
‘That’s what I hear.’
‘It’s not true, I tell you!’
‘Why? About what?’
‘Me. What I said.’
‘What do you think you said?’
‘I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters a great deal, Mr Baxter. It seems to indicate something about Ann Harris quite different from what I’m being told by everyone.’
‘It’s all a misunderstanding!’
‘Clarify it for me!’ demanded Cowley. ‘She was arrogant, wasn’t she? Thought she could do anything — behave however she liked — because of her uncle?’
‘She was strong-willed, certainly.’ Baxter fumbled his rimless glasses from his nose to polish them: it was an interrupting, delaying gesture, not a necessary one.
‘Arrogant?’ persisted Cowley, pushing the demands to a limit but believing he was guessing correctly. ‘Upset a lot of people quite a lot of the time?’
‘No!’
‘Did she upset you?’
‘No!’
‘Never?’
‘No.’
‘“Why the hell was she like she was?”’ quoted Cowley, yet again. ‘That sounds like you were exasperated. Angry. Upset, certainly.’
‘Exasperation isn’t anger,’ tried Baxter.
Cowley snatched at the doubt. ‘But you did say it!’
‘I don’t remember, precisely,’ said the diplomat, qualifying further. ‘I resent this inquisition! Won’t have it. You’ve no right.’
‘An American embassy is American territory, irrespective of the country it’s in,’ Cowley reminded him. ‘An FBI agent is empowered by federal statute of the United States of America to investigate murder within the territory and jurisdiction of America. That’s the law.’
‘I’m sorry … I didn’t mean … you confused me …’
‘Why are you confused, Mr Baxter?’
‘I want to help, really. But this is harassment. An inquisition …’
The diplomat was rocky, Cowley judged: but enough to blurt out something without thought? ‘“You know what I’m saying,”’ he quoted, relentlessly, going on like a dog picking at the last scraps on a bone. ‘What were you saying, Mr Baxter?’
‘Just that,’ said Baxter, desperately. ‘That she was arrogant. Exasperating.’
‘Sufficiently arrogant and exasperating to be murdered?’
‘No! That’s ridiculous! You’re twisting words!’
‘Were you her lover, Mr Baxter? Had you been with her that night?’
‘No! This is intolerable! I won’t be treated this way!’
‘Who was then?’ persisted Cowley. ‘I know, from the scientific examination, that no Russian was in the Pushkinskaya apartment last Tuesday.’
‘I don’t know!’ Baxter shouted so loudly that his voice cracked, causing the man more disorientation. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quieter now but still unsettled. ‘You are harassing: not giving anyone time to think.’
‘There’s nothing to think about. All I want from this enclosed, insular embassy is to know the name of Ann Harris’s lover, so that I can talk to him. Just a name. That’s all.’
‘I don’t have a name,’ said Baxter, stubbornly, face set more firmly. ‘Why has her lover necessarily got to be attached here?’
Cowley decided the man had pulled himself together; withdrawn behind the barrier of a professional diplomat. Not so rocky after alclass="underline" the annoyance now was at himself, for allowing the escape, not at the foot-shuffling evasion he believed he had been encountering. ‘So you can’t help me?’
‘I’m afraid not: not on this line of inquiry.’
‘Or won’t?’
‘That’s a contemptible question I will not answer.’
‘This isn’t going to go away, Mr Baxter. If there are embarrassments, nothing can stop them coming out.’
Baxter’s face flinched but became impassive again as he regained control. ‘I don’t choose to comment upon that remark, either.’
‘Think upon it then,’ urged Cowley. ‘If you decide there is anything you can help me with, I’d like to hear from you.’
The economic section was on the most dispiriting side of the embassy, directly fronting a shabby Moscow apartment block over a tangle of barbed-wire security and almost completely obscuring the beautifully restored town-house of Fedor Chaliapin, the opera singer rehabilitated after years of being banned as a non-person during the reign of Stalin. So depressing was the outlook — and so little of the Chaliapin mansion visible — that the windows were boarded from ceiling to floor, so that lights had to burn permanently to enable the financial staff to work.
Again the department had been formed by partitioning a huge original room into smaller units. Paul Hughes occupied the largest part of the conversion, befitting his position as controller. The designation was actually spelled out on a door inscription and again on another name-plate on a large mahogany desk. The entire area to the left of the desk was occupied by two computer terminals, with connected printers, and tape storage facilities. Directly in front were telephones on short leads to attach to the computer modems. There were two large framed photographs on the desk, one of a smiling woman holding her hair from her eyes in an obvious breeze, the other of two children, a boy and a girl, in Sunday-best clothes, posing formally. The girl was smiling but awkwardly, trying to conceal rigidly braced teeth.