An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  This train of reflection did no more than pass over the surface of Appleby’s mind. It was what prompted him, nevertheless, to pause and have a word with the modestly industrious Solo now. He might very easily have walked past with no more than a good-morning. The circumstance was one which Appleby was to reflect on afterwards in a mood of some sobriety.

  ‘And how is the moped going, Solo?’ Appleby asked. It was only lately that Solo, who had appeared to be of a thrifty disposition, had acquired one of these unambitious conveyances. Appleby suspected that Bobby – for whom Solo cleaned golf clubs, whitened tennis-shoes, made emergency trips to Linger post office with important manuscripts and the like – had put up the last ten pounds or so necessary for the purchase. The aged Hoobin had disapproved, and Appleby himself had felt misgivings. But Solo – although never quite all there, and decidedly less than all there at the full of the moon – commanded almost preternaturally swift reaction times, and it seemed reasonably probable that he would survive the acquisition of an internal combustion engine. Hoobin Senior abounded in predictions that his nephew would presently be maimed and lamed for life. But then Hoobin Senior made the same prediction (with a superadded glee) whenever Appleby himself was prompted to display his skill with a scythe or a chain-saw. ‘Are you thinking of taking your test with it yet?’ Appleby pursued. Appleby had a professional faith in the importance of driving tests, licences and general regimentation – or so his family unkindly alleged. So he didn’t want Solo to spend an unconcerned lifetime behind an L-plate.

  ‘Urr,’ Solo said, and ran a hand through his unkempt locks. Solo had considerable skill in answering inconvenient questions with the appearance of having been deprived by an ungenerous Nature of the divine faculty of articulate speech.

  ‘Have you been for any long trips lately?’ Appleby pursued – this by way of producing a more congenial topic.

  ‘Lunnon,’ Solo said. ‘Been to Lunnon.’

  Appleby remembered that the moon was at the full; that it was under its brilliant illumination, indeed, that he had met and conversed with Sergeant Howard on the golf-course. Solo’s persuasion that he had, whether by one means or another, visited this mysterious metropolis was a regular feature of what must be called his manic phase.

  ‘London?’ Appleby repeated. ‘Well, I used to live there myself.’ This was an evasive remark. It seemed immoral to acquiesce in Solo’s delusions, and at the same time unkind not to accept them.

  ‘Great orchards there were everywhere,’ Solo said. ‘And the paths atween them paved with gold.’ He paused reflectively. ‘But,’ he added, ‘rabbits be scarce there.’

  ‘There aren’t so many as there once were.’ Appleby saw a route to saner ground. ‘Where have you been going for your rabbits lately, Solo?’

  ‘Golf-course,’ Solo said. ‘Wi’ Jem Puckrup. Jem he’ ferret.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, it can’t be called poaching, I think. Rabbits are only a nuisance on a golf-course.’ Appleby was about to move on, but was prompted to ask another question. ‘When were you there last, Solo?’

  ‘Urr.’ Solo had to think. ‘Monday night, it ’twere. Jem and me slep’ there.’

  Appleby stared at Solo. He was wondering whether he ought to be at all surprised by this casually tendered information. When the aged Hoobin, in the presence of his nephew, had ghoulishly discussed the probability of unknown horrors on the golf-course on Monday night, Solo had displayed not the slightest interest in the subject. He had merely doodled with his sickle on the drive. Of course the Linger golf-course was a large area, and there was very little reason to suppose that the slumbers of Solo and his friend Jem had been disturbed by anything untoward there. But it wasn’t exactly a matter to let pass unexamined.

  ‘How many rabbits, Solo?’ It was necessary to remember that Solo, like other wild creatures, was easily alarmed. And Solo’s wildness, or at least his closeness to a primeval state, was never to be forgotten. Solo’s mother, a dark little woman, had been a Bunn, and it was well known that the Bunns had retired to the deep woodland towards the end of the Celtic Iron Age and seldom shown up since. Solo’s mother must have been captured by a Saxon Hoobin during a foray of comparatively recent date. Solo, emerging from childhood, had been turned into somebody’s garden boy, and broken to his tasks with some severity. That he continued to work after a fashion at Dream (where even his venerable uncle was forbidden to take a strap to him) might be attributed to the softening power of kindness, or it might just be a matter of reflexes. But Solo was still liable, metaphorically at least, to make for his ancestral silvan fastnesses when scared.

