An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  ‘Roses round it,’ Bobby said. ‘And listen.’

  Music was filtering from the cottage into the night – canned but stereophonic. Bobby, who was not musical, had a vague notion it was the Fifth Symphony. If it was, he didn’t, somehow, like the sound of this particular bit. Perhaps it was where E M Forster says that goblins start walking quietly over the universe from end to end. If that was so, there would presently be an interlude with elephants dancing. But the main point was that old Hartsilver appeared to be having a quiet cultural evening.

  So for a moment it seemed to Bobby that they were on a fool’s errand, and even that they had better, perhaps, clear out. And then with Beethoven’s celebrated composition (if it was indeed that) there was blended another sound. It wasn’t a sound that could claim the remotest logical relationship to the matter in hand. It was nothing more, in fact, than the faint rattle of a train far away in the dark. But then the train whistled.

  The whistle was not of the sort to which Bobby – long ago in his well-appointed and night-light-lit night-nursery – had moderately thrilled: the old-fashioned steam-engine kind of whistle, which might have been emanating from a perfectly ordinary dragon. This whistle didn’t rise and fall on an indrawn and out-going breath (accompanied by fire – a small and lurid flame against the sky). This was the mechanical and uniform note of a Diesel-engine – or not uniform only because borne onward into a farther dark at eighty miles an hour. Most irrationally, it alerted Bobby now.

  There was another waft of scent. This time it was from the roses, for he had stepped inside the porch, getting Susan behind him. He felt the scratch and prick of a thorn across the back of his hand, and realized that he was reaching for the door-handle rather than searching for a knocker or a bell. Hartsilver seemed not very tidy in his gardening. The music was still going on, and the scent came to him as if mixed up with it. Something moved at his touch.

  ‘Door’s ajar,’ he said.

  ‘Go in.’

  ‘But it won’t open further. I’m shoving against something.’

  ‘Then shove. But not too hard.’

  He shoved, and squeezed through. A little light came with him from the porch behind. A little more slanted from a half open door to one side. He looked down at his feet.

  ‘Don’t come in,’ he said – sharply and instinctively.

  But Susan was already beside him. They had stood rather like this before – side by side, viewing a body. Susan bent over this one.

  ‘Leaver,’ she said.

  12

  There was a moment’s silence. Or rather, between Bobby and Susan there was that, and at the same time the cottage was full of what seemed a deafening din. Beethoven was winding things up. With vast roarings of a superhuman joy.

  Bobby looked at the half-open door through which the music came, and felt a sharp pricking down his spine. He fancied, in a split second of mere muddle, that it was the roses round the door again; that some untended thorny spray had reached out and stroked him. Then he heard himself talking sense.

  ‘His body blocked the outer door. Unless there’s a back entrance, nobody can have–’

  ‘There is: And there are windows.’ Susan made his remark seem not sensible after all. ‘But I think he crawled here.’ She was again bending over the body – if not professionally, at least composedly enough. ‘He’s been killed, all right. Stabbed. But not instantly. Left dying. And he tried to crawl out.’ She spoke jerkily. ‘Find Hartsilver.’

  The music stopped.

  Bobby’s body had tautened, and instinctively he knew that Susan’s had too. It was as if they were both for a fraction of time under the delusive persuasion that, failing some immediate human agency, music can’t stop. Then Bobby acted. He turned, and made for the room the music had been coming from. Three paces took him through the door and into it. It was quite a large room, or at least it seemed so in terms of the general scale of the place. Although it was lined with books, there was enough space to give the record-player a chance. The only picture was a small one over the fireplace: an unassuming reproduction of Dürer’s ‘St Jerome in his Study’. Dürer must be Hartsilver’s favourite artist – if Hartsilver, Bobby suddenly reflected, was properly to be spoken of as having a favourite anything any longer.

