Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  It was a nightmare of a night. A dark howling nightmare. I screwed my eye almost shut against the hurricane-driven knife-lash of the rain and stared up into the black sky. Two hundred feet above my head I could just distinguish the intermittent flicker of the derrick-top aircraft warning lights, utterly unnecessary on a night such as this unless there were some lunatic pilots around, and quite useless as far as giving any illumination at deck-level was concerned. The absence of light was a mixed blessing but on the whole, I felt, favourable: I might run into dangerous, even crippling obstacles because I couldn’t see where I was going but on the other hand no one else could see where I was going either.

  Arm in arm we lurched and staggered across the deck like a couple of drunks, heading for a square patch of light shining on the deck from a concealed window. We reached a door on the south side, on the near corner and sheltered from the wind, and I was on the point of bending down and having a squint through the keyhole when Mary caught the handle, pushed the door and walked into a small unlit corridor. Feeling rather foolish, I straightened and followed. She pulled the door softly to.

  ‘The entrance door is on the far end on the right,’ she whispered. She’d reached both arms up round my neck to murmur in my ear, her voice couldn’t have been heard a foot away. ‘I think there’s someone inside.’

  I stood stock still and listened, with her arms still round my neck. Given a more favourable time I could have stayed there all night, but the time wasn’t favourable. I said: ‘Couldn’t it be that they just leave that light on to guide the operator to the shack when his call-up bell rings?’

  ‘I thought I heard a movement,’ she whispered.

  ‘No time to play it safe. Stay out in the passage,’ I murmured. ‘It’ll be all right.’ I gave her hands a reassuring squeeze as I disengaged them from my neck, reflecting bitterly that Talbot luck was running typically true to form, padded up the passage, opened the door and walked into the radio room.

  For a moment I stood there blinking in the brightness of the light, but not blinking so fast that I couldn’t see a big burly character sitting at the radio table whirling round in his seat as the door opened. And even if I couldn’t have seen him I’d still have heard him a split second later as he sent his seat toppling backward with a crash and leapt to his feet, spinning so as to face me, with a speed so remarkable in so big a man. In so very big a man. He was taller than I was, a good bit wider, heavier and younger: he had that blue-jowled, black-eyed, black-haired very tough face that you occasionally see in first or second generation Italian-Americans and if he was a genuine radio-man I was the Queen of Sheba.

  ‘What’s all the panic about?’ I demanded shortly. It was my best American accent and it was terrible. ‘The boss has a message for you.’

  ‘What boss?’ he asked softly. A build like a heavy-weight champion and a face to match doesn’t necessarily mean a mind like a moron and this boy was no moron.

  ‘Let’s have a look at your face, Mac.’

  ‘What the hell’s bitin’ you?’ I demanded. I turned down the collar of my coat. ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘Now the hat,’ he said quietly.

  I took off the hat and flung it in his face just as I heard him spit out the solitary word ‘Talbot!’ I was into a dive even as I threw the hat and I hit him fair and square in the middle with the point of my left shoulder. It was like hitting the trunk of a tree, but he wasn’t as well anchored as a tree and he went over.

  His head and shoulders crashed against the far wall with a crash that shook the radio shack to its metal foundations. That should have been that, but it wasn’t, I would have sworn that boy didn’t even blink. He brought up one knee in a vicious jab that would have been a sad farewell for me had it landed where it had been intended to land. It didn’t, it caught me on the chest and upper arm, but even so it had sufficient power behind it to knock me over on one side and the next moment we were rolling across the floor together, punching, kicking, clawing, and gouging. The Marquess of Queensberry wouldn’t have liked it at all.

  I was under two big disadvantages. The heavy oilskins hampered my movements, and although they helped absorb some of the impact of his jolting short-arm jabs they also, because of their constricting effect, robbed my own blows of much of their power, and while he was obviously more than willing to turn the entire radio shack into a shambles of broken furniture and fittings, that was the last thing I wanted: everything, literally everything, depended on my keeping that radio intact. And we both rolled against the radio table now, myself underneath, where I could have a good view of one of the legs splintering and caving in under the combined weight of our bodies against it.

