An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  ‘I don’t mind if I ’ave a drop with bitters – not at this hour.’ The landlord spoke quite affably as he reached for a bottle of gin. ‘Susan,’ he repeated. ‘Name of Susan. I’d rather ’ave ’er than a square meal any day. And there’s not many as you can say that of.’

  ‘That’s a true word.’ Bobby put his beer down on a ledge beneath the bar. He was pretty sure he couldn’t drink another drop of it.

  ‘Only her tastes are peculiar, if you ask me. Not keen to show the youngsters a bit of life, the same that Timothy’s mother seems to have been. This Susan comes in ‘ere to meet an ol’ man, more often than not. An ol’ man ’e is from the school too – which is another peculiar thing to my mind. Name of ’artsilver.’

  ‘Hartsilver!’

  ‘The drawering-master, ’e’s said to be. A low class of employment. But this girl comes in to meet him quiet-like. More private than up at the school, I suppose. And I’ll tell you another thing. Sometimes there’s a young chap as well. Appears from nowhere, ’e does. Not a local. Might have dropped from the clouds. They go into the garden, they do, and don’t know I’ve sometimes watched them through that there key-’ole.’ The landlord pointed unblushingly. ‘And they’re that much in an ’uddle, they might as well be all three beneath the same blanket. I don’t like it – not in a respectable ’ouse like this.’

  ‘You mean–’ Bobby stared at the landlord aghast.

  ‘Well, no. That’s only by way of passing a joke, you might say. You learn the uses of ’armless ’umour in a job like mine. But very thick about something, they are. Very thick, indeed. ’Ere – where’s your beer?’

  Bobby retrieved his beer hastily, but was fortunately not constrained to apply himself to it. For now a diversion occurred. The door of the public bar had opened – had in fact been kicked open – to admit two young men. Bobby glanced at them and recognized them instantly as among those grown-ups privileged to partake of Dr Gulliver’s nutritious midday meal. There was to be a contingent from Overcombe at the Leather Bottle after all.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen. The usual, I suppose?’ It seemed to be the landlord’s policy to make a considerable effort of cordiality towards regulars from Overcombe.

  ‘The bloody usual twice, George.’ The first young man – the one who had kicked open the door – looked round the bar disgustedly. ‘Pas de jupe,’ he said. ‘Aucun oiseau. Bloody hell.’

  ‘But, Jakin, we ought to have invited them, don’t you think?’ Unlike the first young man, who was beefy and choleric, the second young man was pale and mild. ‘You can’t expect the girls to come in a lot on their own.’

  ‘Rot, Lew. The new one does, if George is to be believed. But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps they don’t care to drop in with strange types lurking around.’ The young man called Jakin glowered at Bobby. Disappointment in the expectation of eligible female society had put him in a bad temper. He had raised his voice as he spoke, and now he raised it further. ‘Bet you a flyer,’ he said, ‘I lay her before the end of term.’

  ‘Shut up, Jakin.’ Lew appeared to feel a certain measure of impropriety in his companion’s remarks. ‘Stick your mug in your pot, and pipe down.’

  ‘Do you take me on, or don’t you? A flyer that I lay the Danbury–’

  Jakin broke off – surprised, and perhaps even alarmed, that the strange type was advancing upon him in long strides across the bar. Half-way, however, the strange type checked himself, assumed an expression of elaborate unconcern, felt in a trouser pocket for sixpence and veered off in the direction of one of the one-armed bandits. Sir John Appleby, had he been present on this interesting occasion, might not have been able to award his son high marks for technique. But he would undoubtedly have awarded him very high marks indeed for self-control.

  Bobby shoved sixpence in the idiotic machine and pulled the handle. The machine went through its routine performance – one calculated to suggest to the folk-mind a high complexity of shifting and changing chances. Unfortunately the machine also judged it impressive to make a good deal of noise, so that for some seconds he had lost the opportunity to edify himself by Jakin’s conversation. He hoped it would occur to neither of the young men to put a coin in the juke-box. That would reduce the possibility of further successful eavesdropping to about zero. It was odd that neither young man seemed aware of having seen him before. But Jakin had clearly registered him only as an objectionable foreign body of a generalized sort. Bobby wasn’t so clear about Lew, who was possibly a slightly more cerebral type.

