Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  They came out again, talking softly, Royale in the lead with the torch in his hand. They passed through a wicker gate not fifteen feet from me, but by this time I’d withdrawn some yards into the wood and had the thick bole of an oak for cover. They went off together up the path that led to the front of the house and by and by the low murmur of voices faded and vanished. A bar of light fell across the porch as the front door opened, then there came the solid click of a heavy door closing on its latch. Then silence.

  I didn’t move. I stayed exactly where I was, breathing lightly and shallowly, not stirring an inch. The rain redoubled in violence, the thick foliage of the oak might have been a wisp of gauze for all the protection it afforded, but I didn’t move. The rain trickled down inside oilskin and overcoat and ran down my back and legs. But I didn’t move. It trickled down my front and into my shoes, but I didn’t move. I could feel the tide rising up to my ankles, but I didn’t move. I just stayed where I was, a human figure carved from ice, but colder. My hands were numb, my feet frozen and uncontrollable shivers shook my entire body every few seconds. I would have given the earth to move. But I didn’t. Only my eyes moved.

  Hearing was of little value to me now. With the high moan of the steadily increasing wind through the topmost swaying branches of the trees and the loud frenetic rustling of the rain driving through the leaves, you couldn’t have heard a careless footfall ten feet away. But after three-quarters of an hour standing there motionless, eyes became perfectly accustomed to the dark and you could have spotted a careless movement ten yards away. And I spotted it.

  A movement, that is, but not careless. Deliberate. I think it must have been a sudden furious flurry of wind and rain that finally broke the patience of the shadow that now detached itself from the shelter of a nearby tree and moved away silently up towards the house. If I hadn’t been watching, staring into the darkness with eyes sore and strained from staring, I would have missed it, for I certainly would have heard nothing. But I didn’t miss it. A shadow moving with the soundlessness of a shadow. A quiet deadly man. Royale. His words to Larry had been so much bluff for the benefit of any listener. Royale had heard a noise, all right, and the noise must have been just sufficiently off-beat to make him wonder if someone were there. Only enough to make him wonder. If Royale had been certain he’d have remained there all night waiting to strike. The strike of a fer-de-lance. I thought of myself going into that kitchen garden immediately after the three had left, getting a spade and starting to investigate, and I felt colder than ever. I could see myself bending over the hole, the unseen, unheard approach of Royale, and then the bullet, just one, a cupro-nickel jacketed .22 at the base of the skull.

  But I had to go and get a spade and start investigating some time, and no better time than now. The rain was torrential, the night as dark as the tomb. In those conditions it was unlikely that Royale would return though I would have put nothing past that cunning and devious mind, but even if he did he would have been exposed to the bright lights inside and it would take him ten minutes, at least, to re-adapt his eyes to that almost total darkness before he would dare move around again. That he wouldn’t move around with a torch was certain: if he thought there was still an intruder in the grounds, then he thought that intruder had seen the digging operations but had still made no move: and if he thought there was such a man, then he would assume him to be a careful and dangerous man to move in search of whom with a lighted torch in hand would be to ask for a bullet in the back. For Royale was not to know that the intruder had no gun.

  I thought ten minutes would be enough to find out what I wanted, both because any burial of anything in a garden was bound to be temporary and because neither Larry nor the butler had struck me as people who would derive any pleasure from using a spade or who would dig an inch deeper than was absolutely necessary. I was right. I found a spade in the tool shed, located the freshly-raked earth with a pin-point of light from my pencil flash, and from the time I had passed through the wicker gate till I had cleared off the two or three inches of earth that covered some kind of white pine packing case, no more than five minutes had elapsed.

  The packing case was lying at a slight angle in the ground and so heavy was the rain drumming down on my bent back and on top of the case that within a minute the lid of the case had been washed white and clean and free from the last stain of earth, the muddy water draining off to one side. I flashed the torch cautiously: no name, no marks, nothing to give any indication of the contents.

  The case had a wood and rope handle at each end. I grabbed one of those, got both hands round it and heaved, but the case was over five feet long and seemed to be filled with bricks: even so I might have managed to move it, but the earth around the hole was so waterlogged and soft that my heels just gouged through it and into the hole itself.

