Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

"You first, lady. Other side. You're driving, Talbot." He banged my door shut as I got in behind the wheel, slid into the back seat and closed his own door. He let me feel the Mauser, hard, against the back of my neck in case my memory was failing me.

"Turn south on the highway."

I managed to press the proper buttons, eased through the deserted motel courtyard and turned right. Jablonsky said to the girl: "Your old man's place is just off the main highway? Right?"

"Yes."

"Any other way of getting there? Back streets? Side roads?"

"Yes, you can go round the town and—"

"So. We'll go straight through. I'm figuring the same way as Talbot figured when he came to the La Contessa — no one will be looking for him within fifty miles of Marble Springs."

We drove through the town in silence. The roads were almost deserted and there weren't half a dozen pedestrians to be seen. I caught the red both times at the only two sets of traffic lights in Marble Springs, and both times the Mauser came to rest on the back of my head. By and by we were clear of the town and the rain sheeting down in a torrential cascade that drummed thunderously on the roof and hood of the car. It was like driving under a waterfall and the windscreen-wipers weren't built for driving under waterfalls. I had to slow down to twenty and even so I was all but blind whenever the headlights of an approaching car spread their whitely-diffused glare over the streaming glass of the windscreen, a blindness which became complete with the spraying wall of water that thudded solidly against screen and offside of the body as the approaching cars swept by with the sibilant whisper of wet rubber on wet roads and a bow-wave that a destroyer captain would have been proud to own.

Mary Ruthven peered into the alternating glare and gloom with her forehead pressed against the windscreen. She probably knew the road well, but she didn't know it tonight. A north-bound track rolled by at the wrong moment and she almost missed the turn-off.

"There it is!" She grabbed my forearm so hard that the Ford skidded for a moment on to the shoulder of the road before I could bring it under control. I caught a glimpse through the rain of a dimly phosphorescent glow on the left and was fifty yards beyond before I stopped. The road was too narrow for a U-turn so I backed and filled until we were heading the other way, crawled up to the illuminated opening in first and turned in slowly. I should have hated to turn in there quickly. As it was, I managed to pull up a few feet short of a six-barred white-painted metal gate that would have stopped a bull-dozer.

The gate appeared to be at the end of an almost flat-roofed tunnel. On the left was a seven-foot high white limestone wall, maybe twenty feet long. On the right was a white lodge with an oak door and chintz-covered windows looking out on to the tunnel. Lodge and wall were joined by a shallowly curved roof. I couldn't see what the roof was made of. I wasn't interested in it anyway: I was too busy looking at the man who had come through the lodge door even before I had braked to a stop.

He was the dowager's dream of a chauffeur. He was perfect. He was immaculate. He was a poem in maroon. Even his gleaming riding boots looked maroon. The flaring Bedford cord breeches, the big-buttoned tunic, the gloves perfectly folded under one epaulette, even the peak of the cap were all of the same perfect shade. He took his cap off. His hair wasn't maroon. It was thick and black and gleaming and parted on the right. He had a smooth brown face and dark eyes set well apart, just like his shoulders. A poem, but no pansy. He was as big as I was, and a whole lot better looking.

Mary Ruthven had the window wound down, and the chauffeur bent to look at her, one sinewy brown hand resting on the edge of the door. When he saw who it was the brown face broke into a wide white smile and if the relief and gladness in his eyes weren't genuine he was the best actor-chauffeur I'd ever known.

"It is you, Miss Mary." The voice was deep, educated and unmistakably English: when you'd two hundred and eighty-five million bucks it didn't cost but pennies extra to hire a home-grown shepherd to look after your flock of imported Rolls-Royce. English chauffeurs were class. "I'm delighted to see you back, ma'am. Are you all right?"

"I'm delighted to be back, Simon." For a brief moment her hand lay over his and squeezed it. She let her breath go in what was half-sigh, half-shudder, and added: "I'm all right. How is Daddy?"

"The general has been worried stiff, Miss Mary. But he'll be all right now. They told me to expect you. I'll let them know right away." He half-turned, wheeled, craned forward and peered into the back of the car. His body perceptibly stiffened.

"Yeah, it's a gun," Jablonsky said comfortably from the rear seat. "Just holding it, sonny — gets kinda uncomfortable sitting down with a gun in your hip pocket. Haven't you found that yourself?" I looked and, sure, enough, I could see the slight bulge on the chauffeur's right hip. "Spoils the cut of the Little Lord Fauntelroy suit, don't it, though?" Jablonsky went on. "And don't get any funny ideas about using yours. The time for that's past. Besides, you might hit Talbot. That's him behind the wheel. Fifteen thousand dollars on the hoof and I want to deliver him in prime condition."

"I don't know what you're talking about, sir." The chauffeur's face had darkened, his voice was barely civil. "I'll ring the house." He turned away, went into the small lobby behind the door, lifted a phone and pressed a button, and as he did so the heavy gate swung open silently, smoothly, of its own accord.

"All we need now is a moat and a portcullis," Jablonsky murmured as we began to move forward. "Looks after his 285 millions, does the old general. Electrified fences, patrols, dogs, the lot, eh, lady?"

She didn't answer. We were moving past a big four-car garage attached to the lodge. It was a carport type garage without doors and I could see I had been right about the Rolls-Royces. There were two of them, one sand-brown and beige, the other gun-metal blue. There was also a Cadillac. That would be for the groceries. Jablonsky was speaking again.

"Old Fancy-pants back there. The Limey. Where'd you pick that sissy up? "

"I'd like to see you say that to him without that gun in your hand," the girl said quietly. "He's been with us for three years now. Nine months ago three masked men crashed our car with only Kennedy and myself in it. They all carried guns. One's dead, the other two are still in prison."

"A lucky sissy," Jablonsky grunted and relapsed into silence.

The asphalt drive-way up to the house was narrow, long, winding and thickly wooded on both sides. The small evergreen leaves of live oak and long dripping grey festoons of Spanish moss reached out and brushed the roof and side-screens of the car. Suddenly the trees receded on both sides from the beams of the headlamps, giving way to strategically placed clumps of palms and palmettos, and there, behind a stepped granite balustrade wall and a gravel terrace, lay the general's house.

Built as an ordinary family house, the girl had said. Built for a family of about fifty. It was enormous. It was an old white ante-bellum type house, so Colonial that it creaked, with a huge pillared two-story porch, a curiously double-angled roof of a type I'd never seen before and enough glass to keep an active window-cleaner in year-round employment. Over the entrance of the lower porch were two more lights, big old-fashioned coach lamps each with a powerful electric bulb inside. Below the lamps stood the reception committee.

I hadn't expected the reception committee. Subconsciously, I suppose, I had expected the old high-class routine of being welcomed by the butler and deferentially and ceremoniously conducted to the library where the general would be sipping his Scotch before a crackling pine fire. Which was pretty silly, when you came to think of it. When you're expecting a daughter back from the dead and the door-bell rings, you don't just keep on sipping whisky. Not if you're halfway human. The chauffeur had warned them: hence the committee.