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    The Thursday Syndrome
    The Thursday Syndrome
    The Thursday Syndrome
    Ebook249 pages3 hours

    The Thursday Syndrome

    By TONY NASH

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    With a Thursday murder, DI John Hunter always expects something odd, but this one is a first. The dead woman was calling herself Rosalind Howard-Baker, but that is the name of a much older senior High Court judge who has disappeared from her home. Is the woman who she says she is? There is nothing in the apartment to confirm her identity, but the recent extensive facial surgery she had undergone has made her the spitting image of that judge as she appeared twenty years ago. John arranges to have Howard-Baker’s long time lover view the body. At first sight he is unsure, but other parts of her body convince him that the corpse is not her. They have a Jane Doe.
    John receives a phone call from a man who claims he knows who killed not only that woman but most intriguingly who also murdered John’s foster mother, a Government spook, over twenty years before; a murder John would dearly love to solve. They meet, but the man is shot before he is able to speak.
    He is identified as another spook and John is now sure that the two murders were committed by someone in MI5.
    In that headquarters he is confronted with a hall of mirrors and a host of suspects but finally works out who the killer is.
    He knows that if the man is arrested he will find a way to get off the hook.
    John faces a dilemma. Is the only answer a final solution?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTONY NASH
    Release dateNov 21, 2015
    ISBN9781311198525
    The Thursday Syndrome
    Author

    TONY NASH

    Tony Nash is the author of over thirty detective, historical and war novels. He began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, later re-training at Bletchley Park to become an electronic spy, intercepting Russian and East German agent transmissions, during which time he studied many languages and achieved a BA Honours Degree from London University. Diverse occupations followed: Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school, ocean yacht skipper, deep sea fisher, fly tyer, antique dealer, bespoke furniture maker, restorer and French polisher, professional deer stalker and creative writer.

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      Book preview

      The Thursday Syndrome - TONY NASH

      The Thursday Syndrome

      Tony Nash

      Copyright Tony Nash © November 2015

      Smashwords Edition

      Works by the same author:

      The Mayhem in Norfolk thrillers:

      Murder on Tiptoes

      Murder by Proxy

      Murder on the Back Burner

      Murder on the Chess Board

      Murder on the High ‘C’

      The John Hunter mysteries:

      Carve Up

      Single to Infinity

      The Most Unkindest Cut

      The Iago Factor

      Blood Lines

      Blockbuster

      Beyond Another Curtain (Sequel to Blockbuster)

      The Thursday Syndrome

      The Harry Page thrillers:

      Tripled Exposure

      Unseemly Exposure

      The Norfolk Farming Family Trilogy:

      A Handful of Destiny

      A Handful of Salt

      A Handful of Courage

      The Rarer Side of the Moon

      Hell and High Water

      Hardrada’s Hoard (with Richard Downing)

      The Devil Deals Death

      The Makepeace Manifesto

      The World’s Worst Joke Book

      The Last Laugh, a Norfolk tale

      This is a work of pure fiction, and any similarity between any character in it and any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional. Where actual places, buildings and locations are named, they are used fictionall

      PROLOGUE

      PGU KGB HQ, YASENEVO DISTRICT, MOSCOW 20th July 1971.

      Yevgeny Karshoi, Controller in Chief of the division responsible for the control and handling of all foreign assets, a great bear of a man with a disposition well south of that of a grizzly, had that morning good reason to be even more dyspeptic than usual, and for the last hour he had been contemplating with some relish on whom to vent his anger. Half a dozen of his subordinates at the First Chief Directorate of the Committee for State Security of the USSR, the Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye, were in the immediate firing line, since they all had a hand in the decision to deploy the SAM-23 in East Germany, a move which he had at last reluctantly agreed to, but only after being given firm assurances by three of those subordinates that its secrets were safe from the Western powers.

      He grabbed up the telephone and jabbed his thick, hairy index finger on 5.

      As the receiver was lifted at the other end, he barked, ‘My office, now!’ and slammed the phone down.

      That was the way, he thought: have them quaking in their boots before they even reach my office.