  I took my torch again, hooded it till the light it cast was smaller than a penny, and started quartering the surface of the packing case. No metal clasps. No heavy screws. As far as I could see, the only fastenings holding down the lid were a couple of nails at either end. I lifted the spade, dug a corner under one end of the lid. The nails creaked and squealed in protest as I forced them out of the wood, but I went on anyway and sprung the end of the lid clear. I lifted it a couple of feet and shone my flash inside.

  Even in death Jablonsky was still smiling. The grin was lopsided and crooked, the way they had had to make Jablonsky himself lopsided and crooked in order to force him inside the narrow confines of that case, but it was still a smile. His face was calm and peaceful, and with the end of a pencil you could have covered that tiny hole between his eyes. It was the kind of hole that would have been made by the cupro-nickel jacketed bullet from a .22 automatic. Twice that night, out on the gulf, I had thought of Jablonsky sleeping peacefully. He’d been asleep all right. He’d been asleep for hours, his skin was cold as marble.

  I didn’t bother going through the pockets of the dead man, Royale and Vyland would have done that already. Besides, I knew that Jablonsky had carried nothing incriminating on his person, nothing that could have pointed to the true reason for his presence there, nothing that could have put the finger on me.

  I wiped the rain off the dead face, lowered the lid and hammered the nails softly home with the handle of the spade. I’d opened a hole in the ground and now I closed a grave. It was well for Royale that I did not meet him then.

  I returned spade and rake to the tool shed and left the kitchen garden.

  There were no lights at the back of the entrance lodge. I found one door and two ground-level windows – it was a single-storey building – and they were all locked. They would be. In that place everything would be locked, always.

  But the garage wasn’t. Nobody was going to be so crazy as to make off with a couple of Rolls-Royces, even if they could have got past the electrically operated gate, which they couldn’t. The garage was fit match for the cars: the tool bench and equipment were the do-it-yourself devotee’s dream.

  I ruined a couple of perfectly good wood chisels, but I had the catch slipped on one of the windows in a minute flat. It didn’t seem likely that they had burglar alarms fitted to a lodge, especially as there hadn’t even been an attempt made to fit half-circle thief-proof sash latches. But I took no chances, pulled the top window down and climbed in over it. When wiring a window the usual idea is to assume that the sneak-thief who breaks and enters is a slave to habit who pushes up the lower sash and crawls in under, apart from which the average electrician finds it much kinder on the shoulder muscles to wire at waist level instead of above the head. And in this case, I found, an average electrician had indeed been at work. The lodge was wired.

  I didn’t drop down on top of any startled sleeper in a bedroom or knock over a row of pots and pans in the kitchen for the sufficient reason that I’d picked a room with frosted windows and it seemed a fair bet that that might be the bathroom. And so it was.

  Out in the passageway I flicked my pencil light up and down. The lo
dge had been designed – if that was the word – with simplicity. The passage directly joined the back and front doors. Two small rooms opened off either side of the passage: that was all.

  The room at the back opposite the bathroom proved to be the kitchen. Nothing there. I moved up the small passageway as softly as the squelching of my shoes would permit, picked the door on the left, turned the handle with millimetric caution and moved soundlessly inside.

  This was it. I closed the door behind me and moved softly in the direction of the deep regular breathing by the left hand wall. When I was about four feet away I switched on my pencil flash and shone it straight on the sleeper’s closed eyes.

  He didn’t remain sleeping long, not with that concentrated beam on him. He woke as at the touch of a switch and half sat up in bed, propped on an elbow while a free hand tried to shade his dazzled eyes. I noticed that even when woken in the middle of the night he looked as if he’d just brushed that gleaming black hair ten seconds previously: I always woke up with mine looking like a half-dried mop, a replica of the current feminine urchin cut, the one achieved by a short-sighted lunatic armed with garden shears.

  He didn’t try anything. He looked a tough, capable, sensible fellow who knew when and when not to try anything, and he knew that now was not the time. Not when he was almost blind.

