Fear is the Key

TEN

At half-past six I left the bathyscaphe. I was glad to leave. If you have no work to occupy you — and apart from a task lasting exactly one minute I hadn’t done a stroke that afternoon — the interior of a bathyscaphe has singularly little to offer in the way of entertainment and relaxation. I left Cibatti to screw down the hatch in the floor of the pillar and climbed alone up the hundred and eighty iron rungs to the compartment at the top. Royale was there, alone.

‘Finished, Talbot?’ he asked.

‘All I can do down there. I need paper, pencil, the book of instructions and if I’m right — and I think I am — I can have those engines going within five minutes of getting down there again. Where’s Vyland?’

‘The general called for him five minutes ago.’ Good old general, dead on the dot. ‘They’ve gone off somewhere — I don’t know where.’

It doesn’t matter. This’ll only take me half an hour at the most. You can tell him we’ll be ready to go shortly after seven. Now I want some paper and peace and quiet for my calculations. Where’s the nearest place?’

‘Won’t this do?’ Royale asked mildly. ‘I’ll get Cibatti to fetch some paper.’

‘If you imagine I’m going to work with Cibatti giving me the cold cod eye all the time you’re mistaken.’ I thought a moment. ‘We passed a regular office a few yards along the passage on the way back here. It was open. Proper desk and everything, all the paper and rules I need.’

‘What’s the harm?’ Royale shrugged and stood aside to let me pass. As I went out Cibatti emerged through the trunking from the pillar and before we’d gone ten feet along the passage I heard the solid thudding home of a bolt, the turning of a key in the lock behind us. Cibatti took his keeper of the castle duties very seriously indeed.

Halfway along the passage an opened door led into a small, fairly comfortable room. I looked over my shoulder at Royale, saw his nod and went in. The room looked as if it had been used as an architect’s office, for there were a couple of large drawing boards on easels topped by strip lighting. I passed those up in favour of a big leather-covered desk with a comfortable armchair behind it.

Royale looked round the room the way Royale would always look round a room. It was impossible to imagine Royale sitting down anywhere with his back to a door, overlooked by a window or with light in his eyes. He would have behaved the same in a children’s nursery. In this case, however, he seemed to be examining the room more with an eye to its qualification as a prison, and what he saw must have satisfied him: apart from the doorway through which he had just entered, the only other point of egress from the room was through the plate-glass window that overlooked the sea. He picked a chair directly under the central overhead light, lit a cigarette and sat there quietly, the lamplight gleaming off his dark blond slick hair, his expressionless face in shadow. He was no more than six feet from me and he had nothing in his hands and could have had that little black gun out and two little holes drilled through me before I covered half the distance towards his chair. Besides, violence wasn’t on the cards just then: not, at least, for me.

I spent ten minutes in scribbling down figures on a sheet of paper, fiddling with a slide rule, consulting a wiring diagram and getting nowhere at all. I didn’t conceal the fact that I was getting nowhere at all. I clicked my tongue in impatience, scratched my head with the end of my pencil, compressed my lips and looked with mounting irritation at the walls, the door, the window. But mostly I looked in irritation at Royale. Eventually he got it — he would have been hard pressed not to get it.

‘My presence here bothering you, Talbot?’

‘What? Well no, not exactly — I just don’t seem to be getting—’

‘Not working out as easily as you thought it would, eh?’

I stared at him in irritable silence. If he wasn’t going to suggest it I would have to, but he saved me the trouble.

‘Maybe I’m just as anxious as you to get this thing over. I guess you’re one of those characters who don’t like distraction. And I seem to be distracting you.’ He rose easily to his feet, glanced at the paper in front of me, picked up his chair with one hand and made for the door. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

I said nothing, just nodded briefly. He took the key from the inside of the door, went out into the passage, shut the door and locked it. I got up, crossed to the door on cat feet and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. Within a minute I heard the sound of feet walking briskly along the passage outside, the sound of somebody saying, ‘Sorry, Mac’ in a pronounced and unmistakably American accent and then, almost in the same instant, the solid, faintly hollow sounding impact of a heavy blow that had me wincing in vicarious suffering. A moment later the key turned in the lock, the door opened and I helped drag a heavy load into the room.

