The East German Spy Mistress by Natalia Pastukhova

Author:Natalia Pastukhova
Format: epub

* * * *

Barry Haines dug up and discarded four cabbages, which consisted mostly of leafless ribs. ‘Slugs,’ he cursed.

Resting on his spade-handle, he spotted amid the weeds of the neighbouring allotment, a mildewed boot.

This off-duty policeman studied it. It was a woman’s, black, knee-length and size six. In his little hut, he wrapped it in newspaper, put his coat on and set off for the police station.

An hour later, he was back with Detective Inspector Golding.

They viewed the ill-kept patch.

‘Who rents it?’

‘Howard Tait did until he died.’

‘Hmm.’

‘He liked red-currants, but its clayey here and wet, so his bushes didn’t thrive.’

‘Someone’s dug over the middle bit quite heavily.’

‘Yes. The rest’s just prolific briars.’

‘I do have eyes, Haines.’

This plot lay beside a broad track, on the other side of which a brook gurgled.

‘An orange excavator was here a couple of months back. It cleared out that ditch.’

‘Who sent it?’

‘The council I suppose.’

Later, at the District Council Offices, Inspector Golding discovered the ill-tended allotment holder’s name and address and that he had paid his rent on cue and in cash.

From Gainsborough he rang his colleagues in Doncaster, who an hour later rang back to say that the given address did not exist.

By mid-afternoon, four policemen in Wellingtons and with sleeves rolled up, were digging a trench. The earth was loose in places and two feet down, they hit a large metal box.

Oblong, three feet by four and two deep, made of heavy three-sixteenth-inch steel plate, it had an access hatch sealed with some thick wax-like material.

Beside it lay the decomposing bodies of a young woman and a dog.

The patrol sergeant – in charge of the force’s new black Riley motor car – and a more senior detective, arrived.

A constable was posted to guard the scene and next day the ditch-deepening was investigated. One council employee Martin O’Hara had authorised it. He was brought in and the D.C.I. interrogated him.

The Scouser though remembered his training; ‘Deny everything, admit nothing.’ Yet the forms sanctioning the excavator’s hire, bore his signature.

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