Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

“Don’t move. Keep quite still.” Carmody leant over Reynolds’s shoulder and relieved him of a silenced automatic which he had begun to slide out of a shoulder-holster. “You could cause yourself an injury. What’s a law-abiding citizen like you doing carrying a hand-gun?”

Gasps of surprise broke out all round the room. Almost everybody stood up to get a better view. Reynolds’s face, normally so rubicund, had gone grey. He sat as if paralysed while Carmody slipped manacles on him.

“This is in no way a trial,” Brady announced. “So I do not propose to question him. Nor will I adumbrate the factors that made him turn the way he did – save to say that his main grievance appears to have been that he had been passed over for promotion. He found his way ahead blocked: he conceived the idea that outsiders were always brought into the firm to occupy senior positions. You may think his reaction a little excessive.”

Brady stopped. He had, at this point, intended to have a dig at Black, by mentioning the oil companies’ practice of installing accountants in senior management positions. As things had turned out, however, he decided against it, and merely asked Black to sum up.

This Black did, in a surprisingly warm and human manner. Again he praised Brady Enterprises effusively, and he ended by reassuring everyone present that the campaign of terror and destruction was over. The meeting was closed. Police officers escorted Reynolds, Blake, Bronowski and Houston away to the cells, and in small groups and very slowly everyone else began to leave the hall.

Brady, feeling unwontedly nervous, sidled up to Black.

“My apologies,” he muttered. “Must offer you my sincere apologies. My associates were infernally rude to you that time in the course of their…ah…investigations…no cause for it.”

“My dear fellow – not at all,” said Black magnanimously. “I daresay it was my fault anyway. I hardly realised what deep trouble we were in. I thought your investigations were superfluous. Now I know different.”

“I’d like to apologise, too, sir,” muttered Dermott, stiff with embarrassment. “Trouble was – if I may say so – you seemed so unco-operative.”

“It was the cost that frightened me. Don’t forget, I’m an accountant by training.” To the amazement of the Brady team, Black actually laughed. They laughed too, from sheer release of tension – and the next second, Black caught them neatly on the rebound.

“Well now, Mr Brady,” he said briskly. “As to the question of your fee…”

“Oh…now!” Brady spluttered, caught right off-balance. “I assumed all along I would negotiate that with your London office.”

“No need, I’m glad to say.” Black was all breezy sunshine. “London has empowered me to deal directly with you. Our chairman felt that despite your close friendship, or perhaps because of it – I should settle this up.”

“That’s…well…NO! I mean, I…I never discuss fees myself.” Brady sounded lame, and knew it. But he pulled himself together fast. “I have to consult my accountant, even if you don’t.”

“Forty love, and Black to serve,” muttered Dermott as they moved away. He was about to go for his coat when, down one side of the room, he spotted Corinne Delorme still sitting on a bench, as if in a trance.

“Come on, honey,” he said gently. “Time to go.”

“I just can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s not possible.”

“Well – it happened. Are you upset?”

“Not really – no. I didn’t care that much about him. It’s just that I kind of got used to believing what he said.”

“I know, one does. But you saw how devious he was. Anyone who has himself kidnapped to add verisimilitude to the proceedings – anyone who does that is hardly straightforward.”

“I guess that’s right. Those murders, too. Oh God, it’s awful.”

“It was awful. But it’s over. Coming?”

“I suppose so.” She stood up, and Dermott helped her into her coat.

“You and I were the two luckiest people in the whole damn business,” he said. “We both ought to be dead. Without you I would be.”

Suddenly her blank eyes lit up and she smiled.

Dermott smiled back. “What are you going to do now you’ve got no boss to work for?”

“I don’t know. Find another job first.”

“Not many good jobs in Fort McMurray. Why not come south and work for me?”

“For you? ” Her eyes widened. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Think of it now. Shall we go?”

“O.K.”

“I’d offer you my arm, if it wasn’t still so damned sore.”

“And I might even take it.” She looked upward and snuggled close against him as they went out through the door.

The sight seemed to occasion the most immense merriment in Brady and his one remaining associate. They rolled in their seats like clowns, giving vent to noisy explosions.

“Stay me with flagons, Donald,” cried Brady, as he recovered. “I am seriously in need of liquid refreshment. For unless my investigative powers are dwindling, we have a romance on our hands.”

Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was born in 1922 and brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941 at the age of eighteen he joined the Royal Navy; two-and-a-half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses , his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war, he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a school master. In 1983 he was awarded a D. Litt. from the same university.

By the early 1970s he was one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world, and the biggest-selling Briton. He wrote twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers that have sold more than 30 million copies, and many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century. Alistair MacLean died in 1987 at his home in Switzerland.