Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘Why, Talbot?’ he repeated in the same monotone.

‘Because I had to have evidence. I had to have evidence to send you both to the chair. Up till now we had no evidence whatsoever, all along the way your back trail was divided into a series of water-tight compartments with locked doors. Royale locked the doors by killing everybody and anybody who might talk. Incredibly, there wasn’t a single solitary thing we could pin on you, there wasn’t a person who could split on you for the sufficient reason that all those who could were dead. The locked doors. But you opened them all today. Fear was the key to all the doors.’

‘You’ve got no evidence, Talbot,’ Royale said. ‘It’s only your word against ours – and you won’t live to give your word.’

‘I expected something like that,’ I nodded. We were at a depth of about 250 feet now. ‘Getting your courage back, Royale, aren’t you? But you don’t dare do anything. You can’t get this scaphe back to the rig without me, and you know it. Besides, I have some concrete evidence. Taped under my toes is the bullet that killed Jablonsky.’ They exchanged quick startled looks. ‘Shakes you, doesn’t it? I know it all, I even dug Jablonsky’s body up in the kitchen garden. That bullet will match up with your automatic, Royale. That alone would send you to the chair.’

‘Give it to me, Talbot. Give it to me now.’ The flat marbled eyes were glistening, his hand sliding for his gun.

‘Don’t be stupid. What are you going to do with it – throw it out the window? You can’t get rid of it, you know it. And even if you could, there’s something else that you can never get rid of. The real reason for our trip today, the reason that means you both die.’

There was something in my tone that got them. Royale was very still, Vyland still grey, still shaking. They knew, without knowing why, that the end had come.

‘The tow-rope,’ I said. ‘The wire with the microphone cable leading back to the speaker in the rig. You see the microphone switch here, you see it’s at “Off”? I jinxed it, I fixed it this afternoon so that the microphone was always live. That’s why I made you speak up, made you repeat most things, that’s why I dragged you, Vyland, close up to me so that you were right against the mike when you were making your confession. Every word that’s been spoken down here today, every word we’re speaking now is going through live to that speaker. And every word is being taken down three times: by tape-recorder, by a civil stenographer and by a police stenographer from Miami. I phoned the police on the way back from the rig this morning, they were aboard the rig before daylight – which probably accounts for the field foreman and the petroleum engineer looking so nervous when we came aboard today. They’ve been hidden for twelve hours – but Kennedy knew where they were. And at lunchtime, Vyland, I gave Kennedy your secret knock. Cibatti and his men would have fallen for it, they were bound to. And it’s all over now.’

They said nothing. There was nothing they could say, at least not yet, not until the full significance of what I had said had become irrevocably clear to them.

‘And don’t worry about the tape recording,’ I went on. ‘They’re not normally acceptable as court evidence but those will be. Every statement you made was volunteered by yourselves – think back and you’ll see that: and there’ll be at least ten witnesses inside the caisson who can swear to the genuineness of the recordings, who will swear that they could not have come from any source other than the bathyscaphe. Any prosecutor in the Union will call for and get a verdict of guilty without the jury leaving the box. You know what that means.’

‘So.’ Royale had his gun out, he must have had some crazy notion of trying to snap the tow-rope and sailing the scaphe off to safety. ‘So we were all wrong about you, Talbot, so you were smarter than we were. All right, I admit it. You have what it takes – but you’ll never live to hear the jury give their verdict. As well hung for a sheep as a lamb.’ His trigger finger began to tighten. ‘So long, Talbot.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Not if I were you. Wouldn’t you like to be able to grip the arm-rests of the electric chair with both hands when the time comes?’

‘It’s no good talking, Talbot, I said–’

‘Look down the barrel,’ I advised him. ‘If you want to blow your hand off, you know what to do. When you were unconscious this evening Kennedy used a hammer and punch to jam a lead cylinder right down the barrel. Do you think I’d be so crazy as to come down here and you with a loaded gun in your hand? Don’t take my word for it, Royale – just pull the trigger.’

He squinted down the barrel and his face twisted into a malevolent mask of hate. He was using up ten years’ quota of expressions in one day – and he was telegraphing his signals. I knew that gun was coming before he did. I managed to dodge, the gun struck the Plexiglas behind me and fell harmlessly to the floor at my feet.

‘No one tampered with my gun,’ Vyland said hoarsely. He was almost unrecognizable as the smooth urbane slightly florid top executive he’d been, his face was haggard now, curiously aged and covered in a greyish sheen of sweat. ‘Made a mistake at last, haven’t you, Talbot?’ His breath was coming in brief shallow gasps. ‘You’re not going–’

He broke off, hand halfway inside his coat, and stared down into the muzzle of the heavy Colt pointing in between his eyes.

‘Where – where did you get that? It – it’s Larry’s gun?’

‘Was. You should have searched me, shouldn’t you – not Kennedy? Fools. Sure it’s Larry’s gun – that dope-headed junky who claimed he was your son.’ I looked steadily at him, I didn’t want any gunfire 150 feet below sea level. I didn’t know what might happen. ‘I took it off him this evening, Vyland, just about an hour ago. Just before I killed him.’

‘Just – just before–?’

‘Just before I killed him. I broke his neck.’

With something between a sob and a moan Vyland flung himself at me across the width of the chamber. But his reactions were slow, his movements even slower and he collapsed soundlessly to the floor as the barrel of Larry’s Colt caught him across the temple.

‘Tie him up,’ I said to Royale. There was plenty of spare flex lying around and Royale wasn’t fool enough to get tough about it. He tied him up, while I was blowing gasoline through a valve and slowing our ascent about 120 feet, and just as he finished and before he could straighten I let him have it behind the ear with the butt of Larry’s Colt. If ever there had been a time for playing it like a gentleman, that time was long gone, I was now so weak, so lost in that flooding sea of pain, that I knew it would be impossible for me to bring that scaphe back to the rig and watch Royale at the same time. I doubted whether I could even make it at all.

I made it, but only just. I remember easing the hatch of the bathyscaphe up inside the caisson, asking through the mike, in a slurred stumbling voice that wasn’t mine, for the annular rubber ring to be inflated and then lurching across to twist open the handle of the entrance door. I don’t remember any more. I am told they found the three of us lying unconscious on the floor of the bathyscaphe.

I walked down the court-house steps out into the still, warm October sunshine. They’d just sentenced Royale to death and everybody knew there would be no appeal, no reversal of the decision. The jury, as I had prophesied, had convicted without leaving the box. The trial had lasted only one day and during the entire day Royale had sat as though carved from stone, his eyes fixed on the same spot for hour after interminable hour. That spot had been me. Those blank, flat, marbled eyes had been as expressionless as ever, they hadn’t even altered a fraction when the prosecution had played the recording of Royale begging for his life on his hands and knees in the scaphe at the bottom of the sea, they hadn’t altered when the death sentence had come but for all the lack of expression a blind man could have read his message. ‘Eternity’s a long time, Talbot,’ his eyes had said. ‘Eternity is forever. But I’ll be waiting.’