1957 - The Guilty Are Afraid by James Hadley Chase

darkness of the car I could hear the steady movement of his jaws as he chewed.
    “Okay if I smoke?” I said, more or less for something to say.
    “Better not,” Candy said, his voice flat and cold. “I was told to bring you in rough.”
    “What’s biting the Captain?”
    “If you don’t know, how should I?” Candy said, and there the conversation ceased.
    I stared out of the window. I wasn’t happy. There was a chance that someone had seen me on the beach and had phoned in my description. I had visions of being grilled. If Katchen conducted the grilling, I knew I was in for a bad time.
    No one said anything until we pulled up outside the police headquarters, then Candy groped in his hip pocket and produced a pair of handcuffs.
    “Got to put the nippers on,” he said, and I thought I detected an apologetic note in his voice. “The Captain likes everything ship-shape.”
    “Are you arresting me?” I asked, offering my wrists.
    The cold bite of the steel bracelets added to my depression.
    “I’m not doing anything,” Candy said, getting out of the car. “The Captain wants to talk to you—that’s all there’s to it.”
    He and I walked across the sidewalk and up the steps into the charge room, leaving the two plainclothes men in the car.
    The desk sergeant, a big, fat-faced man, looked at me and then at Candy, who shook his head and kept on, through a doorway, up some stairs and along a passage to a door at the far end. I walked at his heels.
    He paused outside the door, rapped once, then turned the handle and shoved the door wide open. He put his hand on my arm and moved me into a big room that contained a desk, six upright chairs, a couple of filing cabinets, Captain Katchen, Lieutenant Rankin and a tall, thin man around forty with straw-coloured hair, rimless glasses and a face of an eager ferret.
    Candy said, “Brandon here, Captain,” then stepped back, giving me the stage.
    I took a couple of steps forward and stopped. Katchen was standing by the window, his massive face dark with congested blood. He looked at me the way a caged tiger might look at a fat lamb that is being marched past its cage.
    Rankin sat on one of the upright chairs, his hat tipped over his eyes, a cigarette burning between his fingers. He didn’t turn his head to look at me.
    The straw-haired man eyed me with the interest and the professional detachment of a bacteriologist confronted with an obscure germ that might or might not be a potential killer.
    “Why is this man handcuffed, Captain?” he asked in a soft, Ivy League voice.
    Katchen suddenly appeared to have difficulty in breathing.
    “If you don’t like the way I make my arrests, you’d better talk to the Commissioner,” he said in a voice that could have stripped rust off any lump of old iron.
    “Is this man under arrest then?” the straw-haired man asked, his voice a polite inquiry.
    Even if he had the face of a ferret and an Ivy League accent, he was rapidly becoming my favourite member of this oddly assorted trio.
    Katchen bent his glaring stare on Candy.
    “Take those goddam bracelets off,” he said, his voice muffled with rage.
    Candy came over to me, slid a key into the lock, twisted and the cuffs dropped into his hand. With his back turned to Katchen he allowed himself a slow, deliberate wink at me. He moved away while I went through an elaborate pantomime of rubbing my wrists and looking injured.
    “Sit down, Mr. Brandon,” the straw-haired man said. “I’m Curme Holding of the District Attorney’s office. I heard Captain Katchen wanted to see you so I thought I would see you too.”
    I began to feel less depressed.
    “Glad to know you, Mr. Holding. I feel in need of protection. The Captain has already talked to me once today. So I’m more than pleased to see you.”
    Holding took off his glasses, inspected them and put them back on again.
    “Captain Katchen wouldn’t do anything out of the line of duty,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if