Fear is the Key

SEVEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Jablonsky would never smile again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I only jumped about a foot, then I froze. I suppose I should have stood there with my mind racing but the truth was that with what I had been through that night and with all the inconclusive and futile thinking I’d been doing in the past two hours, my mind was in no condition to walk, far less race. I just stood there. Lot’s wife had nothing on me. For a lifetime of ten seconds not a single intelligent thought came, just an impulse, one single overpowering impulse. To run. But I had no place to run to.

It was Royale, that quiet cold deadly man with the little gun. It was Royale, he was waiting outside that door and the little gun would be in his hand. He knew I was out, all right. He’d checked. He knew I’d be back, because he knew that Jablonsky and I were in cahoots and that I hadn’t gone to such extreme lengths to get myself into that household just to light out at the first opportunity that offered, and he’d guessed that I should have been back by this time. Maybe he’d even seen me coming back. Then why had he waited so long?

I could guess the answer to that one too. He knew I would have been expecting Jablonsky to be there when I returned. He would think that I would have figured that Jablonsky must have gone off on some private expedition of his own and that as I’d locked the door when I came back and left the key there Jablonsky wouldn’t be able to use his own to get in. So he would knock. Softly. And after having waited two hours for my partner’s return I would be so worried stiff by his continuing absence that I would rush to the door when the knock came. And then Royale would let me have one of those cupro-nickel bullets between the eyes. Because if they knew beyond doubt that Jablonsky and I were working together they would also know that I would never do for them what they wanted me to do and so I would be of no further use to them. So, a bullet between the eyes. Just the same way Jablonsky had got his.

And then I thought of Jablonsky, I thought of him lying out there jammed up in that cheap packing case, and I wasn’t afraid any more. I didn’t see that I’d much chance, but I wasn’t afraid. I cat-footed through to Jablonsky’s room, closed my hand round the neck of the whisky bottle, went as silently back into my own room and slid a key into the lock of the door opening on to the passage outside. The bolt slid back without even the whisper of a click and just at that moment the knocking came again, slightly louder this time and more sustained. Under cover of the sound I slid the door open a crack, raised the bottle over my head ready for throwing and stuck my head round the corner of the door.

The passage was only dimly lit by a single weak night-light at the other end of a long corridor, but it was enough. Enough to let me see that the figure in the passage had no gun in its hand. Enough to let me see that it wasn’t Royale. It was Mary Ruthven. I lowered the whisky bottle and stepped back softly into my room.

Five seconds later I was at the door of Jablonsky’s room. I said in my best imitation of Jablonsky’s deep husky voice: ‘Who’s there?’

‘Mary Ruthven. Let me in. Quickly. Please!’

I let her in. Quickly. I had no more desire than she had that she could be seen out in that passage. I kept behind the door as she came through, then closed it swiftly before the pale glimmer of light from outside gave her time to identify me.

‘Mr Jablonsky.’ Her voice was a quick, urgent, breathless, frightened whisper. ‘I had to come to see you, I simply had. I thought I could never get away but Gunther dropped off to sleep and he may wake up at any moment and find that I’m—’

‘Easy, easy,’ I said. I’d lowered my voice to a whisper, it was easier to imitate Jablonsky that way, but even so it was one of the worst imitations I had ever heard. ‘Why come to see me?’

‘Because there was no one else I could turn to. You’re not a killer, you’re not even a crook, I don’t care what they say you’ve done, you’re not bad.’ She was a sharp one, all right, her woman’s insight or intuition or whatever had taken her far beyond what either Vyland or the general could see. ‘You must help me — us — you simply must. We — we are in great trouble.’

‘We?’

‘Daddy and I.’ A pause. ‘I honestly don’t know about my father, I honestly don’t. Perhaps he’s not in trouble. Maybe he’s working with those — those evil men because he wants to. He comes and goes as he pleases. But — but it’s so unlike him. Maybe he has to work with them. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. Perhaps they have power over him, some terrible hold, perhaps—’ I caught the glint of fair hair as she shook her head. ‘He — well, he was always so good and honourable and straight and — and everything, but now—’

‘Easy.’ I interrupted again. I couldn’t keep this deception up much longer, if she hadn’t been so scared, so worried, she’d have caught on right away. ‘Facts, miss, if you please.’

