Fear is the Key (13 page)

But I had to go and get a spade and start
investigating some time, and no better time than
now. The rain was torrential, the night as dark
as the tomb. In those conditions it was unlikely
that Royale would return though I would have
put nothing past that cunning and devious mind,
but even if he did he would have been exposed
to the bright lights inside and it would take him
ten minutes, at least, to re-adapt his eyes to that
almost total darkness before he would dare move
around again. That he wouldn't move around with
a torch was certain: if he thought there was still
an intruder in the grounds, then he thought that
intruder had seen the digging operations but had
still made no move: and if he thought there was
such a man, then he would assume him to be a
careful and dangerous man to move in search of
whom with a lighted torch in hand would be to
ask for a bullet in the back. For Royale was not to
know that the intruder had no gun.

I thought ten minutes would be enough to find
out what I wanted, both because any burial of anything
in a garden was bound to be temporary and
because neither Larry nor the butler had struck
me as people who would derive any pleasure from
using a spade or who would dig an inch deeper
than was absolutely necessary. I was right. I found
a spade in the tool shed, located the freshly-raked
earth with a pin-point of light from my pencil flash,
and from the time I had passed through the wicker
gate till I had cleared off the two or three inches of
earth that covered some kind of white pine packing
case, no more than five minutes had elapsed.

The packing case was lying at a slight angle in
the ground and so heavy was the rain drumming
down on my bent back and on top of the case
that within a minute the lid of the case had been
washed white and clean and free from the last
stain of earth, the muddy water draining off to
one side. I flashed the torch cautiously: no name,
no marks, nothing to give any indication of the
contents.

The case had a wood and rope handle at each
end. I grabbed one of those, got both hands round
it and heaved, but the case was over five feet
long and seemed to be filled with bricks: even
so I might have managed to move it, but the
earth around the hole was so waterlogged and
soft that my heels just gouged through it and into
the hole itself.

I took my torch again, hooded it till the light
it cast was smaller than a penny, and started
quartering the surface of the packing case. No
metal clasps. No heavy screws. As far as I could
see, the only fastenings holding down the lid were
a couple of nails at either end. I lifted the spade,
dug a corner under one end of the lid. The nails
creaked and squealed in protest as I forced them
out of the wood, but I went on anyway and sprung
the end of the lid clear. I lifted it a couple of feet
and shone my flash inside.

Even in death Jablonsky was still smiling. The
grin was lopsided and crooked, the way they
had had to make Jablonsky himself lopsided and
crooked in order to force him inside the narrow
confines of that case, but it was still a smile. His face
was calm and peaceful, and with the end of a pencil
you could have covered that tiny hole between his
eyes. It was the kind of hole that would have been
made by the cupro-nickel jacketed bullet from a
.22 automatic.
Twice that night, out on the gulf, I had thought
of Jablonsky sleeping peacefully. He'd been asleep
all right. He'd been asleep for hours, his skin was
cold as marble.

I didn't bother going through the pockets of
the dead man, Royale and Vyland would have
done that already. Besides, I knew that Jablonsky
had carried nothing incriminating on his person,
nothing that could have pointed to the true reason
for his presence there, nothing that could have put
the finger on me.

I wiped the rain off the dead face, lowered
the lid and hammered the nails softly home with the
handle of the spade. I'd opened a hole in the
ground and now I closed a grave. It was well for
Royale that I did not meet him then.

I returned spade and rake to the tool shed and
left the kitchen garden.

There were no lights at the back of the entrance
lodge. I found one door and two ground-level
windows – it was a single-storey building – and
they were all locked. They would be. In that place
everything would be locked, always.

But the garage wasn't. Nobody was going to be
so crazy as to make off with a couple of Rolls-
Royces, even if they could have got past the electrically
operated gate, which they couldn't. The
garage was fit match for the cars: the tool bench
and equipment were the do-it-yourself devotee's
dream.

