The Man from the Sea

by Michael Innes

  Copyright & Information

  The Man From The Sea

  First published in 1955

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1955-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755121031 EAN: 9780755121038

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  1

  The beginning of Cranston’s adventure – the real adventure, not the intrigue – seemed as sudden and grotesque as a queer twist in a dream. The night was very still, and the empty sea as it rose and fell gently under a great low moon sighed like a woman half-awake – sighed and then stretched out cold fingers of surf to the young man’s naked body sprawled on the cold sand. He told himself that he wanted to be very cold; that this was why he lingered. Lady Blair – for in his own mind he still involuntarily called her that – had disappeared among the rocks, so the hide-and-seek which was now prescriptively the next phase of the affair was due to begin. She had a childish love of it, and part of the two nocturnal hours they could risk together went regularly to a sort of ritual enactment of the game. Tonight these hours were already running out. But Cranston still lingered. Prompted to give himself a reason, he recalled – conscientiously and from all the luxury of his large new knowledge – that to start with chilled limbs was additional fun. Lingering still, he turned over on his belly in the last feeble ripple of a wave. But the movement plucked obscurely and disturbingly at his mind, edging towards the light a very different reason for delay. And at that moment the thing happened.

  What had appeared to be a clot of seaweed floating in with the tide became the head of a swimmer. The swimmer dropped his feet to the seabed and started to wade ashore. He was stripped except for a belt about his middle and a wisp of fabric round his loins. Under the sudden unnatural weight of a body long supported in water, and with the staggering movement of a clumsily constructed ambulatory toy, he lurched forward foot by foot. Seeing that he was exhausted – that he might fall on his still streaming face at any moment and drown in eighteen inches of water – Cranston scrambled up and ran towards him. The man from the sea stopped dead. It was a reaction which for some reason made Cranston stop too. On this unfrequented strip of Scottish coast in the small hours, the two confronted each other like wary savages. And then the man from the sea turned his head – turned it in the direction from which he had come. He was listening.

  What the man from the sea had heard Cranston caught a moment later. It was the throb of an engine. Already that night he had heard something of the sort. Lady Blair – Caryl Blair – had been frightened by it. She enjoyed fear in a way that fascinated and repelled him. It was at its prompting that she had made this the manner of their meeting; it was what lay perhaps at the bottom of their relationship. She had insisted that the sound was from a car on the coast road; that it was her husband; that it meant discovery, confusion. And she had clung to him. He had known very well that the sound came from offshore, that it was the pulse of turbines in some steamer moving down the coast. And then it had stopped and she had been reassured. It had seemed to stop – he now remembered – rather than to fade into distance. This new sound, although also from the sea, was very different. It was the rapid throb of a motorboat. And it was coming nearer.

  The man from the sea took a great breath and stumbled forward once more. It was when only his ankles remained in water that Cranston hit on the truth about him. He was a fugitive.

  He was a fugitive. That was why the engines had ceased. The man had swum from a steamer out at sea, and it had stopped and sent a launch in pursuit of him. The discovery drew from Cranston a confusion of responses. Here was something vexatious, frustrating – perhaps dangerous. His meeting with Caryl – their assignation, in the dark word that still excited him – was suddenly a mess. This encounter had ruined it, and presently they must manage to scramble out of its mere embarrassment and indecency as he himself must scramble into his shorts. For a moment he was aware only of what he was going to miss, and he felt his body tremble in what he took to be indignation or rage. But it wasn’t that – or not wholly. Even as he stared at the other naked man he recognised within his own physical response a thrill of pleasure. What had risen from the sea was some harsh male predicament to which he responded as to a release.

&
nbsp; The throb of the motorboat was louder, as if the craft had rounded some point near at hand. And the man from the sea turned upon Cranston with an urgent and commanding gesture. The little sandy bay, pale as a bleached bone tossed against the dark cliff, was flanked at either end by a tumble of dark broken rock, and into gaining the shelter of the nearer of these refuges the man was now throwing his last energies. But he had also managed this imperious wave. Cranston was to go into hiding too. The motorboat, if it appeared, must find only an empty beach.

