by L. C. Tyler
‘But, I tell you, this envelope was empty when I opened it.’
‘Then it must have been empty when you gave it to me,’ said the receptionist.
‘Why would I give you an empty envelope?’
‘How can I possibly know that?’
‘But why would you put an empty envelope into the safe?’
‘We put into the safe whatever we are given to put into the safe. We do not check the contents. If a guest gave us an empty envelope, we would put it in the safe, if that was what he wished us to do. That is the service we provide.’
‘You must remember that the envelope I gave you clearly had something inside it.’
‘Do you think I remember every little detail of every little thing that is handed to me?’
They glared at each other.
‘Show me the safe,’ demanded Davidov suddenly.
‘I cannot show you the safe.’
‘Show me the safe.’
‘I cannot show you the safe.’
They sounded as though they were rehearsing some sort of comedy double-act, and were being slow in reaching its punchline.
‘I demand that I am allowed to search the safe,’ said Davidov, thumping the counter.
‘Monsieur, what exactly are you looking for?’
‘That is none of your business.’
‘Then I am unable to assist.’
‘I insist that you assist.’
‘You cannot insist that I assist.’
‘I insist that I can.’
‘You cannot insist that you can.’
‘You cannot tell me what I can insist and what I cannot insist.’
‘You cannot tell me what I can tell you.’
‘I can tell you what you can tell me.’
They both paused thoughtfully at this point, and eyed each other up for a moment in silence. Davidov tried a new tack.
‘The contents of my envelope are very valuable. If you refuse to help, then I must speak to the manager.’
‘This is most irregular, Monsieur Davidov. But I shall speak to the manager myself. If he permits, I shall allow you to look in the safe, after breakfast. But there was only ever one white packet. You have it there.’
‘Then you have allowed somebody else access to the safe. Somebody has taken my envelope and replaced it with this one.’
‘Nobody has the combination except for me and the manager. You may rest assured of that.’
‘I shall return after breakfast,’ said Davidov. ‘I have to check out of the hotel at nine o’clock. By that time, I insist that you will have found my envelope.’
I waved to Davidov as I passed but, in his distress, he did not even see me. He must have been very fond of his white envelope.
When I mentioned this to Ethelred he just nodded and chewed his croissant a bit. When the Davidov–receptionist incident reminded me that I had earlier caught Davidov and Gold in a cosy tête-à-tête, Ethelred was a little more interested.
‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘Quite impossible.’
‘Why?’ I was curious to know, seeing that I had been there and Ethelred hadn’t.
‘You forget I have been staying here longer than you. Davidov is what is termed an oligarch.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Literally, a member of a small elite ruling a state in ancient Greece.’
‘Thanks, Ethelred, but I meant in real life. How did he make his money exactly?’
‘Davidov, as you would know if you read a newspaper or two, is a powerful Russian businessman with dubious but immensely valuable political connections. His base, to the extent that he lives anywhere in particular, is Moscow, though he also spends a lot of time on his yachts. Nobody quite knows how he made his first billion, but he now owns an oil company, some mines, a nuclear reprocessing facility, a chemical works in India and various minor enterprises in Britain. He wants to buy an English football team, but there are plenty of people who want to block that because of Yacoubabad.’
‘Is that Manchester United’s wicket keeper?’
‘No, it’s the town in India that was poisoned by one of Davidov’s factories – allegedly.’
Ah, yes, that one. Even I remembered the footage of that chemical leak and the newsreader saying in portentous tones: ‘You may find some of the pictures in this report distressing.’ I watched, but was glad that I wasn’t the cameraman.
‘That was bad,’ I said. ‘And how many . . .?’
‘About seven hundred dead,’ said Ethelred. ‘There was an investigation of course and some surprise that it was not followed by Davidov’s arrest and extradition to India.’
‘How do you know all this?’ I asked.
