The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012) by E. X. Ferrars (Elizabeth Ferrars)

Author:E. X. Ferrars (Elizabeth Ferrars) [Ferrars, E. X.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, mystery
Goodreads: 17357330
Publisher: Crippen & Landru Publishers
Published: 2012-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

FLY, SAID THE SPY

They had promised that they would warn him if it ever became necessary. They had promised that he had nothing to fear, that they would arrange his getaway. They had promised to look after him to start a new life. But he had never quite trusted them to do these things. If there was any real trouble, he had thought that he would be thrown to the wolves. That was why, on an impulse, on a visit to a friend’s laboratory, he had acquired a small packet of cyanide. Sooner the cyanide, he had thought, than years in prison. Sooner swift death than the shame of having his wife discover what the man whom she had loved so devotedly for the last eight years had really been all that time.

So when the warning came and with it precise instructions as to what he was to do next day, the first thing that happened was that his mind was thrown into a state of confusion in which sheer disbelief that this could happen to him when everything had gone so smoothly and comfortably for so long, was blended with blinding fear. This was the time for the cyanide. That very evening. A letter to his wife, telling her the truth about himself, which he would leave beside his typewriter in his small study at home, and then the darkness. But when it came to the point, could he face it? Would it not be best to do as they said and rely on them to take care of their own?

He had been working for them for ten years. They had approached him almost as soon as he, a nuclear physicist, had taken up his new work at the very secret Institute of Physical Science at Bladfield in Berkshire, and because of a bitter and defeated mood that he had been in at the time, mostly because a job that he had coveted had gone to another man, one whom it happened he had despised and never considered seriously as a rival, and also because of trouble over a woman which had almost broken him, he had found something attractive in the thought of taking revenge on a world that did not value him as it ought. Perhaps at the beginning there had been a spark of idealism in what he had done, an attempt to achieve faith of some kind in something or other, but that had not lasted long. He had never felt much need for a faith, religious or political. His pleasure in what he was paid had lasted longer and what was expected of him had never been too demanding. In fact, the ease with which he had managed to do it had given him a sardonic sort of amusement. It had added to the zest of life. Until, that was to say, he had found that he wanted to marry Rosemary.

When that had happened he had told them that he wanted to end what he had been doing, only to find that this was not going to be allowed.

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