The Singing Sands ag-6

by Josephine Tey

  No, Grant could think of nothing against that, but his eye was on the piece of paper that Tad was fishing from his pocket.

  ‘Did you find the book?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I had only to lean in and pick it up. That guy doesn’t do any homework, it seems. It’s the dullest list of engagements outside a prison. Not a gardenia from start to finish. And no good to us anyway.’

  ‘No good?’

  ‘He was busy, it seems. Will I write out that advertisement for the papers?’

  ‘Yes, do. There’s paper in my desk.’

  ‘Which papers shall we send it to?’

  ‘Write six, and we can address them later.’

  He looked down at Tad’s child-like copy of the entries in Lloyd’s engagement book. The entries for the 3rd and 4th of March. And as he read them the full absurdity of his suspicions came home to him. What was he thinking of? Was his mind still the too-impressionable mind of a sick man? How could he ever have dreamed that Heron Lloyd could possibly have been moved to murder? Because that was what he had been thinking, wasn’t it? That somehow, in some way that they could not guess, Lloyd had been responsible for Bill Kenrick’s death.

  He looked at the crucial entries, and thought that even if it were proved that Lloyd had not kept these particular engagements it would be fantastic to read into that absence any more than the normal explanation: that Lloyd had been indisposed or had changed his mind. On the night of the 3rd he had apparently attended a dinner. ‘Pioneer Society, Normandie, 7.15’ the entry read. At 9.30 the following morning a Pathé Magazine film unit were due to arrive at 5 Britt Lane and make him into number something-or-other of their Celebrities At Home series. It would seem that Heron Lloyd had more important things to think of than an unknown flyer who claimed to have seen ruins in the sands of Arabia.

  ‘But he said: “On what?”’ said that voice in him.

  ‘All right, he said: “On what?”! A fine world it would be if one was going to be suspected, if one was going to be judged, by every unconsidered remark.’

  The Commissioner had once said to him: ‘You have the most priceless of all attributes for your job, and that is flair. But don’t let it ride you, Grant. Don’t let your imagination take hold. Keep it your servant.’

  He had been in danger of letting his flair bolt with him. He must take a pull on himself.

  He would go back to where he was before he saw Lloyd. Back to the company of Bill Kenrick. Back from wild imaginings to fact. Hard, bare, uncompromising fact.

  He looked across at Tad, nose to paper and pursuing his pen across the page with it as a terrier noses a spider across a floor.

  ‘How was your milk-bar lady?’

  ‘Oh, fine, fine,’ said Tad, absent-minded and not lifting his glance from his handiwork.

  ‘Taking her out again?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Meeting her tonight.’

  ‘Think she will do as a steady?’

  ‘She might,’ Tad said, and then as he became aware of this unusual interest he looked up and said: ‘What’s this in aid of?’

  ‘I’m thinking of deserting you for a day or two, and I’d like to know that you won’t be bored if left to your own devices.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, no; I’ll be all right. It’s time you took some time off to attend to your own affairs, I guess. After all, this is no trouble of yours. You’ve done far too much as it is.’

  ‘I’m not taking time off. I’m planning to fly over and see Charles Martin’s people.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘His family. They live just outside Marseilles.’

  Tad’s face, which had looked for a moment like a lost child’s, grew animated again.

  ‘What do you reckon to get from them?’

  ‘I’m not doing any reckoning. I’m just beginning from the other end. We’ve come to a blank wall where Bill Kenrick is concerned—unless his hypothetical girl-friend answers that advertisement and that won’t be for two days at the very least—so we’ll try the Charles Martin end and where we get from there.’

  ‘Fine. What about me coming with you?’

  ‘I think not, Tad. I think you had better stay here and be O.C. the Press. See that all these are inserted and pick up any answers.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ Tad said in a resigned way. ‘But I sure would like to see Marseilles.’

  ‘It’s not a bit the way you picture it,’ Grant said, amused.

