The Package Included Murder (9 page)

Jim Lewcock never questioned where the Hon. Con had got this snippet of information from. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I can't help that, love. We still don't know her.'

‘When did you decide to come on this particular package holiday?'

‘About a bloody week ago.' Tony Lewcock's voice was almost as surly as his face. ‘We was all set to go to your Costa Brava but there was some sort of bloody mix-up over the bookings. By the time they'd got things sorted out, this trip was all they could give us that fitted. Believe you me, missus, this isn't
our
idea of your dolche vita!'

The Hon. Con scratched her head. It certainly didn't sound as though these two yobboes had come to the Soviet Union with the deliberate intention of murdering Penny Clough-Cooper. Still, the attacks might have been triggered off by some accidental and unexpected encounter though the Hon. Con couldn't quite see Penny Clough-Cooper as a grisly spectre from somebody's past.

‘Miss Clough-Cooper works for a solicitor in Wattington, you know. Either of you ever had any dealings with him?'

‘No!' The answer came sharply and independently from either side.

The Hon. Con was floundering. ‘You sure?' she asked again.

‘Jesus!' Tony Lewcock got his cigarettes out and lit one defiantly. It was only when he'd finished coughing his guts up that he continued. ‘Our trade union sees to all that soft of thing for us, lady. The Southern Lathe Operators Brotherhood & Society. They've got their solicitor and everything. He's a right sharp laddie up in London – so why should we start messing around on our own, hiring some bloody country yokel in the next bloody town?'

Trade union, eh? Well, the Hon. Con was not surprised. She'd always thought that the Lewcock brothers looked like a couple of anarchists. She remembered the passports again. ‘Ah, yes,' she said, ‘I meant to ask you. What exactly is it that you do for a living?'

‘I'm off sick at the moment,' said Tony.

‘We own a garage,' said Jim.

Somebody far more dense than the Hon. Con would have noticed that the Lewcock brothers immediately regretted their simultaneous and disparate answers. There was a moment or two of confusion and the Hon. Con felt instinctively that there was a guilty secret lurking around somewhere.

‘I thought you were supposed to work in a factory,' she said.

The Lewcock brothers did it again.

‘That's right!' said one.

‘We used to,' said the other.

The Hon. Con grinned. Better and better!

Jim Lewcock tried to sort things out. ‘I was just doing a bit of swanking,' he explained lamely. ‘About the garage, I mean.'

The Hon. Con didn't yield an inch. ‘Oh, yes?'

‘It's only a matter of time,' said Tony Lewcock, plunging disastrously to the rescue.

‘What is?'

‘Well …' Tony Lewcock gazed hopelessly out of the window and sighed. ‘It's a long story, miss.'

The Hon. Con consulted Big Ben. ‘It had better not be, laddie!' Her jocular manner struck a gruesome note. ‘We're due to land in this Bukhara place in ten minutes and I want this whole business settled before then.'

The Lewcock brothers nervously lit more cigarettes and, after an abortive attempt to swear the Hon. Con to eternal secrecy, came out with their pathetic little story.

‘We did work in a factory,' began Jim Lewcock. ‘Bromberg & Sons. Making specialised components for the mining industry. As jobs go, it wasn't bad and the money was fairish. With overtime. But – well – you know how it is. I suppose everybody wants to be their own master when you get right down to it.'

The Hon. Con nodded her agreement. ‘That's what's wrong with the world these days,' she pointed out sourly. ‘Too many chiefs and not enough indians.' As one of nature's chiefs, she spoke with feeling.

‘We tried to save,' explained Tony Lewcock, examining the tip of his cigarette with apparent interest, ‘ but it was bloody uphill work. It's one thing earning good money at the bench, but you need bloody thousands to put down on the smallest sort of business. Before long you find yourself beginning to think again, don't you? And the prospect of having a dirty great mortgage tied round our necks for the next ninety years didn't help, either.'

The Hon. Con rolled her eyes in exasperation. Really, how the poor went on about money!

‘Then,' Jim Lewcock broke in wistfully, ‘we had ourselves a bit of luck.'

‘Yes,' agreed his brother, without bitterness, ‘I crooked my bloody back at work.'

The Hon. Con's eyes popped. ‘You call that luck?'

