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

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.’

Chapter Nine
    The flat was on the third floor. Charlie began to talk as soon as the blonde girl opened the door. ‘My name’s Rogers, Miss Broderick, I’m with the Daily Banner on features. This is my colleague, Jack Hunt. We wondered if you’d be interested in giving us a story.’
    ‘A story about me? For your paper?’ She had the small, precise voice of a little girl. ‘Come in.’
    For a moment Hunter had the disconcerting impression that he was in Bond’s flat again. The same bookcases with the same book club editions, the same, or very similar furniture. But there were some differences, a telephone covered by the dress of a large French doll, several other dolls in various dresses around the room, a number of tiny glass animals on a table. Miss Broderick herself was tiny, with blonde hair cut in a fringe, a smooth-skinned babyish face, and hard blue eyes.
    ‘I know newspapermen like beer,’ she said in that curious, quite artificial little voice. ‘But beer always makes me want to keep on spending pennies. There’s gin or whisky. But why ever should your newspaper want to do a feature story about me?’
    Charlie took out a notebook. ‘Tell me now, I haven’t got it wrong, you are the Miss Broderick who gave evidence in the case of Melville Bond, aren’t you?’
    She was pouring whisky, and had her back turned to them. ‘Yes.’
    ‘We’re doing a series called “The Vital Witness,”’ Charlie said. ‘People who actually saw what happened during a vital moment in a crime–’
    ‘But there wasn’t any crime.’
    ‘Of course not, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that some of the other cases are of witnesses who actually saw crimes being committed, and without them the evidence would have been incomplete. Or there’d have been no case.’
    She brought over the whisky to them. Her fingernails, Hunter saw as she put down the glass by his side, were enamelled bright green to match her dress. ‘I see what you mean. But then there wasn’t any case, was there? He just jumped out of the window, that’s all. I mean, it isn’t interesting.’
    ‘There’s only your word for it,’ Charlie