I’d left the electric fire burning in my room, the communicating door was open and I was pretty sure it was only a matter of time till she could see enough of my features to see that I wasn’t Jablonsky — and that red thatch of mine was a dead giveaway. I turned my back to the glow of the fire.

‘How can I begin?’ she said. ‘We seem to have lost all our freedom, or daddy has. Not in moving around, he’s not a prisoner, but we never make decisions for ourselves, or, rather, Daddy makes mine for me and I think he has his made for him too. We’re never allowed to be apart for any time. Daddy says I’m to write no letters unless he sees them, make no phone calls, never go anywhere except when that horrible man Gunther is with me. Even when I go to a friend’s house, like Judge Mollison’s, that creature is there all the time. Daddy says he’s had kidnap threats about me recently. I don’t believe it and if it were true Simon Kennedy — the chauffeur — is far better than Gunther. I never have a private moment to myself. When I’m out on the rig — the X 13 — I’m no prisoner, I just can’t get off, but here my room windows are screwed into the wall and Gunther spends the night in the ante-room watching to see—’

The last three words took a long, long time to come out and trailed off into a shocked silence. In her excitement, her eagerness to unburden herself of all those things that had been worrying her for weeks, she had come close to me. And now her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. She started to shake. Her right hand began to move up slowly towards her mouth, the arm trembling all the time and jerking like the arm of a marionette, her mouth opened and her eyes widened and kept on widening until I could see white all the way round the pupils. And then she drew a long quavering breath. Prelude to a scream.

But the prelude was all that there was to it. In my business, you don’t telegraph your signals. I’d one hand over her mouth and an arm round her before she’d even made up her mind what key to sing in. For several seconds, with surprising strength — or in the circumstances perhaps not so surprising — she struggled furiously, then sagged against me, limp as a shot rabbit. It took me by surprise, I’d thought the day when young ladies had passed out in moments of stress had vanished with the Edwardians. But perhaps I was underestimating the fearsome reputation I appeared to have built up for myself, perhaps I was underestimating the cumulative effect of the shock after a long night of nerving herself to take this last desperate chance, after weeks of endless strain. Whatever the reasons, she wasn’t faking, she was out cold. I lifted her across to the bed, then for some obscure reason I had a revulsion of feeling, I couldn’t bear to have her lie on that bed where Jablonsky had so recently been murdered, so I carried her through to the bed in my own room.

I’ve had a fairly extensive practical first-aid education, but I didn’t know the first thing about bringing young ladies out of swoons. I had a vague feeling that to do anything might be dangerous, a feeling that accorded well enough with my ignorance of what to do, so I came to the conclusion that not only the best thing but the only thing to do was to let her come out of it by herself. But I didn’t want her to come out of it unknown to me and start bringing the house down so I sat on the edge of the bed and kept the flash on her face, the beam just below the eyes so as not to dazzle her.

She wore a blue quilted silk dressing-gown over blue silk pyjamas. Her high-heeled slippers were blue, even the night-ribbon for holding those thick shining braids in place was of exactly the same colour. Her face, just then, was as pale as old ivory. Nothing would ever make it a beautiful face, but then I suppose that if it had been beautiful my heart wouldn’t have chosen that moment to start doing handsprings, the first time it had shown any life at all, far less such extravagant activity, in three long and empty years. Her face seemed to fade and again I could see the fire and the slippers that I’d seen two nights ago and all that stood between us was 285 million dollars and the fact that I was the only man in the world the very sight of whom could make her collapse in terror. I put my dreams away.

She stirred and opened her eyes. I felt that the technique I’d used with Kennedy — telling him that there was a gun behind my torch — might have unfortunate results in this case. So I caught one of the hands that were lying limply on the coverlet, bent forward and said softly, reprovingly: ‘You silly young muggins, why did you go and do a daft thing like that?’

Luck or instinct or both had put me on the right track. Her eyes were wide, but not staring wide, and the fear that still showed there was touched with puzzlement. Murderers of a certain category don’t hold your hand and speak reassuringly. Poisoners, yes: knife-plungers in the back, possibly: but not murderers with my reputation for pure violence.

‘You’re not going to try to scream again, are you?’ I asked.

