He was late. After half past three the place started gradually filling up, but not with anyone who announced himself as Jonas Steen. When he was ten minutes late I found a phone and rang him and got no reply.
And so? So, being a master of disguise, he'd transformed his features with a couple of smears of greasepaint and shipped out as a Chinese cook on a guano boat bound for Chile. Or, realising that he could never match his puny wits against the mighty brain of James Card, he'd taken a long step out of a tenth-floor window…
I found myself swallowing hard. That last idea wasn't too impossible, not when I remembered how jittery he'd sounded on the phone. I gobblectmy beer and hurried out to see for myself. The building was one of the new jobs, slim, glassy, five storeys high, with a small lobby of veined cat-grey marble, now jammed with typists waiting for the rain to stop or the boyfriends to start or just swapping gossip. I picked the name Steen off the board – third floor – pushed through the mob, and piloted myself up in a lift.
Seventeen
Up there, it was quiet and empty under cold neon lighting, just a straight bare corridor with offices at either side. I prowled the names – most of them seemed to be connected with shipping in some way – until I found Steen's. There was a light on behind the glass panel, so I knocked. And waited. And waited.
So? So because the door didn't seem to be locked and I'd come all the bloody way from bloody London via bloody Newcastle, I went in.
And I was just too late. By maybe a few minutes and certainly a lifetime. He didn't look anything but dead – sprawled back in his chair, arms and legs outflung, two neat, slightly bloody holes in his temple. When I took a deep breath I could smell the sweet-sour scent of powdersmoke.
I shut the door quietly and just stood for a while. Then I remembered he might not be Steen at all, so I wrapped a handkerchief round my hand and explored the pockets of the natty golden-brown suit. And it was him, all right. Alive, I'd guess he'd been in his late thirties, with fair hair left a bit long for Norwegian standards, no sideboards or moustache, a handsome fleshy face whose eyes probably hadn't bulged like that until a couple of small bullets burst his brain.
I moved away and something crunched under my foot: a little copper-coloured cartridge case. A -22, which I'd guessed already. And what else did I want to know? – apart from the way home to Mummy. But not this time; this time I had to stay. I reached for the phone, then remembered the cops would prefer me to use another one, and then noticed the gun beside it. A -22, of course – Mauser HSC model, just like the one the Pentathol boys had pinched a few evenings back.
It even had the same number.
'Now that,' I said out loud, 'really is cheating.' Then I just stood and looked carefully around the office. Time was running out and I was following it – but I'd still come all the way from London to see this bloke and – well, here he was.
It wasn't a particularly big room, and the only desk was Steen's own oiled-teak job, so he didn't have a full-time secretary. The rest of the room matched the desk: teak arms on the slim black-leather chairs, low teak bookcase, teak filing cabinets. Even the indoor plants on the window-sill were in a long teak trough. Maybe he knew somebody in a teak jungle.
All of which was fine if I were writing him up in Homes ‹Sr Gardens but no help when it came to explaining things to the boys with big feet and disbelieving eyes. And I was going to have to explain – some, anyhow.
Top priority was that second cartridge case; that wasted me another half minute. There were also a small cushion and a pen down on the floor – the sort of pen you stick in a desk-top holder. Probably he'd been writing when he got shot. I left it lying there, then started on the filing cabinet. D, E, F for Fen-wick… Fenwick… no Fenwick. Not a whisper of one. Odd? How could I tell? Try Lloyd's – and there was more than a drawerful of that, but subdivided by what looked like ship names. Anyway, still no Fenwick.
Try the desk diary – a nice big affair bound in black leather. Appointments for today: a shipping line in the morning, Larsen at two-fifteen. Fontenen at three-thirty, but no mention of my name. And whoever Larsen had been, he wouldn't have left that diary if he was the killer. The rest of the desk was pretty clear: a small card index – names of ships and shipping lines – a brass pot full of pencils, the empty penholder.
But what had he been writing on? Well, whatever it was, my guess was the killer had lifted it. Probably a telephone notepad. So why pinch a whole pad when you can just tear off a page?
I'm writing something. Important. Secret. Somebody knocks on the door. I'm not expecting anybody, it's late in the day, I'm surprised. I call 'Come in', but at the same time I open the central desk drawer and just slide the notepad in and out of sight, and he comes in before I've had time to put away the pen and – bang. And bang again.
I opened the drawer and took out the pad and tore off the top half-dozen pages. And five seconds after, I was starting down the stairs.
There was still a small crowd in the lobby, so I strolled through listening to the thunder of my heartbeat, and just getting outside was the first day of spring. Even if I knew winter was on its way back.
By then the Fontenen was really filling up with prosperous-looking types steaming out the rain over the first beer of the day. I ordered one for myself, then went to explore the gents' lavatory. It had a modern cistern, but the lid still lifted off, and the Mauser and the derringer – plus the clip holster – went down into the water, well clear of the ball-and-cock gear. The two cartridge cases and five blank sheets of notepaper just got flushed away; I was prepared to chance the sheet with writing on it – even if it did start off with the word card. Five minutes later, I was back in the lobby of Steen's building.
The crowd had thinned to three girls getting the word from two young men. I marched up to the janitor at his marble-topped counter and asked for Jonas Steen.
He looked curiously at me, significantly at the wall clock. 'Does he expect you?'
'He said he'd meet me at the Fontenen cafe, but he's twenty minutes late and I just wondered…'
He shrugged, dialled on the house phone. No reply. He shrugged. 'He has gone.'
'But he can't have. He arranged to meet me. I've come all the way from London to see him.'
He shrugged again, but called something to the group and one of the girls considered and called something back. I don't know what, but enough to get him puzzled. And I'd done my part. Steen wouldn't rest lonely all night.
Even then, it took time. Janitors don't make fast, purposeful decisions. They stand there and think, or at least stand there. Then they pick up the phone and make two other calls and get two other no replies. Then they think, or stand there, some more. And finally they haul out a big bunch of keys and lead you over to the lift.
I watched, trying to look bored, as he went through the inevitable, useless ritual of knocking, knocking again louder, and then pasting an apologetic smile on his face and opening the door and leaning in to have a look.
'-!' he said. I mean, I don't know what he said but I know what he meant. And even from the back of his head I could tell there wasn't any more smile on the front. He lunged into the room, and I followed.
Just for the record, I said something like, 'Good Christ!' but it was wasted. He'd rushed straight across to the body but was just standing there, not touching it, not really looking at it, not doing anything.
'Is it Mr Steen? ' I asked.
'Yes, yes,' he said impatiently – and went on doing nothing.
After a while, I suggested, 'What about the police?'
'Yes, yes.'
And at last he picked up the phone.
They were fast and, as far as I could tell, good. There were a couple of uniformed cops on the spot inside two minutes, two motor-cyclists a half-minute later, and after that a carload of plainclothes jacks. One of these took me back downstairs and parked me in the janitor's room behind the marble counter and leaned against the door to stop the draught coming in or something. And we waited. For a long time voices and feet went hither and yon outside.