The Mindwarpers Read online

  “I am.”

  A wolfish grin followed by, “When you left home you told your wife you were going to Burleston. How about that?”

  “Did I tell her?”

  (Fighting for time, frantic with thought.)

  “She says you did.”

  “She’s mistaken.”

  “Your two kids heard you tell her.” Silence.

  “They’re mistaken too, eh?”

  Silence.

  “All three make identically the same mistake, eh?

  “Perhaps I did tell her—though I’ve no recollection of doing so. I must have had Burleston sort of stuck in my mind and went there without thinking.”

  “All right. So you went to a God-forgotten dump like that, huh? Most folk around here have never heard of the place. But you knew of it. You’ve just said yourself that it must have been somewhere in your mind. How did it come to be in your mind? What put it there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your records show you weren’t born in Burleston. You have never lived there. You didn’t get married there. Your wife doesn’t come from there. On the face of it you have no personal connection with the place. So why did you go there?”

  “I’ve told you a dozen times I don’t really know.”

  “Why did you consider it necessary to tell a bunch of lies about this trip?”

  “I didn’t. I told my wife where I was going and that is your own evidence.”

  “Never mind our evidence—you concentrate on yours, such as it is. You told Markham that you were having difficulty with relatives but your wife doesn’t know a thing about it. You told your wife you were being sent to Burleston on official business but your superiors flatly deny it. You told a taxi-driver and a shopkeeper that you were looking for a factory site when in fact you were doing nothing of the kind. Isn’t that a bunch of lies?”

  “I didn’t want Markham to know I was feeling lousy.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t stand the pace. It doesn’t help to give an impression of weakness.”

  “Doesn’t it? Well, all your explanations are weak enough to fall apart. It’s quite normal for employees to get sick and say so and be given time off. Why do you regard your case as exceptional?”

  Silence.

  “How about the fairy tale you told your wife? A man doesn’t deceive an attractive woman without good motive.”

  “She was already deeply concerned for me. I didn’t want to add to her worry.”

  “So you went to Burleston and sought a factory site—or said you were seeking one. We’ve two witnesses to that. Thinking of setting up in business for yourself? What kind of manufacturing did you have in mind? What products did you plan to turn out? Why locate your plant in Burleston where there is no rail service?”

  “The witnesses are mistaken.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “H’m! They’re suffering from delusions in the same way as your wife and kids, eh? Strange how everybody gets you wrong, isn’t it?”

  No reply.

  “Medical evidence shows that this girl was murdered. Of all traceable suspects you alone had the opportunity and, we believe, the motive. The crime lies dormant for twenty years while you establish yourself as a loving husband, a good father and a solid citizen. You become a perfect picture of suburban respectability.”

  Silence.

  “Then by a most remarkable coincidence you get tired of it all just after the murder comes to light. By still greater coincidence you decide to take a sudden vacation. In where, of all places? In Burleston!”

  Silence.

  “Don’t let’s fool around any longer. We’ve wasted enough time already. Let’s get down to basic facts. The news gave you the jitters because you had good reason for jittering. You had to check up. You had to find out whether the police had got a line on anyone and, if so, who. Otherwise you couldn’t sleep at night.”

  Silence.

  “Mister, you’re sewed up tight enough to satisfy any jury. A confession is your only hope. At least it may save your neck.” A pause, a hard stare, a contemptuous wave of the hand. “Take him away. Let him think it over until his lawyer gets here.”

  Bransome had no difficulty in imagining the whole dreadful dialogue in which he would be assigned the role of the cornered rat. When the end came would it really be like that? His pulse put in a few extra thumps as he thought of it.

  FIVE:

  THE QUEASY feeling had passed off by the time he reached Hanbury. He had argued himself out of it on the basis that idle anticipation and ultimate realization can be completely different things. The futute lay in the lap of the gods rather than in the depths of his over-active imagination. The worst might never happen; if it did he would meet it when it came.

  He found the office of the Hanbury Gazette a few hundred yards from his hotel, went in, said to the lean, sallow-faced youth behind the counter, “Do you have any back numbers available?”

  “Depends how far back.”

  “How about the last three months?”

  “Yes, we’ve plenty. One of each?”

  The other dug them out, rolled them into a bundle, put string around them and handed them over. Bransome paid, returned to the hotel and took them up to his room. Locking his door, he opened the bundle on the table by the window and started his examination. For most of two hours he searched through the newspapers page by page, column by column, missing nothing.

  These sheets covered a period stretching from last week to three months ago. They recorded a fire, a couple of hold-ups and several car thefts in town, a suicide out of town and a spectacular shooting forty miles away. Nothing out of the ordinary appeared to have happened in or near Burleston.

  He could think up two possible explanations for this. First, the trucker who had given forth about the body under the tree may have been misled by talk about a very similar crime located elsewhere. He snatched a gleam of hope from the idea that his burden of guilt might be cast off and borne by another.

