Chapter Eight

Bond had lived in a large block of anonymous flats, a greyish slab at the back of Marble Arch. The caretaker, to Hunter’s surprise, was a woman, a dark square-faced motherly woman in her forties named Mrs Williams, who watched with apparent fascination the toothpick that shuttled from side to side of Charlie’s mouth. But although fascinated she was cautious. ‘I’ve told the police everything, of course. And newspapermen too. What would you gentlemen be wanting information for, now?’

Charlie rolled the toothpick frantically. His explanation was voluble but confused. Hunter caught words and phrases. ‘…journalists…my editor said…something more behind it, Cash, than simple…heart of the mystery…get right down there and find out…’ He took out his wallet, but the woman’s eyes showed no gleam at sight of the notes with which it was stuffed.

She seemed merely puzzled. ‘I’ve got my work to do, you know, but I don’t mind answering questions if they don’t take too much time. But there’s no mystery that I know of. Mr Bond jumped out of the window, poor man, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Ah, but why did he jump?’ Charlie put his head on one side as he asked the question, to which he immediately added another. ‘Did you know that he took drugs?’

‘I did not. But how would I have done? I used to clean up there for an hour every day, but I never saw anything suspicious. For the matter of that, I probably wouldn’t have recognised it anyway.’

‘You cleaned up the flat,’ Charlie said in an astonished voice, rather as if she had told him she performed a daily miracle. In what was almost a whisper he said, ‘Would it be possible for us – my friend here and I – to have a look over it?’

She looked doubtful, and he again produced the wallet. This time she spoke decisively. ‘You can put that thing away, and stop flashing your money at me. I’m an honest widow, Mr Cash, quite satisfied with what I get from my job here. If I show you the flat it’s because I like your looks, and not for money.’

‘You mean you’re going to let us see it? Bless you, ma’am.’ Charlie split his long body in a bow, so that his head almost touched the floor.

‘You don’t go prying about in there alone, mind. I’ll be in there with you. I know what you’re like, you journalists. Not a scrap of honesty among the lot of you. Rob your own mothers to get a story.’ She spoke almost affectionately.

‘Did he have many visitors?’ Hunter asked as they went up in the lift.

‘How should I know? They come in, get into the lift, press the button. No reason for me to see them, or them to see me.’

They got out, walked along the corridor, stopped in front of a door.

‘What sort of a man was he?’

‘What sort of a man?’ She had taken out a key and put it in the lock. Now she turned it. ‘Work it out for yourself.’

The flat consisted of a living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette. It had, like so many such flats, an utter lack of individuality. The furniture was of good quality, but might have come from any big department store. The books in two small cases were book club editions. A desk stood in one corner of the room. Charlie moved over towards it, delicately touched the top, looked out of the corner of one eye at Mrs Williams, and coughed.

‘It’s locked,’ she said.

‘That needn’t bother us.’ He jingled keys in his pocket, grinned.

‘You see,’ she appealed delightedly to Hunter. ‘Just as I said, not a scrap of honesty. Think nothing of opening a dead man’s desk, going through his belongings. But it’s no good. Even if I was to let you do it, you’d find nothing. The police have been through it already.’

‘Did they find anything interesting?’

‘Not that I know of. Then Mrs Riddell – that’s Mr Bond’s sister, his nearest relative – came in, too. She took away some papers. There’d be nothing interesting left now.’

‘I’d like to make sure of that.’ Charlie put his head on one side, rolled the toothpick. ‘Haven’t you got something important to do in another flat now? Just for ten minutes.’

‘No,’ she said emphatically.

Hunter crossed to the window. ‘He jumped from this one?’

‘Yes.’

The sill was fairly low, the window a modern iron-framed one that opened outwards. It would be easy enough to step on to the outer sill and jump. There were no marks on the sill outside. Inside, two long scratches had torn the wallpaper below the sill. Hunter bent to look at them, and then asked Mrs Williams if they were new.

‘They are. The police asked me the same thing.’

‘Come and look at these, Charlie. See what you think of them.’ Charlie Cash came over, looked, said nothing. ‘Hard to see why anybody getting on the sill to jump out of the window should make marks like that.’

Charlie nodded. He hardly seemed to be listening.

‘But if Bond was being forced out, pushed out backwards, then his heels might catch on the wallpaper as he struggled. Nobody heard any sound of a struggle?’ he asked the housekeeper. ‘The people in other flats, I mean.’

‘No. You might not think it, but these flats are very well insulated for sound. You don’t hear the radio from one flat in another.’ She sniffed. ‘Not that in this case there was anything to hear, if you ask me. He jumped. That was the verdict at the inquest, wasn’t it.’

‘Yes. You’re forgetting something, Bill.’ Charlie was staring across the street, at a tall, narrow building opposite.

‘What’s that?’

‘There was a witness. In that block over there. Somebody who saw Bond jump.’

They moved away from the window. Mrs. Williams had said they could work out for themselves what sort of a man Bond was. What had she meant?

The bedroom seemed at first sight to give no more hint of a personality than the living room. The suits hanging in the wardrobe were well made, conspicuously elegant. Several pairs of shoes stood at the bottom of the wardrobe, in different colours of suede. A chest of drawers contained silk underclothing, and several silk shirts.

Charlie whistled. ‘Beauty gallery. Come and look.’

Over the divan bed were photographs of half a dozen boys and young men, all rather consciously posed against backgrounds of sea or country landscape. Three of them wore open neck shirts, two wore bathing shorts, one was naked. All of the photographs were signed in scrawling, unformed hands. Hunter read, ‘For Mel, with love from Jack.’ ‘For my friend Mel, from Jimmy boy.’

On a small mantelpiece were some photographs of Bond. One showed him outside the Houses of Parliament – he had been elected in 1945, Hunter remembered – looking spruce, dapper, younger than his twenty-seven years. Another photograph showed him bouncing a ball on the beach, with one of the boys in the photographs over the bed. A third, obviously much more recent, was of a gaunt, baggy-eyed figure, hardly recognisable as the man standing outside the House of Commons.

Was this what Mrs Williams had meant? Evidently it was. She stood now with her hands clasped together, eyes looking modestly at the floor.

When they were outside Hunter said, ‘So now we know that he was a homosexual, as well as taking drugs. Nice chap. But how does it help?’

‘You’re forgetting those heel marks, if that’s what they were. The ones you thought meant there’d been a struggle.’

‘The police won’t have missed them. They’re not fools. And what can we do about them anyway?’

‘We can see what Miss Tanya Broderick thinks.’

‘Who’s Miss Tanya Broderick?’

They had crossed the road. Charlie spat out his toothpick and pushed open the door to the entrance hall of the narrow building. ‘She calls herself a fashion model. And she’s the witness who saw Bond jump out of the window.’