Curtain of Fear Read online

  CURTAIN OF FEAR

  by

  DENNIS WHEATLEY

  For my friend of many years

  THE RT. REVEREND

  CYRIL EASTAUGH, M.C.

  Lord Bishop of Kensington.

  Most affectionately.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter I “The Path of True Love …”

  Chapter II The Atomic Scientist

  Chapter III The Terrible Dilemma

  Chapter IV The Black Limousine

  Chapter V The Persistent Negro

  Chapter VI It Can Happen Here

  Chapter VII Unhappy Landing

  Chapter VIII Behind the Iron Curtain

  Chapter IX Luxury Suite for Two

  Chapter X In the Net

  Chapter XI The People’s Representative

  Chapter XII A Taste of Soviet Justice

  Chapter XIII A Mind in Torment

  Chapter XIV Night-Life Under the Soviets

  Chapter XV The Faith that Failed

  Chapter XVI Trapped

  Chapter XVII Ordeal by Water

  Chapter XVIII Decree of Fate

  Chapter XIX The Morning After

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ‘all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  CHAPTER I

  “THE PATH OF TRUE LOVE …”

  “What about a little kiss from my teacher?” said Wendy with a smile.

  “Come right up to the top of the class, darling,” Nicky smiled back.

  The door of the class-room had barely closed before her arms were round his neck. She was a senior student and he a junior professor at Birmingham University. About three minutes had elapsed since he had finished his morning lecture. During them they had both made an impatient pretence of packing up their notes and books until the other students had left the room. At last they were free to snatch a few moments’ bliss together.

  For a dozen heart-beats they stood tightly embraced, then drew apart to smile into one another’s eyes. Wendy Stevenson was twenty-two, a well-built athletic-looking girl with dark curly hair, a straight nose, rather full cheeks and a generous mouth. Nicholas Novák was thirty, tallish, with a slight stoop, red-headed and so thin-faced as to be almost cadaverous, but his lively brown eyes gave his face charm and strong personality.

  A glance at their clothes was enough to indicate their very different backgrounds.

  As it was May and a sunny day, she had put on a gaily-coloured print frock. It was new and she would not have worn it for any other Professor’s class that Friday morning; but her bag, shoes and the small attaché case which contained her sandwich lunch all spoke of ample money. Her father was a rich manufacturer and she lived with her parents in a big house with a pleasant garden out at Solihull.

  He was wearing an old tweed jacket, baggy grey flannel trousers and a dark blue shirt. His tie was a rag, his shoes needed re-heeling, and the satchel into which his packet of sandwiches was stuffed with his books was gaping at the seams. This seediness about his things was not altogether due to the carelessness of appearance common among intellectuals, as when new they had been cheap and shoddy. His father had been a Czech commercial traveller who had married an English girl and taken British nationality shortly after the First World War. Both had been killed by a flying bomb in 1944 and, from the age of twenty-one, Nicholas had been left to fend for himself with very little money.

  This was the second term that Wendy had sat as one of Nicholas’ students in Political Economics. From the beginning she had admired his quick, vital manner and fine intellect; while he had soon, rather grudgingly, admitted to himself that for a spoilt little rich girl she showed unusual promise as a student; but their real ‘discovery’ of one another was much more recent. They had been drawn as partners in the mixed doubles for the first tournament of the year at the University Tennis Club. She had ask
ed him out to her home to practise and, with the suddenness of blossom bursting on a warm day in spring, their acquaintance had become a passionate yearning for one another.

  Wendy had philandered happily with half a dozen young men in her own wealthy set, but this was her first serious affair. She felt to the very bottom of her being that Nicky was the only man she could ever possibly marry. Never having had to bother about money, she did not do so now. Imperiously she had swept aside Nicky’s uneasy admission that he could not afford to get married. For her it was enough that with his brilliant gifts he was certain to go to the top of the tree. In the meantime, her father would provide; or, should he refuse, that would be a challenge to her love which she would readily accept, as in her ignorance of living meanly the prospect of life with Nicky in a tiny flat appeared to offer all the delights of a gay adventure.

