In the Name of a Killer

by Brian Freemantle

  Danilov forced himself on, through the dead man’s file. Suzlev has been a gregarious, well-liked man with no enemies. He’d drunk with three other drivers the night of his death, having found a liquor store with supplies near the Belorussian railway station. It had been a pleasantly drunken evening – they’d sung, according to the other drinkers – with no arguments or disagreements. He had not been robbed: when he’d been found he still had ten roubles in his pocket and his watch was on his wrist. He had no criminal record. His wife was sure he’d loved her and she claimed to have loved him: there was no extramarital involvement. He’d been a doting, if strict, father, although there was no complaint that he’d ever actually beaten either of his children, both boys, one fourteen, the other sixteen. The autopsy had discovered he was suffering a hernia his wife hadn’t known about: there was the beginning of cholesterol build-up in the arteries but it would not have become a health factor for possibly another ten years.

  Danilov straightened again, still looking at his file but not focusing on the details. An ordinary man leading an ordinary life until one night, a month ago, he stopped being ordinary and became a murder victim. So why Vladimir Vasilevich Suzlev, a Moscow taxi driver? And why Ann Harris, a pretty, successful, presumably high-earning American whose life was so different they might have come from separate planets? Virtually did come from separate planets. Where was the connection, the link he could logically follow to make the arrest and prevent it happening again? There wasn’t one, he conceded, hopelessly. And it was hopeless: depressingly, emptily hopeless. Murders were committed by people – men and women – who knew their victims. They were husbands and wives or lovers or acquaintances: investigations were routine, plodding back through the lies and deceits and evasions until eventually it became obvious, usually accompanied by a tearful, apologetic confession. This case – these murders – weren’t going to be solved that way. Danilov wished he knew how they were going to be solved.

  Found. The one word suddenly seemed to come into focus from the rest of the unseen blur and Danilov concentrated forward, trying for a connecting factor. Ann Harris had been killed just off Ulitza Gercena. The body of Vladimir Suzlev had been found in another badly lit alley, running off the Ulitza Stolesnikov. Close, Danilov decided. Possibly the first positive common denominator, the comparatively compact area in which the killer was operating. Danilov wrote down the two street locations, drew a circle around each and joined them, with a single line. Above the line he put a question mark.

  Danilov spent another fifteen minutes with both files, moving from one to the other and back again, but could not find anything else to join with a connecting line. He reassembled and closed the file on Vladimir Suzlev, intending to remove it completely from his desk, but stopped, uncertainly, with the hard-topped folder in his hand, unable to find anywhere to put it. Danilov’s office was a filled up box of a place, enclosed in the very middle of the Militia building and therefore without even an outside window. One of the three bulbs which had to burn permanently, for illumination, had failed a week before and maintenance insisted there wasn’t any more in store to replace it: they’d been expecting a delivery for a month. Danilov was uneasy because the bulb in the desk lamp had started to flicker. Every drawer in the two filing cabinets – some half open as if in proof – was jammed with past case files and documents that Danilov retained for reference, along with the books in the three crammed shelves, and the tops of both cabinets supported more precariously lodged files threatening an avalanche at the slightest vibration. There was more paperwork on the only visitor’s chair and a growing wall stacked to the left of Danilov’s desk.

  The appearance, of completely disorganized chaos, was however entirely misleading. Danilov knew the location of every record, file and book and usually found his research facilities better – and certainly swifter – than the official basement archives staffed by uninterested clerks resentful of any inquiry.

  Remaining uncertain, Danilov stood, the Suzlev case record still in hand, seeking space that didn’t exist. Finally he heightened the wall of folders beside his desk: it was, after all, something he was going to need as close to hand as possible.

  Ann Harris, the neat and tidy economist, had kept her correspondence meticulously: Danilov realized, the moment he unfastened the first bundle, that she had packaged them in their elastic bands strictly according to the date of receipt, creating a consecutive record of every letter she had received since her arrival in Moscow, eighteen months earlier. He sorted through, placing the packs in their proper chronological order, reading from the beginning. There seemed to be four main correspondents, her parents, who lived in Hartford, Connecticut, being the most regular. There was a man, John, who wrote from a New York address and whom it took Danilov some time to identify as a brother. Judy Billington, who lived in Washington, DC, emerged to be a fellow economist and former college friend. Senator Burden’s letters were always typed – Danilov guessed by a secretary, because there were none of the mistakes of an amateur, twofingered effort – and signed with a flourish of curlicues, a signature intended for posterity.

