Time to Kill Read online

  I always like everything to serve more than one purpose—it’s economical—so I lit the pipe, then drove the two miles to Geoff’s flat in Edgbaston.

  In those two miles I drove into a different world. At one time this had been a district of gracious homes set in reasonably large grounds. The homes were still there, converted in most cases to absorb as much of the population as possible, and the grounds had mostly been taken over by new buildings. But here and there is still a solid and stately building, almost quiet, set back behind an impudent wall. Geoff had half of the second floor of what had been a Judge’s residence. It was solid, placid and calm.

  I ran up the stairs and pounded his door a little and pressed his bell, but he was not there. His advice would have been welcome. I drove away from there with mixed thoughts about the billiard hall at Queens.

  I was wishing I hadn’t promised to go.

  2

  I had been remembering the place as it was a couple of years before. At that time the hall was an underground dive beneath the old Queens Hotel—which always denied any connection with it—entered by a narrow diving staircase opposite the railway station. But since then the hotel had been demolished, just in time to save it from falling down, and replaced by sixteen storeys of flats and offices. They had retained the billiard hall underneath, perhaps with the idea that their male tenants might be pleased to have their own tables under the same roof. But the same old crowd haunted the hall, and not only did none of the tenants use it but Queens Mansions was already denying the same connection as Queens Hotel had.

  I got there at five to nine. It costs nothing to leave your car in the huge basement park, which is an echoing cavern with a few widely-separated lights. I patted the old car on the bonnet, and hoped that in the poor light somebody might take it in error. Then, with my cue case firmly in one hand and my pipe jauntily in my teeth as a sign of confidence, I walked over to the billiard hall at the far end.

  There was an iron door wide open and leading into a small corridor. On one side a cloakroom and a gents, and on the other the lift shaft leading up to the offices on the ground floor and the other fifteen floors of luxury flats. Facing me was a fire door. I opened it, and was in the low-ceilinged expanse of glaring light and hard shadows that was the billiard hall. At the far end a snack bar. There were ten tables arranged in two rows of five, and in the out skirting shadows a lurking number of watchers and general dead-losses, who’d got nothing else to do but lounge around. At the table nearest the door a slab of man was pushing the balls around languidly. I saw it was my goon. I was right up to the table before the hooded light touched my face and he recognized me. Then he stood, twirled his cue in his left hand, and stuck out his right. He smiled.

  “Odin Breeze,” he said openly, and with apparently sincere friendship.

  Odin? It surely must be a nickname. Now, with the ceiling and the concrete floor retaining their respective positions, I could take a good look at him. He was wearing a light-weight suit in pale brown, which flowed over him like a cascade, a pink shirt and a flowered tie. His blond hair fell over his eyes, presumably drooping from his last shot, and over his ears and over his neck. For the rest of him his legs seemed short. His hips were narrow, his chest deep and wide. And above that power and effortless strength was such an open and uncomplicated face that I looked at it twice before I could accept it. His nose and chin were chiselled hard and firm, his mouth large and good-humoured. Two enormous ears stood out valiantly.

  I offered my hand tentatively, but he could control his strength. He squeezed my fingers and broke nothing.

  “He’ll be here any minute,” he said. “He sent me to bag a table.” He had a strong Black Country accent.

  All the tables were occupied. I could see what he meant; you had to be prepared to use force if necessary. But we had what was probably the best table.

  He went back to the balls he was pushing around, playing long, delicate shots and tossing the odd friendly remark over his shoulder. I decided not to try and smash in the back of his head with my cue. It was no time for reprisals. At nine, almost precisely, Eldon Kyle arrived, still in his coat and hat, which he carelessly tossed on to a chair in the deep shadows by the door. It was asking for trouble, but I supposed that with Odin around the local hoodlums would behave. He had his cue in its case in his hand.

  “I’m not late, am I?”

  “Been here a couple of minutes,” I said.

  “You’ve met Odin?”

  “Twice. You want a knock-up?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Kyle nodded and Odin started clattering the balls into the frame.

  With such unspectacular dialogue I launched into a game with Kyle that was as deadly as anything I’ve ever encountered.

  The years inside had glanced off him and left no mark; the same gaunt face and pendulous lower lip, his eyes light grey and ice-cold. His hands were huge and knobbly—he had one of the firmest bridges in the game. He took off his jacket and handed it to Odin. His chest was narrow, his arms thin and brittle, and when he spread himself over the table, low with the green baize reflected up into his cavernous face, he was like a creeping, slimy reptile, crouched to strike. He glanced at me with such triumph in his expression that his actual words were banal.

  “A fiver a frame?” Could he feel such triumph at the thought of depriving me of a few quid?

  I nodded. With wild exuberance he scattered the balls, implying he could afford to open them out for me. In the shadows by the wall stood Odin, keeping score, and very soon in those same shadows stood I, watching Kyle beat up the breaks.

  He had lost none of his style. It might be a few more months before he was back again at championship level, but he had an affinity with the balls that was uncanny. I’m no mean performer myself, but he made me look like a beginner. It was inevitable that the word soon went around. Eldon Kyle was on number one. They pressed stiflingly close, their numbers uncountable in the shadows, and my humiliation was doubled by their presence. They were not the polite audience of a championship match; they were not averse to a little hooting when I missed a shot. The whole affair began to be something of a trial.

