An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  And now – Bobby told himself as he turned away – it was quite possible that he had seen it for the last time.

  His walk had brought him not much more than the ghost of an idea. He had rejected the impulse to ring up home and report. He had turned down as inadvisable for the present the prompting to shove in on Susan Danbury again and have it out with her. But he had remembered one of the customs of Overcombe which was quite likely still to obtain. Evening prep was taken either by a single victimized and fidgety master, or by an infant grandly known as Prefect of Studies – who in theory was armed for the duration of these occasions with disciplinary powers of the lines-awarding order. But nobody much attended to the Prefect of Studies – who had commonly learnt from experience anyway that his companions had their own disciplinary resources should his conduct of affairs be judged objectionable. He could be well booted, for example, during some convenient game. In an extreme case, he could simply be scragged on the spot – while Dr Gulliver and Mr Onslow were enjoying in their own apartments a dignified repose, and before the junior staff had returned from the Leather Bottle.

  It must be one of the few alleviations in the lot of the Doctor’s assistants, Bobby reflected, that the nearest human habitation to Overcombe was a pub. The staff commonly contrived to get there by opening time, and to spend in the bar a comfortable hour fortifying themselves against the remaining harassments of the fag-end of the day. Bobby’s ghost of an idea was simply to join them there. They were probably quite vague about the movements and occasions of Gulliver’s lunchtime visitor, and it might be possible to pick up something from them in the way of gossip. Bobby, of course, had never in his juniority entered the Leather Bottle, and the comportment of the daily Overcombe contingent there was necessarily a matter of conjecture. But it seemed reasonable to suppose a more or less unbuttoned mood obtained.

  Bobby glanced at his watch, and calculated that he had a quarter of an hour in hand. Not wanting to find himself hanging round the Leather Bottle before that modest pot-house opened its doors, he decided to linger for a little where he was. It was an agreeably lonely situation. He had been dropping down a winding track between high turf-covered banks, in a late-afternoon air which was still warm and murmurous with insects. But just over the bank to his left it would be warmer still, and there would be a whole landscape to survey beneath the westering sun. Perhaps the contemplation of this would give his thoughts some nudge. Bobby scrambled over the bank, and sat down on the fine grass which here sprang everywhere from the chalk. There was a flock of sheep in the middle distance and a kestrel overhead. A minute or two before, he had been listening to the song of a lark. But the lark had fallen silent, and now there wasn’t a sound. Only there was. For suddenly Bobby was hearing voices from somewhere on the path down which he had come. And they had barely become distinguishable before Bobby was on his feet again, oddly alert. Within seconds he knew that, however unaccountable his reaction, his ears had not deceived him. He was listening to men’s voices, speaking in a foreign tongue.

  It wasn’t French – or any other language with Latin in its ancestry. It wasn’t German. Perhaps it was Swedish, Danish – something like that. Or perhaps –

  There didn’t come into Bobby’s head any notion of lying low, or of otherwise wasting time. He reached the top of the bank – a commanding position – in a bound. The men – there were two of them – had come abreast of him, and their heads were on a level with his feet.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Bobby said.

  The men came to a halt. It was not entirely the natural thing to do – except, of course, that Bobby’s appearance had been sudden and perhaps surprising. Wayfarers when saluted by other and momentarily pausing wayfarers commonly deliver their own greetings while continuing in motion. Halt, and something further has to be said – an exchange of conjectures about the weather, or about the lie of the land, or the mileage to this place or that. But neither of the two men appeared momentarily to have anything to say. If they had stopped other than in a purely involuntary fashion it had been to look at Bobby rather hard. And Bobby looked hard at them. They were both bearded men. And both had haircuts of a very close-clipped sort.

  Bobby found he didn’t care for this. The reaction was perhaps illiberal in him, since he was himself clean-shaven and given to wearing his hair somewhat notably long. But it wasn’t the aesthetics of the situation that much compelled him now. Rather it was the topography. For he couldn’t at all see where these industriously conversing foreigners had come from. Of course they had been invisible to him when behind him on the narrow sunken track. And he must have been invisible to them. But the track had snuggled between its banks only a hundred yards or so below the Great Smithy. And all around was the bare down. Bobby found himself scanning the down for abandoned parachutes, and then – without intending anything dramatic – equally scanning the heavens for, perhaps, a drifting balloon. For everywhere a great silence reigned.

  The bearded men remarked this behaviour. One of them even imitated it.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ this man said. ‘Beautifully still. Very little wind. Nice walking weather.’

  ‘So unspoilt a countryside,’ the second man said. He continued simply to look at Bobby. ‘And yet the urban centres are not far distant, after all. It is sad that people are so unaware of their rural heritage.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bobby said. Both men spoke very good English. But there was surely something a little odd about what they offered by way of chat. And there was something odd about their clothes as well. Or was there? Bobby found that he was merely thinking they weren’t dressed as they ought to be. They were dressed rather as he was. But they were chunky men – there was no other way of describing them – and what they should have been wearing was suits with chunky double-breasted jackets together with rather formal Homburg hats. For the world they belonged to was the world he had been conjuring up for Beadon and Walcot – and which Beadon and Walcot had so promptly and obligingly peopled with two bearded Russians. These men, in fact, were the boys’ bearded Russians. Bobby was very properly disturbed by this weird conclusion. There seemed no way of escaping it, all the same.

