General Yevgeni Karpov climbed the last of the stairs to the third floor of the apartment building on Mira Prospekt and rang the buzzer. After several minutes the door opened. Philby’s wife stood in the frame. Karpov could hear the sound of small boys at their tea inside. He had chosen 6:00 p.m. on the hunch that they would be home from school by then.
“Hello, Erita.”
She tilted her head back in a small gesture of defiance. A very protective lady, he thought. Perhaps she knew Karpov was no admirer of her husband.
“Comrade General.”
“Is Kim at home?”
“No. He’s away.”
Not “he’s out,” but “he’s away,” thought Karpov. He affected surprise. “Oh, I had hoped to catch him. Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“No. He’ll be back when he’ll be back.”
“Any idea where I might contact him?”
“No.”
Karpov frowned. Something Philby had said at the Kryuchkov dinner ... about not being allowed to drive since his stroke. Karpov had already checked the basement parking area. Philby’s Volga was there.
“I thought you drove him around these days, Erita.”
She was half smiling. Not the expression of a woman whose husband has walked out on her. More the smile of a woman whose husband has obtained a promotion. “Not anymore. He has a driver.”
“I’m impressed. Well, sorry to have missed him. I’ll try to catch him when he gets back.”
He descended the stairs deep in thought. Retired colonels did not rate personal drivers. Back in his own flat, two blocks behind the Ukraina Hotel, Karpov called the KGB motor pool and insisted on speaking to the chief clerk. When he identified himself, the clerk’s reaction was suitably deferential. Karpov was bluff and jovial. “I’m not in the habit of handing out bouquets of carnations, but I see no reason not to when good work has been done.”
“Thank you, Comrade General.”
“That chauffeur who has been driving for my friend Comrade Colonel Philby. He speaks extremely highly of him. A very fine driver, so he says. If my own man is ever sick, I must ask for him personally.”
“Thank you again, Comrade General. I’ll tell Gregoriev myself.”
Karpov hung up. Gregoriev. Never heard of him. But a quiet talk with the man might be useful.
The next morning, April 8, the Akademik Komarov moved quietly past Greenock and into the Clyde, bound upriver for the port of Glasgow. She stopped briefly at Greenock to pick up the pilot and two customs officers. They had the usual glass in the captain’s cabin and ascertained that the ship was out of Leningrad and in ballast to pick up a cargo of heavy-duty pump accessories from Weir of Cathcart Limited. The customs men checked the crew list but did not memorize any particular name. Later it would be established that deckhand Konstantin Semyonov was on the list.
The habitual practice when Soviet illegals enter a country by ship is that their names do not appear on the crew list. The illegal arrives crouched in a tiny cubbyhole, or oubliette, that has been skillfully cut into the ship’s structure and so well hidden that the most thorough search would not uncover it. Then, if the man for operational or accidental reasons fails to go out on the same ship, there is no discrepancy in the crew list. But this had been a hurried operation. There had been no time for structural changes.
The extra crewman had arrived with the men from Moscow only hours before the Komarov was due to leave Leningrad for Glasgow on a long-scheduled freight run, and the captain and his resident political officer had had no choice but to put him on the crew list. His seaman’s paybook was in order, and he would be returning, they were told.
Nevertheless, the man had taken a cabin to himself, spent the whole voyage in it, and the two genuine deckhands whose cabin it was had become fed up with their sleeping bags on the wardroom floor. These bags were cleared away by the time the Scottish pilot came on board. Down in his cabin, tense, for evident reasons, Courier Two was waiting for midnight.
While the Clyde pilot stood on the bridge of the Komarov and the fields of Strathclyde slid by as he munched his breakfast sandwiches, it was already noon in Moscow. Karpov called the KGB motor pool again. There was a new chief clerk on duty, as he knew there would be.
“My driver looks as if he’s coming down with the flu,” he said. “He’ll see the day out, but I’m giving him tomorrow off.”
“I’ll ensure that you get a replacement, Comrade General.”
“I’d prefer Gregoriev. Is he available? I’ve heard the best reports of him.”
There was a rustle of paper as the clerk checked his files. “Yes, indeed. He’s been on temporary assignment but he’s back in the pool.”
“Good. Have him report to my Moscow flat at eight tomorrow morning, I’ll have the keys, and the Chaika will be in the basement.”