  Nicholas, too, had never before had a serious affair. His struggle to achieve professorship without money or influence had begotten in him a bitter class hatred; he loathed and despised what were loosely termed the ‘idle rich’. Yet he was fastidious by nature and had acquired an illogical snobbishness about women which had, up till now, made him reject any permanent association with such girls as had been within his reach. On the few occasions when his loneliness had caused him temporarily to succumb he had afterwards despised himself; yet he despised himself still more for secretly hankering after the beautifully-turned-out daughters of the rich, whom he thought of as spoilt and empty-headed. But Wendy had carried him off his feet. She was neither idle nor foolish, but everything he had ever longed for. That she should return his love still seemed to him a miracle. He knew that to marry her on his income would be madness, and his every instinct revolted against accepting help from her father; but, all the same, a week before he had put all his scruples behind him and they had become secretly engaged.

  They thought it a foregone conclusion that her parents would oppose the match, as Novák was very far from being the type of man the Stevensons would have chosen as a son-in-law; but neither of the love-bemused couple was unduly worried about that. Wendy had a fine chin and a will that went with it; while Nicholas at least had prospects and, although he remained adamant about becoming what he termed a ‘parasite’, had been persuaded to agree that it would be unreasonable to insist on Wendy’s refusing a handsome increase in her dress allowance. In consequence they were confident that now Nicholas was prepared to forgo any attempt to make his young wife entirely dependent on him in near poverty, consent could be won after a display of sufficient persistence.

  Yet one thing secretly troubled them; it was their diametrically opposed views on politics. As a professor and a student of Political Economics, both of them took all questions of government and ideologies with extreme seriousness. Unhappily, he was as Red as any Leftist could be, while by upbringing and conviction she was a True-Blue Tory.

  During the early stages of their acquaintance they had found it a fascinating game to argue their differences. Wendy, whose earnestness was leavened with a sense of humour, had had a lot of fun seeing him get hot under the collar when she shrewdly quoted examples of the incompetence the Socialists had displayed while in office; and Nicholas had felt a pleasant sense of elation whenever he had forced her to admit one or other of the barbarous circumstances in which the governments of the rich had for many generations compelled the poor to scrape a living. But now that they were eager to marry, these differences of outlook had become like hideous insects gnawing at the core of their happiness.

  Each time he came to her home she was fearful that he might give free reign to his boundless admiration for Mr. Aneurin Bevan—whose very name was anathema to her father; while on these visits he sometimes went white with the strain of holding his tongue when her family spoke with love and admiration of the man he always thought of as ‘that deceitful, imperialist warmonger, Churchill’.

  Passionately as they were drawn to one another, honestly as they admired each other’s minds and characters, determined as they were to exercise every possible restraint where their political feelings were concerned, both of them were horribly conscious that this was the one rock upon which their love might founder. And a crisis that held all the ingredients for bringing about such a wreck was far more imminent than either of them imagined.

  They had been talking, in half breathless snatches between kisses, for only a few minutes when Wendy said: “Darling, I’ve got an awful chore for you. I know you’ll hate it, but will do it for my sake and be on your best behaviour.”

  He smiled at her. “Of course I will. What is it?”

  “I’ve fixed up for us to stay the weekend after this with Aunt Agatha,” she replied a little hurriedly.

  His sudden frown did not surprise her. Aunt Agatha was her mother’s sister, and the widow of Colonel the Honourable George Lis-Hartley. She had been left extremely well off and lived in almost pre-war luxury at Lis Court, a fine old Georgian manor in Shropshire. She entertained lavishly, ruled her estate despotically, and still rode to hounds enthusiastically at the age of fifty-eight. In fact she represented everything that Nicholas most heartily condemned.

  “Now don’t be difficult, my sweet,” Wendy hurried on before he could reply. “As you are going to marry me you’ll have to meet her some time, and the sooner you get it over the better. You really must get it out of your head that everyone who has a title or a lot of money is necessarily horrid.”

  “I never said they were.”