  ‘Two,’ Solo said. ‘Four.’ He performed some complicated ritual of numeration with his fingers. ‘Five rabbits come first light Tuesday.’

  ‘And then you came straight home?’

  ‘Not till Jem and me were clemmed. Then we came home-along.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby did his best to impart a casual air to this untoward exhibition of curiosity on his own part. Not that he felt it was much good. Deep beneath Solo’s sluggish and straying conscious mind lay intuitive perceptions which were very acute indeed. It was certain that these were alerted now. ‘You waited till you felt hungry, Solo, before coming back to Dream. And you had your breakfast and then turned up to work. You must have bolted it. For you were well on time.’

  ‘Urr.’ Solo perhaps intended a gracious acknowledgement of this commendation from his employer. ‘Afore uncle, I were.’

  ‘Solo, are you sure you and Jem Puckrup didn’t see anything strange on the golf-course?’

  ‘Two leverets. Playward, they were. Like as if a great joy were in them.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Appleby was familiar with Solo’s propensity to sidestep awkward issues by way of poetical reflection. Here was a striking instance of it. Which meant that there was something awkward. There was something, that was to say, which Solo judged it would be hazardous to admit cognizance of. So Appleby decided to take a chance, and move in. ‘Solo,’ he said, ‘you saw something. And Jem too, I expect. It was at the bunker. The bunker where the body was found. Or wasn’t found. You saw somebody, didn’t you?’

  Solo said nothing. But he very slowly shook his head.

  ‘I don’t want to have the police from Linger coming and asking you questions. Or asking Jem. So tell me, please. For instance, did you see Bobby?’

  ‘We ne’er had sight o’ Mr Bobby.’ Solo had spoken surprisingly quickly.

  ‘Nobody is suspecting Bobby of anything. He has nothing to hide.’ Appleby wondered whether these were ideas within or without Solo’s conceptual range. ‘Just what did you see?’

  Appleby paused hopefully. But Solo had changed gear again. He simply shook his head even more slowly than before.

  ‘Mr Robert,’ Appleby said with some formality, ‘simply must know what you and Jem saw. It is most important to him. So speak up.’

  ‘He hasn’t axed me. Mr Bobby hasn’t.’ Solo looked almost cunning. He was determined not to be tricked.

  ‘That’s because he isn’t here, Solo. He went away without knowing that you and Jem had been near the golf-course. But he’d want you to tell me. Out with it, Solo, and then you can get on with your work.’

  ‘Urr.’ It was impossible to tell what attitude to honest toil Solo’s favourite vocable (learnt from his elderly relative) was intended to convey. But now he took a deep breath, and Appleby realized that something was coming at last. ‘There were a rake,’ Solo said.

  ‘A rake?’ For a moment Appleby was at a loss. ‘Where were you when you saw a rake?’

  ‘Coming out of thicket where we slep’. But we stopped-like, unbeknownst.’

  ‘Nobody saw either of you?’

  ‘Had rabbits.’

  ‘Yes, of course. You thought you might be spotted with your rabbits, so you stayed in hiding. What was the first thing you saw?�
�

  ‘Car on road.’

  ‘There was a car with a trailer. I can see you are telling the truth, Solo. Bobby would be very pleased with you. And what was the next thing that you saw after that?’

  ‘Men running.’

  ‘How many men?’

  ‘The two men carrying it might be a bed.’

  ‘Carrying a bed? Do you mean a stretcher?’

  Solo looked blank. His vocabulary was not extensive.

  ‘These two men were running with their bed or stretcher towards the bunker? And there was a body in the bunker?’

  ‘Certain there were body in bunker.’ Solo seemed indisposed to accord any special emphasis to the circumstance. ‘And there were this rake.’

