Fear is the Key

FOUR

It was one of those silences. It went on and on and on. Pregnant, they call it. It didn’t worry me much, I was for the high jump anyway. It was the general who spoke first and his voice and face were stiff and cold as he looked at the man in the dinner suit.

‘What is the explanation of this outrageous conduct, Vyland?’ he demanded. ‘You bring into this house a man who is apparently not only a narcotics addict and carries a gun, but who also served a prison sentence. As for the presence of a police officer, someone might care to inform me—’

‘Relax, General. You can drop the front.’ It was Royale who spoke, his voice quiet and soothing as before and curiously devoid of any trace of insolence. ‘I wasn’t quite accurate. Ex-Detective-Lieutenant, I should have said. Brightest boy in the bureau in his day, first narcotics, then homicide, more arrests and more convictions for arrests than any other police officer in the eastern states. But your foot slipped, didn’t it, Jablonsky?’

Jablonsky said nothing and his face showed nothing, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking plenty. My face showed nothing, but I was thinking plenty. I was thinking how I could try to get away. The servants had vanished at a wave of the hand from the general and, for the moment, everyone seemed to have lost interest in me. I turned my head casually. I was wrong, there was someone who hadn’t lost interest in me. Valentino, my court-room acquaintance, was standing in the passageway just outside the open door, and the interest he was taking in me more than made up for the lack of interest in the library. I was pleased to see that he was carrying his right arm in a sling. His left thumb was hooked in the side pocket of his coat, and although he might have had a big thumb it wasn’t big enough to make all that bulge in his pocket. He would just love to see me trying to get away.

‘Jablonsky here was the central figure in the biggest police scandal to hit New York since the war,’ Royale was saying. ‘All of a sudden there were a lot of murders — important murders — in his parish, and Jablonsky boobed on the lot. Everyone knew a protection gang was behind the killings. Everybody except Jablonsky. All Jablonsky knew was that he was getting ten grand a stiff to look in every direction but the right one. But he had even more enemies inside the force than outside, and they nailed him. Eighteen months ago it was, and he had the headlines to himself for an entire week. Don’t you remember, Mr Vyland?’

‘Now I do,’ Vyland nodded. ‘Sixty thousand tucked away and they never laid a finger on a cent. Three years he got, wasn’t it?’

‘And out in eighteen months,’ Royale finished. ‘Jumped the wall; Jablonsky?’

‘Good conduct remission,’ Jablonsky said calmly. ‘A respectable citizen again. Which is more than could be said for you, Royale. You employing this man, General?’

‘I fail to see—’

‘Because if you are, it’ll cost you a hundred bucks more than you think. A hundred bucks is the price Royale usually charges his employers for a wreath for his victims. A very fancy wreath. Or has the price gone up, Royale? And who are you putting the finger on this time?’

Nobody said anything. Jablonsky had the floor.

‘Royale here is listed in the police files of half the states in the Union, General. Nobody’s ever pinned anything on him yet, but they know all about him. No.1 remover in the United States, not furniture but people. He charges high, but he’s good and there’s never any comeback. A freelance, and his services are in terrific demand by all sorts of people you’d never dream of, not only because he never fails to give satisfaction but also because of the fact that it’s a point of Royale’s code that he’ll never touch a man who has employed him. An awful lot of people sleep an awful lot easier, General, just because they know they’re on Royale’s list of untouchables.’ Jablonsky rubbed a bristly chin with a hand the size of a shovel. ‘I wonder who he could be after this time, General? Could it even be yourself, do you think?’

For the first time the general registered emotion. Not even the beard and moustache could hide a narrowing of the eyes, a tightening of the lips and a slight but perceptible draining of colour from the cheeks. He wet his lips, slowly, and looked at Vyland.

‘Did you know anything of this? What truth is there—?’

‘Jablonsky’s just shooting off the top of his mouth,’ Vyland interjected smoothly. ‘Let’s get them into another room, General. We must talk.’