  “But you are inclined to think it, aren’t you? Anyway, Aunt Agatha is a dear. She’s fat and jolly and awfully kind.”

  “If you say so I’m sure she is, darling; but all the same I can’t accept her invitation.”

  “Oh, Nicky! But you must. As I was telling you the other night, I’m her only niece, she’s awfully fond of me and has made me her heir; so it would be not only stupid but most unkind to offend her. You really needn’t be nervous about staying at Lis Court, or about the people you’ll meet there. I know you haven’t got a dinner jacket, but you could easily hire one, and …”

  “Thanks!” He cut her short with an edge on his voice. “I don’t need to wear their absurd livery to hold my own with a bunch of snobs.” But he added quickly, “Sorry, darling! I didn’t mean that. I haven’t yet got used to thinking of such people as your friends; and I’d willingly dress myself up, even as Punchinello, to please you. It isn’t my ingrained dislike of all that your amiable aunt represents that makes me say no, either.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He hesitated a second, angry with himself now at having put off telling her before, because he felt certain that his intention would displease her; then he blurted out:

  “Next weekend I have to attend a conference of the new I.L.P. at Llandudno.”

  Her brown eyes opened wider. She was aware that he contributed articles to several Left-wing journals, but had not known that he took an active part in extremist politics; so she asked:

  “Do you often attend such meetings, Nicky?”

  “No,” he shrugged. “Only those that I think may be of particular interest.”

  “Then surely, as it is to please me, you wouldn’t mind terribly not going to this one?”

  “I’m afraid I must. You see, it has been specially called to discuss a matter of major policy, and some of my friends who will be there are counting on my support. I’m sorry, darling. Really I am. I’ll come to your aunt’s any other week-end you like, and I’ll be as good as gold about hiding my red light under a bushel.”

  Dropping her eyes she murmured, “All right, then. I suppose it can’t be helped. I’ll make some suitable excuse to Aunt Agatha.”

  After a moment’s awkward pause, he plucked up the courage to say, “I’m afraid I’ve got another disappointment for you, sweetheart. I’ve had to scratch our game in the tennis doubles for to-morrow.”

  She looked up quickly. “Oh, Nicky, why?”

  “My cousin telephoned me last night.”


  “Your cousin! I thought your only relatives lived in Czechoslovakia.”

  “They do, except for Bilto. I’ve seen very little of him during the past few years, and I suppose that’s why it never occurred to me to mention him to you. He came here as a refugee soon after Hitler marched into Prague. As he is a very able scientist he has done quite well for himself. During most of the war he was employed on atomic research in Canada and the States, and he now holds a senior appointment at Harwell. Anyhow, he rang me up to say that he wanted to see me urgently on an important family matter, so I promised to meet him in London tonight. In the circumstances, I couldn’t possibly refuse.”

  “No, I quite see that,” Wendy agreed. “But if you are seeing him to-night, what is to stop you catching a train back to-morrow morning? Even quite a late one would get you here in time for our match.”

  Nicholas shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, then he said uneasily, “Darling, I’m afraid you are going to be awfully annoyed with me, but I’ve committed myself for the whole weekend. You remember I told you about this new economic monthly that Igor Sinznick is planning to start. He has been urging me for the past three weeks to go up and have a really long talk with him about it, but I’ve kept putting it off because of us. I can’t afford trips to London often, and since I’ve got to go up to see Bilto anyhow, this seemed the perfect opportunity. The Sinznicks can always give me a bed at their house in Cricklewood, so I wired Igor this morning, saying that I’d arrive late to-night, and would stay over with them till Sunday evening. I had no chance to discuss the matter with you, and when I sent off my wire to Igor I didn’t think you’d really mind.”

  “But I do mind!” Wendy took a swift pace back from him and her mouth became a firm, angry line.

  “Oh come, my sweet!” he protested. “You have to go to a party to which I am not invited on Saturday night, and as Sunday is your grandfather’s birthday you are tied up for dinner that night as well. It is unreasonable to expect me to forgo this chance of spending the weekend with one of my oldest friends just to be with you for a few hours on a tennis court.”