Stranger and stranger, Karpov thought as he put the phone down. Gregoriev had been ordered to drive Philby around for a while. Why? Because there was a great deal of driving to do, too much for Erita to cope with? Or so that Erita should not know where he was going? And now the man was back in the pool again. Meaning? Probably that Philby was now somewhere else and did not need a driver anymore, at least not until the end of whatever operation he was involved in.
That evening, Karpov told his grateful regular driver he could have the following day off to take his family out.
The same Wednesday evening, Sir Nigel Irvine had a dinner date with a friend in Oxford.
One of the charming things about Saint Antony’s College, Oxford, is that, like so many highly influential British institutions, so far as the general public is concerned it does not exist.
In fact it does exist but is so small and so discreet that if anyone surveying the groves of academe in the British Isles were to blink, he would probably miss it. Its Hall is small, elegant, and tucked away out of sight; it offers no degree courses, educates no students, has no undergraduates and therefore no graduates, and awards no degrees. It has a few resident professors and fellows, who sometimes dine together in Hall but live in rooms scattered around the city, and others who live elsewhere and simply visit. It occasionally invites outsiders to address the fellows—an extraordinary honor—and the professors and fellows occasionally submit papers to the higher echelons of the British establishment, where they are taken very seriously. Its funding is as private as the profile it maintains.
In fact it is a think tank where assembled intellects, often with extensive nonacademic experience, pursue the study of one single discipline: current affairs.
That evening, Sir Nigel dined in Hall with his host, Professor Jeremy Sweeting, and after an excellent repast the professor took the Master back to his rooms in an agreeable house on the outskirts of Oxford for port and coffee.
“Now, Nigel,” said Professor Sweeting when they had broached a vintage Taylor and were at ease before the fire in the study, “what can I do for you?”
“Have you by any chance, Jeremy, heard of a thing called the MBR?”
Professor Sweeting held his port in midair. He stared at it fiar a long while. “You know, Nigel, you really do have a way of spoiling a chap’s evening when you have a mind to. Where did you hear those letters?”
For answer, Sir Nigel Irvine passed over the Preston report. Professor Sweeting read it carefully, and it took him an hour. Irvine knew that the professor, unlike John Preston, was no legman. He did not get out on the ground. But he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxian theory and practice, of dialectical materialism, and of the teachings of Lenin on the applicability of theory to the practice of the achievement of power. His pursuit and his absorption was to read, study, collate, and analyze.
“Remarkable,” said Sweeting as he handed back the report. “A different approach, a different attitude, of course, and a completely different methodology. But we’ve come up with the same answers.”
“Care to tell me what those answers are?” asked Sir Nigel gently.
“It’s only theory, of course,” apologized Professor Sweeting. “A thousand straws in the wind that may—or may not—make up a bale of hay. Anyway, this is what I’ve been on since June 1983. ...”
He talked for two hours, and when, much later, Sir Nigel left to be driven back to London, he was a very pensive man.
* * *
The Akademik Komarov was tied up at the Finnieston Quay in the heart of Glasgow, so that the giant crane there could hoist the pumps aboard in the morning. There are no customs or immigration checks there; foreign seamen can simply walk off their ships, across the quay, and into the streets of Glasgow.
At midnight, while Professor Sweeting was still talking, deckhand Semyonov walked down the gangplank, followed the quay for a hundred yards, avoided Betty’s Bar, outside whose door a few drunken sailors were still protesting their right to just one more drink, and turned up Finnieston Street.
He was unremarkable in appearance, being dressed in a turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and an anorak; his shoes were scuffed. Under one arm he clutched a canvas gunnysack held closed by a drawstring. Passing under the Clydeside Expressway, he reached Argyle Street, turned left, and followed it to Partick Cross. He consulted no map but headed on into Hyndland Road. A mile farther on, he reached another major artery, the Great Western Road. He had memorized his route days before.
Here he checked his watch; it told him he still had half an hour. The rendezvous could not be more than ten minutes’ walk ahead. He turned left and proceeded in the direction of the Pond Hotel, next to the boating lake and a hundred yards past the BP service station whose lights he could see blazing in the distance. He was almost at the bus stop at the junction of the Great Western and Hughenden roads when he saw them. They were lounging about in the passenger shelter of the bus stop. It was half past one in the morning, and there were five of them.
