I would describe my own writings as psychological horror, or perhaps darkness, which illuminates the mundane world, paradoxically heightening our awareness, although I was published as Crime. Consequently, my “real world counterpart” was the Inspector, with his theories about order and disorder, darkness and light within society, and, of course, his wealth of practical experience, which he became intent on demonstrating to me, either for egotistical or for inspirational reasons, or maybe because he genuinely liked me. Hence his driving me back to Bucharest to show me things, which seductive Adriana was also intent on. In her case, maybe with a tentative motive of gaining an author from abroad as a husband, a foreign passport, a different life? Authors are esteemed unduly in some countries. Or maybe Adriana merely wanted some fun and to enjoy herself. When I explained that my surname, Osler, was originally a French name for someone who catches wild birds, Adriana had been highly amused.
I’d been persuaded to pay my own, fairly minimal, airfare from England by fellow crime author Max Rigby, who was moving slowly around Eastern Europe and who had already enjoyed the free hospitality of the island the year before. Currently, Max was renting a flat in Bucharest, where I’d stay for a week. Other habitués of the island were driving Max back to the city.
Max was seeking exotic foreign settings for future novels because, frankly, in my opinion, his most recent book, set in England, had seemed lacklustre and ho-hum. Competently done, to be sure, but lacking the additional frisson of strangeness which distinguishes a competent book from something exceptional. I’d said so myself in no uncertain terms in a review, which I certainly didn’t sign with my own name, concocting instead an alias-Martin Fairfax (a reviewer should always seem fair), which, ironically, as I realized later, was the name of a minor character in one of my early books, long out of print. Should I beware of impending Alzheimer’s? Not so long as I continued drinking red wine.
With so many Eastern European countries joining the EU, and so many citizens of those countries settling in Britain for jobs, not least about a million Poles, obviously one should expand one’s repertoire, which was a reason why Max easily persuaded me to visit Romania.
Badelescu, though I suppose I should more familiarly call him Ovid, placed a flasher on the roof of his BMW, and we sirened our way past trolleybuses, trucks, a convoy of giant Turkish lorries, decrepit Dacias, and flashier new cars, along tree-lined avenues, the trunks painted white.
I pointed, and asked Adriana, “Is that so you can see the trees in the dark?”
“Do you know why we’re giving a lift to Virgil?” she replied. “He wouldn’t get to the island otherwise. That’s because his wife crashed their car into the only other car on a huge empty boulevard.” She zigzagged her hands as if steering two vehicles. “From hundreds of metres apart they start trying to avoid each other. Virgil’s wife steers left, the other guy steers right. Then they change their minds and directions a dozen times. Until crash. It was incredibly bad luck.”
“And neither of them slowed down?”
“Why do that, on an empty boulevard?”
Presently, the dilapidated city mutated into a Futureville of huge honey-white buildings adorned with balconies. Part-way around a huge piazza, police vehicles clustered, on and off a broad pavement. Ovid kept his siren howling to herald his arrival until we had parked.
Bye-bye to Romulus and Virgil, who sauntered off with their rucksacks.
“Oh, look,” said Adriana, pointing into the distance along a vast boulevard. “Ceaus?escu’s palace, there at the far end.”
That was my first view of the dead dictator’s megalomaniac structure, supposedly the second largest building in the world. Even dwarfed by distance it loomed. And the great bright apartment building where the murder had happened was in direct line of sight.
Ovid informed me, “This place was built for the Securitate, but it was only finished after the Revolution. Come on!”
The Securitate: Ceaus?escu’s secret police, whose surveillance of Romania’s citizens was very exhaustive indeed, and whose network of informers, many of those against their will or wishes, may have comprised a significant percentage of the population.
“I don’t want blood on my shoes,” said Adriana.
If she went home, how was I going to find Max’s flat? The Inspector might become too busy to drive me there, and I felt dubious about trusting myself to a taxi driver in an unknown city when I only knew a few phrases of Romanian that Adriana and others had taught me on the island. Ah, Max could come and fetch me, because my mobile now had a Romanian simcard. However, Adriana spied a café. Yellow Bergenbier umbrellas-cum-sunshades outside sheltered tables and chairs. Half a dozen large mongrels lay nearby.
“I’ll buy a magazine and wait for you in there, okay?”
Accordingly, in went Ovid and I to find the Boys in Blue busy on the ground floor examining an open lift, the floor and walls of which were very bloody. I’d been at two or three actual crime scenes before, yet here it was as if a madman had thrown crimson paint around. The smell, however, wasn’t of paint but of a slaughterhouse. I presumed my presence was explained cursorily by Ovid, since various police nodded at me before, as I supposed, reporting circumstances to him in Romanian.
“So, Mr. Story Writer,” Ovid said after peering assiduously, “what do you notice?”
“Less blood on the floor outside than I’d have expected,” I suggested.
“And that was probably caused by us police and by the ambulance people. It seems there are some bloody tracks and drops on the sixth floor, but again not too much blood is in the corridor up there.”
“So she was attacked inside the lift, with the doors shut.”
“Precisely. And I think I know how.”
Ovid stepped inside the lift fastidiously, crouched, and peered at the paneled rear wall, which was almost unstained. Then he inserted his little finger somewhere amongst the woodwork and pulled. The rear wall split in half, opening as two floor-to-ceiling doors. Behind was a space large enough for a couple of people to stand, or kneel, between the true rear wall and the false wall. And the true rear wall was bloody, as were the insides of the doors.
“Here,” said Ovid, “is where the killer hid, to burst out suddenly between floors. I told you this building was made for the Securitate, but about six thousand special spies spied upon the secret police themselves by such bizarre methods as this. No doubt a microphone would have been hidden inside the elevator, but here’s a back-up, just in case. A man sitting on a stool could look and listen through the tiny hole in the wall.”
The sheer shock of being between floors in an otherwise empty lift when suddenly the wall opened and another person emerged! The victim might faint or even die at once of a heart attack.
Ovid explained in Romanian, and the lesser police looked at him in admiration.
Of course we climbed the white marble stairs to the sixth floor rather than using the lift.
It seemed to me that the tracks up there were rather narrow to be those of shoes or trainers. They became vague after not too many paces.
Adriana pointed through the café window at one of the tall white apartments around the piazza, blue sky showing through ornamental turrets along the edge of the rooftop.
“Sniper watchtowers,” she said. “You could shoot down into any rebellious crowds.”
We were inside for the air-conditioning. So were some bleached-blond youths wearing gold chains, sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads, sons of the new rich.
“You say the tracks of blood were narrow.” She shuddered and crossed herself. “I think a werewolf killed that woman in the elevator. Probably the Inspector thinks so, too, but he wouldn’t tell you that.”