‘No.’ Her voice was husky. ‘I–I’m sorry I was so stupid—’

‘Right,’ I said briskly. ‘If you’re feeling fit for it, we’ll talk. We have to, and there’s little time.’

‘Can’t you put the light on?’ she begged.

‘No light. Shines through curtains. We don’t want any callers at this time—’

‘There are shutters,’ she interrupted. ‘Wooden shutters. On every window in the house.’

Hawk-eye Talbot, that was me. I’d spent a whole day doing nothing but staring out the window and I’d never even seen them. I rose, closed and fastened the shutters, closed the communicating door to Jablonsky’s room and switched on the light. She was sitting on the side of the bed now, hugging her arms as if she were cold.

‘I’m hurt,’ I announced. ‘You can take one look at Jablonsky and tell right away, or so you think, that he’s not a crook. But the longer you look at me the more convinced you are that I’m a murderer.’ I held up a hand as she was about to speak. ‘Sure, you got reasons. Excellent reasons. But they’re wrong.’ I hitched up a trouser leg and offered for her inspection a foot elegantly covered in a maroon sock and completely plain black shoe. ‘Ever seen those before?’

She looked at them, just for a second, then switched her gaze to my face. ‘Simon’s,’ she whispered. ‘Those are Simon’s.’

‘Your chauffeur.’ I didn’t care much for this Simon business. ‘He gave them to me a couple of hours ago. Of his own free will. It took me five minutes flat to convince him that I am not a murderer and far from what I appear to be. Are you willing to give me the same time?’

She nodded slowly without speaking.

It didn’t even take three minutes. The fact that Kennedy had given me the OK was the battle more than half won as far as she was concerned. But I skipped the bit about finding Jablonsky. She wasn’t ready for any shocks of that nature, not yet.

When I was finished she said, almost unbelievingly: ‘So you knew about us all the time? About Daddy and me and our troubles and—’

‘We’ve known about you for several months. Not specifically about your trouble, though, nor you father’s whatever that may be: all we knew was that General Blair Ruthven was mixed up in something that General Blair Ruthven had no right to be mixed up in. And don’t ask me who “we” are or who I am, because I don’t like refusing to answer questions and it’s for your own sake anyway. What’s your father scared of, Mary?’

‘I–I don’t know. I know he’s frightened of Royale, but—’

‘He’s frightened of Royale. I’m frightened of Royale. We’re all frightened of Royale. I’ll take long odds that Vyland feeds him plenty of stories about Royale to keep him good and scared. But it’s not that. Not primarily. He’s frightened for your sake, too, but my guess is that those fears have only grown since he found out the kind of company he’s keeping. What they’re really like, I mean. I think he went into this with his eyes open and for his own ends, even if he didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. Just how long have Vyland and you father been, shall we way, business associates?’

She thought a bit and she said: ‘I can tell you that exactly. It started when we were on holiday with our yacht, the Temptress, in the West Indies late last April. We’d been in Kingston, Jamaica, when Daddy got word from Mummy’s lawyers that she wanted a legal separation. You may have heard about it,’ she went on miserably. ‘I don’t think there was a paper in North America that missed out on the story and some of them were pretty vicious about it.’

‘You mean the general had been so long held up as the model citizen of the country and their marriage as the ideal family marriage?’

‘Yes, something like that. They made a lovely target for all the yellow Press,’ she said bitterly. ‘I don’t know what came over Mummy, we had all always got on so well together, but it just shows that children never know exactly how things were or are between their parents.’

‘Children?’

‘I was just speaking generally.’ She sounded tired and dispirited and beaten, and she looked that way. And she was, or she would never have talked to a stranger of such things. ‘As it happens, there’s another girl. Jean, my young sister — she’s ten years younger than I am. Daddy married late in life. Jean’s with my mother. It looks as if she’s going to stay with my mother, too. The lawyers are still working things out. There’ll be no divorce, of course.’ She smiled emptily. ‘You don’t know the New England Ruthvens, Mr Talbot, but if you did you’d know that there are certain words missing from their vocabulary. “Divorce” is one of them.’

‘And your father has never made any attempts at reconciliation?’

