Fear is the Key

SIX

It was exactly two o’clock in the morning when Captain Zaimis skilfully eased the Matapan alongside the wooden jetty from which we had left. The sky was black now, the night so dark that it was scarcely possible to distinguish land from sea and the rain was a drumfire of sound on the roof of the cabin. But I had to go and go at once. I had to get back inside the house without being observed, I had to have a long conference with Jablonsky, and I had to get my clothes dry: my luggage was still in La Contessa, I’d only the one suit, and I had to have it dry before morning. I couldn’t bank on not seeing anyone until evening, as I’d done the previous day. The general had said that he’d let me know what job it was he had in mind inside thirty-six hours: the thirty-six hours would be up at eight o’clock this morning. I borrowed a long oilskin to keep off the worst of the rain, put it on over my own raincoat — the oilskin was a couple of sizes too small, it felt as if I were wearing a strait-jacket — shook hands all round, thanked them for what they had done for me and left.

At a quarter past two, after making a brief stop at a call-box, I parked the Corvette in the side turning where I’d found it and squelched along the road in the direction of the drive leading up to the general’s house. There were no sidewalks on the road, the kind of people who lived on this exclusive stretch of sea frontage didn’t have any need of sidewalks, and the gutters were swollen little rivers with the muddy water spilling over the uppers of my shoes. I wondered how I was going to get my shoes dry in time for the morning.

I passed the lodge where the chauffeur lived — or where I presumed he lived — and passed by the driveway also. The enclosed tunnel was brightly lit and clambering over the top of that six-barred gate in that blaze of light wouldn’t have been a very clever thing to do. And for all I knew the top bar might be set to work some electrically operated warning bell if sufficient weight were brought to bear. I wouldn’t have put anything beyond the lot who lived in that house.

Thirty yards beyond the drive I squeezed through an all but imperceptible gap in the magnificent eight-foot hedge that fronted the general’s estate. Less than two yards behind the edge was an equally magnificent eight-foot wall, hospitably topped with huge chunks of broken glass set in cement. Neither the hedge concealing the wall, nor the wall designed to discourage those too shy to enter by the main driveway was, I had learnt from Jablonsky, peculiar to the general’s estate. All the neighbours had money enough and importance enough to make the protection of their privacy a matter of considerable consequence, and this set-up was common to most of them. The rope dangling from the gnarled branch of the big live oak on the other side of the wall was where I had left it. Badly hampered by the binding constriction of the oilskin I waddled rather than walked up that wall, swung to earth on the other side, clambered up the oak, unfastened the rope and thrust it under an exposed root. I didn’t expect to have to use that rope again, but one never knew: what I did know was that I didn’t want any of Vyland’s playmates finding it.

What was peculiar to the general’s estate was the fence about twenty feet beyond the wall. It was a five-stranded affair, and the top three were barbed. The sensible person, obviously, pushed up the second lowest plain wire, pushed down the bottom one, stooped and passed through. But what I knew, thanks to Jablonsky, and what the sensible person didn’t, was that pressure on either of the two lower wires operated a warning bell, so I climbed laboriously over the top three wires, to the sound of much ripping and tearing, and lowered myself down on the other side. Andrew wasn’t going to have much farther use for his oilskin by the time he got it back. If he ever got it back.

Under the closely packed trees the darkness was almost absolute. I had a pencil flash but I didn’t dare use it, I had to trust to luck and instinct to circle the big kitchen garden that lay to the left of the house and so reach the fire-escape at the back. I had about two hundred yards to go and I didn’t expect to make it in under a quarter of an hour.

I walked as old Broken-nose, the butler, had fancied he walked when he crept away from our bedroom door after leaving Jablonsky and myself there. I had the advantages of normal arches to my feet and no adenoids worth talking about. I walked with both arms outstretched before me, and it wasn’t until my face collided with a tree trunk that I learned not to walk with my arms outspread as well as outstretched. I couldn’t do anything about the dripping clammy Spanish moss that kept wrapping itself about my face but I could do something about the hundreds of twigs and broken branches that littered the ground. I didn’t walk, I shuffled. I didn’t lift my feet, I slid each one forward slowly and carefully, brushing aside whatever lay in my path, and not allowing any weight to come on the leading foot until I had made good and certain that there was nothing under that foot that would snap or creak when my weight was transferred to it. Although I do say it, I was pretty silent.