  ‘There’s a .32 behind this flash, Kennedy,’ I said. ‘Where’s your gun?’

  ‘What gun?’ He didn’t sound scared because he wasn’t.

  ‘Get up,’ I ordered. The pyjamas, I was glad to see, weren’t maroon. I might have picked them myself. ‘Move over to the door.’

  He moved. I reached under his pillow.

  ‘This gun,’ I said. A small grey automatic. I didn’t know the make. ‘Back to your bed and sit on it.’

  Torch transferred to my left hand and the gun in the right, I made a quick sweep of the room. Only one window, with deep velvet wine curtains closed right across. I went to the door, switched on the overhead light, glanced down at the gun and slipped off the safety catch. The click was loud, precise and sounded as if it meant business. Kennedy said: ‘So you hadn’t a gun.’

  ‘I’ve got one now.’

  ‘It’s not loaded, friend.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said wearily. ‘You keep it under your pillow just so you can get oil stains all over the sheets? If this gun was empty you’d be at me like the Chatanooga Express. Whatever that is.’

  I looked over the room. A friendly, masculine place, bare but comfortable, with a good carpet, not in the corn-belt class of the one in the general’s library, a couple of armchairs, a damask-covered table, small settee and glassed-in wall cupboard. I crossed over to the cupboard, opened it and took out a bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses. I looked at Kennedy. ‘With your permission, of course.’

  ‘Funny man,’ he said coldly.

  I went ahead and poured myself a drink anyway. A big one. I needed it. It tasted just the way it ought to taste and all too seldom does. I watched Kennedy and he watched me.

  ‘Who are you, friend?’ he asked.

  I’d forgotten that only about two inches of my face was visible. I turned down the collar of my oilskin and overcoat and took off my hat. My hat had become no better than a sponge, my hair was wet and plastered all over my head but for all that I don’t suppose it was any less red than normal. The tightening of Kennedy’s mouth, the suddenly still expressionless eyes told their own story.

  ‘Talbot,’ he said slowly. ‘John Talbot. The killer.’

  ‘That’s me,’ I agreed. ‘The killer.’

  He sat very still, watching me. I suppose a dozen different thoughts must have been running through his mind, but none of them showed, he had as much expression in his face as a wooden Indian. But the brown intelligent eyes gave him away: he could not quite mask the hostility, the cold anger that showed in their depths.

  ‘What do you want, Talbot? What are you doing here?’

  ‘You mean, why am I not high-tailing it for the tall timber?’

  ‘Why have you come back? They’ve had you locked up in the house, God knows why, since Tuesday evening. You’ve escaped, but you didn’t have to mow anyone down to escape or I would have heard of it. They probably don’t even know you’ve been away or I’d have heard of that too. But you’ve been away. You’ve been out in a boat, I can smell the sea off you and that’s a seaman’s oilskin you’ve got on. You’ve been out for a long time, you couldn’t be any wetter if you’d stood under a waterfall for half an hour. And then you came back. A killer, a wanted man. The whole set-up is screwy as hell.’

  ‘Screwy as hell,’ I agreed. The whisky was good, I was beginning to feel half-human for the first time in hours. A smart boy, this chauffeur, a boy who thought on his feet and thought fast. I went on: ‘Almost as screwy a set-up as this weird bunch you’re working for in this place.’

  He said nothing, and I didn’t see why he should. In his place I don’t think I would have passed the time of day by discussing my employers with a passing murderer. I tried again.

  ‘The general’s daughter,’ Miss Mary. She’s pretty much of a tramp, isn’t she?’

  That got him. He was off the bed, eyes mad, fists balled into hard knots and was halfway towards me before he remembered the gun pointing straight at his chest. He said softly: ‘I’d love you to say that again, Talbot – without that gun in your hand.’

  ‘That’s better,’ I said approvingly. ‘Signs of life at last. Committing yourself to a definite opinion, you know the old saw about actions speaking louder than words. If I’d just asked you what Mary Ruthven was like you’d just have clammed up or told me go jump in the lake. I don’t think she’s a tramp either. I know she’s not. I think she’s a nice kid, a very fine girl indeed.’

