The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel. Gordon Landsborough
Читать онлайн книгу.
said: “The hell, what is there for you to investigate?” That girl, I was still sure, had been whipped away by Turkish police, and I wasn’t to be kidded by this big, well-spoken, calm-looking young man.
But he was shaking his head. “Mr. Heggy,” he said, and his voice was very firm, “we can’t allow girls to be abducted forcibly from hotels in this city. You may have imagined what you say you saw—”
“Brother, I never imagined what I saw,” I rapped with equal firmness.
“Then you see, Mr. Heggy, we’ve got to enquire into these statements you have made.”
He was so calm, so polite, but so firm with it. I kept looking at him, trying to read what was behind that big, brown-red healthy face of this young police officer. And my eyes sometimes flickered beyond him, to those monkeys of his in the passage. They were all such big men, filling their uniforms with solid muscle, and I couldn’t help feeling that if it came to a shindig I was going to get the worst of it.
And Joe P. Heggy just naturally hates to get the worst of any fight.
The officer said: “Perhaps you would like to discuss this matter further inside your room, Mr. Heggy.” He looked significantly down the corridor, where a few guests, heading for the elevator or stairs, were caught in that irresolute pose of people wanting to do two things at once—and one of them was to gawk at a man in trouble with the police.
I thought there wasn’t anything else I could do about it. I had a feeling that if I said: “No, to hell with it, you stay out in the corridor,” these monkeys would just force their way into my room.
I stood by grudgingly, and I felt like giving them Lincoln’s Address at Gettysburg. I was fully determined to kick up the goddamnedest row ever heard in Istanbul if they tried any police tricks on me.
Brother, I was in for yet another surprise! The police officer stepped into my apartment, and closed the door after him upon his men.
I said rather suspiciously: “Don’t you want your strong-arm boys in with you?”
He laughed and took off his gloves. I had a feeling he was laughing at me. He said, tolerantly: “No, Mr. Heggy, I don’t think we need any witnesses to our conversation. This is a friendly call, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, and I’m out to help you.”
Suspiciously—“Help me? Now why in hell’s name should I need helping?”
His eyes widened in surprise, and yet I was sure he was mocking me. He said: “But you told them at the station that this girl who was carried away was a friend of yours?”
I swallowed. That comes of telling lies. One was coming home to me now. I thought George Washington had something, right then, and I made a lot of vows for the future. One of them was to keep my big nose out of other people’s affairs.
The officer said, patiently: “Now, Mr. Heggy, will you please tell me in your own words exactly what you saw? Please tell me absolutely everything, and don’t omit any detail.”
I found myself telling him the tale. I started by thinking it was a waste of breath, that this guy must have known the full story better than I, but I ended up feeling entirely different.
He knew I had changed towards him, because when I had finished, he said, quietly: “This has nothing to do with the police. I think now you are believing me, aren’t you, Mr. Heggy?”
I was grouchy in my admission of the rightness of his statement. The hell, a man doesn’t like to admit he’s been a bit of a fool. It made me feel like some kid stuffed with fantastic novelettish or filmic notions. But I was convinced, and Joe P. Heggy at times can do the big thing.
I growled: “Yeah, I’ve got to change my mind, I reckon.” I changed it so much I went over to a sideboard and dug out a bottle of best Scotch. I said: “I’ll make amends with a drop of good liquor.”
The young police officer laughed. He said: “That’s unnecessary, Mr. Heggy. We’re rather used to other nationals getting curious ideas about our police forces.” He shrugged. “You’ve got to remember, though, that we’re not an advanced country such as your own.”
He didn’t continue, and maybe he was wise, because there was no sense in taking up time arguing about degrees of democracy—or totalitarianism.
Instead he said: “What you have told us sounds very serious. We’ve got to find out who has kidnapped this girl. You think she was Turkish?”
I nodded. “Could be. Or maybe a Bulgarian or from one of the adjacent countries.”
He smiled. “That,” he said dryly, “won’t help us very much. I want you to give me your description of this girl.”
I said: “Look, brother, why don’t you go down to Reception and ask that two-timing Benny something about his female guests in this hotel? He should know who’s in the hotel, and he should be able to say who’s missing now.”
That young officer was watching me all the time I spoke. There was a thoughtful look in his calm, rather humorous-looking brown eyes. Then he said: “I’ve already spoken to the night receptionist.”
“Yeah?”
“The man you call Benny says he has been round the hotel and can account for all the female guests.”
We looked at each other for a few seconds. And then I took a deep breath and I came out heavily with: “Benny’s in on this, whatever it is. He’s a slimy sonavobitch, and money will get him to do anything or say anything.”
I looked at the police officer to see what he thought about my statement. But he was a police officer, and trained to be diplomatic. He merely nodded, and that could mean anything.
I was raw inside about Benny’s statement, because it clashed with my own. In fact it made my story sound like the hotted-up imagination of an incipient D.T. And I hadn’t been drinking so far this evening.
I started in to say: “Look, that girl was wearing pyjamas. Leastways, some of the pyjamas was still on her.” I was thinking of that glimpse of firm, rounded young breasts when the buttons came off her jacket in the struggle. “That girl must have been staying in this hotel to be dragged out in her pyjamas like that.”
But even as I said that I saw the fallacy of the argument. Or at least I saw a possible explanation of it all, and I reckon that young officer saw it, too, but he didn’t say anything.
It won’t be the first time that a husband and friends have surprised an unfaithful wife with some ardent lover in an hotel apartment. Maybe this was just such a case. Maybe those big, heavy-muscled men had been dragging home a naughty little wife.
Maybe.
But I didn’t think so. It just stuck in my craw, that theory. I mean, when things like that happen they’re not planned to include a cop standing guard to cover the proceedings—and a bribe sufficient to keep a man like Benny lying to the police.
I didn’t feel she was any erring wife. I felt there was something infinitely more sinister behind this carefully laid scheme to snatch a girl out of her bedroom at night.
The. young officer was very serious. He said: “The important part of your statement, so far as we are concerned, Mr. Heggy, is that you insist that one of our policemen was complicit in this affair. Now that’s a most serious statement to make.”
I said: “Serious? Well, brother, I repeat it. There was a cop in on this snatch.”
I heard the officer murmur: “I believe you, Mr. Heggy. Or at any rate, I believe that someone masqueraded as a policeman to help in this abduction “
You know, at that I breathed a tremendous sigh of relief. I’d just got around to believing this cop when he said that the Istanbul police had nothing to do with that kidnapping, and now I was mighty glad to realize that this big officer believed my story. I mean, without any other witness, I had to admit that my story sounded thin. Okay, to have it believed, was