  ‘In the bunker too?’

  ‘Only ball were in bunker. Ball and corpus.’

  ‘I know there was a ball. But where was the rake?’

  ‘Rake were wi’ wench. Wench were running wi’ rake, and men were running wi’ bed. Wench had picked up rake, might be, from shelter by second tee.’

  ‘It was very quick-witted of her.’ Appleby’s voice had changed. ‘Listen, Solo. I am going to tell you what happened then. These three people ran to the bunker. The men put the body on the stretcher, and hurried back to the car with it. The wench – she was a young girl – stayed to rake over the bunker, and then she ran back after them. They put the body in the trailer, and drove away at once. It that right?’

  ‘That be right.’ Solo was reproachful. ‘You never said you a-been there too.’

  ‘No more I was. Why haven’t you told anybody about this?’

  “’Twere no affair of ours, Jem nor me. Had rabbits.’ A large rationality now seemed to attend Solo’s utterance. ‘And foreigners, they been. Nought had it to do wi’ folk from Dream nor Stony Dream nor Boxer’s Bottom. Not even from Linger itself or the Yatters, they were. Happen they came from distant parts. Long Snarl, it might be. Or from other kingdoms. Little Sneak, belike, or Abbot’s Amble.’

  ‘No doubt. Now listen, Solo. This is very important. You say you saw nothing of Mr Robert? You didn’t, immediately after this, see him coming from the club-house to the bunker?’

  ‘No sight of Mr Bobby.’

  ‘Nor of a little group of men, one of whom might have been Mr Robert?’

  ‘All we seen you now know.’ Solo produced this surprisingly succinct statement almost crisply. ‘We bain’t nesh, Jem nor me. But we bain’t fools neither. Had rabbits. Ran.’

  8

  So much – Appleby told himself as he walked slowly back to the house – for the young woman in whose service Bobby had chosen to set off as a knight errant. Perhaps she had actually murdered the man upon whom Bobby had come in the bunker. If she had not, she had certainly been an accessory after the fact. She had distracted Bobby in the moment that there was a danger of his identifying the corpse. She had got him off to the telephone and had herself made hard for the car – the occupants of which were in fact her accomplices. She had hurried them back to the bunker – it had almost certainly been back – bearing the stretcher upon which the body had presumably been conveyed to it in the first place. The body had then been removed to the car or its trailer, and the girl had been quick-witted enough to find and do her job with that rake. And of that the consequence had been that Bobby could be aspersed as imagining things.

  And so indeed he could. Appleby came momentarily to a halt as the force of this was born in upon him. Girl, confederates, corpse and all had disappeared into the blue. And so had Bobby – his head full of the rash assumption that he was in quest of an abducted heroine.

  Neither living nor dead had Nauze – Bloody Nauze – ever been within Appleby’s view. But now, suddenly in his own garden, Appleby seemed to see Nauze very clearly indeed – as a dead body with a good part of its head shot off. And this, one might say, was the measure of the savagery of the affair in which Bobby – under a vast illusion which made him hideously vulnerable – had gone hurtling off to involve himself. Not, of course, that there was any crisis. Even on the assumption that the dead man was indeed Nauze, all that Bobby was at present engaged upon was trying to pick up at Overcombe what would almost certainly be a very cold trail upon that long-departed Latin master. It was true that it mightn’t be healthy for Bobby if the obviously ruthless people involved in the crime got to know that a young man was chasing them up even at that remove. But there was not the slightest reason to suppose that Overcombe was any longer in the picture at all. The probability was that Bobby would return unscathed but baffled from what had proved to be a wild-goose chase. The important thing, meanwhile, was to make rather more sense of the mystery than either Appleby himself or anybody else had yet been able to do.

  The telephone call. The spurious telephone call which had represented itself as coming from the Home Office, and by which Sergeant Howard had not unnaturally been taken in. As Appleby found his mind going back to this, he reflected that Howard had at least come to an acute conclusion about it. Bobby’s adventure had got in rather an imprecise way into an early edition of an evening paper – and almost at once some unknown person had attempted to check up on it. The affair of the bunker was far from being a one-man show, Howard had said. And there were villains who weren’t trusting one another very far.

