The Innocent: A Coroner Jenny Cooper Crime Short Read online

  ‘Am I right in thinking you’re Mr Roy Emmett Hudson, R& D Director at Genix?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The man’s gentle tone made it sound like a social inquiry, but he looked too youthful to be a parent at a private school.

  ‘Have we met?’

  ‘No, sir.’ He reached discreetly into his pocket and flashed an ID card held in a cupped palm.

  Hudson made out the initials ‘FDA’.

  ‘FDA? You’re kidding me.’ The bureaucrats of the Food and Drug Administration were a constant thorn in his flesh – every individual piece of research involving gene manipulation required a licence that involved paperwork of nearincomprehensible complexity – but even by their intrusive standards this was a new low. ‘Son, this is hardly an appropriate place—’

  ‘We’ll only take a moment, Mr Hudson. We want to process your application as swiftly as possible.’

  ‘What? … Which one?’

  ‘I have the documents in the van. I’ve been told to obtain your signature by close of business – it’s a new privacy clause. The Administration’s getting anxious about who’s sharing what with whom.’

  ‘Why would my company be sharing its research?’

  ‘I promise it’ll only take a moment, Mr Hudson.’

  Hudson sighed impatiently and stood up from his seat. ‘I have a ball game to watch. You have five minutes.’ He strode off towards the parking lot planning the stiff phone calls he’d be making to the FDA’s Washington HQ first thing in the morning.

  ‘I can’t apologize enough for disturbing you, sir, but I’m sure you’ll accept this is only a formality.’

  The young man sounded embarrassed, making Hudson feel guilty for snapping at him.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The black Chevy.’

  The minivan was parked in the centre of the lot, the engine idling to keep the air-conditioner rolling. Another young official was rifling through papers in the driver’s seat. Seeing them coming, he climbed out and opened the door on the far side of the vehicle – the kind that slid open sideways on runners.

  ‘What’s this – a travelling office?’ Hudson said, with more than a hint of sarcasm.

  ‘As a matter of fact, it is. You want, you can call your attorney or even fax him.’

  Hudson made no comment and walked around the rear of the van. ‘OK, show me what you got.’

  He glanced through the open door and saw black plastic sheeting on the floor of the empty interior, and in the sliver of a second between sight and thought felt a cold sensation at the nape of his neck accompanied by a brief metallic click.

  TWO

  Berlin, 9 November 1989

  ‘Do you wish to go straight to Dr Keppler’s house or call at the apartment first?’ Dagmar spoke in perfect Russian.

  Professor Roman Slavsky said, ‘I have a choice?’

  ‘Of course. But you should bear in mind that it’s a thirtyminute drive. You are invited for eight. It’s just past seven.’

  ‘No one expects a Russian to be on time.’

  ‘Then you don’t know Germans, Professor.’

  Slavsky smiled and lit one of the Marlboros he had hidden in a packet of Doinas. ‘I think I do, even if your language continues to confound me.’ He opened the window of the BMW a crack, still enjoying the novelty of the electric motor that propelled it smoothly up and down, and tossed out his spent match. ‘No, I think I’ll look into the apartment first, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Dagmar turned right out of the Institute’s driveway and headed through the moonless evening along an empty street lined with dismal apartment buildings. Somehow the bleakness of East Berlin was more pronounced even than Moscow’s, Slavsky thought. The atmosphere of depression here felt more acute than chronic. Russians were naturally gloomy, never happier than when staring into the abyss; but his colleagues in the GDR seemed less reconciled to their lot, a condition no doubt aggravated by the uncertainty of the times. The military scientists in his lecture room at the symposium had been greasy with nervous perspiration. During the coffee breaks he had sensed that every last one of them was bursting to discuss ‘the situation’, not least the matter of their many professional associates who had slipped across the open border from Hungary to the West during the previous month, taking God knows what information with them. But no one had dared say a word. Rather they had silently sweated their anxiety out through their pores.