‘He went up to see her twice. It was no good. She doesn’t — she doesn’t even want to see me. She’s gone away somewhere and apart from Daddy nobody quite knows where. When you have money those things aren’t too difficult to arrange.’ It must have been the mention of the money that sent her thoughts off on a new tack for when she spoke again I could hear those 285 million dollars back in her voice and see the Mayflower in her face. ‘I don’t quite see how all our private family business concerns you, Mr Talbot.’

‘Neither do I,’ I agreed. It was as near as I came to an apology. ‘Maybe I read the yellow Press, too. I’m only interested in it as far as the Vyland tie-up is concerned. It was at this moment that he stepped in?’

‘About then. A week or two later. Daddy was pretty low, I suppose he was willing to listen to any proposal that would take his mind off his troubles, and — and—’

‘And, of course, his business judgement was below par. Although it wouldn’t have to be more than a fraction below to allow friend Vyland to get his foot stuck in the front door. From the cut of his moustache to the way he arranges his display handkerchief Vyland is everything a top-flight industrialist ought to be. He’s read all the books about Wall Street, he hasn’t missed his Saturday night at the cinema for years, he’s got every last littlest trick off to perfection. I don’t suppose Royale appeared on the scene until later?’

She nodded dumbly. She looked to me to be pretty close to tears. Tears can touch me, but not when I’m pushed for time. And I was desperately short of time now. I switched off the light, went to the window, pulled back one of the shutters and stared out. The wind was stronger than ever, the rain lashed against the glass and sent the water streaming down the pane in little hurrying rivers. But, more important still, the darkness in the east was lightening into grey, the dawn was in the sky. I turned away, closed the shutter, switched on the light and looked down at the weary girl.

‘Think they’ll be able to fly the helicopter out to the X 13 today?’ I asked.

‘Choppers can fly in practically any weather.’ She stirred. ‘Who says anybody’s flying out there today?’

‘I do,’ I didn’t elaborate. ‘Now, perhaps, you’ll tell me the truth of why you came here to see Jablonsky?’

‘Tell you the truth—’

‘You said he had a kind face. Maybe he has, maybe he hasn’t, but as a reason it’s rubbish.’

‘I see. I’m not holding anything back, honestly I’m not. It’s just that I’m so — so worried. I overheard something about him that made me think—’

‘Get to the point,’ I said roughly.

‘You know the library’s wired, I mean they’ve got listening devices plugged in—’

‘I’ve heard of them,’ I said patiently. ‘I don’t need a diagram.’

Colour touched the pale cheeks. ‘I’m sorry. Well, I was next door in the office where the earphones are and I don’t know why I just put them on.’ I grinned: the idea of the biter bit appealed. ‘Vyland and Royale were in the library. They were talking about Jablonsky.’

I wasn’t grinning any more.

‘They had him tailed this morning when he went into Marble Springs. It seems he went into a hardware store, why, they don’t know.’ I could have filled that part in: he’d gone to buy a rope, have duplicate keys cut and do quite a bit of telephoning. ‘It seems he was there half an hour without coming out, then the tail went in after him. Jablonsky came out, but his shadower didn’t. He’d disappeared.’ She smiled faintly. ‘It seems that Jablonsky must have attended to him.’

I didn’t smile. I said quietly: ‘How do they know this? The tail hasn’t turned up, has he?’

‘They had three tails on Jablonsky. He didn’t catch on to the other two.’

I nodded wearily. ‘And then?’

‘Jablonsky went to the post office. I saw him going in myself when we — Daddy and I — were on our way to tell the police the story Daddy insisted I tell, about how you’d dumped me and I’d thumbed a lift home. Well, it seems Jablonsky picked up a pad of telegraph forms, went into the booth, wrote out and sent off a message. One of Vyland’s men waited till he’d left then got the pad and took off the top message sheet — the one under the sheet Jablonsky had written on — and brought it back here. From what I could hear Vyland seemed to be working on this with some powder and lamps.’

So even Jablonsky could slip up. But in his place I would have done the same. Exactly the same. I would have assumed that if I’d disposed of a shadower that would be the lot. Vyland was clever, maybe he was going to be too clever for me. I said to the girl: ‘Hear anything more?’

‘A little, not much. I gather they made out most of what was written on the form, but they couldn’t understand it, I think it must have been in code.’ She broke off, wet her lips then went on gravely: ‘But the address was in plain language, of course.’

