An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  ‘Howard is inclined to see it that way.’ Colonel Pride reflected for a moment, and appeared to conclude that this was not quite a straight answer. ‘I can’t say more about myself, John, than that I’m at a good deal of a loss before the whole thing.’

  ‘Bobby felt the body, you know. He got his hand on to the man’s bare back. He says it was stone cold.’

  ‘Howard maintains that any slightly chilly body will feel like that if you place a warm hand on it.’

  ‘That is true. All the same, Tommy, any such theory positively posits my son as subject to hallucination. Think what he swears to – for it comes to that – about the state of the head.’

  ‘Yes.’ Colonel Pride looked unhappy. ‘But there was no blood found in that confounded bunker – not even after they’d sifted down quite a way.’

  ‘There needn’t have been – if the man had been dead for some time before they chucked him there.’

  ‘Howard says that.’ Pride brightened a little at this. ‘Only, you know, the whole thing is such nonsense. As a crime, I mean.’

  ‘Tommy, are your people, or are they not, treating this as a crime?’

  ‘Of course they are, so far as the most rigorous inquiry is concerned.’ It looked for a moment as if Pride had been seriously offended. ‘Owe it to your boy, my dear chap, to have every man in my force looking for a criminal. Nothing turned up yet. No line on a stranger to the district with a missing finger, or on an unknown girl, or on a car with two men and a trailer-caravan. And in point of what we can usefully look for, that’s about it.’

  ‘Certainly it is. Or that, and any report of a man gone missing elsewhere. A missing man with a missing finger – even if it were in Chicago or Marrakesh – would be a line at once.’

  ‘Marrakesh?’ For a moment Pride appeared to perpend this hyperbole conscientiously. ‘Yes, of course. But we’ve had all that from your old colleagues at the Yard already. Remarkable efficiency nowadays in the way information is categorized. Several people with missing right forefingers have gone missing in the UK in the last ten years. But, dead or alive, all have turned up again. So that tells us nothing at all.’

  ‘In a fairly short time, Tommy, it might tell us quite a lot. If you grant that there was a body – and an entirely dead one – then the fact that nobody in the near future starts inquiring about a missing man mutilated in this way–’

  ‘That would put the corpse roughly in a category, I agree. What they call a drop-out, or the like. Incidentally, your son says the fellow’s clothes suggested reasonable prosperity.’ Pride hesitated. ‘Do you know? I gather Bobby won’t say much about the girl. She was blonde and a lady. He doesn’t go much beyond that.’

  ‘Gentlemen prefer blondes.’

  ‘Just what do you mean by that?’

  ‘Not a great deal, perhaps.’ Appleby hesitated. The affair of the body in the bunker was, in an important sense, very much Bobby’s own affair. He mustn’t be nudged by his father unless he asked to be nudged. He mustn’t even be too much talked about, even to a family friend like Tommy Pride. On the other hand, something patent about Bobby that Pride or Pride’s men simply hadn’t noticed might just as well be named now. ‘Only,’ Appleby said, ‘that the boy seems to have been rather struck by the girl.’

  Pride drained his whisky, and shook his head as Appleby’s hand went hospitably out to the decanter. He gave a moment to examining the empty fireplace, and a couple more to finding and lighting a cigarette. It was clear that the admirable man felt this whole damnable piece of jiggery-pokery to have its delicate side.

  ‘Easy on the eyes, and all that?’ he asked. ‘Clean-cut girl? I’m sure your boy would have good taste where a filly’s concerned. But you don’t think he’s sitting tight on something because of having taken a fancy to her? Chivalry – that sort of thing?’

  Appleby’s amusement at this string of questions didn’t prevent his taking a moment or two to reflect in his turn.

  ‘It’s hard to say, Tommy. Perhaps it depends on how your chap Howard – for whom I’ve a high regard – has been viewing the girls. Is it as an accomplice of the villains, supposing there to have been a crime – or of the jokers, on the weird theory that Bobby was being taken in by a piece of macabre fun? Or does he suppose the girl to have been a victim, just as Bobby was?’

