by John Creasey
Copyright & Information
The Extortioners
First published in 1974
© John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1974-2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of John Creasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2014 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
075513561X 9780755135615 Print
0755138945 9780755138944 Kindle
0755137280 9780755137282 Epub
0755154894 9780755154890 Epdf
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
John Creasey – Master Storyteller - was born in Surrey, England in 1908 into a poor family in which there were nine children, John Creasey grew up to be a true master story teller and international sensation. His more than 600 crime, mystery and thriller titles have now sold 80 million copies in 25 languages. These include many popular series such as Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Toff, Dr Palfrey and The Baron.
Creasey wrote under many pseudonyms, explaining that booksellers had complained he totally dominated the ‘C’ section in stores. They included:
Gordon Ashe, M E Cooke, Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J J Marric, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.
Never one to sit still, Creasey had a strong social conscience, and stood for Parliament several times, along with founding the One Party Alliance which promoted the idea of government by a coalition of the best minds from across the political spectrum.
He also founded the British Crime Writers’ Association, which to this day celebrates outstanding crime writing. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed upon him the Edgar Award for best novel and then in 1969 the ultimate Grand Master Award. John Creasey’s stories are as compelling today as ever.
Chapter One
Rich Man
“You’re a rich man,” said the stranger on the telephone. “You can pay twenty thousand pounds without missing it. Don’t make any mistake, Clayton. You pay the money or your wife knows about your little peccadillo.” The speaker gave a curiously mirthless laugh. “If that’s what you like to call it.”
He fell silent, but Oliver Clayton did not speak.
“Are you there?” the caller asked, sharply. “I’m not fooling. I can give her chapter and verse, going back over nineteen years. I can tell her everything. To keep those secrets, twenty thousand pounds is cheap.”
Still Clayton did not speak.
“Answer me!” the speaker rasped. “You’re still there, I can hear you breathing. Answer me!”
Very slowly and deliberately, Clayton put down the receiver.
He was at the large, pedestal desk in a spacious, book-lined room; both spacious and gracious. French windows opened on to a narrow lawn and a herbaceous border not yet in full colour, for it was early spring; but there were crocuses and daffodils and some flowering shrubs, vivid in the afternoon sun. Morning rain had given the green fresh brightness and the flowers clarity of colours. Sparrows flew and a robin pecked at a patch of ground newly dug by Rosamund.
By his wife.
It was a bright and beautiful afternoon; and this room was full of light. Yet it also seemed full of shadows; near darkness; menace. The weathered red-brick wall, with its ramblers – tied and trained by Rosamund – already in leaf, gave a sense of solidity to the tranquillity out there, but in his heart and mind there was the beginning of awful turbulence.
Fear.
He had a mind which scholars conceded was as lucid as a man’s could be, but just now it was clouded; even thoughts would not come, only the fears. He felt as if he had come up against some dark, forbidding, unyielding mass which spread pain throughout his body and along his limbs.
He did not yet ask himself who could possibly know of his other life.
He sat back in his padded swivel chair, with the high back against which he rested his dark head; a pale patch showed where the hair was going thin. He had a long, narrow face, with sensitive lips and a sensitive nose, and dark, deep set, very bright eyes. Their present brightness was caused by pain. His long, slender hands gripped the arms of the chair as if some hidden compulsion put power into him.
Slowly, he relaxed.
In a voice little above a whisper, he said: “Oh, dear God.” He shivered.
There was no sound in the room but his breathing, none outside except the hum of a car, moving along this quiet street in Hampstead. Beyond the garden he could see the tops of beech trees on the Heath, beyond the trees the high, white cloud and the clear blue sky.
He moistened his lips, and said again: “Oh, dear God.”
When at last he focused his eyes, it was on a photograph of Rosamund and the two girls, when they had been young; Angela, ten, Bertha, eight. An age ago. Both were married now, Angela had a child of her own, and only occasionally was this big house filled with people or with voices, with footsteps or with laughter. There was just Rosamund and himself.
Just Rosamund.
Here, he had grown into the habit of forgetting – yes, forgetting! – his other life.
Forgetting?
Perhaps more truly he had become able over the years to put it out of his mind, emotionally, when he was here; to live, behave, think, as if Ida and her son – their son – did not exist, or, if they were alive, existed in a different world which had nothing to do with this one.
At last, he was beginning to think a little, and the obvious question came: what should he do?
Out of the blue, the telephone call had come; out of the blue, a demand for twenty thousand pounds; out of the blue, the crashing of this part of his life, perhaps of all of his life.
What would Rosamund do, if she found out? What would I do?
