The Art of Murder: An Alan Cleverden Omnibus by Patrick Gooch

Author:Patrick Gooch [Gooch, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Published: 2018-07-17T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 38

The next day, before boarding the British Airways flight to London, I bought a raft of Russian newspapers and magazines at Domedodovo Airport.

In the hotel I had watched the television films of the incident at Sheremetyovo. Though, from what I could gather, the Russian authorities have such a tight control of most of the media, it was portrayed as purely a minor scuffle.

Not so from the pictures in the radical press. However, I would have to wait for Ingrid to tell me what was actually being reported. What was shown in the majority of the papers was a photograph of someone called Sergei Litvinov retrieving Manet’s painting and stowing it in the aluminium container. This was the fellow to whom Karppinen had shouted when taken into custody. Who was he I wondered.

The previous evening, Roger had shown me the discreet video he had taken of the scene at Sheremetyevo. He had even managed a close-up of the moment the fake Un Bar Aux Folies Bergère fell to the concourse floor, exposed for all to see.

I had the strongest feeling the whole affair could not have worked better for my friend, Kosnievsky. It was apparent the fellow was not Leoni Tupolev’s closest supporter; and, like others before him, he would have to watch his step.

During Tupolev’s reign there had been a trail of bodies of people who had voiced fierce opposition to his policies and to his acquisitive nature. To many, it bordered on an arrogance that he was all-powerful, and beyond the constraints of ordinary mortals.

Muckraking journalists, rights advocates, opposition politicians, government whistle-blowers and others who threatened that image had been treated harshly — imprisoned on trumped-up charges, smeared in the government-controlled news media, and, with increasing frequency, silenced.

Some years ago, I wrote a lengthy article on the Russian artist, Mikhail Nesterov. In 1938, toward the end of the Great Purge, his son-in-law, Vladimir Schroeter, a prominent lawyer, was accused of being a spy and shot.

His daughter was sent to a prison camp in Zhambyl, and Nesterov was also arrested and held in Butyrka Prison.

Eventually freed, in 1942 , while working on his painting,’Autumn In the Village’, he had suddenly died. While the Botkin Hospital recorded his death as a stroke, his daughter was convinced he had been poisoned. This prompted my interest, for poison has been a favourite tool of Russian intelligence for more than a century.

A biochemist, Grigory Mairanovski, laboured in secret from 1928 on the task of developing tasteless, colourless and odourless poisons. In 1954, a K.G.B. defector described a secret laboratory, near to the agency’s Lubyanka headquarters, where they conducted experiments on living people.

It was not until 2015 that a botanist was able to identify the principal killing agent most frequently used by the Russian secret services. It was gelsemium. A rare, poisonous plant grown in the Himalayas, and known to have been used in many Chinese assassinations.

To outsiders, it sounded like a paranoid, conspiracy theory. But having read of the catalogue of mysterious deaths,

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