  Alternatively, the trucker’s story might be accurate enough but referred to an event far older than he, Bransome, had assumed. The fellow’s manner had not suggested it; on the contrary, he had conveyed the impression of telling about something that had happened fairly recently, within the last few days or perhaps during the previous couple of weeks. The trucker certainly had given the listening Bransome the notion that the news had not had time to grow stale.

  Yet again his brain suffered a momentary dizziness. Up to now he had taken it for granted that the powers that be had had only little time in which to trace him; but if, in fact, they had had more than three months they might be very near to him, close upon his heels. Perhaps right at this moment they were in his home firing questions at a pale-faced and distraught Dorothy.

  “Where did he tell you he was going? To Burleston? Where the heck is that? See if you can get through to the police there, Joe. Tell ‘em he’s wanted. If it’s not a false lead, they may be able to pick him up.”

  He sat in his room wrestling with his predicament. From first to last he’d had to cope with a constant succession of panics brought on by his own fears. Now he was managing to develop a resistance to them. Right now the wires might be humming as Dorothy’s questioners raised the Burleston or Hanbury police. A day or two ago the mere idea of it would have got him on the run again. But not now. He would sit tight until morning and take a chance on the cops.

  It was essential that he remain overnight because the Gazette office would have closed by this hour. No more back copies could be got until tomorrow. The part of his mind that battled with his emotions and insisted upon dealing with the situation—the same part that had steered him here—maintained that he must not leave Hanbury without finding what he was seeking or satisfying himself beyond all doubt that it was not there to be discovered. At whatever risk the matter must be settled one way or the other.

  Tossing the use
less newspapers into the wastebasket, he rubbed his chin and decided to shave before dinner. He unlocked his case, opened it, stood staring at it with deep suspicion. The contents were neatly packed, his belongings intact, nothing missing. Ever since childhood he’d been ludicrously fussy about his packing and, like most people of that type, could tell at a glance when something has been disturbed. Things now lay in his case almost but not quite as he usually placed them. He felt fairly sure that during his absence the case had been emptied and repacked.

  He could not be absolutely positive about this but, all the same, he considered it a good guess that someone had opened the case and given the contents a swift and expert examination. Somebody looking for what? In the circumstances there could be only one answer, namely, incriminating evidence. A petty thief, he reasoned, would not have bothered to try to conceal his search by tidily repacking and locking the case. More likely he’d have flung the stuff all over the room to express his anger at finding nothing of value. Only an official searcher would take pains to hide his probing.

  He examined the locks for signs of picking or forcing but they showed not a scratch and turned easily. Could he be mistaken about this? Had he unwittingly bounced the suitcase around a bit and thus shaken it up since last it was opened? Or were the Hanbury police already swinging into action?

  For the next few minutes he sought carefully through the room for a crushed cigarette butt or a splash of tobacco ash or anything else that could be construed as the mark of an intruder. He found nothing. Neither the bed nor the wardrobe showed the slightest sign of having been disturbed. Proof was nonexistent and all he had to go upon was a fussy belief that a spare tie had been folded left to right instead of right to left and that a bunch of handkerchiefs had been packed with points to the rear of the case instead of to the front.

  Next, he stood by the window, half-concealed at one side, and watched the street below. He was seeking proof that the hotel was under observation. That got him nowhere, either. Passers-by were numerous but no same figure wandered past twice in twenty minutes and nobody appeared to have even a casual interest in the hotel.

  Of course, anyone keeping official watch on the place would not necessarily hang around outside. He might be inside the hotel itself, lounging in the lobby and wearing an innocent air of waiting for someone, or behind the counter posing as a relief clerk. Bransome went downstairs to have a look. The only persons visible in the foyer were two elderly ladies gossiping together; he could not picture either of them in hot pursuit of a murderer. At the counter the one clerk on duty was a skinny runt who could have fitted into a leg of a cop’s pants. Bransome went up to him.

  “Has anyone called for me while I’ve been out?”

  “No, Mr. Bransome.”

  “Anyone been shown up to my room?”

  “No, sir, not that I know of.”

  “H’m!”

  “Something wrong?” asked the clerk, eyeing him.

  “Nothing much. Just had a queer feeling that someone has been prowling around my room.”

  “Is anything missing?” said the clerk, stiffening himself in readiness for trouble.

  “No, nothing at all.”

  The clerk showed vast relief and suggested, “It may have been the maid.”

  “Possibly.”

  Bransome glanced down, ill at ease and vaguely dissatisfied. The hotel register lay wide open and practically under his nose. It was turned to face the clerk but he could see the last entry quite clearly. The fact that the writing was upside-down caused only a little delay in appreciating what he saw. He stared at it absently while his mind churned around until eventually his eyes chipped in and told his brain what was there.

  Joseph Reardon. Room 13.

  “Thanks,” he said to the clerk.

  He tramped upstairs, sat on the edge of his bed, and tangled and untangled his fingers while he tried to estimate how many Reardons there might be in the world. Maybe six or seven thousand, maybe ten or more. No knowing, no way of telling. And besides, that lanky, beady-eyed snooper at the plant wasn’t necessarily a Joseph. He could be a Dudley or a Mortimer or any-thing but a Joseph.

