It was a tempting offer, and I would have parted with it but not for two reasons. First, what was going to happen to me once they had it in their possession? The contents were known only to me. Presumably they had already killed Lycett, the man who made the original rough notes in those two exercise books, so with me out of the way nobody else would know about the contents. How could they be sure that I wouldn’t sit down and rewrite the lot from memory? For all they knew I might already have taken a carbon copy. No, there was only one way they could be sure of eradicating the contents of that unpublished literary work forever!
Secondly, I had a duty to the public. If I gave Carson the script I would become an accessory to the organisation of blackmail, drug trafficking, murder, and a whole empire of crime.
I only ever saw Lycett, the author, once. He was a reporter on one of the smaller papers at the time, and it was six months earlier when he had called to see me, the month my grandmother died, in fact. He said he’d seen my articles in the press, and wondered if I’d care to undertake the writing of this particular work on his behalf. I said I’d look through the notes, every page of which was filled with barely legible handwriting. It took me a week to decipher it, and I came to the conclusion that it was the basis of a plot for a highly imaginative novel, compiled by a man who stretched one’s own credulity to its very limits. However, I hadn’t much work on hand at the time, which isn’t a good situation for any freelance journalist, so I worked on it night and day.
Then, one day, I chanced upon a name towards the end of the manuscript which seemed to ring a bell somewhere in my memory. Purely out of curiosity I looked it up in my files, and it was then that I received the first shock in this chain of events which was only just the beginning. Feverishly I began to look up the other characters in this wildly improbable work. One by one I found them, prominent citizens, businessmen, landowners. Every one of them existed in real life. The book Lycett had asked me to write was fact, not fiction! And within its pages were exposed a ring of corruption so vast that the villains would fill one of our leading prisons.
Needless to say, I rang Lycett at his apartment at once, but the call went unanswered. I rang again at intervals throughout the day, but still there was no reply. He could have just been out. I began to feel uneasy, and eventually I decided to go and call on him in person.
It was nine o’clock when I stepped out of the elevator onto the lush carpeting of the floor where Lycett had his flat. As I approached the door I halted in my tracks, a feeling of despair creeping over me. I was almost unable to comprehend the wording of the notice pinned to the door - ‘VACANT. TO LET’. It was at this moment that I realised that I would never set eyes on Lycett again.
The next few weeks found me in a state of acute indecision. What was I to do with the completed manuscript now in my possession? Common sense told me to destroy it, but a sense of loyalty to my fellow men urged me to hold on to it, to hide it. Then Carson approached me, the morning of my grandmother’s funeral, and as I joined the mourners my face was white and strained. I had already come to a decision. I knew what I had to do, to protect both myself and my folks, in a way it was a kind of compromise, an insurance of life and safety for us.
Within a week my whole life had become one nightmare game of hide-and-seek. Carson now showed his true colours and threatened me with my life unless I handed the manuscript over to him, but I countered this with the ultimatum that if anything happened to me it would come to light, anyway. Whether or not he believed me, I don't know, but he wasn’t taking any chances and I was allowed to live. I also let him know that the death of either of my folks would mean an exposure of his corrupt organisation, too. I was buying time for all of us, as fast as I could, but one day it would run out.
The weeks wore on, weeks of fear and foreboding for myself. My office was constantly under surveillance from the street below, and I knew that the cars which were parked overnight on the piece of waste ground opposite the house where I lived with my mother and father contained Carson’s hidden watchers. His Lurkers, the killers who remained under cover of darkness and shadows, waiting.
Once I stood at the window of my bedroom with a loaded shotgun in my hands. The moon was full, and I could see the two men in the parked car clearly. They were less than thirty yards away, and I was tempted to discharge both barrels at them. However, I
