I only jumped about a foot, then I froze. I suppose I should have stood there with my mind racing but the truth was that with what I had been through that night and with all the inconclusive and futile thinking I’d been doing in the past two hours, my mind was in no condition to walk, far less race. I just stood there. Lot’s wife had nothing on me. For a lifetime of ten seconds not a single intelligent thought came, just an impulse, one single overpowering impulse. To run. But I had no place to run to.
It was Royale, that quiet cold deadly man with the little gun. It was Royale, he was waiting outside that door and the little gun would be in his hand. He knew I was out, all right. He’d checked. He knew I’d be back, because he knew that Jablonsky and I were in cahoots and that I hadn’t gone to such extreme lengths to get myself into that household just to light out at the first opportunity that offered, and he’d guessed that I should have been back by this time. Maybe he’d even seen me coming back. Then why had he waited so long?
I could guess the answer to that one too. He knew I would have been expecting Jablonsky to be there when I returned. He would think that I would have figured that Jablonsky must have gone off on some private expedition of his own and that as I’d locked the door when I came back and left the key there Jablonsky wouldn’t be able to use his own to get in. So he would knock. Softly. And after having waited two hours for my partner’s return I would be so worried stiff by his continuing absence that I would rush to the door when the knock came. And then Royale would let me have one of those cupro-nickel bullets between the eyes. Because if they knew beyond doubt that Jablonsky and I were working together they would also know that I would never do for them what they wanted me to do and so I would be of no further use to them. So, a bullet between the eyes. Just the same way Jablonsky had got his.
And then I thought of Jablonsky, I thought of him lying out there jammed up in that cheap packing case, and I wasn’t afraid any more. I didn’t see that I’d much chance, but I wasn’t afraid. I cat-footed through to Jablonsky’s room, closed my hand round the neck of the whisky bottle, went as silently back into my own room and slid a key into the lock of the door opening on to the passage outside. The bolt slid back without even the whisper of a click and just at that moment the knocking came again, slightly louder this time and more sustained. Under cover of the sound I slid the door open a crack, raised the bottle over my head ready for throwing and stuck my head round the corner of the door.
The passage was only dimly lit by a single weak night-light at the other end of a long corridor, but it was enough. Enough to let me see that the figure in the passage had no gun in its hand. Enough to let me see that it wasn’t Royale. It was Mary Ruthven. I lowered the whisky bottle and stepped back softly into my room.
Five seconds later I was at the door of Jablonsky’s room. I said in my best imitation of Jablonsky’s deep husky voice: ‘Who’s there?’
‘Mary Ruthven. Let me in. Quickly. Please!’
I let her in. Quickly. I had no more desire than she had that she could be seen out in that passage. I kept behind the door as she came through, then closed it swiftly before the pale glimmer of light from outside gave her time to identify me.
‘Mr Jablonsky.’ Her voice was a quick, urgent, breathless, frightened whisper. ‘I had to come to see you, I simply had. I thought I could never get away but Gunther dropped off to sleep and he may wake up at any moment and find that I’m –’
‘Easy, easy,’ I said. I’d lowered my voice to a whisper, it was easier to imitate Jablonsky that way, but even so it was one of the worst imitations I had ever heard. ‘Why come to see me?’
‘Because there was no one else I could turn to. You’re not a killer, you’re not even a crook, I don’t care what they say you’ve done, you’re not bad.’ She was a sharp one, all right, her woman’s insight or intuition or whatever had taken her far beyond what either Vyland or the general could see. ‘You must help me – us – you simply must. We – we are in great trouble.’
‘We?’
‘Daddy and I.’ A pause. ‘I honestly don’t know about my father, I honestly don’t. Perhaps he’s not in trouble. Maybe he’s working with those – those evil men because he wants to. He comes and goes as he pleases. But – but it’s so unlike him. Maybe he has to work with them. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. Perhaps they have power over him, some terrible hold, perhaps––’ I caught the glint of fair hair as she shook her head. ‘He – well, he was always so good and honourable and straight and – and everything, but now –’
‘Easy.’ I interrupted again. I couldn’t keep this deception up much longer, if she hadn’t been so scared, so worried, she’d have caught on right away. ‘Facts, miss, if you please.’
