‘I take you,’ he said finally, ‘to Intourist Hotel.’
He dropped me in fact around the corner outside the National, where he had picked me up, implying, though not saying, that there was no sense in engaging the attention of the watchers unnecessarily.
It was by that time growing dark, as for various reasons our lunch had been delayed in arrival and leisurely in the eating, not least because of a wedding party going on in the next room. The bride had worn a long white dress and a minuscule veil. Did they get married in church? I asked. Of course not, Yuri said: it was not allowed. Pagan rituals, it seemed, had survived the rise and fall of Christianity.
The powdery snowfall of the morning had thickened into a determined regularity, but by no means into a raging blizzard. The wind, in fact, had dropped, but so had the temperature, and there was a threatening bite to the cold. I walked the short distance from one hotel to the other among a crowd of hurrying pedestrians and no men in black cars attempted to pick me off.
I arrived at the Intourist entrance at the same time as the Wilkinsons and their package tour, fresh back from the coach trip to Zagorsk.
‘It was quite interesting,’ said Mrs Wilkinson gamely, pushing through into the suddenly crowded foyer. ‘I couldn’t hear the guide very well, and it seemed wrong somehow, guided tours going in through churches, when there were people in there praying. Did you know that they don’t have any chairs in Russian churches? No pews. Everyone has to stand all the time. My feet are fair killing me. There’s a lot of snow out in the country. Dad slept most of the way, didn’t you, Dad?’
Dad morosely nodded.
Mrs Wilkinson, along with nearly everyone else on the bus tour, carried a white plastic bag with a green and orange swirly pattern on it.
‘There was a tourist shop there. You know, foreign currency shop. I bought ever such a pretty matroshka.’
‘What’s a matroshka?’ I said, waiting beside her at the desk, to collect our room keys.
‘One of these,’ she said, fishing into the white plastic depths and tearing off some tissue-paper. ‘These dolls.’
She produced with a small flourish an almost identical double of the fat brightly-coloured wooden doll I too carried in the string bag dangling from my left hand.
‘I think matroshka means little mother,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you know, they pull apart and there’s another smaller one inside, and you go right down to a tiny one in the middle. There are nine inside here. I’m going to give it to my grandchildren.’ She beamed with simple pleasure, and I beamed right back. If only all the world, I thought regretfully, were as wholesome and as harmless as the Wilkinsons.
Wholesome and harmless did, I supposed, describe the outward appearance of my tidy room upstairs, but this time, when I swept the walls with the tape-recorder, I heard the whine. High-pitched, assaulting the ear, and originating from a spot about five feet up from the floor, and about midway along the bed. I switched off the recorder and wondered who, if anyone, was listening.
The matroshka doll which Elena had handed me proved, on a closer look, to be a well-worn specimen with paint scratched off all over her pink-cheeked face and bright blue dress and yellow apron. In shape she was a very large elongated egg, slightly smaller round the head than lower down, and flat at the bottom, in order to stand. In all, about ten inches high and rotund in circumference.
Pull apart she should, Mrs Wilkinson had said, and pull apart she did, across the middle, though either the two halves were a naturally tight fit, or else Misha or Elena had used some sort of glue. I tugged and wrenched, and the little mother finally gave birth with a reluctant jerk and scattered her close-packed secrets all over the sofa.
I collected Misha’s souvenirs of England and laid them out on the dressing-table shelf; a row of valueless bits and pieces brought home by an unsophisticated young rider.
Easily the largest in size was the official programme of the International Event, printed in English but with the results and winners written in, in several places, in Russian script. The programme had been rolled to fit into the matroshka doll, and lay in an opening tube with the pages curling.
There were two picture postcards, unused, with views of London. A brown envelope containing a small bunch of wilted grass. An empty packet of Players cigarettes. A small metal ashtray with a horse’s head painted on the front, and ‘Made in England’ stamped into the back. A flat tin of mentholated cough pastilles. Several pieces of paper and small cards with writing on, and, finally, the things which had come from the vet’s stolen case.
Stephen had been right in thinking that Misha’s share had not been very much, and I wondered what in fact he had made of it, with all the wording on the labels being in English.
There were four flat two by two inch sachets of a powder called Equipalazone, each sachet containing one gram of phenyl-butazone B Vet C, otherwise known succinctly in the horse world as ‘bute’.
I had used the drug countless times myself, in ten years of training my own horses, as it was the tops at reducing inflammation and pain in strained and injured legs. In Eventing and show jumping one could give it to the horses up to the minute they performed, but in British racing, though not in some other countries, it had to be out of the system before the ‘off’. Bute might be the subject of controversy and dope tests, but it was also about as easy to get hold of as aspirins, and one did not have to get it through a vet. The amount that Misha had brought home was roughly a single day’s dose.
There was next a small plastic tub of sulphanilamide powder, which was useful for putting on wounds, to dry and heal them: and a sample-sized round tin of gamma benzine hexachloride, which, as far as I could remember, was anti-louse powder. There was a small, much folded advertisement leaflet extolling a cure for ringworm; and that was all.
No barbiturates. No pethidine. No steroids. Either Kramer, or the German lad, had cleaned out the lot.
Well, I thought, as I began to pack everything back into the doll; so much for that. I went through everything again, more thoroughly, just to make sure. Opened up the sample-sized tin of louse powder, which contained louse powder, and the small plastic tub of sulphanilamide powder, which contained sulphanilamide powder. Or at least I supposed they did. If the two white powders were actually LSD or heroin, I wasn’t sure that I would know.
The Equipalazone sachets were foil-packed, straight from the manufacturers, and hadn’t been tampered with. I stuffed them back into the doll.
There was nothing lodged between the leaves of the programme. I shook it; nothing fell out. The writings on the pieces of card and paper were some in Russian and some in German, and I laid these aside for a translation from Stephen. The empty cigarette packet contained no cigarettes, or anything else, and the small tin of cough lozenges contained... er... no cough lozenges. The tin of cough lozenges contained another piece of paper, much handled and wrinkled, and three very small glass phials in a bed of cotton wool.
The phials were of the same size and shape as those I had for adrenalin: tiny glass capsules less than two inches in length, with a much-narrowed neck a third of the way along, which snapped off, so that one could put a hypodermic needle through the resulting opening, and down into the liquid, to draw it up. Each phial in the tin contained one millilitre of colourless liquid, enough for one human-sized injection. Half a teaspoonful. Not enough, to my mind, for a horse.
I held one of the phials up in the light, to see the printing on it, but as usual with such baby ampoules it was difficult to see the lettering. Not adrenalin. As far as I could make out, it said 0.4 mg naloxone, which was spectacularly unhelpful, as I’d never heard of the stuff. I unfolded the piece of paper, and that was no better, as whatever was written there was written in Russian script. I put the paper back in the tin and closed it, and set it aside with the other mysteries for Stephen to look at.