  Bobby looked around him, and caught his breath. He had never before been in a room that could be described as having been broken up or wrecked. (His Oxford college was one at which smashing people’s rooms had ceased to be an accepted form of social intercourse.) He didn’t like the look of the thing now – not even the look of the untouched record-player, with the aid of which Beethoven must have continued to plumb the recesses of human experience throughout whatever lurid events had been transacting themselves. There was no sign of Hartsilver – of Hartsilver whether dead or alive. But there was a sofa, a desk, a long curtain drawn across a window-space. Bobby hurried round, peering.

  ‘Nothing.’ Susan was in the doorway, and he spoke as he turned to her. ‘No sign of him.’

  ‘Nor anywhere else in the place.’ She must have made a rapid tour. ‘Too late. We lose again. Or I do.’

  He looked at her in horror, and then back at the room.

  ‘A ghastly mess,’ he said. ‘Ransacked.’

  ‘Not that. Precisely not that.’ She was looking round with an eye more expert than his. ‘Not a search. Just a struggle. Leaver put up a fight. Hartsilver too, perhaps.’

  ‘What have they done with him? Where can he be now?’

  ‘They didn’t have to hunt for anything.’ Susan had ignored the questions. She was speaking very quietly. ‘No drawers tugged open. No books pulled out. Carpet not hauled back. So they probably just picked up what they wanted from that desk.’

  ‘Your photostat, or whatever it’s called?’

  ‘Well, that – yes. And perhaps something else.’

  ‘You mean Hartsilver’s successful decoding of it as well?’

  ‘Not exactly that. If they’d got that, Hartsilver would still be here. Dead too, I suppose. Say, just what looked like a promising start.’

  ‘They’ve taken him away – alive?’

  ‘Yes.’ Susan’s voice had gone momentarily toneless and flat. ‘I’m afraid that’s my appreciation of the situation.’

  ‘If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.’

  ‘Bobby, don’t be literary– for God’s sake.’

  ‘But it’s true. And the worst is just this: that your inspired little plan has landed this harmless old creature in a nasty spot. They’ll hold him till he finishes the job. Perhaps twisting bits and pieces of him from time to time just to hurry him up.’

  ‘Bobby, please!’

  ‘No – not Bobby, please. Just plain fact, and we’re both equally responsible. Face it, and we begin to feel a fraction better. Is there a telephone in this place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are there more Leavers anywhere in the immediate vicinity?’

  ‘No. He was the only one left me. But we had a whole group scouring the countryside for those two killers, and it appeared certain they’d cleared out. Then you meet them in broad daylight. We have to work on that.’

  ‘Won’t they be more or less on their own? I mean that their action only makes sense if they’re preparing to swop paymasters. You explained that to me. It’s no good their taking this decoded thing to the people who instructed them to liquidate Nauze. Those people have this gen. They’re now out for something they can flog to a third party – or government. That means, surely, that they’re free-lancers just at the moment. It makes them less formidable. We just find them, and I batter their brains out.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be rather drastic?’ Susan contrived to smile bleakly.

  ‘Not in the least. They’ve made themselves a nuisance to you. So at least I’ll have them how
ling for mercy.’ Bobby looked at his watch. ‘But the first thing is to stop being free-lances ourselves. You must report the current situation to your bosses. That’s why I asked about a telephone. After that, we can put in a spell going it alone. I’ve an idea, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘An idea?’ She looked at him round-eyed.

  ‘A wild one, but an idea, all the same. I wish we had a gun.’

  ‘But we have. Leaver’s. He never managed to draw it, however hard he fought. And they didn’t pause to collect it. I’ve just found it under him. Rather bloody, but that won’t impair the works.’

  ‘Good.’ Those last words, it seemed to Bobby, had come from Susan with a rather forlorn defiance. There must be a limit, in this sort of thing, to what any girl could take. ‘I’ll pocket it.’

  ‘I’ll pocket it. I’m taught about such things.’