Ruthven nodded, his face still pale, and Vyland glanced at Royale. Royale smiled and said without inflection: ‘All right, you two, out. Leave that gun there, Jablonsky.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘You haven’t cashed that cheque yet,’ Royale said obliquely. They’d been listening, all right.

Jablonsky put his gun on the table. Royale himself didn’t have a gun in his hand. With the speed he could move at it would have been quite superfluous anyway. The hophead, Larry, came up behind me and dug his pistol barrel in my kidney with a force that made me grunt in pain. Nobody said anything, so I said: ‘Do that again, hophead, and it’ll take a dentist a whole day to repair your face.’ So he did it again, twice as painfully as before, and when I swung round he was too quick for me and caught me with the barrel of his gun high up on the face and raked the sight down my cheek. Then he stood off, four feet away, gun pointed at my lower stomach and those crazy eyes jumping all over the place, a wicked smile on his face inviting me to jump him. I mopped some of the blood off my face and turned and went out the door.

Valentino was waiting for me, gun in hand and heavy boots on his feet, and by the time Royale came leisurely out of the library, closed the door behind him and stopped Valentino with a single word, I couldn’t walk. There’s nothing wrong with my thigh, it’s carried me around for years, but it’s not made of oak and Valentino wore toe-plates on his boots. It just wasn’t my lucky night. Jablonsky helped me off the floor into an adjacent room. I stopped at the doorway, looked back at the grinning Valentino and then at Larry, and I wrote them both down in my little black book.

We spent perhaps ten minutes in that room, Jablonsky and I sitting, the hophead pacing up and down with the gun in his hand and hoping I would twitch an eyebrow, Royale leaning negligently against a table, nobody saying anything, until by and by the butler came in and said the general wanted to see us. We all trooped out again. Valentino was still there, but I made it safely to the library. Maybe he’d hurt his toe, but I knew it wasn’t that: Royale had told him once to lay off, and just once would be all that Royale would have to tell anybody anything.

A far from subtle change had taken place in the atmosphere since we’d left. The girl was sitting on a stool by the fire, head bent and the flickering light gleaming off her wheat-coloured braids, but Vyland and the general seemed easy and relaxed and confident and the latter was even smiling. A couple of newspapers were lying on the library table and I wondered sourly if those, with their big black banner headlines ‘Wanted Killer Slays Constable, Wounds Sheriff’ and the far from flattering pictures of myself had anything to do with their confidence. To emphasize the change in atmosphere, a footman came in with a tray of glasses, decanter and soda siphon. He was a young man, but moved with a peculiarly stiff leaden-footed gait and he laid the tray down on the table with so laborious a difficulty that you could almost hear his joints creak. His colour didn’t look too good either. I looked away, glanced at him again and then indifferently away once more, hoping that the knowledge of what I suddenly knew didn’t show in my face.

They’d read all the right books on etiquette, the footman and the butler knew exactly what to do. The footman brought in the drinks, the butler carried them around. He gave a sherry to the girl, whisky to each of the four men — Hophead was pointedly bypassed — and planted himself in front of me. My gaze travelled from his hairy wrists to his broken nose to the general in the background. The general nodded, so I looked back at the silver tray again. Pride said no, the magnificent aroma of the amber liquid that had been poured from the triangular dimpled bottle said yes, but pride carried the heavy handicap of my hunger, soaked clothes and the beating I’d just had and the aroma won looking round. I took the glass and eyed the general over the rim. ‘A last drink for the condemned man, eh, General?’

‘Not condemned yet.’ He lifted his glass. ‘Your health, Talbot.’

‘Very witty,’ I sneered. ‘What do they do in the state of Florida, General? Strap you over a cyanide bucket or just fry you in the hot seat?’

‘Your health,’ he repeated. ‘You’re not condemned, maybe you’ll never be condemned. I have a proposition to put before you, Talbot.’

I lowered myself carefully into a chair. Valentino’s boot must have mangled up one of the nerves in my leg, a thigh muscle was jumping uncontrollably. I waved at the papers lying on the library table.

