Seven Days to a Killing

by Clive Egleton

  His eyes took in her bare feet and the nylon dressing-gown worn loosely over a strawberry pink slip. ‘Where’s Paul?’ he said.

  ‘Golfing. I told you he always goes to the club on a Thursday— remember?’

  She was standing very close to him now and their knees were almost touching. She put an arm around his neck and kissed him with an open mouth and gently but firmly pushed him back into the room.

  ‘This is foolish, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Do you really think that Paul and I will stay together when this is over? I’m going to leave him.’

  ‘I’m not interested in your future plans.’

  ‘Are you also an empty husk like Paul?’ Her hand moved across the flat of his stomach and then caressed him. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can feel you’re a real man.’

  ‘You’re a whore,’ he said angrily.

  ‘Why don’t you treat me like one, then? Or are you afraid of what Paul might say or do? He won’t do or say anything because he’ll never know.’

  Her active hand continued to excite him and her body moved against his. The smile was an open-ended invitation, and slipping her arms out of the dressing-gown, she allowed it to fall to her feet. He reached out and tearing off the thin satin straps, he rolled the slip down to her waist with about as much affection as he would have given to peeling a banana.

  She stepped back a pace and removed her bra. ‘You’re an animal,’ she whispered, ‘a wonderful, savage animal.’

  McKee cupped her breasts in the palm of each hand, and then, quite deliberately, he pinched the nipples between finger and thumb.

  ‘You hurt me,’ she moaned. ‘You really hurt me then.’

  McKee stooped, lifted and threw her on to the bed. ‘Isn’t that what you’ve been wanting me to do?’ he said.

  Her teeth were clenched together and the smile on her face was predatory. ‘Oh yes,’ she whispered, ‘you know that’s what I want.’

  There was no tenderness, no expression of love, just the urgency of a dog coupling with a bitch on heat. They rolled, fought, bit, twisted and crushed one another like frenzied animals cooped up in a cage until, finally, McKee pushed her away and lay exhausted on his back breathing heavily.

  She lay beside him in silence, her hand resting on his thigh, and slowly his eyelids began to droop, and seeing this, she leaned over and sought to arouse him.

  McKee pushed her hand away. ‘What’s the matter with you,’ he said, ‘haven’t you had enough?’

  She laughed softly. ‘Didn’t you know?—we Poles have passionate natures.’

  McKee turned, his left arm flailed in a half circle and he struck her across the face with the open palm and her skull cracked against the headboard. Four livid fingermarks began to leave their imprint on her cheek and tears gathered in her eyes. McKee grabbed her by the throat. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he hissed. ‘I’ll kill you if ever I hear you say that again.’ He put a foot against her hip and shoved her on to the floor. ‘Get out of here, you whore,’ he said tightly.

  She crawled across the room on her hands and knees gathering the torn slip and bra, and then she managed to stand up, and the tears were streaming down her face and she was trembling like a leaf, and she pushed her blonde hair out of her eyes and somehow she succeeded in composing herself, and there was even a certain amount of dignity about her.

  ‘At least I know who and what I am,’ she said quietly, ‘but can you say the same?’ She walked out and the door slammed behind her.

  McKee rolled over on to his back and stared up at the ceiling. She had posed a question which he had difficulty in answering and for the first time in years, he was in doubt. He closed his eyes; images of the last thirty-one years passed in a kaleidoscope.

  *

  It is Saturday, the 28th of June, and the dirt road leading east is a shuffling stream of refugees, stragglers and deserters. Every bus and lorry had been commandeered by the army and only the lucky ones have some form of transport—a bicycle or a horse and cart. Most people are on foot, and the dust rises in a choking grey-white cloud and attacks your eyes and throat, and you are tired and thirsty and very hungry.

  Minsk is a long way behind and you have crossed the Berezina, but the Dnieper still lies ahead of you and you will cross it at Mogilev before swinging north-east to Smolensk. You are pulling a handcart on which your mother has placed her treasured possessions and she is walking beside you, a rather stout woman whose ankles are badly swollen, and you are gradually dropping back in the column because she cannot walk as quickly as you would wish, and you think about your sister Svetlana who is married to a doctor and who lives in Smolensk, and you wonder about your father who is a Brigade Commissar with V. I. Kuznetsov’s 3rd Army at Grodno, and you hope he is still alive.

