Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘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.’