‘I take it you’ve read those, General. I take it you know all about what happened today, all about my record. What kind of proposition can a man like you possibly have to put to a man like me?’

‘A very attractive one.’ I imagined I saw a touch of red touch the high cheekbones but he spoke steadily enough. ‘In exchange for a little service I wish you to perform for me I offer you your life.’

‘A fair offer. And the nature of this little service, General?’

‘I am not at liberty to tell you at present. In about, perhaps — thirty-six hours, would you say, Vyland?’

‘We should hear by then,’ Vyland agreed. He was less and less like an engineer every time I looked at him. He took a puff at his Corona and looked at me. ‘You agree to the general’s proposition, then?’

‘Don’t be silly. What else can I do? And after the job, whatever it is?’

‘You will be provided with papers and passport and sent to a certain South American country where you will have nothing to fear,’ the general answered. ‘I have the connections.’ Like hell I would be given papers and a trip to South America: I would be given a pair of concrete socks and a vertical trip to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

‘And if I don’t agree, then of course—’

‘If you don’t agree then they will all be overcome by a high sense of civic responsibility and turn you over to the cops,’ Jablonsky interrupted sardonically. ‘The whole set-up stinks to high heaven. Why should the general want you? — he can hire practically any man in the nation. Why, especially, should he hire a killer on the lam? What earthly use can you be to him? Why should he help a wanted murderer to evade justice?’ He sipped his drink thoughtfully. ‘General Blair Ruthven, the moral pillar of New England society, best-known and highest-minded do-gooder after the Rockefellers. It stinks. You’re paddling in some dark and dirty water, General. Very dark, very dirty. And paddling right up to your neck. Lord knows what stakes you must be playing for. They must be fantastic.’ He shook his head. ‘This I would never have believed.’

‘I have never willingly or knowingly done a dishonest thing in my life,’ the general said steadily.

‘Jeez!’ Jablonsky ejaculated. For a few seconds he was silent, then said suddenly: ‘Well, thanks for the drink, General. Don’t forget to sup with a long spoon. I’ll take my hat and my cheque and be on my way. The Jablonsky retirement fund is in your debt.’

I didn’t see who made the signal. Probably it came from Vyland. Again I didn’t see how the gun got into Royale’s hand. But I saw it there. So did Jablonsky. It was a tiny gun, a very flat automatic with a snub barrel, even smaller than the Lilliput the sheriff had taken from me. But Royale probably had the eye and the aim of a squirrel-hunter, and it was all he needed: a great big hole in the heart from a heavy Colt makes you no deader than a tiny little hole from a .22.

Jablonsky looked thoughtfully at the gun. ‘You would rather I stayed, General?’

‘Put that damn gun away,’ the general snapped. ‘Jablonsky’s on our side. At least, I hope he’s going to be. Yes, I’d rather you stayed. But no one’s going to make you if you don’t want to.’

‘And what’s going to make me want to?’ Jablonsky inquired of the company at large. ‘Could it be that the general, who has never willingly done a dishonest thing in his life, is planning to hold up payment on that cheque? Or maybe just planning to tear it up altogether?’

It didn’t need the general’s suddenly averted eyes to confirm Jablonsky’s guess. Vyland cut in smoothly: ‘It’ll only be for two days, Jablonsky, three at the most. After all, you are getting a great deal of money for very little. All we’re asking you to do is to ride herd on Talbot here until he’s done what we want him to do.’

Jablonsky nodded slowly. ‘I see. Royale here wouldn’t stoop to bodyguarding — he takes care of people in a rather more permanent way. The thug out in the passage there, the butler, our little friend Larry here — Talbot could eat ’em all before breakfast. You must need Talbot pretty badly, eh?’

‘We require him,’ Vyland said smoothly. ‘And from what we’ve learnt from Miss Ruthven — and from what Royale knows of you — you can hold him. And your money’s safe.’

‘Uh-huh. And tell me, am I a prisoner looking after a prisoner, or am I free to come and go?’

