Hell Is Too Crowded - Jack Higgins [17]
There was a moment of absolute stillness and her eyes widened perceptibly. "Brady!" she said in a whisper. "But it isn't possible."
"Sorry to disappoint you, angel," he said. "But it is. I crashed-out of Manningham Gaol not much more than an hour ago."
She sat up, swinging her legs to the floor, and stubbed out her cigarette in the ash tray. "What do you want, Brady?" she said calmly, and she seemed to have recovered her nerve.
"I haven't got time to argue, so I'll give it to you straight," Brady told her. "Jango tried to see me out of this world yesterday. With a little persuasion he told me that you'd put him up to it. I want to know why."
"I'll see you in hell first," she said. "Get out of here before I ring for the law."
She started to get up and Brady slapped her backhanded across the face, and pushed her back down on to the bed, a hand at her throat. "You'd better listen to me, you cheap tramp," he said. "If you put the cops on to me now or at any other time, I'll see that Jango pays. I've got friends inside--good friends. If I say the word, they'll make his face look like raw meat."
She glared up at him, but there was fear in her eyes--real fear and he knew that he had said the right thing. That Jango was important to her.
He took his hand away from her neck and she sat up, smoothing it with one hand. "What do you want to know?" she said sullenly.
"That's better," Brady said. "That's a whole lot better. Who asked you to sick Jango on to me?"
She took a cigarette from a box by the telephone and lit it from a table lighter. "It was a man called Das," she said. "He's an Indian--runs a phoney religious set-up called the Temple of Quiet about a mile from here, near the Hippodrome Theatre."
Brady frowned. "But I don't understand. I've never heard of him before."
She shrugged. "I'm telling you the truth. He's got his finger in everything crooked that goes on in these parts from drugs to girls. He came to see me on Wednesday. Told me he had a client who wanted to see you meet with a fatal accident inside. He said there was five hundred in it for us if Jango could handle it."
"And an extra two hundred and fifty if he managed it by today," Brady said.
She nodded. "That's right. If you want to know anything more, you'll have to see Das."
"I intend to," Brady said. He went to the door, unlocked it and turned. "Remember what I told you, Wilma. If I get nicked through you, Jango pays the piper."
She spat out one filthy, unprintable word at him and he gently closed the door and went along the corridor.
The girl in the cloakroom still looked bored. She gave him his coat and hat without a flicker of emotion and he put them on and went downstairs and out into the rain.
(5)
AS he walked away from the club the wind, blowing across the water, brought with it the dank, wet smell of rotting leaves, redolent with decay, filling him with a vague, irrational excitement.
The rain was falling in solid silver lances that gleamed in the lamplight as he went briskly towards the centre of the town through deserted streets. An occasional car swept by, and now and then, someone hurried along the sidewalk, head lowered against the driving rain.
He found an old man in tattered overcoat and cloth cap standing in a doorway on the corner of the main shopping street, hopefully trying to sell his last halfdozen Sunday newspapers. Brady bought one and the old man wiped a dewdrop from his nose with the back of a hand and stepped out into the rain to direct him.
He came to the Hippodrome first, a narrow, marble-fronted Edwardian music hall with an alley running down one side to the stage door. The stills for that week's show were still on display in glass-fronted display cases and on impulse, he stopped and searched through them, looking for Anne Dunning.
He found several of her, mostly carefully posed in a tableau with two or three young male dancers, but there was one studio portrait which had really caught