I ruined a couple of perfectly good wood chisels,
but I had the catch slipped on one of the windows
in a minute flat. It didn't seem likely that they
had burglar alarms fitted to a lodge, especially as
there hadn't even been an attempt made to fit
half-circle thief-proof sash latches. But I took no
chances, pulled the top window down and climbed
in over it. When wiring a window the usual idea
is to assume that the sneak-thief who breaks and
enters is a slave to habit who pushes up the lower
sash and crawls in under, apart from which the
average electrician finds it much kinder on the
shoulder muscles to wire at waist level instead
of above the head. And in this case, I found, an
average electrician had indeed been at work. The
lodge was wired.

I didn't drop down on top of any startled sleeper
in a bedroom or knock over a row of pots and
pans in the kitchen for the sufficient reason that
I'd picked a room with frosted windows and it
seemed a fair bet that that might be the bathroom.
And so it was.

Out in the passageway I flicked my pencil light
up and down. The lodge had been designed – if
that was the word – with simplicity. The passage
directly joined the back and front doors. Two small
rooms opened off either side of the passage: that
was all.

The room at the back opposite the bathroom
proved to be the kitchen. Nothing there. I moved
up the small passageway as softly as the squelching
of my shoes would permit, picked the door on the
left, turned the handle with millimetric caution
and moved soundlessly inside.

This was it. I closed the door behind me and
moved softly in the direction of the deep regular
breathing by the left hand wall. When I was about
four feet away I switched on my pencil flash and
shone it straight on the sleeper's closed eyes.

He didn't remain sleeping long, not with that
concentrated beam on him. He woke as at the
touch of a switch and half sat up in bed, propped
on an elbow while a free hand tried to shade his
dazzled eyes. I noticed that even when woken in
the middle of the night he looked as if he'd just
brushed that gleaming black hair ten seconds previously:
I always woke up with mine looking like
a half-dried mop, a replica of the current feminine
urchin cut, the one achieved by a short-sighted
lunatic armed with garden shears.

He didn't try anything. He looked a tough,
capable, sensible fellow who knew when and
when not to try anything, and he knew that now
was not the time. Not when he was almost blind.

‘There's a .32 behind this flash, Kennedy,' I said.
‘Where's your gun?'

‘What gun?' He didn't sound scared because he
wasn't.

‘Get up,' I ordered. The pyjamas, I was glad to
see, weren't maroon. I might have picked them
myself. ‘Move over to the door.'

He moved. I reached under his pillow.

‘This gun,' I said. A small grey automatic. I
didn't know the make. ‘Back to your bed and
sit on it.'

Torch transferred to my left hand and the gun
in the right, I made a quick sweep of the room.
Only one window, with deep velvet wine curtains
closed right across. I went to the door, switched
on the overhead light, glanced down at the gun
and slipped off the safety catch. The click was
loud, precise and sounded as if it meant business.
Kennedy said: ‘So you hadn't a gun.'

‘I've got one now.'

‘It's not loaded, friend.'

‘Don't tell me,' I said wearily. ‘You keep it under
your pillow just so you can get oil stains all over
the sheets? If this gun was empty you'd be at me
like the Chatanooga Express. Whatever that is.'

I looked over the room. A friendly, masculine
place, bare but comfortable, with a good carpet,
not in the corn-belt class of the one in the general's
library, a couple of armchairs, a damask-covered
table, small settee and glassed-in wall cupboard. I
crossed over to the cupboard, opened it and took
out a bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses.
I looked at Kennedy. ‘With your permission, of
course.'

‘Funny man,' he said coldly.

I went ahead and poured myself a drink anyway.
A big one. I needed it. It tasted just the way it
ought to taste and all too seldom does. I watched
Kennedy and he watched me.

‘Who are you, friend?' he asked.

I'd forgotten that only about two inches of my
face was visible. I turned down the collar of my
oilskin and overcoat and took off my hat. My hat
had become no better than a sponge, my hair was
wet and plastered all over my head but for all that I
don't suppose it was any less red than normal. The
tightening of Kennedy's mouth, the suddenly still
expressionless eyes told their own story.