‘Of course.’ I crossed the room and stared down at her. I knew the answer to my next question, but I had to ask her. ‘And the address?’

‘A Mr J. C. Curtin, Federal Bureau of Investigation. That — that was really why I came. I knew I had to warn Mr Jablonsky. I didn’t hear any more, somebody came along the passage and I slipped out a side door, but I think he’s in danger. I think he’s in great danger, Mr Talbot.’

For the past fifteen minutes I’d been looking for a way to break the news to her, but now I gave up.

‘You’re too late.’ I hadn’t meant my voice to sound harsh and cold but that’s the way it sounded. ‘Jablonsky’s dead. Murdered.’

They came for me at eight o’clock next morning, Royale and Valentino.

I was fully dressed except for my coat and I was fastened to the bed-head by a single set of handcuffs — I’d thrown the key away together with Jablonsky’s three duplicate keys after I’d locked all the doors.

There was no reason why they should search me and I hoped as I never hoped before that they wouldn’t. After Mary had left, tear-stained, forlorn and having unwillingly promised me that no word of what had passed should be repeated to anyone, not even her father, I’d sat down and thought. All my thinking so far had been in a never-ending circle and I’d got so deep in the rut that I could hardly see daylight any more and just when my mental processes had been about to vanish completely into the darkness I’d had the first illuminating flash, in the dark gloom of my thinking a blindingly bright flash of intuition or common sense, that I’d had since I’d come to that house. I’d thought about it for another half-hour, then I’d got a sheet of thin paper and written a long message on one side, folded it twice until it was only a couple of inches wide, sealed it with tape and addressed it to Judge Mollison at his home address. Then I’d folded it in half lengthwise, slid it over the neck-band of my tie and turned my collar down over it until it was completely hidden. When they came for me I’d had less than an hour in bed and I hadn’t slept at all.

But I pretended to be sound asleep when they came in. Somebody shook me roughly by the shoulder. I ignored it. He shook me again. I stirred. He gave up the shaking as unprofitable and used the back of his hand across my face, not lightly. Enough was enough. I groaned, blinked my eyes painfully and propped myself up in bed, rubbing my forehead with my free hand.

‘On your feet, Talbot.’ Apart from the upper left-hand side of his face, a miniature sunset viewed through an indigo haze, Royale looked calm and smooth as ever, and fully rested: another dead man on his conscience wasn’t going to rob him of much sleep. Valentino’s arm, I was glad to see, was still in a sling: that was going to make my task of turning him into an ex-bodyguard all the easier.

‘On your feet,’ Royale repeated. ‘How come only one handcuff?’

‘Eh?’ I shook my head from side to side and made a great play of being dazed and half-doped. ‘What in hell’s name did I have for dinner last night?’

‘Dinner?’ Royale smiled his pale quiet smile. ‘You and your gaoler emptied that bottle between you. That’s what you had for dinner.’

I nodded slowly. He was on safe ground as far as he knew his ground; if I’d been doped I’d have only the haziest recollection of what had happened immediately before I’d passed out. I scowled at him and nodded at the handcuffs: ‘Unlock this damn thing, will you?’

‘Why only one cuff?’ Royale repeated gently.

‘What does it matter if it’s one cuff or twenty,’ I said irritably. ‘I can’t remember. I seem to think Jablonsky shoved me in here in a great hurry and could only find one. I think perhaps he didn’t feel too good either.’ I buried my face in my hands and drew them down hard as if to clear my head and eyes. Between my fingers I glimpsed Royale’s slow nod of understanding and I knew I had it made: it was exactly what Jablonsky would have done; he’d have felt something coming over him and rushed in to secure me before he collapsed.

The cuff was unlocked and on the way through Jablonsky’s room I glanced casually at the table. The whisky bottle was still there. Empty. Royale — or Vyland — didn’t miss much.

We went out into the passage with Royale leading and Valentino bringing up the rear. I shortened my step abruptly and Valentino dug his gun into the small of my back. Nothing Valentino would do would ever be gently, but, for him, it was a comparatively gentle prod and my sharp exclamation of pain might have been justified if it had been about ten times as hard. I stopped in my tracks, Valentino bumped into me and Royale swung round. He’d done his conjuring act again and his deadly little toy gun was sitting snugly in the palm of his hand.

