by Tony Cape
“Nobel prize for physics, back in the sixties. One of the most brilliant men here. Certainly the most eminent fellow of St. Margaret’s. We’ve been lucky to keep him all these years, really, but it’s probably because we don’t tie him down with teaching duties. In fact, he has little contact with the junior members, which is why it was so unusual he agreed to look over Bowles’ doctoral work. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. Didn’t Davies tell you?”
Smailes replied that Davies had not mentioned the relationship, and he wondered what an old scientist, no matter how distinguished, might be able to add to what he already knew about Bowles. But he had an intuition that by alternately pacifying and provoking Hawken, he might get this self-important little man to betray something about Bowles’ death that he might be holding back. It could be that his agitation that morning was simply displeasure at the adverse publicity that would result from the suicide, but it was clearly something that affected Hawken directly, personally. Perhaps there were deeper political issues of which he, Smailes, was unaware. He agreed that he would be pleased to meet the eminent physicist the following afternoon, if Beecroft could make arrangements.
“Why is he ignoring the signs, walking on the grass like that?” asked the detective. The question seemed to delight Hawken.
“Oh, that notice is for the tourists, and the junior members. One of the quirks of a St. Margaret’s fellowship is that it confers the right to walk across all the lawns. A tradition dating back to the eighteenth century, I gather. It allows our aging fellows to simultaneously exercise their limbs, and their prerogatives,” Hawken beamed at Smailes.
“I think I’ll visit Mr. Bowles’ room again. I’d like to take another look around before the family comes in,” Smailes said impassively. “Can I get a key at the lodge?”
“Yes, of course,” said Hawken, a little too politely.
Andrei Petrovich Orlovsky stood at the sixth floor window of the huge steel and glass building and gazed across the ribbons of traffic on the Moscow ring road. Winter was lingering, and still in mid-April the limbs of the birch trees surrounding the distant lake were bare, allowing glimpses of gray water. In summer, the dense foliage would prevent his seeing the foreign diplomats who came from the city to row and swim. It would also prevent prying eyes with binoculars from examining the building.
Unlike many at First, he had not bridled at the move to Yasyenevo, to the giant seven story building in the shape of a three-pointed star. Many felt an almost mystic attachment to the building at Dzerzhinsky Square, but he had been irritated by its cramped offices, the unreliable heating and communications systems, the increasing crowds of tourists with their guidebooks and telephoto lenses. The move to Yasyenevo had brought the expansion and privacy those at the top of First had long sought, and had confirmed the First Chief Directorate, the KGB’s foreign intelligence section, as the elite domain within the world’s largest security agency. It had also allowed him to settle some scores, to encourage retirements and advance promotions, to try and mold the higher echelons of the directorate to his liking. It was now no secret where Chairman Andropov was aiming, and his boss Gryslov, as head of the First Chief Directorate, was a logical successor when the move came. That left himself and Veleshin as the two leading candidates for Gryslov’s seventh floor office when reorganization came to Yasyenevo. He was a major general and head of the Scientific and Technical Directorate, and senior to Veleshin by three or four years. Veleshin was only a brigadier general, but was in charge of Third Directorate, which included the prestigious Western Europe beat. It could be a close call, and Veleshin’s overt jockeying for the chairman’s favor was beginning to annoy him. But it was a ploy that could well backfire.
There was one retirement he had been particularly pleased to accomplish. He had never shared in the fawning admiration of the so-called Five Stars. They were supposedly shining examples of the triumph of communist ideology over capitalism, but he had known the three who had escaped to Moscow well enough to know they were dissolute, sentimental fools. The fourth, now exposed to the world, seemed no better. The identity of the fifth was a mystery to him, as to everyone else at First, except he knew that he worked in Whitehall. He seemed made of sterner stuff.