  ‘I think Howard supposes the girl to have been – well, not on Bobby’s side. And it’s difficult, you know, to view it in any other way. After all, she had cleared out – along with the body, and the chaps in the car, granting that they had anything to do with the affair. Otherwise, why didn’t she stay put, or run for the club-house, or just give a shout? A good loud halloo would have carried that far, I’d say.’ Yet again, Pride hesitated. ‘I know that Bobby behaved perfectly correctly to my people. But I rather wish he was still here now. You and I could have had another quiet word with the boy, eh? As it is, the brute fact seems to be that he vanished from Dream early this afternoon.’

  ‘Am I to understand that Howard asked him to remain for the time being at Dream?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind.’ Colonel Pride had hastily shaken his head. ‘Boy has been perfectly correct, as I say.’

  ‘My dear Tommy, we’d better get this clear. If Bobby formed a notion as to what was in Howard’s head – the notion that he had been taken in by a gruesome and pointless practical joke – then the boy had a perfect right to take certain measure of offence. Or call it umbrage, if you prefer the word.’

  ‘I quite see–’

  ‘And please consider this.’ For the first time, Appleby’s voice had gone a shade grim. ‘He’s still very young. And – whether for good or ill – he’s been given fair ground for considering himself quite other than a fool–’

  ‘My dear fellow!’ The Chief Constable’s discomfort was now acute. ‘Absolutely brilliant, of course. We all know it. There never was a Raven who was all bone above the neck.’ Pride positively floundered – glimpsing, perhaps, a certain lack of the felicitous in thus instantly directing his thought to the Raven side of the house. ‘I quite see what you mean.’

  ‘I don’t know that you do.’ For the moment, Appleby’s astringency didn’t relax. ‘There’s another very possible reason why this girl may, as you express it, have cleared out. She may have been cleared out – say at the point of a gun. A man needn’t have taken a First in Greats, or even have written an anti-novel or whatever it’s called, to tumble to that. Now, if Bobby sees the thing that way – persons unknown making off, for some mysterious reason, with a murdered man and a living girl – what is he likely to do?’

  ‘Go after them, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s a fair enough bet.’ Appleby’s asperity vanished. ‘By the way, do you happen to know whether he told Howard of any notion he had about the dead man’s possible identity?’

  ‘I don’t think Bobby came forward with anything of that kind.’

  ‘Um.’ For the first time, Appleby confessed to himself an uneasy sense that Bobby had perhaps gone hazardously out on a limb.

  ‘I believe he said he’d once known a man with a missing index finger. But you can’t mean that. Howard took it for rather a trivial remark.’

  Appleby checked an impulse to say ‘Um’ again. He wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t have to revise his opinion of Howard.

  ‘You mean,’ he asked, ‘that Howard brushed the information aside?’

  ‘My dear John, I don’t know that that’s altogether fair. If you think there could be anything in it, you must have a word with Howard yourself. And it can be taken up again as soon as Bobby gets home.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’ Appleby again reminded himself that he wasn’t playing Bobby’s hand for him. It was, of course, extremely serious to withhold a scrap of information from the police – even from a policeman convinced that one had been made some sort of ass of. But this didn’t m
ean that Appleby himself need start talking about an obscure schoolmaster called Nauze here and now. ‘Wherever Bobby’s gone off to,’ he said pacifically, ‘I expect he’ll ring up this evening. I’ll let you know at once if he has anything sensible to say.’

  But Bobby didn’t ring up – or not by eleven o’clock, the hour after which the senior Applebys discouraged telephone calls from their children. Appleby was far from alarmed. He had very little doubt where Bobby had gone off to, since there was only one spot in England in which he had any immediate prospect of picking up a trail on the man who used to be called Bloody Nauze. And at least at his old private school Bobby was more likely to pick up something useful about the man than would be an officer from a CID. Old hands at Overcombe would be prepared to go up with Bobby (a distinguished Old Boy) as they wouldn’t be with a policeman.