  This much was clear – and so was the proper immediate response to make. As Cranston ran for the rocks he felt again the flush of unreasonable pleasure. A problem had bobbed up from the blue – literally from that – and this time he knew the answer. Of course the man must be given a chance to explain himself. Even if some lurking risk were involved, he must be given a chance. To wait for the motorboat, to haloo at it, would be treachery. It was surprising to Cranston that he should have this clear bit of knowledge, and surprising too that in the hurry and huddle of this strange flight it should rise up in his mind as a fact that was lucid and important. Moreover, it had so risen up without any visible basis in reason. The fellow now by chance at his side had no conceivable claim on him – and it was long odds, too, that he was simply some sort of commonplace wrongdoer. Treachery meant the breaking of a bond, and here no bond could possibly exist. Then why…?

  They had made it. Their feet lost the firm sand and slipped on slime, trod painfully on barnacled rock. It was necessary to climb, but even some way up there was no more than bare cover for the two of them, and as they crouched down together in a shallow cup of darkness they had to press so close that each for a moment could hear the other’s heart. Then the sound of the motorboat drowned this and their rapid breathing. Cautiously Cranston moved his head a couple of inches to peer round a boulder. At the same moment the engine stopped. The boat had entered the bay on a long curve and was coming directly towards them now. As many as three or four men were crouched aft, and another man stood poised in the bows, sweeping the shore through night-glasses. For perhaps half a minute he scanned the farther rocks. Cranston remembered Caryl. She must have heard the engine, and presumably she was lying low there at the other end of the beach. He wondered what would happen if she lost her head and made a dash for his protection. He wondered what this boatload of mysterious searchers would make of that surprising appearance.

  The man with the glasses swung them round and appeared to focus straight on Cranston. Instinctively the young man drew back his head and shoulders, and the movement caused him to jostle his companion. Caught off balance, the man from the sea swayed and was about to tumble over the lip of the narrow depression in which they cowered. Cranston grabbed at him and caught first a naked shoulder and then an arm. For a moment the two men clung together, steadying themselves, and for the first time their eyes met directly. Here in the rocks they were in near-darkness, and what Cranston was aware of was no more than a fleeting intent gaze in a featureless face – a mere glint of light, no more, upon dilated pupils. But he knew that a signal, a sort of recognition, had passed. It declared a union which, if quite impermanent, was for the moment primitive and absolute. Neither had spoken a word, had so much as attempted to whisper. The whole adventure, so far, had happened in silence. But now there were voices. They came from the boat.

  At least three of the pursuers were talking. Their words came clearly over the water but were completely unintelligible. They were speaking in a foreign language unrelated to any of which Cranston had a smattering. Yet it was clear to him that they were arguing, and with the same caution as before he took another glance round the boulder. The man in the bows was pointing towards the rocks and seemed to be urging a landing. It was about this that there was a dispute. And now, almost at once, the man in the bows prevailed. The boat had not yet entirely lost its momentum, and at a touch on the tiller it turned slowly and glided towards the beach. And Cranston found himself reacting swiftly. His mind took a leap to the backdrop of this obscure drama in the line of cliff overlooking the bay. There were a dozen places where it could be negotiated, and lately he had come to know them well. One of them lay almost directly behind this hiding-place. If the man from the sea could be guided up that at once – and in the moonlight there was no great difficulty – his chances of finally escaping would be good. Cranston had put out a hand to tug gently at the fugitive’s arm when he was arrested by a fresh sound.

  “Dick-ee!”

  It was Caryl calling from the farther rocks. And her voice held nothing of the fright that might have been expected of it. It held only what, heard ten minutes before, would have sent him racing across the sand with a swimming head. Now it did something queer to his stomach instead.

  “Dick-ee…where are you?”