‘It was in all the papers last year,’ said Ethelred with a sigh. ‘Don’t you read anything except the Bookseller?’
‘Yes, I read the literary reviews and Hello! magazine,’ I said. ‘Frankly, when the best years of your working life are spent reading dross, the one thing you don’t want to do in your spare time is read more dross.’
Ethelred said nothing.
‘So, Davidov urgently needs to clean up his act then?’ I said.
‘If he wants to buy into the Premiership, then he will need to do more than a little public-relations work. He will also need to dispel rumours of links to organized crime and the murder of a close business associate, who was found drifting in the Baltic. Of course, I’m sure that some people do go for a midnight swim under the ice in January.’
‘So, you’re saying that Davidov is staggeringly rich and unpleasant?’
‘That’s how some people would describe him, though it might be risky to do so in his hearing.’
‘The thing that puzzles me,’ I said, ‘is what an oligarch is doing in a joint like this. Shouldn’t he be somewhere where you can bath in champagne? Shouldn’t he have half a dozen flunkies with Kalashnikovs to protect him?’
‘This is the official hotel for the stamp fair. He has a genuine interest in stamps. He has also, he tells me, not forgotten his humble origins.’
A bit like my old man, then, who didn’t forget his humble origins even though he eventually owned both vegetable stalls in the market. He didn’t poison an entire town, of course, though it probably wasn’t through want of trying.
‘And Gold?’ I asked.
‘Jonathan Gold, conversely, is an environmental campaigner, with a profound dislike of companies that treat the Third World as a dumping ground for toxic waste. It is difficult to imagine him having a cosy tête-à-tête with Davidov about anything. In any case, I know for certain that they dislike each other intensely. The evening before you arrived I found them arguing in the sitting room. I thought they were about to murder each other.’
‘But only in a figurative sense,’ I added.
A waiter had crept up on us unobserved. He bent over and said very quietly: ‘I am informing all of the guests that the police will need to speak to them.’
Well, I knew what that was about.
‘You can tell them,’ I said, ‘that I never touched Mr Davidov’s white envelope.’
The waiter looked puzzled. ‘I do not know anything about that. The fact is that one of our guests has . . . died. Suddenly and unexpectedly. It will be quite impossible for you to leave the hotel until each of you has been questioned.’
‘We have a train to catch,’ I pointed out.
‘Most of the guests are anxious to leave,’ he said. ‘Some very anxious indeed. There will be a lot of complaints, I think, but there is nothing I can do. The police have . . . some suspicions.’
I looked at Ethelred. He looked at me. The only thing that I was thinking that he was not thinking (I assume) was that I now had a chance to rectify my unfortunate misunderstanding with Jonathan Gold and set up a date for tonight if we were all still stuck here.
‘Who has died?’ asked Ethelred, apparently with no more than polite concern.
The waiter paused then said: ‘Monsieur Gold.’
‘How?’ I asked.
>
The waiter pulled a face. ‘The unfortunate gentleman was stabbed. To death.’
So, that was the sort of day I was having. Stuck indefinitely in a hotel with peeling wallpaper, and the only fit guy in the whole place is the one they choose to murder. Bloody typical, isn’t it?
Five
I always set my novels in England, preferably in Sussex.
A sense of place – preferably a location that you have established as your own from a literary viewpoint – is one of the keys to writing good modern detective fiction. Another is a detailed knowledge of police procedure. I have therefore tried to keep up to date with changes in practice, down to the minutiae of official record keeping. I have rarely been arrested in England, but should it happen in future, little would take me by surprise.
I neither know nor care, however, how the French police or the Italian police conduct a murder investigation, and at my age I have no plans to find out. Nothing in my experience as a crime writer had therefore prepared me for the questioning that I received that morning, in a small office, just off the main hotel reception.
The questions proved, however, to be routine and untaxing. Though my French was probably better than the police sergeant’s English, I decided to let him do the hard work linguistically. Whenever there is the remotest chance of things getting tricky, you are always well-advised to stick to your own language.