‘You heard what the general said,’ Vyland answered. ‘You’re a free agent. But if you do go out make sure he’s locked up or tied so that he can’t break for it.’

‘Seventy thousand bucks’ worth of guarding, eh?’ Jablonsky said grimly. ‘He’s safe as the gold in Fort Knox.’ I caught Royale and Vyland exchanging a brief flicker of a glance as Jablonsky went on: ‘But I’m kind of worried about that seventy thousand. I mean, if someone finds out Talbot is here, I won’t get the seventy thousand. All I’ll get, with my record, is ten years for obstructing the course of justice and giving aid and comfort to a wanted murderer.’ He looked speculatively at Vyland and the general and went on softly: ‘What guarantee have I that no one in this house will talk?’

‘No one will talk,’ Vyland said flatly.

‘The chauffeur lives in the lodge, doesn’t he?’ Jablonsky said obliquely.

‘Yes, he does.’ Vyland spoke softly, thoughtfully. ‘It might be a good idea to get rid of—’

‘No!’ the girl interrupted violently. She’d jumped to her feet, fists clenched by her sides.

‘Under no circumstances,’ General Ruthven said quietly. ‘Kennedy remains. We are too much in his debt.’

Vyland’s dark eyes narrowed for a moment and he looked at the general. But it was the girl who answered the unspoken query.

‘Simon won’t talk,’ she said tonelessly. She moved towards the door: ‘I’ll go to see him.’

‘Simon, eh?’ Vyland scraped a thumb-nail against the corner of his moustache, and looked at her appraisingly. ‘Simon Kennedy, chauffeur and general handyman.’

She retraced a few steps, stopped in front of Vyland and looked at him steadily, tiredly. You could just see the fifteen generations stretching back to the Mayflower and every one of the 285 million bucks was showing. She said distinctly: ‘I think you are the most utterly hateful man I have ever known,’ and walked out, closing the door behind her.

‘My daughter is overwrought,’ the general said hastily. ‘She—’

‘Forget it, General.’ Vyland’s voice was as urbane as ever, but he looked a bit overwrought himself. ‘Royale, you might show Jablonsky and Talbot their quarters for tonight. East end of the new wing — the rooms are being fixed now.’

Royale nodded, but Jablonsky held up his hand. ‘This job Talbot is going to do for you — is it in this house?’

General Ruthven glanced at Vyland, then shook his head.

‘Then where?’ Jablonsky demanded. ‘If this guy is taken out of here and anybody within a hundred miles spots him, we’ve had it. Particularly, it would be goodbye to my money. I think I’m entitled to a little reassurance on this point, General.’

Again the swift interchange of looks between the general and Vyland, again the latter’s all but imperceptible nod.

‘I think we can tell you that,’ the general said.

‘The job’s on the X 13, my oil rig out in the gulf.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Fifteen miles from here and well out in the gulf. No passers-by to see him there, Mr Jablonsky.’

Jablonsky nodded, as though for the moment satisfied, and said no more. I stared at the ground. I didn’t dare to look up. Royale said softly: ‘Let’s be on our way.’

I finished my drink and got up. The heavy library door opened outwards into the passage and Royale, gun in hand, stood to one side to let me pass through first. He should have known better. Or maybe my limp deceived him. People thought my limp slowed me up, but people were wrong.

Valentino had disappeared. I went through the doorway, slowed up and moved to one side round the edge of the door as if I were waiting for Royale to catch up and show me where to go, then whirled round and smashed the sole of my right foot against the door with all the speed and power I could muster.

Royale got nailed neatly between door and jamb. Had it been his head that was caught it would have been curtains. As it was, it caught his shoulders but even so it was enough to make him grunt in agony and send the gun spinning out of his hand to fall a couple of yards down the passage. I dived for it, I scooped it up by the barrel, swung round, still crouched, as I heard the quick step behind me. The butt of the automatic caught the diving Royale somewhere on the face, I couldn’t be sure where, but it sounded like a four-pound axe sinking into the bole of a pine. He was unconscious before he hit me — but he did hit me. An axe won’t stop a falling pine. It took only a couple of seconds to push him off and change my grip to the butt of the pistol, but two seconds would always be enough and more than enough for a man like Jablonsky.