  ‘How do you know how I picture it?’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose I can sit on a stool and look at Daphne. What funny names girls have in this neck of the woods. It’s a bit draughty, but I can count up the number of times people say thank-you for doing other people service.’

  ‘If it’s iniquity you’re looking for you’ll find as much on a Leicester Square pavement as you will on the Cannebière.’

  ‘Maybe, but I like my iniquity with some ooh-la-la in it.’

  ‘Hasn’t Daphne got any ooh-la-la?’

  ‘No. Daphne’s very la-di-da. I have an awful suspicion that she wears woollen underwear.’

  ‘She would need it in a milk-bar in Leicester Square in April. She sounds a nice girl.’

  ‘Oh, she’s fine, fine. But don’t you stay too long away, or the wolf in me will prove too strong and I’ll take the first plane out to Marseilles to join you. When do you plan to go?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, if I can get a seat. Move over and let me reach the telephone. If I get an early-morning service I can, with a piece of luck, get back the following day. If not, then Friday at the latest. How did you get on with Richards?’

  ‘Oh, we’re great buddies. But I’m a bit disillusioned.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the possibilities of the trade.’

  ‘Doesn’t it pay?’

  ‘I expect it pays off in coin but not any other way, take it from me. All you can see from outside a window, believe it or not, is your own reflection in the glass. What are the names of those papers you want me to address these things to?’

  Grant gave him the names of the six newspapers with the largest circulations, and sent him away with his blessing to employ his time as he saw fit until they met again.

  ‘I certainly wish I was going with you,’ Tad said once more as he was leaving, and Grant wondered if seeing the South of France as one big honky-tonk was any more absurd than seeing it as mimosa. Which was what it was to him.

  ‘France!’ said Mrs Tinker. ‘When you’ve only just come back from foreign parts!’

  ‘The Highlands may be foreign parts, but the South of France is merely an extension of England.’

  ‘It’s a very expensive extension, I’ve ’eard. Roonous. When was you expectin’ to be back? I got a loverly chicken from Carr’s for you.’

  ‘The day after tomorrow, I hope. Friday at the latest.’

  ‘Oh, then it’ll keep. Was you wantin’ to be called earlier tomorrow mornin’, then?’

  ‘I’ll be away before you come in, I think. So you can have a late morning tomorrow.’

  ‘A late mornin’ wouldn’t suit Tinker, it wouldn’t. But I’ll get me shoppin’ done before I come in. Now you see and take care of yerself. No burning the candle at both ends and comin’ back lookin’ no better than when you went away to Scotland in the beginnin’. I ’ope it keeps fine for you!’

  Fine indeed, Grant thought, looking down at the map of France next morning. From that height on this crystal morning it was not a thing of earth and water and crops. It was a small jewelled pattern set in a lapis-lazuli sea; a Fabergé creation. Not much wonder that flyers as a species had a detached attitude to the world. What had the world—its literature, its music, its philosophies, or its history—to do with a man who saw it habitually for the thing it was: a bit of Fabergé nonsense?

  Marseilles, at close quarters, was no jeweller’s creation. It was the usual noisy crowded place filled with impatient taxi-horns and the smell of stale coffee; that very French smell that
haunts its houses with the ghosts of ten million coffee-brewings. But the sun shone, and the striped awnings flapped a little in the breeze from the Mediterranean, and the mimosa displayed its pale expensive yellow in prodigal masses. As a companion picture to the grey and scarlet of London it was, he thought, perfect. If he ever was rich he would commission one of the best artists in the world to put the two pictures on canvas for him; the chiaroscuro of London and bright positive blaze of Marseilles. Or perhaps two different artists. It was unlikely that the man who could convey the London of a grey day in April would also be able to paint the essence of Marseilles on a spring noon.