  I wasn’t feeling any too good by this time. I had just the evidence of my own eyes to show me that this lad was only equipped with arms and fists just like anyone else and not a couple of flexible sledge-hammers which was what it felt like, but the sight of that tottering radio table made me desperate. A particularly vicious clubbing blow to the lower ribs didn’t make it at all hard for me to gasp out in pain and fall back limply on the floor, and while he was taking advantage of my co-operation and time off to wind up his right sledge-hammer to drive me through the floor I brought up my knee and simultaneously chopped him across the exposed neck with the edge of my right hand and all the power those hampering oilskins would permit.

  By all the rules he should have gone out like a light, only he had never read any of the rules. But I had hurt him, though: the grunt of agony was as genuine as mine had been faked, and he was momentarily dazed – just long enough to let me squirm out from under and roll over and over until I brought up against the half-open doorway through which I had entered. I might have nailed him then, back where we had been, but I wasn’t going to take even the chance of touching the few splintered pieces of table leg which were all that kept the transmitter from crashing on to the steel deck.

  He was tough, all right. By the time I was on my feet he was on his, shaken, but still on his feet. For a moment I thought he had lost all taste for the hand to hand stuff, the heavy wooden chair he had picked up and was bringing whistling over his shoulder certainly made it seem so, but when I ducked and heard the chair smash to pieces on the door jamb behind, it turned out that this was only his long-range artillery bombardment and that the assault troops were moving in later. Later, in this case, was almost right away, but I managed to avoid his wild flailing bull-rush and whirled round to meet his next charge.

  It never came. He was crouching there, facing me, teeth showing and his eyes a couple of wicked slits in his dark Latin face, hands pressed against the wall behind him ready to help him in his take-off, when I saw a slender wrist appearing in the doorway behind him, high up. At the end of the wrist was a white-gloved hand and gripped in the hand was a broken chair-leg.

  Mary Ruthven hit him as I would have taken long odds that she would hit him – a hesitant experimental tap on the head that wouldn’t have dazed a cockroach – but for all that it had the galvanic effect of an electric shock. He whipped his head round to locate the source of this fresh threat and as he did I moved in with two long steps and hit him with everything I had on the neck, just below the ear, my knuckles socketing solidly into the hollow behind the back of his left jawbone.

  One of the most deadly blows in boxing, it could easily have dislocated his jaw or broken his neck, and with any normal man might well have done just that. But he was phenomenally tough. He crashed back against the steel bulkhead and started to slide down towards the floor, eyes unfocused in his head, but even as he slid he made a last despairing effort to fling himself at me and wrap his arms around my legs to bring me down. But his co-ordination, his timing were gone. I had time to step back as his face came down near my right foot. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t bring the two into contact and every reason why I should, so I did.

  He lay spread-eagled face downwards on the floor, silent and still. I was far from silent myself, my breath was coming in great heav
ing gasps as if I had just run a mile, and I hadn’t even run a hundred yards in years. My arms, my hands, my face were wet with sweat, and it was this that made me think to get out a handkerchief and rub it all over my face. But there was no blood there, and I couldn’t feel any bruise. It would have been very difficult indeed to explain away a black eye or a bleeding nose to Vyland when I met him later. I tucked the handkerchief away and looked at the girl in the doorway. The hand that still held the chair-leg was trembling slightly, her eyes wide, her lips pale and what little expression there was on her face couldn’t easily have been misconstrued as the beginnings of a worshipping admiration.

  ‘Did you – did you have to use your boot?’ she asked shakily.

  ‘What did you expect me to use?’ I asked savagely. ‘The palm of my hand to smooth his fevered brow? Be your age, lady. That guy never heard of little Lord Fauntleroy, he’d have chopped me into bits and fed me to the barracuda if he’d had half the chance. Now, just you stand by with your shillelagh there and clout him if he bats an eyelid –but hard, this time. Not,’ I added hastily, lest she suspect me of being thought ungracious, ‘that I’m not grateful for what you’ve already done.’