I’d left the electric fire burning in my room, the communicating door was open and I was pretty sure it was only a matter of time till she could see enough of my features to see that I wasn’t Jablonsky – and that red thatch of mine was a dead giveaway. I turned my back to the glow of the fire.
‘How can I begin?’ she said. ‘We seem to have lost all our freedom, or daddy has. Not in moving around, he’s not a prisoner, but we never make decisions for ourselves, or, rather, Daddy makes mine for me and I think he has his made for him too. We’re never allowed to be apart for any time. Daddy says I’m to write no letters unless he sees them, make no phone calls, never go anywhere except when that horrible man Gunther is with me. Even when I go to a friend’s house, like Judge Mollison’s, that creature is there all the time. Daddy says he’s had kidnap threats about me recently. I don’t believe it and if it were true Simon Kennedy – the chauffeur – is far better than Gunther. I never have a private moment to myself. When I’m out on the rig – the X 13 – I’m no prisoner, I just can’t get off, but here my room windows are screwed into the wall and Gunther spends the night in the ante-room watching to see –’
The last three words took a long, long time to come out and trailed off into a shocked silence. In her excitement, her eagerness to unburden herself of all those things that had been worrying her for weeks, she had come close to me. And now her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. She started to shake. Her right hand began to move up slowly towards her mouth, the arm trembling all the time and jerking like the arm of a marionette, her mouth opened and her eyes widened and kept on widening until I could see white all the way round the pupils. And then she drew a long quavering breath. Prelude to a scream.
But the prelude was all that there was to it. In my business, you don’t telegraph your signals. I’d one hand over her mouth and an arm round her before she’d even made up her mind what key to sing in. For several seconds, with surprising strength – or in the circumstances perhaps not so surprising – she struggled furiously, then sagged against me, limp as a shot rabbit. It took me by surprise, I’d thought the day when young ladies had passed out in moments of stress had vanished with the Edwardians. But perhaps I was underestimating the fearsome reputation I appeared to have built up for myself, perhaps I was underestimating the cumulative effect of the shock after a long night of nerving herself to take this last desperate chance, after weeks of endless strain. Whatever the reasons, she wasn’t faking, she was out cold. I lifted her across to the bed, then for some obscure reason I had a revulsion of feeling, I couldn’t bear to have her lie on that bed where Jablonsky had so recently been murdered, so I carried her through to the bed in my own room.
I’ve had a fairly extensive practical first-aid education, but I didn’t know the first thing about bringing young ladies out of swoons. I had a vague feeling that to do anything might be dangerous, a feeling that accorded well enough with my ignorance of what to do, so I came to the conclusion that not only the best thing but the only thing to do was to let her come out of it by herself. But I didn’t want her to come out of it unknown to me and start bringing the house down so I sat on the edge of the bed and kept the flash on her face, the beam just below the eyes so as not to dazzle her.
She wore a
blue quilted silk dressing-gown over blue silk pyjamas. Her high-heeled slippers were blue, even the night-ribbon for holding those thick shining braids in place was of exactly the same colour. Her face, just then, was as pale as old ivory. Nothing would ever make it a beautiful face, but then I suppose that if it had been beautiful my heart wouldn’t have chosen that moment to start doing handsprings, the first time it had shown any life at all, far less such extravagant activity, in three long and empty years. Her face seemed to fade and again I could see the fire and the slippers that I’d seen two nights ago and all that stood between us was 285 million dollars and the fact that I was the only man in the world the very sight of whom could make her collapse in terror. I put my dreams away.