His foot caught my gun-hand and the gun landed twenty feet away. I launched myself for his legs but he moved to one side with the speed of a fly-weight, lifted his knee and sent me crashing against the open door. And then it was too late, for he had the Mauser in his hand and it was pointing between my eyes.

I climbed slowly to my feet, not trying anything. The general and Vyland, the latter with a gun in his hand, came crowding through the open door, then relaxed when they saw Jablonsky with the gun on me. Vyland bent down and helped a now-moaning Royale to a sitting position. Royale had a long, heavily bleeding cut above his left eye and and tomorrow he’d have a duck’s egg bruise there. After maybe half a minute he shook his head to clear it, wiped blood away with the back of his hand and looked slowly round till his eyes found mine. I’d been mistaken. I’d thought his the emptiest, the most expressionless eyes I’d ever seen, but I’d been mistaken. I looked in them and I could almost smell the moist freshly-turned earth of an open grave.

‘I can see that you gents really do need me around,’ Jablonsky said jovially. ‘I never thought anyone would try that stuff with Royale and live to talk about it. But we learn.’ He dug into a side pocket and brought out a set of very slender blued-steel cuffs and slipped them expertly on my wrists. ‘A souvenir of the bad old days,’ he explained apologetically. ‘Would there happen to be another pair and some wire or chain round the house?’

‘It might be arranged,’ Vyland said almost mechanically. He still couldn’t credit what had happened to his infallible hatchet-man.

‘Fine.’ Jablonsky grinned down at Royale. ‘You don’t need to lock your door tonight. I’ll keep Talbot out of your hair.’ Royale transferred his sombre, evil stare from my face to Jablonsky’s and his expression didn’t alter any that I could see. I fancied perhaps Royale was beginning to have ideas about a double grave.

The butler took us upstairs and along a narrow passage to the back of the big house, took a key from his pocket, unlocked the door and ushered us in. It was just another bedroom, sparsely but expensively furnished, with a wash-basin in one corner and a modern mahogany bed in the middle of the right wall. To the left was a communicating door to another bedroom. The butler took a second key from his pocket and unlocked this door also. It gave on to another room, the mirror image of the first, except for the bed, which was an old-fashioned iron-railed effort. It looked as if it had been made with girders left over from the Key West bridge. It looked solid. It looked as if it were going to be my bed.

We went back into the other room. Jablonsky stretched out his hand. ‘The keys, please.’

The butler hesitated, peered uncertainly at him, then shrugged, handed over the keys and turned to leave. Jablonsky said pleasantly: ‘This Mauser I’m holding here, friend — want that I should bounce it off your head two three times?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.’

‘“Sir”, hey? That’s good. I wouldn’t have expected them to have books on buttling in Alcatraz. The other key, my friend. The one leading to the passage from Talbot’s room.’

The butler scowled, handed over a third key, and left. Whatever buttling book he’d read he’d skipped the section on closing doors, but it was a stout door and it stood up to it. Jablonsky grinned, locked the door with an ostentatious click, pulled the curtains, checked rapidly that there were no peep-holes in the walls and crossed back to where I stood. Five or six times he smacked a massive fist into a massive palm, kicked the wall and knocked over an armchair with a thud that shook the room. Then he said, not too softly, not too loudly: ‘Get up when you’re ready, friend. That’s just a little warning, shall we say, not to try any further tricks like you tried on Royale. Just move one finger and you’ll think the Chrysler building fell on top of you.’

I didn’t move a finger. Neither did Jablonsky. There was a complete silence inside the room. We listened hard. The silence in the passageway outside was not complete. With his flat feet and adenoidal, broken-nosed breathing, the butler was completely miscast as the Last of the Mohicans and he was a good twenty feet away by the time the thick carpet absorbed the last of his creaking footfalls.