It was as well that I was. Ten minutes after leaving the fence, when I was seriously beginning to wonder whether I had angled off in the wrong direction, suddenly, through the trees and the curtain of rain dripping steadily from the oaks, I thought I saw a tiny glimmer of light. A flicker, then gone. I might have imagined it, but I don’t have that kind of imagination. I knew I didn’t, so I slowed down still more, pulling my hat-brim down and coat collar up so that no faintest sheen of paleness might betray my face. You couldn’t have heard the rustle of my heavy oilskin three feet away.

I cursed the Spanish moss. It wrapped its long clammy tendrils round my face, it made me blink and shut my eyes at the very moments when shutting my eyes might have been the last thing I ever did, and it obscured my vision to a degree where I felt like dropping to my hands and knees and crawling forward on all fours. I might even have done that, but I knew the crackling of the oilskin would give me away.

Then I saw the glimmer of light again. It was thirty feet away, no more, and it wasn’t pointing in my direction, it was illuminating something on the ground. I took a couple of quick smooth steps forward, wanting to pinpoint the light source, and see the reason for its use, and then I discovered that my navigational sense in the darkness had been completely accurate. The kitchen garden was surrounded by a wire-netted wooden fence and halfway through my second step I walked right into it. The top rail cracked like the door to an abandoned dungeon.

There came a sudden exclamation, the dousing of the light, a brief silence and then the torch flicked on again, the beam no longer pointing at the ground but reaching out for and searching the perimeter of the kitchen garden. Whoever held the torch was as nervous as a kitten, because whoever held the torch had more than a vague idea where the sound had come from and a steady careful sweep would have picked me up in three seconds. As it was the search consisted of a series of jittery probings and jerkings of the beam and I’d time to take a long smooth step backwards. Just one: there was no time for more. As far as it is possible to melt into a neighbouring oak tree, I melted into a neighbouring oak tree, I pressed against it as if I were trying to push it over and wished as I had never wished before: I wished I had a gun.

‘Give me that flash.’ The cold quiet voice was unmistakably Royale’s. The torch beam wavered, steadied, then shone down on the ground again. ‘Get on with it. Now!’

‘But I heard something, Mr Royale!’ It was Larry, his voice a high-pitched jittery whisper. ‘Over there! I know I did.’

‘Yeah, me too. It’s all right.’ With a voice like Royale’s, with a voice with as much warmth in it as a champagne bucket, it was difficult to sound soothing, but he was doing his best. ‘Woods are full of those noises in the dark. Hot day, cold rain at night, contraction, then all sorts of noises. Now hurry it up. Want to stay out in this damned rain all night?’

‘Look, Mr Royale.’ The whisper was more than earnest now, it was desperate. ‘I didn’t make a mistake, honest, I didn’t! I heard—’

‘Missed out on your shot of the white stuff, tonight?’ Royale interrupted cruelly. The strain of even a moment’s kindness had been too much for him. ‘God, why did I have to be saddled with a junky like you. Shut up and work.’

Larry shut up. I wondered about what Royale had said, because I’d been wondering about it ever since I saw Larry. His behaviour, the fact that he was allowed to associate with Vyland and the general, the liberties he was permitted, above all his very presence there. Big criminal organizations working for big stakes — and if this bunch weren’t working for big stakes I couldn’t imagine who were — usually picked the members of their organization with as much care and forethought as a big corporation picks its top executives. More. A careless slip-up, a moment’s indiscretion on the part of an executive won’t ruin a big corporation but it can destroy a criminal set-up. Big crime is big business, and big criminals are big businessmen, running their illegal activities with all the meticulous care and administrative precision of their more law-abiding colleagues. If, most reluctantly, it was found necessary to remove rivals or such as offered menace to their security, the removal was entrusted to quiet polite people like Royale. But Larry was about as much use to them as a match in a powder magazine.

There were three of them in that corner of the kitchen garden, Royale, Larry and the butler, whose range of duties appeared to be wider than that normally expected of his profession in the better class English country houses. Larry and the butler were busy with spades. Digging, I thought at first, because Royale had the light hooded and even at ten yards in that rain it was difficult to see anything, but by and by, judging more by ear than by eye, I knew that they were filling in a hole in the ground. I grinned to myself in the darkness. I would have taken long odds that they were burying something very valuable indeed, something that would not be remaining there very long. A kitchen garden was hardly the ideal permanent hiding place for treasure trove.

Three minutes later they were finished. Someone drew a rake to and fro across the filled-in hole — I assumed that they must have been digging in a freshly turned vegetable patch and wanted to conceal the signs of their work — and then they all went off together to the gardening shed a few yards away and left their spades and rake there.

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 lodge 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 speculatively. ‘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.’

‘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 and 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.