Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

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.