  ‘Sure you do.’ His voice was bitter, but I could see the first shadows of puzzlement touching his eyes. ‘That’s why you scared the life out of her that afternoon.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, sincerely sorry. But I had to do it, Kennedy, although not for the reasons that you or any of that murderous bunch up at the big house think.’ I downed what was left of my whisky, looked at him for a long speculative moment, then tossed the gun across to him. ‘Suppose we talk?’

  It took him by surprise but he was quick, very quick. He fielded the gun neatly, looked at it, looked at me, hesitated, shrugged then smiled faintly. ‘I don’t suppose another couple of oil stains will do those sheets any harm.’ He thrust the gun under the pillow, crossed to the table, poured himself a drink, filled up my glass and stood there waiting.

  ‘I’m not taking the chance you might think I am,’ I began. ‘I heard Vyland trying to persuade the general and Mary to get rid of you. I gathered you were a potential danger to Vyland and the general and others I may not know of. From that I gathered you’re not on the inside of what’s going on. And you’re bound to know there’s something very strange indeed going on.’

  He nodded. ‘I’m only the chauffeur. And what did they say to Vyland?’ From the way he spoke the name I gathered he regarded Vyland with something less than affection.

  ‘They stuck in their heels and refused point-blank.’

  He was pleased at that. He tried not to show it, but he was.

  ‘It seems you did the Ruthven family a great service not so long ago,’ I went on. ‘Shot up a couple of thugs who tried to kidnap Mary.’

  ‘I was lucky.’ Where speed and violence were concerned, I guess, he’d always be lucky. ‘I’m primarily a bodyguard, not a chauffeur. Miss Mary’s a tempting bait for every hoodlum in the country who fancies a quick million. But I’m not the bodyguard any longer,’ he ended abruptly.

  ‘I’ve met your successor,’ I nodded. ‘Valentino. He couldn’t guard an empty nursery.’

  ‘Valentino?’ He grinned. ‘Al Grunther. But Valentino suits him better. You damaged his arm, so I heard.’

  ‘He damaged my leg. It’s black and blue and purple all over.’ I eyed him speculativel
y. ‘Forgotten that you’re talking to a murderer, Kennedy?’

  ‘You’re no murderer,’ he said flatly. There was a long pause, then he broke his gaze from me and stared down at the floor.

  ‘Patrolman Donnelly, eh?’ I asked.

  He nodded without speaking.

  ‘Donnelly is as fit as you are,’ I said. ‘Might take him some little time to wash the powder-stains out of his pants, but that’s all the damage he suffered.’

  ‘Rigged, eh?’ he asked softly.

  ‘You’ve read about me in the papers.’ I waved a hand at the magazine stand in the corner. I was still front page news and the photograph was even worse than the previous one. ‘The rest you’ll have heard from Mary. Some of what you’ve heard and read is true, some of it just couldn’t be less true.

  ‘My name is John Talbot and I am, as they said in court, a salvage expert. I have been in all the places they mention, except Bombay, and for approximately the periods they mention. But I have never been engaged in any criminal activities of any kind. However, either Vyland or the general or both are very cagey birds indeed. They’ve sent cables to contacts in Holland, England and Venezuela – the general, of course, has oil interests in all three places – to check on my bonafides. They’ll be satisfied. We’ve spent a long time preparing the groundwork for this.’

  ‘How do you know they sent those cables?’

  ‘Every overseas cable out of Marble Springs in the past two months has been vetted. The general – all cables are in his name – uses code, of course. Perfectly legal to do so. There’s a little old man from Washington living a block away from the post office. He’s a genius with codes: he says the general’s is childish. From his point of view.’

  I got up and started to walk around. The effects of the whisky were vanishing. I felt like a cold wet flounder.

  ‘I had to get in on the inside. Up till now we’ve been working very much in the dark, but for reasons which would take too long to explain at present we knew that the general would jump at the chance of getting hold of a salvage expert. He did.’