The load was Royale and he was out, cold as a flounder. I hauled him inside while the oilskinned figure who’d lifted him through the door reversed the key and turned it in the lock. At once he started throwing off sou’wester, coat and leggings, and beneath everything his maroon uniform was as immaculate as ever.

‘Not at all bad,’ I murmured. ‘Both the sap and the American accent. You’d have fooled me.’

‘It fooled Royale.’ Kennedy bent and looked at the already purpling bruise above Royale’s temple. ‘Maybe I hit him too hard.’ He was as deeply concerned as I would have been had I accidentally trodden on a passing tarantula. ‘He’ll live.’

‘He’ll live. It must have been a long deferred pleasure for you.’ I had shed my own coat and was struggling into the oilskin rig-out as fast as I could. ‘Everything fixed? Get the stuff in the workshop?’

‘Look, Mr Talbot,’ he said reproachfully, ‘I had three whole hours.’

‘Fair enough. And if our friend here shows any sign of coming to?’

‘I’ll just kind of lean on him again,’ Kennedy said dreamily.

I grinned and left. I’d no idea how long the general could detain Vyland on whatever spurious errand he’d called him away, but I suspected it wouldn’t be very long; Vyland was beginning to become just that little bit anxious about the time factor. Maybe I hadn’t done myself any good by pointing out that the government agents might only be waiting for the weather to moderate before coming out to question the general, but with Vyland pointing his gun at me and threatening to kill me I had to reach out and grasp the biggest straw I could find.

The wind on the open well-deck shrieked and gusted as powerfully as ever, but its direction had changed and I had to fight my way almost directly against it. It came from the north now and I knew then that the centre of the hurricane must have passed somewhere also to the north of us, curving in on Tampa. It looked as if the wind and the seas might begin to moderate within a few hours. But, right then, the wind was as strong as it had ever been and on my way across I had my head and shoulders so far hunched into the wind that I was looking back the way I came. I fancied, in the near darkness, that I saw a figure clawing its way along the life-line behind me, but I paid no attention. People were probably using that line all day long.

The time for circumspection, for the careful reconnoitring of every potential danger in my path, was past. It was all or nothing now. Arrived at the other side I strode down the long corridor where I had whispered to Kennedy earlier in the afternoon, turned right at its end instead of left as we had done before, stopped to orientate myself and headed in the direction of the broad companionway which, Mary had said, led up to the actual drilling deck itself. There were several people wandering around, one of the open doors I passed gave on to a recreation room full of blue smoke and crowded with men: obviously all work on drilling and the upper deck was completely stopped. It didn’t worry the drillers, their ten-day tour of duty was paid from the time they left shore till they set foot on it again, and it didn’t worry me for it was to the working deck I was going and the absence of all traffic that I’d find up there would make my task all the easier.

Rounding another corner I all but cannoned into a couple of people who seemed to be arguing rather vehemently about something or other: Vyland and the general. Vyland was the man who was doing the talking but he broke off to give me a glare as I apologized for bumping him and continued down the passage. I was certain he could not have recognized me, my sou’wester had been pulled right down to my eyes, the high flyaway collar of my oilskin was up to my nose and, best disguise of all, I had dispensed with my limp, but for all that I had the most uncomfortable sensation between the shoulder blades until I had rounded another corner and was lost to their sight. I wasn’t sure whether this obvious argument between the general and Vyland was a good thing or not. If the general had managed to get him deeply interested in some controversial subject of immediate and personal importance to them both, then well and good; but if Vyland had been expostulating over what he regarded as some unnecessary delay, things might get very rough indeed. If he got back to the other side of the rig before I did, I didn’t like to think what the consequences would be. So I didn’t think about them. Instead, I broke into a run, regardless of the astonished looks from passers-by at a complete loss to understand the reason for this violent activity on what was in effect a well-paid holiday; reached the companion way and went up two steps at a time.

Mary, tightly wrapped in a hooded plastic raincoat, was waiting behind the closed doors at the top of the steps. She shrank back and gave a little gasp as I stopped abruptly in front of her and pulled down the collar of my oilskin for a moment to identify myself.

‘You!’ She stared at me. ‘You — your bad leg — what’s happened to your limp?’

‘Never had one. Local colour. Guaranteed to fool the most suspicious. Kennedy told you what I wanted you for?’