He had always distrusted Philby. The self-conscious, stammering manner, the affectation of gentleman’s distaste for the modern world and its unpleasant necessities, the peculiarly British arrogance that assumed infallibility for his bland analyses. And for all the glamor of his reputation, no one had raised a protest when he had lobbied in the relocation committee against the assignment of an office. Many of his contemporaries were veterans of the Patriotic War and their xenophobia ran deep, no matter how loyal a particular foreigner may have been to the revolution. Orlovsky had thought he had gotten rid of him for good.
Then his source at headquarters had begun to tell him of the private correspondence between Philby and Comrade Andropov. Not only did Philby continue to submit his irrelevant position papers, but occasionally the chairman would actually solicit his opinion, as if to counter the prevailing views at First. Then the freelance material. Profiles of politicians and businessmen, even jazz musicians, pandering blatantly to the chairman’s private tastes. He had heard rumors of weekends at the chairman’s dacha, which thankfully turned out to be false. Now he heard that between them the chairman and Veleshin had turned to Philby over the routine question of a protection operation in Britain. He had not seen the recommendation, and did not know the principals involved, but his friend Maschenko at Department Five had seemed excited at the prospect of a challenging foreign mission. Although he had not been consulted, he would have concurred that Maschenko’s men were the most able and the best trained, and their deployment was the most logical response in such a situation. Orlovsky did not know of the disposition of the case, except that the recommendation had been overridden, and that Veleshin had seemed particularly smug of late. For his part, Maschekno was smoldering over the insult. Orlovsky watched as his breath clouded the reinforced window. He reflected that Veleshin and Philby were both ambitious men, and seemed to have secured an inside track with the chairman. He thought with sudden disgust that the grandiose Englishman might even consider himself a candidate for rehabilitation at First, then dismissed the idea immediately. But he would dearly like to know the response they had cooked up between them. Perhaps it would give him an opportunity to fire a shot across both their bows.
Chapter Six
THE SUMMER DENISE had married and moved out, he grew closer to Yvonne, whose chastity had yielded to the imprecations of his unhappiness. He could not face the idea of another year in school to just to retake the examinations. He enrolled in a Liberal Studies program at the Cambridge College of Technology, and stayed home with his mother. He hated the Tech. He felt older and more intelligent than the other students, and cut off from their hedonism. His few schoolfriends, and particularly Iain, had left for college, and he had his mother to think of. Financially she was all right, with his father’s half pension, and was making a brave attempt to adapt. But she was lost without Harry Smailes’ monumental self-regard as her reference point, and in her loneliness appreciated his staying at home more than she would say.
At the beginning of his second year, Yvonne became pregnant. They had never been that careful. Oddly, he never considered any option other than marriage. It was as if the glad promise of his youth had given way to the obligations of manhood with a momentum he was unable to resist. And within two months, he had asked to see George Dearnley about the possibility of joining the force.
In time he got used to being called Harry’s boy. He knew it would be a long shadow to walk in, but he got the firm impression his father had not been much liked on the force, which gratified him. But it had all seemed inevitable. His father’s admonition from the grave had been too strong.
Immediately on leaving Hawken’s staircase Smailes strode over to the porters’ lodge, signed for a pass key, then asked for a private teleph
one. He was shown into Beecroft’s office, which was vacant, and arranged for the prints officer to meet him at the college within the hour. He took the precaution of phoning directly through to the lab and giving precise directions to Bowles’ court and corridor. He did not want anyone at the college to know he was having second thoughts. He figured that Alex Klammer, the duty officer, could carry his nondescript briefcase past the porters’ lodge without being questioned.
