It took every bit of control that Andrews could find but he did find it. Circumstantial but inadmissible: he was sure of it. They were in America now, land of the free and protected. Not an asshole society like Russia, where everything could be bent to fit. There had to be a formal charge and there had to be formal, legally acceptable evidence, and they didn’t have it. He was cleverer than them all: always had been. Firm-voiced, unafraid, he said: ‘I told you I wanted someone here of authority. Someone to end all this …’ He turned to the men behind him. ‘There’ll be a civil action, against each of you. As well as criminal proceedings. Enjoy today. It’ll be the last for any of you, here at head-quarters. Anywhere. I don’t know how you got caught up in this, but I feel sorry for you. Pity you.’
‘We’ve taken a formal statement from Judy Billington. She will give evidence about Mr Droop, if she’s called.’
‘So will Fred Erickson,’ said Danilov. ‘You know Fred Erickson, the New York Times man, don’t you? He regards you as a good contact. Particularly after your prompting him before the Moscow press conference about Ann Harris being defiled in some way, meaning her hair I guess. Which no one publicly knew about then. But guaranteed a sensation.’
‘Can’t understand why you did that,’ resumed Cowley. ‘Unless, of course, you wanted to build it all up into a case we were never going to be able to solve. Make us look stupid. Or was it to make me look stupid? That’s what the psychiatrist, Dr Meadows, thinks. He thinks you hate me: that stealing Pauline away was part of hating me. And that when I got assigned, taking the case and the glory away from you, you tried to kill Lydia Orlenko and then did kill Nadia Revin to create a serial killing I couldn’t solve. And I wouldn’t have been able to, Barry, if you’d left it there. But you couldn’t, could you? You’d planned the perfect murders and the perfect solution and you wanted to show how you meant Hughes to be convicted, didn’t you? You got confused there. You know what you did? You caught yourself! How about that, Barry! Perfect murders, perfect solutions.’
No! Dear God no! Don’t give the bastards the satisfaction of responding. Would have liked to, though. Careful. Mustn’t lose control. That’s what they wanted. For him to lose control. Blurt something out. Wouldn’t though. Knew all the tricks. Like he knew all about serial killings from what they’d taught him in Quantico.
‘We’ll have your sorority ring, from your left hand,’ said Danilov. ‘It’ll match the bruise measurements on those you killed, won’t it?’
Cowley was holding back by his fingertips the furious disgust he felt for the other man. He forced himself to think of the drill, the inviolable rule: always stay objective, never let personal feelings intrude. But how could he stop personal feelings intruding? ‘I went to see Pauline, after you left. I wasn’t sure, when I got there, what I was even going to say, although I guessed then how you’d fixed the evidence against Yezhov, planting all the stuff you’d collected in the clothing I gave you to send back here. But we didn’t have much then. Just the miscount that could have only been you. Pauline was packing: surrounded by boxes and stuff. I was trying to think of anything odd – anything that didn’t fit – and I remembered something she’d said, the night I took her to the embassy club while you were back here for the relocation interview. We were talking about the first night; the dinner party. You know what she said then? She said: “Did you sort out the problems of the world? You seemed to talk long enough.” It didn’t register at the time, but when I went back, looking for things, I asked her what she’d meant. And she told me that within fifteen minutes of my leaving your apartment after that dinner you went out, too. Told her you had something you’d forgotten that couldn’t wait until morning to talk to me about. And you didn’t get back for two hours. She’s absolutely definite, about that. But you didn’t catch up with me. You went to Granovskaya and attacked Lydia Orlenko, didn’t you? We’ve timed it out. It all fits quite easily into a two-hour time frame.’
Bitch! Didn’t matter. Her word against his, no corroboration. Still in the clear. Still cleverer than them.
‘“It was pretty common knowledge that Ann moved about a bit but I didn’t know she was quite like she was,”’ quoted Cowley. ‘How’s that strike you?’
Andrews shook his head, in patronizing dismissal. ‘This will have to end sometime, I suppose?’