  And now – even as Bobby was obliged to acknowledge something incredible violently tugging at his mind – the silence of outer nature was broken. For a moment he thought that it was the buzzing of an insect quite close to his ear. Then his glance was drawn to Moby Dick. Moby Dick was a spinney, and from Overcombe it appeared as a wedge-shaped object lying on the horizon of the down. Hence its name – although it looked like a black whale rather than a white one. Something like an insect, or rather something like a dragonfly, was just disappearing over Moby Dick. A momentary change in such light breeze as there was had brought its tiny buzz, or rather its tiny clatter, this way. The dragonfly was a helicopter. It vanished before Bobby could begin to estimate its line of flight. It might have come from any quarter of the horizon.

  The two men had also caught sight of the stumpy little aerial argosy. They didn’t look too pleased with it. For that matter, they hadn’t been looking too pleased with Bobby either. And now Bobby wondered to what extent he had given himself away as a young man desperately groping after some sense of what he was up against. But perhaps it wasn’t like that at all. Perhaps the bearded men were unaware of anything that could be called suspicion as being directed upon them. The were doing nothing more out of the way than taking an ordinary sort of walk in this rather lonely place, and they had done no more than show themselves as slightly taken aback when someone had suddenly bounced up on a grassy bank and addressed them.

  But – Bobby asked himself – if the two strangers were not in the least possessed by any sense of crisis, why was he himself gripped by precisely that? For what was upon him was not merely a feeling of hovering revelation. His whole body was tensed for action – much as if he was on his toes behind his scrum, well inside his opponents twenty-five, while trailing by three points d
uring the last minutes of the game. But, no – it wasn’t even quite like that. What he was vividly aware of was danger. Yet neither of these men had made the slightest movement of a muscle which could be construed as a threat. Unless he was imagining things – which was likely enough – it could only be that he had stood in momentary telepathic communication with something going on inside their heads.

  They were moving on. They were moving on – Bobby’s sharpened sense told him – fractionally more slowly than they had been walking before. One tends to do this when anxious to obviate the suspicion that one is retreating in disorder. They were two innocent wayfarers, with plenty of leisure before them, going on their way after a casual encounter in this peaceful spot. One of them had even wished Bobby a good afternoon – a somewhat formal thing to do, but then foreigners are like that. The other had displayed a splendid set of teeth in an obtrusive style. And now their chunky figures were already diminishing down the path.

  Bobby found that he had sat down abruptly on a tump of grass. His body, he supposed, had to cope with the excess of adrenalin, or whatever it was, that this real or imagined crisis had summoned into his blood-stream. In any case, there was no point in following these two men. He would do much better to manage some thinking about them, and about the whole transformed face – if it was transformed – of the quest he had embarked upon.

  Beadon had spoken of bearded Russians, and bearded Russians had appeared. Walcot had offered a midnight helicopter, and a helicopter had presented itself in the afternoon sky. There need be nothing in this – absolutely nothing at all. If a couple of foreigners were around, they were around: it was as simple at that. And helicopters potter about the heavens by night as by day. Messrs Beadon and Walcot had produced these appearances as mysterious only – one might say – upon challenge. With the dead man in the bunker, with the mystery of Susan Danbury, these things need have nothing to do.

  But Beadon had mentioned the dead man in the bunker as well. Or at least he had mentioned – and again as mysterious – ‘the man with the missing finger’. Bobby saw, clearly and too late, that he ought not have let Dr Gulliver’s afternoon roll-call abrupt whatever further communication the boys had to make. When you are dealing with something as desperate as murder, you ought not to hold up your investigations just to spare a couple of tough little creatures the risk of a mild ritual licking. But for the moment Beadon and Walcot were beyond Bobby’s ken. He couldn’t simply march straight back to the school and demand instant access to them – or not without what might be a rashly obtrusive scene. They would turn up again as they had promised, no doubt. Meanwhile, he must make some other cast. The Leather Bottle, after all, must remain next on his list. Bobby got to his feet, and then firmly sat down again. It seemed to be his impulse to rush around. And that was all wrong. You don’t plant the ball firmly between the posts by puffing and panting and pounding all over the place. You stay poised on your toes at least for those fractions of a second in which you can take in the field and think something out.

