The Best of British Crime omnibus by Andrew Garve, David Williams, Francis Durbridge Page B

their rooms, and the VOKS people went along to Bolting’s room with the delegates to talk over the terrible occurrence. Gradually the hotel quietened down.
    I typed out a cable for my paper and rang for my messenger to take it across to the censor. There was little one could say at this stage, and in any case the Russians would almost certainly hold up our stories until they’d had a chance to investigate the crime. When the cable was out of the way I walked past Mullett’s guarded door and went in to talk to Jeff.
    In the next hour or so we discussed the murder from every angle. The time of it, fortunately, could be narrowed to a very short period. Mullett hadn’t come in until well after nine – about ten-past nine, Nikolai had told the police, and the floor manageress had confirmed that – and his body had been found just before 9.25, when the broadcast had stopped. Fifteen minutes. But it must have taken a little time for Mullett to walk along the corridor and get rid of Mrs Clarke, and for the murderer to approach; and a little more time at the end for the murderer to get clear. Say ten minutes. Whoever had followed Mullett in, or been admitted by him, had evidently acted with speed and decision.
    The fact that the wallet and its contents had obviously been tampered with suggested theft as a motive – but theft of what? Neither of us could believe that Mullett had been killed on a sudden impulse for the money he was carrying – he was most unlikely to have had much, and anyway the Astoria was an improbable setting for that sort of robbery. You could expect to have your linen filched but not your head cracked. Dark alleys were the place for small-time ‘hit-and-grab.’
    If, on the other hand, the motive had been theft of something more important than money – something that we didn’t know about but the murderer did – then at once there was a snag. Theft of that sort spelt premeditation. Yet a blow with a bottle that happened to be lying around suggested sudden anger or fear, rather than premeditation. It was a dangerous weapon for the user, even if a towel had been wrapped round the neck of the bottle, for the murderer could easily have been badly cut and that would have given his identity away. It didn’t even strike us as a very efficient weapon. People had often been hit with bottles and recovered.
    Of course, all that disarray of wallet and papers might have been a blind – theft might not have been the motive at all. The murderer might have stepped in and had a quarrel with Mullett, and that would have accounted for the unpremeditated appearance of the killing. All the same, it seemed hardly possible that a fortuitous quarrel could have blown up and been so violently settled in so short a space of time.
    There were other puzzling things – loads of them. We both found it quite impossible to imagine the circumstances in which a murderer could have been let in by Mullett and could somehow have managed to get through into his bedroom and bathroom and collect the bottle from his bed-table and wrap it in a towel and strike a blow with it, all without apparent objection or resistance from his intended victim. It didn’t make sense – not even if he’d been well-known to Mullett and trusted by him.
    It was odd, too, that the murderer had left the door open behind him. If he’d shut it, surely he’d have more time for a clean getaway?
    If the motive hadn’t been theft at all, but something more personal, the choice of suspects seemed narrow. It was, of course, just conceivable that Mullett might have made some enemy during one of his earlier visits to Russia, and that this was the pay-off, but it was rather more conceivable that one of the delegates had done it. Several of them had had the opportunity. Mrs Clarke, certainly. Schofield, certainly. There was no corroboration that Bolting and Thomas and Perdita had been in their rooms, as