II
As I drove along the promenade, I could see people still bathing in the sea. In the light of the big white moon the water was the colour of old silver.
I reached Bay Beach after a ten-minute drive. This part of the beach was away from the fashionable end and I found the bathing station was closed, and the row of cabins, under the shadows of the palms, in darkness.
I left the Buick in a side street just beyond the bathing station, then I walked down to the beach. Apart from a few cars, drifting along the beach road with nowhere to go and all the time in the world in which to get there, this section of the promenade was as quiet and as deserted as a railroad waiting room on a Christmas morning.
The gate down to the beach was closed and locked. I looked to right and left, satisfied myself there was no one watching me, then put my hand on the top rail and vaulted over. I landed in soft sand with no noise. Moving fast, I reached the sheltering shadows of the palms and then paused.
I had no concrete idea why I should have come down here except that I hadn’t anything better to do, and I wanted to see again the place where Sheppey had died. Keeping in the shadows, I looked over at the row of cabins.
There was a chance that Rankin had left a cop on duty and the last thing I wanted at this moment was to run into the law. But there was no sound nor movement on this strip of lonely beach except from the murmur of the sea and the occasional car that drove along the promenade above me and out of my sight.
Satisfied I had the place to myself, I moved down the row of cabins until I reached the second one from the end. In that one, Sheppey had died.
I pushed against the door, but found it locked. Taking a flashlight and a gadget of thin steel from my hip pocket, I examined the lock. Then I inserted the gadget between the lock and the doorpost and levered hard and pushed. The door swung open.
I paused in the doorway, feeling the pent-up heat of the little room coming out at me like the blast from a fierce oven. I stepped just inside, turned the beam of my flashlight on and swung it slowly around the room.
There were two stools, a table and a divan bed. In the corner where Sheppey had died, there was a big dark stain on the floor that gave me a cold, creepy feeling.
Opposite me were two doors, leading into the changing rooms. One of them Sheppey had used: the other, the girl who had been with him.
I wondered about her. Had she been a decoy to get Sheppey down here? He had been mug enough about women to have fallen into that kind of trap. Had his death nothing to do with Creedy? Had he been fooling around with the girl belonging to some thug who had caught up with them?
If the boyfriend had suddenly walked in on them it would explain why the girl had left her clothes in the cabin. While he was killing Sheppey she had probably run out and away. But why hadn’t she got help? Wouldn’t she have tried to get someone to stop this thug killing Sheppey? Or had it happened so fast that Sheppey was dead before she could get out and, seeing he was dead, she had just run?
I pushed my hat to the back of my head and wiped my forehead with my hand. Or had she killed him?
I moved into the hut and closed the door. I didn’t want any swimmer or someone in a boat to spot my light through the open door.
I went over to the first door leading into the dressing room, opened it and glanced inside. It was a cupboard of a room with a bench and four hooks for clothes and a small mirror. I swung my beam around as I wondered if this was the room Sheppey had used. I didn’t expect to find anything. The police had already been over it, and it was too small for them to miss anything: I didn’t find anything.
I stepped out, thinking I was wasting time. There was nothing here for me: not even atmosphere. Maybe I wouldn’t have bothered to have looked in the other little room, but suddenly I had a feeling I was no longer alone in the dark cabin. I stood motionless, listening, hearing my heart thumping. My finger eased on the button of the flashlight and thick darkness engulfed me.
For a long moment I heard nothing, then just as I was thinking my imagination was playing me tricks, I heard a sound that seemed close: the sound of a faint sigh: the sound someone makes when letting his breath out slowly through his open mouth.
It was a sound so slight that if I hadn’t been listening intently, and if there hadn’t been any other sound during that brief moment, I wouldn’t have heard it. I felt the hair on the nape of my neck move. I wished now I had brought a gun. Stepping back two steps brought me against the door of the changing room. I lifted the flashlight and pressed the button.
The white beam of the light made a meaningless circle on the floor boards. I swung it around, saw nothing, and listened again.
On the road a car went by with a roar and a woosh of someone in a hurry.
I turned the beam to the door of the second changing room, reached forward, turned the handle and gently pushed open the door.
I lifted the flashlight.
She was sitting on the floor, facing me, in a pale blue French swimsuit, her golden skin shiny with sweat. Her eyes were fixed in a vacant stare. Down her left shoulder was a long stream of dried blood.
She was a dark, good-looking girl with black silky hair; around twenty-four or five with the figure of a model. She was much too young to be dying.
She stared sightlessly into the beam of the flashlight. I stood transfixed, sweating ice, my heart hammering, my mouth dry.
Then, very slowly, she began to topple sideways.
I was unable to move. I just stood there, staring. It wasn’t until she slid with a horrible ghost-like silence to the floor that I moved forward to clutch at her.
But by then I was just that much too late.
II
She lay on her side, her dark hair covering her face. Looking down at her, I saw on the floor an icepick with a white plastic handle. It was a reminder that this girl had died the same way as Sheppey had died, although this time the killer’s hand had lost some of its cunning, for Sheppey had died instantaneously.
I bent over her, sweat running down my face and dripping off my chin. The spasm, completely unmistakable, that I had seen run through her as she had spread out on the floor told me the exact moment when she died. I didn’t have to feel for an artery nor lift her eyelid to know she was beyond any help I could give her.
I kept the beam of light on her. There was nothing to tell me who she was. All she had on was this swimsuit. The fact that she was well groomed, that her hair had been recently shampooed and set, that her nails were manicured and stained dark red and the costume itself was a good one told me nothing. She could have been rich or she could have been poor. She could have been a model; she could have been just one of the thousands of workers in St. Raphael City; she could have been anything.
There was one thing I was certain of: she was the girl who had called for Jack Sheppey at the hotel: the one Greaves had been so certain had been a blonde. Remembering he had thought she had either been wearing a wig or had dyed her hair, I held the torch closer to satisfy myself that he had been wrong, and I did satisfy myself.
She was neither wearing a wig nor had she dyed her hair.
There was no doubt about that and that proved just how wrong a trained house dick could be.
I turned the beam of light on to her arms. In the bright light, the soft down looked fair. It wouldn’t have been natural if it had been otherwise. She had been worshipping the sun for months to judge by her tan: the down on her arms would naturally be bleached.
I straightened up. Taking my handkerchief from my pocket, I wiped my face.
The heat in the tiny room was awful. I found I had sweated right through my clothes and I moved back into the larger room.
It was then that I noticed another door that obviously communicated with the next-door cabin. There was a bolt on the door, but it wasn’t pushed into its socket.
That gave me a jolt.
I realized it must have been through this door that the killer had come and gone. For all I knew he was still in the cabin next door, waiting for me to go away, and I wished even more that I had brought a gun with me.
