1951 - In a Vain Shadow by James Hadley Chase Read Free Book Online Page A

Thinking back I can see now I played my cards badly with Emmie. I know now she was crazy about Sarek, and there was nothing she wouldn’t have done for him. She was as worried as he was about the threatening letters, and had encouraged him to hire himself a bodyguard.
    The scene had been set for me if I hadn’t been such a blind fool and stepped out of turn from the beginning. If I had been courteous to her, treated her like a human being, she would have been strong for me, and I could have handled her when the time came when I had to handle her or go under.
    Instead, I treated her as I saw her: a tat, hideous little Jewess, who had weak eyes and a spotty complexion. I didn’t make any pretence that that sight of her turned my stomach.
    I scarcely spoke a word to her, and when I did I pointedly looked away from her so I shouldn’t be unnecessarily sickened by the sight of her face.
    So she did what anyone would have done after being treated like that: she hated me with everything she had: a vicious, spiteful angry hatred, full of patience for the time to get even, and that’s about the most dangerous type of hatred to come up against.
    But I was so smug, so sure of myself, I didn’t care. All I could think of was Rita and Sarek’s money. To me, Emmie was a joke: and not even a good joke at that.
    If I was in bad with Emmie I was going great guns with Sarek. By now I had my feelings about Rita under control. I could sit in the same room with her without feeling I wanted to walk across the ceiling, and I could get my mind on to chess.
    I had learned chess from a Russian who had once drawn three games and won one against Alekhine. I had run into him at a Prisoner of War Camp in Germany, and he and I spent five hours a day for eighteen months playing chess.
    Sarek was no slouch either, and the battles we had in the evening were tournament stuff.
    Whenever she went to bed early I beat him. But so long as she remained in the room, some of my mind was on her, and he beat me. But he reckoned I was the most stylish player he had ever met, and those nightly games cemented his liking for me as nothing else could.
    And another thing pleased him. He was expecting another threatening letter. He had received one every Thursday morning for the past month, but this Thursday it didn’t turn up. That put him right on top of the world, for those letters scared him more than he admitted.
    ‘They take a look at you, Mitchell. You scare them off.’
    And that began to worry me. If he didn’t receive any more threatening letters he might begin to think he was paying out ten pounds a week for nothing. Even a nightly game of chess doesn’t rate at ten pounds a week. I couldn’t imagine him feeding and paying me to sit around his office and home, doing nothing once he got over his scare. Maybe he did like me, but not to that extent.
    Then on the fourth day, a Friday, the opportunity I had been waiting for turned up.
    I had driven Sarek to Shoreditch where he had collected a parcel, and we were on our way back to the West End when he said suddenly, ‘Tomorrow I go to Paris. Maybe I stay a week; maybe two weeks. Is not necessary for you to come.’
    And I thought this was the payoff. I couldn’t imagine him handing me ten pounds a week for two weeks while he was in Paris.
    ‘So what do I do?’
    ‘Is nothing for you to do except look after the house. But maybe you don’t care to do that?’
    The thought he might be feel enough to leave me in the house alone with her sent the blood pounding in my temples.
    ‘How about Mrs. Sarek? Can’t she look after it?’
    ‘She come with me.’
    I should have known he wouldn’t have been that much of a fool.
    ‘You mean you want me to hang around, feed the chickens and keep burglars away?’
    ‘Is right. Two years my wife has not been away. All the time the chickens tie her to the house: you understand? I promise her the next time I go to Paris she come with me. So long as the chickens are fed I