The Guilty Are Afraid

Hammerschult gave him a bleak stare.

“Did I? Mr. Creedy thinks otherwise,” he said. “Mr. Creedy won’t be free now until four o’clock. This way,” he went on to me, and, leading the way down the passage, he took me into a smallish lobby, through two doors, both lined with green baize, to another massive door of solid polished mahogany.

He rapped, opened the door, looked in, said, “Brandon’s here, sir.”

Then he stood aside and waved me in.

II

The room reminded me of the pictures I had seen of Mussolini’s famous office. It was sixty feet long if it was an inch. Placed at the far end between two vast windows, with a fine view of the sea and the right arm of Thor Bay, was a desk big enough to play billiards on.

The rest of the room was pretty bare apart from a few lounging chairs, a couple of suits of armour and two heavy, dark oil paintings that could or could not be original Rembrandts.

Behind the desk sat a small, frail-looking man, his horn glasses pushed up and resting on his forehead. Apart from a fringe of grey hair, he was bald and his skull looked bony and hard. He had a pinched, tight face: small features and a very small, tight mouth. It wasn’t until I encountered the full force that dwelt in his eyes that I realized I was in the presence of a big man.

He gave me the full treatment, and I felt as if I were under X-rays and that he could count the vertebra of my spine.

He let me walk the length of the room and he kept the searchlight of his gaze on me. I found I was sweating slightly by the time I reached his desk. He leaned back in his chair and eyed me over the way you would eye a bluebottle fly that has fallen in your soup.

There was a long pause, then he said in a curiously soft, effeminate voice, “What do you want?”

By then, and by his reasoning, I should have been completely softened up and ready to fall on my hands and knees and rap my forehead on the floor. Okay, I admit I was slightly softened, but not as soft as he would want.

“My name’s Brandon,” I said, “of the Star Inquiry Agency of San Francisco. You hired my partner four days ago.”

The thin, small face was as deadpan as the back of a bus.

“What makes you imagine I would do that?” he asked.

From that I knew he wasn’t sure of his ground, and he was going to probe first before he took the hoods off his big artillery.

“We keep a record of all our clients, Mr. Creedy,” I said untruthfully. “Sheppey, before he left our office, recorded that you hired him.”

“Who would Sheppey be?”

“My partner and the man you hired, Mr. Creedy.”

He placed his elbows on his desk and his fingertips together. He rested his pointed, bony chin on the arch thus formed.

“I must hire twenty or thirty people a week to do various unimportant jobs for me,” he said. “I don’t recall any man named Sheppey. Where do you come in on this? What do you want?”

“Sheppey was murdered this morning,” I said, meeting his hard, penetrating gaze. “I thought you might want me to finish the job he was working on.”

He tapped his chin with his fingertips.

“And what job would that be?”

Here it was: the dead-end. I knew sooner or later it might come to that, but I had hoped I might flush him out of his cover by bluff: it hadn’t worked.

“You’d know more about that than I do.”

He sat back in his chair, drummed on the desk for about four seconds, his face still dead pan, but I knew his mind was busy. Then he reached out a bony finger and pressed a button. A door to the right of the desk opened immediately and Hammerschult appeared. He appeared so quickly he had to be waiting just outside the door for the summons.

“Hertz,” Creedy said without looking at him.

“At once, sir,” Hammerschult said and went away.

Creedy continued to drum on his desk. He kept his eyes lowered.

We waited in silence for perhaps forty-five seconds, then a rap sounded on the door. It opened, and a short, thickset man came in. His right ear was bent and crushed into his head. At some time in his career someone must have hit him either with a brick or possibly a sledgehammer: no fist could have caused that amount of damage. His nose was boneless and spread over his face. His eyes were small, and had that wild light in them you might see in the eyes of an angry and vicious orangutan. Black hairs sprouted over the top of his collar. He wore a pair of fawn flannel trousers, a white sports coat and one of those razzle-dazzle, hand-painted ties. He moved up to the desk silently and swiftly. He was as light on his feet as any ballet dancer.

Creedy pointed his chin at me.

“Look at this man, Hertz,” he said. “I want you to remember him. It may be I will want you to take care of him. It’s unlikely, but he may be a bigger fool than he looks. Just make certain you will know him again.”

Hertz turned and stared at me. His cruel little eyes moved over my face, his own smashed-up, ruined face was expressionless.

“I’ll know him again, boss,” he said, his voice husky and soft.

Creedy waved him away and he went out, closing the door silently behind him.