The Best of British Crime omnibus by Andrew Garve, David Williams, Francis Durbridge

yes, the factory was all right,’ Cressey was saying, apparently in reply to a question from Tanya, ‘but what surprises me is the way ordinary everyday things don’t get seen to here. You don’t seem to be what I’d call thorough. Only this morning I was looking out of my window and three times I saw one of those trolley arms jerk off the wire at the same place. There must be some little thing wrong, but nobody seems to bother. Now why is that?’
    â€˜I was watching exactly the same thing last Sunday,’ said Potts, who had crept up on us silently. ‘In three hours it happened twenty-two times.’
    Bolting gave him much the same sort of look that Jeff had done. ‘Quite a vigil, Mr Potts!’
    â€˜Actually I was reading, but the flashes made me look up. I estimated that only seventy-three per cent of the buses got through without trouble. It was really quite an amusing sight.’
    Tranter said mildly, ‘I dare say you’d find just as much to amuse you at home, Mr Potts, if you kept your eyes open there as well.’ It was the first time I’d really been close to Tranter, and I turned to have a good look at him. He had seemed so quiet and undistinguished at first sight, and until now I’d never noticed how extraordinarily cold his blue eyes were. There was no mildness there! I began to wonder if I’d been mistaken in the man.
    â€˜At least, Mr Cressey,’ said Tanya, smiling prettily, ‘you must admit that our trolleybus girls are very efficient at scrambling on to the roofs of the buses to fix things.’ She was looking directly at him as she spoke, and I had the impression, not for the first time, that she was deliberately trying to cultivate him. Perhaps she was intended to be part of the Soviet embrace. She looked very dashing in a little black suit with gilt frogging. Jeff’s nylons couldn’t have been shown off to better advantage, and her exquisite small shoes were far too frivolous to have been bought in Moscow. I thought again how very attractive she was, with her high cheek-bones, lovely complexion and dancing blue eyes. She might be all the things Jeff knew she was, but I felt pretty sure he’d miss her.
    Bolting intercepted her smile. ‘Would you think me an enemy of the people,’ he asked, ‘if I told you of a funny incident I once saw in that square?’ His usually melodious voice was a trifle husky, as though he were just starting a cold.
    Tanya said, ‘Not you, Mr Bolting,’ with a reproachful glance at Potts.
    â€˜Well, it was one summer during the war. I was sitting out on my balcony, and just across the road was a trolleybus stop. A man had been watering the streets with a hose from a hydrant, and he’d left the hose leaning against something and still sluicing out water while he went off somewhere. It was very hot, and all the buses had their windows down, and one of them pulled up at the stop with its first window right in the line of fire. The passengers yelled, of course, and the driver realised that something was wrong and moved forward. But he did it very slowly, so that the hose played the whole way along the bus. All the passengers were soaked, and they were all yelling like mad. It was quite one of the funniest things I’ve seen.’
    â€˜In summer, at least, it wouldn’t hurt them,’ said Tanya, smiling in spite of herself. ‘They would soon dry.’ She sighed. ‘If only it were summer now! Mr Cressey, why did you have to come in the winter – that was a mistake. Russia is so beautiful in the summer – the wide fields and the flowers and the big rivers.’
    â€˜It can be lovely in winter, too,’ I said. ‘Hundreds of miles of virgin steppe, with the smooth snow lying in wide ridges, blue in the shadow, yellow in the sun. Wonderful!’
    â€˜I agree, Mr Verney, but I still prefer the summer. The Caucasus in the summer is heavenly.