Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

"Room 14?" I asked. "Which way, please?"

"Mr. Brooks?" I nodded, and he went on: "I've left all the keys ready. Down this way."

"Thank you." I looked at him. Grey and bent and thin and the faded old eyes the clouded mirrors of a thousand sorrows and defeats. "What's your name?"

"Charles, sir."

"I want some whisky, Charles." I passed money across. "Scotch, not bourbon. And some brandy. Can you?"

"Right away, sir."

"Thanks." I let in the gear, drove down the block to No. 14. It was at the end of a narrow peninsula between the gulf to the left and a kidney-shaped swimming pool to the right. The garage door was open and I drove straight in, switched off the car lights, closed the sliding door in the near-darkness, then switched on the overhead light.

At the inner end of the left hand wall a single door led off the garage. We went through this, into a kitchenette, neat, hygienic and superbly equipped if all you wanted was a cup of coffee and had all night to make it. A door led off this into the bed-sitting-room. Lilac carpet, lilac drapes, lilac bedspread, lilac lamp-shades, lilac seat-covers, the same excruciating motif wherever you looked. Somebody had liked lilac. Two doors off this room: to the left, let into the same wall as the kitchen door, the door to the bathroom: at the far end, the door leading into the corridor.

I was in this corridor within ten seconds of arriving in the room, dragging the girl after me. The closet was no more than six feet away, unlocked, and my bag still where it had been left. I carried it back to the room, unlocked it and was about to start throwing some stuff on the bed when a knock came to the door.

"That will be Charles," I murmured. "Open the door, stand well back, take the bottles, tell him to keep the change. Don't try to whisper, make signs or any clever little jumps out into the middle of the corridor. I'll be watching you from the crack of the bathroom door and my gun will be lined up on your back."

She didn't try any of those things. I think she was too cold, miserable and exhausted by the accumulated tension of the day to try anything. The old man handed over the bottles, took the change with a surprised murmur of thanks and closed the door softly behind him.

"You're frozen and shivering," I said abruptly. "I don't want my insurance policy to go catching pneumonia." I fetched a couple of glasses. "Some brandy, Miss Ruthven, then a hot bath. Maybe you'll find something dry in my case."

"You're very kind," she said bitterly. "But I'll take the brandy."

"No bath, huh?"

"No." A hesitant pause, a glint in her eye more imagined than seen, and I knew I'd been mistaken in imagining her to be too worn out to try anything. "Yes, that too."

"Right." I waited till she'd finished her glass, dumped my case on the bathroom floor and stood to let her pass. "Don't be all night. I'm hungry."

The door closed and the key clicked in the lock. There came the sound of water running into the bath, then all the unmistakable soaping and splashing sounds of someone having a bath. All meant to lull any suspicions. Then came the sound of someone towelling themselves, and when, a minute or two later, there came the furious gurgling of water running out of the waste pipe, I eased myself off the door, passed through the two kitchen doors and outside garage door just in time to see the bathroom window open and a little cloud of steam come gushing out I caught her arm as she lowered herself to the ground, stifled the frightened gasp with my free hand, and led her back inside.

I closed the kitchen door and looked at her. She looked fresh and scrubbed and clean and had one of my white shirts tucked into the waistband of her dirndl. She had tears of mortification in her eyes and defeat in her face, but for all that it was a face worth looking at. Despite our long hours in the car together it was the first time I had really looked at it.

She had wonderful hair, thick and gleaming and parted in the middle and of the same wheat colour and worn in the same braids as that often seen in girls from the East Baltic states or what used to be the Baltic states. But she would never win a Miss America contest, she had too much character in her face for that, she wouldn't even have been in the running for Miss Marble Springs. The face was slightly Slavonic, the cheekbones too high and wide, the mouth too full, the still grey eyes set too far apart and the nose definitely retrousse. A mobile and intelligent face, a face, I guessed, that could move easily into sympathy and kindness and humour and laughter, when the weariness was gone and the fear taken away. In the days before I had given up the dream of my own slippers and my own fireside, this was the face that would have fitted the dream. She was the sort of person who would wear well, the sort of person who would still be part of you long after the synthetic chromium polished blondes from the production lines of the glamour factory had you climbing up the walls.

I was just standing there, feeling a little sorry for her and feeling a little sorry for myself, when I felt a cold draught on the back of my neck. It came from the direction of the bathroom door and ten seconds ago that bathroom door had been closed and locked. But it wasn't now.

It didn't require the sudden widening of the girl's eyes to tell me that I wasn't imagining that cold draught on the back of my neck. A cloud of steam from the overheated bathroom drifted past my right ear, a little bit too much to have escaped through the keyhole of a locked door. About a thousand times too much. I turned slowly, keeping my hands well away from my sides. Maybe I would try something clever later. But not now.

The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hand, and it wasn't the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once.

The second thing I noticed was that the bathroom doorway seemed to have shrunk since I'd seen it last. His shoulders didn't quite touch both sides of the doorway, but that was only because it was a wide doorway. His hat certainly touched the lintel.

The third thing I noticed was the kind of hat he wore and the colour of the jacket. A panama hat, a green jacket. It was our friend and neighbour from the Ford that had been parked beside us earlier that afternoon.

He reached behind him with his left hand and softly closed the bathroom door.

"You shouldn't leave windows open. Let me have your gun." His voice was quiet and deep, but there was nothing stagy or menacing about it, you could see it was the way he normally spoke.

"Gun?" I tried to look baffled.

"Look, Talbot," he said pleasantly. "I suspect we're both what you might call professionals. I suggest we cut the unnecessary dialogue. Gun. The thing you're carrying in your right coat pocket there. With the finger and thumb of the left hand. So. Now drop it on the carpet. Thank you."

I kicked the gun across to him without being told. I didn't want him to think I wasn't a professional too.

"Now sit down," he said. He smiled at me, and I could see now that his face wasn't chubby, unless you could call a lump of rock chubby. It was just broad and looked as if you could bounce a two by four off it without achieving very much. The narrow black moustache and the thin, almost Grecian nose looked out of place, as incongruous, almost, as the laughter lines round the eyes and on either side of the mouth. I didn't place much store on the laughter lines, maybe he only practised smiling when he was beating someone over the head with a gun.

"You recognised me in the parking-lot?" I asked.

"No." He broke open the Colt with his left hand, ejected the remaining shell, closed the gun and with a careless flick of his wrist sent it spinning ten feet to land smack in the waste paper basket. He looked at if he could do this sort of thing ten times out of ten, everything this man tried would always come off: if he was as good as this with his left hand, what could he do with his right? "I'd never seen you before this afternoon, I'd never even heard of you when first I saw you in the lot," he continued. "But I'd seen and heard of this young lady here a hundred times. You're a Limey, or you'd have heard of her too. Maybe you have, but don't know who you got there, you wouldn't be the first person to be fooled by her. No make-up, no accent, hair in kid's plaits. And you only look and behave like that either if you've given up competing — or if there's no one left to compete against." He looked at the girl and smiled again. "For Mary Blair Ruthven there's no competition left. When you're as socially acceptable as she is, and your old man is who he is, then you can dispense with your Bryn Mawr accent and the Antonio hairdo. That's for those who need them."