  We had been going for around half an hour before he made any significant error. By that time, obviously playing to the crowd with a leer he probably considered to be a smile, he was moving them around happily, playing for the fourth or fifth shot ahead. There was only one red left on the table, and as far as I could see he was about to clear the lot. But remarkably he miscued. I was left with a beautiful set-up. Kyle stepped back, and at once his face was in the shadows. He shrugged, I think, and left it to me.

  I potted the red and the pink, and Kyle had positioned the colours so carefully that he could have cleared the table. I intended to do just that. It was breathless round the table. Then, down to the pink and black, it was my frame if I potted them. A difficult shot the pink home. I crouched for the black, and click—it was down. I straightened. Kyle was just coming back from where he’d left his coat, a fiver in his hand.

  But from then on he played fast and precise snooker and never made another mistake. It was all so perfect that our spectators even became bored with it. I became bored with diving into my back pocket for fivers. Kyle proceeded to annihilate me.

  Then, much later, there was a voice in the background calling my name. “Anybody called Mallin around here?”

  That was me. I said, “here”, lifted my head from the weary baize, and looked round.

  “You’re wanted on the phone.”

  The clock above the snack bar said it was ten-fifty. Below it and to one side was a wall phone. I took the handset.

  “Mr Mallin?”

  I said it was.

  “This is the night porter, sir. Mr Forbes said would you go up to his suite at about eleven.”

  I had not yet hauled my mind from the snooker table. Two hours of concentration had dulled me. “His suite?”

  “Mr Forbes has two-oh-three, sir, on the thi
rd floor.”

  There was something wrong, something terribly wrong. Warning buzzers were sounding off in my head. Geoff had? In this building? But he couldn’t even know I was there. Nobody did.

  “Two-oh-three?” I mumbled. “Go there when?”

  “At about eleven, sir. It’s now seven minutes to.”

  “I know that.” I probably snapped it. I carefully controlled my voice. “When did he give you the message?”

  “When he came in, sir.”

  I hung up. Or rather, I gave the handset to the nearest lounger to hang up. I was definitely confused.

  Back at the table Eldon Kyle had left me an impossible shot. I said something about conceding the game, and slipped him another fiver. I was still thinking about Geoff Forbes having a flat in this building. Elsa had said nothing about a flat at Queens, and I’d mentioned the one at Edgbaston.

  I locked the cue away in the car and went back to the lift. It was a small and snug affair. I pressed button three and glided up to the third floor. It slid me out into a long, quiet corridor. This sort of silence and seclusion comes expensive in the middle of the city. The doors were far apart, discreetly panelled in soft, glowing colours. And all the way down the corridor an apple green carpet ran without a break. I was standing opposite to two-one-nine.

  I went to the right. Two-oh-three was way at the end. There was a bell push with a small inset card, printed and not handwritten. It said: G. Forbes.

  I rang. There was no reply. I rang again and could hear the distant double chime of the bell. The corridor was quiet.

  The door was on the catch. I touched it, reminiscently, with a cautious finger, and moved inside. It was a short corridor with duck-egg blue walls. There were prints of three Turners on the walls. Soft carpeting. I trod gently. The corridor opened on to a low balcony, three steps above the lounge floor.

  The lounge was deliciously modern, the whole concept in reds. Wide windows were hung with maroon velvet drapes; the floor was carpeted with red and pink Axminster. Along a back wall a four-seater settee, beside it a low, glass-topped table with scattered magazines. The other seats were large and soft, with red scatter cushions. More magazines on the floor beside an easy chair, with Geoff’s coat and scarf tossed over it, and over in the corner a small bar. I wandered over. The usual scotch and brandy, two syphons of soda water. An opened bottle of Hollands gin was on the shelf beneath, and beside it a bottle of Cointreau, nearly empty.

  Spaced along the wall was one of the finest radio and record-reproducer combinations I had ever seen. There were a couple of dozen LP sleeves scattered on the flat surface, mainly the classics that Geoff liked—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—but also at least six sleeves of Stravinsky and Ravel, Elsa’s favourites.

  The doors into the other rooms were shut. Rather than touch the handles, I decided not to go in.

  The blood was most noticeable at one end of the carpet. Geoff had managed to crawl as far as the foot of the three steps. Maybe twenty feet. There he had collapsed, rolling over on to his back, and died there with a wound in his stomach. There was no weapon visible.

  The only things I touched were the phone in the hall—with a handkerchief and the sneck on the inside of die door lock, to make sure nobody walked in before they got there from Central Office.

  3

  We were five hours in that flat. As I’d expected, they dug out Vantage and sent him along. Geoff Forbes was an ex-copper, so they sent their best. Vantage was the best, I have to admit that.

  “Friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

  I agreed. At that time I hadn’t dug out my emotions and had a look at them.

  “And he left a message for you to come up here at eleven?”

  “I didn’t even know he had this place.”

  “You were playing snooker downstairs?” he asked.