  ‘So am I. Officers are still supposed to carry revolvers. They’re to persuade other ranks to keep moving in the right direction, I suppose. So we were taught to handle them in the OTC. And now we’ll be off.’

  ‘Off? Where to?’

  ‘We’re going up on the downs. But there’s a telephone at the cross roads at the foot of Lark Hill. That’s where you’ll report from.’

  ‘Bobby–’

  ‘Pick up your trailing skirts, girl, and run.’

  ‘Well?’ Bobby said ten minutes later, when Susan had come out of the telephone kiosk.

  ‘We’ll be thick on the ground in not much over an hour.’

  ‘We? What the hell! You don’t mean it takes over an hour to rustle up a bunch of local coppers?’

  ‘Bobby, dear, my people wouldn’t think of having them in. We keep ourselves to ourselves – M & Co do.’

  ‘Very well.’ Bobby swore robustly as he let in the clutch. ‘It’s still just two against two – or so we’re reckoning. But – do you know? – while you were on the blower I had an odd notion we were being spied on. I wish the sky would clear, and give the moon a chance. It may soon. There’s a breeze coming up. It may get those clouds moving.’

  ‘What do you mean – being spied on?’ Susan spoke sharply. ‘Flitting forms in the murk – that kind of thing. This light on the instrument-panel was a bit bright. I ought to have turned down the rheostat. A sitting target, I’d have been. Or at least easy to identify. You too, for that matter, inside that glass telephone-affair. Let’s get on.’

  ‘Bobby, is this a hunch?’

  ‘A hunch? My father, who has shoved in his oar on me–’ Bobby broke off. ‘Pretty usefully, to be fair. You and I might have been at cross-purposes a lot longer, I suppose, if he hadn’t started throwing his weight around. What was I saying? He sometimes has hunches. But I don’t call this a hunch, quite. It’s straight topography.’

  ‘Topography?’

  ‘They were surprised, you know, when I bobbed up on them. It was because I’d been sunning myself behind a bank – and I’d jumped up, and there I was, at quite close quarters, looking down on them. But I was surprised too. I was more puzzled than I realized at the time. For there was just nowhere they could have come from. Except out of the earth. And that, of course, is it. It’s a weird explanation. But we must accept it, since there just isn’t another. They’ve treated themselves to a hide-out in the Great Smithy.’

  ‘It would explain there being no trace of them in anything that can be called a human habitation – or a cattle-shed – for miles around. But it doesn’t quite make sense. There are always likely to be a few tourists and walkers and people peering in there. Almost every day, surely, at this time of year. It’s quite a famous archaeological site – one of the most notable chambered tombs in the country.’

  ‘True enough.’ They were now half-way up Lark Hill. And suddenly Bobby had slowed, stopped, switched off his lights. ‘The moon!’ he said.

  And there it certainly was: Solo’s orb. As Bobby thought of it in this way, he momentarily felt a long way from home. This, of course was absurd. Or it was absurd in relation to himself, but not absurd in relation to Susan. He thought he’d better get this clear now.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’d like to send you home.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Wait. I’d like to send you home, and run up and finish off this business myself.’

  ‘You’re the most cocksure–’

  ‘I said wait. I realize you started this Hartsilver episode, and have to see it through. All right. But that’s the finish. I’m not going to be married to Susan the Secret Service Girl. I’m a plain unromantic man.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Have said,’ Susan said. ‘It looks as if it may be quite a nice moon.’

  This was true. The moon had, indeed, only taken a quick look at them, and vanished again from direct view. But elsewhere there must be a larger break in the cloud, since ahead the whole line of the down was defining itself in a faint radiance.

  ‘Yes,’ Bobby said. ‘But I don’t know whether it’s going to be useful, or just a bit of an embarrassment. And I think we’d better walk from here on. We could drive slowly up to the top without lights, I suppose. But on a night like this the sound of a car carries for miles. There’s a torch in the glove-box.’

  They began to walk up the rest of Lark Hill. The long crest of the down, already an immemorial highway when first glimpsed by the legionaries of Caesar, now showed dark against a rapidly clearing sky.