‘A — a watchdog. To keep guard.’

‘That’s it. I don’t want a bullet or a knife in my back in that radio shack. Sorry it had to be you, but there was no one else. Where’s the shack?’

‘Through the door.’ She pointed. ‘About fifty feet that way.’

‘Come on.’ I grabbed the door handle, incautiously twisted it open, and if I hadn’t had a strong grip on it I’d have been catapulted head over heels to the foot of the stairs. As it was, the hammerblow blast of that shrieking wind smashed both door and myself back against the bulkhead with a force that drove all the breath out of my lungs in an explosive gasp and would possibly have stunned me if the sou’wester hadn’t cushioned the impact as the back of my head struck painfully against the steel. For a moment I hung there, my head a kaleidoscopic whirl of shooting colour, bent double against the hurricane force of the wind, whooping painfully as I fought to overcome the shock of the blow and the sucking effect of the wind and to draw some breath into my aching lungs: then I straightened up and lurched out through the door, pulling Mary behind me. Twice I tried to heave the door close, but against the sustained pressure of that wind I couldn’t even pull it halfway to. I gave it up. They could, and no doubt very shortly would, send up a platoon from below and heave it shut: I had more urgent things to attend to.

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 heaving 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.’

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?’

‘Hophead,’ I said softly. I’d nothing to lose.

‘What?’ His face was a mask of disbelief. He went into a crouch over his gun that would have been laughable in different circumstances. It wasn’t any strain at all not to laugh. ‘What did you say, copper?’

‘Junky,’ I said distinctly. ‘You’re all doped up so that you don’t know what you’re doing. What are you going to do with the body?’ It was the first time I’d ever thought of myself as a corpse and I didn’t care for the feeling very much. ‘Two of you couldn’t lift me out of here and if they find me shot in this cabin they’ll know it was you who did it and than you’ll be in for the high jump, because they still need my services very badly, more than ever. You won’t be popular, Larry boy.’

He nodded cunningly as if he had just thought up all this himself.

‘That’s right, copper,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t shoot you in here, can I? We’ll have to go outside, won’t we, copper? Near the edge, where I can shoot you and shove you into the sea.’

‘That’s it,’ I agreed. This was macabre, this arrangement for my own tidy disposal, but I wasn’t going as crazy as Larry, I was gambling on my last hope. But the gamble was crazy enough.

‘And then they’ll be running around and looking for you,’ Larry said dreamily. ‘And I’ll be running around and looking for you too and all the time I’ll be laughing to myself and thinking about you and the barracuda down among the seaweed there and knowing that I’m smarter than any one of them.’

‘You have a charming mind,’ I said.

‘Haven’t I now?’ Again that high falsetto giggle and I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck. He poked at Mary with his foot, but she didn’t stir. ‘The dame will keep till I come back. I won’t be long, will I, copper? Come on. You first. And don’t forget I have a torch and a gun.’

‘I’m not likely to forget.’

Neither Mary nor the radio operator had stirred. I was pretty sure that the operator wouldn’t stir for a long time, I could still feel the ache in my fist and foot. But I wasn’t at all sure about Mary, I wasn’t even sure that she wasn’t faking, her breathing seemed much too quick and irregular for an unconscious person.

‘Come on, now,’ Larry said impatiently. He thrust the gun painfully into the small of my back. ‘Out.’

I went out, through the door, along the passage and through the outer door on to the wind- and rain-swept deck beyond. The outer door had opened on the sheltered side of the radio shack but in a moment we would be exposed to the pile-driving blast of that wind and I knew that when that moment came it would be then or never.

It was then. Urged on by the revolver in my back I moved round the corner of the shack, crouched low and barrelling forward into that great wind as soon as it struck me. Larry wasn’t so prepared, not only was he slightly built but he was standing upright, and the sudden wavering and jerking of the torch beam on the deck by my feet was intimation enough to me that the wind had caught him off-balance, perhaps sent him staggering several feet backward. I lowered my head still farther until I was in the position of a hundred yards sprinter in the first two steps of the race and lurched forward into the wind.

Almost at once I realized that I had miscalculated. I had miscalculated the strength of the wind, running into that hurricane was like running through a barrel of molasses. And I had also forgotten that while a seventy-mile-an-hour wind offers an almost insuperable resistance to a human being it offers relatively none to a heavy slug from a Colt with a muzzle velocity of 600 mph.

