The Last Best Friend by George Sims

Author:George Sims [Sims, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781464209017
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-07-25T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

‘THE CALEY PROPERTY CO.’ was the type-written name on the grubby card thumb-tacked by the bell to No. 12B Felton Road. It was at the side of a seedy looking Indian restaurant. There was no response when Balfour rang the bell, so after a minute he walked up the uncarpeted splintering wooden stairs. The cream plaster walls he passed were bare apart from some pencilled graffiti. The Caley Company’s sign was stencilled in black on a shabby, pale green door which hung open. He knocked and then walked into an empty room. There was not a single piece of furniture in the place and only a small mirror and a calendar decorated with a nude girl on the wall. The green lino-covered floor was filthy, littered with cigarette ends, used matches and odd scraps of paper. He went to the window and looked out into the empty street. A phone began to ring and he realized it was coming from behind another door which he had taken to be a cupboard. He opened it and found another, very small room, again bare apart from a large carton and a phone on the floor. He picked up the phone tentatively, holding it a little way from his ear as if it might explode, noticing that the wall facing him bore a number of phone numbers and had a pattern of small holes where it had been used for darts. The carton contained a large number of empty bottles. The room stank of beer and stale cigarette smoke.

‘Balfour! You made it quick! We saw you go in.’ The asthmatic voice ended the sentence on an accusing note.

‘I came here as you said. Is this some kind of joke?’ Balfour felt tense and his chest was tight—he was having a little trouble in breathing himself.

‘No, Skipper. Just a little obstacle course to see if you are really keen about Steiner. Now you can meet me pronto, just round the corner. 14 Hyde Park Place. No more tricks. Wait where you are for five minutes. Bert Caley won’t mind you loitering on his property—I promise you that.’ There was a kind of choky laugh.

Balfour was willing to complete the obstacle course in order to hear about Steiner. He went into the larger office and opened the window to get some fresh air. In the mirror he glimpsed his face, white and strained and the nostrils pinched. At least it made a change from the ‘selfish expression’.

He looked at the calendar. The top-heavy, sultry nude was the one chosen for July, so it looked as if the office had only recently been vacated. The tenant had been a careful man in one respect, for all the previous months of the calendar had been carefully turned over rather than torn off. With his toe he moved round a small piece of paper on which there was a list of small sums totalled and boldly ticked.

He waited five minutes and then left the Caley Property Co.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.