The Follower Read Online Free Page B

he forced his rebelling body crosstown to the river and then downtown ten blocks. At the end of a sidestreet below Sutton Place he took off Corey’s coat and dumped it with the briefcase into the river.
    It was exactly five o’clock when he returned for the last time to the apartment. There were still the papers. He took them into the living-room, and, hardly able to keep his eyes open, glanced through them. There were minutes of a board meeting, and a lot of technical manuscripts which he didn’t try to understand. They might well have been of major importance to the Ross Steel Products Company, but he couldn’t concern himself about that.
    He pulled the fire screen from the hearth and deliberately, one by one, burnt all the papers and dispersed the ashes in the grate.
    He turned off the lights, moved into the bedroom, stripped off all his clothes and, naked, dropped into Ellie’s tumbled pink sheets.
    Suddenly, as if some tap had been opened, anxieties flooded through him, dispelling his great fatigue. He had done what he had been able to do for Ellie. But what did it amount to? At the time it had all seemed planned, efficient, almost heroically sound; all traces, it seemed, of Corey’s visit to the apartment had been erased.
    Now, with a merciless clarity, he saw that the ark of safety he had built for his wife was as riddled with holes as a sieve. Corey Lathrop was an important man, with secretaries and dozens of friends. Why wouldn’t one of them know that he had planned to visit Ellie that evening? His disappearance would be reported tomorrow. Why wouldn’t the police make a bee-line for Ellie’s apartment? Why wouldn’t an elevator operator remember taking Corey up to the penthouse? Why…? There were a thousand ‘whys.’
    Until then he had succeeded in keeping from thinking emotionally about his wife. But now she leaped into reality as vividly as if she were in the bed with him, and his love and fear for her clutched at him. Where was she? The poor, frightened kid, what was she suffering?
    He twisted on to his side and his hand touched something. His fingers curved around it and picked it up. It was Ellie’s brassiere.
    ‘What a homecoming,’ he thought. ‘What a hell of a homecoming …’

4
    MARK LIDDON woke up. For an instant he confused the scarlet bed canopy with mosquito netting and was back in Venezuela. Then he remembered where he was and what had happened. He looked at his watch. It was almost nine o’clock. He had slept less than four hours, but it seemed to him that he had been recklessly wasting time. There was so much to do.
    He got out of bed and put on his grey bathrobe. Outside the window the rooftops of Manhattan gleamed white like great frosted cakes. It was not actually snowing, but the heavy grey of the sky indicated that the storm was not over. The brief sleep had restored his thoughts to their normal coherence. He had to find Ellie before the police found Corey, or everything he had done for her, instead of helping her, would boomerang on them both. It was as simple as that.
    He went into the living-room and inspected the fireplace to be sure that he had efficiently burned Corey’s papers the night before. Satisfied, he went up to the bar and studied the area of floor which had been bloodstained. He had done a better job than he had thought. Police analysis might be able to detect blood, but there was nothing visible to the human eye.
    He thought of the rag with which he’d cleaned up the night before. Going into the kitchen, he picked it out of the trash can and put it down the chute which led directly to the apartment house incinerator. If he had thought of the chute last night, he could probably have disposed of Corey’s coat and briefcase that way. But, until he met Ellie, his New York days had been spent in cheap walk-ups. The chute was still exotic to him. In the emergency he had reverted to the technique of poverty.
    By now Ingeborg, the Swedish maid, should have