So, I confirmed (in English) that I had arrived a few days before, from India, via Paris. I had, I explained, been travelling for some time to research my next book, but was about to return to London. I confirmed that I knew this part of France well, though I had not stayed in this hotel before, normally preferring a different establishment in town. I had been fortunate to obtain a room in a hotel full of stamp collectors.
‘Fortunate?’ asked the police sergeant.
‘In the sense that I might otherwise have been sleeping in the street,’ I said. ‘Not in any other sense.’
‘You do not like the stamps?’
‘Until recently, I would have said that I was indifferent to stamps,’ I said. ‘But I have talked enough about them over the past three or four days to last me a life-time.’
‘So, it is that perhaps you dislike stamp collectors?’ He found this interesting.
‘Not sufficiently to murder one of them.’ I smiled. He didn’t.
‘Perhaps somebody was not as tolerant as you,’ he observed.
‘You think that Mr Gold was killed simply because he was a philatelist? That seems a little harsh.’
The policeman shrugged. ‘We think that too. In effect, we think he was not a philatelist. Is that so?’
‘How would I know? How, for that matter, do you know?’
He gave me the policeman’s stare. This was not something he really needed to tell me. But he did anyway. ‘We have searched his room,’ he said. ‘There were no stamps. That is a little odd, no? To travel so very far and then to buy nothing?’
It struck me as a reasonable question, but I had no idea what the answer was. Collectors probably did sometimes go to stamp fairs without buying.
‘Perhaps, like me, he just happened to be here?’ I suggested.
‘But you are here to – what do you say? – research your roman?’
‘My book. Indeed.’
‘Monsieur Gold on the contrary told the receptionist that he was here for the philatelic fair. Others saw him at the philatelic fair.’
‘Perhaps he was selling something?’
‘Yes, selling something, perhaps, though he did not register as a stamp dealer. We know, in fact, that he was a pharmacist by profession. Also that he had some interest in the environment. Of course, none of that prevents his being a collector of stamps. But we think that the fair was not his real reason for visiting France. Did he say anything that might have revealed what else he was doing?’
It was my turn to shrug, so I did. ‘We spoke once or twice,’ I said. ‘We talked about the usual things that the English talk about when they meet each other overseas. On learning that I lived near Worthing, he asked me if I knew an acquaintance of his who also lived near Worthing. Remarkably, I did not. Nor had he come across my great-aunt who formerly lived in Finchley. I asked him if he had heard the cricket score. He had not. We wished each other a pleasant day.’
‘That is the only conversation that you had with him?’
‘No, I had others, but that was about as interesting as it got.’
‘This is English irony?’
‘Yes, this is English irony.’
‘I see. Thank you.’ For a moment I thought that the interview was at an end, then he added: ‘What do you know about Jonathan Gold’s relations with Grigory Davidov – I mean, since the last few days?’
I had been wondering since breakfast how I would answer this inevitable question. I did not like Davidov, I had no views one way or the other about Jonathan Gold, and I had caught only part of their conversation. It was probably irrelevant in any case.
‘I heard Mr Gold arguing with Mr Davidov,’ I said.
‘About what, please?’
‘I can’t be certain,’ I said.
‘But you are certain it was an argument? Then their voices must have been raised? Or perhaps one appeared to be about to strike the other?’
‘Something like that.’
‘But this could be important,’ said the sergeant. He had ceased to take notes some time before, but now he reached for his pen. ‘What precisely can you can remember, Monsieur Tressider?’
I closed my eyes and tried to picture the scene again. I had come across them in the sitting room – a small stuffy bolthole, painted wherever possible in shiny brown paint and provided with a number of uncomfortable, red plush armchairs and three or four incomplete chess sets. It seemed designed to dissuade guests from lingering, and to move them on to those parts of the hotel in which cash could be spent. It was an improbable location for anything except a conversation that was not to be overheard by other guests. I cannot remember now why I looked in, but the first thing I noticed was Gold with his fist raised, apparently about to punch Davidov on the nose. Davidov was laughing for some reason but, as I watched, the smile faded. It was as if he had just realized that a discussion that had started well enough was about to go badly wrong.
