Of course, there was the chance, too, that Vantage had thought of this, but as he hadn’t thought about the Jag, and had my own car under observation, he would probably not envisage me travelling this far without transport. It was a risk I had to take.
I drew the car up in front of the porch and cut the engine. Nothing happened. I gave a staccato double blast of the horn. In about half a minute a light came on upstairs. A curtain was flipped to one side and I gunned the heads on and off a couple of times. I was waiting in the porch when Elsa opened the door.
“I’m sorry, Elsa. There was nowhere else.”
13
All I’d come for was the key to the flat in Edgbaston, but obviously it wasn’t going to be as simple as that. Elsa got me through into their splendid fitted kitchen, and I was just about hanging on to my consciousness.
“Dear God, what have you been doing?” she said.
“Running,” I told her. “Away.”
She put two kettles to boil without any question and went to see what she’d got that we could put on my side. While she was gone I had a look at it. Nothing but a row of stitches was going to do me any good.
Elsa came back with what she’d found in the bathroom cupboard, a couple of rolls of bandage and a bottle of antiseptic. Half inch bandage wasn’t going to be much use. We loaded hot water with the antiseptic and I padded at the raw flesh with a cloth soaked in it, while she brewed tea.
“I could do with something to eat,” I mentioned.
There was plenty of that. She made me tomato and beef sandwiches, and produced half a cold apple pie for me to dig out of the dish. I went on padding away with the antiseptic with my left hand whilst I shovelled in food with my right. It was the best cup of tea I had ever tasted.
“What happened?”
She was sitting opposite me at the formica-topped table, cradling her cup in her hands. Her hair was still wild, straight from the pillow, and she had put a quilted dressing gown over pale blue pyjamas. I was feeling very low. I could have wept for her, sitting there so sweet and innocent, and I wondered why she’d denied she knew of the Queens flat.
“It’s blown up in my face. Is there any more tea?”
She glanced at me, then poured it. I watched the fine, arched line of her neck. She was not wearing any makeup, her skin shining, her lips pale.
“Vantage was round at my place. They’d found Margie Dee and they’d come round to see me about it.” I watched her eyes as I took the cup from her. My wound had eased down to a steady howl of pain. “Tell me again, Elsa. You never knew about the Queens flat?”
“You know very well I didn’t,” she said sharply.
The kitchen was in red and cream, the walls all flanked with units, high ones, low ones, all the fittings carefully blended in.
“He’d got this theory,” I told her. “He thought I’d done it.”
“But that’s ridiculous. What possible reason—”
“Is it ridiculous? Think about it.” There could have been something strange in my voice. She sat down.
“We may as well get it cleared up,” she said.
“Get what cleared up?”
“Your attitude. You’re strange. Is there something you don’t want to say?”
There was something I hadn’t been able to face. Elsa’s prints had been in the flat. “To cut it short, Vantage thinks I killed Geoff and Margie Dee. He accused me, so it seemed to be a good time to make a run for it.”
She eyed me calmly, consideringly. “But I think you’ve missed out a lot of detail.”
“I’ve missed out several hours of detail,” I told her, “because Vantage will be here as soon as he’s done some thinking.”
“Is there some reason I shouldn’t know all about it?”
“Of course not.”
“Then tell me, David, why you should want to kill Geoffrey.”
The panatellas were in the car. “Have you got a cigarette?”
“Why don’t you want to answer?” “Never mind, then.”
She found me a packet from a drawer. “Don’t keep raising your voice,” she told me. “We’ll have Doris down here.”
“I didn’t know I was shouting.”
“David, you’re very close to collapse, and I don’t think you know what you’re doing. Now try to behave.”
I groaned. I lit a cigarette.
“Now tell me,” she said, “why you would want to kill Geoffrey.” She took a cigarette herself and before I could do anything about it she’d lit it with a tiny lighter she’d got in the pocket of her dressing gown. My reactions were getting slow.
“The theory is that Margie Dee was the woman Geoff was taking to the flat.”
There were spots of red on her cheeks. “I told you that was stupid.”
You need reserves of strength to exercise patience. “It’s stupid because you can’t accept he’d be interested in any woman but yourself...”
“That’s insulting.”
“It’s not meant to be. You can’t accept it because of what you know of Geoff, and you particularly can’t accept Margie Dee.”
She was eyeing me carefully. “Where is this getting us?”
“It may interest you that it’s known from one end of the city to the other that I’m in love with you.”
She flushed and made a little gesture of distaste.
“You flaunt your feelings, David. You’re as bad as Geoff for that. You just don’t care.”
But I did care and had cared. It was particularly galling that everybody seemed to have known—when I’d been killing myself keeping it buried way down beneath a casual exterior.
“It’s expected that I’d be furious to discover that Geoff was playing around with city sluts while I was being all coy and self-martyred, and not going near his wife. They say I’d be mad enough to kill him then.”
“And would you, David?” she asked softly.
“I’d kill him for that. For what he did to you, for being a fool and not appreciating what he’d got. Yes, Elsa, I’d kill him...if I believed it.”
“So the point is: whether you knew of it and believed it was true.”