In the heat of the moment jim Lewcock forgot the precariousness of his situation and patted the Hon. Con on the knee. ‘The compensation, love!' he explained. ‘Prove it's the firm's fault and you're sitting bloody pretty! And our solicitor – the trade union one I was telling you about – he's no doubts at all. Tone's accident, he says, was definitely due to negligence on the part of Bromberg & Sons and he personally was going to see to it that they paid through the nose. And I'm talking in thousands, you know. Well, why not? Our Tone here'll never be fit for a proper day's work again.'

‘He looks perfectly healthy to me,' said the Hon. Con firmly.

‘Not on your life!' objected Jim Lewcock. ‘He'll never be able to do the sort of job he did before he ricked himself. Besides,' – he couldn't repress a triumphant grin – ‘there's no bloody law that says you've got to rupture yourself for the bosses, is there?'

This kind of revolutionary talk was usually like a red flag to the Hon. Con but she couldn't be bothered with questions of industrial loyalty just at the moment. ‘ Here,' she demanded, ‘have I got this straight or do my ears deceive me? You' – she jabbed an accusing finger at Tony – ‘have allegedly damaged your back in some kind of sordid industrial accident. As a result, you and your blooming trade union lawyer are claiming some vast sum in compensation. And it is with the money thus fraudulently extracted from your employers that you intend to set yourselves up in the garage business. Right?'

‘I don't go much on calling it fraudulent,' objected Tony Lewcock. ‘My back plays me up something cruel some days.'

‘But not badly enough,' the Hon. Con pointed out, licking her lips as she delivered the coup de grace, ‘ to stop you enjoying a pretty strenuous holiday.'

‘We told you – we was intending to be sunning ourselves on a bloody Spanish beach,' objected Jim Lewcock. ‘Casting a friendly eye over the birds. It'd have done poor Tone's back a power of good. It's not our fault that we've got lumbered with this bloody endurance test.'

‘What,' said the Hon. Con, ‘ would your employers – or the compensation tribunal – say if they knew that he' – she jerked a thumb at Tony – ‘was hopping around Russia like a two-year-old?'

‘They wouldn't say nothing!' snarled Jim Lewcock. ‘Nothing! Why should they? Even the bloody labouring classes are entitled to a bloody holiday once in a bloody blue moon.'

‘They're not entitled to swindle people by claiming to be sicker than they actually are!' retorted the Hon. Con. ‘That's dishonest! No wonder you didn't want the Russian police enquiring into our affairs.'

Jim Lewcock sucked in a sharp intake of breath and lowered his voice as much as he could while still remaining audible. ‘Listen, love,' he growled, ‘don't you start getting any clever ideas! What compensation assessors don't know, won't hurt ' em, will it? We're not asking for nothing that isn't our bloody rights.'

‘That,' interrupted the Hon. Con with a smugness of which only the very rich are capable, ‘is a matter of opinion, my good man!'

‘What's likely to happen to you won't be a bloody matter of opinion, love!' Jim Lewcock's face was black. ‘Look, I'm giving you a friendly warning, see? Don't stick your nose in where it's not wanted. That way you won't come round to find it smashed flat in your stupid face, will you?'

There was nothing wrong with the Hon. Con's courage – mental or physical. Indeed, some admirers considered her at times brave to the point of foolhardiness. On this occasion, however, there was an undercurrent of such viciousness in Jim Lewcock's voice that even our lion-hearted one held her fire. The Hon. Con wasn't frightened, of course. In her book, being frightened was a luxury to be indulged in only by women and children and, in any case, it would take more than a peasant like Jim Lewcock to put the wind up her. Still, she was in a strange country a thousand miles from home and … She was jolly pleased when the flashing of illuminated signs and a general air of bustle indicated that they were getting near to landing. The arrival of a bossy young air hostess saved her the trouble of finding a suitably defiant piece of repartee for Jim Lewcock.

The Hon. Con clipped her seat belt into place as the plane banked sharply. Poor old Bones, she thought as she braced herself against the centrifugal force, she'll be dying a thousand deaths back there all alone. The plane levelled out.

