An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  Copyright & Information

  NOTE: Reader preferences vary, as do eReaders, but to view a reflowable version of the publisher's printed book layout use the following eReader settings, or their equivalent: Clear Local Data – off; Local Styling – off; Text Alignment – Publisher Default.

  An Awkward Lie

  First published in 1971

  Copyright: Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1971-2011

  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 Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 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

  1842327240 9781842327241 Print

  0755117972 9780755117970 Pdf

  0755119665 9780755119660 Kindle

  0755120868 9780755120864 Epub

  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

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President's Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen's University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  PART ONE

  The Bunker

  1

  Mr Robert Appleby (successful scrum-half retired, and author of that notable anti-novel The Lumber Room) fixed his gaze for a full thirty seconds on the flag on the first green. Then, judging that the sudden ghastly threat to his stomach and his bowels had abated, he took another look at the body in the bunker. He might as well make what he could of it (he told himself, as his normal mental processes began to return). It wasn’t the sort of thing a man was likely to come on twice.

  Or only a man – his own father, for instance – who made such matters his business. Sir John Appleby’s earlier career – Bobby Appleby vaguely supposed – had been corpses all the time. But although his father was quite willing to indulge in reminiscence over some of these, he allowed himself a certain fastidiousness in point of gory detail. So Bobby had always been disposed to imagine that when somebody had a bullet directed at his brain the resulting token was one small hole, or perhaps two small holes, in the head. Intellectually, of course, he was better informed. Friends who had done a spot of VSO between university and taking up a job, and who had in consequence stumbled into one or another nasty little war in remote places, had been much less reticent than Sir John about the frequent surprising sheer messiness of homicide. But the present spectacle was his own introduction to anything of the kind. What had happened to this man’s head at least seemed to make it certain that he was dead. Quite a bit of it had vanished.

  The bunker was large and quite unusually broad. If your drive had been entirely to your satisfaction, and some delusion of grandeur persuaded you that you could be snugly beside the pin in two, then this hazard was more likely to get you than not. As a matter of fact, it had got Bobby now. His ball was pretty well in the mathematical centre of the bunker. And so was the dead man. The dead man could (so to speak) have stretched out an arm and put the ball in his pocket.

  There was an immediate problem, turning on the fact that Bobby was at present alone on the links. It was his habit, when spending a summer weekend at Long Dream, occasionally to run over to Linger early in the morning and play a practice nine holes before returning to his parents’ home for breakfast. It usually made him late for the meal. But nobody minded. Mrs Colpoys enjoyed being vastly put out by Mr Robert – to the extent of keeping something hot in the oven and allowing him to make fresh coffee in her kitchen. His father, looking up from his reading of The Times in the breakfast-room window, would politely inquire whether he had found himself in form, particularly in point of that rather uncertain command of his with a niblick. His mother would sit down at the table for a few minutes with a great air of general gossip, but with what Bobby judged to be the palpable design of suggesting some polite attention to one of the more eligible young gentlewomen of the region. Bobby would make large and disingenuous promises about activity of this sort some months ahead. On the whole he preferred what his father called Away Matches where girls were concerned.

  This morning there would be something altogether more grim to talk about. And meantime there was the problem. Bobby had seen it at once.

  A bunker on a golf-course is rather a special place within which to find a man who has suffered violent death. It was clear, moreover, that this bunker had been raked over by a green-keeper late on the previous evening. There were a certain number of footprints in the sand. But not very many. And Bobby would add to these the moment he stepped off the turf.

  So perhaps he should simply hurry away to the club-house and telephone for the police. For the man was certainly dead. But what if he wasn’t? Or – and this was the real truth of the matter – what if he were? Even from a dead body one doesn’t simply turn aside. To go up to it and touch it is the human thing to do. The slightest suspicion of life, of course, and one would run like anything for a doctor. But a dead man one watches by, if possible, until somebody comes along.

  These notions, surprisingly old-world in a novelist of the avant-garde, passed quite quickly through Bobby’s mind. It was as a result of them that he now stepped carefully into the bunker, treading only where the sand was still wholly undisturbed. He knelt beside the body. That meant an indentation made by his left knee, but again he wasn’t obliterating anything. The dead man lay prone and with his face in the sand. Bobby’s first thought was that you couldn’t tell ho
w old he was. Not even by the colour of the hair on the back of the head. What had killed him had seen to that.