I’d got maybe eight yards when the frantically searching torch beam picked me up and steadied on me, and managed to cover perhaps another two before Larry fired.

Gangsters and hoodlums are notoriously the world’s worst marksmen, their usual method being to come within a couple of yards before firing or spraying the landscape with a sufficient hail of bullets to make the law of averages work for them and I had heard a hundred times that those boys couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces. But maybe Larry had never heard of this, or maybe the rule applied only to barn doors.

A mule-kick is nothing compared to the slamming stopping power of a forty-five. It caught me high up on the left shoulder and spun me round in a complete circle before dropping me in my tracks. But it was this that saved my life, even as I fell I felt the sharp tug on my oilskin collar as another slug passed through it. Those weren’t warning shots that Larry was firing: he was out to kill.

And kill he would if I had remained another couple of seconds on that deck. Again I heard the muffled boom of the Colt — even at ten yards I could hardly hear it over the howling power of that wind — and saw sparks strike off the deck inches from my face and heard the screaming whirr of the spent bullets ricocheting off into the darkness of the night. But the sparks gave me hope, it meant that Larry was using full metal-jacketed slugs, the kind cops use for firing through car bodies and locked doors, and that made an awful sight cleaner wound than a mushrooming soft-nose. Maybe it had passed clear through the shoulder.

I was on my feet and running again. I couldn’t see where I was running to and I didn’t care, all that mattered was running from. A blinding, bulleting gust of rain whistled across the deck and made me shut both eyes tight and I loved it. If I had my eyes shut so had Larry.

Still with my eyes shut I bumped into a metal ladder. I grabbed it to steady myself and before I properly realized what I was doing I was ten feet off the ground and climbing steadily. Maybe it was just man’s age-old instinct to climb high to get out of danger that started me off but it was the realization that this ladder must lead to some sort of platform where I might fend off Larry that kept me going.

It was a wicked, exhausting climb. Normally, even in that giant wind, it wouldn’t have given me so much trouble, but, as it was, I was climbing completely one-handed. My left shoulder didn’t hurt much, it was still too numb for that, the real pain would come later, but for the moment the entire arm seemed paralysed, and every time I released a rung with my right hand and grabbed for the one above, the wind pushed me out from the ladder so that my fingers hooked round the next rung usually at the full extent of my arm. Then I had to pull myself close with my one good arm and start the process all over again. After I’d climbed about forty rungs my right arm and shoulder were beginning to feel as if they were on fire.

I took a breather, hooked my forearm over a rung and looked down. One look was enough. I forgot about the pain and weariness and started climbing faster than ever, hunching my way upwards like a giant koala bear. Larry was down there at the foot of the ladder, flickering his torch in all directions and even with that bird-brain of his it was only going to be a matter of time until it occurred to him to shine that torch upwards.

It was the longest ladder I had ever climbed. It seemed endless, and I knew now that it must be some part of the drilling derrick, the ladder, I was now almost sure, that led up to the ‘monkey board,’ that narrow shelf where a man guided the half-ton sections of the drill pipe, as it came from the ground, into the storage-racks behind. The only thing I could remember about the monkey was the cheerless fact that it was devoid of handrails — those would only get in the way of the man guiding the heavy drill sections into place.

A jarring vibrating clang as if the iron ladder had been struck by a sledge-hammer was Larry’s way of announcing that he had caught sight of me. The bullet had struck the rung on which my foot rested and for one bad moment I thought it had gone through my foot. When I realized it hadn’t I took another quick look down.

Larry was coming up after me. I couldn’t see him, but I could see the torch clutched in one hand making regularly erratic movements as he swarmed his way up the ladder making about three times the speed I was. It wasn’t in character this, Larry could never have been accused of having an excess of courage: either he was loaded to the eyes or he was driven by fear — fear that I should escape and Vyland find out that he had been trying to murder me. And there was the further possibility, and a very strong one, that Larry had only one or two shells left in his gun: he couldn’t afford not to make those count.

I became gradually aware of lightness above and around me. I thought at first that this must be a glow cast from the aircraft warning lights in the top of the derrick, but in the same instant as the thought occurred I knew it to be wrong: the top of the derrick was still over a hundred feet above where I was. I took another breather, screwed my eyes almost shut against the stinging lash of the rain and peered upwards into the murky gloom.