  “With Eldon Kyle.”

  He grunted. The call had gone out to pick up Kyle.

  They had taken Geoff away after the doctor had done his preliminary.

  Anything from nine to ten, he said it had happened. They’re always cautious, but apparently Geoff could have lived for some minutes after the stabbing. It looked like a long, thin blade, which had penetrated upwards from below the ribs.

  I just stood around and watched the squad at work. It left me in a rather awkward position. I was not officially assigned to it because I was still on the sick list. They were flashing their cameras, making measurements, entering those thousands of details in their notebooks. Two men were puffing around for prints. Time flowed along and nobody hurried, and only I knew it was all a waste of time, because I knew who had done it.

  The word came through that Kyle was held at Central Office.

  “Let him wait,” said Vantage.

  He was an extremely thorough man, who would plod patiently through every item of routine even if the murderer had run into his arms with a dripping knife in his hand.

  At around three in the morning they fetched up the night porter. That was when we ran into trouble.

  His name was Jenkins. He had one of those roly-poly faces of benign innocence, and eyebrows that shot up in aggrieved surprise every time anyone suggested he might not be entirely correct. He was in his late sixties. They had packed him into a blue and gold uniform and given him a peaked cap. You could tell by the way he kept fiddling with it, putting it on, taking it off, swinging it between his knees, that he was uncertain whether his veracity was best indicated with the hat on or off. This comes of a job that requires the wearing of a hat indoors. He was not nervous, and only too eager to help.

  Vantage sat him down in an upright chair.

  “Now...when did you last see Mr Forbes?”

  “Around nine-thirty, sir.”

  “When he came in?”

  “He came in from the car park lift and stopped to have a word with me at the desk.”

  “What word?”

  “He asked me to ring downstairs to the billiard hall and ask Mr Mallin to come up here at about eleven.”

  I burst in: “But you didn’t ring until...” I stopped. Vantage’s cold eye had turned on me. He coolly went on:

  “Which I’m sure you did.”

  “Oh, yes sir.”

  “At once?”

  “No. You see, this was the way it was. Mr Forbes came up in the lift and said was there any mail—he usually does that—and left this message.”

  “You said that.” Vantage was completely relaxed and unhurried.

  “But he said—ring down about ten to eleven.”

  I was beginning to have a strange feeling that things were not quite right. “This was half past nine?”

  Vantage’s eyes were coldly furious, but he waited for the reply.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you check it?” I persisted.

  “Yes. I glanced at the clock in the foyer, because Mr Forbes had said phone at ten to eleven, so naturally...” Jenkins shrugged. He put on his cap and took it off again.

  “Naturally,” Vantage purred. He stared me down, guessing what I was about to say. “You said something about his post.”

  “He usually calls at the desk and asks for his mail.”

  “And was there any?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “And usually?”

  “A few times. Odd letters.”

  “And how long has he been a tenant here?”

  Queens Mansions had been completed only in the past six months. I waited, impatient to express what was on my mind.

  Jenkins blinked. “About two months. A bit over, perhaps.”

  “And was he usually alone?”

  “Not always,” said Jenkins calmly hammering a nail into my skull. “Sometimes he was with a woman. But usually she’d stay back in the lift cage, waiting to go on up. Kind of not being too conspicuous.” Jenkins looked from my haggard face to Vantage’s calm one. “If you know what I mean, sir.”

  “No,” said Vantage coldly, not encouraging. “What do you mean?”

  �
��It was none of my business of course, and I didn’t wish to imply...”

  “But you did imply.” Vantage raised his eyebrows with that devastating stare of his. Jenkins looked down at his cap.

  “Kind of slipping a woman up to his flat...sir.”

  “Describe her,” I snapped.

  Vantage glanced at me with a gentle smile. “Yes, describe her.”

  “Well sir, kind of tiny, and I reckon blonde, with a sharp little face, and...well, small.”

  Vantage looked at me. I shook my head. That wasn’t Elsa, who was a brunette, and taller. Her head came just to my eyes...

  I turned away and left them to it. I lit my pipe and dropped ash on the blood on the carpet. But we’d done with the blood on the carpet. In the background Vantage was still hammering out details. How many times had he seen the blonde? Maybe four—five perhaps. Always with Mr Forbes? Yes. Never alone? No.

  “But she wasn’t with him tonight?”

  “Not tonight, sir. He was on his own”.

  I was feeling sick. The wardrobes had proved to be empty—but why should Geoff have stocked them if he only used the place to bring a woman to? By that time the fingerprint detail was about clearing up. There were no prints in the bedroom or bathroom, but the place had probably been cleaned and polished since he’d been here last. In the lounge there were a few of Geoff’s prints, mostly on the drinks and the LP sleeves. You could almost see him entertaining his female.

  And there were a few prints, unidentified, but of a woman.

  Vantage sent Jenkins back to his desk and we stood and watched the men clearing up. He had brought along Sergeant Crewse. Crewse was first-class at this sort of thing. Left to himself with a squad of men, he’d not miss a thing.

  They were tidying-up, looking round for details. Vantage, Crewse and I stood and watched them locking away their cases.