  I turned round, already a precious minute had been lost since I had come into the shack, and found what I was looking for right away. Several pegs on the walls were festooned with tightly-rolled coils of wire and flex, material for antenna leads and radio repairs. I picked a nice flexible roll of flex and within one minute I had the radio operator trussed like a chicken ready for the broiler, passed a slip knot round his neck and tied the end of it to a cupboard handle. There could only be some bells or pushes or phones he might try to reach but he’d soon give up when he found that all he was doing was strangling himself. I gave the matter of a gag only a passing thought: there may be those who know how to draw a happy median line between suffocating a man and making a gag loose enough to permit breathing without at the same time letting the victim be heard a hundred miles away, but I’m not one of them. Besides, with that great hurricane howling outside he could holler away till he got laryngitis and nobody below deck would ever hear him.

  I reached for the only other chair in the shack and sat down before the radio. It was a standard aircraft-type transmitter, I knew it well and I knew how to operate it. I switched on, tuned it on the wavelength the sheriff had given me through Kennedy and clamped on a pair of headphones. I wouldn’t have long to wait, I knew that: the police were keeping a twenty-four hour watch on their short-wave receivers. Within three seconds of the end of my call-up sign the headphones crackled in my ears.

  ‘Police headquarters. Sheriff Prendergast here. Please go ahead.’

  I threw the transmitter switch from manual to microphone.

  ‘Car Nineteen reporting.’ The agreed subterfuge wasn’t necessary for identification, every police car in the county had been warned to stay off the air and the sheriff knew it could only be me: but in these days of enthusiastic radio hams airwave eavesdroppers abound and I wouldn’t have put it past Vyland’s organization to maintain a permanent listening watch on the police wavelengths. I continued: ‘Suspect answering to description detained near Ventura crossroads. Shall we bring him in?’

  ‘Negative,’ the voice crackled. A pause. ‘We’ve found our man. Please release suspect.’

  I felt as if someone had given me a million dollars. Almost without realizing it I relaxed heavily against the back-rest of the chair, the strain of the keyed-up tension of the past forty-eight hours had been far greater than I had realized. The sheer mental relief, the depth of satisfaction I experienced then surpassed anything I had ever known.

  ‘Car Nineteen,’ I said again. Even to myself my voice didn’t sound quite steady. ‘Would you repeat that, please?’

  ‘Release your suspect,’ Prendergast said slowly and distinctly. ‘We have found our man. Repeat, we have found –’

  The transmitter leapt backwards about two inches, a great jagged hole appeared in the centre of the tuning band and the radio shack seemed to explode about my ears so deafening, so shattering was the effect of a heavy gun being fired in that confined space.

  I didn’t jump more than a couple of feet and after I came down I got to my feet the normal way, but slowly, carefully. I didn’t want anyone getting too nervous, and whoever had pulled that stupid trick, unnecessarily smashing the set and tipping off the cops that something had gone wrong, was very nervous indeed. Almost as nervous as I felt as I turned slowly round and saw who my guest was.

  It was Larry and the smoking Colt in his hand was lined up, as nearly as his shaking hand would permit, on a spot somewhere between my eyes. It looked as large as a howitzer. His lank black hair was plastered wetly over his forehead, and the coal-black eye behind that wavering barrel was jerking and burning and crazy as a loon’s. One eye. I couldn’t see the other, I couldn’t see any part of him except half his face, his gun-hand and a left forearm crooked round Mary Ruthven’s neck. The rest of him was completely hidden behind the girl. I looked at her reproachfully.

  ‘Fine watchdog you are,’ I said mildly.

  ‘Shut up!’ Larry snarled. ‘A cop, eh? A john. A dirty crawling double-crossing screw!’ He called me several names, all unprintable, his voice a venomous hiss of hate.

  ‘There’s a young lady here, friend,’ I murmured.