  All the same, it was an unpleasant coincidence. Like meeting Reardon at the railroad station was a coincidence. Or having his case tampered with here, right here, just after a Reardon had arrived.

  For a short time he seriously considered paying his bill and getting out, not out of town but to some other nearby place where he could stay the night with more assurance of being unwatched. That wouldn’t be so easy. It was rather late in the evening, Hanbury had only two hotels, and now would be a poor hour in which to roam the streets seeking a rooming-house.

  There was an alternative with which he toyed in the manner of a trapped rat provoked into attacking the cat. He could go to Room 13, boldly knock on the door and confront this Reardon. If the fellow proved to be a complete stranger everything would be all right.

  “Sorry, my mistake—wrong room.”

  But if the occupant of Room 13 turned out to be the one-and-only Reardon there’d be a couple of pointed questions ready for him the moment he opened the door.

  “What the hell are you doing here? What’s the idea of following me around?”

  Yes, it might pay off. Without real proof, Reardon dare not accuse him of anything. If such proof already existed he, Bransome, would now be under arrest. The fact that as yet nobody had seen fit to haul him in gave him an advantage, if only a temporary one.

  Filled with sudden resolve he left his room, hurried along the corridor and tapped on the door of Room 13. He was all set to create a scene if the familiar face appeared. He tapped again, more loudly and impatiently. There was no response. Putting an ear to the keyhole he heard not a sound. He knocked longer and still more loudly. Silence. The room was empty. He tried the door-handle and was out of luck; the door remained fastened.

  Oncoming feet sounded around the corner of the corridor. Bransome dashed back to his own room, where he left his door a quarter-inch ajar and watched through the crack. A man built on beer-barrel lines tramped past Room IS and continued steadily onward. Bransome shut and locked his door and gazed meditatively at his suitcase.

  In the end he wedged a chair under the door-handle for good measure and got into bed, first having had another long look through the window without finding evidence of a stake-out. For all the good his night’s repose did him he could just as well have spent it walking the streets. He missed Dorothy and the kids, pictured them in his mind, wondered when he would see them again. For hours he lay experiencing alternate states of alertness and semi-consciousness, merging himself into a series of fantastic dreams from which the slightest sound brought him fully awake. By dawn he was visibly baggy-eyed and in no mood to sing.

  At eight-thirty, the moment it opened, he was at the Gazette office. Returning to the hotel, he dumped a large roll of back numbers in his room, then went down to breakfast. A dozen people were sitting around chatting and eating. They included nobody he could recognize. For all that he could tell the whole lot might have been named Reardon, the clerk, the beer-barrel man and the two old ladies to boot.

  Breakfast over, he hastened upstairs and sought through the newspapers one by one. They reached back into the past for almost a year. None mentioned his crime. Not one.

  For reasons best known to themselves the police might have suppressed the news—but it was incredible that they’d have imposed so complete a blackout for so long. Or was the event more than a year old and reported in an equally older paper? Or had the trucker talked about somebody else’s similar misdeed?

  He still felt that he had to know one way or the other without tempting fate by his methods of gaining the knowledge. Yet he could think of only one sure and conclusive means of securing the actual facts. It would be a dangerous move if he had the courage to make it. It would be tantamount to shoving his head into the lion’s mouth. He could go and ask the police about the matter, boldly, frankly, just like that.
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  Might he get away with it if he gave them a false name and covered his curiosity with a plausible story? How about describing himself as a professional writer of unsolved mysteries and asking them to help with the data on the case of Arline Lafarge? Jeepers, that might be going too far. He could imagine the cops’ reaction.

  “Hey, how do you know about this? The newspapers have made no mention of it. And how have you got hold of the victim’s name? We haven’t yet identified her ourselves. Seems to us, mister, that you know a whole lot more than is good for your health. Only one man could know so much—the man who did it!”

  Then they’d hold him as a major suspect, eventually discover his true identity, and the fat really would be in the fire. Too risky and too darned stupid. Well, how about calling them from a phone booth? There was an idea. Much as they might like to they couldn’t grab a man through a mile of copper wire. Neither could they trace his call and pick him up if he had the sense to refuse to hold on and await their convenience.

  He was learning one at a time the tricks and subterfuges of the man on the run. It was a hell of a life.

  The booth by the bus station would be the best place. A good tactic would be to consult the time-table there and make his call just before two or three buses were due to depart. If the police came racing to the booth, eager to grab any guilty-looking character in sight, they might be tempted to jump to the wrong conclusions and go haring out of town in pursuit of the buses while he was ruminating his next move back in the comparative safety of the hotel. The police would catch the buses and find themselves stalled for lack of a description of the unknown caller. They’d be unable to pin anything on anyone.

  All right, he’d give it a try and with luck persuade authority to let slip something significant over the phone. If, for instance, he asked the police chief whether he needed a line on that case concerning bones found under a tree and the chief showed interest and responded with counter-questions or tried to hold the caller on the line, it would demonstrate the grim reality of the discovery plus the fact that investigators really were working on it.