  Appleby was restless, all the same. He wished that his wife hadn’t gone off on one of her London jaunts. In Judith’s absence – and Bobby’s – the establishment at Dream was a little lacking in intellectual calibre. Mrs Colpoys in the kitchen had her heart in the right place, and expressed extreme indignation at Mr Robert’s having had his early-morning golf interrupted in that nasty way. She thought it likely that the dead man had fallen out of an aeroplane – probably a helicopter, which had then descended and picked him up again. She believed that people fell out of such contraptions far more frequently than was known. It was the sort of thing the authorities kept quiet about.

  Out in the garden the aged Hoobin, pausing in his day’s work (which chiefly consisted in issuing directions to his nephew and assistant young Solo Hoobin), had offered a number of remarks too gnomic in manner to be very certainly understood, but having apparent relevance to the darkest recesses of sexual crime. The aged Hoobin was the owner of a pair of spectacles (which had been given him by old Lady Killcanon along with a copy of the Bible) and had as a consequence set himself up in the dignity of what he called a perusing man. He still read the Bible on weekdays, but on Sundays he read The News of the World. He thus achieved, no doubt, a balanced view of the whole nature of man. Yet temperamentally he inclined increasingly to a sombre interpretation of human character and motive. Moreover, he had lately been taking bold steps in the exploration of morbid psychology.

  ‘There be them,’ Hoobin had said to his employer, ‘who be one man today and another man tomorrow. And there be them that be one man this hour and another man that hour. So it do be said to be.’

  ‘Would you say it was true of everybody?’ Appleby asked. It was his intention to suggest that while Solo put sickle to one verge of the drive Hoobin himself might put sickle to the other. But the best chance of achieving this lay in first giving Hoobin his head as a sage. ‘Would you say’ – he achieved a great effect of sharpening a philosophical discussion – ‘it was true of Solo?’

  Solo began whistling defiantly. He always did this when he heard his name mentioned.

  ‘Solo be nothing of a man.’ Hoobin would have made an excellent performer in a medieval disputation; he was a master of the distinguo. ‘Not yet wench-high, Solo be. And all childer be unaccountable quite.’

  Solo suddenly fell to whetting his sickle with demoniacal vigour. Appleby wondered if he were indulging some monstrous fantasy of eviscerating his aged uncle.

  ‘But Mr Robert,’ Hoobin pursued, ‘a bin wench-high and over them three years and more. The vittels ha the doing on’t. High living in the colleges. That and being flown with wine.’

  ‘Mr Robert,’ Appleby said with some severity, ‘is a very temperate young man.’

  ‘He be that when he be one man.’ Hoobin pounced on the thread of his former argument. ‘But what when he be another? And they do disremember, the one does, what t’other done. The right hand, Sir John, knowth not what the left hand doth. So the scholards ha brought it out.’

  Solo – who was a perfect natural only at the full of the moon – had stopped whistling, and was blunting the point of his sickle by doodling with it in the gravel of the drive. A sideways glance revealed to Appleby the rudiments of a squat and boldly callipygian female form. Prehistoric Man had been a dab-hand at this in leisure moments devoted to meditations upon fertility. Some deep atavism was prompting Solo to this means of asserting that his uncle’s estimate of his imperfect maturity was fallacious. Appleby reflected, as he had frequently had occasion to do before, that the Hoobins were a tribe who should be living not in council cottages but in caves. The thought resulted in his losing for a moment the drift of Hoobin’s remarks.

  ‘And it be the word at the Killcanon Arms,’ Hoobin was saying, ‘that her corpus be not found yet.’

  ‘His corpus, you mean?’

  ‘That her corpus be not found yet. But time uncovers all. First a leg ’twill be, and then an arm. Let them look in the railway station, I say, where folk do leave their trunks and parcels.’

  Appleby parted from the Hoobins with some abruptness – leaving Hoobin to return, unperturbed, to telling Solo what to do. It was evident that quite a lot was abroad about the trio who had met at the bunker. And Bobby was being cast hopefully in the roles of some fiendish Jekyll and Hyde. Judith wouldn’t have turned a hair at this manifestation of the rustic mind, but it at least had power to return several times to Appleby’s thoughts during a solitary evening. At half-past eleven and with a second cigar (which was a sign of disquiet in itself) he went out into the garden.

