Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘We?’ Kennedy still had his reservations about me.

  ‘Friends of mine. Don’t worry, Kennedy, I’ve got all the law in the world behind me. I’m not in this for myself. To make the general take the bait we had to use the general’s daughter. She knows nothing of what actually went on. Judge Mollison’s pretty friendly with the family, so I got him to invite Mary along for a meal, suggesting that she drop in at the court-house first while she was waiting for him to clear up the last cases.’

  ‘Judge Mollison’s in on this?’

  ‘He is. You’ve a phone there, and a phone book. Want to ring him?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Mollison knows,’ I continued, ‘and about a dozen cops. All sworn to secrecy and they know that a word the wrong way and they’re looking for a job. The only person outside the law who knows anything about it is the surgeon who is supposed to have operated on Donnelly and then signed his death certificate. He’d a kind of troublesome conscience, but I finally talked him into it.’

  ‘All a phoney,’ he murmured. ‘Here’s one that fell for it.’

  ‘Everybody did. They were meant to. Phoney reports from Interpol and Cuba – with the full backing of the police concerned – blank rounds in the first two chambers of Donnelly’s Colt, phoney road blocks, phoney chases by the cops, phoney –’

  ‘But – but the bullet in the windscreen?’

  ‘I told her to duck. I put it there myself. Car and empty garage all laid on, and Jablonsky laid on too.’

  ‘Mary was telling me about Jablonsky,’ he said slowly. ‘Mary’, I noticed, not. ‘Miss Mary’. Maybe it meant nothing, maybe it showed the way he habitually thought of her. ‘“A crooked cop”, she said. Just another plant?’

  ‘Just another plant. We’ve been working on this for over two years. Earlier on we wanted a man who knew the Caribbean backwards. Jablonsky was the man. Born and brought up in Cuba. Two years ago he was a cop, in New York homicide. It was Jablonsky who thought up the idea of rigging false charges against himself. It was smart: it not only accounted for the sudden disappearance of one of the best cops in the country, but it gave him the entrée into the wrong kind of society when the need arose. He’d been working with me in the Caribbean for the past eighteen months.’

  ‘Taking a chance, wasn’t he? I mean, Cuba is home from home for half the crooks in the States, and the chances –’

  ‘He was disguised,’ I said patiently. ‘Beard, moustache, both home-grown, all his hair dyed, glasses, even his own mother wouldn’t have known him.’

  There was a long silence, then Kennedy put down his glass and looked steadily at me. ‘What goes on, Talbot?’

  ‘Sorry. You’ll have to trust me. The less anyone knows the better. Mollison doesn’t know, none of the lawmen know. They’ve had their orders.’

  ‘It’s that big?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘Big enough. Look, Kennedy, no questions. I’m asking you to help me. If you’re not frightened for Mary’s health, it’s time you started to be. I don’t think she knows a thing more about what goes on between Vyland and the general than you do, but I’m convinced she’s in danger. Great danger. Of her life. I’m up against big boys playing for big stakes. To win those stakes they’ve already killed eight times. Eight times to my certain knowledge. If you get mixed up in this business I’d say the chances are more than even that you’ll end up with a bullet in your back. And I’m asking you to get mixed up in it. I’ve no right to, but I’m doing it. What’s it to be?’

  Some of the colour had gone out of his brown face, but not much. He didn’t like what I’d just said, but if his hands were trembling I couldn’t notice.

  ‘You’re a clever man, Talbot,’ he said slowly. ‘Maybe too clever, I don’t know. But you’re clever enough not to have told me all this unless you were pretty certain I’d do it. Playing for big stakes, you said: I think I’d like to sit in.’

  I didn’t waste any time in thanking him or congratulating him. Sticking your neck in a running noose isn’t a matter for congratulation. Instead I said: ‘I want you to go with Mary. No matter where she goes I want you to go also. I’m almost certain that tomorrow morning – this coming morning, that is – we’ll all be going out to the oil rig. Mary will almost certainly go along too. She’ll have no option. You will go with her.’

  He made to interrupt, but I held up my hand.