  ‘A good day?’ Dagmar asked.

  ‘Mmm?’ Slavsky pulled back from his gloomy thoughts.

  ‘Were your lectures well received?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. Although I’m not sure how much I can teach your countrymen that they don’t already know. We Russians like to think we’re ahead of the game, but your people have been quietly unwinding the genomes of exotic bacteria for years. Some I’ve never even heard of until this week.’

  It was a good line, and his minder seemed to buy it.

  ‘You’re too modest, Professor,’ she said, ‘your knowledge is critical. Why else would you have been invited?’

  Why indeed? It was a question he had pondered for the entire three months since the official letter of invitation had arrived at his Moscow laboratory. Throughout his fifteen years working for the Soviet Ministry of Defence all foreign travel had been explicitly forbidden – his work was classified as ‘ultra sensitive’ – but with only a day’s notice and in the midst of political upheaval, he had been requested to address fellow military microbiologists in the GDR on his innovations in gene-sequencing technology. No one in the Ministry had volunteered a specific reason, but Slavsky had picked up rumours that his presence was one of a hastily arranged series of gestures designed to make the Germans feel they still belonged under the Soviet umbrella. The unspoken message conveyed by his visit was that if they could be trusted to share in the most sensitive of Soviet military secrets, there would be no more playing second fiddle. After four and a half unequal decades, they were all comrades now.

  If that was the case, it was an empty gesture offered far too late to achieve its purpose. The Soviet heart had grown hollow, and the Germans and their Eastern European colleagues sensed it even more keenly than Slavsky’s countrymen. Gorbachev and his glasnost had merely served to accelerate the loss of faith that had taken hold while dear old Brezhnev was fading. Without the rhetoric of a charismatic leader like a Stalin, or even a Khrushchev, no one knew for certain what the project was any more. Slavsky’s own moment of disillusionment had come in June 1982. He had been barely thirty-two years old and placed in charge of an entire research programme with an unlimited budget and a hotline to the KGB. He had expected his colleagues in the Lubyanka to overwhelm him with information from their spies buried in the universities of the West, but instead they came him to like schoolboys asking for instruction. Whom should they approach? Where was our knowledge lacking? Which international scientific conferences should they attend? They were men of straw looking for guidance to a young scientist who had never travelled further than Leningrad. He had whipped them into some sort of shape, and used them to garner a number of valuable secrets from his foreign competitors, but from that day onwards he had known that he was riding an exhausted horse; and as a logical man he had begun to plan for the time when the empire he served would finally crumble.

  Ironically, the closer the end appeared to be, the more confused his once-solid plans became. He blamed his wife, Katerina. They had no children – who could remain intellectually productive and spare time for children? – but she worried for her elderly parents. Her mother was showing signs of senility and her father’s heart was enlarged. The prospect of abandoning them was tearing her in two. When, in the week before leaving for Berlin, Slavsky had angrily pronounced that the old had no right to fetter the young, she had denounced him as callous and turned him out of their bed. During three long nights spent on the hard couch he had wondered whether concern for her parents really was the reason
she had recoiled from him. Slavsky had spotted expensive black-market French cosmetics on her dressing table and noticed that she had taken to shaving her legs most mornings. He speculated that her fear of the future had led her to seek the distraction of a lover. Could he forgive her if she had? Would she allow him the opportunity, or would she desert him if he confronted her with the truth? So many awkward questions of the kind he hated: those with no rational answer.

  ‘The streets seem very quiet tonight,’ Slavsky said.

  ‘Everyone is watching television. The government is holding a news conference.’

  ‘Have I missed something important?’ He had been so preoccupied by the wretched symposium that he hadn’t looked at a newspaper in days.

  ‘The border issue,’ she replied. ‘There’s to be some sort of announcement.’

  ‘Are we allowed to discuss such things?’

  ‘In theory, but it might be wiser not to.’

