There was no immediate reply and Charlie thought he could almost see reflected in the transfixed eyes the slow-moving cogs in the man’s brain. Finally Stout managed, “I thought Mr. Dawkins was handling it all?”
“He isn’t,” corrected Charlie. “I am.”
“I think I should talk to Mr. Dawkins.”
“We’ll both talk to Mr. Dawkins,” insisted the exasperated Charlie. And it was still only just after ten thirty.
3
Charlie didn’t believe that rainbows always followed rain or that every cloud that brought the downpour had a silver lining, so his satisfaction at London’s insistence on unfettered, unimpeded assistance within the embassy was muted. Appealing both to Aubrey Smith and the Foreign Office had been the very last resort he’d had no alternative but to take against Dawkins’s obdurate determination to be the hands-on controller of every move Charlie made. Sure that the housing officer would have already complained as well, his demand for a liaison ruling racked up two petty but officially recorded disputes in the space of twenty-four hours and Charlie feared Smith’s irritable reaction-“What about the real problem you’re there to sort out?”-was a reaction to the internal pressure in London and not a belief that he needed a bigger boy’s hand to hold, which was the very last impression Charlie either needed or wanted. There was something else he didn’t need or want, either: the foot-aching twinge Charlie never ignored as a warning, that even at this early stage there was something he’d missed or hadn’t realized, which for once he hoped was not its usual talisman but merely the tightness of new Hush Puppies.
“Having wasted the entire morning, are we finally ready to begin?” Charlie asked the head of security.
“Sir!” replied Stout, the parade-ground loudness less belligerent than before. From a desk drawer, the man extracted a file and said, “My report, sir!”
As he accepted the dossier Charlie said, “For Christ’s sake, cut out the ‘sir’ crap, will you? What time were you told about the body?”
“Eight thirty-three exactly, as I say in my report. . ” He just stopped himself.
“I want to hear your account, as well as read it. Who told you?”
“The man in charge of the gardening detail. He called me, here in the office.”
“A Russian?”
“Yes. He told me one of his workers had found a body; that it didn’t have a face.”
“What’s the name of the man who actually found it?”
“Maksimov. Boris Maksimov.”
Charlie nodded to the telephone on Stout’s desk. “Can you arrange for me to speak to Maksimov, as well as the Russian in charge?”
“I’m afraid you can’t. Not speak to either of them, I mean.”
“What’s the problem now?” demanded Charlie, the exasperation returning.
“Neither is here, at the embassy. One of the Russians who came when I raised the alarm told me to put both of them on extended leave, to help the organized crime bureau.”
“Colonel Pavel told you to do that?”
“I don’t know his name.”
Charlie had to swallow hard before he could continue. “You’ve got their home addresses?”
“The Russian staffs are supplied by the Foreign Ministry.”
To which they were supplied by the FSB, as they had been before the renaming of the KGB and before that by the MVD-MGB and before that by the NKGB-NKVD, Charlie knew. Nothing had changed except the titles. And everyone in the West imagining that espionage had been swept away in the flood of the Cold War thaw, worried instead about Islamic terrorism. “You spoke to Maksimov?”
“Briefly. He spoke hardly any English, I speak hardly any Russian.”
Charlie knew-every intelligence professional knew-that local Russian support staff spoke more than adequate English, which was why they were there, to listen and read everything they could. “Don’t leave out a single word, tell me everything you saw and talked about and heard.”
“It really was very brief. He’d started work at eight that morning, he told me. His job was to weed the flower beds around the conference hall. He said he saw the body the moment he finished the first bed and came around the corner to continue on the next section. He thought it was someone asleep or drunk until he got close enough to see what it really was, that it was a dead man. He ran to get his supervisor. He said he hadn’t done it.”
“He said what?”
“ ‘I didn’t do it. He was like that when I found him.’ That was the last thing Maksimov said to me.”
“Who was there ahead of you at the scene?”
“Demin, the Russian team leader, and Maksimov.”
“None of your security people?”
“No.”
“Had the two Russians touched anything?”
“They told me they hadn’t; that they were too scared.”
From the hesitation before the reply, Charlie guessed Stout hadn’t asked either Russian about touching the body. “Tell me, in every detail, what you found.”
The hesitation now was for recall, and the account was punctuated by pauses when the man finally began to speak. Charlie, who was well aware of the psychological peculiarity that few witnesses to dramatic events had the same recollection, was caught by the similarity in Stout’s account to that of Paula-Jane Venables.
“Did you touch the body?” picked up Charlie.
“No!” insisted the man, at once. “I didn’t go through any of his pockets.”
“That wasn’t the question,” persisted Charlie. “Did you touch it? If the clothes were wet, it would give us an indication of how long it had been there, before or after dew might have fallen.”
“I didn’t touch it,” repeated the man. “His jacket looked as if it might be damp.”
“How much blood was there?”
“A lot, from what I could see.”
“Soaked into the ground?”
“Yes.”
Charlie thought that Stout was telling him what the man imagined he wanted to hear. “After the body was removed, the Russians-a forensic examiner-dug up the soil where what remained of the head had been, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“How big, wide as well as deep, was the hole?”
“I don’t know.” Stout frowned. “Why’s that important?”
“The size might have given an indication of how much blood there was, which in turn might have told us whether he was shot there or somewhere else. How deep it was might have suggested whether the bullet was found.”
“There was no sign of a bullet being found. It was a deep hole, maybe two foot round.”
Again what the man thought he wanted to hear, decided Charlie. “The forensic people took photographs?”
“I think so,” said Stout, immediately correcting himself. “Yes, yes, of course they did.”
“Didn’t you take photographs?”
“By then Mr. Dawkins had arrived. He told me it was a Russian investigation and that we should leave everything to them.”
Now it was Charlie who hesitated, unsure if there was anything to be gained from questioning any further. He wouldn’t know unless he tried, he reminded himself. “Tell me about nighttime security.”
“The gatehouse is staffed. Two men.”
“What about ground patrols?”
Stout shifted, uncomfortably. “No.”