‘And I'll tell you something else, missus!' Jim Lewcock leaned over so that he could bawl straight down the Hon. Con's ear. ‘I'll admit that Tone and me aren't too keen on having the Russian police sniffing around, but Tone's back isn't the only bloody reason. That Clough-Cooper bird! She's having you on! I've met her sort a million times. She's just one of these tarts that'll do anything as long as she's the centre of attention. Anything! Listen,' – he gave the Hon. Con a nudge to make sure she hadn't fallen asleep on him – ‘I don't reckon as how anybody's trying to bloody murder her at all!'

‘Well, dear,' – Miss Jones tried to sound tactful – ‘perhaps Mr Lewcock has got a point.'

The Hon. Con thumped her fist into a handy pillow. ‘Et tu, Brute?' she demanded bitterly.

Although Miss Jones suffered from the benefits of a sound classical education, she didn't allow herself to be diverted. She went on placidly unpacking the suitcases.

‘Dunno why you're bothering,' grumbled the Hon. Con, still sulking. ‘We're only spending one flipping night here.'

Miss Jones ignored this red herring, too. ‘Miss Clough-Cooper,' she went on, stretching the truth a little more than she liked but comforting herself that it was in a good cause, ‘ is a very nice young woman and I'm sure she doesn't actually mean to tell fibs. I think she's probably deceiving herself just as much as she's trying to deceive us. My guess is that something or other happened to frighten her and she's built up a whole persecution mania on the basis of that. She strikes me as being very highly strung, dear.'

‘Fiddlesticks!' muttered the Hon. Con. She propped her feet in their heavy shoes on the counterpane of the other bed and waited to see if this would divert Miss Jones into a homily on the need for respect of other people's property.

It didn't.

‘And something of an exhibitionist,' added Miss Jones, putting away the Hon. Con's shirts in one of the dressing-table drawers.

‘An exhibitionist?' howled the Hon. Con.

Miss Jones steeled herself. ‘ Can't you see, dear, that she's simply trying to draw attention to herself? She's trying to make herself appear interesting. That's why she's making up all these silly stories about somebody – one of us, no less! – attempting to kill her. I mean, what proof have you got, dear?'

‘Holy cats, Bones!' exploded the Hon. Con, well and truly stung into defending herself. ‘ I know when somebody's trying to pull the old wool over my eyes, for goodness sake!'

‘All you've got is what she says,' continued Miss Jones, being cruel to be kind. ‘I mean – all that business in Alma Ata about somebody trying to smother her – well, she never did get round to explaining how this ‘‘somebody'' got into her room, did she?'

‘She probably forgot to lock the door.'

‘After two attempts on her life?' asked Miss Jones incredulously. ‘A single woman travelling by herself? I don't think that sounds very likely, dear. And what about the Russian floor maid who slept outside on the landing all night? Wouldn't she have noticed somebody breaking into one of the guests' rooms?'

The Hon. Con ripped off a few isometric exercises that were supposed to strengthen your thigh muscles. ‘The window was open!' she recalled triumphantly.

‘Miss Clough-Copper's bedroom was like ours, dear – on the second floor.'

‘There was a balcony.'

‘That still doesn't explain how this attacker reached it – or how he got away again without anybody spotting him.'

The Hon. Con bounced off the bed and strode over to the window. ‘An agile chappie could have nipped across from one balcony to another as easy as anything. Bet I could have done it myself if I'd put my mind to it. And it's not my fault I didn't get the chance to give Penny Clough-Cooper's bedroom a real forensic going over, is it?'

But Miss Jones, who lived in a constant fear of being murdered in her bed, had as a matter of routine examined all the possibilities of forcible entry into the hotel at Alma Ata. In her considered opinion, the defences had been impregnable and she had subsequently slept the sleep of the just until Miss Clough-Cooper had raised the roof with her screams. However, she saw no sense in antagonising the Hon. Con by challenging her in the field of detection, a field which the Hon. Con jealously regarded as her own. Faute de mieux, Miss Jones returned to personal attacks on Miss Clough-Cooper.

‘She's sly, too.'

The Hon. Con turned away from the window as comprehension dawned. ‘Bones, you don't like her!'

‘That has absolutely nothing to do with it, dear.' Miss Jones bustled off into the bathroom with the sponge bags and continued the conversation from there. ‘You just can't believe a word she says, that's all. The woman's a congenial liar.'