      Aleksandr Pravitch had been expecting trouble from the moment he saw the report when he reached the office that morning, half an hour early as always, despite his wife, Olga, demanding that he stay and service her again. After eighteen years of marriage, sex had dwindled to once or twice a week at most, but suddenly her sexual appetite had become almost impossible for him to satisfy and the daily demands were wearing him down. What was far worse in his opinion, his inability to perform was causing serious problems with Katrina Olyetnova, his mistress. He did not for one moment accept Olga’s insistence that her newly rampant libido was caused by the menopause, and Aleksandr was having her watched by one of his best teams, sure that some other man had caused the change and was having a piece of the action, but she had been a well trained and experienced field operative before he married her and had not lost her skills, always managing to lose her ‘tail’ at some point in the day, and then disappearing off the radar for several hours.

      A small but dapper man of forty-three, who managed somehow to make even the standard Russian male garb appear almost elegant and whose hair always appeared to have been freshly cut and brushed, he was a stickler for accuracy in everything he did and accepted nothing but perfection from those under him. In this case the information he had based his forecast on had seemed gold plated; what had happened was something that could never have been foreseen, but in the department he served excuses of any sort were never accepted.

      Normally self-possessed, he had an unfortunate left eye flicker when stressed; a tiny flicker unnoticeable to others, but one he imagined as much larger and obvious.

      He knocked on the open door and waited until he received the command, ‘Enter’.

      ‘Dobrye Dyen, Tovarisch Karshoi.’ He forced a smile.

      His superior officer knew how to reduce him to a jelly. He glared, saying nothing.

      A long half minute passed, and Pravitch began to sweat, although it was a cold day and Karshoi never had heating on in his office. Pravitch could feel his eye flickering madly.

      Eventually, he had to say something and it sounded lame even to him, ‘No one could possibly have foreseen this outcome, comrade; no one.’

      Karshoi kept silent, deliberately letting Pravitch squirm, until he eventually growled, ‘You and the others assured me that the British did not have the ability to achieve what they have and that it was safe to deploy the SAM-23 to Oranienburg.’

      ‘And with good reason, Director. Our mole at RAF Gatow in Berlin, the airman we have recruited who works for the ‘Y’ Service as a Morse operator at the intercept station, assured us that the Morse and linguist radio intercept rooms there are separate from one another and that when our stations change from Morse to voice as the aircraft begin their runs, it takes longer for the Morse intercept operator to ring through to the voice operators’ room, tell the linguist there what frequency he is working on, and for the voice operator to tune in to that frequency, than for the aircraft to complete its run, so that the operator hears virtually nothing of that voice transmission. At the end of each run by the aircraft, the frequency is changed to a new one by our station, and even if the voice operator hears that snippet of information, passing the details back to the Morse operator again involves another loss of time, so that that operator in turn will invariably miss at least the beginning of the next transmission. They were chasing their tails and failing miserably, missing almost everything. It should have been foolproof.’

      ‘You obviously did not pay him enough. He gave you incorrect information!’

      ‘All he wanted was a cheap second-hand car, and with respect, Director, his information was correct, except for something he could not have known.’

      ‘And that was?’

      ‘One of the intercept analysts, an experienced flight-sergeant and ex-set room supervisor, who had day after day seen the useless operators’ logs, became annoyed at the obvious inefficiency of the system in place and decided to teach himself enough Russian to log the voice transmissions himself, on the same sheet as the Morse intercept. He began to go into work when off-duty and become an operator himself. He was, of course, was able to change frequency quickly when those changes were given either on Morse or voice. He was thus able to keep a continuous log, which on its own would not have been of much use, but he then decided to go further and obtain the American radar intercepts of the aircraft runs too, which gave him their headings and speeds. Those he married up with the voice and Morse intercepts, second by second, and plotted every run on a three-hundred and sixty degree chart, which clearly showed the acquisition capabilities of the SAM and the distances from the aircraft at which the missile shots were reportedly made. Although he is not a reporting officer, he drafted a report, which apparently upset some of his superiors. They tried to suppress it, since it showed them up in a bad light, but a more senior officer saw it and – well, you know the rest – the Americans took it up and their estimate of it was, One of the best reports ever and invaluable.’

      ‘So now they know the exact capabilities of our newest and first genuinely mobile surface-to-air missile?’

      Pravitch shrugged, ‘Unfortunately, Director.’

      ‘That is not the word I would use! My description would be a bloody disaster, one for which you are personably responsible, Pravitch. It will go down on your record. You are lucky it is not the old days; it would have been your neck on the block.’

      His subordinate lowered his head. He had been the scapegoat, but he had not been the only one in the chain. It was the way the system worked.