Bowles’ room was as gloomy as before. The SOCO boys and coroner’s people had left the lamp on over the desk, and had replaced the belt in the plant-hook above the window, where it hung limply. The chair had been righted, and stood expectantly next to the potted plant on the floor. Smailes stood on the chair and carefully replaced the belt with the aspidistra, holding the plastic plant pot with his handkerchief and working the belt-hole off the hook with his free hand. He placed the belt on the desk beside the typewriter and studied them both slowly. He doubted the leather of the belt would take a decent print, and anyway, it had probably been handled by several others already besides himself. Same for the chair. The typewriter was a different story, of course. He knew the metal body and plastic keys would take the tiny sweat prints beautifully, and it was unlikely the machine had been touched since Bowles had supposedly used it to type his last message to the world. When he squatted next to it, the detective could see distinct whorls lit by the compressed light from the desklamp on the space bar and return key. The lamp would take good prints too, and maybe the plant pot. He would have Klammer dust the whole desk, the hanging plant and the chair.
The file cabinet was a possibility too. He swung open the first drawer and again he saw the first file labelled Abominable Snowman. There were several hanging files which seemed to contain papers and clippings. Further back was a file labelled Extraterrestrials. For a mathematician, Bowles certainly had had a speculative curiosity.
The second file drawer was introduced by a typed tab that read Cambridge, and by a smaller tab on the first hanging file labelled Apostles. The drawers and files were obviously ranged alphabetically, which made sense for such an organized mind as Bowles’. Smailes pulled the Apostles file. The notes were typed, and obviously quite recent. They seemed to describe some secret society at Cambridge University in the thirties, which meant nothing to him. He replaced the file and looked through the other subdivisions. The file headings seemed to reflect a dry sense of humor—Fellows and Travellers, Golf Club and Chess Society, The Trinity Homintern—and a personal code that was impenetrable to him. The file drawer was full, with twelve or thirteen fat files. Towards the front he found a more recognizable file, labelled Communist Party of Great Britain, which he pulled. It contained pages and pages of typed notes. He wondered whether any of this stuff would be of interest to the Special Branch, and made a mental note to check out the second drawer more thoroughly.
The third drawer was arranged similarly. The file label at the front said Kennedy, followed by a series of supporting files marked neatly with colored tabs. Smailes scanned the headings: The Geometry of a Murder, The Hall of Mirrors, Hands Of Cuba, Jack Ruby—The Jew Who Had Guts. Again, he was struck by the quirky style. The last title seemed particularly odd, so he pulled out the fat folder and moved to the desk to examine it. He spread the pages carefully and saw a series of photocopied articles, handwritten and typed notes, and a collection of black-and-white photographs. At the front of the file was a typed document stapled together, which bore the same title as the file itself. Smailes flipped it open to the second page and read:
The Warren Commission concluded that Ruby’s murder of Oswald was a freak accident that changed history, that premeditation could only be inferred if there was evidence that Ruby had been stalking Oswald from the time Oswald was in custody. Yet that is precisely what Ruby had done. He was observed at Dallas police station the Friday evening Oswald was arrested, attempting to enter the room where Oswald was being interrogated. He was there the following day, at the precise time Oswald was first scheduled to be moved to the county jail. Then he appeared in the station basement with split-second timing on Sunday morning to murder Oswald in front of scores of armed police and a television audience of millions.
Jack Ruby had led a life of seamless venality, uncluttered by any demonstrated concern for other human beings. The notion that he killed Oswald out of compassion for Jacqueline Kennedy is nonsense. So is his later assertion that he intended to show the world that a Jew could have guts. He killed Oswald because he knew he would be tortured and killed himself if he did not, believing desperately that he could escape a murder charge and receive a light sentence because he would be seen as a hero by the American people. In fact, he only escaped the electric chair on a technicality, and died of lung cancer while awaiting a retrial.
Smailes had been ten years old when John Kennedy was shot. He remembered he had been playing at Iain Mack’s house, with their model trains, when Iain’s sister had dashed into the room and told them in a superior way that they had shot the American president. The two boys had thought it was a joke, barely knowing who the American president was, but Janet had started to cry.
Days later he remembered seeing the shooting of the president’s killer on television. Oswald, a greasy little man surrounded by gangsters, was walking through a concrete basement when one of the gangsters stepped forward and shot him. Then the other gangsters jumped on the killer. The news announcer had told them excitedly that the gangsters were Dallas policemen.
