Read I Was Jack Mortimer (Pushkin Collection) for Free Online

you come here and…”—“I really… I really panicked, I can’t even think straight any longer, I don’t even know… I…” He leant forward with a groan as though about to slump over the wheel to hide his face, but then threw himself back again, clenched his teeth, and banged a couple of times with his fist on the edge of the car door. He couldn’t just carry on driving with the dead man in the car… He had to decide. He could no longer make a statement to the police. He had to get rid of the dead man.
    Somewhere on the road, together with his luggage! Let the others, when they find him, work out for themselves how and when he’d been shot! He, Sponer, had nothing to do with it. Had he attacked him? No, it was rather the other way round. The chap had boarded an unsuspecting man’s cab, had snuffed it there and left the driver to pick up the pieces. How? Very simply. Out you go, my fellow, in some dark spot, suitcases and all! You can’t really expect me to do the decent thing, sit around for weeks, lose my job and get mixed up with the police, until, perhaps, one day they catch the real murderer. Or perhaps they won’t. It’s the least of my worries. You two can sort it out amongst yourselves!”
    He looked around. He was now in the seventeenth district,on the road to Dornbach. Fine! In the hills of Dornbach, between the villas, there were a number of lanes running through the gardens and the shrubbery, and poorly lit roads connecting the villas, where you hardly saw anyone after dark. He could stop there and, when the coast was clear, drag the dead man out, throw him onto the roadside, together with his bags, and clear off. He’d lie there till someone found him. They wouldn’t know how he got there. They’d find out who he was, of course. He probably had some documents on him, a passport… But he, Sponer, could take care of that. They’d obviously open the suitcases and perhaps find something there, letters and such like, which would reveal the identity of the dead man… But one could throw the suitcases away somewhere else, a few hundred yards up the street… or perhaps right here, straight away? Maybe someone would see them lying there and simply take them home because of their contents. One doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth… But what if they are were handed in?
    Why not take them to his lodgings instead?
    Suppose, though, they did find out who the dead man was from his distinguishing features, for the police were trained in that sort of thing.
    As far as he was concerned, what did it matter if they found out? But in fact it did… it did matter. Once they’d found out who the man was… “Arrived at the Westbahnhof. And? Took a taxi? Which one?” The other drivers, put on the spot, insist, “Not ours.” But one of them could have seen Sponer drive up.“Ferdinand Sponer from the Brandeis Garage.”—“Did you pick up a fare?”—“Yes.”—“What did he look like?”—“I don’t know.”—“You don’t know?”—“No! He got in the cab when my back was turned, I only saw…”—“What did you see?”—“He was wearing an overcoat.”—“What sort of overcoat?”—“A large grey one.”—“And you saw nothing else?”—“No, all he said was…”—“What did he say?”—“He said… He said…”—“‘The Bristol’,” the porter intervenes.—“Yes, ‘the Bristol’. Hotel Bristol.”—“And what about you?”—“Me?… I took him there.”—“To which one?”—“To… the old one.”—“But when he got out and paid, you must have seen what he looked like.”—“No… Yes. That is…”—“Well?”—“I don’t remember precisely.”—“OK, not precisely! But roughly. What do you remember roughly?”—“He… he wasn’t very tall…”—“Not tall?”—“No.”—“But not very short either?…”—“That’s right.”—“Roughly what age?”—“Not old.”—“And what about his hair? Was it fair? Brown?”—“No,