  He stopped thinking about artists and ceased to find Marseilles either bright or positive when he found that the Martin family had left their suburb only the week before for parts unknown. Unknown, that was, to the neighbours. By the time that he had with the help of the local authorities discovered that ‘part unknown’ merely meant Toulon, a great deal of precious time had been wasted, and still more was wasted in journeying to Toulon and finding the Martins among its teeming inhabitants.

  But in the end he found them and listened to the little they had to tell. Charles was a ‘bad boy’, they said, with all the antagonism of the French for someone who has apostatised from that supreme god of the French idolatry, the Family. He had always been a wilful, headstrong creature and (crime of crimes in the French calendar) lazy. Bone lazy. He had gone away five years ago after a small trouble over a girl—no, no, he had merely stabbed her—and had not bothered to write to them. They had had no news of him in all those years except that a friend had run into him in Port Said about three years ago. He was doing pavement deals in second-hand cars, the friend said. Buying up crocks and selling them after he had tinkered with them a little. He was a very good mechanic; he could have been a very successful man, with a garage of his own and people working for him, if he had not been so lazy. Bone lazy. A laziness that was formidable. A laziness that was a disease. They had heard nothing more of him until they had been asked to identify his body.

  Grant asked if they had a photograph of Charles.

  Yes, they had several, but of course they were of Charles when he was much younger.

  They showed him the photographs, and Grant saw why Bill Kenrick, dead, looked not too unlike the Charles Martin that his family had remembered. One thin dark man with marked eyebrows, hollowed cheeks, and straight dark hair looked very like any other similar young man when the individuality of life was quenched. They did not even have to have the same colour of eyes. A parent receives a message saying: Your son is dead as the result of a regrettable accident; would you please identify him as your son and arrange for the burial. The bereaved parent is presented with his dead son’s papers and belongings and is asked to identify the owner as his son. There is no question in his conditioned mind; he accepts what he sees, and what he sees is what he expected to see. It would not occur to him to say: Are this man’s eyes blue or brown?

  In the end, of course, it was Grant who submitted to questioning. Why was he interested in Charles? Had Charles after all left some money? Was it that Grant was looking for the legal heirs, perhaps?

  No, Grant had promised to look Charles up on behalf of a friend who had known him on the Persian Gulf coast. No, he did not know what the friend wanted of him. He understood that there was some suggestion of a future partnership.

  In the expressed opinion of the Martin family the friend was lucky.

  They gave him Armagnac and coffee and little biscuits with Bath-bun sugar on them, and asked him to come again if he was ever in Toulon.

  On the doorstep he asked if they had possession of their son’s papers. Only his personal ones, they said: his letters. The official ones they had not bothered with or thought about. They were no doubt still with the Marseilles police, who had first made contact with them when the accident happened.

  So a little more time was wasted in making friends with the Marseilles officials; but this time Grant spent no energy on conscientiously-unofficial methods. He produced his credentials and asked for a loan of the papers. He drank a sirop, and signed a receipt. And he caught the afternoon plane to London on Friday afternoon.

  He had two more days. Or one day and a Sunday, to be accurate.

  France was still a jewelled pattern as he flew back over it, but Britain seemed to have disappeared altogether. Beyond the familiar outline of the western European coast there was nothing but an ocean of haze. Very odd and incomplete the map looked without the familiar shape of that very individual island. Supposing there never had been that island: how different would the history of the world have been? It was a fascinating speculation. An all-Spanish America, one supposed. A French India; an India without a colour-bar and so racially intermarried that it had lost its identity. A Dutch South Africa ruled by a fanatic Church. Australia? Who would have discovered and colonised Australia? The Dutch from South Africa, or the Spaniards from America? It was immaterial, he supposed, since either race would in a generation have become tall, lean, tough, nasal, drawling, sceptical and indestructible. Just as all Americans eventually began to look like Red Indians even if they entered the country as broad large-boned Saxons.

  They dropped into the ocean of cloud and found Britain again. A very mundane, muddy, and workaday place to have changed the history of a world. A steady drizzle soaked the land and the lieges. London was a water-colour of grey reflections with spots of vermilion oil paint where the buses plunged dripping through the haze.

