Tired of Perkins and Manston, I stared at one of the modern paintings beyond Sutcliffe. The canvas was covered with irregular coloured squares and triangles, and in the top right-hand corner was the word Hommes and in the diagonally opposite corner the word Femmes. I didn’t try to work it out. I was just content to be a bloody-minded Philistine.
Sutcliffe read through the two epistles, held the various sheets up to the light, squinted at them, fingered their texture and then read them all through again. This done, he said to no one in particular, ‘Get Hackett up.’
Perkins reached out a long left arm and thumbed a bell push in the wall. Ten seconds later Hackett came in without knocking.
‘Sir?’
Sutcliffe swung his head round slowly and gave Hackett a smile. ‘Take Mr Carver down to the waiting room and make him comfortable.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And see that he doesn’t panic.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Hackett came over to me. An automatic had suddenly sprouted out of his right hand. With his left he ran expertly over my jacket and trousers.
‘Nothing lethal,’ I said. ‘Except a nail-file in my ticket pocket.’
Hackett led me out and shut the door.
‘They must be cross with you, Mr Carver. Never sent you down to the waiting room before, have they?’
‘No.’
But I knew all about the waiting room from hearsay. Personally I would have been glad to leave it that way.
We went down into the basement. Hackett unlocked a green baize door at the end of a little corridor and waved me in. He did it with the automatic, so I had to obey.
The door closed behind me and I was alone. It was a big room without windows. The floor was tiled, plain white tiles. The walls were sound-proofed, leather panels covering whatever they had used for insulation. When you touched the stuff it gave gently. In a recess at the far end of the room was a bunk, screwed to floor and wall. At its foot a little washbasin was set in the wall. Behind a plastic curtain in the right-hand wall was a recessed toilet. A plain wooden table and a kitchen chair stood in the middle of the room. Set in the ceiling behind an iron grille was a light. Above the doorway almost at ceiling height was a row of small portholes, some glass-covered and some covered with perforated brass discs. From one of them now was coming the gentle hiss of air being forced into the room. Looking up at it, I caught the blast of hot draught funnelling down at me. As I stood there the noise of the hissing increased.
I went over to the bunk and sat down on the low pile of folded army blankets. I’ve lived in some odd rooms in my time, most of them crummy hotel rooms, and generally managed to make myself comfortable. In this room I knew I was never going to be comfortable. Nothing would ever make it sing for me—and why should it? The purpose of this room was to make people sing loud and clear if they had any sins or deceits to be purged.
Within five minutes the temperature had gone up to tropical level and I had my jacket off and my collar loosened. Within the next ten it went down to freezing point so that I had the blankets huddled round me and my breath hanging in cold clouds before my face. This hot and cold sequence went on for about an hour. It was nothing serious. It was just annoying. But I knew that it was no more than a mild foretaste of unpleasantness to come unless I decided to behave myself. They needn’t have bothered. Within reasonable limits I had already decided to behave myself. Like Martin Freeman, I had a high survival factor and meant to protect myself.
From a loudspeaker in one of the portholes over the door Sutcliffe’s voice suddenly came out cold and clear into the room.
‘We’ll be down later, Carver. Don’t rely on any sentiment about the help you’ve given us in the past—almost outweighed, of course, by the trouble you’ve given us too. You don’t come out of that room alive until we have the last scrap of truth out of you about this business. Think about it and prepare yourself for confession.’
I said, ‘Can you hear me?’
He said, ‘Yes. Why?’
‘Because in that case I won’t speak my deepest thoughts about you out loud. I’ll just be polite and say, “Drop dead, you stinking bastard!” ’
I heard someone laugh. It could have been Perkins or Manston. It certainly wasn’t Sutcliffe.
CHAPTER 10
Next Stop Hades
At no time were they all three in the room together. Sometimes there were two, usually only one, while the others, I guessed, watched and listened on the closed-circuit screen in Sutcliffe’s room. Or, if they had any sense, took a nap . . . because what was there to get from me?
But they obviously thought that there was something.
Manston, alone, started the ball rolling. About four hours after my being shown into the room, Hackett let him in. From the moment of his arrival the air-conditioning went back to normal.
He sat on the kitchen chair while I lay on the bunk.
‘All right,’ he said, no emotion in his voice, no encouraging look on his face, ‘just tell your story from start to finish—and omit nothing.’
I sat upright and told him. It took quite a while and when I had finished he said, ‘That’s all?’
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘You mean to say it was just pure chance that you were given a commission by the London Fraternal Insurance Society to recover Mrs Stankowski’s property—and this led you, again by chance, into this Freeman business?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was just some little bell ringing at the back of your mind that began to warn you that Bill Dawson might be the