      Karshoi changed the subject, ‘This new agent that you have reported recruiting, the one you are calling ‘Woodpecker’, what is your assessment of him?’

      Pravitch breathed a sigh of relief; anything to get off the subject of the SAM. ‘Early days, Director, but last week he received confirmation that he has been accepted as a junior employee with the British Secret Intelligence Service. Naturally that will be merely chai malchik* status to begin with. Only time will tell, but I am optimistic that he will become an active agent and progress through their ranks to achieve great things for us. He has an IQ of 134.’ *tea boy

      ‘Who recruited him?’

      ‘Irina Kardansky.’

      Karshoi hid a secret smile; Irina had been trained by him personally, and he had, of course, needed to check her prowess as part of that training. That check had taken quite a number of months.

      ‘With sex?’

      Pravitch nodded, ‘I am told that she can go right through the Kama Sutra, without pausing for breath.’

      Karshoi could have expanded on that remark but did not.

      ‘But is that the only reason he is ready to betray his country?’

      ‘No, Director. Irina elucidated that he is hungry for power over his fellow man, and for money. ’

      ‘Both are much preferable to treason from political motives; they can become confused over the years.’

      ‘True.’

      ‘He had no connection with Blake and the others?’

      ‘No, he is too young to have known them, and his family moves in entirely different circles. He is not an Oxbridge graduate, having attended London University.’

      ‘Not being friends with that crowd is in my opinion a good thing. I’ve never felt happy about their Old Boys’ network. What is his degree?’

      ‘B.A. Honours, First Class, in Modern Languages.’

      ‘Russian?’

      ‘And German, but he is fluent in several other European languages. One of his uncles being with the SIS ensured his acceptance.’

      Karshoi frowned, ‘The uncle is one of ours?’

      Pravitch smiled, ‘Oh, no, Director. He is a patriot and lily-white as far as his masters are concerned, an ex-field agent who has over the years caused us a great deal of trouble, and that is all to the good for our candidate, who will bask in his uncle’s reflected aura and no doubt be helped by him on his way up the promotion ladder. It will be some years before he produces anything of value, of course, and I do not intend to use him at all until he reaches agent status.’

      ‘Good. See that you stick to that. We have time on our side. This other mess we can do nothing about now. The Allies now know the capabilities of the SAM-23 system. It might make them more wary.’

      ‘And we do have the improved capability SAM-26 under final test.’

      CHAPTER ONE

      Standard practice would have had one of us checking for vital signs, but a throat slit from ear to ear left little doubt that the woman had gone to meet her Maker.

      In life she had been a beauty: lustrous, shoulder-length russet hair now lying haphazardly in a large spreading pool of her own blood, emerald green eyes that were still wide open as if in surprise, classic high cheekbones, a nose that looked too good to be natural, and full, kissable lips that would never kiss again. I estimated her age at somewhere in the late thirties, but she could have been a well preserved ten years older. These days they can fool you. Ain’t plastic surgery wonderful?

      I knew what a rocket I’d get if it came out that I’d trampled all over Locarde’s Principle yet again, but what the hell – I’d had so many rockets up my arse during my career that it was a wonder I hadn’t landed on Mars years before, with the worst case of piles on the planet, but it was a Thursday, my day for the weirdest twists in murder cases, and on Thursdays, even more than on other days, I take nothing for granted.

      I tiptoed forward and touched a finger on her wrist to check if she was cold, which would have put an entirely different slant on the apparent timing of the death, leaning over from a couple of feet away to do so and reversing afterwards in my own footprints. Her corpse was still warm; the timing was kosher.

      While I blissfully ignored protocol, my gorgeous wife and partner Jane had been on the phone to our pathologist, Janet Keller, and the head of the SOCO team, Ken Bryson, and when I regained the doorway we stood and surveyed the scene. First impressions were often the most important.

      The room was sparsely furnished, with bare magnolia walls, and apart from the upright wooden chair that had been knocked over, probably by the woman’s body as she fell, nothing seemed out of place and the blood spatter on the oatmeal carpet confirmed where she had been standing when she was attacked, about ten feet in from the doorway and close to the far wall. She could retreat no further. The blood-spattered, cordless phone she had been using was close to her left hand and had obviously fallen from it as her body collapsed. The drawers in the beautiful, antique, mahogany bookcase-on-bureau, neatly in line, had apparently not been pulled out, and the same applied to those in the miniature, matching chest of drawers under the window. Theft was not an issue.