In some parts of Britain they call them “skinheads” or “punks,” but in Glasgow they call them “Neds.” Semyonov thought of crossing the street but he was too late. One of them called out to him, and they spilled out of the bus shelter. He could speak some English, but their broad, drink-slurred Glaswegian dialect defeated him. They blocked the sidewalk, so he stepped into the street. One of them grabbed his arm and shouted at him. What the lout actually said was “Wha’ ha’ ya got in ya wee sack, then?”
But Semyonov could not understand, so he shook his head and tried to walk past. Then they were on him and he went down under a rain of blows. When he was in the gutter the kicking started. He dimly felt hands tearing at his gunnysack, so he clutched it to his belly with both hands and rolled over, taking the blows around the head and kidneys.
Devonshire Terrace overlooks that road junction; it is a row of solid, four-story, middle-class houses of buff and gray sandstone blocks. On the top floor of one, Mrs. Sylvester, old, widowed, alone, and riddled with arthritis, was unable to sleep. She heard the shouts from the street below and hobbled from her bed to the window. What she saw caused her to limp across the room to the telephone, where she dialed 999 and asked for the police. She told the police operator where to send the patrol car but hung up when asked for her name and address. Respectable people—and those of Devonshire Terrace are very respectable—do not like to get involved.
Police Constables Alistair Craig and Hugh McBain were in their patrol car a mile down the Great Western at the Hillhead end when the call came through. Traffic was nearly nonexistent and they reached the bus stop in ninety seconds. When the Neds saw the headlights and heard the siren, they ceased trying to rip away the gunnysack and chose to race away across the grass verge that separates Hughenden Road from the Great Western, so the patrol car could not follow them. By the time Police Constable Craig could leap out of the car they were disappearing shadows and pursuit was useless. In any case, the priority was the victim.
Craig bent over the man. He was unconscious and huddled in the fetal position. “Ambulance, Hughie,” Craig called across to McBain, who was already on the radio. The ambulance from the Western Infirmary came six minutes later. Meanwhile, the two officers left the injured man strictly alone, as per procedure, save that they covered him with a blanket.
The ambulance men eased the limp form onto a gurney and into the back of the vehicle. As they were tucking the blanket around the victim, Craig lifted the gunnysack and placed it in the rear of the ambulance. “You go with him, I’ll follow,” shouted McBain, so Craig climbed into the ambulance as well.
They all arrived at the hospital in less than five minutes. The ambulance men quickly wheeled the injured man through the swinging doors, down the corridor, around two corners, and into the rear of the casualty ward. As this was an emergency admission, there was no need for them to pass through the public waiting room, where the usual collection of small-hours-of-the-morning drunks nursed the cuts and bruises collected while in earlier contact with a number of unyielding objects.
Craig waited at the entrance while McBain parked the patrol car. When his partner joined him, he said, “You handle the admission forms, Hughie. I’ll go along and see if I can get you a name and address.” McBain sighed. Admission forms went on forever.
Craig collected the gunnysack and followed the gurney down the corridor to Emergency. This department at the Western Infirmary consists of a passage with swinging doors at each end and twelve curtained examination rooms, six at either side of the central corridor. Eleven of the rooms are used for examinations; the twelfth is the nurse’s office, and it is located nearest the rear entrance through which the gurneys come. The doors at the other end have one-way mirrors in their panels and give onto the public-waiting room where the walking wounded are made to sit and wait their turn.
Leaving McBain with a sheaf of admission-forms to fill in, Craig went through the mirrored doors to see the unconscious man on his gurney, parked at the other end. The nurse gave the injured man the usual once-over—he was alive, at any rate—and asked the orderlies to put him on a table in one of the examination rooms so that the gurney could be returned to the ambulance. The cubicle they chose was the one opposite the nurse’s office.
The house physician on duty that night, an Indian named Mehta, was summoned. He had the orderlies strip the injured man to the waist—he could see no signs of blood leaking through the trousers—and made a lengthier examination before ordering an X-ray. Then he left to attend to another emergency admission from a car crash.
The nurse telephoned X-Ray but it was occupied. They would let her know when they were free. She put on her kettle to make a cup of tea.
Police Constable Craig, having ascertained that his anonymous charge was still unconscious on his back across the corridor, took the man’s anorak, entered the nurse’s office, and placed both anorak and gunnysack on her desk. “Have you a spare cup of that brew?” he asked in the jocular familiarity used by people of the night who spend their duty hours cleaning up the mess of a major city.
“I might,” she said, “but I don’t see why I should waste it on the likes of you.”
