Page 66 of Last Violent Call
Lev pouted. “He is in hard-class assuring everyone they can disembark soon. He told me not to listen if you try to persuade me to find him.”
“This is incredibly important.” Marshall finally got the bags to stand upright, practically gasping for breath from the exertion. He needed to start jogging as a hobby when this was all over. He used to be able to chase rival gangsters across half the city while dodging bullets. These days he apparently couldn’t even lift a luggage case without sweating up a storm.
“He also warned me against the lines you would use.This is more important than anything else. This is a new investigation path. This is a great find—”
“This is theanswer,” Marshall cut in, waving his hands to erase the other lines Lev had been parroting at him. “Actually, forget your uncle getting his answers. You should want to hear this so you can write about it. My partner is fetching the last puzzle piece.”
The boy clearly hadn’t been expecting this. He had been standing at the end of the passageway before, but now he hurried closer, his hands coming around his camera eagerly. “Really?”
“It will be the article of the century, Ipromise,” Marshall said. “You might even win an award. ‘Train Murder Runs Off the Rails with Unexpected Outcome.’There—I thought up a headline for you.”
Lev’s eyes were big. The bait was set. Marshall just needed to haul the line in.
“No journalist has ever written something like this before. Get your uncle, Lev. Before everyone is forced to disembark and we don’t get our resolution.”
Without another word, Lev shot off in the other direction. Marshall grinned to himself.
Benedikt ushered everyone into the dining carriage. Irkutsk’s snow-covered landscape cast an intense reflective glare outside the large windows, surrounding the train in white as it came to a complete stop.
“Ten minutes, that isallI ask,” he said to Vodin, pushing the train officer by his arms. Perhaps he was overstepping his bounds just a tad, but they were so close now. He had really only wanted to get Vodin and Lev into the dining carriage—Vodin to report to and Lev so he could get his photos and article content—but other passengers were hearing the commotion in the passageway and were stepping out from their rooms to hear the conclusion of the investigation too.
An audience was fine, Benedikt supposed. He signaled for Marshall at the back of the crowd, and Marshall grinned brightly from where he stood, indicating that they were good and he had the movement under control.
“The police arewaiting—”
“And they can board very soon,” Benedikt said. “You decide when the doors open, right? They will understand that you need a moment to get everything in order. No matter what happens after I explain everything,they can board. I ask that you just listen to me first. We have spent most of this journey investigating. Ten minutes is all we need now.Please.”
Vodin, thankfully, seemed persuaded. Or at least enough to stop resisting. Benedikt released the officer and spun around to look for Marshall again, who was coming through the doors with the last of the curious passengers.
“You got it?” Marshall asked.
Benedikt tipped his head to the side. He had fetched a coat rack from one of the other compartments after cajoling the provodnitsa to let him in. Now it waited by the bar, placed in front of the working attendant, who kept glancing at the growing crowd with confusion.
“I got it. Let’s begin.”
Lev pushed forward, a pen and a notepad clutched in his hands. He bobbed up on his toes, trying to avoid getting swallowed by the milling passengers.
“Fellow train-riders joining us today,” Marshall declared. The dining carriage fell into a hush. “We will waste no time with polite introductions. You have all spoken with us at least once this week while we investigated the death of Danila Andreyevich Popov. Thank you for bearing with us.”
Marshall had the sort of theatric voice that could get everyone’s attention fixated on the scene. With that done, he looked to Benedikt, who shifted the coat rack forward a little and took over.
“Danila Andreyevich Popov was stabbed through the throat with a pen, in case you hadn’t heard gossip about the gory details yet,” he said plainly. “He was also a busy man. A founder of a pharmaceuticals company with business in both Moscow and Vladivostok. He made this journey across Siberia often.”
“Gentlemen,” Vodin interrupted. “I am waiting to hear about the culprit.”
“We are getting there,” Marshall assured him.
“Right this moment, actually.” From underneath one of the tables, Benedikt drew out the briefcase that they had taken from Popov’s belongings. He pulled forth the letters that had been bundled in there, mostly set aside for irrelevance in the beginning. “A few passengers heard Mr. Popov arguing with someone, but they only heard his voice. There was the indication ofsomereply being given, but no one could pick out words. No one could guess if it was a man or woman in his compartment—there was nothing to go by.”
“And it doesn’t make sense, does it?” Marshall continued while Benedikt smoothed out the letters. “We know how thin the walls are. How is it possible to carry on an argument like that?”
“The answer,” Benedikt said, “is that it wasn’t an argument at all, but Mr. Popov talking to himself. He was writing letters, and he was getting incredibly worked up. He was shouting his argument, then muttering imagined responses from his business correspondents as he wrote his letters. You can read some of these lines and hear the turn in his thoughts.”
Marshall shuffled the papers closer to Lev. He lifted the camera dangling at his neck and snapped a picture.
“Next”—Benedikt walked to the coat rack—“for the longest time, we couldn’t determine why the coat rack at the crime scene was snapped in half. It wastes several seconds if it was a spur-of-the-moment decision; it doesn’t add up if it was a logical decision. Why not swing the whole thing? Wouldn’t that make a more formidable weapon because it is heavier?
“The answer…,” Benedikt concluded. He picked up the coat rack set in front of them and then suddenly snapped it in half over his knee. The part of his leg that made contact with the furniture piece throbbed in pain, but he drew a few gasps across the dining carriage, and he knew he had made his point. “It wasn’t snapped to be used as a weapon. It was snapped in a fit of anger.”