What of the children; the girls and their husbands, and: Kevin.
My God! What had been going on in his mind all these years? Had he really believed that the truth would never out? Had he lived in security for so long that he had lulled himself into believing that the security was true, not false?
He was sweating; at forehead and neck, lips and eyes; he was hot and cold.
What should he do?
Pay the man off?
Some inner voice answered: No. He did not listen at first, did not really hear it, for another thought came like the slash of a knife: he must not let Rosamund come back and find him like this. She would see at a glance that something was seriously wrong, and ply him with questions. He could not lie to her now, he had to get away, perhaps for a day or two, so that he could think clearly and make up his mind what to do. He glanced at a wall-clock, the ticking of which was so soft he could not hear a sound. It was twenty to four. Rosamund had gone to one of her do-gooding committees and the afternoon ones always spilled over into tea and cakes or tea and biscuits; she wouldn’t
be back until five o’clock, possibly half past five to six.
He pushed his chair back and stood up – and the telephone bell rang.
The last time it had rung, he had not the faintest premonition of what the call would be about; it might have been from any one of a dozen, a hundred people, from a newspaperman to a tradesman, from a friend to a casual acquaintance. It had been the man with the husky voice, who had begun by asking: “Is that Professor Clayton?”
“Yes,” Oliver Clayton had answered.
“You won’t know me, Professor,” the man had said, “but I know a great deal about you.”
In the light of what had followed that had been a sinister remark but at the moment Clayton had thought nothing of it. A dozen people might telephone or write and say much the same thing. He was a professor of zoology, who had worked for many years on tracing, through fossils found in mountains and sea beds, in underground oil masses and in countless mines in a hundred countries, the origin of animals. He had never set out with any specific purpose or objective in mind; just to explore, for his was a nature which throve on facts. He had written dozens of papers, all of which had appeared in obscure magazines throughout the world, some translated into over twenty languages, and he was an expert in a subject which few people considered of any great importance. Moreover, he was wealthy by inheritance, and could afford to do exactly what he wanted; and he wanted to investigate the history of mammals.
He had travelled widely, and in the early years, Rosamund had not been able to go with him. It was on one of his expeditions, in Australia, that he had met Ida, and she had fallen in love with him.
And he, with her?
It had been very different from his first burning passion for Rosamund, and yet had not been simply physical. In fact Ida had looked after his creature comforts rather more than his sexual appetite. Yet he could remember the time when they had first lain together, in a shack beside a billabong in South Australia. A series of accidents had left them on their own. Ida, a young student interested in fossils, had come along at least as much as cook and general help as for digging and research. She had been a pretty thing, with a nice figure, perhaps too heavy-breasted, and with beautiful grey eyes. He had woken on a Sunday morning to find her squatting close to him, those grey eyes close to him, smiling. “My,” she had said. “You look good enough to eat.”
“And you,” he had retorted, “look good enough to bed.”
“Maybe I am,” she had said. “Like to try me?” Afterwards there had been such a vivid picture of Rosamund and the children in his mind; and, carelessly, he had left the photograph he had of them out, by the oddments of shaving and washing gear, so that when they had come back from the cave, chipping away at the rock and getting a good haul of sea-animal fossils as well as a few opals, Ida had picked it up and then looked at him.
“May I take a dekko, Professor?”
“Are you sure you want to?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Then look,” he agreed.
She had studied Rosamund for a long time. He had wondered what had been passing through her mind, wondered whether she would be resentful, or indifferent; whether she was falling in love with him, whether hurt for her was inevitable. Suddenly, she closed the leather case slowly, and said: “They’re a pair of beaut kids, Professor.”
“They are, yes.”
“And she’s got everything it takes.”
“Yes,” he had answered.
“You in love with her?” Ida had challenged, and he had not hesitated to answer even though the words had come out slowly: “In my way, yes.”
“What’s your way, Professor?” Ida had demanded. “Out of sight, out of mind? What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve about?”
To this day he could recall the hard, near-truculent tone and manner; remembered that he had realised in those moments that she was in love with him, that the morning’s passion had not simply been a snatch at a passing mood.
“No,” he had said.
“So you’ve got another way, all your own.”
“I know what I feel and what I think,” he had replied.
“Tell me, Professor, how do you feel and how do you think?”
Sitting on a wool-stuffed cushion with his back against a rock he had looked at her for a long time, very steadily; he could not remember any of the exact words, of course, but he could recapture the mood and be almost sure of the words. He had sensed the way her heart was beating, sense her yearning.
“I can love her,” he said. “And love you.”