‘What gives?’ he asked coldly. No inflection, not the slightest raising of the pitch of voice. I hoped I lived to see the day when Royale was good and worried.

‘This gives,’ I said tightly. ‘Keep your trained ape out of my hair, Royale, or I’ll take him apart. Gun or no guns.’

‘Lay off him, Gunther,’ Royale said quietly.

‘Jeez, boss, I didn’t hardly touch him.’ Discounting the anthropoid brow, broken nose, pock-marks and scars, there wasn’t much room left on Valentino’s face for the shift and play of expression, but what little area remained appeared to indicate astonishment and a sharp sense of injustice. ‘I just gave him a little tap—’

‘Sure, I know.’ Royale had already turned and was on his way. ‘Just lay off him.’

Royale reached the head of the stairs first and was half a dozen steps down by the time I got there. Again I slowed abruptly, again Valentino bumped into me. I swung round, chopped the side of my hand against his gun-wrist and knocked the automatic to the ground. Valentino dived to pick it up with his left hand then roared in anguish as the heel of my right shoe stamped down and crushed his fingers between leather and metal. I didn’t hear any bones break, but nothing so drastic was necessary — with both his hands out of commission Mary Ruthven was going to need a new bodyguard.

I made no attempt to stoop and pick up the gun. I made no attempt to move. I could hear Royale coming slowly up the stairs.

‘Move well back from that gun,’ he ordered. ‘Both of you.’

We moved. Royale picked up the gun, stood to one side and waved me down the stairs in front of him. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking; for all the expression on his face he might just as well have been watching a leaf falling. He said nothing more, he didn’t even bother to glance at Valentino’s hand.

They were waiting for us in the library, the general, Vyland and Larry the junky. The general’s expression, as usual, was hidden behind moustache and beard but there was a tinge of blood to his eyes and he seemed greyer than thirty-six hours ago: maybe it was just my imagination, everything looked bad to me that morning. Vyland was urbane and polished and smiling and tough as ever, freshly shaven, eyes clear, dressed in a beautifully cut charcoal-grey suit, white soft shirt and red tie. He was a dream. Larry was just Larry, white-faced, with the junky’s staring eyes, pacing up and down behind the desk. But he didn’t look quite so jerky as usual; he too, was smiling, so I concluded that he’d had a good breakfast, chiefly of heroin.

‘Morning, Talbot.’ It was Vyland speaking; the big-time crooks today find it just as easy to be civil to you as to snarl and beat you over the head and it pays off better. ‘What was the noise, Royale?’

‘Gunther.’ Royale nodded indifferently at Valentino, who had just come in, left hand tucked tightly under his disabled right arm and moaning in pain. ‘He rode Talbot too hard and Talbot didn’t like it.’

‘Go off and make a noise somewhere else,’ Vyland said coldly. The Good Samaritan touch. ‘Feeling tough and tetchy this morning, hey, Talbot?’ There was no longer even an attempt at keeping up the pretence that the general was the boss, or even had an equal say in what went on in his own house: he just stood quietly in the background, remote and dignified and in some way tragic. But maybe the tragedy was only in my own mind; I could be guessing wrongly about the general. I could be terribly wrong about him. Fatally wrong.

‘Where’s Jablonsky?’ I demanded.

‘Jablonsky?’ Vyland raised a lazy eyebrow: George Raft couldn’t have done it any better. ‘What’s Jablonsky to you, Talbot?’

‘My gaoler,’ I said briefly. ‘Where is he?’

‘You appear very anxious to know, Talbot?’ He looked at me long and consideringly and I didn’t like it at all. ‘I’ve seen you before, Talbot. So has the general. I wish I could remember who it is you remind me of.’

‘Donald Duck.’ This was perilous ground indeed. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s left. Lammed out. With his seventy thousand bucks.’

‘Lammed out’ was a slip, but I let it pass. ‘Where is he?’

‘You are becoming boringly repetitious, my friend.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Larry, the cables.’

Larry picked up some papers from the desk, handed them to Vyland, grinned at me wolfishly and resumed his pacing.