She stirred and opened her eyes. I felt that the technique I’d used with Kennedy – telling him that there was a gun behind my torch – might have unfortunate results in this case. So I caught one of the hands that were lying limply on the coverlet, bent forward and said softly, reprovingly: ‘You silly young muggins, why did you go and do a daft thing like that?’
Luck or instinct or both had put me on the right track. Her eyes were wide, but not staring wide, and the fear that still showed there was touched with puzzlement. Murderers of a certain category don’t hold your hand and speak reassuringly. Poisoners, yes: knife-plungers in the back, possibly: but not murderers with my reputation for pure violence.
‘You’re not going to try to scream again, are you?’ I asked.
‘No.’ Her voice was husky. ‘I – I’m sorry I was so stupid –’
‘Right,’ I said briskly. ‘If you’re feeling fit for it, we’ll talk. We have to, and there’s little time.’
‘Can’t you put the light on?’ she begged.
‘No light. Shines through curtains. We don’t want any callers at this time –’
‘There are shutters,’ she interrupted. ‘Wooden shutters. On every window in the house.’
Hawk-eye Talbot, that was me. I’d spent a whole day doing nothing but staring out the window and I’d never even seen them. I rose, closed and fastened the shutters, closed the communicating door to Jablonsky’s room and switched on the light. She was sitting on the side of the bed now, hugging her arms as if she were cold.
‘I’m hurt,’ I announced. ‘You can take one look at Jablonsky and tell right away, or so you think, that he’s not a crook. But the longer you look at me the more convinced you are that I’m a murderer.’ I held up a hand as she was about to speak. ‘Sure, you got reasons. Excellent reasons. But they’re wrong.’ I hitched up a trouser leg and offered for her inspection a foot elegantly covered in a maroon sock and completely plain black shoe. ‘Ever seen those before?’
She looked at them, just for a second, then switched her gaze to my face. ‘Simon’s,’ she whispered. ‘Those are Simon’s.’
‘Your chauffeur.’ I didn’t care much for this Simon business. ‘He gave them to me a couple of hours ago. Of his own free will. It took me five minutes flat to convince him that I am not a murderer and far from what I appear to be. Are you willing to give me the same time?’
She nodded slowly without speaking.
It didn’t even take three minutes. The fact that Kennedy had given me the OK was the battle more than half won as far as she was concerned. But I skipped the bit about finding Jablonsky. She wasn’t ready for any shocks of that nature, not yet.
When I was finished she said, almost unbelievingly: ‘So you knew about us all the time? About Daddy and me and our troubles and –’
‘We’ve known about you for several months. Not specifically about your trouble, though, nor you father’s whatever that may be: all we knew was that General Blair Ruthven was mixed up in something that General Blair Ruthven had no right to be mixed up in. And don’t ask me who “we” are or who I am, because I don’t like refusing to answer questions and it’s for your own sake anyway. What’s your father scared of, Mary?’
‘I – I don’t know. I know he’s frightened of Royale, but –’
‘He’s frightened of Royale. I’m frightened of Royale. We’re all frightened of Royale. I’ll take long odds that Vyland feeds him plenty of stories about Royale to keep him good and scared. But it’s not that. Not primarily. He’s frightened for your sake, too, but my guess is that those fears have only grown since he found out the kind of company he’s keeping. What they’re really like, I mean. I think he went into this with his eyes open and for his own ends, even if he didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. Just how long have Vyland and you father been, shall we way, business associates?’
She thought a bit and she said: ‘I can tell you that exactly. It started when we were on holiday with our yacht, the Temptress, in the West Indies late last April. We’d been in Kingston, Jamaica, when Daddy got word from Mummy’s lawyers that she wanted a legal separation. You may have heard about it,’ she went on miserably. ‘I don’t think there was a paper in North America that missed out on the story and some of them were pretty vicious about it.’
‘You mean the general had been so long held up as the model citizen of the country and their marriage as the ideal family marriage?’
‘Yes, something like that. They made a lovely target for all the yellow Press,’ she said bitterly. ‘I don’t know what came over Mummy, we had all always got on so well together, but it just shows that children never know exactly how things were or are between their parents.’