  Although the correspondence was necessarily one-sided, nearly all a response or reaction to something the girl had written from Moscow, it soon became clear to Danilov that Ann Harris presented a different persona to different audiences. To her parents in Connecticut she was a polite and caring daughter, solicitous about their well-being, an eager reporter of the unusual experiences and pleasures possible in Moscow. It’s good to know how much you like it, her parents had enthused, in a letter six months earlier. There seemed to have been plans for the elderly couple to visit. The girl had assured her father, who suffered from angina, that there was an excellent embassy doctor: she had proposed trips to the Bolshoi and the State Circus. Everyone was going to have a great time.

  The letters from Senator Burden continued to reflect an unqualified enjoyment and a grateful awareness of the career benefits of the Russian posting, although more stiffly expressed, just as the politician’s letters were stiffly typed. Although, from the way some of the letters were phrased, it was obvious Ann Harris was giving the necessary guarantees, there was frequent urging from Burden for her always to be conscious of the political influence being exerted on her behalf. Those urgings were invariably accompanied by assurances that back in Washington the man was monitoring and guarding her career. I am proud, Burden recorded in one letter. You’re rightfully earning the chance to the highest promotion, which I am going to see you get insisted another. A third said, pompously: It gratifies me to hear you have positively decided to subjugate all personal feelings and thoughts to repay with success the efforts I have made on your behalf.

  With the brother and the college friend, the tone changed dramatically.

  In repeated promises from New York, John Harris undertook never to tell their parents or their uncle of her unhappiness in Moscow and its insular diplomatic environment. It can’t be the virtual prison that you describe, the brother had protested, within two months of her arrival. It seemed to be a consistent complaint, because prison was a word that appeared in several letters. There were also inquiries about her social life. In a June letter the man had written Sorry about the man shortage. In July the reference was A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, but I would have thought there were enough eligible bachelor diplomats to go around.

  The most revealing and intimate correspondence was from Judy Billington.

  The very first recorded letter contained the phrase I know it’s not the same, but if you’re that frustrated there’s always your bedside friend. Near the conclusion of the next letter, six weeks after Ann Harris’s arrival, the Washington-based friend had written: I know fucking isn’t everything but agree it helps a lot. Judy Billington had been quite explicit about her own sex life – Danilov wondered what the phrase giving head meant – listing her bed partners and awarding them performance scores, out of ten.

  The interesting, intriguing reference surf
aced in a letter dated ten months earlier. At first he missed the beginning of the sequence, because the words were so innocuous. It was only an odd sentence that followed that made Danilov re-read the entire page to pick out what he thought was important. At least it’s better than nothing, Judy Billington had written. Then, after the separation of two unconnected sentences, there was: I don’t like pain, either. Why not go back to one of the others? There was an entire further unconnected paragraph and then, cynically, They always say they love you: that’s part of the necessary bullshit: I thought you’d know that by now. But be careful with this one.

  Danilov broke away from that particular letter, leaning back in his creaking chair to gaze up at the unlit, unreplaced bulb in the overhead socket. He was not shocked by open references to sex and sexuality, any more than he’d been shocked by what he’d found in Ann Harris’s bedroom cabinet. The correspondence with the other American girl was merely a confirmation of what the bedroom contents indicated, a liberated woman behaving and talking as she had every right to do. But with whom? He’d already known, from the verbal report from the pathologist, that Ann Harris had been engaged in a sexual relationship. Now he knew it had existed for ten months. And there seemed to have been others before. But this one included pain. He was sure the word, in the context in which it was used, meant physical discomfort. So how much was he further forward? Maybe a few millimetres. Ann Harris had eased her sexual frustration for ten months, right up until the night of her death, with a man who enjoyed either inflicting or receiving pain. He partially re-read the letter before him. I don’t like pain, either … More likely receiving what the man inflicted, he decided.

  There were ten more letters from Judy Billington and Danilov went through each more slowly than any of the rest, examining the contents word by word, desperate for a clue – the merest hint – to whom Ann Harris’s partner might have been. From one passage Danilov guessed the woman had confessed to some sort of sexual activity in the open, in Moscow’s botanical gardens after a river cruise. Tell him you don’t like it was a repeated piece of Washington advice in another. The second-to-last sheet in the batch said: You were wise about the bondage. Jim was into it; it was pretty damned scary to be trussed up like a chicken, not able to move, not knowing what the hell the kinky bastard was going to do next. I only ever did it once.

