Rum Affair Read Free Page B

lied. “Mr Chigwell must keep it shut.”
    The sergeant rattled the door again. “It’s a sort of cloakroom, isn’t it? Funny place to keep locked.”
    “Keeps his golf clubs in it, I expect,” advised a mild voice from the kitchen. The bifocals appeared, pot of tea nursed in its hands, and leaned against one of the doorposts. “Amazing who’ll walk off with a golf club when you lend your flat to a pal. It’s like books. Some chaps have no conscience.”
    The policeman rattled the handle again. “All the same, it’s a roomy place: just the spot a fellow would hide in.”
    “It is, of course.” Bifocals, laying down the teapot, advanced and peered at the lock. The two policemen peered at the lock. I could not look. Almost anything now was going to give it away. A trickle of blood on the carpet: a blow on the door that would dislodge the body inside . . . The smell of blood, even . . . Except that there had been almost no blood. The sergeant said: “It’d be an easy lock to force, that,” and fetched a piece of wire out of one pocket. The telephone rang.
    It rang insistently, as irritating in its way as the doorbell had been, and as incongruously welcome.
    It rang steadily until the sergeant, listening, suddenly said: “That might be for me, Miss,” and got to his feet just as I fled through to the sitting room with another thought in mind: Kenneth. It might be Kenneth, with God knew what story to tell, and the police listening, here in the flat. I got to it first, and said: “Hallo?”
    It wasn’t Kenneth. It was a policeman, to say that they thought they had apprehended the thief. In two minutes, before my heart had stopped thudding, the two policemen were trading courteous farewells and admonitions. Bifocals, returned to nursing the teapot, enquired whether I should find it offensive if he remained to share a small cup of tea, assuming the law would allow him to identify the miscreant later.
    The law gave him the necessary dispensation, and so did I. The door shut behind the two departing police officers and in five minutes Bifocals and I were sitting like china cats, one on each side of a rebuilt and roaring fire, drinking strong Indian tea, a pursuit that may seem to possess no particular appeal unless you have been through what I had been through in the last hour and a half. I studied my undesired champion.
    He was difficult to place. Not, my God, a man about town, with that green knitted pullover and those socks and the pipe sticking out of one pocket. But a man who went to a really good barber about three weeks less often than he should, and who could afford a rented flat in the Square, and the kind of cash and camera and cufflinks a thief thought worth having. A member of the professions, perhaps: but which among these would rent a flat in Edinburgh in August in solitary state? A university don, perhaps, who took a pride in following the European festivals? A medical man? Some inquisitive, music-loving rector from a Surrey vicarage, with more money than sense? He was older than I was, but not old. The agile eyebrows were black, and the shining puff of Indian-black hair showed no grey as yet. He might as well have had no eyes or mouth, so dominating were the spectacles. “Thirty-eight,” he remarked.
    I jumped.
    “Painter. London. On holiday. Got your records. Who’s in the cupboard? Boyfriend? Body?”
    I had to trust him. I hadn’t any choice. “Body,” I said.
    Johnson, his name was. It didn’t ring any bells: not then. He listened without comment to my whole story, and seemed to find nothing antisocial in my desire not to be found by the tabloids alone in a love nest with a corpse. “No, no,” he said. “Another cup . . . ? It could ruin your winter programme. No, no. An anonymous phone call to the police once you are well out of town. That will do it, if the interests of justice are concerning you. Dr Holmes is, you believe, the murderer?”
    I couldn’t afford to snap, but I came