Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

I walked as old Broken-nose, the butler, had fancied he walked when he crept away from our bedroom door after leaving Jablonsky and myself there. I had the advantages of normal arches to my feet and no adenoids worth talking about. I walked with both arms outstretched before me, and it wasn’t until my face collided with a tree trunk that I learned not to walk with my arms outspread as well as outstretched. I couldn’t do anything about the dripping clammy Spanish moss that kept wrapping itself about my face but I could do something about the hundreds of twigs and broken branches that littered the ground. I didn’t walk, I shuffled. I didn’t lift my feet, I slid each one forward slowly and carefully, brushing aside whatever lay in my path, and not allowing any weight to come on the leading foot until I had made good and certain that there was nothing under that foot that would snap or creak when my weight was transferred to it. Although I do say it, I was pretty silent.

It was as well that I was. Ten minutes after leaving the fence, when I was seriously beginning to wonder whether I had angled off in the wrong direction, suddenly, through the trees and the curtain of rain dripping steadily from the oaks, I thought I saw a tiny glimmer of light. A flicker, then gone. I might have imagined it, but I don’t have that kind of imagination. I knew I didn’t, so I slowed down still more, pulling my hat-brim down and coat collar up so that no faintest sheen of paleness might betray my face. You couldn’t have heard the rustle of my heavy oilskin three feet away.

I cursed the Spanish moss. It wrapped its long clammy tendrils round my face, it made me blink and shut my eyes at the very moments when shutting my eyes might have been the last thing I ever did, and it obscured my vision to a degree where I felt like dropping to my hands and knees and crawling forward on all fours. I might even have done that, but I knew the crackling of the oilskin would give me away.

Then I saw the glimmer of light again. It was thirty feet away, no more, and it wasn’t pointing in my direction, it was illuminating something on the ground. I took a couple of quick smooth steps forward, wanting to pinpoint the light source, and see the reason for its use, and then I discovered that my navigational sense in the darkness had been completely accurate. The kitchen garden was surrounded by a wire-netted wooden fence and halfway through my second step I walked right into it. The top rail cracked like the door to an abandoned dungeon.

There came a sudden exclamation, the dousing of the light, a brief silence and then the torch flicked on again, the beam no longer pointing at the ground but reaching out for and searching the perimeter of the kitchen garden. Whoever held the torch was as nervous as a kitten, because whoever held the torch had more than a vague idea where the sound had come from and a steady careful sweep would have picked me up in three seconds. As it was the search consisted of a series of jittery probings and jerkings of the beam and I’d time to take a long smooth step backwards. Just one: there was no time for more. As far as it is possible to melt into a neighbouring oak tree, I melted into a neighbouring oak tree, I pressed against it as if I were trying to push it over and wished as I had never wished before: I wished I had a gun.

‘Give me that flash.’ The cold quiet voice was unmistakably Royale’s. The torch beam wavered, steadied, then shone down on the ground again. ‘Get on with it. Now!’

‘But I heard something, Mr Royale!’ It was Larry, his voice a high-pitched jittery whisper. ‘Over there! I know I did.’

‘Yeah, me too. It’s all right.’ With a voice like Royale’s, with a voice with as much warmth in it as a champagne bucket, it was difficult to sound soothing, but he was doing his best. ‘Woods are full of those noises in the dark. Hot day, cold rain at night, contraction, then all sorts of noises. Now hurry it up. Want to stay out in this damned rain all night?’

‘Look, Mr Royale.’ The whisper was more than earnest now, it was desperate. ‘I didn’t make a mistake, honest, I didn’t! I heard–’

‘Missed out on your shot of the white stuff, tonight?’ Royale interrupted cruelly. The strain of even a moment’s kindness had been too much for him. ‘God, why did I have to be saddled with a junky like you. Shut up and work.’

Larry shut up. I wondered about what Royale had said, because I’d been wondering about it ever since I saw Larry. His behaviour, the fact that he was allowed to associate with Vyland and the general, the liberties he was permitted, above all his very presence there. Big criminal organizations working for big stakes – and if this bunch weren’t working for big stakes I couldn’t imagine who were – usually picked the members of their organization with as much care and forethought as a big corporation picks its top executives. More. A careless slip-up, a moment’s indiscretion on the part of an executive won’t ruin a big corporation but it can destroy a criminal set-up. Big crime is big business, and big criminals are big businessmen, running their illegal activities with all the meticulous care and administrative precision of their more law-abiding colleagues. If, most reluctantly, it was found necessary to remove rivals or such as offered menace to their security, the removal was entrusted to quiet polite people like Royale. But Larry was about as much use to them as a match in a powder magazine.

There were three of them in that corner of the kitchen garden, Royale, Larry and the butler, whose range of duties appeared to be wider than that normally expected of his profession in the better class English country houses. Larry and the butler were busy with spades. Digging, I thought at first, because Royale had the light hooded and even at ten yards in that rain it was difficult to see anything, but by and by, judging more by ear than by eye, I knew that they were filling in a hole in the ground. I grinned to myself in the darkness. I would have taken long odds that they were burying something very valuable indeed, something that would not be remaining there very long. A kitchen garden was hardly the ideal permanent hiding place for treasure trove.

Three minutes later they were finished. Someone drew a rake to and fro across the filled-in hole – I assumed that they must have been digging in a freshly turned vegetable patch and wanted to conceal the signs of their work – and then they all went off together to the gardening shed a few yards away and left their spades and rake there.

They came out again, talking softly, Royale in the lead with the torch in his hand. They passed through a wicker gate not fifteen feet from me, but by this time I’d withdrawn some yards into the wood and had the thick bole of an oak for cover. They went off together up the path that led to the front of the house and by and by the low murmur of voices faded and vanished. A bar of light fell across the porch as the front door opened, then there came the solid click of a heavy door closing on its latch. Then silence.

I didn’t move. I stayed exactly where I was, breathing lightly and shallowly, not stirring an inch. The rain redoubled in violence, the thick foliage of the oak might have been a wisp of gauze for all the protection it afforded, but I didn’t move. The rain trickled down inside oilskin and overcoat and ran down my back and legs. But I didn’t move. It trickled down my front and into my shoes, but I didn’t move. I could feel the tide rising up to my ankles, but I didn’t move. I just stayed where I was, a human figure carved from ice, but colder. My hands were numb, my feet frozen and uncontrollable shivers shook my entire body every few seconds. I would have given the earth to move. But I didn’t. Only my eyes moved.