‘Children?’
‘I was just speaking generally.’ She sounded tired and dispirited and beaten, and she looked that way. And she was, or she would never have talked to a stranger of such things. ‘As it happens, there’s another girl. Jean, my young sister – she’s ten years younger than I am. Daddy married late in life. Jean’s with my mother. It looks as if she’s going to stay with my mother, too. The lawyers are still working things out. There’ll be no divorce, of course.’ She smiled emptily. ‘You don’t know the New England Ruthvens, Mr Talbot, but if you did you’d know that there are certain words missing from their vocabulary. “Divorce” is one of them.’
‘And your father has never made any attempts at reconciliation?’
‘He went up to see her twice. It was no good. She doesn’t – she doesn’t even want to see me. She’s gone away somewhere and apart from Daddy nobody quite knows where. When you have money those things aren’t too difficult to arrange.’ It must have been the mention of the money that sent her thoughts off on a new tack for when she spoke again I could hear those 285 million dollars back in her voice and see the Mayflower in her face. ‘I don’t quite see how all our private family business concerns you, Mr Talbot.’
‘Neither do I,’ I agreed. It was as near as I came to an apology. ‘Maybe I read the yellow Press, too. I’m only interested in it as far as the Vyland tie-up is concerned. It was at this moment that he stepped in?’
‘About then. A week or two later. Daddy was pretty low, I suppose he was willing to listen to any proposal that would take his mind off his troubles, and – and –’
‘And, of course, his business judgement was below par. Although it wouldn’t have to be more than a fraction below to allow friend Vyland to get his foot stuck in the front door. From the cut of his moustache to the way he arranges his display handkerchief Vyland is everything a top-flight industrialist ought to be. He’s read all the books about Wall Street, he hasn’t missed his Saturday night at the cinema for years, he’s got every last littlest trick off to perfection. I don’t suppose Royale appeared on the scene until later?’
She nodded dumbly. She looked to me to be pretty close to tears. Tears can touch me, but not when I’m pushed for time. And I was desperately short of time now. I switched off the light, went to the window, pulled back one of the shutters and stared out. The wind was stronger than ever, the rain lashed against the glass and sent the water streaming down the pane in little hurrying rivers. But, more important still, the darkness in the east was lightening into grey, the dawn was in the sky. I
turned away, closed the shutter, switched on the light and looked down at the weary girl.
‘Think they’ll be able to fly the helicopter out to the X 13 today?’ I asked.
‘Choppers can fly in practically any weather.’ She stirred. ‘Who says anybody’s flying out there today?’
‘I do,’ I didn’t elaborate. ‘Now, perhaps, you’ll tell me the truth of why you came here to see Jablonsky?’
‘Tell you the truth –’
‘You said he had a kind face. Maybe he has, maybe he hasn’t, but as a reason it’s rubbish.’
‘I see. I’m not holding anything back, honestly I’m not. It’s just that I’m so – so worried. I overheard something about him that made me think –’
‘Get to the point,’ I said roughly.
‘You know the library’s wired, I mean they’ve got listening devices plugged in –’
‘I’ve heard of them,’ I said patiently. ‘I don’t need a diagram.’
Colour touched the pale cheeks. ‘I’m sorry. Well, I was next door in the office where the earphones are and I don’t know why I just put them on.’ I grinned: the idea of the biter bit appealed. ‘Vyland and Royale were in the library. They were talking about Jablonsky.’
I wasn’t grinning any more.
‘They had him tailed this morning when he went into Marble Springs. It seems he went into a hardware store, why, they don’t know.’ I could have filled that part in: he’d gone to buy a rope, have duplicate keys cut and do quite a bit of telephoning. ‘It seems he was there half an hour without coming out, then the tail went in after him. Jablonsky came out, but his shadower didn’t. He’d disappeared.’ She smiled faintly. ‘It seems that Jablonsky must have attended to him.’