“You certainly know some lovely people,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
They were moving along Aldgate and she braked to a halt on the opposite side of the road to the tube station. “Look, lover, you wanted your girl friend back and you’ve got her,” she said. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll drop off here and we’ll call it square.”
“Not quite,” Brady said. “If I remember correctly, there was some question of a name, wasn’t there?”
For a moment she glared at him defiantly, and then her shoulders sagged. “I wish I’d never set eyes on you, you bastard. The party you want is Jane Gordon. She has a flat at Carley Mansions, Baker Street.”
“Where does she fit in?”
Soames shrugged wearily. “I don’t know. She got in touch with me some days ago, said a friend of hers wanted to contact somebody reliable in Manningham. Someone who could keep his mouth shut. I owed her a favour from way back. I put her on to Das.”
“But it was Haras who went to Manningham and gave Das his instructions,” Brady said.
“So that was the way Jane wanted to handle it,” Soames said. “It was no skin off my nose. After you came snooping round my place this morning, I got in touch with her by phone. Told her I had you under lock and key. She asked me to hang on to you for the time being. Said she had to get in touch with someone else. Someone important. Promised to phone me back at six tonight, but it’s after that now.”
“Carley Mansions, Baker Street,” Brady said. He reached across her and opened the door. “If you haven’t told me the truth, you’ll be seeing me.”
“What I’ve told you is strictly kosher, lover,” she said. “I’ve had enough of you to last me a lifetime.”
She scrambled out on to the pavement and made straight for the entrance to the tube station without looking back. Brady lit another cigarette and watched her, a slight frown on his face. He turned to Anne, who was leaning back in the corner of the seat, eyes closed. “Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes and nodded wearily. “I’m fine, just fine. I feel as if I could go to bed for a week, that’s all.”
“I’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” he said. “Then I’ll take you straight home.”
He got out of the car and walked across to the tube station. Just inside the entrance, there was a row of phone booths. Soames was in the end one, talking animatedly. He watched her for a moment, a tiny frown on his face, and then turned and hurried back to the car.
That she would get in touch with Jane Gordon was a chance he’d have to take. All it meant was that he would have to move much faster now.
Despite the poor weather, the West End was crowded as usual and it took him longer to reach Kensington than he had counted on. It was nearly eight o'clock when he braked to a halt outside the house in the quiet square.
Anne was a dead weight on his arm as he mounted the stairs to the flat. The drug seemed to have taken even greater control and he carried her into the bedroom, half-fainting, and quickly stripped the clothes from her slim body.
She shivered slightly in the cool breeze from the window and he quickly pulled back the blankets and put her to bed. Her hair spread across the pillow, a dark halo round her head. She moaned once softly and he bent down and kissed her and then he quietly left the room.
There was a map of central London in the glove compartment of the car and he quickly located Baker Street. It was no more than fifteen minutes away by car and he drove through light traffic, past Kensington Gardens and out into the Bayswater Road. Some inner caution prompted him to park the car near Bond Street tube station and he went the rest of the way on foot.
Carley Mansions was an imposing block of flats at the Marylebone Road end of Baker Street. It looked extremely expensive. In a discreet gold-and-glass frame in the entrance there was a list of the residents. Miss Jane Gordon was listed as flat eight on the fourth floor.
Inside, a brocaded porter sat in a glass booth and read a magazine. As Brady watched, the telephone started to ring. The porter picked it up and turned wearily, leaning against the counter, his back to the entrance.
Brady didn’t hesitate. He pushed open the heavy glass door, crossed the heavy carpet soundlessly, and went straight up the stairs.
The whole place looked very new and the soundproofing was perfect. A stillness that was almost uncanny seemed to move ahead of him as he mounted to the fourth floor.
Flat eight was the last one in the corridor. He knocked lightly on the door and waited. There was no reply. He knocked again and tried the handle. The door opened smoothly before him.
The lights were on, but there was no one there. Several broad steps dropped down into a luxuriously furnished room, one side walled with glass, giving a magnificent view of London.
He could see through the serving hatch into the kitchen. It was in darkness, but the bedroom door was slightly open and the light was on.
It was the shoe he noticed first, lying in the middle of the carpet, slim and expensive, the stiletto heel somehow infinitely deadly.
The rest of her was sprawled on her face at the end of the bed, her dress rocked up wantonly, one slim hand clawing at the carpet. Someone had shot her in the back twice at close quarters with a parabellum from the look of the wounds.
She was only just dead, that much was obvious, and the faintly acrid taint of gunpowder still hung upon the air. He sighed heavily, crouched down and turned her over.
The sight of her face was like a heavy blow in the stomach, delivered low down, taking the breath from his body, for this wasn’t Jane Gordon. This was the woman he had known so briefly as Marie Duclos. The woman whose smashed and violated body he had last seen in the bedroom of her Chelsea apartment. The woman for whose murder he had been sentenced to death.
For one single, terrifying moment, he thought he must be going mad, and then, quite suddenly, he was aware of the truth, or at least a part of it.
He started to get to his feet and behind him there was a quiet movement. Even as he turned, pulling the .38 from his pocket, a hand thudded solidly against the nape of his neck and he slumped forward on to his face with a cry of pain.
(9)
When he opened his eyes again, he was sprawled on his face beside the body. There was only one added refinement. In his right hand he was firmly clutching a Mauser automatic with an SS bulbous silencer fitted to the barrel.
There was something familiar about it — something very familiar. It was the gun with which Anton Haras had tried to kill him in Manningham.
He could not have been unconscious for more than five minutes; that much was obvious. He scrambled to his feet, sat on the edge of the bed and massaged his neck muscles.
What a fool he’d been. What a blind, stupid fool. The smell of the gunpowder fresh on the air, the warmth of her body. It had been so obvious that she had only been dead for minutes. Perhaps the fatal shots had been fired as he was coming up the stairs and he had walked straight in like a lamb to the slaughter.
One thing was certain. If the police caught him here, he was finished, which was obviously what Haras had intended. This time it would mean the death cell plus all the trimmings, right up to the bitter end one cold, grey morning.
The room had been turned upside down, drawers pulled out, clothing scattered everywhere. It was hardly likely the Hungarian had overlooked anything incriminating.
Brady moved out quickly into the other room. As he mounted the steps to the door, he paused. Draped across a chair, was a woman’s light raincoat and underneath it was her handbag. Obviously she had intended going out. Perhaps only the arrival of Haras had prevented her.