  The dead man’s jacket looked expensive. It was made of a good Lovat tweed. Bobby put out a hand and touched it. It felt slightly damp. But there had been no rain since Bobby woke up at about seven o’clock, and he thought it improbable that there had been any during the night. What had produced this damp feeling was dew. Perhaps the body had been lying here throughout the night. Bobby remembered that it is on cold surfaces that moisture condenses as dew. He slipped his hand under the dead man’s jacket. Overcoming a certain reluctance, he pulled up the dead man’s shirt-tail to his waist and slipped his hand gently beneath it, so that his palm lay on the naked flesh of the dead man’s back. The body was very cold. For a confused fraction of a second Bobby felt this to be unnatural. It was as if the man’s clothing had been falling down on its job. Then he realized that this was how a dead body felt – how it felt when a certain interval of time had elapsed since death. He didn’t at all know – as his father would – what that interval of time would be. It must vary, he supposed, according to one circumstance or another. He realized that he ought to look at his watch. But his watch was on the wrist of the hand that lay on this lately living thing which had chilled to clay. For a moment he fumbled once more with the dead man’s shirt-tail, shoving it back under the waist-band of his trousers. It seemed a necessary thing to do – just because the man was dead and could never know indignity again. Then his hand came free, and he saw that it was ten minutes to eight. Quite often there were other people out on the course by this time – either after an early breakfast or doing as Bobby himself had proposed to do. But now there was nobody around.

  The club-house, naturally, wasn’t all that far away from the first green. But a small spinney – it made the first hole a dog’s-leg affair – had edged it out of view. It probably wasn’t beyond shouting range, particularly as the morning was very still. But the mere stillness somehow made Bobby reluctant to start hallooing, and in any case there hadn’t appeared to be anybody around. He remembered that the labour force of the golf club consisted of two men and a boy, and that they all lived not even in Linger itself, but in the little clump of council houses close to Linger Junction. The club’s professional, although he spent most of his time either in the club-house or on the course, had recently attained to rather a grand little villa more than a mile away. None of these people probably arrived until half-past eight or thereabouts. So in default of another matutinal player turning up, Bobby would have to keep his wake by the body for some time. He decided that, after all, the most sensible thing would be to return to the club-house and telephone the local police.

  He straightened up, and backed out of the bunker just as he had come. He did this so precisely that the effect was odd; it was as if a heavy man had walked up to the body, knelt by it, and then been snatched into the air by a balloon, a helicopter, a demon, or a guardian angel. This fancy made Bobby pause when he had reached the grass – this in order to take a synoptic view of such other evidence of this kind as the surface of the bunker afforded. But – inevitably, perhaps – his glance was first drawn back once more to the body.

  Once you had recovered from the mere gruesomeness of the spectacle – it occurred to him – your main impression was of its dramatic quality. Here, surely, was somebody who had been ruthlessly shot down as he fled. The man’s legs were splayed out in a manner suggesting just that. His left arm lay beneath his head, as if he had flung it up to protect his face as he fell. His right arm was stretched stiffly out from his side. It was as if he really were trying to reach for Bobby’s ball. Or perhaps it was not quite like that – for the hand was bent back at the wrist, and the thumb and fingers were spread out wide, and slightly crooked, like the hand of a man who makes a last desperate clutch at empty air. Bobby looked at this hand. And suddenly, without his at first at all knowing why, a queer cold tremor ran down his spine. And it was doing this – the persuasion was at once utterly illogical and wholly overwhelming – not now but a long time ago.

  The feeling was one which Robert Appleby had never experienced before. A fraction of a second passed, and it had modulated into one which was almost comfortably familiar although inexpugnably strange. It was feeling known as déjà vu. Just this had happened long ago. Looking at that hand. And the shiver. Or the frisson. (Mr Robert Appleby, anti-novelist and admirer of Monsieur Robbe-Grillet, very oddly – even to his own sense – took time off to reflect upon the superiority of the French tongue.) Bobby also noticed that he was frightened. It was that sort of shiver (or frisson). He had glimpsed something which had once frightened him very much.

