The Package Included Murder (6 page)

‘What about them?'

Everybody was looking anxiously at the Hon. Con.

She took a firm grip on herself. ‘ They eat them,' she said, as clearly and calmly as she could.

Mr Withenshaw recoiled. ‘Oh, surely not!'

The Hon. Con looked around for an illustration which would clinch the argument. She pointed. ‘Then what,' she demanded, struggling to keep her gorge in its place, ‘is that photograph of a plateful of
sausages
doing there?'

The Albatrossers were back at their hotel nearly two hours early for lunch, though not many of them felt very hungry. Some of the weaker sisters had already declared that they weren't going to touch another mouthful for the rest of their holiday and the maternal Mrs Frossell was in tears.

‘I'll never eat another sausage as long as I live!' she declared, holding a lavender perfumed handkerchief to her ashen lips. ‘Never!'

Her son clutched at his head. ‘Oh,
mother
!' he groaned.

‘Them poor bloody horses!' Even young Mrs Smith had been touched by the startling gastronomic revelations. ‘Fancy breeding 'em for meat! Bloody disgusting, I call it.'

‘They milk 'em, too,' her husband pointed out, wrapping his arms affectionately round his wife's neck.

Mrs Frossell gulped. ‘And I shall drink my coffee
black
in future!'

The question of how they were to spend the rest of the morning arose and Ludmilla Stepanovna, grim-faced and washing her hands of the whole stupid business, was unhelpful. They could, she supposed scornfully, go and look at the shops.

The Hon. Con caught Miss Clough-Cooper just in time. ‘ It's an ill wind,' she observed cheerfully. ‘Now we can have our little confab, eh? Your room or mine?'

Penelope Clough-Cooper didn't put up much of a fight. Some people know when they're beaten. She did suggest that, perhaps, the Hon. Con's room might be more convenient and, when they had repaired there, settled her self rather deliberately on the stool in front of the dressing-table.

The Hon. Con sprawled blissfully across the nearer of the two beds. ‘Shoot!' she invited with a boyish grin. ‘ Tell me all about yourself! Er – live alone, do you?'

‘No, I live with my father, actually. He's a doctor. Well, an orthopaedic surgeon, really.'

‘You housekeep for him, eh?' The Hon. Con beamed encouragingly, approving as she did of womanly women.

‘Well, yes, I suppose so. But I have a job of my own as well. Part-time. Secretarial work. In a solicitor's office. Bensons & Jowett. Er – do you know Wattington at all?'

‘Been there,' said the Hon. Con, ‘once or twice. Nice sort of little town. It's not too far from us, you know. I live in Totterbridge.'

‘Oh, yes.' Miss Clough-Cooper smiled politely. ‘That's quite a nice little town, too. I was just thinking that, if you knew Wattington, you'd probably know Bensons & Jowett. They're the leading solicitors in the town. They have their offices in that lovely old Regency house at the top of Market Street.'

‘You don't say.' The Hon. Con's love of architecture was not very highly developed. ‘Any romantic involvements?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Well, are you engaged to be married or' – the Hon. Con looked stern – ‘mixed up with a married man or anything like that?'

‘No.'

The Hon. Con relaxed. ‘You mean that nobody's any reason to be jealous of you?'

Miss Clough-Cooper shook her head. ‘Not as far as I know.'

The Hon. Con sat up and scratched her scalp so vigorously that her hair stood out like a golliwog's. ‘Must be money, then,' she grunted.

‘Money?'

For one fleeting moment the Hon. Con wondered if she could have been making a mistake about Penny Clough-Cooper. The girl looked bright enough but she did seem more than a trifle slow on the uptake. ‘The motive for your murder,' she explained briefly. ‘If it isn't some form of emotional entanglement, it must be money. What else is there?'

Miss Clough-Cooper didn't know. ‘But, it can't be money.' She managed a rather disgruntled laugh. ‘I mean, I haven't got any. Well, not much. We're quite comfortably off, I suppose, but there's no question of any sort of fortune.'

‘You've got expectations, though?'

‘Well,' – Miss Clough-Cooper was obviously finding this line of investigation rather distasteful – ‘only from my father. I imagine I shall inherit whatever he leaves. I'm an only child.'

