I Was Jack Mortimer (Pushkin Collection) Read Online Free PDF Page B

was still standing outside the main door. He hadn’t a clue that there was a dead man in the car just three paces away from him. Sponer jumped into his seat and sped off.

    For about ten minutes he raced aimlessly though the streets, then he came to his senses and looked round. He was in the ninth district, not far from the Liechtenstein Palace. He turnedoff the meter without thinking. The person for whom he’d turned it on wouldn’t be paying for the journey now.
    He drove on and tried to recall the events. He found it impossible to gather his thoughts. It was as if there were an empty space, a blank between his brain and his thoughts. He couldn’t concentrate on what he wanted to think about, because all kinds of unrelated matter kept racing through his head like mad. The moment he tried to think what he should do next, all kinds of thoughts tumbled through his head, except the one he wanted to focus on. As clearly as a maniac sees visions, he kept on seeing one of the two men get into the cab at the station, followed immediately by the other man jumping onto the running board from the other side and opening the door as the cab drove off. The two men were now screaming at each other, but he couldn’t hear this due to the noise of the traffic, and then came the shots drowned by the noise of the confounded lorry and sounding confusingly like an exhaust backfiring; a split second later, the murderer had slammed the door shut and jumped clear. Had it not been for the lorry, Sponer would have turned around when he heard the bangs and seen the bastard jump clear. As it was, he hadn’t turned around, and… But even if he had seen him, the man would still have jumped off and run away! But at least he could have claimed the man was wearing a brown coat, say, or he was tall perhaps, wearing a round hat; he could have seen him running off, he could have said the fellow looked such-and-such, but he just ranaway. “What was I supposed to do? Run after him? He was going like a bat out of hell, Inspector! A man who jumps onto a moving car in the middle of the traffic and shoots someone!…” However, supposing he were to drive to a police station and simply say he’d seen the murderer jump off?… “Where, sir?”—“Right by the station, between the dark… between the patches of open ground…”—“What time?”—“Well, the train arrived at five minutes past the half hour, it’s a couple of minutes to the exit, and then one, or at most two minutes on the road… It’d be about a quarter to…”—“Hell! A quarter to seven! It’s already half past!”—“Half past seven?”—“Yes! Where have you been in the meantime?”—“Where have I been?…”—“And how did you get here from the Westbahnhof?”—“How did I get here?…”—“Yes! Didn’t you stop immediately?”—“Yes, I did… no, yes… no, it wasn’t at the West… it wasn’t at the Westbahnhof at all, it happened in Währinger Strasse…”—“Did it now? Where did the man get in then?”—“Where?… Yes, he got in… he got in at the station, of course, but in the meantime I stopped…”—“Where did you stop in the meantime?”—“I broke down…”—“What was the matter?”—“I had a puncture…”—“And where in fact did the man ask you to take him? Hotel Bristol? How then did you manage to end up in the ninth district?”—“No, he wanted to go to… to Berggasse!”—“I see. What were you doing at the Opera House intersection in that case?”—“At the Opera?…”—“Yes, it says here in the report that you drove backwards and forwards like a madman over the Opera Houseintersection! You must have known at the time that the man was already dead, otherwise you wouldn’t have panicked as you did…”—“Yes, I panicked…”—“For three-quarters of an hour? You heard shots, you saw a man jump off, you didn’t stop, and only three-quarters of an hour—no, it’s now nearly a whole hour—later,