LITMIR.BIZ

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His house was just like this, and yet when he wanted to show me something in one of his books, he could lay his hands on it in a minute.’

      ‘Well, good for him,’ said Quaid. ‘But why did you say “almost everything”? What was that about?’

      ‘I’m not sure. Maybe it’s nothing. It’s just these papers on the floor here, they’re different somehow,’ said Trave, pointing to a small heap of documents near his feet that were lying on the carpet in the space between the desk and the fireplace.

      ‘In what way different?’

      ‘They look like they’ve been thrown there, maybe from off the desk. They’re not stacked up like the other papers.’

      ‘Yes, maybe you’re right,’ said Quaid, looking down. ‘Good work, William. You’ll make a decent detective yet. Okay, leave everything where it is for now. We need to get back downstairs. We can bring the daughter up here when she’s back on her feet – see what she says; see if anything’s missing. You can carry her if you like,’ he added with a grin as he went out of the door.

      Trave shook his head and gave a weary smile. He’d already picked up on his boss’s irritation at the way he’d helped the bereaved woman downstairs, but what was he supposed to do – leave her to faint on top of her father’s corpse?

      Carefully he replaced Mein Kampf on the table where he’d found it and looked curiously around the room one last time before he followed his boss down the stairs. Strange, he thought, how all the books seemed to be about different kinds of politics. Reference books, language primers, treatises – but as far as he could see, there wasn’t one novel in the whole damn place. But then fact, of course, could be a great deal stranger than fiction.

      Downstairs, Trave went to check on the dead man’s daughter and was pleased to see that she’d recovered her senses while he’d been away. She was sitting up on the sofa where he had laid her before he went upstairs, sipping from a glass of brandy that the old lady must have given her. There was even some colour in her pale cheeks.

      Reassured, Trave returned to the hall, where Quaid was standing by the remains of the woman’s father.

      ‘There’s no point waiting for a doctor,’ said Quaid, sounding typically decisive. ‘We know he’s dead and we know what killed him, so we’d better get on with finding out who did it.’

      Trave knew in the immediate sense that ‘we’ meant him. It was his job, not Quaid’s, to handle the dead and go through their possessions. So he took out his evidence gloves, pulled them carefully over his hands, and began methodically to go through the dead man’s pockets, doing his best to keep his eyes averted from the mess of shattered bone and blood that had once been a human face.

      ‘What’ve you got there?’ asked Quaid, watching at the side.

      ‘A wallet,’ said Trave, holding up a battered leather notecase that he’d extracted from inside the dead man’s jacket. He took out his torch to shine a brighter light on the contents. ‘There’s an ID card in the name of Albert Morrison, aged sixty-eight; address 7 Gloucester Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, SW11,’ he went on. ‘Plus three pounds ten shillings in banknotes, a ration card, and two ticket stubs. Oh, and a piece of paper – same inside pocket, but not in the wallet, folded into four. There’s a bit of blood on it, but you can read what it says: “Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C.” And there’s a name written underneath with a question mark – Hayrich or Hayrick, maybe.’

      ‘Never heard of him,’ said Quaid.

      ‘I think it’s all the same handwriting – same as on the papers upstairs,’ said Trave, peering closely, ‘but the name’s a bit of a scrawl, like it’s been written in a hurry, sometime after the sentence, I’d say.’

      ‘All right, bag it. Is there anything else?’

      ‘A few coins in the right trouser pocket; a couple of keys on a ring. That’s it.’

      ‘Okay. Let’s go talk to the daughter, see if she knows something. There’s no point standing around doing nothing, waiting for the death wagon to get here.’

      ‘Are we still taking her upstairs?’ asked Trave.

      ‘Yes, why not?’

      ‘I just don’t want her to see her father again, that’s all. I don’t think she can take much more.’

      ‘Fine,’ said Quaid impatiently. ‘Get a sheet or something. The old woman must have one spare.’

      Left on his own in the hall, Quaid scratched his head absent-mindedly as he looked down at the smashed-up corpse that had less than an hour before been a sixty-year-old man called Albert Morrison. The sight didn’t upset him. In the last three months he’d seen far worse – soldiers at bomb sites picking up bits of arms and legs and putting them in potato sacks as if they were working in a harvest field; blast victims fused into the walls of their homes; even once a severed head staring down at him from an oak tree that had been stripped of all its leaves by a land mine explosion.

      No, the dead man was a puzzle. That was all. And solving the puzzle shouldn’t be too difficult once all the clues were assembled. For now, Quaid had to be content with speculation. What had happened upstairs? he wondered. Had the old man come home and surprised a burglar, who’d pushed him down the stairs? The answer to that was almost certainly no – Quaid thought Trave was most likely right that the killer hadn’t come in through the fire escape door, and from what he’d been able to see when he was upstairs, there were no signs of forced entry on the entrance door to the flat. And given that the front door of the building appeared unscathed as well, the likely explanation was that someone had let the killer in. All the tenants in the building would have to be questioned, obviously, but Quaid’s intuition told him that it was Morrison who had opened the door. Perhaps the killer had followed Morrison home or perhaps he had been waiting at the door. Either way, he had targeted the old man. Why? To steal from him? The daughter would be able to tell them if anything significant was missing, but as far as Quaid had been able to see from a cursory inspection, there hadn’t been any items of obvious great value in the flat – a lorryload of boring academic books, certainly, but in Quaid’s experience people didn’t get killed for their books. So if it wasn’t to steal, why had the killer come? Perhaps to talk about some matter of mutual interest. According to statistics, most murderers knew their victims, and Quaid had a great deal of faith in statistics. Perhaps the professor and his guest had got into an argument and the argument had got out of hand. Throwing your victim over the banister was certainly an unlikely method for premeditated murder. So much could go wrong in a struggle even with a weak opponent – one false move and the would-be murderer could easily end up falling down the stairs himself.

      The professor! Quaid realized that he’d already unconsciously given the victim a nickname. It was a habit he’d developed with all his cases, and then afterwards when they were solved, the names became a filing system in his mind – useful in its way. The sailor for the man who’d drowned under Lambeth Bridge, held down under the water by his brother’s boat hook; the nun for the pious lady in Clerkenwell murdered for her savings by the drug-addicted lodger who lived in her attic; the prime minister for the man who looked like an oversize version of Churchill, dispatched by his wife with a bread knife one evening because she couldn’t stand to listen to him barking orders at her any more. And now the professor – killed by one of his students, perhaps, or an academic rival.

      A loud knocking at the front door recalled the inspector from his reverie. Trave had still not returned, so Quaid walked over to the door and opened it, and then had to step back quickly as an overweight man in a green tweed suit almost fell past him into the hall, coming to a halt in front of the still-uncovered dead man on the floor. The newcomer was red in the face and breathing heavily, but it was hard to say whether that was from the shock of what he was now seeing or from the haste of his arrival.

      ‘Oh, God,’ he said, stepping back. ‘That’s Albert.’

      ‘How

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