The Light of the Day - Eric Ambler [9]
2
I was in the bedroom and he came through from the sitting room. All the same he must have opened the outer door very quietly indeed, or I would certainly have heard the latch. I think he expected to find me there. In that case, the whole thing was just a cunningly planned trap.
I was standing at the foot of one of the beds, so I couldn’t move away from him. For a moment he just stood there grinning at me, as if he were enjoying himself.
“Well now, Arthur,” he said, “you ought to have waited for me, oughtn’t you?”
“I was going back.” It was a stupid thing to say, I suppose; but almost anything I had said would have sounded stupid at that point.
And then, suddenly, he hit me across the face with the back of his hand.
It was like being kicked. My glasses fell off and I lurched back against the bed. As I raised my arms to protect myself he hit me again with the other hand. When I started to fall to my knees, he dragged me up and kept on hitting me. He was like a savage.
I fell down again and this time he let me be. My ears were singing, my head felt like bursting, and I could not see properly. My nose began to bleed. I got my handkerchief out to stop the blood from getting all over my clothes, and felt about among the checks lying on the carpet for my glasses. I found them eventually. They were bent a bit but not broken. When I put them on, I saw the soles of his shoes about a yard from my face.
He was sitting in the armchair, leaning back, watching me.
“Get up,” he said, “and watch that blood. Keep it off the rug.”
As I got to my feet, he stood up quickly himself. I thought he was going to start hitting me again. Instead, he caught hold of one lapel of my jacket.
“Do you have a gun?”
I shook my head.
He slapped my pockets, to make sure, I suppose, then shoved me away.
“There are some tissues in the bathroom,” he said. “Go clean your face. But leave the door open.”
I did as I was told. There was a window in the bathroom; but even if it had been possible to escape that way without breaking my neck, I don’t suppose I would have tried it. He would have heard me. Besides, where could I have escaped to? All he would have had to do was call down to the night concierge, and the police would have been there in five minutes. The fact that he had not called down already was at least something. Perhaps, as a foreigner, he did not want to get involved as a witness in a court case. After all, he had not actually lost anything; and if I were to eat enough humble pie, perhaps even cry a bit, he might decide to forget the whole thing; especially after the brutal way in which he had attacked me. That was my reasoning. I should have known better. You cannot expect common decency from a man like Harper.
When I came out of the bathroom, I saw that he had picked up the check folder and was putting it back in the suitcase. The checks I had torn out, however, were lying on the bed. He gathered them up and motioned me towards the sitting room.
“In there.”
As I went in, he moved past me to the door and bolted it.
There was a marble-topped commode against the side wall. On the commode was a tray with an ice bucket, a bottle of brandy, and some glasses. He picked up a glass, then looked at me.
“Sit down right there,” he said.
The chair he motioned to was by a writing table under the window. I obeyed orders; there did not seem to be anything else to do. My nose was still bleeding, and I had a headache.
He slopped some brandy into the glass and put it on the table beside me. For a moment or two I felt encouraged. If you are going to have a man arrested you don’t sit him down first and give him a drink. Perhaps it was just going to be a man-to-man chat in which I told him a hard-luck story and said how sorry I was, while he got dewy-eyed over his own magnanimity and decided to give me another chance.
That one did not last long.
He poured himself a drink and then glanced across at me as he put ice in the glass.
“First time you’ve been caught at it, Arthur?”
I blew my nose a little to keep the blood running before I answered.