Time to Kill

by Roger Ormerod

  “You suggest, Mr Mallin.”

  “I’ll tell you where I’m going, and save you the trouble.”

  “That’d be mighty nice of you,” he agreed.

  It was clear that sarcasm had no place in Odin’s life.

  “The police asked you any questions?” He looked aggrieved. “Two hours of it.”

  “But they still let you go?”

  “What’ve I done, Mr Mallin?”

  I sighed. It was no use talking to him. I didn’t tell him that I could drop him in a minute if I wanted to, but just let him tag me round the Ringway and watch me go into Central Office.

  There was no grand hello. The odd raised hand in salute, the distant nod. Nobody would be pleased that it was Dave Mallin who’d given Kyle his alibi. Crewse was in Vantage’s outer office.

  “Vantage in?”

  “He wants to see you.” Crewse said. “Just a minute, I’ll...”

  I didn’t give him time to do it, just tapped on Vantage’s door and walked right in. I wasn’t in my polite mood.

  “You let him go then?”

  He pointed the dead end of his ballpoint at a chair.

  “Sit down, Mallin.”

  I sat. He went on writing for a minute, placidly refusing to either lose the continuity of his thought, or to be roused into ordering me out again. Then he put down his pen, pushed back his chair, and swung it a little.

  “What could I hold him on?”

  I had never noticed how old Vantage was looking. Puffy grey bags hung beneath his eyes, creases ran down each side of his chin. But I’d no doubt he’d come straight here from Queens in the early morning and had been working steadily ever since.

  “He did it. You know and I know that he did it. You can’t let him get away with it.”

  He put a foot against the edge of his desk and eyed it. “Unfortunately, you gave him a very good alibi.”

  “There must be a way round it. It’ll probably work out that he got me there just for the purpose of giving him an alibi. That would amuse him.”

  “Except for a couple of things,” he smiled mildly. “Don’t think I’m jumping on you, Mallin, but I’ve done a lot of work on this.” He squeezed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. There was patchy grey skin on his cheeks. “For one thing, there’s a dozen or so layabouts who’ll swear he never left the table...”

  “He wouldn’t have known he could depend on them.”

  I had pounced in quickly; too quickly, judging by the grave, weary smile he gave me.

  “I think he could—they’re always there, hanging around, looking for some game they can edge into.”

  But Lord, I’d seen it in Kyle’s eyes. He had been using me for something. I said quietly: “And the second reason?”

  “He says it was you asked him there for the game, not him asked you.”

  I let a bit of silence lie around for a few seconds. Vantage calmly kept his eyes on me, head slightly tilted, just waiting.

  “And you believed him?”

  “It’s against my principles to believe an underhanded rat like Kyle, but sometimes even the worst of them tells the truth.”

  I just managed to keep my voice steady. “But surely, sir, when it comes to the word of an officer in your own division against the word of a slimy crook like Kyle...”

  “You must understand my difficulty,” he cut in. He put down his foot, leaned over the desk surface with sudden impatience but with his voice still painfully calm. “This is too close to you, Mallin, too personal. I understand you worked with Forbes for five years. You enjoyed a mutual understanding and...affinity that I find quite admirable...” He paused. “But that could only colour your judgement—”

  “But not my veracity.”

  “Your judgement. I am trying to retain an open mind on it.”

  “I want to know if you think I was lying.”

  “When I think you’re lying, I’ll tell you. Then I’ll demand the truth. I’m not demanding anything right now...but I would like to ask you some questions.”

  He looked fixedly at me. I was aware that he was giving me an opportunity to tell him something, or it may only have been a pause to see whether I was willing to drop it. I was. I shrugged angrily, dug in my pocket for the pipe I’d forgotten, and lit a cigarette instead.

  “Questions?”

  “This thug called Odin Breeze...” He glanced at some notes. “I understand he was the one you had the little difficulty with in your flat.” He waited for my nod. “Why didn’t you put in an official report? Charge him.”

