Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘We’re just leaving, General. Everything’s set. Petersen is waiting for us down in the bay.’ Petersen, I guessed, would be the helicopter pilot. ‘A couple of fast trips and we should all be out there in an hour or so. Then Talbot here can get to work.’

‘All?’ asked the general. ‘Who?’

‘Yourself, myself, Royale, Talbot, Larry and, of course, your daughter.’

‘Mary. Is it necessary?’

Vyland said nothing, he didn’t even use the eyebrow routine again, he just looked steadily at the general. Five seconds, perhaps more, then the general’s hands unclenched and his shoulders drooped a fraction of an inch. Picture without words.

There came the quick light tap of feminine footsteps from the passage inside and Mary Ruthven walked in through the open door. She was dressed in a lime-coloured two-piece costume with an open-necked green blouse beneath. She had shadows under her eyes, she looked pale and tired and I thought she was wonderful. Kennedy was behind her, but he remained respectfully in the passage, hat in hand, a rhapsody of maroon and shining high leather boots, his face set in the remote unseeing, unhearing expression of the perfectly trained family chauffeur. I started to move aimlessly towards the door, waiting for Mary to do what I’d told her less than two hours previously, just before she’d gone back to her own room.

‘I’m going in to Marble Springs with Kennedy, Father,’ Mary began without preamble. It was phrased as a statement of fact, but was in effect a request for permission.

‘But – well, we’re going to the rig, my dear,’ her father said unhappily. ‘You said last night–’

‘I’m coming,’ she said with a touch of impatience. ‘But we can’t all go to once. I’ll come on the second trip. We won’t be more than twenty minutes. Do you mind, Mr Vyland?’ she asked sweetly.

‘I’m afraid it’s rather difficult, Miss Ruthven,’ Vyland said urbanely. ‘You see, Gunther has hurt himself–’

‘Good!’

He worked his eyebrow again. ‘Not so good for you, Miss Ruthven. You know how your father likes you to have protection when–’

‘Kennedy used to be all the protection I ever needed,’ she said coldly. ‘He still is. What is more, I’m not going out to the rig with you and Royale and that – that creature there’ – she left no doubt but that she meant Larry – ‘unless Kennedy comes with me. And that’s final. And I must go into Marble Springs. Now.’

I wondered when anyone had last talked to Vyland like that. But the veneer never even cracked.

‘Why must you, Miss Ruthven?’

‘There are some questions a gentleman never asks,’ she said icily.

That floored him. He didn’t know what she meant, the same as I wouldn’t have known what she meant, and the net result was to leave him stranded. Every eye in the room was on the two of them, except mine: mine were on Kennedy’s and his were on mine. I was near the door now, with my back turned to the company. It had been easy to slip out the piece of paper from under my collar and now I held it against my chest so that he could see Judge Mollison’s name on it. His expression didn’t alter and it would have taken a micrometer to measure his nod. But he was with me. Everything was fine – but for the chance that Royale might get me with a snapshot before I cleared the doorway.

And it was Royale who broke the tension in the room, giving Vyland an easy out. ‘I’d like some fresh air, Mr Vyland. I could go along with them for the ride.’

I went out through that doorway the way a torpedo leaves its tube. Kennedy had his arm outstretched and I caught it: we crashed heavily to the floor and went rolling along the passageway together. Inside the first two seconds I had the letter stuck deep inside his tunic and we were still threshing about and belabouring each other on the shoulders and back and everywhere it didn’t hurt very much when we heard the unmistakable flat click of a safety catch.

‘Break it up, you two.’

We broke it up and I got to my feet under the steady menace of Royale’s gun. Larry, too, was hopping around in the background, waving a revolver in his hand: had I been Vyland I wouldn’t even have let him have a catapult in his hand.

‘That was a good job of work, Kennedy,’ Vyland was saying warmly. ‘I won’t forget it.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Kennedy said woodenly. ‘I don’t like killers.’

‘Neither do I, my boy, neither do I,’ Vyland said approvingly. He only employed them himself because he wanted to rehabilitate them. ‘Very well, Miss Ruthven. Mr Royale will go along. But be as quick as you can.’

She swept by without a word to him or a glance at me. Her head was high. I still thought she was wonderful.

I hadn’t enjoyed the helicopter trip out to the oil rig.

Planes I’m used to, I’ve flown my own, I once even owned a piece in a small charter airline, but helicopters are not for me. Not even in fine weather, and the weather that morning was indescribable. We swayed and rocked and plummeted and soared up again as if some drunk had us on the end of a giant yo-yo, and nine-tenths of the time we couldn’t see where we were going because the wipers couldn’t cope with the deluge of water that lashed against the windscreen: but Petersen was a fine pilot and we made it. We touched down on the landing-deck of the X 13 shortly after ten o’clock in the morning.

It took six men to hold the machine even reasonably steady while the general, Vyland, Larry and I shinned down the extension ladder. Petersen gunned his motor and took off just as the last of us reached the deck, and was lost in a blinding flurry of rain inside ten seconds. I wondered if I would ever see him again.

Out there on the exposed deck the wind was far stronger and much gustier than it had been on land and it was all that we could do to keep our balance on the slippery metal underfoot. Not that there was much chance of me falling, at least not backwards, not with Larry’s cannon jabbing into the small of my back all the time. He was wearing the big-collared, big-lapelled, belted, epauletted and leather-buttoned coat that Hollywood had taught him was the correct rig of the day for this kind of weather, and he had the gun inside one of the deep pockets. I felt nervous. Larry didn’t like me and would have counted a hole in his fine coat as a small price to pay for the privilege of pulling that trigger. I’d got right under Larry’s skin like a burr under a saddle, and I meant to stay there. I rarely spoke to him, but when I did I never failed to refer to him as ‘hophead’ or ‘junky’ and to hope that his supplies of snow were coming along all right. On the way down to the helicopter that morning I’d inquired solicitously whether or not he’d remembered to pack his grip, and when he’d asked suspiciously what the unprintable I meant by that I explained that I was concerned that he might have forgotten to pack his syringe. It took Vyland and the general all the strength of their combined efforts to pull him off me. There is nothing more dangerous and unpredictable than a drug addict, just as there is nothing more pitiable: but there was no pity in my heart then, Larry was the weakest link in the chain and I meant to keep sawing away at him until something snapped.

We staggered along against the wind till we came to a raised hatch-cover entrance which gave to a wide companionway leading to the deck below. A group of men awaited us here, and I had my collar turned up, hat-brim turned down and a handkerchief in my hand busy wiping the rain off my face, but I needn’t have bothered: Joe Curran, the roustabout foreman I’d talked to ten hours previously, was not there. I tried to imagine what would have happened had he been there, or had he asked the general whether C. C. Farnborough, his private confidential secretary, had found the missing brief-case; but I gave it up, the strain on the imagination was too great. I’d probably just have borrowed Larry’s gun and shot myself.