  Why had the Russians and the helicopter (and, for that matter, the man with the missing finger) been conjured into being by Beadon and Walcot amid that aroma of Turkish tobacco? Entirely because Bobby had invented for himself a role in a spy story. And why had he done that? Superficially, it had been to catch the interest and gain the help of a couple of schoolboys who might have been bored or puzzled or offended by the obscure situation which Bobby was actually involved with. Yet it had been an utterly spontaneous and uncalculating thing. ‘Do you know anything about espionage?’ Bobby had suddenly asked – and had then been constrained to go on to a great deal of rot about M (and N and K) and 008. He hadn’t even been at all sure that Beadon and Walcot believed a word of it. Indeed, hadn’t the belief been, in an utterly obscure and unaccountable way, all on his own part? Hadn’t it sprung from something almost wholly bizarre which had just hovered on the farthest verge of his consciousness when Hartsilver had given him a little fresh information about Bloody Nauze?

  Bobby looked at his watch. The Leather Bottle would be open by now, and by the time he reached it the employees of Dr Gulliver and Mr Onslow would be well into their first gin-and-tonic or their first pint. Which would be all to the good, no doubt.

  The exterior of the Leather Bottle certainly hadn’t changed, except that a discouraged-looking placard outside its only entrance intimated a willingness to purvey grills, snacks at the bar, freshly-cut sandwiches (since there are, of course, other sorts) and morning coffee. The morning coffee, Bobby thought, was the most incredible of the lot; it was inconceivable that it should be made in such a place, let alone called for and consumed. What the beer would be like, he didn’t know at all; he resolved to look round until he spotted an unopened bottle of reputable whisky, and firmly ask for that. There was a possibility that his visit would be abortive. The people at Overcombe nowadays might have the habit of piling into their cars and going somewhere a little more gay. And it was too early for any locals, so there was no chance of useful gossip from them. That would leave only the pub-keeper or the bar-maid. Real detectives, he knew, possessed an advanced technique for eliciting information from people of that sort. It was something he had never been required to have a go at.

  In the poky entrance it would have been possible to shove open the doors of the saloon bar and the public bar simultaneously with your two elbows. There was no sound of revelry to guide him either way, so he tried the saloon bar first. It was unoccupied except by a lot of flies, and they were all buzzing at a window-pane in an effort to get out. The only decoration was an uncertain sketch of the Great Smithy, done direct on a decaying wallpaper. Some strolling artist had no doubt executed this on a basis of so many pints to the square yard. Bobby turned back and tried the public bar. This too was without patrons, which was discouraging. But the landlord – as he should presumably be called – was in attendance, and beguiling vacancy by filling in a football coupon. Perhaps he had been much busier earlier in the day. He hadn’t shaved.

  ‘Good evening,’ Bobby said, and approached the bar. To do so he had to negotiate two one-armed bandits and a juke-box. Bobby thought poorly of these. One could play darts, he saw – but there was no shove-halfpenny board, let alone bar billiards. Perhaps he could challenge the landlord to a game of darts, and so get chatty with him that way. He didn’t seem a very naturally chatty sort. His response to Bobby’s greeting had simply been to put down his assault on the Pools with visible reluctance and favour his customer with a gloomy stare. At the risk of some gastronomic discomfort, Bobby decided to abandon the quest for an unopened whisky-bottle and make a bold bid for favour. ‘Pint of best bitter, please,’ he said cheerfully.

  Socially, this didn’t appear to be a particular success. The landlord went through the required motions in silence, picked up his coupon again, wetted the point of a pencil in a dribble of beer on the counter, and added a further prognostication to his list.

  ‘People from the school come in here often nowadays?’ Bobby asked. He received in reply no more than an indeterminate motion of the head. ‘The fact is,’ Bobby said, ‘that I’d like to know something about the place. I’m thinking of sending my kid there.’

  ‘Huh!’ The landlord had at last uttered. ‘Entered at birth, is it? Eton and ’arrow stuff.’ He sniffed with overt contempt.

  ‘Not birth at all. The kid’s eight tomorrow. That’s why I’ve come down.’

  ‘Eight tomorrow!’ The landlord stared at Bobby. ‘’ere, mister, ’ow old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-four. But that’s tomorrow too. Timothy and I have the same birthday.’

  ‘Been living it up quite some time, ’aven’t you?’ The landlord was now staring at Bobby with proper respect. ‘Learnt your way about early, it seems to me.’

  ‘I was born in India, you see.’ Bobby spoke modestly. ‘A hot climate. It makes a difference.’

  ‘It can’t be ’ealthy, that
can’t. Worn out before your time, you’ll be. Mark my words.’

  ‘Well, I’m quite OK now, thanks.’ Bobby raised his glass of beer affably, and at the same time contrived what he hoped was an atrociously vulgar wink. ‘And keep my eyes open as I move around. Some nice pieces they have, up at that school. Unexpected in a place like that. House-mothers, they call them. I’d call them–’

  ‘Har-har!’ Unexpected raucous laughter from the landlord relieved Bobby of the necessity of concluding this coarse pleasantry. ‘Quite in your Timothy’s line soon – eh? – if ’e’s ’is father’s son. But one of them girls come in here regular. Name of Susan. And I wouldn’t ’arf mind.’

  ‘Won’t you have something on me?’ Bobby asked. It was clear to him that only an aggressive and forward policy would enable him to carry on this revolting conversation. Even before the mention of Susan’s name it had been pretty thick.