  She glanced across and unwittingly caught his eye. Dagmar wasn’t a classically attractive woman, but for a member of the secret police she was remarkably appealing. During their three days’acquaintance he had observed something in her expression, a knowingness that told him that she possessed intelligence and a degree of perceptiveness far beyond that required for her regular work. He supposed these were the qualities that had singled her out for accompanying a senior military scientist: she was watching him, recording his moods, reading his unspoken thoughts as intently as he was discerning hers.

  They continued their journey across the unfamiliar city in silence, Slavsky smoking another cigarette and trying to think of subjects for conversation that would see him through his evening with Dr Keppler. Tell them as little as possible, his director had instructed him, techniques, yes, but the substance of his research, the implications of the genetic code he was deciphering, absolutely not. Occasionally Slavsky felt Dagmar’s eyes flit to her right and register his expression, searching out the features of his inner landscape. He pretended not to notice: a woman was inevitably intrigued by a self-contained man. He had secured her interest on the first day; yesterday he had deepened it, and now, he sensed, they were reaching the delicate tipping point. It must be she who makes the first move, Slavsky told himself, only then would he be able to reconcile his infidelity with his conscience.

  As they drew closer to the centre of the city, Slavsky became aware that people had start to emerge onto the street, not just in trickles, but in streams that became a river as they turned into a wide boulevard a short distance from the apartment block in which he was staying. They spilled off the sidewalks into the road, prompting Dagmar to lean on the horn.

  ‘There is a soccer stadium nearby,’ she said impatiently. ‘A big match, I think.’ She turned left across the oncoming lanes and drove down the ramp into the basement car park. ‘Do you follow soccer, Professor?’

  ‘No. Only boxing. As a student it was the one sport I excelled at.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather a brutal sport for an intellectual?’

  ‘I like its honesty – the strongest wins. Chance rarely plays a part.’

  ‘You dislike ambiguity?’

  ‘I avoid it where I can. But a certain amount is unavoidable, don’t you think?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She pulled into a space near the elevator. ‘Shall I wait for you here?’

  ‘Absolutely not. You don’t think I’d treat you like a common driver.’

  She smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  In the intimate space of the elevator Slavsky caught her scent. A trace of perfume and the heat of her body. They avoided one another’s eyes, the tension between them increasing with each illuminating number above the door. As they arrived on the seventh floor Slavsky stood aside to let Dagmar step out ahead of him. She brushed his shoulder as she passed.

  Slavsky crossed the hall and unlocked the door. ‘I have Brazilian coffee – shall I make you some?’

  ‘I can help myself,’ she said. ‘I’m familiar with the apartment.’

  ‘Of course.’ She had probably bought the coffee herself, personally planted every bug and hidden camera. They stepped into the narrow hallway. ‘Make yourself at home. I shan’t be long.’

  He showered quickly and thoroughly and cleaned his teeth with the unpleasantly sweet Western toothpaste his hosts had provided along with the scented soaps and effeminate deodorants. He was perfectly aware that this could not possibly be a secret encounter, but in the headiness of the moment he longer cared. He studied his torso in the mirror. He was pale but carried no fat, his body the envy of his middle-aged friends at the Moscow banya. Yes, he could be rightly proud of his body. Reassured that he had no need for self-consciousness, and his conscience eased by the thought of his wife’s infidelity, Slavsky pulled on a towelling robe, and slid back the bolt on the bathroom door, his heart pounding in his chest; he hadn’t touched a woman other than Katerina for nearly sixteen years.

  Approaching the sitting room he heard the sound of the television, and then Dagmar speaking in an urgent whisper into the telephone. He paused to listen, trying to unscramble her rapid German. He moved closer to the door and looked through the crack. Her jacket and shoulder holster were hanging from the back of a chair, her black shoes on the carpet beneath them. She had begun to undress for him.

