“This way, Mr. Hutchman.” Crombie-Carson led him through a side entrance from the vehicle park, along a corridor, past an area containing an hotel-like reception desk and potted palms, and into a small sparsely furnished room. “Please sit down.”
“Thank you.” Hutchman got a gloomy feeling it would take him more than thirty minutes to extricate himself.
“Now.” Crombie-Carson sat down at the other side of a metal table without removing his showerproof. “I’m going to ask you some questions and the constable here is going to make a shorthand note of the interview.”
“All right,” Hutchman said helplessly, wondering how much the Inspector knew or suspected.
“Good. I take it that, as a condition of your employment, you are familiar with the provisions of the Official Secrets Act and have signed a document binding you to observe the Act?”
“I have.” Hutchman thought back to the meaningless scrap of paper he had signed on joining Westfield’s and which had never influenced his activities in any way.
“Have you ever revealed any details of your work for Westfield’s to a third party who was not similarly bound by the Act?”
“No.” Hutchman began to relax slightly. Crombie-Carson was barking up the wrong tree and could continue to do so for as long as he wanted.
“Did you know that Miss Knight is a member of the Communist Party?”
“I didn’t know she actually carried a card, but I’d an idea she had socialist leanings.”
“You knew that much, did you?” The Inspector’s condensed face was alert.
“There’s no harm in that, is there? Some of the shop stewards in our missile-production factory are red-hot Party men who go to Moscow for their holidays. It doesn’t mean they’re secret agents.”
“I’m not concerned with your trade-union officials, Mr. Hutchman. Have you ever discussed your work at Westfield’s with Miss Knight?”
“Of course not. Until yesterday I hadn’t even spoken to her for years. I…” Hutchman regretted the words as soon as they were uttered.
“I see. And why did you re-establish contact?”
“No special reason.” Hutchman shrugged. “I saw her accidentally at the Jeavons Institute the other day and yesterday I rang her. For old times’ sake, you might say.”
“You might. What did your wife say?”
“Listen, Inspector.” Hutchman gripped the cool metal of the table. “Do you suspect me of betraying my country or my wife? You’ve got to make up your mind which.”
“Really? I wasn’t aware that the two activities were in any way incompatible. In my experience they often go hand in hand. Surely the Freudian aspect of the typical spy fantasy is one of its most dominant features.”
“That’s as may be.” Hutchman was shaken by the relevance of the Inspector’s comment — there had been that terrible moment of self-doubt, of identity blurring, just after he had met Andrea in the Camburn Arms. “However, I have not committed adultery or espionage.”
“Is your work classified?”
“Moderately. It is also very boring. One of the reasons I’m so positive I’ve never discussed it with anybody is that nothing would turn them off quicker.”
Crombie-Carson stood up, removed his coat, and set it on a chair. “What do you know about Miss Knight’s disappearance?”
“Just what you told me. Have you no clue about where she is?”
“Have you any idea why three armed men should go to her apartment, forcibly drag her out of it, and take her away?”
“None.”
“Have you any idea who did it?”
“No. Have you?”
“Mr. Hutchman,” the Inspector said impatiently, “let’s conduct this interview the old-fashioned way. It’s always more productive when I ask the questions.”
“All right — but permit me to be concerned about the welfare of a friend. All you tell me is…”
“A friend? Would acquaintance not be a better word?”
Hutchman closed his eyes. “Your use of the language is very precise.”
At that moment the door opened and a sergeant came into the room with a buff folder. He set it on the table in front of CrombieCarson and left without speaking. The Inspector glanced through it and took out eight photographs. They were not typical policerecord pictures, but whole-plate shots of men’s faces, some of them portraits and others apparently blown up from sections of crowd photographs. Crombie-Carson spread them in front of Hutchman.
“Study these faces closely, and tell me if you’ve seen any of them before.”
“I don’t remember ever seeing any of these men,” Hutchman said after he had scanned the pictures. He lifted the edge of one and tried to turn it over, but Crombie-Carson’s hand pressed it down again.
“I’ll take those.” The Inspector gathered up the glossy rectangles and returned them to the folder.
“If you have finished with me,” Hutchman said carefully, “i have a craving for a pint of stout.”
Crombie-Carson laughed incredulously and glanced at the shorthand writer with raised eyebrows. “You haven’t a hope in hell.”
“But what more do you want from me?”
“I’ll tell you. We have just completed part one of the interview. Part one is the section in which I treat the interviewee gently and with the respect a ratepayer deserves — until it becomes obvious he is not going to co-operate. That part is over now, and you’ve made it clear you are not going to be helpful of your own accord. From now on, Mr. Hutchman, lam going to lean on you. More than a little.”
Hutchman gaped at him. “You can’t! You have nothing against me.”
Crombie-Carson leaned across the table. “Give me some credit, friend. I’m a professional. Every day in life I’m up against other professionals and I nearly always win. Did you seriously think I would let a big soft amateur like you stand in my way?”
“An amateur at what?” Hutchman demanded, concealing his panic.
“I don’t know exactly what you’ve been up to — yet — but you’ve done something. You’re also a very poor liar, but I don’t mind that because it makes things easier for me. What I really object to about you is that you’re a kind of walking disaster area.”
I’m the ground zero man, a voice chanted in Hutchman’s head. “What do you mean?”
“Since you quietly slipped out of your fashionable bungalow this morning one woman has been abducted and two men have died.”
“Two men! I don’t…”
“Did I forget to tell you?” Crombie-Carson was elaborately apologetic. “One of the three men who abducted Miss Knight shot and killed a passer-by who tried to interfere.”
Part two of the interview was every bit as bad as Hutchman had been led to expect. Seemingly endless series of questions, often about trivia, shouted or whispered, throwing coils of words around his mind. Implications which if not immediately spotted and challenged hedged him in, drove him closer and closer to telling the wrong lie or the wrong truth. Grazing ellipsis, Hutchman thought at one stage, his exhaustion creating a feeling — akin to the spurious cosmic revelation of semiwakefulness — that he had produced the greatest pun of all time. So numbed was he by the end of the ordeal that he was in bed in a neat but windowless “guest room” on an upper floor of the station before realizing he had not been given the option of going home to sleep. He stared resentfully at the closed door for a full minute, telling himself he would kick up hell if it proved to be locked. But he had had virtually no sleep for forty-eight hours, his brain had been savaged by Crombie-Carson, and although he was going to stand no nonsense about the door, it seemed hardly worth while doing anything about it before morning…