Джон Пристли - The Doomsday Men

“I don’t blame you,” said Malcolm. “But where does this other brother, John-Father John or whatever he is-come in?”

“He doesn’t, so far as I know. I don’t care about him. Probably he’s crazy. These families nearly always produce at least one crazy one, and I doubt if the other two are strictly sane.”

“That might possibly explain Andrea-the girl, y’know.”

Hooker struggled with a yawn. “Don’t ask me. Nothing explains girls to me. I gave that up years ago, when I stopped dating ’em. What time is it? Must be late.”

Malcolm looked at his watch. “Nearly eleven. Look here, this is absurd. Do you realise, Hooker, how long that chap’s been gone for his whisky? Why, it couldn’t have been much after nine when he went, and he said he’d be back in half a minute.”

The other did not reflect the alarm in Malcolm’s tone. “Decided to finish the Scotch himself, I guess. I’ll bet he’s snoring now.”

But Malcolm was still uneasy. “He seemed to me too keen on this mad business-with his talk about murder and God knows what-just to do that. We’d better go and see if he’s all right, Hooker. Number Twenty-two, he said. It’s on this floor somewhere. Come on.”

Hooker yawned again, pointing out afterwards that he had been driving since early morning, but agreed to go along. They went down the corridor, and, turning a corner, came to Twenty-two. The door was open, and the lights were on inside the room. An elderly chambermaid was in there, tidying up. A half-empty bottle of Scotch stood on the table, and by its side was a pipe, the one that Edlin had been smoking when he left them. There was also a decided reek of whisky. But there was no sign of Edlin, no sign even of his baggage. After peering in for a moment or two, Malcolm and Hooker stared at one another. The chambermaid went on grumpily with her work, taking no notice of them.

“Could you please tell us where the gentleman is who had this room?” asked Malcolm.

“No, I couldn’t.” The chambermaid sounded as cross as she looked. “He’s gone, that’s all I know.”

“Gone where?”

“I wasn’t told that. All I was told was to come up and do the room out. You’d better ask at the desk.”

“Mr. Edlin was in this room, wasn’t he?”

“Don’t know the name,” she snapped, as if she strongly disapproved of everything connected with this business. “You’ll have to ask at the desk. Whoever he was, he seems to have been powerful fond of liquor. Place stinks of liquor.”

They withdrew slowly, feeling somewhat defeated as well as mystified. On their way downstairs, Hooker gave it as his opinion that Edlin, a little shaky after his escape, must have taken a few enormous swigs of whisky, and then, suddenly drunk, must have forgotten all about returning to their room and have gone reeling out of the hotel. Malcolm felt that there was more in it than that, though he was not prepared even to guess at what had happened.

The reception clerk was more communicative than the chambermaid, though he spoke with a certain reserve. Yes, Mr. Edlin of Twenty-two had left about an hour ago.

“But did he say why he was going?” asked Malcolm.

No, he hadn’t said anything.

Malcolm looked questioningly at Hooker, who was frowning now. Then they both looked again at the young clerk, who showed some faint signs of embarrassment.

“We can’t make this out,” Hooker told him. “Mr. Edlin was talking to us, about two hours ago, went to his room, saying he’d be back in a minute, and we haven’t seen him since.”

The clerk leaned forward a little and became confidential. “He oughtn’t to have been out, you see. And the doctor and an attendant came for him. Good job they did too, because he’d got himself pretty bad even in that short time. Practically passed out. But they got him away all right.”

It was left to Hooker to ask the questions. Malcolm felt that everything had now escaped any kind of control. His own lunacy had brought him here, and he had wandered into an ever-enlarging and more spectacular lunacy.

“One of these sanatoriums for fellows who can’t quit the liquor,” the clerk explained. “The doctor didn’t say much, but I knew that was it. They came for him from Riverside or somewhere down there. Pretty bad case, I reckon. He’d only just checked in, but when they carried him out, I could smell the whisky from here. He’d had plenty, believe me. And I don’t mind telling you gentlemen I wasn’t sorry to see him go.”

After a struggle, Malcolm now found his voice. “Did you know this doctor?”

“No, sir. Stranger to me. From Riverside-or Pasadena, I forget which. Johnson, the name was. A tall dark man with a terrible squint.”

Malcolm seemed to have heard just recently of a tall dark man with a terrible squint, but could not remember in what connection it was. At the moment he felt all at sea. No sense in any of this.

“Thanks,” said Hooker, rather dryly.

“You bet!” replied the clerk, beaming, and turned away.

Without a word, Malcolm and Hooker moved across the little lobby and went outside, where a locomotive, which looked to Malcolm of an incredible size, was ringing its warning bell. Another train, away in the distance, was giving that long mournful hoot that seems to make the night spaces of America even vaster than they actually are. Away across the gleaming railroad tracks the coloured lights of Barstow’s main street shone bravely, very small in the immensity of the night. Malcolm felt a long way from home; not only bewildered but lost.

“Well,” he asked, at length, “what do you make of it?”

“You’ve got to take one line or the other,” replied Hooker, slowly. “Either he’s one of these crazy drunks, and he never had a brother who was murdered and there isn’t a Brotherhood of the Judgment and a Father John and all the rest of it-or-”

“He was telling the truth, and those fellows came back and somehow took him out of the hotel, eh?”

“That’s it. Either one or the other. Take your choice.”

Malcolm thought a moment. “He seemed all right to me.”

“They often do, those drunks, when they’ve just had enough and not too much,” said Hooker, almost as if he enjoyed making it all more difficult. “But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.”

“What?” Malcolm had nothing to suggest himself.

“I’m going,” said Hooker firmly, “to bed.”

“Back in half a minute,” said Jimmy Edlin, over his shoulder, as he opened the door. When he came out into the corridor, he had a feeling that somebody had just gone round the corner, towards the stairs, but he did not attach any importance to this fact. After all, they hadn’t the whole hotel to themselves. He went along to his room in a pleasantly excited state of mind. The last thing he had expected was to find here a couple of fine young fellows who seemed to be as curious about this MacMichael business as he was, and who appeared to have seen it so far from an entirely different point of view. In a minute or two he would know what that point of view was, and might learn something valuable, over a drink or two of that excellent Scotch he had had the sense to put in his bag. This was going to be great. Nice fellows, and the three of them all after the same queer crowd. Jimmy liked company, and so far he had not been a big success working by himself on this job, which he was convinced now was a very rum job indeed. The little widow, Mrs. Atwood-and there was an attractive little piece of womanhood for a lonely man-had been very much interested, very sympathetic, almost excited it seemed when he told her over the telephone where he was going-but you couldn’t land a woman into this nasty mess, as he had been careful to tell her. (She hadn’t liked that either, he remembered, and had even been a bit short and sharp with him, saying Good-bye abruptly and cutting him off. A pity! Though he was no hand at saying things that might please a woman over the telephone; something too inhuman about that lump of vulcanite.) But now it looked as if he had two very useful allies in these fine alert young chaps. Yes, he’d been lucky.