He said gloomily (он сказал мрачно), "Wandering round (бродил) and trying to sort things out (и пытался разобраться во всем: «рассортировать вещи»)."
"Any evidence of your movements (какое-либо доказательство ваших передвижений)?"
"No."
record ['rekO:d], movement ['mu:vmqnt], disquiet [dIs'kwaIqt], explain [Iks'pleIn], eliminate [I'lImIneIt], attach [q'txtS], unauthorised [An'O:TqraIzd]
I HAD KEPT A very careful record of Martins' movements from the moment I knew that he had not caught the plane home. He had been seen with Kurtz, and at the Josefstadt Theatre: I knew about his visit to Dr. Winkler and to Cooler, his first return to the block where Harry had lived. For some reason my man lost him between Cooler's and Anna Schmidt's flats: he reported that Martins had wandered widely, and the impression we both got was that he had deliberately thrown off his shadower. I tried to pick him up at Sacher's Hotel and just missed him.
Events had taken a disquieting turn, and it seemed to me that the time had come for another interview. He had a lot to explain.
I put a good wide desk between us and gave him a cigarette: I found him sullen but ready to talk, within strict limits. I asked him about Kurtz and he seemed to me to answer satisfactorily. I then asked him about Anna Schmidt and I gathered from his reply that he must have been with her after visiting Cooler: that filled in one of the missing points. I tried him with Dr. Winkler, and he answered readily enough. "You've been getting around," I said, "quite a bit. And have you found out anything about your friend?"
"Oh yes," he said. "It was under your nose but you didn't see it."
"What?"
"That he was murdered." That took me by surprise: I had at one time played with the idea of suicide, but I had ruled even that out.
"Go on," I said. He tried to eliminate from his story all mention of Koch, talking about an informant who had seen the accident. This made his story rather confusing, and I couldn't grasp at first why he attached so much importance to the third man.
"He didn't turn up at the inquest, and the others lied to keep him out."
"Nor did your man turn up—I don't see much importance in that. If it was a genuine accident, all the evidence needed was there. Why get the other chap in trouble? Perhaps his wife thought he was out of town: perhaps he was an official absent without leave—people sometimes take unauthorised trips to Vienna from places like Klagenfurt. The delights of the great city, for what they are worth."
"There was more to it than that. The little chap who told me about it—they've murdered him. You see they obviously didn't know what else he had seen."