  The one-armed bandit had, of course, yielded no dividend. Bobby produced another sixpence, but held on to it parsimoniously while affecting to study with concentration the creature’s gaudy dial. Like the waiter in Mr Eliot’s quaint poem, it was prolific in oranges, bananas, figs and hothouse grapes. Hence, no doubt, the alternative name of fruit-machine. Or had the manufacturers gone fruity because, for some extraneous reason, the term had already been applied to their contraptions? Bobby dismissed this irrelevant speculation as he heard Jakin speaking once more.

  ‘Herself to herself,’ he was saying. ‘That’s our Susan. Been at Overcombe eight weeks now, and what do you know? Not so much as if she’s ever been there.’

  ‘Been there?’ Lew asked.

  ‘You know bloody well where. And yet she’s a beddable bitch. I’ve watched her with the other drabs. Definitely not Lesbian.’

  Bobby, although the blood was behaving awkwardly in his temples and before his inner eye invitingly hovered a vision of Jakin flat on the floor with a badly bruised jaw, concentrated doggedly on the serious business of the day. It hadn’t occurred to him – nor had the talk of Beadon and Walcot suggested – that Susan was quite a new arrival at Overcombe. There had been her manner with Hartsilver, for example, when she had come into his hut. That had somehow suggested a more established relationship than would normally develop in the inside of a term.

  ‘Would you say she was a trained nurse?’ Lew was asking. ‘She seemed to be always in and out of the San, when that pal of Gulliver’s was supposed to be recuperating there.’

  ‘Recuperating?’ Jakin asked.

  ‘Convalescing, or whatever.’

  ‘Supposed to be?’

  ‘Well, there was something odd about it, wasn’t there?’ As he asked this question, Lew looked quite acute. Bobby made a motion as if about to put his second sixpence in the machine, and then paused again in profound study of its obscure symbolism. ‘Do you know that one day they brought him into the Upper Third and said he was going to teach Latin? But it didn’t work, and they took him away again.’ Lew paused for a swig at his tankard. ‘And now he’s vanished without a word spoken.’

  ‘Nut case, wasn’t he?’ Jakin was contemptuous. ‘A by-blow of Gulliver’s if you ask me, and gone off his rocker. Now they’ve had to shove him in the bin. Did you ever get a good look at him?’

  ‘Not really. But I noticed he had a finger missing.’

  ‘A screw loose and a finger missing.’ Jakin appeared to find this witticism highly entertaining. ‘Have you come across anybody who knew anything about him?’

  ‘Nobody at all.’ Lew again consulted his tankard, and then glanced curiously in Bobby’s direction. This constrained Bobby to operate the bandit again, with the result that he missed out on something. When the clatter of the machine had subsided again, Jakin was speaking.

  ‘A photograph?’ Jakin said.

  ‘One of those group affairs. There’s a pile of them in a drawer in common room. This one was about twelve years’ back. And there was this chap uncommonly like Gulliver’s mysterious guest.’

  ‘To hell with him, anyway. This is a damned dull pub. What about a game of darts?’

  ‘No time.’ Lew had looked at his watch. ‘Back to the nick, old boy.’ Quite unexpectedly, Lew swung round on Bobby. ‘I think,’ he said politely, ‘that you we
re lunching at Overcombe today, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’ Bobby found himself quite taken aback by this civilized conduct on Lew’s part.

  ‘Gent come to see after the school for ’is kid,’ the landlord struck in informatively. ‘An eight-year-old, ’e ’as. And if you knew ’is own age, you’d be surprised.’

  Bobby remembered with alarm the absurd story he had told about himself. He didn’t feel he at all wanted the ribaldry of Jakin directed on it. Not that it hadn’t been ribald in itself. It might give Susan a very bad impression of him, if it got around.

  ‘I was at Overcombe myself,’ he said hastily. ‘About a dozen years ago. I suppose you haven’t been teaching there very long?’

  ‘Six terms – the same at Jakin.’ Lew, although he had moved towards the door, appeared willing to converse. ‘The pay’s lousy at a prep school, but the work’s not too bad.’