  And because you are lost in thought, you do not hear the strafing ME 109s until you see the strike of their cannon-shot on the track, and miraculously you are unharmed, and you turn to your mother but she is lying in the ditch by the roadside, and her eyes are already glazed because one leg has been blown off at the hip. But you do not weep because you are numbed with shock, and you abandon the cart and go on, and later, much later, it seems to you that the column is hardly moving at all, and then the reason for this log jam becomes clear.

  The road block is manned by internal security troops of the NKVD who are sorting the deserters and stragglers out from amongst the dense column of refugees. For the first time you are aware of the man at your side and you notice that he is trying to conceal the sleeves of his jacket and instinctively you know that he has removed the tell-tale insignia of the red star and hammer and sickle of the Political Commissar, and thinking of your father, you are suddenly disgusted and you wonder if you should tell the troopers. But the NKVD men are observant, and the man is taken into the field and stood apart from the ordinary soldiers, and his hands are tied behind his back and then he is forced to kneel down, and you can see that his shoulders are quivering and the tremor ends only when he is shot through the back of the head with a bolt-operated Moissim Nagant rifle. And suddenly you are afraid for your father and you hope, oh how you hope that a like fate does not await him, but you will never know. He is just one of two hundred and ninety thousand men who will be taken prisoner when the 3rd and 10 th Armies trapped inside the Bialystok pocket capitulate.

  It is the sixth day of the Great Fatherland War of the Soviet Union. You are Andrei Kalinine and you are fifteen years old.

  *

  The city is a scarred mountain of rubble softened by the winter snow. The buildings which are still standing are but empty shells, and their fire-blackened walls are stark in the light of a November morning. You are crouching with the rest of the company behind the rubble of an apartment block, waiting to cross the start line and the objective is the Tractor Works. The city is Stalingrad and this is your first battle.

  You are dressed for winter in white hood, white smock and white trousers and you clutch a PPSH machine carbine in your gloved hands, and you have had only eight weeks’ training and understandably you are a little nervous and you wish now that you hadn’t lied about your age. The platoon sergeant frightens you, but only when he is drunk, because when he is drunk he likes to boast of the things he has seen and done. You recall him telling you that the Fascists had been forced to issue new pay books to their flame-thrower troops in an effort to disguise their trade in case they were taken prisoner, and innocently you had asked why this should be necessary, and the sergeant had smiled wolfishly and said, ‘Because we fry them with their own flamethrowers.’

  And now Commissar Vatutin is moving along the ranks, and he gives you a warm friendly smile and you feel encouraged, but as he passes you the smile is wiped from his face and he looks stern as he stands before the two men who had been attached to your company from the punishment battalion. These men are dressed in summer uniform and they are unarmed, and they seem more like scarecrows than soldiers, for they are hollow-eyed and despair is written in their faces
. Commissar Vatutin draws his Makarov pistol and reluctantly they get to their feet, and climbing over the pile of protective rubble, they start moving towards the tractor Plant. They cover fifty metres before they are caught in enfilade by the MG42 sited in the basement of what used to be the bus depot. The machine-gun stutters briefly and they die twitching in the snow, and the platoon sergeant says, ‘They did a good job, that MG could have done the lot of us,’ and suddenly you know the sergeant is right.

