Peter Corris - The Empty Beach

All journalists keep an address book. Some combine this with a sort of diary, but there was no sign of any such item. That left the body and the nasty part. I squatted down just beyond the bloody swamp and tried to suspend all senses while I felt around Bruce. He’d been wearing jeans and an army shirt with deep front pockets and I found his wallet in one of them. I finger-tipped through it, but it was functional, nothing more. There was no diary, no address book. I got blood on my hands and went into the bathroom to wash it off. I’d been right about the bathroom the first time-there was no message written in soap on the mirror and nothing written in blood on the walls.

I looked at my face in the mirror. I’d been sweating and my hair flopped down lankly onto my forehead. I was blinking convulsively and the search had given me a fixed, long-faced look, like a wax dummy. If someone had walked in, put a knife in my hand and said, ‘He did it’, I’d have believed it.

I went out and looked at Henneberry again. His face was black, half of his intestines lay on the carpet beside him and he smelled like an open drain. I used the phone.

‘Manny’s.’

‘Ann Winter, please.’ Pause.

‘Ann Winter.’

‘Hardy. Get Manny to pour you a brandy.’

‘I don’t want brandy, I…’

‘Do it!’

‘Okay, I’ve got it. Now what?’

‘Bruce is dead. He’s been murdered. Drink the brandy.’

There was a pause and her voice came through again harshly.

‘All right. I’m all right. Are you sure… it’s… not an accident or anything?’

‘No accident. Look, I’m going to have to phone the cops now, and they’ll look you up pretty soon. I don’t know whether this is connected with what you’re doing or with what I’m doing. Any ideas on that?’

‘No. I told you we were careful. I don’t think we’ve trodden on any big toes, but I don’t know…’

‘Okay. Did Bruce have an address book, diary, notebook, anything like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not here. That must mean something, but I don’t know what. Have you got that cassette?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hang on to it. Don’t give it to the cops. Who else knows about it?’

‘Well, Manny.’

‘Will he keep quiet?’

‘I think so. He’s…’

‘Okay, I know he’s there. You’d better go home. I’ll have to give your name to the police. Will the university have an address for you?’

‘No, only my supervisor, Dr Kenneth Badly.’

‘Right, I’ll give them that. It’ll take them a while to get to you and give you time to think. I take it you don’t mind holding out on the police a bit?’

‘Are you kidding? After what I’ve heard? No. But I want to see

…’

‘No, you don’t. Believe me, you don’t. Give me your home number and I’ll talk to you later.’

She did, and I rang off. Talking and acting in the real world of the living had steadied me, and I was able to take a closer look at Bruce. The killer had put something thin and strong around his neck and pulled. It would probably have been impossible to strangle someone of Bruce’s build with bare hands, but even with the garotte it hadn’t been easy; marks on the neck suggested that Bruce had got a hand up under the cord or had got leverage somehow. That had brought the knife into play. It looked as if the killer had cut and had gone on strangling.

I took a last look around the flat to see if there was anything more to be learned. There wasn’t, but I found something I’d missed before. Down by the bed was a small bronze statuette mounted on a wooden block. A plate on the block read: ‘Bruce Henneberry’ and below ‘Champion Light Heavyweight Division, A.A.L.O. 1977’. It hadn’t done him much good.

I called the cops. While I was waiting for them, I called my lawyer Cy Sackville and put him in the picture.

‘Are you sure you didn’t do it?’ he asked.

‘He was the light heavyweight champion of Oregon and I haven’t used a disembowelling knife in years.’

‘Well, just play a straight bat with the police. Stonewall, you know.’

‘Trevor Bailey,’ I agreed.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted to see if you knew what you were talking about. How about my client? D’you think I can keep her out of it?’

‘Depends how hard they squeeze your balls. If I don’t hear from you in, say, six hours, I’ll start making noises. Okay?’

I sat in a chair with my jemmy in my lap and waited. Two uniformed men came in; they looked at the body and looked at me and didn’t know what to say. Then Detective Sergeant Frank Parker arrived, and he knew just what to say. He issued orders in a rapid stream that set the patrol boys running and summoned technicians who photographed, dusted and measured in the way they do. He wandered around the flat after telling me to stay where I was. He was very tall and well-groomed with an expensive suit and good manners. I stayed put and watched him being efficient; it really was too soon to tell whether or not he had any brains.

He certainly scored on style. His directives to the technical people suggested that he knew what they were doing and that they knew he knew. He bent down to look at things and didn’t seem to be worried about the crease in his nice dark blue pants; more points scored. When all the activity was going to his satisfaction, he called me out to the kitchen. I handed him the jemmy.

‘Illegal tool,’ he said. He had a good voice, like the voices you hear on the taxi radios but a bit smoother.

I shrugged. That’s when he told me his name and offered me a filter cigarette. I refused the smoke and he asked to see my papers, quite politely. He looked through them quickly and handed them back. He seemed to be about to snap his fingers as a way of asking to see the. 45, but he stopped himself. I passed the gun across and he gave it a quick once over. He put it on the table and we both looked at it.

‘The licence isn’t for that gun,’ he said. So he did have brains. ‘Where’s the. 38?’ he added quietly.

‘At home.’

‘This is your car gun?’

‘Right.’

‘Sit down, Hardy.’ He reached across to drop his ash in the sink and stayed in a leaning position, very relaxed. He wasn’t easily placed as a copper; not one of the old belt-’em-by-accident-before-you-do-it-on-purpose types who might or might not be honest and not one of the new, flashy types who are interested in your money and their careers and who play a balancing game by their rules.

He got out a notebook that had been spoiling the sit of his jacket pocket and wrote down my name and address from memory.

‘What was the licence number again?’

I told him and he wrote some more. Then he said, ‘Excuse me’, and stuck his head out the door. He looked into the living-room for a minute and wrote some more before he put the notebook away.

‘We’ll need a full statement, of course. What do you want to tell me now?’ He stubbed out the cigarette in the sink and with it went the slight informality. He was all business now.

‘Not much to tell,’ I said. ‘I only met him yesterday.’

‘Maybe that was his unlucky day.’

‘Maybe, but I can’t see how.’

‘Let’s start with how you met him.’

It dawned on me that this was all technique with him. Leaning there in his sharp but uncared-for suit, with his hair a bit long and his voice almost professionally persuasive, he was like a cat with claws in. If you weren’t careful, you’d be telling him how much you fiddled on your income tax and all about the shoplifting you’d done back in the 1950s. I dug in a bit.

‘You’ve seen my papers, Parker. You know what I do for a living. I think a formal statement might be the best move and you can make up your mind what to do after that.’