‘That was something else Pauline said, after the embassy party. Again I missed it, then. But not now. How come, if Pauline knew Ann screwed around – that it was pretty common knowledge – that you didn’t tell me? You didn’t want me to start looking in your direction, did you? Steered me away, all the time.’
An even weaker shot. Stay disdainful.
Cowley shook his head, both in revulsion and in uncertainty that he’d properly followed the guidance Dr Meadows had suggested. ‘I know you’re sick. Doubly sick, because we’ve discussed it with psychiatrists and had it explained to us how, mad as you are, you faked another madness to fit all the profiles of a serial killer and became one, by intent … Remember telling me you’d heard all the Quantico lectures? I know you have. We’ve checked all your course attendances, when you learned how to do it …’
Bastard was out of control now: wallowing. Nothing to worry about.
‘But you even took your sickness lower, didn’t you Barry? Beyond belief. No one at Quantico has ever heard of something quite as obscene. I don’t suppose obscene is a big enough word, but I can’t think of another. Don’t want to think of another.’ The psychiatrist had instructed him constantly to show contempt, judging Andrews’s motivation to be personal, between the two of them, but there wasn’t much left and Andrews hadn’t broken. It wasn’t necessary, with all they had, but Cowley needed the man to break. He didn’t give a fuck about illness, mental or physical. It was personal with him now. Like he supposed it always had been.
What was Cowley talking about? It couldn’t be that! Not that!
Cowley forced himself on. ‘When I went to Pauline she was packing, like I said. I poked about, making out to help: didn’t want to alarm her, thinking you were under suspicion, not then …’ How the hell could he show more contempt – goad further – than he’d done already? Lying, he said: ‘She liked me being there. Told me it was like the old times you kept on about, only better without you there. She felt good about it.’ Andrews was flushing, shifting his feet, angry! Cowley said: ‘You really think she wouldn’t have noticed? Someone like Pauline! Christ that was dumb! That was really dumb! What was it you called her? Goddess of the kitchen?’
Andrews looked warily across the table. No! It wasn’t possible! No one was to know!
‘She couldn’t understand it, of course. Held it up to me and said she knew everything in her kitchen and that the knife definitely wasn’t hers. Didn’t even fit any of the sets she had.’
‘But it did fit a set.’ Danilov picked it up on rehearsed cue. ‘Perfectly. The set I recovered from Ann Harris’s apartment on Ulitza Pushkinskaya. It’s even printed with the maker’s name, Kuikut, on the blade. And it’s on the knife rack we took for evidence, too.’
‘And the handle has your fingerprints all over it. You should have kept your rubber gloves on: the rubber kitchen gloves Pauline could never understand disappearing like they did. Had to spend a lot of time, I guess, getting the tobacco smell all over them from that cigar habit you specially acquired to connect with Hughes’s smoking. With the knife maybe you should have better remembered the Quantico lectures about serial killers needing souvenirs. And stopped yourself. But you couldn’t by then, could you? You’d become the serial killer you wanted to be.’
Andrews smiled. ‘Cleverer than you. Always cleverer than you.’ He’d wanted them to know. Now they would. Perfect.
He began to hum.
Neither felt like celebrating – Cowley least of all – but the American decided he had to make as big an effort as possible for the few days Danilov remained in Washington, and they both ended up trying, each for the other.
They ate at
the Occidental, close to the FBI headquarters, and at two separate restaurants in Georgetown, a district Danilov preferred to any others they visited. Cowley imposed upon the Secret Service and got the Russian ahead of the normal tour of the White House and waited in a queue he didn’t want to be part of to get to the top of the Washington Monument. There was another special visit to the Congress buildings and the usual tourist route to the Lincoln and Vietnam monuments. One night they saw a Shakespeare production at the Kennedy Center. Cowley considered asking Pauline to join them, but quickly abandoned the idea. On the last day they returned to Georgetown, to eat and for Danilov to shop: Cowley planned to drive direct to Dulles airport, when they’d finished.
‘It all worked out in the end,’ Danilov suggested. They were in a French café just beyond Wisconsin Avenue, at Danilov’s request. He ordered soft-shelled crabs, which he’d eaten at most meals.