There was a platform not ten feet above my head, with a light shining off feebly to the right. It wasn’t much of a light, but enough to let me see something of the dark maze of girders that was the derrick, enough to let me see a dark shadow above and also to the right which looked like some tiny cabin. And then Larry’s torch steadied and shone vertically upwards and I saw something that made me feel slightly sick: the platform above was not solid sheet-metal but open grille-work through which a person’s every move could be seen: gone were my hopes of waiting till Larry’s head appeared above the level of the platform and then kicking it off his shoulders.

I glanced downwards. Larry was no more than ten feet below, and both his gun and torch were levelled on me, I could see the dull glint of light in the barrel and the dark hole in the middle where death hid. One little pull on the trigger finger and that dark hole would be a streaking tongue of fire in the darkness of the night. Curtains for Talbot. I wondered vaguely, stupidly, if my eyes would have time to register the bright flame before the bullet and the oblivion it carried with it closed my eyes for ever … And then, slowly, I realized that Larry wasn’t going to fire, not even Larry was crazy enough to fire, not then. The 185-pound deadweight of my falling body would have brushed him off that ladder like a fly and from that ten-storey height neither of us would have bounced off that steel deck enough so that anyone would notice.

I kept on climbing and reached the top. Had it been a solid platform there and I don’t think I would have managed to pull myself on to it against that wind, my one good hand would just have scrabbled about on the smooth metal surface until exhaustion took me and I fell back off the ladder: but as it was I managed to hook my fingers in the openwork steel grille and drag myself on to the platform.

Larry was close behind. He gestured with his torch and I got his meaning. I moved to one side, past the little cabin at the corner where a lamp on a recessed shelf threw a faint light that was cut off abruptly at waist level, and waited.

Slowly, carefully, his eyes never leaving my face, Larry came over the top and straightened to his feet. I moved farther along the monkey-board, slowly, backwards, with my face to Larry. On my right I could dimly make out the big pipe storage racks, on my left the edge of the monkey board, no handrail, just a sheer drop of a hundred feet. Then I stopped. The gallery of the monkey-board seemed to run all the way round the outside of the derrick and it would have suited Larry just fine to have me out on the northern edge where, wind or no wind, a good shove — or a .45 slug — might have sent me tumbling direct into the sea a hundred and fifty feet below.

Larry came close to me. He’d switched off his torch now. The fixed light on the cabin side might leave the lowermost three feet in darkness, but it was enough for him and he wouldn’t want to take even the remote chance of anyone spotting a flickering torchlight and wondering what any crazy person should be doing up on the monkey-board in that hurricane wind and with all the work stopped.

He halted three feet away. He was panting heavily and he had his wolf grin on again.

‘Keep going, Talbot,’ he shouted.

I shook my head. ‘This is as far as I’m going.’ I hadn’t really heard him, the response was purely automatic, I had just seen something that made me feel ice-cold, colder by far than the biting lash of that rain. I had thought, down in the radio shack, that Mary Ruthven had been playing possum, and now I knew I had been right. She had been conscious, she must have taken off after us immediately we had left. There was no mistaking at all that gleaming dark-blonde head, those heavily plaited braids that appeared over the top of the ladder and moved into the night.

You fool, I thought savagely, you crazy, crazy little fool. I had no thought for the courage it must have taken to make that climb, for the exhausting nightmare it must have been, even for the hope it held out for myself. I could feel nothing but bitterness and resentment and despair and behind all of those the dim and steadily growing conviction that I’d count the world well lost for Mary Ruthven.

‘Get going,’ Larry shouted again.

‘So you can shove me into the sea? No.’

‘Turn round.’

‘So you can sap me with that gun and they find me lying on the deck beneath, no suspicion of foul play.’ She was only two yards away now. ‘Won’t do, Larry boy. Shine your torch on my shoulder. My left shoulder.’

The flash clicked on and I heard again that maniac giggle.

‘So I did get you, hey, Talbot?’

‘You got me.’ She was right behind him now, that great wind had swept away any incautious sound she might have made. I had been watching her out of the corner of my eye, but now I suddenly looked straight at her over Larry’s shoulder, my eyes widening in hope.