Craig grinned. He felt through the pockets of the anorak and extracted a seaman’s paybook. It bore the photograph of the man in the examination room across the way, and was in two languages, Russian and French. He understood neither. He could not read Cyrillic script, but the name was in Roman letters also, in the French-language section.
“Who’s the patient?” asked the nurse, preparing two cups of tea.
“Looks like a seaman, and a Russian at that,” said Craig, perturbed. A citizen of Glasgow roughed up by a gang of Neds was one thing; a foreigner—and a Russian, at that—could spell problems. To try to discover what ship the man could be from, Craig emptied the gunnysack. It contained simply a rolled-up, thick-knit sweater, which was wrapped around a circular, screw-top tobacco tin. Inside the tin was not tobacco but a wad of cotton that shrouded two disks of aluminum with, between them, another two-inch-diameter disk of a dull gray metal. Craig examined the three disks without interest, replaced them in their bed of cotton, screwed the tin shut again, and laid it on the table beside the paybook. What he did not know was that across the corridor the victim of the mugging attack had come to and was peering through the curtains at him. What he did know was that it was time to tell Division that he had an injured Russian on his hands.
“Use your phone, pet?” he asked the nurse, and reached out for it.
“Don’t you ‘pet’ me,” called back the nurse, who was somewhat older than the twenty-four-year-old Craig. “God, they get younger every day.”
Craig began to dial. Just what went through Konstantin Semyonov’s mind will never be known. Dazed and confused, probably suffering a concussion from the kicks to his head, he could see the unmistakable black uniform of a British policeman with his back to him across the corridor. He could see his own paybook and the consignment he had been told to bring to Britain and deliver to the agent at the boating lake sitting on the table by the policeman’s hand. He had watched the officer examine the consignment—Semyonov himself had never dared open the tobacco tin—and now the man was phoning. Perhaps the seaman had visions of an endless third-degree examination in some reeking cellar beneath Strathclyde police headquarters. ...
The first thing Craig knew, he was roughly elbowed aside, caught completely unawares. A bare arm pushed past him, reached for the tin, and grabbed it. Craig responded quickly, dropping the telephone and grasping the outstretched arm. “What the hell!” he shouted; then, assuming the poor fellow was hallucinating, he grabbed the man and tried to restrain him. The tin was shaken from the Russian’s hand and fell to the floor. For a moment Semyonov stared at the Scottish policeman, then panicked and ran. Still calling, “Hey, come back here!” Craig thundered down the corridor after him.
Shortie Patterson was a drunk. A lifetime dedicated to sampling the produce of Scotland had made him unemployed and unemployable. He was no ordinary drunk; he had elevated intoxication to an art form. The previous day he had drawn his welfare allowance and gone to the nearest boozer; by midnight he had been paralyzed. In the small hours he had taken exception to the offensive attitude of a lamppost that refused to respond to his entreaties for the price of a dram, so he had hit the creature.
He had been in X-Ray with his broken hand and was going back down the corridor to his cubicle when a man with a bare and battered torso and bruised and bloody face came running out of an adjacent room pursued by a policeman. Shortie knew his duty to a fellow sufferer. He had no love for policemen, who seemed to have nothing better to do than pluck him out of perfectly comfortable gutters and hand him over to people who made him bathe. He let the running man pass him, then stuck out a foot.
“You stupid wee bugger!” shouted Craig as he crashed down. By the time he was up, he had lost ten yards on the Russian.
Semyonov came through the mirrored doors into the public waiting room, missed seeing the narrow door to the outside that lay to his left, and ran through the larger double doors to his right. This led him back into the corridor down which he had been wheeled thirty minutes earlier. He turned right again, to find approaching him a gurney surrounded by a doctor and two nurses holding up plasma bottles—Dr. Mehta’s accident victim. The gurney blocked the whole corridor; behind him Semyonov heard running boots.
To his left was a lobby containing two elevators. The door to one was just closing, and Semyonov managed to hurl himself through the gap. As the elevator rose, he heard the policeman banging impotently on the closed door. Semyonov leaned back and closed his eyes in misery.
Craig made for the stairwell and ran up. At every level he checked the lights above the elevator doors. It was still climbing. At the top and tenth floor he was hot, angry, and puffing.
Semyonov had got out at the tenth floor. He looked into one door available to him, but it opened onto a ward of sleeping patients. There was one other door, open and leading to a staircase. He ran up the stairs, only to find himself in another corridor, with shower rooms, a pantry, and storerooms along the sides. At the far end was the last door, and in the warm, humid night it stood open. It led to the flat roof of the building.
