Fear is the Key

"All I can do down there. I need paper, pencil, the book of instructions and if I'm right — and I think I am — I can have those engines going within five minutes of getting down there again. Where's Vyland?"

"The general called for him five minutes ago." Good old general, dead on the dot. "They've gone off somewhere — I don't know where."

"It doesn't matter. This'll only take me half an hour at the most. You can tell him we'll be ready to go shortly after seven. Now I want some paper and peace and quiet for my calculations. Where's the nearest place?"

"Won't this do?" Royale asked mildly. "I'll get Cibatti to fetch some paper."

"If you imagine I'm going to work with Cibatti giving me the cold cod eye all the time you're mistaken." I thought a moment. "We passed a regular office a few yards along the passage on the way back here. It was open. Proper desk and everything, all the paper and rules I need."

"What's the harm?" Royale shrugged and stood aside to let me pass. As I went out Cibatti emerged through the trunking from the pillar and before we'd gone ten feet along the passage I heard the solid thudding home of a bolt, the turning of a key in the lock behind us. Cibatti took his keeper of the castle duties very seriously indeed.

Half-way along the passage an opened door led into a small, fairly comfortably furnished room. I looked over my shoulder at Royale, saw his nod and went in. The room looked as if it had been used as an architect's office, for there were a couple of large drawing 'boards on easels topped by strip lighting. I passed those up in favour of a big leather-covered desk with a comfortable arm-chair behind it.

Royale looked round the room the way Royale would always look round a room. It was impossible to imagine Royale sitting down anywhere with his back to a door, overlooked by a window or with light in his eyes. He would have behaved the same in a children's nursery. In this case, however, he seemed to be examining the room more with an eye to its qualifications as a prison, and what he saw must have satisfied him: apart from the doorway through which we had just entered, the only other point of egress from the room was through the plate-glass window that overlooked the sea. He picked a chair directly under the central overhead light, lit a cigarette and sat there quietly, the lamplight gleaming off his dark blond slick hair, his expressionless face in shadow. He was no more than six feet from me and he had nothing in his hands and he could have had that little black gun out and two little holes drilled through me before I covered half the distance towards his chair. Besides, violence wasn't on the cards just then: not, at least, for me.

I spent ten minutes in scribbling down figures on a sheet of paper, fiddling with a slide rule, consulting a wiring diagram and getting nowhere at all. I didn't conceal the fact that I was getting nowhere at all. I clicked my tongue in impatience, scratched my head with the end of my pencil, compressed my lips and looked with mounting irritation at the walls, the door, the window. But mostly I looked in irritation at Royale. Eventually he got it — he would have been hard pressed not to get it.

"My presence here bothering you, Talbot?"

"What? Well, no, not exactly — I just don't seem to be getting-"

"Not working out as easily as you thought it would, eh?"

I stared at him in irritable silence. If he wasn't going to suggest it I would have to, but he saved me the trouble.

"Maybe I'm just as anxious as you to get this thing over. I guess you're one of those characters who don't like distraction. And I seem to be distracting you." He rose easily to his feet, glanced at the paper in front of me, picked up his chair with one hand and made for the door. "I'll wait outside."

I said nothing, just nodded briefly. He took the key from the inside of the door, went out into the passage, shut the door and locked it. I got up, crossed to the door on cat feet and waited.

I didn't have to wait long. Within a minute I heard the sound of feet walking briskly along the passage outside, the sound of somebody saying, "Sorry, Mac "in a pronounced and unmistakably American accent and then, almost in the same instant, the solid, faintly hollow sounding impact of a heavy blow that had me wincing in vicarious suffering. A moment later the key turned in the lock, the door opened and I helped drag a heavy load into the room.

The load was Royale and he was out, cold as a flounder. I hauled him inside while the oil-skinned figure who'd lifted him through the door reversed the key and turned it in the lock. At once he started throwing off sou'wester, coat and leggings, and beneath everything his maroon uniform was as immaculate as ever.

"Not at all bad," I murmured. "Both the sap and the American accent. You'd have fooled me."