  Cranston heard the man beside him catch his breath. Perhaps it was at the new hazard that this irruption brought into the affair. Perhaps it was an involuntary male response to what Caryl could put into that sort of call. And the young man felt himself deeply flush, so madly incongruous with that summons was the new drama into which he had been caught up. Then he tried to think. It seemed incredible that Caryl should not have heard the motorboat and the voices. But nothing about her was quite incredible; nothing could be quite incredible about a woman so astoundingly – His mind stopped, astonished at itself. The important thing was to get the hang of the new situation, and act. And once more he peered out. The men in the boat had all turned and were gazing at the farther rocks. They had certainly heard that unexpected call, and now there could be little doubt that they were glimpsing the caller. Impatient of delay, Caryl had emerged from hiding. Where they had supposed solitude and their quarry there was suddenly this untoward vision. That they were disconcerted was evident at a glance. And in a flash it came to Cranston that they were no more within the pale of the law than was the man they were hunting. There was a very good chance that they could be stampeded.

  And Cranston shouted. “John…Harry…David! Here’s a boat, chaps! Come along down!”

  He made the rocks ring with it – and was aware that the man from the sea had caught the idea and was lustily shouting too. The success of the stratagem was startling. The engine of the motorboat leapt into life, and the craft first turned in a whirl of foam and then tore out to sea. Within a minute it had vanished.

  “Dick-ee!”

  This time there was no doubt of Caryl’s fright. The note of it touched off in him the strong positive response that had been so singularly lacking a few seconds before. His sense of himself as her lover seemed to slip over his head and slide down his body like a shirt: he was startled at the queer aberration which had presented him with her image as astoundingly stupid. But she did get easily confused and scared. It was rotten luck that having been so generous, so marvellous, she should be caught up in this bewildering assault from the sea. He felt protectiveness rise in him – an easy, obliterating emotion. He rose to his feet and called across the bay – called out in urgent, robust reassurance. “Darling…it’s all right!”

  “Dick-ee, come quickly!”

  “All right, Caryl. I’m coming. But stay where you are. There’s a man here…a stranger.”

  There was silence – stricken silence – and he turned to scramble down the rock. The poor darling. The poor old darling. He was about to call out again when, for the first time, the man from the sea spoke.

  “Where are your clothes?”

  Cranston stopped, startled. From the moment that he had heard the voices in the motorboat he had been taking it for granted that the fugitive was a foreigner. And he had jumped to a conclusion, too, about his class. He must be a common sailor, a steward, somebody of that sort, involved in unknown shady business turned suddenly desperate. It was on the basis of these assumptions that he had felt his unaccountable impulse of solidarity with the man. But now the man turned out to be an Englishman – and an Englishman who might have been at his own school. For Cranston the consequence
of this discovery, strangely enough, was an immediate distrust, expressing itself in a quick backward step. Both men were now standing up, and the stranger was in full moonlight down to the waist. Cranston’s recoil completed the movement he had begun to a lower level of the rocks, and he was now looking at the man from the sea as one might look at a picture skied in an old-fashioned gallery. The effect was, in the old exact sense, picturesque. The background was of jagged rock and the empty vault of the night, sparsely pricked out by a few pale stars. Against this the man was posed naked in a symbolism that might have been Leonardo’s: the flesh – enigmatic and evanescent – framed in the immensities of geological and astronomical time. Moreover, in his own figure he sustained the comparison. He was a common man neither in the sense that Cranston had assumed nor in any other.

  “Where are your clothes?” The man from the sea repeated his question impatiently, as if he seldom had to ask for information twice. He was in his early forties – and the fact that he was old enough to be Cranston’s father increased the young man’s new sense of distrust. He experienced a strong instant persuasion that this was the wrong sort of person to come tumbling out of the sea on an obscure wave of melodrama. But there was something more – a further and somehow yet more disconcerting perception to which he was helped by his own very respectable cleverness. He was in the presence not simply of another clever man, far more mature than himself. He was in the presence of a strong capacious intellect.

  “My clothes?” Cranston heard the words jerk out of himself. “They’re no distance away – what I’ve got. I’ve been bathing.”

  “So have I. And we couldn’t have chosen a better night.”