Hell Is Too Crowded

(2)

Pain, exploding in a chain reaction, brought him back from darkness as someone slapped him repeatedly across the face. There were voices near by, a confused and meaningless blur, and then a tap was turned on.

His head was forced down by a strong hand and he choked as ice-cold water surged into his nostrils. The pressure was released and he breathed again, but only for a moment. His head was pushed back down relentlessly. When he was dragged upright again, there was a roaring in his ears and he could hardly breathe, but his vision was clear.

He was in a small, white-tiled bathroom and his reflection stared out at him from a waist-length mirror. His face was haggard and drawn, the eyes deep-set in their sockets, and there were scratches down one cheek.

His shirt was soaked in blood and he leaned on the washbasin for support and stared at himself in bewilderment. A thick-set man in shabby raincoat and soft hat stood at his shoulder, eyes hard and unsympathetic in a craggy face.

“How do you feel?” he demanded.

“Lousy!” Brady croaked, and the voice seemed to belong to a stranger.

“That’s good, you bastard,” the man said and pushed him roughly through the door.

The living-room seemed to be crowded with people. A uniformed constable stood by the door, and two plain-clothes men worked their way round the room, dusting for fingerprints.

A tall, thin man with grey hair and horn-rimmed spectacles, sat at one end of the divan with a notebook and listened to a small, bent old man, who stood before him twisting a cloth cap nervously between his hands.

As Brady moved forward, the little man saw him and an expression of fear crossed his face. “That’s him, Inspector Mallory,” he said. “That’s the bloke.”

Mallory turned and regarded Brady calmly. “Are you quite sure, Mr. Blakey?”

The little man nodded confidently. “I’m not likely to forget him, governor. Saw him plain, standing in the doorway when she switched on the light.”

Mallory looked tired. He made a note in his book and nodded. “That’s fine, Mr. Blakey. You go back to work. We’ll get a statement from you later.”

The little man turned away to the door and Brady said slowly, “Look, what the hell’s going on here?”

Mallory looked up at him coldly. “Better show him, Gower,” he said.

The detective who had brought Brady from the bathroom, pushed him across to the bedroom. Brady hesitated in the doorway. There was a flash and a photographer turned and looked at him curiously.

The room was a shambles, the floor was littered with toilet articles from the dressing-table and the curtains fluttered in the breeze from the smashed window. The bedclothes trailed down to the floor and the far wall was etched with a delicate spray of blood.

Another detective was on his knees wrapping an antique whalebone walking-stick in a towel. It was slippery with blood and he turned and looked across the room and suddenly, there was silence.

Gower pushed Brady forward to the end of the bed. Something was lying there draped in a blanket, squeezed between the bed and the wall.

“Take a look!” he said, pulling the blanket away. “Take a good look!”

Her clothes had been ripped and shredded from her body. She sprawled there wantonly, her thighs spattered with blood, but it was the face which was the ultimate horror, a sticky, glutinous mess of pulped flesh.

Brady turned away, vomit rising into his mouth, and Gower cursed and shoved him across to the door. “You gutless wonder!” he said viciously. “I’d like to string you up myself.”

Mallory was still sitting on the divan, but now he was examining Brady’s passport. Brady looked down at him, horror in his eyes. “You think I did that?”

Mallory tossed Brady’s jacket at him. “Better put that on; you might catch cold.” He turned to Gower. “Stick him in the other bedroom. I’ll be along in a minute.”

Brady tried to speak, but the words refused to come and Gower hustled him across the room, through the bathroom and into another bedroom. It was small and plainly furnished with a single divan under the window and a fitted wardrobe in an alcove. Gower pushed Brady down on to a small wooden chair and left him in the care of a young constable.

When the detective had gone, Brady said, “Any chance of a cigarette?”

The constable hesitated and then unbuttoned his tunic and took out a battered silver case. He gave Brady a cigarette and a light without speaking, and returned to his post by the door.

Brady felt tired, really tired. The rain beat against the window and the cigarette smoke tasted of dead leaves and nothing made any sense. The door opened and Gower and Mallory came in.

Gower moved across the room quickly, a scowl on his face. “Who the hell gave you that?” he demanded, plucking the cigarette from Brady’s mouth.

Brady tried to stand up and the detective hooked a foot in the chair and pulled it away, sending Brady sprawling to the floor.

