Fear is the Key (15 page)

‘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.'