‘And who stands to benefit when you pass through the pearly gates?'

Miss Clough-Cooper frowned. ‘I don't exactly know,' she admitted reluctantly. ‘There isn't anybody, I suppose. I haven't any near relations at all.'

‘Made your will?'

‘No, not yet.'

The Hon. Con rolled over onto her back. ‘I do hope,' she said grumpily, ‘ it isn't going to be one of
those
cases!'

Miss Clough-Cooper smiled vaguely.

‘What about the rest of the party?'

‘The rest of the party?'

The Hon. Con propped herself up on one elbow. Talk about Little Sir Echo! ‘Look, ducks,' she said, muffling her impatience, ‘you were the one who said your attacker was a member of our group. Remember? Mind you, considering that attempts were made on your life both here in Alma Ata and in Moscow, I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you – as a working hypothesis, of course. So, let's have a look at our dear chums, eh? Did you know any of 'em back home in the UK?'

‘Not really. The Smiths come from Wattington, I understand, though of course' – Miss Clough-Cooper smiled at her reflection in the looking-glass and fluffed her hair up – ‘ I don't know them socially. Wattington is quite a big town.'

‘Interesting!' mused the Hon. Con, endeavouring to look enigmatic. ‘The Smiths, eh? Well, there may be a connection.' She flexed her shoulders. ‘ I shall have to do some digging. Anybody else?'

Miss Clough-Cooper shook her head. ‘Well, I did meet Mr Withenshaw once. It must have been – oh – about three years ago. I went on one of these weekend courses for amateur painters. You know the sort of thing. This one was held in a converted castle and it rained the whole time. Mr Withenshaw was one of the instructors. He didn't actually teach me, of course. He was running the life classes and I was studying flower painting.'

‘Withenshaw, eh?' The significance of the life classes was not lost upon the Hon. Con. At an earlier stage in her career she had been deeply involved in a campaign to achieve sexual equality for artist's models and there was little about la vie Boheme with which she was not pretty familiar. ‘Yes, I can see him as a potential murderer. We'll have to see how he stands up to a touch of the old third degree.' She managed to crack her knuckles in a rather sickening way.

Miss Clough-Cooper glanced up in alarm. ‘Good heavens, you can't accuse Mr Withenshaw! I mean, we just happened to be on this weekend course together, that's all. As a matter of fact I don't even think I spoke to him – and he certainly didn't know me when we met at the airport.'

‘You mentioned your previous meeting to him?'

‘Why shouldn't I? I recognised him – well, he is rather striking looking with that touch of grey hair at the temples – but he'd obviously no idea who on earth I was. I felt a complete fool. However, when I explained where it was I thought we'd met, he sort of smiled and pretended that he remembered.'

There was a tap on the door and, in response to the Hon. Con's bellow, Miss Jones came in.

‘I'm so sorry to interrupt you, dear, but it's nearly time for luncheon and Ludmilla What's-her-name was most insistent that we shouldn't be late for our afternoon outing. We're going to see the computer at the university.'

Miss Clough-Cooper must have had a secret passion for Russian computers because she got to her feet with alacrity. ‘ How marvellous!' she gushed. ‘Well, we certainly mustn't be late for that!' Miss Jones stepped smartly to one side so as not to be trampled in the rush. ‘I'll see you both in the dining room … I expect.'

Miss Jones shut the door on the departing guest with the merest touch of smugness. ‘And how are your investigations going, dear?'

The Hon. Con rolled off the bed and did a few quick chest expanding exercises. ‘Not bad,' she opined, puffing a little. ‘Making progress.'

‘That's nice, dear.'

‘Enjoy your shopping expedition, old fruit?'

‘It was hardly a shopping expedition, dear. We were only looking.' Miss Jones got a clean handkerchief out of the special sachet in which she kept them and tucked it neatly into the breast pocket of the Hon. Con's hacking jacket. ‘I walked round with the Beamishes. They seem quite a nice couple, really, though she is a wee bit over-bearing at times. They had quite an argument while we were looking at some gramophone records.'