  “It was something between Kyle and me. And Geoff Forbes.”

  “So you let it go?”

  “There’d been threats of murder, five years ago. If it was all going to be cleared with a bit of a rough-up and a few quid taken from me at snooker...” I shrugged and drew on the cigarette. “...I was going to settle for that.”

  He looked interested. Vantage had bleak eyes that probed. He’d got hunting prints on his walls. I think they were symbolic.

  “Then he asked you to play a few games of snooker?”

  “Frames.”

  “A few frames. Why did you go?”

  “I just explained that. Seeing how far he was willing to take it.”

  “And now you believe he went all the way?”

  I nodded, spat out a shred of tobacco. I waved the cigarette. “I’ll break that alibi. Give me time and I’ll—”

  “You do that, Mallin. You go and break his alibi. Then come back to me and we’ll talk again.”

  He nodded. He lowered his head. I was dismissed. Nothing about starting in again on Monday.

  I left. There was no grand goodbye, either, and I had forgotten to ask if Elsa had been around.

  I dawdled over lunch at Fanelli’s because Odin was parked opposite and I liked to think of him getting hungrier and hungrier, then drove round to the Queens basement again. It occurred to me to wonder where Geoff’s gold-coloured 4.2 Jaguar had gone, and I found it over in a side bay, apparently untouched. While I was walking away from it, Odin drove down the ramp and did a little panicking around before he spotted me.

  “Thought you’d lost me?” I asked as he peeled the car off and shook himself.

  “Knew you’d be around, Mr Mallin,” he said confidently.

  Seeing he was there I decided to use him for a few experiments. I was so certain of his naive innocence that I could even afford to question him and believe what he said.

  We went into the billiard hall. At this time of the afternoon there were very few people about. The man at the snack bar leaned in boredom over his counter toying with a ketchup bottle, and two yobbos were moving the balls on number one. I told Odin I wanted number one. He went over and had a word with them. They were at first aggressive, but he took one of them by the shoulder and gently squeezed, and placed his huge paw over the hand of the other, who had just picked a pink from a pocket. They moved further down the hall.

  Odin was pleased when I told him we would be there some little time. He went and fetched himself a fistful of sandwiches and two pints of tea. I was setting up the balls. He came back and watched me, munching horribly.

  “You remember that break?” I asked.

  “The only one you played?”

  I could have done without the sarcasm, but he was only being friendly. “The only one I played.”

  I was trying to remember the exact position the balls had occupied. All the colours and one red. Odin beamed round half a loaf.

  “I suppose you never took your eyes off the table?” I asked.

  “Didn’t miss a thing.” He nodded encouragingly, no doubt believing I wanted to recapture the only touch of glory of the whole evening. He did not grudge me my glory.

  “So you wouldn’t have noticed if your employer...” He was looking blank. “Mr Kyle,” I amplified. “You wouldn’t have noticed if he’d left the table.”

  “Oh yes I would.” He was mighty confident.

  “Or even left the hall?”
/>
  “Oh yes I did.”

  “You did? You mean he did leave the hall?”

  I’d been expecting I’d have to do one of those cross-examining acts, where the clever copper trips up the over-confident crook. But nobody was going to trip up Odin Breeze. It’s ridiculously easy to tell the truth.

  “When he mis-cued,” said Odin, sluicing it all down with half a pint of tea, “he just shrugged and came over and said you’d clear the table—sure to.”

  So Odin hadn’t noticed anything suspicious about Kyle leaving me with the table set for a steady and protracted break.

  “Then what did he do?”

  “Handed me his cue to hold and went out to the gents.”

  “And how long would you say he was gone?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  But that wasn’t close enough for me. I’d got the balls roughly into the positions they had been in. Then I went through it all again and we timed it. I went through it four times, because twice I missed shots and had to start again. The shortest was one minute and seven seconds, the longest one minute and twenty-one seconds.

  I decided to give Kyle the benefit of the time factor and allowed him one minute twenty.

