The Gigantic Shadow by Julian Symons Read Free Book Online Page A

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