Fear is the Key

Down on my hands and knees I levelled the torch along the nap of the carpet and squinted down the beam. It wasn't much of a carpet but it was enough, the two parallel indentations where Jablonsky's heels had dragged across it were unmistakable. I rose to my feet, examined the bed again, picked up a cushion that lay on the armchair and examined that. I couldn't see anything, but when I bent my head and sniffed there could be no doubt about it: the acrid odour of burnt powder clings to fabrics for days.

I crossed to the small table in the corner, poured three fingers of whisky into a glass and sat down to try to figure it all out.

The set-up just didn't begin to make any sense at all. Nothing jibed, nothing fitted. How had Royale and whoever had been with him — for no one man could have carried Jablonsky out of that room by himself — managed to get in in the first place? Jablonsky had felt as secure in that house as a stray lamb in a starving wolf pack and I knew he would have locked the door. Somebody else could have had a key, of course, but the point was that Jablonsky invariably left his key in the lock and jammed it so that it couldn't be pushed out or turned from the other side — not unless enough force were used and noise made to wake him up a dozen times over.

Jablonsky had been shot when sleeping in bed. Jablonsky, I knew, had pyjamas and used them — but when I found him in the kitchen garden he'd been completely clothed. Why dress him? It didn't make sense, especially trying to dress a dead man weighing 240 Ib. didn't make sense. And why had there been no silencer fitted to the gun? I knew there hadn't been; with the pressure absorption of a silencer not even those special bullets would travel through a skull-bone twice, and, besides, he'd used a cushion to muffle the shot. Understandable enough, in a way: those rooms were in a remote wing of the house and with the help of a cushion and the background noise of the growing storm the chances were that the shot would not be heard in the other parts of the house. But the point was that I had been right next door and was bound to have heard it, unless I were deaf or dead, and as far as Royale had known — or as far as I thought he had known — I had been asleep in the next room. Or had Royale known I was not in that room? Had he come to make a quick check, found I was gone, knew that it must have been Jablonsky that had let me go and killed Jablonsky there and then? It fitted with the facts: but it didn't fit with the smile on the dead man's face.

I went back into my own room, rearranged my steaming clothes on the back of the chair before the electric fire, then returned to Jablonsky's room. I took up my glass again and glanced at the whisky bottle. It was a five-gill flask, still three parts full. That was no help, what was missing wouldn't even have begun to affect Jablonsky's razor-edged vigilance. I'd seen Jablonsky dispose of an entire bottle of rum — he wasn't a whisky man — in an evening and the only apparent effect it had had on him was that he smiled even more than usual.

But Jablonsky would never smile again.

Sitting there alone in the near darkness, the only illumination the glow from the electric fire in the next room, I lifted my glass. A toast, a farewell, I don't know what you'd call it. It was for Jablonsky. I sipped it slowly, rolling the whisky over my tongue to savour to the full the rich bouquet and taste of a fine old Scotch; for the space of two or three seconds I sat very still indeed, then I put the glass down, rose, crossed quickly to the corner of the room, spat the Scotch into the wash-basin and rinsed my mouth out very carefully indeed.

It was Vyland who had provided the whisky. After Jablonsky had paraded me downstairs last night, Vyland had given him a sealed whisky bottle and glasses to take back to his room. Jablonsky had poured out a couple of drinks soon after we had gone upstairs and I'd actually had my glass in my hand when I remembered that drinking alcohol before breathing oxygen on a deep dive wasn't a very clever thing to do. Jablonsky had drained them both, then had maybe a couple more after I had left.

Royale and his friends didn't have to batter Jablonsky's door in with foreaxes, they had a key for the job, but even if they had used axes Jablonsky would never have heard them. There had been enough knockout drops in that bottle of whisky to put an elephant out for the count. He must have been just able to stagger as far as his bed before collapsing. I knew it was stupid, but I stood there in the silent dark reproaching myself bitterly for not having accepted that drink; it was a fairly subtle blending of a Mickey Finn and Scotch, but I think I would have got on to it straight away. But Jablonsky wasn't a whisky man, maybe he thought that was the way Scotch ought to taste.