  “You reckon he was away for one minute and twenty seconds?” I asked. I was recalling that Kyle had been coming back from the chair near the door at the end of my break.

  “If you say so, Mr Mallin.”

  “Right. Now then, Mr Odin Breeze, I’m going to assume you didn’t help him in this.”

  He looked hurt. I was doing a lot of assuming, the main thing being that Kyle must have done the job himself. He could have hired a killer—got the information while he was inside and provided himself with an alibi while it was being done. But the thing didn’t look like a professional killer’s job. That would be a straightforward blasting with a forty-five, nothing refined like a long, thin blade in the guts. The murder itself had all the hallmarks of Kyle’s personality, the viciousness of the wound, lethal but not immediately, and the subtlety of the alibi. I was still firmly convinced he had faked it. But above all there was the coincidence. That Kyle was there was enough for me.

  “He slipped me a fiver to rough you up a bit,” said Odin. “You know that, Mr Mallin.”

  “A fiver! It comes cheap.”

  “It didn’t take much effort.”

  I could have laughed, but he was completely serious.

  “And paid you to follow me?”

  “The way he says it, here’s you trying to land him with this murder, so he wants to know what you’re doing.”

  Kyle was taking it a bit deep, even fooling his helper. “Then you’ll be able to go along and tell him I’m doing my best to bust his alibi wide open.”

  “With one minute and twenty seconds to play with?” he said gravely.

  Then I knew that I had wildly underestimated Odin Breeze. He was looking at me innocently, when in fact he should have been insulted.

  I had been correct on his easy-going good nature, but I had assumed his bulk was compensation for lack of intelligence. It just wasn’t fair, but he’d got brains as well. Obviously, if he had the intelligence to string me along, he’d have the brains to take me the whole way.

  Patiently he waited for me to readjust.

  “With one minute and twenty seconds,” I told him.

  “It doesn’t sound as though you’ve got much chance.”

  I did three or four trips from the table to the lift. It was necessary to assume that Kyle would take it at a normal stroll, so as not to draw attention to himself. But at that same time I had to remember that if he was using the time I’d be on the table he would be prickling with nervous tension, though of course he’d told Odin he was going to the gents. He could always fall back on that. But nevertheless I stolidly did my best to time it, because gents or not, he’d been coming back when I finished my break.

  Three times I made it eleven seconds, once ten seconds.

  “Eleven seconds,” I said, and Odin nodded.

  The lift was a Sanderson Hi-Speed. It was around three feet six inches wide and five feet deep. I had to assume that it had been down in the basement, waiting for Kyle, doors open and inviting. Otherwise I didn’t stand a chance, because there was no spare time for waiting for it to come down. All right, assume it was there. Tackle that later. I got in the lift and jabbed at number three button.

  Seven seconds later I was on the third floor corridor, regarding the apple green carpet morosely. Eighteen seconds had gone. It was calm and wholesome in that corridor, nobody about to ruin my concentration.

  It took me seventeen seconds to walk briskly to the door of two-oh-three.

  I tried running it. Twelve seconds. That was thirty seconds gone. Thirty seconds there and thirty back, that only left me twenty to play with, even assuming he’d run it. And assuming, I realized, that he’d managed to hold the cage door on the third floor while he galloped along the corridor.

  Still...twenty seconds. Damn it all, he could have spent twenty seconds a minute even—waiting for Geoff to answer the bell. No—hold on the door had been open when I arrived, so maybe it was open for Kyle. So all right, assume he ran straight into the flat, weapon in hand...Dear Lord, the weapon! Where was this knife, or whatever it was? Anyway...we’ve got him running into the flat with the weapon in his hand. A quick stab, and away! The whole thing was beginning to sound like a farce. And this was assuming he could guarantee himself a minute and twenty seconds.

  I went back to the basement and told Odin about it. He had a very sympathetic ear.

  “It doesn’t look too good,” I said.

  “For whom?” he asked politely. “Him or you?”

  “For me.”