  There was a tremendous moon – so that he almost expected to encounter Solo offering conjurations to it. The ancient house was laved in its light, like some creature of stone over which the waters of a gentle fountain flow down on every flank. The lawn was a sheet of silver – like water too, but of an utter stillness, so that one could have imagined some craft of obtrusively poetic character – say an elfin pinnace – to come gliding over it at any moment. The acacia tree was a scented cascade, and a nightingale was singing amid its long racemes. All the works, Appleby told himself. Absolutely all the works.

  But the garden failed to hold him, and when he had prowled round the house he found that he had halted before the motor sheds. This cleared his mind for him. He got out the car, and drove over to Linger.

  There was nothing on the road except a hedgehog, a hare; and his mind could play as it pleased. When Bobby was at home, how regularly did he go out before breakfast and play a few holes? Perhaps, Appleby told himself, two or three times a week. Which wasn’t enough for his turning up to be gambled on. So the body hadn’t been disposed in its bunker for Bobby’s specific benefit. Or not unless one imagined a scout with an eye on Dream, and a swift telephone-message as soon as Bobby set out. But nothing of the sort would allow much time to fix up an elaborate piece of miching malicho. That it was Bobby who had come upon the body appeared, therefore, almost certainly fortuitous.

  But somebody had been expected to come upon it. Either some other specific somebody, or whoever among the morning’s golfers propelled his ball in the direction of the first green. You don’t choose the fairway of a golf-course if you are anxious to keep a dead man concealed for any length of time. Of course you may simply shoot a man down where he happens to be, and abandon him on the spot – or near the spot – in a panic. In that case, it isn’t relevant to speak of expectations at all.

  But if the dead man, already dead, had been transported quite some way, then there must at least have been a reason – although possibly a muddled or feeble one – for dumping him just where he had been dumped. But then he had been up-lifted again! This was the point of real astonishment – and one which surely counted against the notion of a muddled or feeble job. For whatever reason it had been done, nerve had been required for the doing. And think of the raking over of the sand, and the leaving of Bobby’s ball in the middle of it. More nerve had been required for that – and perhaps a grim sort of humour as well. It might have been calculated, of course, that Bobby’s story would be totally discr
edited; that without further inquiry the police would dismiss the whole thing. Tommy Pride had revealed, indeed, that it had almost come to that. But nobody could really have banked on it. Even if it had been the sole motive in raking over the surface of the bunker, it could hardly have been the sole motive for carrying off the body.

  Why exhibit a dead man, and then spirit him away again? There existed, no doubt, conceivable answers to this question. But Appleby couldn’t at the moment supply one, so he had to ask himself another question instead. What could precipitate a hazardous change of plan? Abandoning a murdered man on a golf-course was not in itself remarkable. It didn’t, so to speak, cry out for explanation. But whipping the murdered man away again did. And for this – at least in general terms – an explanation could be given. Something had gone wrong. There had been a hitch.

  And the hitch had been either Bobby or the girl.

  These thoughts brought Appleby to the club-house. As he walked up to it from his parked car his footfalls, first on macadam and then on gravel, sounded loud to his own ear. But nobody was going to detect him on this nocturnal expedition. There were no living-quarters, he remembered, in the club-house, and it seemed unlikely that anybody would have thought up the ploy of playing golf by moonlight. The course, it was true, was by no means remote from human habitation. On this side it was bounded for nearly half a mile by a high-road upon which Bobby and the girl had remarked a car, a trailer, and two men. And some fifty yards back from the other verge of this ran a straggle of substantial villas – mostly the homes, Appleby supposed, of retired persons who prized the continuity of a golf-course beyond all else, and who when not playing themselves liked to survey from their drawing-room windows other people doing so. In a way, therefore, this part of the course was likely to be under scrutiny at any daylight hour – or any moonlight hour, for that matter, by somebody of wakeful habit. Yet the whole terrain had one marked peculiarity. There was a great deal of timber on it – far more than would be acceptable on a fashionable modern course, so that one was regularly banging one’s ball down what were in effect very broad avenues, or skying it over hazel copses, or agonizingly writhing one’s own body in the hope of magically deflecting it from large patches of gorse.