Brady came to his feet, anger rising inside him. This was something tangible, something he could handle. He hit Gower hard beneath the breastbone and as the detective doubled over, lifted his right into the man’s face sending him back against the opposite wall.

The young constable drew his staff and Gower scrambled to his feet, face contorted with rage. Brady picked up the chair in both hands and retreated into a corner.

As they advanced towards him, Mallory said sharply from the doorway, “Don’t be a fool, Brady!”

“Then tell this big ape here to get off my back,” Brady said savagely. “If he lays a glove on me again, I’ll pound his skull in.”

Mallory moved in between them quickly. “Go and get cleaned up, George,” he told Gower. “Make a cup of tea in the kitchen — anything. I’ll send for you when I need you.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Gower said. “You saw what he did to that girl.”

“I’ll handle it!” Mallory said, and there was iron in his voice.

For a moment longer, Gower glared at Brady, and then he turned quickly and left the room. Brady lowered the chair and Mallory nodded to the constable. “Wait outside.”

The door closed behind the constable and Mallory took out a packet of cigarettes. “You’d better have another,” he said. “You look as if you could do with one.”

“You can say that again,” Brady told him. He accepted a light from the inspector and slumped into a chair.

Mallory sat on the divan. “Perhaps we can get down to some facts now.”

“You mean you want a statement?”

Mallory shook his head. “Let’s keep it on an informal level for the moment.”

“That suits me,” Brady told him. “To start with, I didn’t kill her. Didn’t even know her name.”

Mallory took a photo from his pocket and handed it across. “Her name was Marie Duclos, born in Paris, been living over here for about six years.” He took out a pipe and started to fill it from a leather pouch. “A known prostitute. After the Act chased her off the streets, she did what a hell of a sight too many of them have done — got herself a flat and a telephone — or someone got them for her.”

The photo was old and faded and Brady frowned and shook his head. “It doesn’t look much like her.”

“That’s not surprising,” Mallory said. “If you look on the back, you’ll see it was taken when she was eighteen and that’s ten years ago. You’d better tell me how you met her.”

Brady told him everything, just the way it had happened, from his first awakening on the Embankment, to the events in the flat.

When he had finished, Mallory sat in silence for a while, a slight frown on his face. “What it really comes down to is this. You maintain you saw a man on the Embankment in the fog who you later saw again, here in this flat, standing behind Marie Duclos, just before you passed out.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“In other words, you’re implying that this man committed the murder.”

“He must have done.”

“But why, Brady?” Mallory said gently. “Why pick on you?”

“Because I was here,” Brady said. “I suppose it could have been any poor sucker she happened to be entertaining.”

“But if he was here, where did he go afterwards?” Mallory said softly. “You and the woman were the only people to use the front door all night. The night-watchman swears to that.”

“How did you know something was wrong here?” Brady said.

Mallory shrugged. “The nightwatchman heard her scream and then a candlestick was thrown through the window. He knocked them up next door and asked them to ring for us. He still had the door under observation the whole time. Nobody left.”

“There must be a rear entrance.”

Mallory shook his head. “There’s a yard and an overgrown garden with a six-foot fence of iron railings dividing it from the graveyard.”

“It’s still a possibility,” Brady said. “And what about the old girl downstairs? Maybe she saw something?”

“The downstairs flat hasn’t had a tenant for two months now.” Mallory shook his head and sighed. “It won’t do, Brady. For one thing, you told me you first saw this man on the Embankment before the Duclos woman spoke to you. Now that just doesn’t make sense.”

“But I couldn’t have killed her,” Brady said. “Only a madman could have beaten a woman to death like that.”

“Or a man so drunk that he didn’t know what he was doing,” Mallory said quietly.

Brady sat there, staring helplessly at him. The whole world seemed to be closing in on him and there was nothing he could do about it — nothing at all.

The door opened and the young constable came in and handed Mallory a slip of paper. “Sergeant Gower thought you might find this interesting, sir.”

The door closed behind him and Mallory quickly scanned the paper. After a while he said, “It would appear that you’re a pretty violent man when the mood takes you, Brady.”

Brady frowned. “What the hell are you getting at?”

