'Did you see this man Zymyanin when he was alive?'

I'd already told him I'd asked Galina to let me see the body and make some notes, and he'd thought it not unreasonable for a diligent journalist to do that.

'I saw him a couple of times,' I said, 'along the corridors. His carriage was two away from mine — or that's what I assume, since he was found in Car No. 9.'

'Did you ever speak to him?'

'Once.'

Gromov looked up from his pad.

'Oh?'

'I think he was — '

'Where was this?'

'In Car No. 7. I think he was waiting to go into the lavatory there, because someone came out while we were talking.'

'What were you talking about?'

I told him Zymyanin had asked me what I thought of the new economic bills they'd just signed in parliament, whether I thought they'd do any good, get any food on the shelves. He kept on circling this incident, Gromov, wanting to know the time when I'd talked to the deceased, what I'd thought of his demeanour — did he seem depressed, anxious about anything?

The other man never took his eyes off me, never made notes. Chief Investigator Gromov made quite a lot, covering half the first sheet of his notepad. Then he switched to a different subject, and I didn't know how well or how badly I'd done so far. It hadn't actually been a hurdle, the question of whether I'd ever talked to Zymyanin: several of the cleaning women had seen us together and so had the man who'd come out of the lavatory, one of the generals' bodyguards. I'd had no chance of lying.

'Do you know,' Gromov asked me suddenly, 'how the body of die deceased was discovered?'

I said no.

'But you saw the body.'

He left his patient brown eyes on me.

'That didn't tell me how it had been found.'

He looked down again at his notes. I didn't like these little traps he was setting for me, giving me a chance to say yes, the deceased had looked very depressed, possibly suicidal; asking me to choose the truth between rumours. It was quite probable that he'd spent his whole career as an investigator setting little traps, did it in his sleep, because he'd found they sometimes paid off; but he wouldn't have done this with the other passengers — unless they were already suspect.

I was right: this was the table where the action was, where they brought people straight through the queue as a matter of doubtful privilege, to be put under intense examination, however patient his eyes, Gromov's, however they reminded you of your favourite uncle's.

I was suspect.

He was saying nothing, waiting for me to volunteer some kind of information, waiting for my nerves to set little traps for myself on their own.

Wasting his time.

The younger man, the thin one, didn't take his cool pale eyes off me: they were fixed at the edge of my vision field, and if they moved I'd see it happen. I turned my head a little and looked through the misted windows. The world had become black and white out there, with the sky towards the east brooding in darkness and the snow-covered flatlands beneath it catching the last of the daylight. By the rocking of the train I would have said we were running flat out again at something like 150 kph, according to Slavsky's figures.

'You have nothing more to say?'

I looked back at Chief Investigator Gromov.

'I'm here,' I said, 'to answer questions.'

'Of course. Let me tell you, then, Comrade Sho — excuse me — Mr Shokin, how the body of the deceased was discovered. It might prompt your memory. The — '

'My memory's very good, Chief lnvestigator. My work demands it'

He inclined his large square head.' I was forgetting,' he said. He wasn't. "The deceased was found in a lavatory, as you know. The door was not bolted from the inside, though it was closed. One of' the passengers tried to go in there, since the sign was set at «Vacant» — the bolt being in the withdrawn position — but they found what they described as some kind of obstruction, and assumed that someone was inside and had forgotten to bolt the door and was simply pushing against it to disallow entry and ensure their continued privacy. This happened with three of the passengers, and after a time one of them told a provodnik that they thought someone might have passed out in the lavatory. The provodnik then used his weight against the door and managed to get it halfway open, and saw the deceased lying on the floor. He raised the alarm.'

I waited. I was here to answer questions.

The two security guards at the far end of the dining car stood aside to let one of the passengers out — a short man, almost round, in a dark coat that hung from him as if someone had thrown a black cloth over a ball. Another passenger was brought in — Tanya Rusakova, no coat, a white heavy-knit polo sweater and black leather skirt, fur-lined boots, a gold chain swinging from her neck as she slipped into the booth and looked at the investigator there, her eyes guarded.

'Does this suggest anything to you?' Gromov asked me.' the fact that the door had not been bolted from the inside?'

I leaned back, resting one arm on the table, at my ease. 'It's still a question of taking your pick, isn't it, Chief Investigator? It could suggest homicide, since nobody could have shot the victim and then bolted the door from the inside when he left. But a suicide wouldn't necessarily have bolted the door either before he shot himself. The kind of evidence you're looking for is quite outside my knowledge, even though I viewed the body.'

'And what kind of evidence is that?'

'Circumstantial. The basics. You'll have got it by now, of course: were there fingerprints on the gun that weren't the victim's or was it wiped clean or did it look as if his fingerprints had been impressed on it by someone else? Was the deceased left-handed, according to the measurements you've had taken of the musculature on both arms, since the shot went into the right side of the head? Things like that. Of course I can't give you the answers.'

His eyes deadened, the tiny gold lights going out. 'And you are not trying to teach me my job, I assume.'

He wasn't being stupid; he was trying to get my goat, that was all, start an argument in the hope that I'd trap myself in the heat of the moment.

'You had me brought here to answer questions, Chief lnvestigator. You asked me what kind of evidence it was that I considered was quite outside my knowledge. That was my answer.'

I waited again. It still worried me that he was setting traps, because it looked as if he'd been given some kind of evidence against me and had got me here to pick at my brains until I broke and confessed, and I'd have to watch it, watch every word, every move. I hadn't shot Zymyanin but I'd been seen talking to him and I'd asked to view the body and I couldn't afford — I could not afford — to let this man put me in handcuffs and under guard on a charge of suspicion. Meridian was running and Hornby had been killed and the Soviet contact had been killed and the only lead I had would be taken away from me if Gromov took away my freedom.

'Your answers are appreciated,' he said in a moment, and looked at his assistant, the thin man, and back to me. 'You speak well, Viktor Shokin. You answer questions… adroitly.'

I let that one go.

The thin man got up and left the table, his thigh catching the corner and sending Chief Investigator Gromov's red ballpoint rolling across his notepad. He picked it up and wrote three more lines, his large head tilted as he watched the thin spidery script forming along the lines on the pad. Then he looked up at me again.

'There are two witnesses,' he said slowly, 'who have given evidence concerning you, Viktor Shokin, that I find significant. They — ' then he broke off as his assistant came back, bringing two people with him: the generals' bodyguard who'd come out of the lavatory when I'd been talking to Zymyanin, and Galina Ludmila Makovetskaya, the red-headed provodnik.' this man,1 the chief investigator said, 'claims that when he came out of the lavatory in Car No. 7 yesterday he saw you talking to the deceased, as you have admitted. But he says that your voices were raised, and that you seemed to be threatening him. What have you to say to that?'