“You mean you’d like a harem?” she had sneered.
“Ida,” he had said, “it’s very rare that one woman can give everything one man needs; equally rare the other way round. Society forces us to make do. We settle for a lot of unhappiness and self-denial. I’m not making any proposals to you, I’m just telling you what I feel and what I think. I could be with you much of the time and not feel in the slightest degree disloyal to Rosamund, and with Rosamund without feeling the slightest sense of disloyalty to you. What I don’t think—” He had broken off; even now, his lips twisted in the kind of wry smile which had twisted them so long ago.
“Well?” How her eyes had glowed in the evening sun. “What don’t you think?”
“That you could be happy if you knew I was with her, or she would be happy if she knew about you.”
“Too bloody right she wouldn’t,” Ida had said, almost viciously.
But that night she had come to him, and said: “I don’t think I would mind, Professor.”
“You need to be sure,” he had replied.
“I’ve always wanted to come to England,” she had said. “She … she wouldn’t have to know about me. And you wouldn’t have to keep me, either, I can work. I’m not going to be any bloody pommie’s fancy girl!”
He had known it was crazy, but he had brought her back, and persuaded her to let him buy a flat for her in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. She lived in the same flat now. Their son, Kevin, had been brought up in the flat. She had registered the child’s birth, using her own name as his, saying she was a widow. She had taken an allowance from Oliver for him, but sent him to a council school, then to one in Westminster. Now he was at London University. To Kevin, Oliver was ‘Uncle Oliver’. There was no way of being sure but Oliver believed Ida had been happy most of the time. He was certain that she had had some tempestuous affairs, and God knew he could not blame her. After the first, he had not really been jealous. The last had been some years ago.
Two lives.
It was a miracle that he had been able to keep them so separate that neither intruded on the other at all; had not until now.
A question began to thunder in his brain, driving out the thoughts of yesterday, all the nostalgia, even the more urgent fears.
“What am I going to do?” he asked himself aloud. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”
He could pay the blackmailer his twenty thousand pounds, but the ‘no’ was more insistent and so more audible and rational. There was no way of being sure the first demand would be the last. Much more likely there would be others, each more difficult to resist than those that had gone before. He could pay the blackmailer off but he must not.
He could tell Ida, and afterwards Rosamund.
He felt absolutely certain that once Rosamund knew he would have to break with Ida, or leave Rosamund, which would mean a divorce. He did not want a divorce. The simple truth was that he did not want to change his way of life at all. The years, if not the law, tied him as closely to Ida as to Rosamund, but they were such different women. He could not be sure how Ida would react but had some idea. After the first shock she would say: “Well, it had to end one day, Professor, and we had a good run.”
Nineteen, nearly twenty years. A good run!
She would probably add: “Kevin doesn’t know you’re his father, that’s one good thing.”
Good thing? His mind echoed. Was it so good
? He had two daughters and a son and the son had never been acknowledged.
Only now, when the full truth was likely to break, was the enormity of the past attacking him with full force. My God! He couldn’t deny the boy forever!
What should he do?
He could tell Rosamund, he reminded himself, but – what could she do, but ask him, expect him, to give Ida up? Either that, or divorce him. It was so much the convention. Not only she herself but her family, probably their daughters, would feel this was essential. He did not think it would make any difference which way he twisted and turned; if he told Rosamund the truth he would lose one life or the other.
What a bloody selfish fool!
What of the hurt this would cause Rosamund? How cold-blooded could one get, to think solely in terms of oneself? It was unthinkable to tell her that for practically all of their married life he had been deceiving her. Divorce or no divorce, she would hang her head because of his shame.
He couldn’t tell her; couldn’t hurt her.
But what could he do?
Suddenly, swiftly, a thought came: the complete answer to his question and in that moment wholly complete and absolutely satisfying: so satisfying that he actually relaxed and smiled.
He could find his blackmailer, and kill him.
That way, no one need ever know; not Rosamund, not Ida; no one in the wide, wide world.
It was while the thought hovered in his mind that the telephone bell rang.
That was about the time when Sir Douglas Fellowes, a civil servant in a position of good standing and great trust at Whitehall, sat at his opulent desk in his opulent office, with a pen in his hand and a single sheet of paper in front of him. His expression was set and stern, the only muscles which moved were those at his jaws, and they very slowly. At last, he put the broad gold nib to paper, and in a bold, flowing hand which did not tremble he wrote:
I want it to be clearly understood that the reasons I have for taking my life are purely personal. Nothing even remotely connected with my post in Her Majesty’s Civil Service is at stake.