  ‘The work’s damn all.’ Jakin struck a more robust note. ‘Keep on the right side of the little brutes – don’t expect them to learn anything, or rubbish of that sort – and they leave you more or less alone. Of course the terms are a bit long. Twelve weeks. Half as long again as at Oxford, I’m an Oxford man.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Bobby was beginning to feel almost a professional interest in Jakin; this was one of the occasions upon which he obscurely felt it a pity that one isn’t really allowed to put characters in the nouvelle écriture. ‘FL’s an Oxford man,’ he said. ‘And a Cambridge man too. And Yale. And played for both sides in the Eton and Harrow match.’

  This ancient Overcombe joke went down well. The Oxford man (Bobby had never before heard anyone announce, tout court, that he was an Oxford man) roared with laughter. Lew, perhaps a Cambridge man, laughed less unrestrainedly. Bobby wondered whether he could briefly detain these two devoted pedagogues over another drink. They had already been uncommonly informative without his so much as uttering. Under judicious questioning, they might – even quite unconsciously – reveal a great deal more. The trouble was that Bobby didn’t have very clearly in his head what questions he wanted to ask. In the last ten minutes the outlines of his problem had shifted sharply, and he wasn’t at all sure what sort of picture he was staring at.

  Susan Danbury must be counted as practically a New Girl at Overcombe. She was mysteriously thick with Hartsilver. Bloody Nauze had been back at Overcombe recently, apparently as some sort of invalid friend of Gulliver’s. Susan had been mysteriously thick with him too. Hartsilver must have known it was Nauze; along with Gulliver and Onslow, he was probably the only person left at Overcombe who would know. But Hartsilver, who appeared to be the soul of openness and simplicity, had concealed this knowledge from Bobby. More than that, he had put on an astonishing piece of play-acting when confronted by Bobby’s quest for Nauze. Recalling this now, Bobby simply felt that it took his breath away. One just didn’t know where one stood in a world in which poor old Hartsilver, failed artist, was minded to behave like that.

  Nauze had been a patient in the school sick-room, with Susan trotting in and out on him. And then – most perplexing scrap of information of all – there had been some abortive attempt to get him to teach Latin – to do again what he had once done superbly well. What on earth could that have been in aid of? Could it simply have proceeded from a feeling of Gulliver’s that his guest (or patient) ought to do a bit to earn his keep? Whatever had been the idea, it hadn’t worked. ‘They took him away again.’ These had been Lew’s exact words. Bobby stared at them inside his own head – and as he did so they became immensely significant. They carried an implication of guardianship – something like that. ‘A nut case,’ had been Jakin’s immediate comment. That was it. Nauze had come to Overcombe, or been brought to Overcombe, as the consequence of some sort of nervous breakdown. He had come to be cured. He had come, say, to be patched up to a point at which he could again – gym-shoe in hand – confront a dozen small boys with mensa and amo; conduct the very cleverest of them to the knowledge that Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. And the therapy hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked at all. Nauze was now dead.

  Gulliver had been blank about Nauze. Onslow had been blank about Nauze. Hartsilver, perhaps with greater cunning, had been communicative about Nauze and successfully blank as well. As for the girl, she had been very blank indeed. Bobby had confronted her – his turning up had confronted her – with a situation (it had been possible to feel) which she had barely been able to control. She had managed what now struck him as having had something of the character of a holding operation. And she had walked away on it.

  Suicide. When people were confronted, within their own circle, with some particularly ghastly suicide it was surely their instinct to keep mum. Could Bloody Nauze conceivably have committed suicide? Was it possible to imagine a man doing just that to…to his own head? Bobby shivered. But there had been no sign of a weapon. Could he have fallen on top of it? But then? The body vanishing, and now all this maze of deception and lies! Suicide didn’t make sense. Add the Russians, and even the helicopter if you pleased, and it made less sense still.

  But what to ask Messrs Jakin and Lew? This was the immediate problem – and Bobby shelved it by saying something hospitable about a quick one. Messrs Jakin and Lew, moments before so urgently cognizant of a need to return to the service of education, seemed not disposed to resist this. Bobby, after proper consultation, called for three large brandies. It wasn’t quite his notion of something to gulp down an hour before dinner-time. But Jakin and Lew appeared to have no doubts about what to drink when the cost was on someone else.

