“Get out of there!” I ordered fiercely.
Another dull groan answered me. I squatted, peering under the table. There, wedged between the table-legs in a terribly uncomfortable-looking position—bound with a rope, doubled over and with a gag in his mouth—was the terrifying gangster, maniac and sadist Hinkus, staring at me with dark, tear-filled, suffering eyes. I dragged him into the middle of the room and removed the gag from his mouth.
“What happened?” I asked.
He answered me with a cough. He coughed for a long time, painfully; he was spitting all over the place, groaning and hacking. I looked in the bathroom, got the Dead Mountaineer’s razor and cut his ropes. The poor guy was so numb that he couldn’t even raise his hands to wipe his face off. I gave him some water. He drank it greedily, until finally he got his voice back and uttered a complicated curse. I helped him stand up and led him over to the armchair. Muttering profanity, his face distorted pitifully, he began rubbing his neck, his wrists, his hips.
“What happened to you?” I asked. Looking at him, I felt relieved: for whatever reason, the idea of Hinkus as a secret murderer had really disturbed me.
“What happened…?” he muttered. “See for yourself! Tied up like a sheep, shoved under a table…”
“Who did this?”
“How should I know?” he said angrily, shaking suddenly all over. “Christ!” he muttered. “I need a drink… You don’t have anything to drink, Inspector?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ll get something. Just as soon as you answer my questions.”
He lifted his left hand up with difficulty and pulled back the sleeve.
“Dammit, the bastard crushed my watch,” he muttered. “What time is it, Inspector?”
“One in the morning,” I answered.
“One in the morning,” he repeated. “One in the morning…” His eyes stared. “No,” he said, and stood up. “I need a drink. I’m going down to the pantry to have a drink.”
I sat him back down with a light push on his chest.
“There’s plenty of time for that,” I said.
“I’m telling you, I want a drink!” he said, raising his voice as he tried to stand up again.
“And I’m telling you, that there’s plenty of time for that!” I said, pushing him back again.
“What gives you the right to order me around?” He screamed at the top of his voice.
“Don’t shout,” I said. “I’m a police inspector. And you, Hinkus, are a suspect.”
“A suspect of what?” he asked, lowering his voice.
“You know what,” I said. I was trying to buy some time, in order to figure out what my next move was.
“I don’t know anything,” he said gloomily. “Why are you fooling around with me? I don’t know anything, and I don’t want to know anything. And you’ll be sorry for horsing around like this.”
I also felt that I would be sorry for horsing around like this.
“Listen, Hinkus,” I said. “There’s been a murder in the inn. So I suggest you answer my questions, because if you cross me, I’ll squash you like a bug. I’ve got nothing to lose here—in for a penny, in for a pound.”
He stared at me quietly for a while, his mouth open.
“A murder…” he repeated, as if disappointed. “Here! And you think I have something to do with it? Me, who was very nearly killed… Who was murdered?”
“Who do you think?”
“How should I know? When I left the dining room, everyone was still alive. And after that…” he was quiet.
“Well?” I asked. “And after that?”
“And after that nothing. I was sitting by myself on the roof, taking a nap. Suddenly I was being grabbed by the neck, someone threw me down, and after that I don’t remember anything. I woke up under this lousy table, going crazy almost—I thought I’d been buried alive. I started knocking. I knocked and knocked, but no one came. Then you came. That’s it.”
“Are you able to say roughly when you were abducted?”
He thought about it for a few minutes, sitting in silence. Then he wiped his mouth with his hand, looked at his fingers, shuddered again, and wiped his hand on his pant leg.
“Well?” I asked.
He looked at me with dull eyes.
“What?”
“I asked, roughly when…”
“Right, right: sometime around nine. The last time I looked at my watch it was eight forty.”
“Give me your watch,” I said.
He obediently unbuckled the watch and held it out to me. I noticed that his wrist was covered with purple-blue spots.
“It’s broken,” he explained.
The watch wasn’t broken: it was crushed. The hour hand was broken off, but the minute hand showed forty-three minutes past the hour.
“Who was it?” I asked again.
“How should I know? I told you I was napping.”
“And you didn’t wake up when they grabbed you?”
“They were behind me,” he said gloomily. “I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.”
“Wait—look at me!”
He glanced at me sullenly out of the corner of his eyes, and I knew I was on the right track. I held his jaw between my finger and thumb and jerked his head up. I had no idea what those bruises and scratches on his lean, sinewy neck meant, but I spoke confidently.
“Stop lying, Hinkus. He was in front of you, and you saw him. Who was it?”
He freed his head with a jerk.
“Go to hell,” he croaked. “Straight to hell. It’s none of your damned business. Whoever was murdered here, I didn’t have anything to do with it, and everyone else can go to hell too… And I need a drink!” he roared suddenly. “I hurt all over, do you understand that, you police pig?”
He was right, so far as I could see. Whatever else he was involved in, the murder had nothing to do with him—at least not directly. However, I had no right to give up now.
“If that’s what you want,” I said coldly. “Then I’m going to have to lock you in the closet, and there’ll be no brandy or cigarettes until you tell me everything you know.”
“What do you want from me?” he groaned. I could see that he was close to tears. “Why are you hassling me?”
“Who grabbed you?”
“Dammit!” he whispered despairingly. “Can’t you understand that I don’t want to talk about it? I saw him—okay, I saw who it was!” He winced again, twisting himself away from me. “I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to see what I saw! You, damn you, I wouldn’t want you to see it! You’d drop dead from fear!”
He was starting to fall apart.
“All right,” I said, standing up. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“To get something to drink,” I said.
We went into the corridor. He was wobbly, he clung to my sleeve. I was interested to see how he would react to the tape around Olaf’s door—but he didn’t notice anything. Clearly his mind was elsewhere. I took him into the pool room, found the brandy on the windowsill, which still had half a bottle left from last night, and gave it to him. He grabbed the bottle greedily and took a long swig from it.
“Goddammit,” he croaked, wiping his mouth off. “Now that’s more like it!”
I watched him. It was possible, of course, that he was in cahoots with the killer, that he’d thought all this up as a diversion (especially since he’d come here with Olaf)—even, that he himself was the murderer and that his accomplices had tied him up afterwards in order to give him an alibi. This seemed too complicated to be true; at the same time, there was no denying that something didn’t seem right about him: he clearly didn’t have tuberculosis, he didn’t act anything like a youth counselor, and there was still the question of what he’d been doing up on the roof… Then it hit me! Whatever he’d been doing on the roof, someone hadn’t liked it—maybe because it had interfered with Olaf’s murder. So they’d gotten rid of him. They’d gotten rid of him, and whoever had done it had somehow given Hinkus a terrible scare, which meant that they weren’t guests at the inn, since Hinkus was clearly not afraid of anyone at the inn. It was some kind of mess… And then I remembered the part about the shower, and the pipe, and the mysterious notes… and I thought about how green and terrified Hinkus had looked that afternoon, coming down from the roof…