  *

  The rain beats against the canvas roof of the field hospital and the wind, lifting the tent flaps, causes the oil stove to flicker. The ward is paved with duckboards which have become greasy and you are quite sure that the bed is gradually sinking into the glutinous mud. Your right leg is in plaster but you count yourself lucky that it is only fractured and that the pieces of metal from the Shoe Mine have not so lacerated the tendons as to cripple you for the rest of your life. The nurses have done their best to make the ward tidy because Sokolovsky, the West Front commander, is to visit the hospital, and you are feeling particularly proud because you are to be decorated with the Order of the Red Star and the Medal for Battle Merit. The Medal for Battle Merit has been awarded for your part in the liberation of Smolensk on the 25th of September 1943, and you are not sure that you really deserve it for many others in the company who ran through the minefield to attack the strong-point in the Collective Farm were equally brave and yet they have not been singled out. Perhaps you have Commissar Vatutin to thank for that; he has looked after you like a son since that first battle in Stalingrad ten months ago, and it is not entirely coincidental that you and he stayed together when the 421st Rifle Division was broken up and its survivors sent as reinforcements to 10th Guards Army. Your hand seeks and finds his note which you keep under the straw-filled mattress and you read it once more.

  You have never considered transferring into the NKVD before but Vatutin wishes to recommend you and he points out that you will be better able to serve the Fatherland, and as a member of the Komsomol, it is your duty to do so, and you think that perhaps this is what your father would have wanted.

  *

  The month is July and the war has been over for two months and you are a Lieutenant in the NKVD screening the returning prisoners of war. They arrive in cattle trucks and when the doors are opened you find that some men have gone to elaborate lengths to commit suicide and you come across one man who has tried unsuccessfully to garrotte himself with a sleeve torn from his shirt. And you place the 9-mm Makarov pistol against his head and squeeze the trigger, and you think nothing of it for you have seen the tattooed blood group under his arm and you know that this swine has served in the Waffen SS, and he is not alone— there are thousands of like bastards who deserted in ’41 and ’42 and joined the Wehrmacht. Special vigilance is needed to unmask these traitors to the Fatherland, and excelling at it, your work is recognised by the award of the Medal for Valour. This medal, which was instituted on the 17th of October 1938, will do more to further your career in the State Security Forces than any other single factor.

  *

  In 1951, at the age of twenty-five, you are sent to the School of Languages to study English for two years, and one day, quite by chance, you run into your sister Svetlana outside the GUM store in Moscow and at first you do not recognise her for she is like an old woman. You learn that her husband was captured in the early days of the war and Svetlana was sent to a forced labour camp for nearly three years under Order Number 274 of 1941. It seems to you that she is looking for sympathy but you remember that when Stalin’s son Yakov, an artillery captain, was taken prisoner in Belorussia in 1941, he had no hesitation in imprisoning his daughter-in-law and what was good enough for Stalin’s daughter- in-law was certainly good enough for Svetlana. She tells you that her husband never returned from the war and she is living now with a construction worker. She is all the family you have left but you part outside the GUM and you never write or see her again.

  In late 1953 you are sent to Kazanakov in the Urals. It is a curious town where only English is spoken and there is a branch of Lloyds Bank and the sole currency in use is English. You were Captain Andrei Kalinine, holder of the Order of the Red Star, the Medal for Valour, the Medal for Battle Merit, the Defence of Stalingrad Medal, the Medal for the Capture of Koenigsberg and the Medal for Victory over Germany during the Great War of the Fatherland, but as soon as you step off the train at Kazanakov you cease to exist.

  *

  The question is answered. You know who you are and what you are—you are Andrew McKee, aged forty-six, single, born of British parents in Argentina and by profession you are an insurance broker, and you are about to bring off the coup of the century.

  11

  THEY CAME BACK ON AN AIR FRANCE CARAVELLE BECAUSE THAT WAS THE first available flight, and Harper sent a car to meet them at Heathrow. Tarrant sat between Drew and Vincent who were ominously silent as they took the M4 out of London. Neither man told him where they were going and he was not inclined to ask. He sensed their hostility and although he could understand the reason for it, he didn’t care. He had given David a few precious hours, and Tarrant hoped that somehow the time gained would be used to advantage. They followed the line of the Thames Valley out to the stockbroker country and then, just outside Goring on Thames, they left the main road, drove along a lane for about a mile and then turned into a private drive which led up to the isolated house.