Craig had lost ground, but he made the final doorway eventually and stepped out into the night air. His eyes adjusting to the darkness, he made out the figure of a man by the north parapet. His annoyance died away. I’d probably panic if I woke up in a Moscow hospital, he thought. He started to walk toward the figure, hands held up to show they were empty.
“C’mon, Ivan, or whatever your name is. You’re all right. You got a bang on the heed, tha’s all. Come on away down wi’ me.”
Craig was accustomed to the darkness now. He could see the Russian’s face quite clearly in the glow from the city below. The man watched him approach until he was twenty feet away. Then he looked down, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and jumped.
Craig could not believe it for several seconds, even after he heard the soggy smack of the body crashing a hundred feet down into the staff parking lot.
“Oh, Christ,” he breathed, “I’m in trouble.” With fumbling fingers he reached for his radio and called Division.
A hundred yards beyond the BP service station and half a mile from the bus stop lies a boating pond, in the shadow of the Pond Hotel. From the sidewalk a set of stone steps leads down to the walkway around the water, and close to the bottom of the steps are two wooden benches.
The silent figure in black motorcycle leathers checked his watch. Three o’clock. The rendezvous had been for two. One hour’s delay was all that was allowed. There was a second, backup rendezvous in a different place, twenty-four hours later. He would be there. If the contact failed to show up, he would have to use the radio again. He rose and left.
Police Constable McBain had missed the entire chase. He had been at his car checking exact times for the mugging attack and the logged appeal calls. The first thing he knew about it was when his “neighbor” (Glasgow slang for partner) came down into the waiting room looking pale and shaken.
“Alistair, have you got that name and address yet?” he asked.
“He is ... he was ... a Russian seaman,” said Craig.
“Oh, hell, that’s all we needed. How do you spell it?”
“Hughie, he’s just ... thrown himself off the roof.”
McBain put down his pen and stared in disbelief at his neighbor. Then the training took over. Any policeman knows that when things go wrong you cover yourself—you follow the procedures right down the line, no cowboy tactics, no clever-clever initiatives. “Have you called Division?” he asked.
“Aye, someone’s on the way over.”
“Let’s get the doctor,’ said McBain.
They found Dr. Mehta, who was already worked to fatigue by the night’s admissions. He followed them to the parking lot, spent no more than two minutes examining the gross and burst cadaver, pronounced it dead and no longer his concern, and returned to his duties. Two orderlies brought a blanket to cover it, and thirty minutes later an ambulance took the thing to the city mortuary on Jocelyn Square by the Salt Market. There other hands would strip off the rest of the clothing—shoes, socks, trousers, underpants, belt, and wristwatch—each item to be bagged and tagged for collection by investigating officers.
Inside the hospital there were more forms to fill out—the admission forms were kept as evidence, although now useless for practical purposes—and the two police constables bagged and tagged the rest of the dead man’s possessions. They were listed as: anorak, 1; turtleneck pullover, 1; canvas gunnysack, 1; thick-knit sweater (rolled), 1; and round tobacco tin, 1.
Before they were finished, about fifteen minutes after Craig’s call, an inspector and a sergeant, both uniformed, had arrived from Division. They were loaned an empty administrator’s office and began to take statements from the two constables. After ten minutes the inspector sent the sergeant to his car to call in the duty chief superintendent. It was then four in the morning of Thursday, April 9, but in Moscow it was eight o’clock.
General Yevgeni Karpov waited until they were out of the main traffic of southern Moscow and on the open road to Yasyenevo before he started to converse with Gregoriev. Apparently the thirty-year-old driver knew he had been singled out by the general and was eager to please him.
“How do you like driving for us?”
“Very much, sir.”
“Well, it gets you out and about, I suppose. Better than a stuffy desk job.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Been driving for my friend Colonel Philby recently, I hear.”
A slight pause. Damn, he’s been told not to mention it, thought Karpov.
“Er ... yes, sir.”
“Used to drive himself until he had his stroke.”
“So he told me, sir.”
Better get on with it. “Whereabouts did you drive him?”
A longer pause. Karpov could see the driver’s face in the mirror. He was disturbed, in a quandary.
“Oh, just around Moscow, sir.”
“Anywhere specific around Moscow, Gregoriev?”
“No, sir. Just around.”
