Since the case concerned a Westerner, the file was now passed to the KGB Bureau in Sochi, who immediately informed Moscow. Dzerzhinski Square had a considerable file on Mrs Warburton. She had been cohabiting with an Englishman, Maddox, who had been killed by a hit-and-run truck the same evening that she had disappeared. The truck had still not been traced. Furthermore, Maddox had been in the employ of a certain Charles Pol whom the Soviet authorities suspected of being involved in the hijacking of the Troika-Caravelle to Finland seventeen days before — the day after the woman had disappeared and Maddox had died. But what interested the Committee of State Security most was the fact that Mrs Warburton had for some months been the mistress of H. A. R. Philby, who had himself disappeared on the same day that she had.
The day after the body was found, a squad of senior KGB officers arrived in Gagra and began a vigorous inquiry. Here they were helped by several events which had seemed unimportant at the time, but which now became crucial. Two days after the woman had disappeared, a skiff had been found on the shore a few miles from the town. It was found to be a hired boat that had been reported missing from the beach below the Grand Hotel. Next day an oar had been washed up, and three days later a schoolboy from the Gagra State Primary had been seen showing off the broken shard of a second oar, which he said he’d found on the beach. Then, a week later, two dilapidated pieces of female undergarments had appeared on the ‘free’ market in Gagra. They were of good material, though badly damaged by sea-water, and both had labels printed in Roman characters which turned out to be the names of a well-known department store in London. The stall-hawkers protested that they had also found the garments on the beach, and were only hoping to sell them for a few kopeks. The police confiscated them, and now brought them out for a careful examination. One, a brassière, was found to contain blood-stains which matched the blood group of the dead woman.
Next the skiff and the two oars were traced and also examined, and further traces of blood were found, particularly on the broken oar, which had also retained in its splintered edges several strands of hair. Both blood and hair again matched those of the dead woman.
The Criminal Police decided that they had a prima facie case of murder; and the KGB did not contradict them. The discovery of the body, with its connections with Philby, Maddox and Pol, now prompted the State Security officers to order a high-level conference. All that remained now was to establish beyond doubt the identity of the decomposed body. For the murder of an Englishwoman in the Soviet Union was not a matter that could be left to routine detection; and it was decided to make an official request, through the British Embassy in Moscow, for a trace to be made of Mrs Warburton’s dental history.
From her Social Security file in England, Scotland Yard tracked down a dentist in Exeter who had made a number of fillings in her teeth. Arrangements were made for him to be flown to Moscow, then down to Sochi, where the body was now being stored. He was a cheerful little man, who had been thoroughly enjoying his trip until he vomited twice during his examination of the body. But his files confirmed without doubt the identity of the late Mrs Joyce Eileen Warburton.
The Soviet police had meanwhile been pursuing inquiries about the visitor who had dined with her the night she disappeared. Here they did not allow themselves to be deterred by the ubiquitous agents from Moscow. They were professional policemen, and murder is the highest crime in the Soviet penal code, except for treason. The fact that the murderer might also be a traitor did not concern them. He was a common criminal — the perpetrator of the brutal killing of a foreign woman on Soviet soil, and it was their duty to see that he was brought to justice.
They obtained three descriptions of the man: besides the head waiter at the hotel, there was the woman in the railway buffet who told them how a man had arrived in the small hours to catch the night express to Sochi. She remembered his exhausted state, which she’d taken for drunkenness; his scuffed shoes and slovenly appearance. Then there was an elderly Georgian who had had the bunk below him on the train, and who now volunteered a detailed description to the police, following an announcement in the local newspaper. The man had talked in his sleep, he said, in a foreign language. And when each of these witnesses was shown a photograph of Philby they all identified him.
After a second conference in Dzerzhinski Square, it was decided to pass the case back to the Central Bureau of Criminal Police, who would pursue the matter through Interpol. The KGB decided to treat the incident as a lucky break; for although Philby’s disappearance had not yet been made public by either side — no doubt for sound tactical reasons — the Committee knew that when the news finally leaked out, Moscow’s embarrassment would be greatly off-set by their being able to prove that Philby was not a master triple-agent, but merely a squalid killer who had lured his mistress out in a stolen boat, then battered her to death with an oar and left her to the fishes.
The Criminal Police assembled the relevant documents and affidavits and presented them formally to the British Embassy, to be passed on to Interpol in Paris.