  He caught only a word or two: ‘Yes, yes … I understand … of course, sir. Right away.’ He could see half of the television screen. A news programme was showing pictures of an impatient crowd. Hundreds of policemen stood in their way, their arms linked together forming a human chain, and then, as if surrendering in the face of some supernatural power, they seemed to lose their will to resist and let go of one another. A torrent of bodies flooded forward and consumed them. At first Slavsky assumed it to be an incident at a football stadium, but as the camera drew back to a wider angle he saw that the multitude was heading for a familiar landmark: the Brandenburg Gate.

  His intake of breath must have been audible inside the room. Dagmar pulled open the door and stared at him, all colour washed from her face.

  ‘We have to go, Professor. Now. Get dressed.’

  Slavsky looked past her to the television. People were running through the border post with no guards to stop them.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘The government opened the borders,’ Dagmar said. ‘It’s no longer safe for you in Berlin. I’ve been ordered to take you to the airport.’ There was panic in her voice.

  The words escaped Slavsky’s lips even before, it seemed, he had consciously formed them. ‘And if I don’t wish to leave?’

  ‘You have no choice.’

  She glanced across to the holster hanging from the chair.

  Propelled by an elemental force, Slavsky pushed her aside and went for the gun. He seized the holster and spun around as Dagmar threw herself at him, knocking him backwards across the table. He felt the holster fly from his fingers and heard it skitter across the thin carpet. Dagmar chased after it. Slavsky forced himself to his feet and kicked her hard in the stomach as she leaned down and closed her fingers around the pistol grip. She jerked forward, extending her arm to steady herself on the back of the sofa. Slavsky punched the side of her face. Blood exploded from her nose. The gun fell from her limp hand. He snatched it by the barrel, and beat her once, then a second time across the face with the butt. As she slumped, bloody and semi-conscious, to the floor, Slavsky turned the weapon in his hands, aimed it between her shoulder blades and fired.

  Third Secretary Gordon Jefferies climbed the stairs to his office on the second floor at the British Embassy in Wilhelmstrasse, having spent fewer than two hours in his bed. Although the East Germans’lifting of border restrictions had not come entirely as a surprise, the overwhelming events of the previous night most certainly had. The Embassy had primed itself for a gradual transition, a steady flow of Easterners and a cautious warming of relations, but no one had envisaged tens of thousands demolishing the Berlin Wall and swarming into the West in one spontaneou
s orgy of liberation. It was both thrilling and terrifying to behold. Jefferies was sharply aware that he was witnessing a great moment in history, and yet felt numbed to it, as if he were merely reading a news report from a distant continent. There was too much to absorb to be able to react meaningfully. The best he could do was to observe, to take note and record for posterity.

  He swiped his security card through the electronic reader and pushed through the office door.

  ‘Mr Jefferies?’ The voice belonged to one of the local temps who’d been called in overnight to deal with the deluge of phone calls from the British press and citizens anxious to know if West Germany was about to descend into anarchy. He tried to recall her name.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The front desk has been calling for you – they say it’s urgent.’

  ‘Oh?’ He noticed her badge, Ingrid, that was it. ‘Did they say what it concerned?’

  ‘A Russian. He’s seeking asylum.’ She handed him a note. ‘He says his name is Professor Roman Slavsky.’

  ‘Tell them I’ll be down in ten minutes.’ He passed through the glass door into his office and reached for the phone. He dialled the switchboard of the Foreign Office and asked to be put through to the Soviet desk. It was his old friend Tim Russen who answered. Just like him to be on the night shift. They’d been at Oxford together, Tim a layabout linguist who acted in a succession of pretentious experimental plays, while Gordon struggled through a law degree, entombed in the library for ten hours each day.

  ‘Gordon – I’ve been thinking about you. It’s unbelievable. What’s the scene on the street?’

  ‘Like Notting Hill the morning after the carnival – ankledeep in trash and bodies in every doorway – except the party’s still going strong. Thousands of Easterners wandering the streets, gawping through shop windows and stroking the cars like holy relics.’

  ‘You’re a lucky man. I’d give my right arm to be there.’

  ‘We may well be needing someone from your desk.’