“We’ve just run a quick check to see if anything was known about you. Since flying in from Kuwait three days ago, you seem to have spent the intervening time in trying to drink yourself into an early grave. On Tuesday night you had to be ejected from a pub on the King’s Road after knocking down the landlord who refused to serve you because of your condition. Later that night, you were involved in a fight in a drinking club in Soho. When the bouncer tried to throw you out, you broke his arm, but the owner refused to press charges. You were finally picked up by the police in the Haymarket at four a.m., drunk and incapable. It says here that you were fined two pounds at Bow Street yesterday. Quite a record.”

Brady got to his feet and paced restlessly across the room. “O.K., I’ll tell you about it.”

He stood looking out of the window, down into the street, watching the policemen standing under the street lamp, their capes shining with rain.

“I’m a constructional engineer. Work mostly on bridges and dams and that sort of thing. I met a girl in London last year called Katie Holdt. She was German, working for some family over here as a children’s nurse while she learned the language. I fell pretty hard, wanted to marry her, but I was short of cash.”

“And what was your solution?” Mallory said.

Brady shrugged. “There was an opening in Kuwait — a new dam. The money was exceptional as nobody wanted the job. Working conditions were pretty grim, mainly because of the heat. I took it on, lived off the company for ten months and had my salary credited to Katie here in London.”

Mallory looked pained. “And the usual thing happened, I suppose?”

Brady nodded. “I flew in three days ago after ten months of hell and discovered from her employer that she’d returned to Germany a month ago to get married.” He slammed a balled fist into his palm. “And there was nothing I could do about it — not a damned thing. It was all legal.”

“And so you decided to get drunk,” Mallory said. “So drunk, you didn’t know what you were doing for most of the time.”

Brady shook his head deliberately. “O.K., Inspector, so I got drunk. I even got mixed up in a couple of brawls, but I didn’t kill that woman.”

Mallory got to his feet. He crossed to a small dressing-table, picked up a mirror and held it out. “Take a look!” he said. “Take a good look!”

The blood from the scratches had dried and they looked ugly and somehow sinister. Brady touched them gently with his fingertips. “You mean she did that?” he said in a whisper.

Mallory nodded. “The doctor took blood and skin from underneath the fingernails of her right hand. He’ll examine you when we get down to the station.”

Brady clenched his hands to keep them from shaking. “I’m an American citizen. I’d like to get in touch with my Embassy.”

“That’s already been taken care of,” Mallory said, opening the door into the bathroom.

Brady made one more try. He paused in the doorway. “Let’s go over this thing again, Mallory. There’s got to be an answer somewhere.”

“There’s only one thing might help you now, Brady,” Mallory told him, “and that’s a lawyer. I’d ask your Embassy to get you a good one. The best there is. You’re going to need all the help you can get.”

Gower was standing outside and his eyes glittered malevolently as Brady moved past him. They took him downstairs and paused at the top of the steps while Gower produced a pair of handcuffs.

It was still foggy and the rain bounced from the asphalt surface of the street in solid rods. Several police cars were parked in the road and a small group of curious people crowded along the railings, held back by a couple of constables. It looked as if most of the inhabitants of the quiet street had turned out, probably awakened by the unaccustomed noise of the cars.

As Gower clamped one steel bracelet around the American’s wrist, Brady stiffened suddenly. Standing out from the mass of faces was one he was already only too familiar with. In the same moment, its owner melted into the fog at the rear of the crowd and disappeared.

Brady pulled away from Gower and jumped down into the crowd, the handcuffs swinging from one wrist. He burst his way through and then someone stretched out a foot and tripped him so that he fell heavily. As he started to get up, they were upon him.

Gower twisted his arm and Brady turned desperately as the inspector came forward, “I saw him, Mallory,” he said. “He was there at the back of the crowd watching. He can’t have got far.”

In the light of the street lamp, Mallory looked suddenly more tired than ever. “For God’s sake, cut it out, Brady! This isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

Brady’s control snapped completely. He lifted an elbow into Gower’s face, tore free, and plunged through the crowd, striking out madly at the faces which surrounded him.

It was no good. He pulled away from the clutching hands and turned with his back to the railings. “Come on!” he cried. “Come and get me, you bastards!”

They came in a rush, Gower leading the way. Brady smashed a fist into the detective’s face and then a staff cracked down across his right arm. He swung again with his left. Someone twisted it behind his back and they forced him down against the wet flagstones. He cursed and kicked out wildly.

It took six of them to get him into the car.