  ‘I know, you’ve been taken off the job. Make some excuse to go up to the house tomorrow morning, early. See Mary. Tell her that Valentino is going to have a slight accident in the course of the morning and she –’

  ‘What do you mean, he’ll have an accident?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said grimly. ‘He’ll have his accident all right. He won’t be able to look after himself, far less anybody else, for some time to come. Tell her that she is to insist on having you back. If she sticks out her neck and makes an issue of it she’ll win. The general won’t object, and I’m pretty sure Vyland won’t either: it’s only for a day, and after tomorrow the question of who looks after her won’t worry him very much. Don’t ask me how I know, because I don’t. But I’m banking on it.’ I paused. ‘Anyway, Vyland will just think she’s insisting on having you because he thinks she has, shall we say, a soft spot for you.’ He kept his wooden Indian expression in place, so I went on: ‘I don’t know whether it’s so and I don’t care. I’m just telling you what I think Vyland thinks and why that should make him accept her suggestion – that, and the fact that he doesn’t trust you and would rather have you out on the rig and under his eye anyway.’

  ‘Very well.’ I might have been suggesting that he come for a stroll. He was a cool customer, all right. ‘I’ll tell her and I’ll play it the way you want.’ He thought for a moment, then continued: ‘You tell me I’m sticking my neck out. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m doing it of my own free will. At the same time, I think that the fact that I’m doing it at all entitles me to a little more honesty on your part.’

  ‘Have I been dishonest?’ I wasn’t annoyed, I was just beginning to feel very tired indeed.

  ‘Only in what you don’t say. You tell me you want me so that I’ll look after the general’s daughter. Compared to what you’re after, Talbot, Mary’s safety doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn to you. If it did you could have hidden her away when you had her the day before yesterday. But you didn’t. You brought her back. You say she’s in great danger. It was you, Talbot, who brought her back to this danger. OK, so you want me to keep an eye on her. But you want me for something else, too.’

  I nodded. ‘I do. I’m going into this with my hands tied. Literally. I’m going into this as a prisoner. I must have someone I can trust. I’m trusting you.’

  ‘You can trust Jablonsky,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Jablonsky’s dead.’

  He stared at me without speaking. After a few moments hereached out for the bottle and splashed whisky into both our glasses. His mouth was a thin white line in the brown face.

  ‘See that?’ I pointed to my sodden shoes. ‘That’s the earth from Jablonsky’s grave. I filled it in just before I came here, not fifteen minutes ago. They got him through the head with a small-bore automatic. They got him between the eyes. He was smiling, Kennedy. You don’t smile when you see death coming to you. Jablonsky never saw it coming. He was murdered in his sleep.’

  I gave him a brief account of what had happened since I’d left the house, including the trip in the Tarpon Springs sponge boat out to the X 13, up to the moment I had come here. When I was finished he said: ‘Royale?’

  ‘Royale.’

  ‘You’ll never be able to prove it.’

  ‘I won’t have to.’ I said it almost without realizing what I was saying. ‘Royale may never stand trial. Jablonsky was my best friend.’

  He knew what I was saying, all right. He said softly: ‘I’d just as soon you never came after me, Talbot.’

  I drained my whisky. It was having no effect now. I felt old and tired and empty an
d dead. Then Kennedy spoke again.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Do? I’m going to borrow some dry shoes and socks and underwear from you. Then I’m going to go back up to the house, go to my room, dry my clothes off, handcuff myself to the bed and throw the keys away. They’ll come for me in the morning.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he whispered. ‘Why do you think they killed Jablonsky?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said wearily.

  ‘You must know,’ he said urgently. ‘Why else should they kill him if they hadn’t found out who he really was, what he was really doing? They killed him because they found out the double-cross. And if they found that out about him, they must have found it out about you. They’ll be waiting for you up there in your room, Talbot. They’ll know you’ll be coming back, for they won’t know you found Jablonsky. You’ll get it through the head as you step over the threshold. Can’t you see that, Talbot? For God’s sake, man, can’t you see it?’

  ‘I saw it a long time ago. Maybe they know all about me. Maybe they don’t. There’s so much I don’t know, Kennedy. But maybe they won’t kill me. Maybe not yet.’ I got to my feet. ‘I’m going back on up.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to use physical force to try to stop me but there must have been something in my face that made him change his mind. He put his hand on my arm.