  It was a good inference – and, if only uncertainly, one could get a little further on the basis of it. Indeed, Appleby had already done so. The body had been put where it had been put with a definite purpose in view – and that purpose looked like being the ensuring of its discovery within a certain limit of time. But there had been a hitch – and that hitch was Bobby. The body was to be found; it was not to be identified. Because of the danger of that, it had been snatched away again. And this had left somebody – presumably not one of the snatchers – in doubt about some vital point. Had Nauze (to call him that) been killed at all? If he had, had he been safely dead by the time somebody was claiming he had been safely dead? But what could be the context of such a situation? Appleby had made a shot or two at guessing. But he didn’t feel that, so far, he had come upon a hypothesis that satisfied him.

  Could anything be arrived at by simply considering the dramatis personae? The trouble was that any persons who could be so described were uncommonly thin on the ground. It was no good perpending the character and situation of Robert Appleby. That Robert Appleby had a hinterland (scrum-half Appleby, author-of-The-Lumber-Room Appleby) was neither here nor there, since the entry of Robert Appleby into the affair had plainly been purely fortuitous. That left Nauze (if Nauze) and the girl. Nauze lacked a finger. Nauze had once possessed a gym-shoe. Nauze had been an usher in a superior academy for young gentlemen. Nauze had taught Latin notably well. End of information on background of Nauze. The girl had been capable of powerfully attracting Robert Appleby (aforesaid). End of information on the girl.

  Or not quite. The girl who had powerfully attracted Bobby had been mixed up in funny business with the corpse of a murdered man.

  Sir John Appleby, remaining stock-still on the garden side of Long Dream Manor, stared very hard (if metaphorically) at this solid fact (for it was a solid fact) of the situation. He then broke into notably rapid motion, gained thereby the modest but eastward-facing apartment in which he had breakfasted, and stared very hard (but non-figuratively, this time) at the newspapers he had lately abandoned there. Not a word. Not a word. For the first time, there glimmered on the verges of the affair of the bunker a faint penumbra of sense. People foxing each other. And a girl – that sort of girl capable of seducing Bobby Appleby even when she didn’t at all mean mto – running around disposing of corpses. Yes! Just conceivably, it added up.

  Mrs Colpoys was in the breakfast-room.

  ‘Sergeant Howard, sir,’ she said.

  And Howard was shown in. He entered with an air entirely proper in a warrant-officer (as it might be) seeking
an interview with (say) a retired Adjutant-General or Chief of the Imperial General Staff. But this did not for a moment disguise the fact that Howard was a very angry man.

  ‘Sir,’ Howard said, ‘I have no business here. None at all.’

  ‘Then I wish it were an hour at which I could offer you a drink. Come to think of it, I can. Mrs Colpoys will still have coffee going. I’ll just chase after her.’ Appleby went to the door. ‘No bells left in this house,’ he explained amiably. ‘All torn out by the roots by some Raven or other in a rage. You’re a local man, Sergeant?’

  ‘Man and boy, Sir John.’

  ‘Then you know about my wife’s people. I shan’t be a moment. Cigarettes in that box. Or light your pipe. I’ve plenty of time for a talk. You’ll find that yourself, when you retire.’

  These composing remarks had a certain effect. When Appleby returned – with Mrs Colpoys hard behind him – Howard had distinguishably calmed down.

  ‘You mustn’t blame the Colonel,’ Appleby said.

  ‘Sir?’ There was proper surprise in Howard’s tone.

  ‘Come, Sergeant. Haven’t you been told to lay off, more or less?’

  ‘Something like that, Sir John. And I don’t like it. It’s not fair on your son. A nice lad, if I may say so. That’s why I’ve called. I dare say I might be hauled over the coals for it.’

  ‘I dare say you might. Your Chief Constable’s a very good man. Army background, of course, and all that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’