Jablonsky took out a key, softly opened the handcuffs, pocketed them and shook my hand as if he meant to break every finger I had. I felt like it, too, but for all that my grin was as big, as delighted as his own. We lit cigarettes and started on the two rooms with toothpicks, looking for bugs and listening devices.

The place was loaded with them.

Exactly twenty-four hours later I climbed into the sports car that had been left empty, but with the ignition key in the lock, four hundred yards away from the entrance lodge to the general’s house. It was a Chevrolet Corvette — the same car that I’d stolen the previous afternoon when I’d been holding Mary Ruthven hostage.

The rain yesterday had vanished, completely. The sky had been blue and cloudless all day long — and for me it had been a very long day indeed. Lying fully dressed and handcuffed to the rails of an iron bed for twelve hours while the temperature in a closed-window south-facing room rises to a hundred in the shade — well, the heat and the somnolent inactivity would have been just right for a Galapagos tortoise. It left me as limp as a shot rabbit. They’d kept me there all day, Jablonsky bringing me food and parading me shortly after dinner before the general, Vyland and Royale to let them see how good a watch-dog he was and that I was still relatively intact. Relatively was the word: to increase the effect I’d redoubled my limp and had sticking plaster crossed over cheek and chin.

Royale needed no such adventitious aids to advertise the fact that he had been in the wars. I doubt if they made sticking plaster wide enough to cover the enormous bruise he had on his forehead. His right eye was the same bluish-purple as the bruise, and completely shut. I’d done a good job on Royale: and I knew, for all the empty remote expression that was back in his face and one good eye, that he’d never rest until he’d done a better job on me. A permanent job.

The night air was cool and sweet and full of the smell of the salt air. I had the hood down and as I travelled south I leaned far back and to one side to let the freshness drive away the last of the cobwebs from my dopy mind. It wasn’t just the heat that had made my mind sluggish, I had slept so long during that sticky afternoon that I was overslept and paying for it: but then, I wasn’t going to get much sleep that coming night. Once or twice I thought of Jablonsky, that big black smiling man with the engaging grin, sitting back in his upstairs room diligently and solemnly guarding my empty bedroom with all three keys in his pocket. I felt in my own pocket and they were still there, the duplicates that Jablonsky had had cut that morning when he had taken the air in the direction of Marble Springs. Jablonsky had been busy that morning.

I forgot about Jablonsky. He could take better care of himself than any man I’d ever known. I had enough troubles of my own coming up that night.

The last traces of the brilliant red sunset had just vanished over the wine-dark gulf to the west and the stars were standing clear in the high and windless sky when I saw a green-shaded lantern on the right of the road. I passed it, then a second, then at the third I turned sharp right and ran the Corvette down on to a little stone jetty, switching off my headlights even before I coasted to a standstill beside a tall, bulky man with a tiny pencil flash in his hand.

He took my arm — he had to, I was blind from staring into the glaring white pool of light cast by the Corvette’s headlamps — and led me wordlessly down a flight of wooden steps to a floating landing jetty and across this to a long dark shape that lay rocking gently by the side of the jetty. I was seeing better already, and I managed to grab a stay and jump down into the boat without a helping hand. A squat, short man rose to greet me.

‘Mr Talbot?’

‘Yes. Captain Zaimis, isn’t it?’

‘John.’ The little man chuckled and explained in his lilting accent: ‘My boys would laugh at me. “Captain Zaimis”, they would say. “And how is the Queen Mary or the United States today?” they would say. And so on. The children of today.’ The little man sighed in mock sorrow. ‘Ah, well, I suppose “John” is good enough for the captain of the little Matapan.’

