The soft click over the line told me she had hung up. I stood for a long moment staring through the glass panel of the booth while I wondered why she had changed her mind about helping me, then I replaced the receiver, pushed open the booth door and walked over to the elevator.
So Jack hadn’t gone to the Musketeer Club. I saw no reason why I should doubt her word. Greaves had said it wasn’t likely. I had been through Sheppey’s things, and I knew he hadn’t brought a tuxedo down with him. He wouldn’t have got beyond the doorman without wearing a tuxedo if I was to believe what Greaves had said about the exclusiveness of the club.
Then where had the match folder come from? Why had Jack kept it? He hadn’t a magpie mentality. He didn’t keep anything unless it was of some use.
I left the elevator, walked down the corridor, unlocked my bedroom door and entered the room. I shut and locked the door, chucked my hat on the bed and went over to Jack’s suit-case. I got the match folder from the suitcase and then sat down in the armchair and took a closer look at the folder. It contained twenty-five tear-off matches: each match-stick carried the name of the Musketeer Club. The inside back of the folder carried an advertisement for one of those arty pottery shops that spring up like mushrooms wherever there are tourists.
The advertisement ran:
You should not miss visiting
Marcus Hahn’s School of Ceramics
The Treasure House of Original Design.
The Château
Arrow Point
St. Raphael City.
I wondered why an advertisement so obviously aimed at the tourist trade should be displayed in a match folder of an exclusive club that would not tolerate a tourist in any shape or form within its high-tone portals. I wondered if I were on to something or whether it was just one of those things.
I tore off one of the matches. On examining it I found printed on the back a row of ciphers: C451136. I bent back the other matches and saw they too were numbered and the numbers were consecutive up to C451160.
I wedged the loose match back into the folder, sat for several minutes wondering why the matches were thus numbered, then coming to no conclusion I put the match folder into my wallet.
The time was now twenty minutes to one o’clock. It had been quite a day. There didn’t seem anything else for me to do now but to wait for the morning. With any luck the newspapers would tell me who the girl in the swim suit was. Until then, it seemed a good idea to go to bed.
As I got to my feet, there came a knock on the door. It was delivered by a set of knuckles that would have no trouble in ramming your teeth down your throat: knuckles that didn’t belong to any member of any hotel staff: knuckles you’d expect to find on the hands of the law.
I stood still, my brain racing. Had I been spotted leaving the beach? Had I left any finger-prints in the cabin?
Knuckles banged on the door again and a voice growled, “Come on! Open up! We know you’re in there.”
I took my wallet from my pocket, took the match folder out and slid it under the edge of the fitted carpet, then I put my wallet back, stepped to the door, turned the key, and opened the door.
Candy stood there, chewing, his dark eyes hostile. Behind him were two big plain-clothes men: their faces stony and their eyes alert.
“Come on,” Candy said in a flat, bored voice. “Captain Katchen wants you.”
“What for?” I said, not moving.
“He’ll tell you. Are you coming rough or smooth?”
I hesitated, then, seeing the odds were against me, I picked my hat off the bed and said I’d come smooth.
Chapter VI
I
The night clerk’s eyes bulged out of his head like organ stops when he saw me come out of the elevator, surrounded by Candy and his two hunks of beef. This was the second time I had been taken away from the hotel by the law, and I had an idea that if I survived this trip, the management would probably ask me to leave.
But I wasn’t any too sure that I would survive the trip. I remembered what Katchen had said at our last meeting, and I had a depressing idea he wasn’t bluffing.
We went across the lobby, down the steps to the waiting police car. The two plain-clothes men got in the front, and Candy and I got in the back.
The car went off with the usual frantic rush and with the usual wailing siren, leaving the kerb so fast the jerk nearly dislocated my neck.
Candy sat beside me like a rock that has been baked in the sun. I could feel the heat of his body, and although I couldn’t see much of his face in the darkness of the car I could hear the steady movement of his jaws as he chewed.
“Okay if I smoke?” I said, more or less for something to say.
“Better not,” Candy said, his voice flat and cold. “I was told to bring you in rough.”
“What’s biting the Captain?”
“If you don’t know, how should I?” Candy said, and there the conversation ceased.
I stared out of the window. I wasn’t happy. There was a chance that someone had seen me on the beach and had phoned in my description. I had visions of being grilled. If Katchen conducted the grilling, I knew I was in for a bad time.
No one said anything until we pulled up outside the police headquarters, then Candy groped in his hip pocket and produced a pair of handcuffs.
“Got to put the nippers on,” he said, and I thought I detected an apologetic note in his voice. “The Captain likes everything ship-shape.”
“Are you arresting me?” I asked, offering my wrists. The cold bite of the steel bracelets added to my depression.
“I’m not doing anything,” Candy said, getting out of the car. “The Captain wants to talk to you — that’s all there’s to it.”
He and I walked across the sidewalk and up the steps into the charge room, leaving the two plain-clothes men in the car.
The desk sergeant, a big, fat-faced man, looked at me and then at Candy, who shook his head and kept on, through a doorway, up some stairs and along a passage to a door at the far end. I walked at his heels.
He paused outside the door, rapped once, then turned the handle and shoved the door wide open. He put his hand on my arm and moved me into a big room that contained a desk, six upright chairs, a couple of filing cabinets, Captain Katchen, Lieutenant Rankin and a tall, thin man around forty with straw-coloured hair, rimless glasses and a face of an eager ferret.
Candy said, “Brandon here, Captain,” then stepped back, giving me the stage.
I took a couple of steps forward and stopped.
Katchen was standing by the window, his massive face dark with congested blood. He looked at me the way a caged tiger might look at a fat lamb that is being marched past its cage.
Rankin sat on one of the upright chairs, his hat tipped over his eyes, a cigarette burning between his fingers. He didn’t turn his head to look at me.
The straw-haired man eyed me with the interest and the professional detachment of a bacteriologist confronted with an obscure germ that might or might not be a potential killer.
“Why is this man handcuffed, Captain?” he asked in a soft, Ivy League voice.
Katchen suddenly appeared to have difficulty in breathing.
“If you don’t like the way I make my arrests, you’d better talk to the Commissioner,” he said in a voice that could have stripped rust off any lump of old iron.
“Is this man under arrest then?” the straw-haired man asked, his voice a polite inquiry.
Even if he had the face of a ferret and an Ivy League accent, he was rapidly becoming my favourite member of this oddly assorted trio.