“Pull over, Gregoriev.”
The Chaika pulled out of the privileged center lane, through the southbound traffic, and onto a shoulder.
Karpov leaned forward. “You know who I am, Gregoriev?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you know my rank in the KGB?”
“Yes, sir. Lieutenant general.”
“Then don’t play games with me, young man. Where, exactly, did you drive him?”
Gregoriev swallowed. Karpov could see he was wrestling with himself. The question was: Who had told him to stay silent as to where he had driven Philby? If it was Philby himself, Karpov outranked him. But if it was someone higher ... In fact, it had been Major Pavlov, and he had frightened Gregoriev badly. He was only a major, but to a Russian the people from the First Chief Directorate are an unknown quantity, whereas a major of the Kremlin Guards ... Still, a general was a general.
“Mostly to a series of conferences, Comrade General. Some at central Moscow apartments, but I never went inside, so I never saw which exact apartment he went to.”
“Some in central Moscow ... And the others?”
“Mainly—no sir, always, I think—at a dacha out at Zhukovka.”
Central Committee country, thought Karpov. Or Supreme Soviet. “Do you know whose?”
“No, sir. Honestly. He just gave me directions to it. Then I used to wait in the car.”
“Who else turned up at these conferences?”
“There was one occasion, sir, when two cars arrived together. I saw the man from the other car get out and enter the dacha. ...”
“And you recognized him?”
“Yes, sir. Before I joined the KGB motor pool, I was a driver in the Army. In 1985 I used to drive for a colonel of the GRU. We were based at Kandahar, in Afghanistan. Once this officer was in the rear seat with my colonel. It was General Marchenko.”
Well, well, well, thought Karpov, my old friend Pyotr Marchenko, specialist in destabilization. “Anyone else at these conferences?”
“Just one other car, sir. We drivers chatted a bit, what with the hours of waiting and that. But he was a surly devil. All I learned was that he drove for a member of the Academy of Sciences. Honestly, sir, that’s all I know.”
“Drive on, Gregoriev.”
Karpov leaned back and watched the passing landscape of trees. So, there were four of them, meeting to prepare something for the General Secretary. The host was a member of the Central Committee, or maybe the Supreme Soviet, and the other three were Philby, Marchenko, and an unnamed academician.
Tomorrow, Friday, the vlasti finished work as early as they could and went to their dachas. Karpov knew that Marchenko had a villa close to Peredelkino, not far from his own. He also knew Marchenko’s weakness, and sighed. He had better take a lot of brandy with him. It would be a heavy session.
Chief Superintendent Charlie Forbes listened carefully and quietly to Constables Craig and McBain, and now and again interjected a soft-spoken question. Forbes had no doubt they were telling the truth, but he had been on the force long enough to know the truth does not always save your neck.
It was a bad business. Technically, the Russian had been in police custody, even though under treatment at a hospital. There had been no one else on that roof but Police Constable Craig. There was no evident reason why the man should have jumped. Forbes did not even care why, assuming, like everyone else, that the man had been severely concussed and in a state of panic due to temporary hallucination. His whole attention was on the possible perspectives for the Strathclyde police.
There would be the ship to trace, the captain to interview, formal identification of the body, the Soviet consul to be informed, and of course the press, the bloody press, some elements of whom would hint darkly at their usual hobbyhorse, police brutality. The darn thing was, when they asked their pointed questions, he did not have any answers. Why should the silly man have jumped?
At half past four there was nothing more to do at the hospital. The investigative machinery would roll into action by dawn. Forbes ordered them all back to divisional headquarters. By six o’clock the two constables had finished their lengthy statements and Charlie Forbes was in his office coping with the demands of the procedural machinery. A search—probably futile—was on for the lady who had dialed 999. Statements had been taken from the two ambulance men who had answered McBain’s call via the divisional switchboard. At least there would be no doubt about the beating the Neds had given the man.
The emergency ward nurse had told her version; the harassed Dr. Mehta had made a statement; the front desk attendant had testified to seeing the bare-chested man, pursued by Craig, run through the waiting room. After that, during the chase up to the roof, no one had seen either of them.
Forbes had identified the only Soviet ship in port as the Akademik Komarov and dispatched a police car to ask the captain to identify the body; he had woken the Soviet consul, who would be at his office at nine—protesting, no doubt. He had alerted his own chief constable, and the procurator fiscal, whose office, in Scotland, includes the duties of coroner.