“I don’t believe it could be.”
She stood up. “I’ll go and look for a sheet.”
She went out. The antiseptic water in the bowl was going cold, but I kept dabbing it on my side. When she came back she was already tearing a sheet into strips.
“But I’d believe it if you’d told me,” I said.
“I didn’t tell you. As you very well know.”
She was folding a strip over and over, making a pad with it. Then she began to sprinkle raw antiseptic on it. I didn’t like the look of it at all.
“They found the weapon.”
For a moment her fingers were still. “Where?”
“In my rooms. My cue split in two, and there was a long blade inside. Kyle used that sort of cue. He used it to hide his drugs in.”
“They’ll say it gave you the idea.”
“I’ve no doubt they will.”
“Now hold still,” she said. “This may hurt.”
I held still. She put the pad on. I was still gasping when she’d got several layers of sheet strips wrapped round me.
“Tight,” I said. I couldn’t afford to lose any more blood.
She pulled it tight. She finished it off with three small brass safety pins. It was the tidiest I’d been all evening.
“You’ll need a complete change,” she decided. “We’ll try some of Geoff’s.”
“He was bigger than me.”
“I don’t think so.” She considered me. “Though you’ve shrunk a bit in the last few days.”
She left me again. She seemed to leave me every time we got to facing anything. Though we hadn’t been facing much at that time—only the weapon. She had walked away from the weapon.
I stood up to give it a try. The floor swayed and I took a firm hold on a corner of the table.
Elsa came back with a grey suit of Geoff�
�s. It had probably cost a dozen times what I usually pay. She had a shirt and a pair of pants. “Try these on.”
“Here?”
She twisted her mouth at me. “I’ll fetch you that key.”
I made a complete change, and I was reasonably decent by the time she came back. I had always thought of Geoff as being bigger, but there couldn’t have been much in it. The material felt smooth and clean. The shirt collar was an inch too big, so I left the neck open.
“I’ll get you a scarf for that,” she offered, looking at me critically. But she didn’t go and get it.
“It’s fine, Elsa. Fine.”
She was looking at me with her head on one side.
“Why did you say you’d believe it if I told you?” she asked gently.
I didn’t answer her directly. “Vantage is going to say I knew about Margie Dee and Geoff. I didn’t.” I paused. “I didn’t even know about the flat.”
She blew out smoke. “No...how could you know?”
“The girl or the flat?”
“They seem to go together.”
“I’m not sure of that.” I was about ready to leave. If she’d only give me the key I’d be on my way. “Vantage is going to be coming round to see you, Elsa. It’s inevitable. It’ll mean a lot to me—what you tell him.”
She shrugged. “What can I tell him?”
“You don’t want to be fooled by Vantage. He’s keen as a razor. Don’t imagine you can lie in his face—”
“Why should I lie?” she demanded sharply.
She was moving about tensely. I stood still, letting my body get used to standing up with hardly any blood in it.
“Elsa, I’m in an awkward position with you. I can’t throw things at you like Vantage would. I can’t hurt you, and he won’t care if he does. He’ll want to know if you told me about the flat.”
“But first I’d need to know, myself.”
“I think he’ll assume you know. He’ll start from there, assuming it, and he’ll hammer at you until you won’t know what you’re saying, and eventually you’ll admit you knew.”
Six feet of vinyl flooring stood between us, and an eternity of distaste in her eyes. “I shall not,” she snapped.
“Because you’ll expect to get the better of him...”
“No!”
“...or because you never really knew?”
“How can you stand there, saying that!”
“I don’t know how I can do it.”
“Why won’t you believe me?” she demanded angrily. “You stand here, throwing your insults at me...”
I ploughed on. Pain had affected my brain. If I’d had the strength I suppose I could have beaten it out of her. But all I could do was lash her with my tongue.
“Because if you know about the flat, then you’d most likely know about the woman he took there.”
“I didn’t know about the flat,” she shouted.
I took a firm grip of my voice. Wasn’t it proof of my sincerity that I controlled my temper? But the voice was still too loud when it came out.
“Because your fingerprints were there, that’s what.”
She stared at me, then twisted suddenly and sat with her back to me. Her voice was so quiet that I hardly heard her.
“Everything has to be proved, doesn’t it? Evidence. Fingerprints.”
“They were there!”
“I know nothing about the place. And that’s that.”
“And that’s what you’ll tell Vantage?”
“I think you should go.” She tossed her head.
She just didn’t realize. Vantage was going to say she’d been in it with me. He’d have her lined up as an accessory.
“I want to know where we’re heading.”
She controlled her anger. “I’m not having you coming here and accusing me. I’ve told you the truth and I’m not going to repeat it. Here. Here’s your damned key. That’s all you really came for...”
“No, Elsa. Listen.”
She threw it across the table at me. It slid off and tinkled across the floor.
“...that and your insinuations.”
It cost me a lot to bend down and pick up that key, and even more to straighten up and struggle for something to say. My years of training in police work had ingrained in me a stolid belief in evidence. Evidence was evidence. Her prints were in that flat. There had to be an explanation, and I was hurt that she could not trust me with it.