  All the lights were on in the finger-print department although it was still daylight; and Cartwright was sitting just as he had last seen him—as he had always seen him—with a half-drunk cup of cold tea at his elbow, the saucer filled with cigarette butts.

  ‘Something I can do for you this beautiful spring afternoon?’ Cartwright said.

  ‘Yes. There is one thing I want very much to know. Have you ever drunk the second half of a cup of tea?’

  Cartwright considered this. ‘Come to think of it, I don’t know that I ever have. Beryl usually takes my cup away and fills it up with fresh stuff. Something else off the cuff? Or is this just a social call?’

  ‘Yes, something else. But you’ll be working for me on Monday, so don’t let your sense of benevolence get out of hand.’ He put Charles Martin’s papers on the table. ‘When can you do these for me?’

  ‘What is this? French identity papers. What are you getting into—or do you want to keep it to yourself?’

  ‘I’m just having one last bet on a horse called Flair. If it comes off I’ll tell you about it. I’ll pick up the prints tomorrow morning.’

  He looked at the clock and reckoned that if Tad Cullen was ‘dating’ Daphne, or any other female creature, tonight, he would at this moment be dolling himself up in his hotel room. He left Cartwright and went to a telephone where he could talk unheard.

  ‘We-e-ll!’ said Tad joyously, when he heard Grant’s voice. ‘Where are you talking from? Are you back?’

  ‘Yes, I’m back. I’m in London. Look, Tad, you say you’ve never known anyone called Charles Martin. But is it possible that you knew him under another name? Did you ever know a very good mechanic, very good with cars, who was French and looked a little like Bill?’

  Tad thought this over.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever known any mechanic who was French. I’ve known a Swedish mechanic and a Greek mechanic, but neither of them was in the least like Bill. Why?’

  ‘Because Martin worked in the Middle East. And it is just possible that Bill got those papers from him before he ever came to Britain at all. Martin may have sold them to him. He was—is: he may be living—a lazy creature and probably very hard-up at intervals. Out there, where no one bothers very much about credentials, he might have tried to cash them.’

  ‘Yes; he might. Someone else’s papers are usually more valuable than your own out there. To have around, I mean. But why would Bill buy them? Bill never did anything on the side.’

  �
�Perhaps because he looked a little like Martin. I don’t know. Anyhow, you yourself have never run into anyone like Martin in the Middle East?’

  ‘Not anywhere, that I can think of. What did you get? Out of the Martins. Anything worth while?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. They showed me photographs; which made it clear how much he would look like Bill if he was not alive. Something that we knew already. And of course the fact that he had gone East to work. Any answers to the advertisement?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Five?’

  ‘All from fellows called Bill Kenrick.’

  ‘Oh. Asking what was in it for them?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  ‘Not a word from anyone who knew him?’

  ‘Not a peep. And nothing at the Charles Martin end either, it seems. We’re sunk, aren’t we?’

  ‘Well—waterlogged, shall we say. We have one remaining asset.’

  ‘We have? What is that?’

  ‘Time. We have forty-eight more hours.’

  ‘Mr Grant, you’re an optimist.’

  ‘You have to be in my business,’ Grant said, but he did not feel very optimistic. He felt flat and tired. He was within an ace of wishing that he had never heard of Bill Kenrick. Wishing that he had come down that corridor at Scoone just ten seconds later. In ten more seconds Yughourt would have realised that the man was dead and would have shut the door and gone for help; and he, Grant, would have walked down that empty corridor and stepped down on to the platform unaware that there had ever existed a young man called Bill Kenrick. He would never have known that anyone had died on the train. He would have driven away with Tommy to the hills, and no words about singing sands would have disturbed his holiday. He would have fished in peace, and finished his holiday in peace.

  In too much peace—perhaps? With too much time to think about himself and his bondage to unreason. Too much time to take his own mental and spiritual pulse.