The dead man’s personal effects—the “productions”—had all been bagged and were being taken to Partick police station (the mugging had occurred in Partick) to be retained under lock and key on the direction of the procurator fiscal, who had promised to authorize the postmortem for ten that morning. Charlie Forbes stretched and called the canteen for coffee and rolls.
While Chief Superintendent Forbes at the Strathclyde HQ on Pitt Street did the paperwork, Constables Craig and McBain signed their statements at Division and repaired to their canteen for breakfast. Both were worried men, and they shared their concerns with a grizzled detective sergeant from the plainclothes branch who sat at their table. After breakfast they sought and received permission to go home to sleep.
Something they said caused the detective to go to the pay phone in the hall outside the canteen and make a call. The man he disturbed—at that moment with a faceful of shaving cream—was Detective Inspector Carmichael, who listened carefully, hung up, and finished his shaving in a pensive mood. Carmichael was from Special Branch.
At half past seven, Carmichael traced the chief inspector in the uniformed branch who would be attending the postmortem and asked if he might tag along. “Be my guest,” said the chief inspector. “City morgue at ten.”
At that same morgue, at eight o’clock, the captain of the Akademik Komarov, accompanied by his inseparable political officer, stared at a videoscreen on which the battered face of deckhand Semyonov soon appeared. He nodded slowly and muttered in Russian.
“That is him,” said the political officer. “We wish to see our consul.”
“He’ll be at Pitt Street at nine o’clock,” said the uniformed sergeant who was accompanying them. Both Russians appeared shaken and subdued. It must be bad to lose a close shipmate, thought the sergeant.
At nine the Soviet consul was ushered into the Pitt Street office of Chief Superintendent Forbes. He spoke fluent English. Forbes asked him to be seated and launched into a narration of the night’s events. Before he finished, the consul was coming back at him.
“This is outrage,” the Russian began. “I must contact Soviet Embassy in London without delay. ...”
There was a knock on the door and the Komarov’s captain and his political officer were shown in. The uniformed sergeant was their escort, but another man was with them. He nodded to Forbes. “Morning, sir. Mind if I sit in?”
“Help yourself, Carmichael. I think it’s going to be a rough one.”
But no. The political officer had been in the room barely ten seconds before he drew the consul aside and whispered furiously in his ear. The consul made his excuses and the two men withdrew to the corridor. Three minutes later they were back. The consul was formal and correct. He would, of course, have to communicate with his embassy. He was sure the Strathclyde police would do all in their power to apprehend the hooligans. Would it be possible for the body of the seaman and all his effects to depart for Leningrad on the Akademik Komarov, which was due to sail this day?
Forbes was polite but adamant. Police inquiries and efforts to arrest the muggers would continue. During that period the body would have to remain at the morgue and all the dead man’s effects would be retained under lock and key at Partick police station. The consul nodded. He, too, understood procedures. And with that, the Russians left. At ten o’clock, Carmichael entered the postmortem room, where Professor Harland was scrubbing. The chatter, as usual, was about the weather, the golf prospects, the norms of everyday life. A few feet away on a slab above the drains lay the battered and pulped body of Semyonov.
“Mind if I have a look?” asked Carmichael. The police pathologist nodded.
Carmichael spent ten minutes examining what remained of Semyonov. When he left, just as the professor was starting to cut, he went to his office at Pitt Street and made a call to Edinburgh—more precisely, to the Scottish Home and Health Department, known as the Scottish Office, at Saint Andrew’s House. There he spoke to a retired assistant commissioner who was on the staff of the Scottish Office for one reason: as liaison with MI5 in London.
At noon the phone rang in the office of C5(C) in Gordon. Bright took it, listened for a moment, and held it out to Preston. “It’s for you. They won’t talk to anyone else.”
“Who is it?”
“The Scottish Office, Edinburgh.”
Preston took the phone. “John Preston ... Yes, good morning to you. ...” He listened for several minutes, his brow furrowed. He noted the name Carmichael on a scratch pad. “Yes, I think I’d better come up. Would you tell Inspector Carmichael I’ll be on the three o’clock shuttle, and could he meet me at Glasgow Airport? Thank you.”
“Glasgow?” asked Bright. “What have they been up to?”
“Oh, some Russian seaman who took a tumble off a roof, and who may not have been all he should have been. I’ll be back tomorrow. It’s probably nothing. Still, anything to get out of the office. ...”