Hell Is Too Crowded - Jack Higgins [4]
"How did you know something was wrong here?" Brady said.
Mallory shrugged. "The nightwatchman heard her scream and then a candlestick was thrown through the window. He knocked them up next door and asked them to ring for us. He still had the door under observation the whole time. Nobody left."
"There must be a rear entrance."
Mallory shook his head. "There's a yard and an overgrown garden with a six-foot fence of iron railings dividing it from the graveyard."
"It's still a possibility," Brady said. "And what about the old girl downstairs? Maybe she saw something?"
"The downstairs flat hasn't had a tenant for two months now." Mallory shook his head and sighed. "It won't do, Brady. For one thing, you told me you first saw this man on the Embankment before the Duclos woman spoke to you. Now that just doesn't make sense."
"But I couldn't have killed her," Brady said. "Only a madman could have beaten a woman to death like that."
"Or a man so drunk that he didn't know what he was doing," Mallory said quietly.
Brady sat there, staring helplessly at him. The whole world seemed to be closing in on him and there was nothing he could do about it--nothing at all.
The door opened and the young constable came in and handed Mallory a slip of paper. "Sergeant Gower thought you might find this interesting, sir."
The door closed behind him and Mallory quickly scanned the paper. After a while he said, "It would appear that you're a pretty violent man when the mood takes you, Brady."
Brady frowned. "What the hell are you getting at?"
"We've just run a quick check to see if anything was known about you. Since flying in from Kuwait three days ago, you seem to have spent the intervening time in trying to drink yourself into an early grave. On Tuesday night you had to be ejected from a pub on the King's Road after knocking down the landlord who refused to serve you because of your condition. Later that night, you were involved in a fight in a drinking club in Soho. When the bouncer tried to throw you out, you broke his arm, but the owner refused to press charges. You were finally picked up by the police in the Haymarket at four a.m., drunk and incapable. It says here that you were fined two pounds at Bow Street yesterday. Quite a record."
Brady got to his feet and paced restlessly across the room. "O.K., I'll tell you about it."
He stood looking out of the window, down into the street, watching the policemen standing under the street lamp, their capes shining with rain.
"I'm a constructional engineer. Work mostly on bridges and dams and that sort of thing. I met a girl in London last year called Katie Holdt. She was German, working for some family over here as a children's nurse while she learned the language. I fell pretty hard, wanted to marry her, but I was short of cash."
"And what was your solution?" Mallory said.
Brady shrugged. "There was an opening in Kuwait--a new dam. The money was exceptional as nobody wanted the job. Working conditions were pretty grim, mainly because of the heat. I took it on, lived off the company for ten months and had my salary credited to Katie here in London."
Mallory looked pained. "And the usual thing happened, I suppose?"
Brady nodded. "I flew in three days ago after ten months of hell and discovered from her employer that she'd returned to Germany a month ago to get married." He slammed a balled fist into his palm. "And there was nothing I could do about it--not a damned thing. It was all legal."
"And so you decided to get drunk," Mallory said. "So drunk, you didn't know what you were doing for most of the time."
Brady shook his head deliberately. "O.K., Inspector, so I got drunk. I even got mixed up in a couple of brawls, but I didn't kill that woman."
Mallory got to his feet. He crossed to a small dressing-table, picked up a mirror and held it out. "Take a look!" he said. "Take a good look!"
The blood from the scratches had dried and they looked ugly and