  Danilov made a note on the pad before him and sectioned off with a paper-clip the letters he considered might have some relevance. The remainder he rebound in their elastic bands, in the order in which the girl had retained them, and stacked them neatly in the stiff-sided evidence container that Pavin had already titled with the girl’s name and accorded an index number.

  Sighing, his shoulders cramped from concentration, Danilov pulled the slender, line-a-day-diary towards him. His immediate impression in the apartment appeared correct: it was very much an appointments record. Predictably Ann Harris wrote in precise, complete legible handwriting. Thursdays seemed to be the day for conferences, the participants unlisted. Someone called Paul featured frequently, sometimes on conference days. Most of the American national holidays were noted with embassy receptions. The birthdays of her parents, Burden and Judy Billington were also entered.

  And the dates of Tuesdays were often circled, although apart from an occasional embassy notation it seemed to be a day in Ann Harris’s schedule that was usually free. A sharp awareness came to Danilov and he concentrated more intently: it had been Tuesday – or to be strictly accurate the night of Tuesday, running over into Wednesday morning – that she had been murdered. He went back to the beginning of the year and counted, lips moving. Every Tuesday – except for three consecutive Tuesdays, all in January – was picked out with a circle. Another awareness registered and although he was sure, confident of his retentive memory, Danilov went sideways to the Suzlev file. It only took him minutes to confirm that the taxi driver had died on a Tuesday. The Russian wrote the two names, separated by the word Tuesday, and made another of his looped chains. The diary followed the letters into the evidence container.

  It was a crowded address book, obviously a continuation of a contact register begun in the United States: it was frequently easy with a naked eye to see the different ink colours – the American faded, the Moscow heavier, more recent – between entries on the same page. Danilov’s immediate concerns were the obvious Moscow numbers. Under E, the main embassy exchange (252–00–11) headed the listing, beneath which was a lengthy series of separate direct-dial numbers, according to the Moscow telephone system. The British and French embassies were also noted. There were reminders of the Bolshoi, Kirov and Pushkin theatres, the numbers of Sheremet’yevo airport and the in-town air terminals. The National and the Ukraina Hotels were also included. Having found the obvious, the diligent Danilov went back to the beginning of the book, searching not the written-down names of the addressees but to the right of each name, for the three-by-two-by-two sequence that would tell him they were Moscow numbers. He found a listing for someone called Hughes, whose initial was P. There was a Janet (Edwards) and a Pam (Donnelly).

  A functional, efficient aid, judged Danilov: but then what had he expected? The address book went into the evidence box, leaving him with the notes bundled together, without envelopes. Further aids, he recognized, as he unpeeled the elastic band: scribbled reminders and telephone message slips, some already printed with lines set out to show who the call had come from, the date, the time, their number and whether it was required to call back. Often the spaces had not been completed.

  The majority of the slips served as an addition to the already studied diary, appointment reminders or conference queries: he even retrieved the diary for a date-by-date comparison and confirmed the connection for five entries.

  And then he came upon the discovery.

  It was in handwriting he knew was not Ann Harris’s, on a piece of white paper completely blank apart from the written words, which were in English. The one he came upon first said I didn’t mean to hurt. There was no date but the paper was dogeared where it had been enclosed in the elastic band and was discoloured, as if it had been retained for some time. The second note, again on unmarked paper, apart from the message, contained just three words: Please like it. The third was the last in the pile. Only one word: Call. On this one there was a date, three days before Ann Harris’s murder. Prompted by the date, Danilov went back to the beginning of the pile. A lot of the messages and reminders were undated but those that had been were in chronological order and Danilov thought it safe to presume she had preserved them in the sequence in which they had come. He fixed the three pieces of paper in a clip, separate from the other notes, as he had the correspondence he believed might help. He was putting the notes back into the evidence folder when Pavin came into the room. He was carrying a large envelope and a notebook.

  ‘We really do have influence and special privileges,’ announced the burly Major. He was smiling, self-satisfied.

  ‘Just how much?’ queried Danilov.

  ‘I put in a request for additional men: I wasn’t happy with what we had for the amount of checks that have to be made at the psychiatric places. We’ve been allocated another squad of ten. I got a car, a Volga, without the slightest obstruction. And it’s new: only six months old. No police markings, although there’s a telephone. I was even asked if we wanted a driver. I said no.’