  ‘There it is.’ Bobby had halted briefly to point. Ahead of them and to the right, the natural flow of the chalk, calligraphic as a brush-stroke by some Chinese master, rose abruptly, ran on a low parallel, dropped again. The Great Smithy was like a gigantic caterpillar slumbering on the sky-line. ‘About a mile away.’

  ‘Bobby, it still seems a pretty long shot to me. Too public. People go poking in, as I said.’

  ‘Have you poked in?’

  ‘Too busy.’

  ‘Well, I remember it from long ago, and I’ve read about it since. It’s megalithic – which means chiefly that it’s a kind of long gallery, walled and roofed in enormous stones. The earth and turf one sees are only a kind of top-dressing. There are some of these things where all that has been washed away. Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall, for example. It’s like what furniture-shops call a coffee-table. But you’d be putting down your cup on a stone slab three-feet thick. The Smithy’s basically like that. It’s also what’s called a chambered tomb, as you said. Think of it as a buried railway-carriage, with a lot of compartments on a corridor – all neatly buried underground. Or something roughly like that.’ Bobby paused on this wealth of comparison. ‘I’m not all that certain about it. But I do remember there was only one chamber excavated in my time, and I think a bit more has been done recently. It’s my idea that these chaps may be using some of these further burrowings for their temporary hide-out. They could probably be disguised easily enough.’

  They walked rapidly on, in spite of the steep gradient. The night was quite still. When they put up a pheasant by the road-side, the whirr and clatter with which it rocketed away was like a sudden burst from a quick-firing gun close to their feet. They had found they could move without using the torch. Bobby, with Susan’s hand in his, concentrated on keeping to the middle of the faintly visible track. Susan kept a look-out on a wide arc around them. It was she who stopped and pointed next.

  ‘A light,’ she said. ‘Moving.’

  ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘It comes and goes. Flickers. If the Smithy’s noon, it’s about four o’clock.’

  ‘Yes.’ The bearing had taken Bobby’s glance where his right shoulder had just been. ‘I think it’s a torch.’

  ‘Then it’s somebody being less careful than us. Is there a track over there?’

  ‘Yes – a very steep one. It’s the most direct way up. We used to call it the Scramble
.’

  ‘Then there’s a spot of scrambling going on.’

  ‘Lovers, perhaps. Or a shepherd.’ Bobby marched on. ‘Or – let’s face it – an unsuspected reinforcement of bearded men. It can’t be your lot yet.’

  ‘No,’ Susan said calmly. ‘Not by a long way.’

  On a Field Day with the Corps – Bobby told himself, thinking back to schooldays – he might have been told to capture the Great Smithy. That would have been by daylight. The exercise would have been all about taking cover in various improbable ways – and, of course, about one lot of chaps providing covering fire for another lot of chaps. All that firing blank had been great fun – even when one of the pros on the job came up and told you you were all dead. But at the yearly Camp it might have been a nocturnal affair, and so approximately like this. There had been Very lights and star-shells to add a little verisimilitude to those occasion and again a great deal of blazing away. But any blazing away done tonight would certainly not be with blank cartridges.

  Bobby had gone over the dead Leaver’s revolver with care. His hand was on the butt of it in the pocket of his jacket now. For they had come to their first critical place: the point at which the prehistoric track – venerable artery of commerce, war, migration – upon the verge of which the Great Smithy stood, crossed the little-frequented modern road they had been following. Here, turning to the right, they had to take to the turf. So far, hedges, telegraph-poles, post-and-rail fences had marched on one or the other side of them – giving some illusion, at least, of screening them from hostile view. Now there was only this immemorial arterial road. It was bounded on either side, no doubt, by some miserable strand of wire. But (in this struggling moonlight, at least) its breadth seemed like that of a motorway of the sort that swept you out of Seattle or Chicago. It was a very unprotected place.