Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

Hearing was of little value to me now. With the high moan of the steadily increasing wind through the topmost swaying branches of the trees and the loud frenetic rustling of the rain driving through the leaves, you couldn’t have heard a careless footfall ten feet away. But after three-quarters of an hour standing there motionless, eyes became perfectly accustomed to the dark and you could have spotted a careless movement ten yards away. And I spotted it.

A movement, that is, but not careless. Deliberate. I think it must have been a sudden furious flurry of wind and rain that finally broke the patience of the shadow that now detached itself from the shelter of a nearby tree and moved away silently up towards the house. If I hadn’t been watching, staring into the darkness with eyes sore and strained from staring, I would have missed it, for I certainly would have heard nothing. But I didn’t miss it. A shadow moving with the soundlessness of a shadow. A quiet deadly man. Royale. His words to Larry had been so much bluff for the benefit of any listener. Royale had heard a noise, all right, and the noise must have been just sufficiently off-beat to make him wonder if someone were there. Only enough to make him wonder. If Royale had been certain he’d have remained there all night waiting to strike. The strike of a fer-de-lance. I thought of myself going into that kitchen garden immediately after the three had left, getting a spade and starting to investigate, and I felt colder than ever. I could see myself bending over the hole, the unseen, unheard approach of Royale, and then the bullet, just one, a cupro-nickel jacketed .22 at the base of the skull.

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.