There was grunted surprise at Charlie’s mockery being in Russian. “You the Englishman to see Sergei Romanovich Pavel?”
“That’s me,” agreed Charlie, equally surprised at the expectation.
“It’s the top floor, second door on the right when you get there,” dismissed the man, nodding toward the linoleum-clad stairs as he went back to his magazine.
Charlie took his time and was glad he did. The top floor was six flights up, and by the time he got there his feet were burning and he was panting, even though he’d paced himself. He’d passed seven people on the way up two of them women, and been ignored by them all, despite being an unauthorized, foreign stranger. It wasn’t casual security, Charlie decided, but stage management to indicate his unimportance. Charlie waited until he’d fully recovered his breath before knocking on the identified door. He had to knock twice more before there was an unintelligible shout beyond, which he took to be an invitation to enter. The outside office was empty, but Pavel was visible through the open door of the next room, behind a cluttered desk. The man’s jacket was looped around the back of his chair, crushed by his leaning back against it. Pavel’s tie was loosened and his shirt collar open. The shirt and tie, as well as the suit, were what the man had worn at the mortuary: at least, Charlie thought, he’d changed his own shirt. And socks. It reminded him he needed to get some laundry done at the hotel. He supposed he’d have to change again, into the better of his two suits, for that evening’s dinner with Paula-Jane’s American friends.
“At last!” greeted Pavel.
“There’s been time for things to develop.”
“I’m looking forward to hearing what they are,” encouraged Pavel.
“As I am from you,” parried Charlie, anxious to get the exchange on his terms.
Pavel pushed two folders through an already cleared space on his desk. “The photographs and the pathology findings of Dr. Ivanov.”
The meeting was obviously being recorded, Charlie accepted, disbelieving the apparent casualness with which he had been allowed to walk unescorted around the building. He couldn’t isolate a lens but he had to assume the encounter was being filmed, too, so he had to be careful even with facial reactions. There were twelve images in the album, which Charlie instantly decided were inadequate without needing any closer examination. The only two pictures of the flower-bed hole, dug to retrieve blood samples and perhaps the bullet, gave no indication of its depth from which to assess the amount of soil removed. Charlie merely flicked through the pathologist’s report, without trying to read anything, judging it equally inadequate simply from its thinness, allowing the frown for the benefit of the undetected camera. He said; “This is only a preliminary medical report, of course? And I’m disappointed there aren’t more photographs.”
“I understood from Dr. Ivanov that it was complete,” equivocated Pavel, giving himself an escape from the challenge.
“It’ll obviously be necessary to talk it all through with the pathologist after I’ve read it in detail,” said Charlie. “Might have to send it to London, to be checked through there.”
“You said there had been developments?” pressed the Russian.
“Most of which I don’t fully understand and others of which are very awkward,” said Charlie. “I’m particularly concerned that our working relations and arrangements could be affected.”
“I need you to explain precisely what you’re telling me,” protested Pavel. There was no longer any bland condescension.
“I’ll set out everything as clearly as I can,” said Charlie, without the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort. “On the phone, you said you were certain that the man wasn’t murdered in the embassy grounds?”
Pavel shifted at the onus being put upon him. “We recovered a lot of earth, where the shattered head lay. There was remarkably little blood residue, scarcely more than a liter. Very little bone or skin debris, either. And most certainly no bullet, which there obviously would have been if he’d been shot where and how he was found.”
Far, far too complacent and far too obviously rehearsed, recognized Charlie: if it hadn’t been so overwhelmingly to his own benefit he might even have been offended at the contemptuous dismissal. “
“I didn’t see anything like that,” broke in Pavel, forward in his chair now, no longer lounged back, creasing his jacket.
“From what I’ve been told everything was rushed, confused,” said Charlie. “We’ve obviously collected a lot of the other blood-soaked earth quite a way away from where you dug. . ” He lifted what the Russians had bothered to include in the photographic selection. “Very much more than your scientist appears to have done. It’s being sifted as well as electronically searched, to find the bullet. The forensic scientist calculated the most likely trajectory from the mark on the wall.”
“Where is it, all this other forensic material?” demanded the Russian.
Charlie hesitated, as if discomfited by a too difficult question. “In London. It’s all been shipped back for further and more detailed examination.” He knew the size of the untouchable diplomatic shipment, including everything Harry Fish had helped him assemble, would have been logged by the FSB staff at Sheremetyevo Airport as a matter of course.
“There are more than adequate forensic facilities here,” said Pavel, tightly.
Charlie remained silent for several moments, looking down as if either in contemplation or unwillingness even to look directly at Sergei Pavel. Eventually he said, “There is a problem. I know-accept-that it is not of your creation: that you don’t know anything about it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what you and I have been assigned to do, but it has obviously affected the thinking in London.”
The bewilderment was mirrored on Pavel’s face. “Something else I don’t understand?”
“What I am going to tell you, I do as an indication of how much I value our further and continued cooperation,” said Charlie. “I ask you, at the same time, to treat it in the strictest confidence. I do not yet know what my government intends publicly to do about it but I certainly don’t wish either of us to be accused of initiating a diplomatic incident.”
“What’s going on? What’s happened?”
Charlie’s assessment of Pavel’s reaction was that the Russian had no knowledge of the embassy bugging. “I have your assurance that what I am going to tell you remains strictly between the two of us?”
“Upon the honor of my mother,” pledged the man.
Who must have been a 50-kopeck whore if Pavel were to be believed, gauged Charlie. “The embassy sought the help of local electricians-recommended by your Foreign Ministry-to rectify some faults in its security system, particularly the CCTV cameras. Some spying apparatus was installed while Russian electricians were within the embassy.”
Pavel shook his head. “I did not know. .”
“I am not accusing you. I’ve given you my confidence for you to understand the attitude of people to whom I am responsible: why they ordered whatever their forensic people retrieved to be examined and tested in London, instead of here, by your people.”
“How can we be expected to continue with such a barrier between us?” Pavel asked, desperately. “It’s been made impossible.”
Charlie hadn’t anticipated that capitulation and the alarm swept through him. “It’s only impossible if we allow it to become so. We have to cut ourselves off from it, entirely. But if we are going to continue with total openness between each other, there is something further I must tell you, because it affects our investigation.”
“What more can there be?”
“The CCTV cameras kept failing, intermittently, finally failing altogether. But there are some images upon them: images of what could be our murder victim and those who killed him.”
The Russian’s complete silence, the man’s inability momentarily even to speak, further convinced Charlie of Pavel’s ignorance of the spying intrusion. At last, Pavel haltingly managed: “The films, the recordings, whatever they are? Where are they?”
“Back in London, being enhanced, with all the other recovered material.”