‘You don't say.' The Hon. Con was examining her tongue in the dressing-table mirror. You can't hope to be a successful detective if your health's bad and, though she was feeling perfectly chirpy, the Hon. Con wasn't going to take any chances. She decided to take a dose of that stomach powder stuff before she went to bed. Probably nothing but powdered chalk, of course, but old Bones swore by it. She let her tongue slide back into her mouth. ‘ What about?'

Miss Jones was used to the Hon. Con's conversational style. ‘About which opera it is we're going to see tonight, dear. Mr Beamish said it was called ‘‘Ivan Susanin'' and Mrs Beamish said it was called ‘‘A Life for the Tsar''. They were almost shouting at each other at one time.'

‘Funny thing to argue about.' The Hon. Con toddled off to the bathroom. Being tone deaf she didn't reckon on working herself up into a muck sweat over some crummy old Russian opera but she thought it was only fair to take a polite interest in Miss Jones's little adventure. ‘Who's right, then?'

Miss Jones giggled. ‘They both are, dear! They finished up by dragging that poor Ludmilla girl out of the kitchen, right in the middle of her lunch. You should have seen her face! However, she sorted things out.'

The Hon. Con paused in the doorway. ‘And?'

‘It's the same opera, dear. By a man called Glinka. It seems they called it ‘‘A Life for the Tsar''
before
the Revolution and ‘‘Ivan Susanin''
after
the Revolution. Isn't that interesting?'

‘Very.' The Hon. Con disappeared into the bathroom, secure in the knowledge that she was going to be able to catch up on last night's lost sleep. She just hoped that blooming music wasn't going to be too loud.

Tashkent! A name to conjure with! The hearts of even the more prosaic members of the group began to beat a little faster and the extremely unsocial hour of their departure from Alma Ata provoked only a muted storm of protest. The Hon. Con had fully intended to get on with her detecting during the short flight, but six o'clock in the morning was one of those bleak facts of life which even took the bounce out of her.

She clamped the safety belt across her stomach and sank back in her seat. ‘Wake me up when we get there!' she grunted, secure in the knowledge that a cowardy-custard like old Bones would remain on the qui vive until they were all back on terra firma again.

Miss Jones dutifully took time off from her anxieties to admire dear Constance's quite incredible coolness. To be able to drop off to sleep in an aeroplane – and a Russian aeroplane at that! Ah, that's what breeding did for you!

When they landed at Tashkent Airport, the Albatrossers found themselves slipping easily into a routine with which they were already becoming familiar. As they trooped off the plane, they were speedily and skilfully separated from the rest of the passengers and conducted to a waiting room situated, in this case, on the first floor of the main airport buildings. There was hardly any delay at all before somebody found the key and got the room unlocked. The Albatrossers were herded inside.

‘Wait here, please!'

The supercilious young woman who had escorted them across the tarmac disappeared before the questions and objections could start and was never seen again. Thus baulked of their legitimate prey, the Albatrossers gloomily spread themselves and their hand luggage over the acres and acres of space which had been placed at their disposal.

‘They've probably not finished wiring our rooms for sound!'

Tony Lewcock's feeble attempt at a joke fell on stony ground.

The chairs, the Albatrossers soon discovered, were modern and uncomfortable. Whenever you stretched your legs, you knocked against occasional tables groaning under their burden of unread and unreadable literature in several languages. At the far end of the waiting room a souvenir counter temptingly displayed its colourful wares and goodies. It was shut, of course.

Bored and sleepy, the Albatrossers settled down to wait. And wait they did. For an hour and twenty minutes. The only thing of note that happened during the whole of this time was the clanking arrival of a cleaning operative. Politically reliable and looking neither to her right nor to her left, she began slowly to mop the floor.

Eventually, however, their Intourist guide turned up. He was a young, studious looking man who probably wouldn't have known what an apology was if one had jumped up and bitten him. He informed them that his name was Oleg and, under his somewhat Olympian guidance, the party collected their heavy luggage from the pile in the corridor and took their places in the bus which was to convey them to their hotel.

Oleg clearly intended to start as he meant to go on. Norman Beamish lit yet another cigarette. Oleg tapped him on the shoulder and pointed officiously at a notice written in Russian. ‘No smoking!' he said.

We all have our breaking point and Norman Beamish had been on edge all morning. He pushed Oleg's hand away. ‘Oh, drop dead!'