‘The general and I are very careful people, Talbot,’ Vyland went on. ‘Some people might say highly suspicious. Same thing. We checked up on you. We checked in England, Holland and Venezuela.’ He waved the papers. ‘These came in this morning. They say you’re all you claim to be, one of Europe’s top salvage experts. So now we can go ahead and use you. So now we don’t need Jablonsky any more. So we let him go this morning. With his cheque. He said he fancied a trip to Europe.’

Vyland was quiet, convincing, utterly sincere and could have talked his way past St Peter. I looked as I thought St Peter might have looked as he was in the process of being convinced, then I said a lot of things St Peter would never have said and finished up by snarling: ‘The dirty lying double-crosser!’

‘Jablonsky?’ Again the George Raft touch with the eyebrows.

‘Yes, Jablonsky. To think that I listened to that lying two-timer. To think I even spent five seconds listening to him. He promised me—’

‘Well, what did he promise you?’ Vyland asked softly.

‘No harm now,’ I scowled. ‘He reckoned I was for the high jump here — and he reckoned that the charges that had had him dismissed from the New York police had been rigged. He thinks — or said he thought — he could prove it, if he was given the chance to investigate certain policemen and certain police files.’ I swore again. ‘And to think that I believed—’

‘You’re wandering, Talbot,’ Vyland interrupted sharply. He was watching me very closely indeed. ‘Get on.’

‘He thought he could buy this chance — and at the same time have me help him while he helped me. He spent a couple of hours in our room trying to remember an old federal code and then he wrote a telegram to some agency offering to supply some very interesting information about General Ruthven in exchange for a chance to examine certain files. And I was mug enough to think he meant it!’

‘You don’t by any chance happen to remember the name of the man to whom this telegram was addressed?’

‘No. I forget.’

‘You better remember, Talbot. You may be buying yourself something very important to you — your life.’

I looked at him without expression, then stared at the floor. Finally I said without looking up: ‘Catin, Cartin, Curtin — yes, that was it. Curtin. J. C. Curtin.’

‘And all he offered was to give information if his own conditions were met. Is that it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Talbot, you’ve just bought yourself your life.’

Sure, I’d bought myself my life. I noticed Vyland didn’t specify how long I would be allowed to hang on to my purchase. Twenty-four hours, if that. It all depended how the job went. But I didn’t care. The satisfaction it had given me to stamp on Valentino’s hand upstairs was nothing compared to the glow I felt now. They’d fallen for my story, they’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker. In the circumstances, with the cards dealt the right way, it had been inevitable that they should. And I’d dealt my cards just right. Judged from the standpoint of their limited awareness of the extent of my knowledge, it would have been impossible for me to have concocted such a story. They didn’t and couldn’t know that I knew Jablonsky to be dead, that they had him tailed yesterday and deciphered the telegram’s address: for they didn’t know that I had been in the kitchen garden during the previous night, that Mary had overheard their conversation in the library and that she had been to see me. Had they thought I had been an accomplice of Jablonsky’s throughout, they’d have shot me out of hand. As it was, they wouldn’t shoot me for some time yet. Not a long time. But perhaps long enough.

I saw Vyland and Royale exchange glances, a mere flicker, and the faint shrug of Vyland’s shoulders. They were tough all right, those two, tough and cool and ruthless and calculating and dangerous. For the past twelve hours they must have lived with the knowledge or the possibility that Federal agents would be around their necks any moment but they had shown no awareness of pressure, no signs of strain. I wondered what they would have thought, how they would have reacted, had they known that Federal agents could have been on to them all of three months ago. But the time had not then been ripe. Nor was it yet.

‘Well, gentlemen, is there any need for further delay?’ It was the first time the general had spoken, and for all his calmness there was a harsh burred edge of strain beneath. ‘Let’s get it over with. The weather is deteriorating rapidly and there’s a hurricane warning out. We should leave as soon as possible.’

He was right about the weather, except in the tense he used. It had deteriorated. Period. The wind was no longer a moan, it was a high sustained keening howl through the swaying oaks, accompanied by intermittent squally showers of brief duration but extraordinary intensity. There was much low cloud in the sky, steadily thickening. I’d glanced at the barometer in the hall, and it was creeping down towards 27, which promised something very unpleasant indeed. Whether the centre of the storm was going to hit or pass by us I didn’t know: but if we stood in its path we’d have it in less than twelve hours. Probably much less.

