We retracked down the corridor to my room. Ian chose vodka and had tossed off his first before I had finished pouring Stephen’s. I refilled his glass, and got myself some scotch.
Without visible emotion he regarded the tape-recorder.
‘If you play that up there much, my old son,’ he said, ‘you’ll want to look around for a sticky stranger. If they think you’ve got something to hide, they’ll plant another ear.’
Stephen silently reached for the recorder and took it on a thorough journey round the room. Ian watched, absentmindedly downed his drink, and poured himself a replacement with an almost steady hand.
The search results were fortunately nil. Back on its perch, still no whine. Stephen left the recorder there on sentry duty, and he and Ian sat down on the sofa.
Ian spent five minutes describing the extreme boredom of the diplomatic life as lived by the British in Moscow, and left me fervently wishing he were stone cold sober.
Malcolm arrived like a gale blowing in from the desert, hard, noisy and dry.
‘Extra,’ he said boisterously, picking up the vodka bottle and reading the label. ‘The Rolls-Royce of the domestic distilleries. I see you cotton on to the, best pretty damn quick, sport.’
‘Stephen’s choice,’ I said. ‘Help yourself.’
For him too, it appeared, Saturday night was to-hell-with-inhibitions night. He poured and tossed back in one draught enough to put an abstainer asleep for a month. ‘You didn’t tell me it was a party, sport,’ he said.
‘Only the four of us.’
‘Could have brought a bottle.’
At the present rate of consumption, we might need it. Stephen was looking as if that sort of party was low on his list of favourite hobbies, and I guessed that he was only staying out of a vague sense of not leaving the sinking ship before the rats.
‘What’ve you got, then, sport?’ Malcolm said, with half a toothmugful in his grasp. ‘What’s all this about a page from my notebook?’
I fished it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He buried his nose in his glass and looked at the small page sideways, over the rim. Some loose drops of vodka trickled down his chin.
‘Christ, sport,’ he said, removing the glass and wiping himself up with the back of his hand, ‘it’s just a lot of doodles.’ He turned it over. ‘What’s all this writing?’
‘I don’t know.’
He looked at his watch and seemed to be coming to a fast decision. A fresh gulp brought him near to the bottom of the glass, and he put it down on the dressing shelf with a snap.
‘Look, mate, got to run.’ He folded the page of notebook and began to put it in his jacket pocket.
‘I’d like to keep that for a bit,’ I said mildly. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
‘What on earth for?’ He tucked it firmly away out of sight.
‘To see if I can decipher the writing on the other side.’
‘But what’s the point?’
‘I’d just like to know who you gave it to in England... to see what he wrote on it.’
Malcolm still hesitated. Ian clawed his way to his feet and helped himself to Extra.
‘Oh give it to him, Malcolm,’ he said irritably. ‘What the hell does it matter?’
Malcolm collected observant stares from three pairs of eyes and reluctantly put his hand in his pocket.
‘It won’t do you any bloody good, sport.’ His voice was sharp with the beginnings of malice.
‘All the same,’ I said, taking back the note and stowing it away, ‘it’s interesting, don’t you think? You wrote that page at Burghley... but you didn’t tell me you were at that meeting. I was surprised that you didn’t mention being there. I was surprised you were there, actually.’
‘So what? I went to write it up.’
‘For The Watch? I thought you were a foreign correspondent, not a sportswriter.’
‘Look, sport,’ he said, the muscles setting like rock in his solid neck. ‘Just what is the point of all this crap?’
‘The point is,’ I said, ‘that you know... you’ve known all along... what I came here to find out, and you’ve been trying all along to make sure I ended up in a fog... if not in a mortuary.’
Stephen and Ian had their mouths open.
‘Balls,’ Malcolm said.
‘Can you drive a horse box?’
His only reply was a stare of intense animosity reinforced by some sort of inner decision.
‘Dinner at the Aragvi,’ I said. ‘Your invitation, your dinner. There were two men there, sitting near us. They in my sight... I in theirs. Face to face, for a couple of hours. After that, they would always know me again. You took my glasses away... and everyone could see I was lost without them. When we left the restaurant I was attacked in Gorky Street... by two men who tried first to knock my glasses off, and then to bundle me into a car. They wore balaclavas, but I saw their dark un-Russian eyes very clearly. And I asked myself... who knew that I would be walking alone down Gorky Street at precisely that moment?’
‘This is a load of horse shit. Look, sport, you’ll end in a psychiatric hospital at the wrong end of a needle if you go on like this.’
Malcolm was deeply angry but his basic confidence was unshaken. He was still certain that I would not hit the absolute bull’s-eye.
‘The telex,’ I said. ‘And your little informer. I’ve no doubt that when a very long telex came for me, you were told. So I set off to the Embassy by the shortest route, and on the way I was jumped on by the same two men, who were waiting for me. That time I was saved only by a sort of ironic miracle... but when I got my senses back I asked myself, who could possibly have known I would make that journey?’
‘Half of Moscow,’ Malcolm said roughly.
‘I knew,’ Ian said, sounding studiedly impartial.
‘Of course,’ Malcolm said forcefully. ‘And Ian knew we were dining at the Aragvi. And Ian knew you were going to see Kropotkin at the Hippodrome, because you told us both in Oliver’s office... So why the hell aren’t you accusing Ian of all this? You’re off your bloody rocker, sport, and I’ll have you for slander if you don’t back down and apologise this immediate bloody instant.’ He looked at his watch again and revised this ultimatum. ‘I’m not staying here to listen to any more of this bloody junk.’
‘Ian helped me. You just told me to go home,’ I said.
‘All for your own bloody good.’
‘It isn’t enough,’ Ian said uneasily. ‘Randall... all this might be possible, but you’ve surely got it all wrong.’
‘I haven’t got to prove anything to any court of law,’ I said. ‘All I do have to do is to let Malcolm know what I think. That’s enough. If a prying neighbour knew you were planning to rob a bank, you’d be a fool to go on with the plan. So call me a prying neighbour... but what Malcolm was planning was far worse than robbing banks.’
‘What, then?’ Ian said.
‘Killing people at the Olympics.’
Malcolm’s reaction went a long way to convincing Ian and Stephen. The shock turned his skin as white as the walls, leaving odd blotchy patches of broken thread veins on cheeks and nose. He literally lost his breath: his mouth opened, and no sound came out. There was sick disbelief in his eyes; and this time I really had chopped into the self-confidence with a lethal axe.
‘So you may never get to court,’ I told him. ‘But if any of the Olympic riders die the same way Hans Kramer died, the world will know where to look.’
He was, in effect, stunned: almost as if losing consciousness on his feet. The room was still, with a silent intensity you could almost touch. Ian and Stephen and I all watched him almost without breathing: and at this impossibly fraught moment, someone knocked briskly on the door.