  The house had once belonged to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries until Harper had acquired it on behalf of his Department in 1962, since when it had been used as a country retreat for guests of the Department, some of whom came willingly, some of whom did not. The basement of this house was reserved for recalcitrant visitors and, in its way, was rather unique. Dimming facilities and ultra-violet light made it possible to so regulate the passing of time that a man could quickly become disorientated. The temperature could also be raised and lowered at will.

  It was sparsely furnished with a steel-topped table, a pair of tubular steel chairs and a steel bunk with biscuit-shaped horsehair mattresses. Every item of furniture in the room was fixed to the floor with six-inch screws. A telephone stood on the table and outwardly there was nothing remarkable about it, except that anyone using it was connected to an exchange in the adjoining room, above which a digital display computer would record the sequence of the numbers dialled and so enable the monitors to make the correct response. It was to this room that Tarrant was brought under escort and then left to face Harper alone.

  Harper said, ‘I do hope you aren’t going to be difficult.’

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  Harper considered the question carefully. ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  Tarrant said, ‘I’d like to call Colonel Mulholland.’

  ‘How refreshing—I thought you might want to talk to your solicitor.’

  ‘Can I use this phone?’

  ‘Of course, that’s what it’s there for.’

  Tarrant dialled 01-930-9400 and the numbers flashed up on the digital display. Drew allowed the phone to ring for precisely half a minute and then ordered the fake operator to answer.

  A woman’s voice said, ‘9400, which number do you require?’

  Tarrant said, ‘Extension 5911, please.’

  There was a brief pause and then he heard the ringing tone and the number went on ringing and ringing until the switchboard operator said, ‘I’m afraid there is no answer from that extention, would you like to speak to someone else?’

  Tarrant said he didn’t and hung up.

  ‘I expect Mulholland has left the office,’ Harper said helpfully. ‘After all, it is a quarter past seven.’

  ‘I could try his home number.’

  ‘Please do, I’m in no hurry.’

  Tarrant dialled 100, waited, and then said, ‘Cherstone 91568.’

  ‘Cherstone 91568. What is your number please, caller?’

  Tarrant checked the number displayed on the instrument and said
, ‘Goringvale 266034.’

  There was a pause of a minute or so and then he heard a blipping sound and the operator said, ‘Sorry, caller, your number is engaged. Would you like me to call you back later when it’s free?’

  ‘Yes, please do that,’ said Tarrant.

  ‘You know,’ said Harper, ‘I find you a curious person, Tarrant.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘In your position, I would have asked to speak to my wife. I’d want to know if she’d heard anything more about our son. But you didn’t, and I think that is strange.’

  ‘And I think you’re pretty strange too. I was brought to this place and the attitude of your goons suggested that I was under arrest, so what did you expect me to say?—Good evening, Mr Harper, have you heard from my wife? For Christ’s sake, if there had been any further news of David, you would have told me about it. I was brought here because you want to know what happened in Paris.’

  ‘I know what happened in Paris—I lost half a million pounds’ worth of diamonds, and you set the whole thing up. You arranged to have your son kidnapped.’

  Tarrant stared at him in disbelief. ‘You’ve got to be joking or else you’re mad,’ he said.

  ‘I know you did it, and I’ll tell you how. You used four men dressed as paratroopers, but James Stroud saw only one of them, and this man was an officer, and apparently he said something about using the airfield as a DZ.’

  ‘A Dropping Zone?’

  ‘Precisely. That’s good psychology because, you see, every mother warns her child about speaking to strangers, with the possible exception of policemen, and I think perhaps soldiers are in the same category as far as the child is concerned. At any rate, what more natural place to find a paratrooper than at a deserted airfield where he proposes to hold a practice descent for his battalion. Certainly David would accept that explanation and the man would be able to get very close to those two boys without arousing their suspicion. He knocked both boys unconscious and they were then placed in two packing crates and taken by Land-Rover to a gravel pit just outside Coxwold, where tyre marks would seem to indicate that there were two or three other cars waiting for them. Plaster casts have enabled the police to identify two of these vehicles; one was a Ford Zephyr towing a horse-box and the other was a Mini. I should add that the Land-Rover and the army uniforms have been recovered from the bottom of the gravel pit.’