‘Talbot,' he said slowly. ‘John Talbot. The
killer.'

‘That's me,' I agreed. ‘The killer.'

He sat very still, watching me. I suppose a
dozen different thoughts must have been running
through his mind, but none of them showed, he
had as much expression in his face as a wooden
Indian. But the brown intelligent eyes gave him
away: he could not quite mask the hostility, the
cold anger that showed in their depths.

‘What do you want, Talbot? What are you doing
here?'

‘You mean, why am I not high-tailing it for the
tall timber?'

‘Why have you come back? They've had you
locked up in the house, God knows why, since
Tuesday evening. You've escaped, but you didn't
have to mow anyone down to escape or I would
have heard of it. They probably don't even know
you've been away or I'd have heard of that too. But
you've been away. You've been out in a boat, I can
smell the sea off you and that's a seaman's oilskin
you've got on. You've been out for a long time,
you couldn't be any wetter if you'd stood under
a waterfall for half an hour. And then you came
back. A killer, a wanted man. The whole set-up is
screwy as hell.'

‘Screwy as hell,' I agreed. The whisky was good,
I was beginning to feel half-human for the first
time in hours. A smart boy, this chauffeur, a boy
who thought on his feet and thought fast. I went
on: ‘Almost as screwy a set-up as this weird bunch
you're working for in this place.'

He said nothing, and I didn't see why he should.
In his place I don't think I would have passed the
time of day by discussing my employers with a
passing murderer. I tried again.

‘The general's daughter,' Miss Mary. She's pretty
much of a tramp, isn't she?'

That got him. He was off the bed, eyes mad, fists
balled into hard knots and was halfway towards me
before he remembered the gun pointing straight at
his chest. He said softly: ‘I'd love you to say that
again, Talbot – without that gun in your hand.'

‘That's better,' I said approvingly. ‘Signs of life
at last. Committing yourself to a definite opinion,
you know the old saw about actions speaking
louder than words. If I'd just asked you what
Mary Ruthven was like you'd just have clammed
up or told me go jump in the lake. I don't think
she's a tramp either. I know she's not. I think she's
a nice kid, a very fine girl indeed.'

‘Sure you do.' His voice was bitter, but I could
see the first shadows of puzzlement touching his
eyes. ‘That's why you scared the life out of her that
afternoon.'

‘I'm sorry about that, sincerely sorry. But I had
to do it, Kennedy, although not for the reasons
that you or any of that murderous bunch up at
the big house think.' I downed what was left of
my whisky, looked at him for a long speculative
moment, then tossed the gun across to him. ‘Suppose
we talk?'

It took him by surprise but he was quick, very
quick. He fielded the gun neatly, looked at it,
looked at me, hesitated, shrugged then smiled
faintly. ‘I don't suppose another couple of oil stains
will do those sheets any harm.' He thrust the gun
under the pillow, crossed to the table, poured
himself a drink, filled up my glass and stood there
waiting.

‘I'm not taking the chance you might think I
am,' I began. ‘I heard Vyland trying to persuade
the general and Mary to get rid of you. I gathered
you were a potential danger to Vyland and the
general and others I may not know of. From that
I gathered you're not on the inside of what's going
on. And you're bound to know there's something
very strange indeed going on.'

He nodded. ‘I'm only the chauffeur. And what
did they say to Vyland?' From the way he spoke
the name I gathered he regarded Vyland with
something less than affection.

‘They stuck in their heels and refused point-
blank.'

He was pleased at that. He tried not to show it,
but he was.

‘It seems you did the Ruthven family a great
service not so long ago,' I went on. ‘Shot up a
couple of thugs who tried to kidnap Mary.'

‘I was lucky.' Where speed and violence were
concerned, I guess, he'd always be lucky. ‘I'm primarily
a bodyguard, not a chauffeur. Miss Mary's
a tempting bait for every hoodlum in the country
who fancies a quick million. But I'm not the bodyguard
any longer,' he ended abruptly.