Read Online Double-Barrel by Nicolas Freeling - Free Book Online Page A

wanted. The two husbands, gifted, energetic, often abroad and accustomed to a circle ofothers equally thrusting, had played the part expected of them. Whisky and call-girls in the hotelsuites of Düsseldorf or Milan. Half the fun was in kicking over the respectability to which they were constrained at home. The girls had meant no more than a stolen apple. Betty, a smalltown, strictly-reared girl, had had intoxicating tastes of these men’s conversation and jokes. She had got over her initial prudery and tried to keep up with them. Stuck at home, a bit neglected by a husband giving too much time to his career, having no children, she had done a few innocent, mildly silly things, but had had the bad luck to be spied out by a blackmailer who had enormously magnified it all. The tangle had grown involved, she had dreaded causing a scandal, dreaded compromising her husband’s position, and had not been able to ride the squall out. Neither the experience of life nor the firmness of character. Who knows: she had perhaps given in to the blackmailer’s demands. Finally, she had seen nothing for it but sleeping pills.
    â€˜That was how it happened – you agree?’
    â€˜Yes; I rather think so, seen like that. But if only she’d told Will – or me, come to that. We’d have backed her up, of course.’
    Prodding this character off balance had been a success; I decided to try a second barrel and a riskier shot.
    â€˜One more small point. Your firm produces sensitive listening gadgets for various purposes. There’s a lot of mention in the police reports of one that might have been useful in a blackmailer’s hands. The thing that – what does it do?’
    â€˜Listens to machinery, jet engines to take an example, under test. It can detect faint flutters with a high level of exterior noise. I know what you’re heading at; it’s nonsense.’
    â€˜You maintained that no such apparatus could get into the wrong hands.’
    â€˜I did and I do.’
    â€˜You don’t have to tell me lies, you know. Don’t interrupt. You, and Will, occasionally take things home. Prototypes or whatever you call them. You play with them at home, and you may think up a modification or experiment on an improvement. Right?’
    â€˜Well, that’s so, within limits, but …’
    â€˜Now it occurred to you – just as it occurred to me; I wasn’t born yesterday either – that it might be very comic to try one of these things out in a hotel, say? You did, and found it a good joke, and being a big broadminded business man you had a good laugh about this in Betty’s presence. Am I wrong?’
    â€˜Completely.’
    â€˜Nonsense,’ in an unimpressed way. ‘You left a gadget – I don’t say this one, but some similar bit of apparatus – lying about in Will’s house. When it disappeared you didn’t even notice at first. When you did you were alarmed because the thing is classified as secret. After Betty’s death you were really scared, because it occurred to you that this thing might in some way be connected. And you stuck to a lie through thick and thin. This is all logical, natural, consequential. But you’ve just denied it with such false bravado, and you are looking so particularly guilty, that I know that this – ach, not necessarily in detail – is so.’
    â€˜But my god … how do you know?’
    â€˜I guessed. Look, the writer of these letters boasts of being the ear of God. That is a figurative remark; the fact is, however, that this person knows a remarkable number of things that an ordinary person would not know. The conclusion is that he got something of this sort, and presumably from or through Betty. I’m not accusing you. Now tell me about the thing – what it looks like; how it’s used.’
    â€˜It’s in a cigar-box,’ much squashed, even shaken. ‘We chose that to