  ‘Lady? A – tramp.’ He tightened his grip around her neck as if it gave him pleasure and I guessed he had at some time mistakenly tried to make time with her and the roof had fallen in on him. ‘Thought you were clever, Talbot didn’t you? You thought you knew all the answers, you thought you had us all fooled, didn’t you, cop? But you didn’t have me fooled, Talbot. I’ve been watching you, I’ve been following you every second since we came out to the rig.’ He was jazzed up to the eyebrows, shaking and jumping as if he had the St Vitus’s Dance, and his voice held all the venomous and vindictive triumph of the consistently ignored and derided nonentity who has been proved right in the end while all those who despise him have been proved wrong. It was Larry’s night to sing, and he wasn’t going to miss out on a single note. But I had listened to pleasanter voices.

  ‘Didn’t know that I knew that you were in cahoots with Kennedy, did you, cop?’ he went ranting on. ‘And with this tramp. I was watching you when you came up from the bathyscaphe ten minutes ago, I saw that smooth-talking chauffeur give it to Royale on the head and –’

  ‘How did you know it was Kennedy?’ I interrupted. ‘He was dressed up –’

  ‘I listened outside the door, mug! I could have finished you off there and then, but I wanted to see what you were up to. Think I care if Royale gets sapped down?’ He broke off suddenly and swore as the girl went limp on him. He tried to hold her up but heroin is no substitute for protein when it comes to building muscle and even her slight weight was too much for him. He could have lowered her gently, but he didn’t: he stood back abruptly and let her collapse heavily on the floor.

  I took half a step forward, fists clenched till they hurt, murder in my heart. Larry bared his teeth and grinned at me like a wolf.

  ‘Come and get it, copper. Come and get it,’ he whispered. I looked from him to the floor and back again and my hands slowly unclenched. ‘Scared, aren’t you, copper? Yellow, aren’t you, copper? Sweet on her, aren’t you, copper? Just like that pansy Kennedy is sweet on her.’ He laughed, a high falsetto giggle carrying the overtones of madness. ‘I’m afraid a little accident is going to happen to Kennedy when I get back over to the other side. Who’s going to blame me for gunning him down when I see him sapping Royale?’

  ‘All right,’ I said wearily. ‘You’re a hero and a great detective. Let’s go see Vyland and get it over with.’

  ‘We’re going to get it over with,’ he nodded. His voice was suddenly very quiet and I think I liked it even less that way. ‘But you’re not going to see Vyland, copper, you’re never going to see anyone again. I’m going to kill you, Talbot. I’m letting you have it now.’r />
  My mouth felt as if someone had gone over it with a roll of high-absorbency blotting-paper. I could feel the slow heavy beat of my heart and the sweat coming on the palms of my hands. He meant every word he said. He was going to squeeze the trigger of that heavy Colt and if he lived to be a hundred nothing would ever give him half so much pleasure again. Finish. But I managed to keep my voice steady.

  ‘So you’re going to kill me,’ I said slowly. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I hate your lousy rotten stinking guts, Talbot, that’s why,’ he whispered, a whisper with a shake in it, a horrible sound. ‘Because you’ve ridden me and laughed at me from the moment we met, hophead this, junky that, always asking about my syringe. Because you’re sweet on this dame here and if I can’t get her no one will. And because I hate cops.’

  He didn’t like me, I could see that. Even when he wasn’t talking his mouth was working and twitching like an epileptic’s. He just told me things that I knew he’d never tell another, and I knew why. Dead men tell no tales. And that’s what I’d be any second now. Dead. Dead as Herman Jablonsky. Jablonsky in two feet of earth, Talbot in 130 feet of water, not that it made any difference where you slept when it was all over. And it made things no better to reflect that the end was going to come at the hands of a quivering mass of doped-up neuroses disguised as a human being.

  ‘You’re going to let me have it now?’ My eye never lifted off that jumping trigger finger.

  ‘That’s it.’ He giggled. ‘In the guts, low down, so I can watch you flop around for a while. You’ll scream and you’ll scream and you’ll scream and no one will ever hear it. How do you like it, copper?’