  It still wasn’t very clear to Bobby what further line he should take, and he found himself seeking inspiration in the spectacle of external nature. In other words, he found himself gazing between the heads of Jakin and Lew, and through the only window of the public bar. It was in a very special guise, however, that external nature met his regard. In fact, it was in the guise of Susan Danbury. She was looking straight at him, and it was evident that she saw him clearly. She raised a hand, put it to her lips. She raised it further, and beckoned.

  PART THREE

  Sir John Appleby

  7

  It was probable, Appleby told himself, that Bobby would not be heard of until he had something positive to report. So there was nothing surprising in his not having rung up the previous night. He hadn’t left Dream until the early afternoon. If his destination was Overcombe (and Appleby was pretty sure it was) he would almost certainly have put up somewhere near the school, and thus have established a base for operations. It was only today, Friday, that he would really be on the job.

  Appleby finished his breakfast, and picked up The Times. At their moonlight meeting the night before, Sergeant Howard had told him that – against Howard’s own inclination – the mystery of the bunker had got into at least one of the evening papers. It was a story with the makings of mild sensation, and there would certainly be more about it in the dailies this morning. Not, perhaps anything that could be called additional hard news – but at least a repeat of yesterday’s report, with some vague speculation thrown in.

  The Times yielded nothing at all: Appleby went through it twice to make quite sure of the fact. No doubt it had held its hand, he concluded, over what might still be interpreted as a trivial prank. But this would not hold off the press as a whole. The mere fact that the young man who had claimed to find a dead body was the son of a retired Police Commissioner would make news of a sort in itself. Appleby tried the two other morning papers regularly delivered at Dream – one chiefly for the reason that it carried a strip-cartoon of what Judith considered to be rather an endearing dog. There was nothing in either of them. The mysterious affair at Linger had dropped abruptly out of the news.

  Appleby’s initial reaction was to feel relieved. He had no fancy for Applebys figuring in crime-reports. And, of course, things did just drop out of the news. Quite big things sometimes did just that. Here
or there about the globe the world was at last plainly coming to an end; there would be columns and columns about events presaging crisis, genocide, universal disaster; and then this would vanish away with a ruthless abruptness to make room for something else of the same sort. It wasn’t exactly suppression. It was just a hunch among those controlling what Bobby called the mass media that people would rather have something new.

  But these considerations scarcely applied to this sudden treating of the obscure little affair of the bunker as what Bobby – once more – would call a non-event. Or perhaps an anti-happening, Appleby told himself as he strolled out into the garden.

  The lawn seemed to be littered with dead birds, as if some band of marksmen had turned up at dawn and conducted a hideous battue. That happened long before midsummer, if you had poplars: twigs and leaves of a blackened silver came tumbling down and around at every breeze. Solo Hoobin was ambling up and down with an effect of the largest leisure, propelling a contraption which was supposed to gather up this litter into a bag. The aged Hoobin had not yet presented himself for his day’s labour; he was no doubt still engaged in vindicating his character as a perusing man by reading a chapter of Deuteronomy or Leviticus – occupation which, as being of a devotional order, it would be profane and impious in his employer to endeavour to abridge.

  Solo Hoobin, Appleby recalled, was regarded by his venerable uncle as not yet wench-high. But it was only in a figurative sense that this held true. Solo had been crouched over his machine; now he had removed its bag, straightened up, and pitched its contents approximately in the direction of a wheelbarrow designed to receive them. Solo was quite as tall as Bobby, and his hair was even longer. Appleby was never quite sure whether Solo wore Bobby’s cast-off jeans or Bobby wore Solo’s. Not that you could mistake the one for the other, for whereas Bobby grew more or less steadily broader as your eye moved from his feet upwards, with Solo it was the other way round. In an obscure fashion they got on rather well together, just as Appleby, equally oddly, got on rather well with Solo’s often infuriating uncle. It wasn’t that the two youths had grown up together in a kind of feudal relationship. Solo was half a dozen years younger than Bobby, and had been imported to Dream only quite recently as some sort of prop to Hoobin Senior in his declining years. It was just that they seemed rather to like each other.