‘That’s not going to help get it back,’ Davidov had smirked, but with an eye on Gold’s fist all the same.
‘You really don’t understand what I could do to you, do you?’ Gold had answered.
It wasn’t clear what he meant, but it could have been a reasonable point. Davidov was big, but my money would have been on Gold in a fair fight. I doubted, though, that Davidov had ever willingly entered into a fair fight. At that juncture my presence had been noticed, and Davidov had made a deep bow, leaving Gold shaking his fist rather improbably in mid-air. Davidov looked at me standing on the threshold.
‘You know that it’s unlucky to stand there like that,’ he said, with what seemed to be an attempt at humour. ‘You should not hold a conversation standing in the doorway.’
‘Another Russian superstition?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And is it unlucky for me or for you?’
‘That is something that we will find out in due course,’ he said. ‘People who make bad luck for me, however, often have bad luck themselves.’
Davidov’s tone was jocular, but Gold just stood there with his fists clenched by his side, looking at nobody in particular.
I had no wish to converse with Davidov from the doorway or otherwise, so I simply enquired whether there were any English newspapers in the hotel. Davidov immediately said he believed not. I departed to let them get on with whatever conversation they wished to get on with. But yes, now I came to think of it, that was precisely the exchange of words that I had overheard.
‘You may be aware,’ said the sergeant, ‘that Mr Davidov had lost what he claimed was a valuable package, just before Gold’s body was found. Could they h
ave been arguing about that, for example?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that. What sort of package?’
‘The receptionist says that he was complaining that a white envelope had gone missing. He seemed very upset.’
It rang a bell. Had somebody mentioned it to me? If so, it had seemed less important at the time than it did now.
‘Did he say what was in it?’ I asked.
My question was pointedly ignored.
‘Perhaps, sir, you could just tell me about the argument between Mr Davidov and Monsieur Gold? You say Mr Davidov had his fist raised?’
‘Did I say that? I’m not so sure that’s right.’
‘So, no threat of violence?’
‘I can’t be sure.’
‘But they were having an argument?’
‘On second thoughts,’ I said, ‘describing it as an argument may be an exaggeration.’
‘I thought you said . . .’
The sergeant looked at his notebook, but since he had not been taking notes at that point it told him nothing.
‘So can you remember anything at all about their conversation?’ the sergeant asked me, pen still poised.
I gave every appearance of considering his question. I wondered whether he would trade information about the white envelope for information about the argument, but I rather doubted that.
‘That’s about all I can tell you,’ I replied.
The sergeant considered this in his turn and then shut his notebook with a dull thump. He screwed the top back on his pen and returned it to his pocket. He did not need to say how much of a disappointment I had been. ‘Thank you, Mr Tressider,’ he said. ‘You have been more than helpful.’
‘My pleasure,’ I said.
Six
A general depression had fallen over the hotel. Every nook and cranny was occupied by people who wanted to be elsewhere. Whatever attraction either Chaubord or the hotel had for us before had evaporated the moment we were informed that we could not leave. Even Ethelred finally noticed that the hotel had a worryingly musty smell – something that I’d detected from Dover. In the sitting room the German family were trying to amuse themselves with one of the incomplete jigsaws and not having much luck. In reception, a fair-haired bloke in a crumpled blue suit sat studying his map and chewing his biro. I hadn’t seen him at dinner the previous evening, but I’d discovered him trying to check out after breakfast and protesting loudly in Birmingham-accented French when he was told that he would have to remain. Of all the unhappy bunnies in the hotel that morning he was, by just a whisker, the unhappiest.