I glanced over his shoulder and had a look at the children. They were, as yet, no more than dark blurs against a slightly less dark skyline, but there was little enough to let me see that they averaged about six feet and were built in proportion. Nor was the Matapan so little: she was at least forty feet long, twin-masted, with curious athwartships and fore-and-aft rails just above the height of a tall man’s head. Both men and vessel were Greek: the crew were Greeks to a man and if the Matapan wasn’t entirely Grecian, she had at least been built by Greek shipwrights who had come to and settled down in Florida just for the express purpose of building those sponge ships. With its slender graceful curves and upswept bows Homer would have had no trouble in identifying it as a direct lineal descendant of the galleys that had roamed the sunlit Aegean and the Levant countless centuries ago. I felt a sudden sense of gratitude and security that I was aboard such a vessel, accompanied by such men.

‘A fine night for the job in hand,’ I said.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’ The humour had left his voice. ‘I don’t think so. It is not the night that John Zaimis would have chosen.’

I didn’t point out that choice didn’t enter into the matter. I said: ‘Too clear, is that it?’

‘Not that.’ He turned away for a moment, gave some orders in what could only have been Greek, and men started moving about the deck, unhitching ropes from the bollards on the landing stage. He turned back to me. ‘Excuse me if I speak to them in our old tongue. Those three boys are not yet six months in this country. My own boys, they will not dive. A hard life, they say, too hard a life. So we have to bring the young men from Greece … I don’t like the weather, Mr Talbot. It is too fine a night.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘Too fine. The air is too still, and the little breeze it comes from the north-west? That is bad. Tonight the sun was a flame in the sky. That is bad. You feel the little waves that are rocking the Matapan? When the weather is good the little waves they slap against the hull every three seconds, maybe four. Tonight?’ He shrugged. ‘Twelve seconds, maybe every fifteen. For forty years I have sailed out of Tarpon Springs. I know the waters here, Mr Talbot, I would be lying if I say any man knows them better. A big storm comes.’

‘A big storm, eh?’ When it came to big storms I didn’t fancy myself very much. ‘Hurricane war ning out?’

‘No.’

‘Do you always get those signs before a hurricane?’ Captain Zaimis wasn’t going to cheer me up, somebody had to try.

‘Not always, Mr Talbot. Once, maybe fifteen years ago, there was a storm warning but none of the signs. Not one. The fishermen from the South Caicos went out. Fifty drowned. But when it is September and the signs are there, then the big storm comes. Every time it comes.’

Nobody was going to cheer me up tonight. ‘When will it come?’ I asked.

‘Eight hours, forty-eight hours, I do not know.’ He pointed due west, the source of the long slow oily swell. ‘But it comes from there … You will find your rubber suit below, Mr Talbot.’

Two hours and thirteen miles later we were uncomfortably nearer that still-distant storm. We had travelled at full speed, but full speed on the Matapan was nothing to write home about. Almost a month ago two civilian engineers, sworn to secrecy, had bypassed the exhaust of the Matapan’s engine to an underwater cylinder with a curiously arranged system of baffle plates. They’d done a fine job, the exhaust level of the Matapan was no more than a throaty whisper, but back pressure had cut the thrust output in half. But it was fast enough. It got there. It got there too fast for me, and the farther out we went into the starlit gulf the longer and deeper became the troughs between the swells, the more convinced I was of the hopelessness of what I had set out to do. But someone had to do it and I was the man who had picked the joker.

There was no moon that night. By and by, even the stars began to go out. Cirrus clouds in long grey sheets began to fill the sky. Then the rain came, not heavy, but cold and penetrating, and John Zaimis gave me a tarpaulin for shelter — there was a cabin on the Matapan, but I had no wish to go below.

I must have dozed off, lulled by the motion of the boat, for the next I knew the rain had stopped spattering on the tarpaulin and someone was shaking my shoulder. It was the skipper, and he was saying softly: ‘There she is, Mr Talbot. The X 13.’

I stood up, using a mast to support myself — the swell was becoming really unpleasant now — and followed the direction of his pointing hand. Not that he needed to point, even at the distance of a mile the X 13 seemed to fill the entire sky.

I looked at it, looked away, then looked back again. It was still there. I’d lost more than most, I didn’t have a great deal to live for, but I did have a little, so I stood there and wished myself ten thousand miles away.

I was scared. If this was the end of the road, I wished to God I’d never set foot on it.