Over the years Smailes had paid little attention to the intermittent sensational accounts in the press and on television of plots and conspiracies in the Kennedy murder. The assassination seemed part of the incomprehensible way that American society worked, an example of its deep, repulsive violence. What he had learned, years later as a policeman, was that there was no way Ruby could have gotten into that police basement without the active collusion of someone on the force. With a prisoner like Oswald, those kinds of mistakes didn’t happen. And sure enough, it had come out that Ruby was a minor hoodlum and a cop gladhander. He provided the police booze and women, and they in turn knocked down the assault and traffic charges on which he was continually being hauled in. Which meant there were probably other, more serious charges on which he was never hauled in, Smailes knew. He knew that score. There were a few like Ruby in Cambridge, these days. Wide boys, the Cambridge cops called them. A crate of beer and Scotch at Christmas, big donations to the benevolent fund. It was a measure of your integrity as a cop, how much slack you cut them.
Thinking about the Kennedy assassination after all this time made Smailes pause as he replaced the file. He wondered if it was true, after all, that Oswald had been the killer. He opened the bottom file drawer, which began with a file labelled Marie Celeste. Then a large Miscellaneous file. Then a big alphabetic jump to UFOs. He closed the drawer, leaving the cabinet unlocked. If the family were due in the following day, it would be simpler if they didn’t have to hunt around for keys. He scanned the outside of the case carefully, but could see no distinct prints with the naked eye.
The standing bookcase to the right of the file cabinet was filled almost exclusively with mathematics and physics textbooks, with a row of binders on the top shelf. Smailes removed one and found workpapers which contained an incomprehensible series of formulae and equations. He replaced the book and shuddered slightly. Mathematical formulae had always looked like barbed wire to him.
Across the room the bookshelves above the bed contained more varied titles. He noticed also that Bowles had them arranged into a kind of private library, with identifying labels taped to the base of each spine. They seemed to reflect the subjects displayed in the files, meticulously arranged by subject and author. Bowles had obviously been a lover of books. Most were hardbacks and had been kept in excellent condition. He removed an old volume on Himalayan travel and noticed that the dust jacket had been carefully repaired. On the inside cover was written Simon Bowles, 1967, a conspicuous sign of pride of ownership.
There was one whole shelf of books relating to American society and to the Kennedy assassination in particular. There were almost two shelves of books about World War II, international espionage, and communism. In this section were also biographies and memoirs about Cambridge University in the twentieth century. There was nothing to suggest to the detective what might have been preoccupying the young man on the night of his death. He checked the desk drawer again, and confirmed that there were no files or papers on which Bowles might have been working. He decided to check the clothes closet on the far side of the room. It contained a modest selection of clothes, and an old briefcase lying on the floor. Smailes removed it expectantly and sat down in one of the armchairs in front of the electric fire.
He was disappointed. There were a lot of handwritten notes in a childish hand which the detective found practically indecipherable, some mathematical work, bank statements, and a collection of personal letters all received within the last six months. He glanced through one from Bowles’ sister, one from his mother and one from a friend called Hugh. They contained nothing of any significance as far as the detective could ascertain, and he felt no relish for examining Bowles’ papers further. He replaced the briefcase and sat down in the armchair again to wait for Klammer, the fingerprint officer.
He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, irritated by the pique he felt at this case. It was just a suicide, after all. Bowles was undoubtedly a bright young man, but he was also unstable, and not particularly communicative about his feelings. Maybe something particular had happened in the hour or so after he got back from the bar to compel him to take his own life. Maybe nothing had happened, except whatever well of misery and grief he had in his life had suddenly and unexpectedly spilled over. Davies and Hawken had both been testy and agitated, but it was perhaps understandable given the fact they had tried deliberately to monitor Bowles’ emotional state, and failed. Smailes lit a cigarette and reached down for an empty ashtray in the hearth of the old fireplace. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was almost three-twenty, and realized he might have a long wait for Klammer.