“I’m sorry.”
“All you can be is sorry,” she tossed at me.
“I’m sorry you don’t trust me.”
“I don’t?” she flared. “God, but you’re good.”
“If you look at it like that...”
“I do.”
“Then I might as well go.”
“Yes, you’d better. I’m just not in the mood.”
“And thanks a lot.” I was talking to the back of her neck. “I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t had you to come to.”
She lifted her head, drew on her cigarette, and plumed smoke towards the ceiling. She said nothing. I thought that maybe there was still something to say. She waited tensely for me to say it.
I turned away. “Good night.”
She made no move. I turned and left.
“Don’t slam the door,” she said as I crossed the hall. “Doris.”
I respected Doris’s aged head on her pillow, and envied her, and closed the front door gently.
It was still very dark. The stars were bright in a blue-black sky. When I reached over for the ignition switch I realized I was handling a bunch of keys. I had a sudden, terrible idea, and fished them out of the lock and put on the interior light. I made a comparison. There was a duplicate key to the Edgbaston flat on the key ring Geoff had left in the ignition.
14
The car had become decidedly cold. Elsa had not given me the scarf she had promised me. I lit another of Geoff’s panatellas and started the engine. As I hacked up and drove away I saw the light go out in the kitchen.
My driving was a little better, though I was feeling decidedly vague. It was not daylight, but the street-lamps in the city were taking on a tired and sickly radiance, as though they’d be only too glad when the sun came up. I drove along to Queens and tried them, but none of the keys on Geoff’s ring fitted the lock of two-oh-three.
Well, what did I expect? The trouble was, I was getting light-headed. I needed twelve hours’ sleep and a few pints of blood, group O please, if anybody’s listening.
I almost giggled, there, in that corridor, but pulled myself up. Enough for one night I’d had. I decided I had better get to the Edgbaston flat, before my luck ran out. Along by the Rotunda I thought I saw a bright orange Mini in the rear-vision mirror. But there’s more than one orange Mini in Birmingham, and I was too tired to trouble to shake off somebody who didn’t have to be Odin Breeze.
I parked nose in to the garage, fumbled my way out of the car, left the garage door up, and weaved to the front door. Elsa had given me the key to the flat and assumed it was enough. That meant the front door should have been open. It was. I walked into a dark hall and mumbled curses while I found the light switch.
The hall was spacious. There was a wide staircase, which I moved to because Geoff’s place was on the next floor. That was how I was having to work things out. The stair carpet caressed my feet. On the way over I’d been thinking of food again, but now I was willing to pass that up for a bed.
At the head of the stairs a corridor ran in both directions with a rich, red carpet along it. All the woodwork was white, with deep and fanciful architraves. I found the other half of the hall switch. There was now a lightening of the darkness behind the window at the end of the corridor. I felt my way along to Geoff’s, at the end on the right.
I got the key into the lock and opened up, slid inside, hauled the key out of the keyhole, shut the door behind me, and put on the light. It was wonderfully and soothingly quiet.
I could have lived my life th
ere. The windows were high, with deep and mellow green velvet to the floor, which was richly brown parquet, polished to a high gloss where it was visible round the edges of a huge Turkey rug. There was green upholstery on the Regency settee and two easy chairs. On the high mantel over the fireplace—now housing a three bar electric fire—there was an ormolu clock and two Dresden figurines. Against one wall a carved cupboard was being used for drinks. The colour television set struck an alien note, and so did the stereogram. There were LPs on the lid.
I opened a door. The bedroom was huge, with a wide bed, spread with candlewick. I tried the doors to the wardrobe and tallboy. Some of Geoff’s clothes—about eight suits—hung in the tallboy. There were a few dresses and two suits of Elsa’s in the wardrobe. The dressing table had a complete set as far as I know—of cosmetics spread on its surface, and in the drawers a lot of her underclothes. A few shirts. I checked the neck sizes but they were all the same, one inch too big for me.
Another door led off the bedroom, to the bathroom. I realized longingly that I could do with a bath or a shower, but either was definitely out with all the wrapping I’d got on. Geoff had an electric razor, already plugged in and lying on a glass shelf to one side of the medicine cupboard. I opened the cupboard to see whether there was anything I could find useful for my wound. He’d got a medicinal half of brandy, but there was plenty of that in the lounge. There was a huge bottle of aspirin. Morphine would have been more acceptable. I went back into the bedroom and through into the lounge.
In a few minutes I’d be able to put off the lights in the lounge anyway, but I played safe and went to draw the curtains. The two tall windows came down to the floor. Across the other side of the grounds the streetlamps were looking pathetic. Outside each of the windows was a small balcony, perched over the garages.
One of the windows had its catch broken.
I opened it and had a look. There was an indentation in the woodwork about one and a half inches across. It looked as though somebody had used a tyre lever as a jemmy, somebody as clumsy and inexperienced as the person who’d broken into my place. Below the balcony there was only about eight feet of drop to the roofs of the garage run. An old, dead ivy plant still clung with naked branches to the wall. I realized that I could have got in that way, if I’d known about it, and if I’d had any climbing left in me.
Time to Kill Page 13