  Even assuming Kyle moved fast from the table, that the cage was invitingly open, that he could hold the cage open on the third floor, that he could gallop madly up and down that corridor, that he could somehow dispose of the weapon—even assuming all that, he’d have had very little time actually to commit the murder.

  “I can’t see Mr Kyle doing any galloping,” said Odin doubtfully.

  But what about those cage holds? I was determined to take it right to its logical conclusion. Kyle would not use an accomplice, only such an innocent as Odin. If there’d been any fiddle with the lift cage, Kyle would have done it on his own.

  I stood with my finger on the ‘hold’ button and thought about it. I asked Odin to fetch a cue.

  “A cue?”

  “A billiard cue, you idiot.”

  He grinned and fetched one. It was only an idea, but to my delight it worked. The distance from the ‘hold’ button to the back of the cage was half an inch less that a cue’s length. It would wedge neatly against the back, holding the button well home.

  “He came in at nine and left a cue like this,” I said. Odin looked doubtful. “He deliberately mis-cued and gave me the break at half-past...”

  “It wouldn’t work, Mr Mallin. You’re assuming nobody else came in between nine and nine-thirty.”

  And found a cue stuck across the lift cage? “All right all right,” I said angrily. “Let’s assume it. He could use this method to hold it on the third floor, couldn’t he?”

  “If you say so. But...” he said, paused, looked pained at the necessity of pricking what optimism I’d still got left.

  “Go on. Say it.”

  “Even if nobody came in between nine and nine-thirty from the car park, somebody, somewhere would complain about the lift being stuck.”

  “You’re a great help,” I snarled. “So they’d complain.”

  “To the porter,” said Odin gravely. I stared at him. I whirled on my heel and marched back into the billiard hall. The night porter wouldn’t be on duty. I picked up the phone.

  A man’s voice. “Porter here.”

  “When does the night porter come on?”

  “At eight sir—normally.”

  “What’s abnormal about it?” My impatience was rasping through.

&n
bsp; “I’m afraid we haven’t got one at the moment, sir.”

  “Jenkins. His name’s Jenkins.”

  “I regret to say Mr Jenkins has met with an accident.”

  “What accident?”

  “Early this morning, sir, on his way home. He was run down by a car in the fog.” Such a smooth voice.

  I could hardly say it. “Is it...serious?”

  “The prognosis is most unsatisfactory, sir.”

  I could have killed him. Prognosis!

  I put down the handset. I turned. Twenty feet away Vantage was standing in his black coat and Anthony Eden, legs well apart.

  “I know,” he said. “Regrettable.”

  5

  All Vantage wanted was to tell me to look in at his office in the morning, because obviously we couldn’t talk there. But he did tell me that they had exhausted all possibilities of Kyle being able to get up to the flat during my one break. Too many people had watched Kyle making a fool out of me. Kyle had not been out of their sight for more than a minute and a half in the whole two hours.

  But I did some more work on it. Stubbornly, unwilling to let it go, I hammered at it. I was reluctant to abandon the wedged-cue idea, but I found something a little more practical.

  They make little rubber wedges for sticking under the bottom edge of doors to hold them open. I remembered this and sent Odin round to the nearest ironmonger’s to buy one. The thing worked perfectly. With the lift’s sliding doors right back, I could dig in the wedge between one of the doors and the wall, and it held the cage. Not simply that, but you could hardly spot it. So Odin’s comment about somebody spotting a cue stuck across the lift was no longer valid. Anyone coming in from the car park would find the lift not working, would probably not notice the wedge, and would walk round to the staircase in the lobby.

  “And complain about it when they got there,” said Odin.

  And the man they would complain to was unconscious.

  I felt I was so near, and yet it was way beyond reach. The idea was not acceptable. Kyle would never base the commission of a crime such as murder on such a tight schedule.

  I told Odin I was going back home, to save him the trouble of following me. He scuttled away, presumably to tell Kyle that I was only succeeding in tightening his alibi.