millimeter?”
“I think so,” agreed the forensic scientist. “Easy enough to establish.”
Going back to Novikov, Charlie said, “Have you weighed the bullets?”
Everyone frowned at Charlie in varying degrees. Novikov said, “They’re just bullets. They’ll be standard weight.”
“I’d like to know
Miriam Bell actually reached out to turn over the hand of the man designated to be American. “Was there any fingernail debris?”
“Some grave dirt that I guess was forced beneath them when he pitched forward after being shot.”
“The nails are manicured,” said Miriam, almost to herself. “You’ve washed the hands. Did you take photographs before doing that?”
Instead of answering, the pathologist shuffled through the pictures on the contents table and offered her two prints.
Miriam studied them, before offering them sideways to Charlie, who at once gestured for Lestov to look ahead of him. Before he could do so, Lestov felt the dead hand Miriam had turned and said, “It’s soft, not blistered. He didn’t dig his own grave.”
“Neither did the other two,” came in Novikov quickly. “Their hands are unmarked.”
Their hands would literally have been raw if they had even been made to try digging through concrete-hard ground, acknowledged Charlie. Which had been the point of his conversation in the car with the local pathologist. He was sure he knew how the grave had been created and wondered if they’d worked it out.
“The wrist bruising is very definitely linear,” said Denebin, taking the hand from the other Russian. “Handcuffs, obviously.”
“Were they still handcuffed?” demanded Miriam.
“No,” said Kurshin.
“Why take them off?” wondered Miriam.
Charlie was sure he knew. Aloud he said, “And there were insects in the tracheae of all three?”
Novikov pointed to the microscope slides on the exhibition table. “There.”
“I want to carry out a second autopsy,” announced Olga Erzin. “Where can I change?”
For a moment Novikov looked nonplussed. “There’s a toilet along the corridor,” he managed, at last.
Sighing, the woman stomped off. At the order from Novikov the two Yakut attendants wheeled the trolley holding the corpse of the woman to the central examination table. Charlie stayed close to the uniforms, their contents and the photographs, although not at that moment making any too-obvious effort to study anything. The clothing, all heavily bloodstained around the collar, was beginning to smell as well as go moldy. Olga swept back into the room in a trousered medical tunic like a barge in full sail. Charlie waited expectantly for her to insist the room be cleared, but she didn’t. Lev Denebin appeared uncertain which group to join, those at the exhibit tables or Olga and Novikov at the autopsy slab. After a moment’s indecision the forensic scientist came to where Charlie stood, his back now to the second dissection of the female corpse.
Beside him Miriam said, “Bizarre!”
Charlie didn’t think so at all, but he said, “Certainly a strange situation.” He reached out, then stopped. He said to Kurshin, “Every hard surface has been checked for fingerprints?”
“I couldn’t find anything,” said the local detective, apologetically.
“I doubt there would have been, in the conditions,” said Denebin.
Without any discussion they divided according to nationality, Charlie by the table holding the English uniform, Miriam to the American and Denebin and Lestov going to where the clothing of the believed Russian woman was laid out.
Charlie carefully separated the coin from the paper and war-script money, feeling the surge of satisfaction at his immediate find. In predecimalization coin there were four pennies, four half crowns and two florins. Protected as they had been in a trouser-pocket, none were affected from being buried for so long. The brightest was a half crown, dated 1944. The earliest date, 1939, was on a florin. Therewas another possible time frame indicator-and a very positive direction to follow-from the inscription in the case containing six Camel cigarettes: “S.N. A First. 1932. From a proud father.” Caught by the thought, Charlie turned to the corpse just as the attendants were moving it, momentarily halting them while he examined each hand. The mark where a signet ring had been was very obvious on the little finger of the left.
There was no inscription on the watch case. It didn’t have a date register, either, although an unspecified day of an unspecified month would have been a difficult clue. It was difficult, too, to surmise anything from the stopping time of 12:43. Experimentally he tried winding it, but the button was jammed: if it had run on after the assassination, it would only have been for less than twenty-four hours. Its significance was that it had still been on the man’s wrist, Charlie decided.
He closely examined the keys, the Parker pen and the tie pin before going to the photographs before the actual clothing, wanting a sequence. The agony-rigored face was dirt-smeared but clearly recognizable, particularly in comparison against the second facial set, which, from the background, had been taken in this examination room just prior to the first postmortem. Fair-haired, not clipped militarily short, a high-cheekboned, aristocratic face badly swollen by insect bites moments before he died. And agony, too: maybe disbelieving surprise. Which didn’t square with the handcuff marks. Charlie put that impression on hold, moving through the photographs, getting the confirmation of something else within the first three frames. He looked around, seeing Kurshin with the group by the Russian woman.
“Can you help me?” he asked. Everyone at the other two tables immediately looked at him.
Miriam said, “Found something?”
Too anxious, Charlie thought: so she was having difficulty. “I don’t know yet.”
Pointing to the photograph he held, Charlie called to Novikov, “That’s how you found them in the grave? You hadn’t touched them?”
“That’s how they were, exactly,” the man called back.
Charlie said, “They’re not properly dressed, are they? Look. The fly to the Englishman’s trousers is wrongly buttoned. And two jacket buttons are undone, as well as the shirt.”
He was able to see the American, too. “The shirt buttons are unfastened here, too …?”
“They’d been stripped of all official ID,” said Novikov. “No dog tags: no military identification at all.”
Charlie turned to the blood-clotted uniform, immediately seeing that there was no regiment designation on the brass buttons but that the shoulder insignia was that of a lieutenant. As casually as he was able, Charlie gently opened the jacket. Where the maker’s name and customer details should have been was an empty, cotton-framed rectangle where it had been torn out: the cloth had actually been ripped, more so at the top where the initial cut, probably with a knife, was clean.
Charlie went immediately but still attempting casualness to the trousers, briefly pausing to locate the mud marks on the knees where the man had been forced to kneel to be executed, which Charlie had known anyway from the downward trajectory of the wound that Novikov had already spelled out. The tailor’s duplicate label, upon which the owner’s name and measurements would have been recorded, had been yanked off even more roughly than from the jacket, a scrap of the label still remaining. There was sufficient to make out what looked like a half C, which was all Charlie thought he needed. He became even more confident when he found in the record of Novikov’s earlier autopsy the precise list of the dead man’s measurements.
Charlie double-checked his examination to fill in the time, not wanting the others to guess what he considered quick and unexpected success. He even ventured to the adjoining table, where Miriam was still frowning over the displayed contents.
She looked up at his approach and said, “You think we’re ever going to be able to make sense of this?”
“Not from what I’ve seen so far,” lied Charlie, who was sure he could identify the dead Englishman, just as he knew that the murder had been committed certainly with the knowledge of some people within the NKVD, the wartime forerunner of the KGB, although he guessed for a reason far removed from Yakutsk.
His more startling conviction-one he knew was going to cause an upheaval of seismic proportions-was that another Englishman had in some way been involved in the killing, which totally justified his keeping to an absolute minimum what he’d so far worked out. Until he discovered much more, he’d even have to keep the English