‘We’re just leaving, General. Everything’s set. Petersen is waiting for us down in the bay.’ Petersen, I guessed, would be the helicopter pilot. ‘A couple of fast trips and we should all be out there in an hour or so. Then Talbot here can get to work.’

‘All?’ asked the general. ‘Who?’

‘Yourself, myself, Royale, Talbot, Larry and, of course, your daughter.’

‘Mary. Is it necessary?’

Vyland said nothing, he didn’t even use the eyebrow routine again, he just looked steadily at the general. Five seconds, perhaps more, then the general’s hands unclenched and his shoulders drooped a fraction of an inch. Picture without words.

There came the quick light tap of feminine footsteps from the passage inside and Mary Ruthven walked in through the open door. She was dressed in a lime-coloured two-piece costume with an open-necked green blouse beneath. She had shadows under her eyes, she looked pale and tired and I thought she was wonderful. Kennedy was behind her, but he remained respectfully in the passage, hat in hand, a rhapsody of maroon and shining high leather boots, his face set in the remote unseeing, unhearing expression of the perfectly trained family chauffeur. I started to move aimlessly towards the door, waiting for Mary to do what I’d told her less than two hours previously, just before she’d gone back to her own room.

‘I’m going in to Marble Springs with Kennedy, Father,’ Mary began without preamble. It was phrased as a statement of fact, but was in effect a request for permission.

‘But — well, we’re going to the rig, my dear,’ her father said unhappily. ‘You said last night—’

‘I’m coming,’ she said with a touch of impatience. ‘But we can’t all go to once. I’ll come on the second trip. We won’t be more than twenty minutes. Do you mind, Mr Vyland?’ she asked sweetly.

‘I’m afraid it’s rather difficult, Miss Ruthven,’ Vyland said urbanely. ‘You see, Gunther has hurt himself—’

‘Good!’

He worked his eyebrow again. ‘Not so good for you, Miss Ruthven. You know how your father likes you to have protection when—’

‘Kennedy used to be all the protection I ever needed,’ she said coldly. ‘He still is. What is more, I’m not going out to the rig with you and Royale and that — that creature there’ — she left no doubt but that she meant Larry — ‘unless Kennedy comes with me. And that’s final. And I must go into Marble Springs. Now.’

I wondered when anyone had last talked to Vyland like that. But the veneer never even cracked.

‘Why must you, Miss Ruthven?’

‘There are some questions a gentleman never asks,’ she said icily.

That floored him. He didn’t know what she meant, the same as I wouldn’t have known what she meant, and the net result was to leave him stranded. Every eye in the room was on the two of them, except mine: mine were on Kennedy’s and his were on mine. I was near the door now, with my back turned to the company. It had been easy to slip out the piece of paper from under my collar and now I held it against my chest so that he could see Judge Mollison’s name on it. His expression didn’t alter and it would have taken a micrometer to measure his nod. But he was with me. Everything was fine — but for the chance that Royale might get me with a snapshot before I cleared the doorway.

And it was Royale who broke the tension in the room, giving Vyland an easy out. ‘I’d like some fresh air, Mr Vyland. I could go along with them for the ride.’

I went out through that doorway the way a torpedo leaves its tube. Kennedy had his arm outstretched and I caught it: we crashed heavily to the floor and went rolling along the passageway together. Inside the first two seconds I had the letter stuck deep inside his tunic and we were still threshing about and belabouring each other on the shoulders and back and everywhere it didn’t hurt very much when we heard the unmistakable flat click of a safety catch.

‘Break it up, you two.’

We broke it up and I got to my feet under the steady menace of Royale’s gun. Larry, too, was hopping around in the background, waving a revolver in his hand: had I been Vyland I wouldn’t even have let him have a catapult in his hand.

‘That was a good job of work, Kennedy,’ Vyland was saying warmly. ‘I won’t forget it.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Kennedy said woodenly. ‘I don’t like killers.’

‘Neither do I, my boy, neither do I,’ Vyland said approvingly. He only employed them himself because he wanted to rehabilitate them. ‘Very well, Miss Ruthven. Mr Royale will go along. But be as quick as you can.’

She swept by without a word to him or a glance at me. Her head was high. I still thought she was wonderful.