  ‘How much are they paying you for this, Talbot?’

  ‘Pennies.’

  ‘Reward?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Then what in the name of God is the compulsion that will drive a man like you to crazy lengths like those?’ His good-looking brown face was twisted in anxiety and perplexity, he couldn’t understand me.

  I couldn’t understand myself either. I said: ‘I don’t know … Yes, I do. I’ll tell you someday.’

  ‘You’ll never live to tell anybody anything,’ he said sombrely.

  I picked up dry shoes and clothes, told him good night and left.

  SEVEN

  There was nobody waiting for me in my room up in the general’s house. I unlocked the corridor door with the duplicate key Jablonsky had given me, eased it open with only a whisper of sound and passed inside. Nobody blasted my head off. The room was empty.

  The heavy curtains were still drawn shut as I had left them, but I let the light switch be. There was a chance that they didn’t know that I’d left the room that night but if anyone saw a light come on in the room of a man handcuffed to his bed they’d be up to investigate in nothing flat. Only Jablonsky could have switched it on and Jablonsky was dead.

  I went over every square foot of floor and walls with my pencil flash. Nothing missing, nothing changed. If anyone had been here he’d left no trace of his visit. But then if anyone had been here I would have expected him to leave no trace.

  There was a big wall heater near the communicating door to Jablonsky’s room. I switched this on to full, undressed by its ruddy glow, towelled myself dry and hung trousers and coat over the back of a chair to dry off. I pulled on the underwear and socks I’d borrowed from Kennedy, stuffed my own rain-soaked underwear and socks into my sodden shoes, opened the curtains and windows and hurled them as far as I could into the dense undergrowth behind the house, where I’d already concealed oilskin and overcoat before climbing the fire-escape. I strained my ears but I couldn’t even hear the sound the shoes made on landing. I felt pretty sure no one else could have heard anything either. The high moan of the wind, the drumming of that torrential rain smothered all sound at its source.

  I took keys from the pocket of my already steaming jacket and crossed to the communicating door to Jablonsky’s room. Maybe the reception committee was waiting there. I didn’t much care.

  There was no committee. The room was as empty as my own. I crossed to the corridor door and tried the handle. The door was locked.

  The bed, as I expected, had been slept in. Sheets and blankets had been pulled back so far that most of them were on the floor. There were no signs of a struggle. There were no signs, even, of violence: not until I turned the pillow upside down.

  The pillow was a mess, but nothing to what it would have been if death hadn’t been instantaneous. The bullet must have passed clean through the skull, not what you would have expected from a .22 but then Mr Royale used very fancy ammunition. I found the shell in the down of the pillow. Cupro-nickel. It wasn’t like Royale to be so careless. I was going to look after that little piece of metal. I was going to treasure it like the Cullinan diamond. I found some adhesive in a drawer, pulled off a sock, taped the spent bullet under the second and third toes where there would be no direct pressure on it and where it wouldn’t interfere with my walking. It would be safe there. The most thorough and conscientious search – should there be one – would miss it. Houdini went around for years with tiny steel instruments taped to the soles of his feet and no one ever thought to look.

  Down on my hands and knees I levelled the torch along the nap of the carpet and squinted down the beam. It wasn’t much of a carpet but it was enough, the two parallel indentations where Jablonsky’s heels had dragged across it were unmistakable. I rose to my feet, examined the bed again, picked up a cushion that lay on the armchair and examined that. I couldn’t see anything, but when I bent my head and sniffed there could be no doubt about it: the acrid odour of burnt powder clings to fabrics for days.

  I crossed to the small table in the corner, poured three fingers of whisky into a glass and sat down to try to figure it all out.

  The set-up just didn’t begin to make any sense at all. Nothing jibed, nothing fitted. How had Royale and whoever had been with him – for no one man could have carried Jablonsky out of that room by himself – managed to get in in the first place? Jablonsky had felt as secure in that house as a stray lamb in a starving wolf pack and I knew he would have locked the door. Somebody else could have had a key, of course, but the point was that Jablonsky invariably left his key in the lock and jammed it so that it couldn’t be pushed out or turned from the other side – not unless enough force were used and noise made to wake him up a dozen times over.

