Then I clapped my hands together; I’d done it, I knew I’d bloody done it! He’d taken the bait, hook, line and sinker, and now I was reeling him in. I looked at my watch. I reckoned it should take him about twelve minutes by taxi; allow him a couple of minutes on top to hail one. Fourteen minutes.
The taxi arrived in thirteen minutes and pulled up outside. I didn’t stretch over too much as I didn’t want to risk being seen, but I could see only one person emerge, a figure in a trilby hat and blue Crombie coat. I pulled on my coat, turned up the collar, put my dark glasses on, pulled my hat down over my forehead; my own mother wouldn’t have recognised me. A sharp buzz from the alarm system I had rigged up told me he’d pushed the button for the elevator.
At the top of the calculator was a plastic lid, which I slid aside, revealing a small pin-shaped object. I pulled the pin out and pocketed it. In exactly ninety seconds the calculator would explode with, Trout and Trumbull had assured me, considerably more force than a conventional hand grenade.
I stepped inside the elevator, pushed the down button, and we started our descent. I sealed the calculator inside the pink envelope, tied the ribbon in a neat bow around it, and then taped it to the inside panel of the sliding door. When the door was open it would be invisible and it would only appear as the door slid shut again. By then it would be too late because the next time the door shut it would stay shut and the elevator would automatically rise to between the second and third floor; there it would stop, and there it would stay.
Thirty of the ninety seconds had ticked away by the time we reached the bottom. As the door slid open I bowed my head slightly to sink further into the upturned collar, watching out of the corner of my eye the envelope neatly disappear from view.
From the way I had arranged the lighting panel on the ground floor it would have appeared to Scatliffe that I was coming from the third floor, not the eighth floor where I had actually come from, so he would not have any reason to connect me with the purpose of his visit. I swept out of the elevator as the figure in the trilby hat and the blue Crombie coat entered. He gave me only a cursory glance, his mind evidently preoccupied with other matters, but there was nonetheless the vaguest hint of recognition in his glance, a moment of uncertainty, as if he knew that he had once somewhere met me before but he couldn’t think where.
As the door shut, gratingly, unremittingly, upon him I knew that if he was thinking he had seen me once before he was right. He’d bowled me out. The man in the trilby hat and blue Crombie coat who had just entered that elevator wasn’t Scatliffe at all. He was Anthony Lines, the Home Secretary.
I walked swiftly down the road. Ninety seconds came up on my watch when I was about a hundred yards down. I was in a state of shock. I heard a faint muffled noise through the wind, very faint. A moment later there was the sound of crashing glass; it was followed by more crashing glass: it was a huge noise. I turned and looked back at the office building. In a random succession, one after another, windows dropped out and crashed down to the ground. I stared in amazement, watching the frames twist, then buckle, flinging great chunks of glass out, away and down.
Suddenly one entire side of the building sagged; bricks, plaster, wood, glass rained down, then the entire building leaned over and collapsed like a pack of cards into a vast irregular pyramid of rubble that spewed right out into the street.
This time, I thought, Trout and Trumbull had really gone over the top.
25
Life has a nasty habit of creeping up behind you and clipping you on the ear when you least expect it. As you lift your hand up to your ear the great iron fist of life strikes out full into the area some six inches below your belt. For a long time after, you feel weak as hell and sick as a dog. That’s how I felt standing over the wash-basin back in the Madison Park East Hotel.
The brown dye was revolting and streamed down my face as I attempted to restore my hair back to its usual colour. The moustache and beard came painfully away, ripping out three days growth of hair in the process, and I flushed them down the lavatory. I didn’t think it would take even the New York police too long to figure out there might be a connection between a collapsed building on 3rd Street, the dead body inside it, and a blonde-haired man with a beard and moustache.
The hotel hadn’t changed in the last few days since I had last stayed. Quasimodo’s grandson downstairs still seemed to be enjoying his movie show on the blank wall; the cockroaches still seemed to be enjoying themselves in the bathroom. The one person who was definitely not enjoying himself was me.
I was busy figuring out hard how having murdered the Home Secretary was going to help my future career. I didn’t think it was going to help it too much. Nor, probably, did he. What had happened was still only just beginning to sink home. The further it sank, the less I liked it. And this was the least of my worries. I tried to think clearly and it was difficult. It all pointed to Anthony Lines and yet it couldn’t have been him. His role in this was crystal clear to me: he had discovered exactly what I had; he’d intercepted the message to the Pink Envelope and had come out himself in order to get to the bottom of the matter.
But it had been Scatliffe’s voice on the telephone. I was absolutely certain of that. Lines’s voice was nothing like Scatliffe’s. Either Scatliffe had been with him or he had done a remarkable job of mimicking Scatliffe’s voice. It didn’t make sense that he would have mimicked Scatliffe’s voice. But it was possible that there was a reason; anything was possible. Too many things were possible and only one thing was absolutely certain: that I was up shit creek, in a barbed wire canoe with no paddle. By what I had done to Lines I had probably pulled the bung out as well.
I had been certain that Scatliffe was the Pink Envelope. When his voice had come on the telephone I knew that the agony and risks I had put myself through during the past days had paid off. And now I was holed up in this wretched room with my career destroyed, a murder hunt about to begin for me, and not the first idea what to do next. If I had been right about Scatliffe then I seemed to have walked into an extremely clever trap. If I was wrong, I could expect no mercy and he would gleefully have me put behind bars for the rest of my days. My only saving grace right now was that everyone except two men, Irving and Karavenoff, thought I was dead. It was in Irving’s interests that I remained so but Karavenoff worried me; he was on the fence and would come down on whatever side suited him best. If I was going to make a run for it then I should kill him first to protect my back.
But I knew that idea was crazy. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a criminal on the run. There had to be a solution to this whole damn mess. If I thought long enough and hard enough maybe it would come. I wasn’t convinced but I had to give it a go.
I sat long into the night, stubbing out cigarette end after cigarette end. It was a slow night and a lonely night and as grey dawn came up I dozed a little and woke a little. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more. I put my coat on and went out into the freezing cold air.
New York is a confusing place. It never really sleeps; while one half goes to bed, the other half gets up to work. At five o’clock in the morning you can buy a second-hand car, or a new suit, or the week’s groceries; not as easily perhaps as at five o’clock in the afternoon but easily enough.
I walked down the streets; less than one week to Christmas, and tinsel and fairy lights and glittering packages shone out at me from the windows. I felt tired and sad and a million other things, and I didn’t want to be here doing this at all. I thought back on what I had done yesterday and wondered if it really was me that had done that and, if it really was me, how I could now be walking casually along, looking in these windows, thinking about Christmas in childhood, without any remorse, any feeling of guilt about the man who had gone to his death in a crummy elevator in a crummy building, yesterday afternoon.