‘We put Yezhov into psychiatric clinic. Sent him irreversibly mad,’ Cowley insisted. He’d ordered the crabs, too, although he wasn’t hungry. He had more tidying up to do, after putting Danilov on the plane. He was uncertain how it was going to go.
‘Andrews’s victim, as much as any of the others.’
‘We contributed.’
‘There hasn’t been an investigation in the history of crime where mistakes weren’t made.’
‘I wish we hadn’t made this one.’
‘What’s happened to Hughes?’
‘They’ve had to stop: worried about his mental health. He’s denied everything. They’re still unsure about entrapment but the inconsistencies about the murder alibis have to be accepted simply as that now, inconsistencies. Maybe the wife was trying to get even: that’s what he said. Difficult to believe she’d go that far, but who knows what a woman would do, in her situation …?’ He hesitated, sure of friendship with Danilov now. ‘You think the KGB, or whatever it’s called, had him?’
Danilov made a doubtful head movement. ‘He’d have been useful, kept in the position he was. So they would have protected him, if they’d had him already. I don’t know, but I’d guess they decided to sacrifice a potential, to cause as much disruption as possible. At which they did pretty well.’
‘I’m curious,’ announced Cowley. ‘About you.’
‘Me?’
‘There’s been a suggestion that you’re KGB.’
Danilov laughed, hugely. ‘Not me. The tapes were, obviously. But I’m not.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d tell me, if you were,’ said Cowley, mildly.
‘I suppose not. But I’m not.’
Cowley nodded, satisfied. ‘The ambassador is being withdrawn, because of the other recordings. And Baxter. Ann Harris was a very busy girl. It’s all pretty devastating.’
‘The Cheka will regard it as a good operation,’ guessed Danilov. He supposed during his visit to the FBI headquarters he would have been covertly photographed: there would have been fingerprints, too. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that your ex-wife married Andrews?’
Cowley pushed aside the barely touched meal. He shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem important. To affect anything.’
‘It became the most important fact there was.’
‘Hindsight,’ shrugged Cowley. ‘You sure you got everything you want?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Danilov. He’d had a far better haircut than he could ever have got in Moscow: at the moment there wasn’t any grey showing at all. He’d bought three of the shirts he liked, the ones with the pin that went behind the tie, and perfume for Olga. He’d returned to the perfumery after the first purchase to get a second bottle for Larissa. The grateful Agayans had exceeded himself, changing roubles for dollars, the reverse of how it normally worked. Danilov was still determined against accepting the television or the washing machine or the dresses Olga wanted. He finished eating and said: ‘All ready to go!’
‘I’d like to know what happens to Yezhov.’
‘You will,’ promised Danilov. He paused, recalling the distant promise about secrets on a wind-swept murder scene. ‘There are still some things belonging to Ann Harris to be returned to the family.’
‘Yes?’ said Cowley, curiously.
‘The letters were listed as correspondence on the evidence list: not itemized. I don’t think there’s any need to send back all those talking about sex, do you?’
‘None at all,’ agreed Cowley. ‘Always difficult to remain entirely detached, isn’t it?’
‘Always.’
Chapter Forty-One
There appeared to be as many packing cases lying around the Bethesda house as there had been on his previous visit. And Pauline moved around the room as if she couldn’t see where she was going, actually collided with one of the larger containers in the hallway when she went to get coffee.
‘The diagnosis is that he’s absolutely insane,’ said Cowley. ‘Beyond treatment, although of course they’ll try. They’ve got to.’
Pauline nodded, but absent-mindedly, as if she wasn’t interested.
He wanted to move across to the couch where she was sitting: to hold her, comfort her. He stayed where he was, on the single chair. ‘You’re the official next-of-kin. There’ll be some legal documents to sign. Committal authority. And a hearing, before a judge in chambers. I’ll take you, if you’d like.’
She nodded again, listlessly. ‘But no trial?’
‘He’s incapable of facing one. There wouldn’t be any point.’
Pauline stirred, forcing herself to concentrate. ‘What about the point of clearing that poor bastard in Moscow?’