‘Try again, copper,’ Larry giggled. ‘Can’t catch me twice that way.’

Throw your arms round his neck or his legs, I prayed. Or throw your coat over his head. But don’t, don’t, don’t go for his gun-hand.

She went for his gun-hand. She reached round his right side and I plainly heard the smack as her right hand closed over his right wrist.

For a moment Larry stood stock-still. Had he jumped or twisted or moved, I would have been on to him like an express train, but he didn’t, the very unexpectedness of the shock temporarily petrified his gun hand too — it was still pointing straight at me.

And it was still levelled at my heart when he made a violent grab for Mary’s right wrist with his left hand. A jerk up with his left hand, a jerk down with his right and his gun-hand was free. Then he moved a little to his left, jerked her forward a foot, pinned her against the storage racks to the right and started to twist her wrist away from him. He knew who he had now and the wolf grin was back on his face and those coal-black eyes and the gun were levelled on me all the time.

For five, maybe ten seconds, they stood there straining. Fear and desperation gave the girl strength she would never normally have had, but Larry too was desperate and he could bring far more leverage to bear. There was a half-stifled sob of pain and despair and she was on her knees before him, then on her side, Larry still holding her wrist. I couldn’t see her now, only the faint sheen of her hair, she was below the level of the faint light cast by the lamp. All I could see was the madness in the face of the man opposite me, and the light shining from the shelf of the little cabin a few feet behind him. I lifted the heel of my right shoe off the ground and started to work my foot out of it with the help of my left foot. It wasn’t even a chance.

‘Come here, cop,’ Larry said stonily. ‘Come here or I’ll give the girl friend’s wrist just another little turn and then you can wave her goodbye.’ He meant it, it would make no difference now, he knew he would have to kill her anyway. She knew too much. I moved two steps closer. My heel was out of the right shoe. He thrust the barrel of the Colt hard against my mouth, I felt a tooth break and the salt taste of blood from a gashed upper lip, on the inside. I twisted my face away, spat blood and he thrust the revolver deep into my throat.

‘Scared, cop?’ he said softly. His voice was no more than a whisper, but I heard it above the voice of that great wind, maybe it was true enough, this business of the abnormally heightened sensitivity of those about to die. And I was about to die. I was scared all right, I was scared right to the depths as I had never been scared before. My shoulder was beginning to hurt, and hurt badly, and I wanted to be sick, that damned revolver grinding into my throat was sending waves of nausea flooding through me. I drew my right foot back as far as I could without upsetting my balance. My right toe was hooked over the tongue of the shoe.

‘You can’t do it, Larry,’ I croaked. The pressure on my larynx was agonizing, the gun-sight jabbing cruelly into the underside of my chin. ‘Kill me and they’ll never get the treasure.’

‘I’m laughing.’ He was, too, a horrible maniacal cackle. ‘See me, cop, I’m laughing. I’d never see any of it anyway. Larry the junky never does. The white stuff, that’s all my old man ever gives his ever-loving son.’

‘Vyland?’ I’d known for hours.

‘My father. God damn his soul.’ The gun shifted, pointed at my lower stomach. ‘So long, cop.’

My right foot was already swinging forward, smoothly, accelerating, but unseen to Larry in the darkness.

‘I’ll tell him goodbye from you,’ I said. The shoe clattered against the corrugated iron of the little hut even as I spoke.

Larry jerked his head to look over his right shoulder to locate the source of this fresh menace. For a split second of time, before he started to swing round again, the back of his left jawbone was exposed to me just as that of the radio operator had been only a few minutes before.

I hit him. I hit him as if he were a satellite and I was going to send him into orbit round the moon. I hit him as if the lives of every last man, woman and child in the world depended on it. I hit him as I had never hit anyone in my life before, as I knew even as I did it that I could never hit anyone again.

There came a dull muffled snapping noise and the Colt fell from his hands and struck the grille at my feet. For two or three seconds Larry seemed to stand there poised, then, with the unbelievably slow, irrevocable finality of a toppling factory chimney, he fell out into space.

There was no terror-stricken screaming, no wild flailing of arms and legs as he fell to the steel deck a hundred feet below: Larry had been dead, his neck broken, even before he had started to fall.