Judas Country

'Yes. She's talking to Inspector Lazarosnow. He seems quite a sharp boy.' I hoped Ken was getting the hint and Nina didn't know I was giving it; he could be called up at any moment. Anyway, he just nodded and hunched his elbows on the bar, brooding. After a while more, Nina gave me a cool look and walked back to the table, her little bottom twitching left and right under the short black skirt, in real professional style. I tapped my glass against my teeth and sighed.

'When you last saw the Prof,' I said, 'what was he wearing?'

Ken didn't look up. 'Dressing-gown, same as when you were there.'

'Would he normally sit around all evening in one?'

This time he did look up – with a rather clogged contempt. 'Sure, he did all the time, in Beit Oren. Except dining-in nights, of course, when we wore white tie and tails.'

All right, so it hadn't been the brightest question of the evening. But then Ken put his face back down into his cup and muttered: 'If you mean was he the sort who liked comfort and class when he could get it? – then yes. I could see him wearing that until he changed for dinner, anyhow.'

'He didn't have dinner. He'd arranged to eat in his room anyway, to stay secret.' I thought about it for a moment. 'He took it off – the dressing-gown, I mean – to shoot himself. I can understand that, in a weird way; it was a nice gown. But then he put a shirt on instead; that, I don't quite get.'

He looked up again. 'Are you looking for rational behaviour in a suicide? They do the wildest things. Women put on their old wedding dresses; men build fancy machines to hang themselves with. I heard of an armourer sergeant once who spentmonths altering a dummy Vickers to shoot himself with and all the time he had a dozen real ones sitting around. Or are you getting the idea that perhaps it wasn't suicide after all? '

'Why should anybody make him change into a shirt before they shot him? But now listen, bright-eyes: when you get upstairsdon't go stuffing that copper up with murder theories. He's doubtful enough already; if he gets convinced it's murder, we'll be stuck on this bloody island until the clock strikes thirteen.'

He cocked his head, then nodded. 'What I'll tell him, you could write on a flea's jockstrap.'

'And don't get him niggled, either, or he may stick his nose into the Queen Air just looking for some technicality to catch us on.'

'Christ, yes.' He'd obviously forgotten about my cargo problems. 'Okay, Roy, I'll treat him like a police officer and a gentleman. And I suppose we'll have a nice cosy chat about my last two years. Bastards. Oh well…' He looked at his watch. 'And twenty-four hours ago I was still safely tucked in the coop. Now…'

'You'll go on dreaming you're still there for a few days yet.'

'Yes, I did already. Your subconscious is a bit like a bloody met office, isn't it? – Just won't look outside to see what's really going on.'

'More coffee?' But just then a uniformed cop escorted Mitzi back in and looked blankly around the rest of us. 'Mister… mister Caviti?'

Ken got up. 'Ready and willing.'

'Please to come…'

Mitzi had sat down at Nina's table. I went over, didn't sit. 'Just want to say how very sorry I am, Miss Spohr. If there's anything I can do…'

She looked pale but dry-eyed; enclosed and introspective rather than openly sorrowing. She didn't look at me. 'Yes, please. If you can move my room.'

I nodded. 'Yes, of course.' The cops would be trampling around up there for probably hours yet. I went across to Kapotas and the Sergeant to arrange it, and after a bit of discussion we shifted her one down and a bit forward to 227, so she wouldn't be under the old rooms.

Then Kapotas asked: 'And what shall I tell Harborne, Gough, in London?'

'Whatever the police decide. What else can you say? People die in hotels all the time; it's nothing new.'

'But I must tell them what he was.'

'A Professor – whatever that means in Austria – and a mediaeval archaeologist.'

'But you knew him.' Slightly accusing.

'Only met him this afternoon. It was Ken who knew him; they met in jail in…' From Sergeant Papa's expression I realised my mistake; I'd never mentioned that angle to Kapotas before, and he hadn't the Sergeant's eye for spotting these things.

'In jail?' he hissed. 'Both of them?' He stared around wildly. 'My God, now I'm running a brotheland a prisoner's aid society! Why don't we set up roulette wheels in the kitchen and sell marijuana at the desk? Or is that something else you forgot to tell me about?' And he glared at the Sergeant.

Papa stiffened and said with dignity: 'There are no drugs in this hotel while I am hall porter.'

That's a small consolation, then,' Kapotas said bitterly, then looked at me. 'And I supposeyou wouldn't be…' Then he stopped because he'd remembered just what we'd discovered Ihad been doing. 'Oh God, I need a drink. And I don't care if it's after dinner or before breakfast! ' And he headed for the bar.

Papa said calmly: 'He has not got the nerves to be a hotel manager.'

'He never expected to be one. And there must be hotels where it's easier.'

'Not much. Even the best hotels cannot really pick their guests; they can only keep out some who they know to cause trouble.'

'I suppose so…' After that, we just sat in weary silence until a uniformed cop brought Ken back in and beckoned me up. Ken's expression was just on the contemptuous side of blank-ness, but I wasn't allowed to have a word with him.

9

After anhour and a half of Lazaros's interrogations, the atmosphere in 105 would have stopped flying at any airport in the world. The Inspector himself was still sitting on the same place on the bed, only now with two ashtrays crammed full of butts, some still smouldering. If he lost his job with CID, with his sense of smell he'd no chance of remustering as a police dog.

'Sit down, please, Captain.'

'Just mister.' I sat carefully on a sagging woven-cane chair, and he turned the pages of his notebook, sprinkling ash around an already grey patch on the counterpane.

'Did you know the Professor had been in jail?'

'I'd been told.'

'You did not tell me.'

'From me it would have been just hearsay. I knew somebody else would tell you."

He looked up Wearily. 'So you know something about the law and the courts?"

'A pilot my age is bound to. The air's got more laws than aeroplanes in it, these days.'

He seemed to accept that. 'Did you see the gun?'

I nodded.

'You have a good stomach. It made my sergeant sick.' It had taken a little finding: it had been in the bath itself, just about below the head.

'Same answer: a pilot my age has seen some messy accidents.'

He bought that, too. 'Gunshot suicide… it is always too easy to arrange. And with the gun in all that blood, the fingerprints are gone. Why would it be in the bath, almost behind him?'

I pointed my right hand at my teeth. 'He sticks the gun in his mouth. The recoil blows it out again. If it stays in his hand for a moment, then it could swing his whole arm in an arc, right round to the side.' I swung my arm and clouted my knuckles on the next chair.'Buggerii. So it hits the edge of the bath, the gunfalls inside, slides down to where it was. His arm flops back by his side. If I'd been faking a suicide, I'd've put the gun in a more obvious place. Anyway, can't you test his hand for powder marks?'

'It is being done.' He groped around on the bed and found a crumpled pack of cigarettes, then lit one from the stub of his last and found a parking place for that in one of the ashtrays. 'But whose gun could it be?'

'Doesn't the licence tell you?'