Kale looked down at the still body on the floor. He was breathless and tense. For just a few seconds it crossed his mind that he should kill this one too. But he quickly dismissed it. There was little point in drawing more attention to the incident than was necessary. Still, it irritated him. It was untidy, the only loose end in the affair. He had been told the flat would be empty, and he had taken that on trust. He was a fool. He should have checked first. He pulled the body over to have a look at the face. It would be as well to remember it. Already the right cheek and temple were bruising where they had struck the floor. It was a wide, hard face that you would remember without difficulty. A little blood was oozing from the mouth where the man had bitten his lip on impact. Kale let the body drop back and kicked the prostrate form viciously in the side. It was unnecessary, but there was a grim satisfaction in it and it released a little of Kale’s tension.
He stepped over the body and crossed to the safe, lifting out the black briefcase and closing the door. He swung the picture back against the wall and pushed his gun into his coat pocket. Then he re-crossed the room and slipped quickly down the hall to the front door. He closed it behind him, carefully replacing the key below the mat.
Bannerman felt the pain of consciousness slowly returning. The dull, hard ache at the back of his head increased to the point where it seemed almost numb. He felt as though he had been kicked in the face and there was the bitter iron taste of blood in his mouth. He forced his eyes open and they hurt sharply even in the half-light. He screwed them shut, opening them again a little more slowly. A light groan came up involuntarily from his throat as he tried to turn himself over. More pain. This time right down one side of his chest. Now it hurt even to breathe.
He lay for several minutes before he tried moving again. This time he gritted his teeth against the pain and pulled himself heavily up onto his knees. Immediately the blood rushed to his head and he felt giddy and sick. He dropped one hand to the floor to give himself support and he swayed slightly back and forth until the sick feeling passed. His breathing was rapid and shallow and everything about his body was, he discovered, stiff and sore to move. What the hell had happened? He fought to remember. Even that seemed to hurt. But it came back slowly. The dark hall, the sounds of movement in the living room. The open safe above the fireplace. He looked over and saw that it was closed now, the painting flush with the wall. He waited yet another few minutes before trying to get to his feet. Then he leaned against the door jamb breathing hard, feeling the pain wash over him time and again. With a slight shock he saw that the clock on the mantel read after twelve. He must have been out for over an hour.
Then he tensed as he heard voices in the landing outside, and a key sounded in the lock. He turned to look down the length of the hall as the door opened. There were three men, one in uniform. The uniformed man pulled a gun clumsily from a black leather holster and raised it towards Bannerman. He shouted a warning in a language that Bannerman did not understand. It could have been Dutch.
II
It was dark now, the wind battering sleet against the window. Inside it was warm and stuffy, insulated against the inhospitable night that had descended over this grey Belgian city. The office was small and cluttered, an anonymous place in a vast building of concrete and glass that men without a sense of history had annexed to the Palais de Justice — a building blackened by the years but still vast and impressive in its brooding grandeur. The annexe housed the police headquarters through which all life passed, under glaring fluorescent lights and through long, drab corridors.
On reflection, Bannerman thought that perhaps this office had a little more character than the others he had been through. A large old oak desk sat at an angle across one corner. Wire trays were piled high with ageing reports, a dog-eared blotter was scribbled with a hundred phone numbers, names, doodles. There were two overflowing heavy glass ashtrays, a fountain pen, a broken pencil. On the wall behind the desk, maps of Belgium and Brussels and charts and a girlie calendar. Beside the door stood a tall, old-fashioned coat stand from which hung two long, dark raincoats that had seen better days, and an old tweed jacket. A broken umbrella leaned against the wall beside a pair of muddy gum boots. Along the door wall and the far wall, filing cabinets of different heights, some wooden, some a grey painted metal, were pushed together, yet more documents piled untidily on top. The room was lit by an anglepoise lamp on the desk.
Bannerman sat waiting on a hard wooden chair in front of the desk. He had been waiting for nearly three hours. The doctor had examined him first, dressing the wound on the back of his head. There were no ribs broken, but they were severely bruised. He would suffer the effects of slight concussion for some time, the doctor had said. He should have plenty of rest, plenty of sleep.
Then he had spent a gruelling half hour in a room with two plain-clothes men who spoke English badly. They had obviously not listened to the doctor’s advice. Who was he? Who did he work for? What was he doing at Slater’s flat? Who had attacked him? What had been taken from the safe? What did he know about Robert Gryffe? Bannerman had answered everything they asked without ever seeming to satisfy them. They, in turn, had told him nothing. His curiosity had been dulled by his own discomfort and he had not pressed for information. He had been brought a meal and a cup of cold coffee then taken to this office where he had sat watching darkness descend on Brussels.
He checked with his watch. It was six thirty. He was hungry, enormously weary, stiff, the pulsing in his head still painful. He ran his tongue over his lips where the blood had dried leaving dark brown rims. Whatever they told him eventually, he thought, would not surprise him, though he had given little conscious thought to what might have happened. There was an unreal quality about it all, dreamlike; a sequence of events through which he had passed without ever feeling that he was an actual participant.
The door opened and a thin man in a baggy brown suit stepped briskly into the office. He was bald across the top, with dark, wiry hair growing in bushy abundance round the sides, and he wore round-rimmed tortoiseshell spectacles over a long, thin nose with flaring nostrils. He would be in his fifties, with a grey, deeply-creased face from which peered two small, very dark eyes behind the spectacles. His suit was well-worn and looked about two sizes too big for him. His waistcoat was open, a thin brown tie hanging from an open-necked white shirt. He carried an air of age and defeat about him, like a schoolmaster who, nearing the end of his career, reeks of chalk-dust and blackboards and thankless years. He closed the door behind him and nodded seriously at Bannerman. It would have been obvious to anyone that this was his office. He rounded the desk and sat down in a round-backed wooden chair, pressing the tips of the fingers of each hand together. Long, thin fingers on big-knuckled hands. He seemed lost in thought and Bannerman noticed the tiny bushes of hair that grew out of each nostril. Finally he swung round and leaned his elbows on the desk and said, ‘Well, monsieur, your story seems to check out.’