Her voice was strident: cracked. Cowley supposed she deserved some near-hysteria. ‘It’s better this way. Yezhov’s being cared for. He’s not suffering.’
‘Better for whom? For the Bureau! And Burden! For the great American public, who’ll never learn an FBI man was a mass murderer!’
‘And for you,’ tried Cowley. ‘You any idea of the clamour there’d be around you, if it was all made public?’
‘Bullshit!’ rejected Pauline, viciously. ‘No one’s given a fuck about me, making this decision! It’s all political!’
‘It’s better,’ repeated Cowley, Why was he being called upon to defend it?
‘Expedient,’ she corrected.
‘OK, expedient.’
‘Jesus! Doesn’t it make you sick to your stomach?’
‘Often.’ Cowley watched her look helplessly around the disorganized living-room. He said: ‘Barry will officially be listed on permanent sick leave. His salary will continue. Pension, too. There’s nothing for you to worry about there.’
‘Stop it, William! You’re talking like they must talk.’
‘I live here, you know. Across the river, at Arlington.’
She’d retreated inside herself, merely nodding.
‘I’d like to help.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Cowley, ‘I just want you to know I’m around. Will be around, if you … I’m here. OK?’
‘Did he mean it to happen?’ she demanded, going off on a tangent. ‘Did he want me to prepare food with a knife he’d killed people with?’ Horrified revulsion shuddered through her.
It was exactly what the psychiatrist had guessed and Andrews had confessed to, under the analysis that was still going on. That he’d wanted Pauline to use it making meals for the three of them, when Cowley had got back from Moscow and they’d invited him over for dinner. Dr Meadows had referred to it as vampire thinking. Cowley said: ‘No one will ever know that. I can’t conceive it.’
She shuddered again. ‘I can’t believe we shared the same bed: that he touched me, although he didn’t, not very much.’
Stop! thought Cowley. Please stop.
‘Would he have killed me?’
Cowley spread his hands towards her, in apparent helplessness. ‘I don’t know! No one can know. Ever.’ Which wasn’t true. That was exactly what Andrews had admitted planning, in his final babbled, mad confession. Cowley had heard the tape. Kill the bitc
h. And Cowley: kill them both. They fuck, you know? I know they fuck, behind my back. That and so much more. Hysterical ramblings of intending to kill Ann in her apartment that night, until she had surprisingly emerged, almost confronting him as he was entering from the spot where he’d watched Hughes emerge. Of intending to replace the knife he’d taken after one of his love visits the day after the murder and of finding Danilov had already sealed the apartment. About him, most of all. Of the hatred, from the time they were in London together: violent, insane jealousy, blaming him for every setback, real or imagined, ever since he’d been in the Bureau.
‘But he would have killed again?’
Cowley hesitated. ‘They think so.’ He would have been one of the record-breakers, the psychiatrists at Quantico had predicted: killed and killed and killed again.
‘With the knife he wanted me to use in the kitchen!’
‘Talking like this doesn’t make any sense.’
She snorted a laugh. ‘Isn’t that it? Isn’t it all mad?’
‘I don’t want you to forget what I said.’
She frowned, confused. ‘What about?’
‘Me being here in Washington.’
‘You and me, you mean?’
The near-hysteria was close again. ‘No! Just that I’m around, if you need somebody.’
‘No, William!’
Cowley didn’t respond immediately. ‘If you ever change your mind.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I can say it was a gift from someone here at the hotel,’ said Larissa.
Danilov hadn’t considered how she’d explain the gift to her husband. The excuse had come very easily: did she accept presents from other people, here at the hotel? He’d been clever enough to buy separate bottles though, Giorgio for Larissa, Dior for Olga. ‘I had to guess. I’m glad you like it.’
‘I’d hoped you’d come, finally.’
‘Just as a friend,’ insisted Danilov, hurriedly. She was sitting demurely on the edge of the bed, he more than a metre away on the only chair. She hadn’t come forward to kiss him or moved to start taking off her clothes, as she’d always done before.
In the Name of a Killer Page 43