      Whoever had killed her had come there for that sole purpose and not to ransack or steal, a fact that was instantly obvious: the heavy links of the gold necklace she was wearing round her neck would fetch every penny of a thousand pounds as scrap, even at today’s low gold price, and she had five large, expensive rings on her fingers; one plain gold, a wide, diamond-encrusted eternity ring, two with what to my eye appeared to be single diamonds of several carats, and the other a huge ruby. There seemed no doubt that the killer had left immediately after slicing the victim’s throat. My first thought was to wonder what he had done with the knife, which must have been dripping blood. Had he brought a bag with him to put it in or had he stuffed it into a pocket? If the latter, some part of his clothing had to have blood visible on it. There were no spots or drips on the carpet between the corpse and the door of the room, or on the floor of the hall or landing outside. Ergo, he had not had the weapon in his hand as he walked away.

      ‘She must have been on her way out when she realised he was outside.’ Jane nodded towards the carpet by the front door of the flat, where an elegant brown handbag lay on its side, close to the small table on which the telephone base unit stood, just inside the door.

      ‘And she’d already undone the deadbolts.’ There were two, one at the top of the door and another at the bottom. No one could have penetrated that apartment if they had been done up.

      ‘Why didn’t she flick one back in?’

      ‘She may have tried but was taken too much by surprise.’

      ‘They look like recent additions, and that alarm system looks state of the art; she was obviously safety conscious.’

      ‘And that tells us something of her state of mind: she was not just safety conscious, she was scared.’

      We’d been sitting at our desks, metaphorically twiddling our fingers on what we in the trade call ‘a lost dog day’, when the call came in from the central police switchboard.

      The operator played us the short recording: ‘Help me! He’s trying to open the front door! The handle’s moving! Please hurry! Aah! He’s in my flat! He’s got a knife…’ The words were cut off by a scream. The victim knew it was a man before he entered the flat. How? Had he knocked, and she’d looked through the spy hole in the door, or had she been expecting someone she knew? Why the hell couldn’t she have told us who ‘he’ was?

      The operator had quickly traced the address and passed it through to us.

      We got up and ran through the office, down the four flights of steps, not waiting for the lift, out into the car park and across to the car.

      Lights flashing and siren blaring we had hurtled through the traffic, hoping to catch the killer before he left the building, knowing it was a forlorn hope.

      I sighed with frustration and suggested, ‘Let’s get on with the witnesses.’

      There were five of them in the outer corridor, three women and two men, and they had been in a huddle for several minutes. I knew from past experience that we were likely to get a similar potted version from each of them, and not what they themselves had witnessed, if we didn’t separate them quickly and dig deeply.

      I asked, ‘Which of you actually heard a scream?’

      Four hands went up; from two females and both of the males. I nodded to one of the men, ‘Where were you at that moment?’

      ‘Coming down the stairs.’

      ‘Near this floor?’

      ‘No, I was two floors above when I heard it, on the way down from my flat.’ I wondered why he was using the stairs and not the lift, but it was not important at that moment; he might just be a fitness fanatic or could not be bothered to wait, if the lift was in use. If necessary, it was a question I could ask him later. ‘And you didn’t see anyone leaving this flat?’

      He looked pissed that he had to answer in the negative, ‘No. I ran down the rest of the way when I heard the scream, but I didn’t see anyone coming out. The door was standing open.’ He confirmed what I’d first thought: the killer left post haste after slicing her throat.

      ‘Did you go in?’

      He nodded, pulling a face, ‘I wish I hadn’t! I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.’

      ‘How far in did you go?’

      ‘Just as far as the door to the room she’s in.’

      ‘Did you touch anything?’

      ‘Not bloody likely! I came straight out and stopped everyone else from going in.’

      He’d done something right, at least.

      I pointed a finger at one of the women, an attractive, silver haired old lady in her sixties, whose classic facial structure and smiling lips told me she must have been something of a stunner forty years before. I was amused to see that though her pleated grey worsted skirt and snow-white cotton blouse looked neat and fairly new, she was wearing two differently coloured, ancient and very tatty slippers, one red, the other grey, with a Mickey Mouse face on the front of it. ‘You heard the scream too, madam. Your name, please.’

      ‘Elaine Flora Wilkinson.’

      ‘Where were you at the time?’

      ‘I was in my flat. It’s this one opposite.’

      ‘Did you see anyone leaving?’

      ‘No, but I

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