  But now something had happened to the body. The morning sunlight (although he hadn’t consciously noted this) had been at play upon it. This remained true only of the three extended limbs. The rest of the dead man’s body was in shadow. And the shadow was the shadow of a human being. Bobby turned round, and saw the girl.

  ‘Has your friend had an accident?’ The girl asked this in a calm sort of way. But not in a cold way. She was humanly concerned. Because she was between Bobby and the sun still low on the horizon, he was less aware of her features than of her figure. Her face was in shadow. Her body, through what seemed a flimsy dress, was very much in silhouette. Bobby was momentarily disturbed by this. Being (as has been remarked) somewhat old-fashioned in some of his instincts, he believed in faces first and figures later: this rather than the other way about. He had a sudden strong wish – surprising in the present harassing situation – simply to see this girl; to observe her features, her expression, clearly, and thus know what she looked like. What are vulgarly called a woman’s vital statistics may be arresting, but they can’t honestly be termed informative. A voice, on the other hand, can. Bobby was a good deal struck by the girl’s voice.

  ‘He isn’t a friend,’ Bobby said. ‘And I don’t think he’s had an accident. Or not what you could call an accident. I think he’s killed himself – or that somebody has killed him.’

  ‘You mean you’ve never seen him before? You’ve just stumbled upon him?’

  ‘I haven’t done any stumbling.’ Bobby didn’t quite know why he produced this absurdly literal reply. ‘But that’s my ball in the bunker. I simply walked up, and there he was.’

  ‘A stranger?’ It was rather sharply that the girl seemed to put this question.

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said not a friend.’ Bobby felt that he was talking rather stupidly. Perhaps he was suffering from what they called shock. ‘I’ve a queer notion that I knew him long ago.’

  ‘He’s not going to be much helped by that.’ As well as being calm, the girl’s voice was now critical. ‘Hadn’t we better get some help?’

  ‘Well, yes. But not help for him. He’s quite dead. I thought I’d told you that.’ Bobby took a few steps away from the bunker. There was no reason why he shouldn’t get a clearer view of this girl who had sprung from nowhere. ‘Do you live round about here?’

  ‘Not very much.’ The girl didn’t make this sound a very evasive reply. ‘Do you?’

  ‘More or less. My parents live at a place called Long Dream. It’s on the other side of Linger.’ Bobby, turning to face the girl, now had the sun behind him. He had a momentary sense – wholly indecorous in the circumstances – that here at last was his girl. He told himself hastily that the same persuasion had on quite a number of occasions visited him before and that nothing whatever had come of it. ‘I wonder,’ he said briskly, ‘if you would mind going and making a telephone call?’

  ‘For a doctor, you mean? Or for the police?’

  ‘Both, I suppose.’

  ‘I think that you had better do that.’ The girl had turned on the corpse a glance that was level and unalarmed. ‘You know who’s who, I suppose. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘I’d hardly like to think–’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, please. I
’m not in a hurry. And a dead man – you say he is dead – isn’t going to hurt me. Is there a telephone in that club-house?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Then go and get on with it.’ The girl had produced a packet of cigarettes. ‘You won’t mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Why on earth should I? Because it’s unwomanly?’ Rather belatedly, Bobby tumbled to the girl’s meaning. ‘A dead man’s in no position to mind. So it’s up to you.’

  ‘Then here goes.’ The girl struck a match. ‘But you will come back when you’ve telephoned? I don’t think I want to be found alone here by a posse of policemen.’

  ‘Of course I’ll come back. I don’t expect I’ll be ten minutes.’

  ‘Then go about it now.’ The girl seemed to inhale her cigarette deeply. ‘But what you said about knowing him long ago. Have you – well, turned over the body and looked at him?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. One oughtn’t to do that, when a man has died in this way. But there’s something that one can see now – just as he lies there.’ Bobby hesitated. He hadn’t meant by this to suggest that the girl should scrutinize the corpse. A single glimpse must surely have been shocking enough. He saw now, however, that she was continuing to gaze at it dispassionately. It was possible that she had turned pale under the impact of this horrible experience, but her complexion was very fair, and he couldn’t be sure. He could be sure that she wasn’t insensitive. Her composure was the result of effort. So, for that matter, was his.

  ‘Something one can see?’ The girl had taken up Bobby’s remark incisively. ‘That tells you you’ve seen him long ago?’