  Jablonsky had been shot when sleeping in bed. Jablonsky, I knew, had pyjamas and used them – but when I found him in the kitchen garden he’d been completely clothed. Why dress him? It didn’t make sense, especially trying to dress a dead man weighing 240 lb didn’t make sense. And why had there been no silencer fitted to the gun? I knew there hadn’t been; with the pressure absorption of a silencer not even those special bullets would travel through a skull-bone twice, and, besides, he’d used a cushion to muffle the shot. Understandable enough, in a way: those rooms were in a remote wing of the house and with the help of a cushion and the background noise of the growing storm the chances were that the shot would not be heard in the other parts of the house. But the point was that I had been right next door and was bound to have heard it, unless I were deaf or dead, and as far as Royale had known – or as far as I thought he had known – I had been asleep in the next room. Or had Royale known I was not in that room? Had he come to make a quick check, found I was gone, knew that it must have been Jablonsky that had let me go and killed Jablonsky there and then? It fitted with the facts: but it didn’t fit with the smile on the dead man’s face.

  I went back into my own room, rearranged my steaming clothes on the back of the chair before the electric fire, then returned to Jablonsky’s room. I took up my glass again and glanced at the whisky bottle. It was a five-gill flask, still three parts full. That was no help, what was missing wouldn’t even have begun to affect Jablonsky’s razor-edge vigilance. I’d seen Jablonsky dispose of an entire bottle of rum – he wasn’t a whisky man – in an evening and the only apparent effect it had had on him was that he smiled even more than usual.

  But Jablonsky would never smile again.

  Sitting there alone in the near darkness, the only illumination the glow from the electric fire in the next room, I lifted my glass. A toast, a farewell, I don’t kn
ow what you’d call it. It was for Jablonsky. I sipped it slowly, rolling the whisky over my tongue to savour to the full the rich bouquet and taste of a fine old Scotch; for the space of two or three seconds I sat very still indeed, then I put the glass down, rose, crossed quickly to the corner of the room, spat the Scotch into the wash-basin and rinsed my mouth out very carefully indeed.

  It was Vyland who had provided the whisky. After Jablonsky had paraded me downstairs last night, Vyland had given him a sealed whisky bottle and glasses to take back to his room. Jablonsky had poured out a couple of drinks soon after we had gone upstairs and I’d actually had my glass in my hand when I remembered that drinking alcohol before breathing oxygen on a deep dive wasn’t a very clever thing to do. Jablonsky had drained them both, then had maybe a couple more after I had left.

  Royale and his friends didn’t have to batter Jablonsky’s door in with foreaxes, they had a key for the job, but even if they had used axes Jablonsky would never have heard them. There had been enough knockout drops in that bottle of whisky to put an elephant out for the count. He must have been just able to stagger as far as his bed before collapsing. I knew it was stupid, but I stood there in the silent dark reproaching myself bitterly for not having accepted that drink; it was a fairly subtle blending of a Mickey Finn and Scotch, but I think I would have got on to it straight away. But Jablonsky wasn’t a whisky man, maybe he thought that was the way Scotch ought to taste.

  And Royale, of course, had found two glasses with whisky dregs in them. That made me as unconscious as Jablonsky. But it hadn’t been any part of their plan to kill me too.

  I understood it all now, everything except the answer to the one question that really mattered: why had they killed Jablonsky? I couldn’t even begin to guess. And had they bothered looking in to check on me? I didn’t think so. But I wouldn’t have bet a pair of old bootlaces on it.

  There was nothing to be gained by sitting and thinking about it, so I sat and thought about it for a couple of hours. By that time my clothes were dry, or as near dry as made no difference. The trousers, especially, were lined and wrinkled like a pair of elephant’s legs, but then you couldn’t expect an immaculate crease in the clothes of a man who is compelled to sleep in them. I dressed, all except for coat and tie, opened the window and was just on the point of throwing out the three duplicate keys for the room doors and the handcuff key to join the other stuff in the shrubbery below when I heard a soft tapping on the door of Jablonsky’s room.