The Man from the Sea

by Michael Innes

  Not that there was any reason to suppose that Sir Alex Blair would know her from Adam – or Eve. Whatever he was up to – and to discover that was decidedly the point – he was presumably without the advantage of any information derived from the late enemy. From his own lodgekeeper, Patullo, he might vaguely have heard of the incident of the mysterious housemaid – supposing Patullo had in fact noticed anything. But that was the nearest, surely, that he could be to any knowledge of her existence.

  And correspondingly she didn’t know him. Her mind worked largely in pictures, and she had indeed invented an Alex Blair. She had invented, for that matter – and with rather more particularity – an image that she called Sally Dalrymple. But neither of these inventions would much serve for the purpose of positive identification… She glanced about the species of assembly hall in which she was standing. There was no great crowd – only, she guessed, the passengers going to London on the Admiral, and an answering group going the other way to Aberdeen. And in a moment this conjecture confirmed itself. With the usual ritual of disembodied voices and lines of coloured lights the Aberdeen contingent was shepherded away. But her Scandinavians were going south – which was so far, so good. And so was she – or ten to one she was. The odds were sufficient to justify her buying a ticket at once. Without much trepidation now, she broke cover to do so. Fortunately the plane wasn’t booked out. She returned to her adopted companions. They received her without surprise, and one or two even appeared to murmur casual words. Presumably their travels were young and they were some of them unknown to one another.

  She scanned the remaining people in the hall. None of them answered to anything she could conceive of as a retired scientist turned Scottish country gentleman. She abandoned the men and studied the women. And almost at once she knew she was looking at Sally Dalrymple. Richard’s Sally, she said to herself. Richard’s sound Sally.

  She was easy on the eyes. George framed this vulgar description to herself with deliberate relish. A sweetly pretty girl. No – that wouldn’t do. It wasn’t at all fair. Sally Dalrymple was beautiful. She was beautiful and knew how to get herself up to match. But she had told tales.

  George took a grip on herself. One wanted a clear head. And to say – or think – a thing like that was less fair still. If the girl had gone straight to her stepfather with the story of John Day one couldn’t honestly and faithfully say that she had done wrong. And the consequence wasn’t any sort of hue and cry. Turnhouse wasn’t swarming with officers from whatever was the Scottish equivalent of Scotland Yard. Sir Alex Blair had acted swiftly – but unobtrusively. If the term didn’t quite fit his Cadillac, George couldn’t blame him for that. Had it not attracted her attention when she was scanning Dinwiddie Castle that morning, its sweeping on to the airfield would have meant nothing to her now.

  Again she hunted around – for she couldn’t believe that Sally Dalrymple was here alone. Sir Alex must be somewhere about. Unless indeed – it struck her suddenly as a possibility – the girl’s travelling south to catch a plane was sheer coincidence. But something about the girl herself indefinably insisted that it wasn’t so. She was not only what is called perfectly groomed; she was also perfectly self-possessed. But if you watched her face you saw that it was set and strained. She was here because of John Day.

  And she was here because she could identify John Day. Even if only in an imperfect early morning light, she had seen him as he now was. The moment must come at which the girl would have to point and say There! It couldn’t be something she was looking forward to, poor kid – and it explained the tension discernible in her now.

  The disembodied voice was telling the London passengers to get ready. And still there was no sign of Sir Alex. How, George wondered, did the girl feel about Richard? There was no doubt about how Richard felt towards the girl. Or about the whole story. George looked at the story steadily – much as she had been looking at Sally. There was nothing easy on the eyes about it. Still, her mind didn’t exactly reel before it. Apparently poor Richard’s did. He felt –

  She caught herself up. All that wasn’t, at the moment, the point. It was the point that this man Blair had been told of young Richard Cranston’s rash involvement with the returned John Day. And what he was now doing – surely the facts could bear no other interpretation – was acting quickly and quietly to relieve the youth of at least some part of the burden of his folly. Presumably Sir Alex didn’t know about the behaviour – about what newspapers or lawyers called the misconduct – of his wife. He thought of Richard as his step-daughter’s friend and the family doctor’s son. He would do what he could to get the matter briskly settled and effectively hushed up.

  The voice was speaking again. They were being exhorted to follow the blue light. George’s Scandinavians shouldered their rucksacks and bundles. The other passengers picked up their hand-baggage. There was a general shuffle across the hall. And then she saw him.

  Sir Alex Blair was as unmistakable as Sally Dalrymple had been. He was the only person in the place, George thought, who had Ruling Class written all over him. If there was anything unexpected about him it was perhaps that the writing was a shade too large. He certainly wasn’t showy or obtrusive or arrogant. There was nothing about him that corresponded, so to speak, directly to the colour of his car. Still, what the car spoke in one language the man himself contrived somehow to speak in another. Perhaps, George told herself, it was all to the good. He looked the sort of man who would prize powerful friends and cherish influential contacts. If Richard were threatened with serious trouble – and he might well be – this was the man who would know just where to go and what to say. Like his step-daughter he was beautifully turned out – in admirable clothes that were just not quite new. He was extremely well preserved, but not offensively so. He would smell – very very faintly – of some superb shaving-soap.

  George had not much time to remark that these observations and responses fell some way short of enthusiasm. For now they were in the open air and had been taken over by a young lady in uniform. George managed to get right at the tail of her large blonde companions and thus to have Sally Dalrymple immediately behind her. Sir Alex, she realised, had been in a little office, and as he advanced she saw out of the corner of her eye that he was carrying a telegram.

  “Just in time.” His voice – pleasant, confident and not exactly subdued – came to her clearly. “It ought to have been waiting for us, but it came in only thirty seconds ago. A near thing. I asked–”

  A sudden roar of engines drowned what followed. The Aberdeen plane was off down its runway. When the noise faded the two people behind George had fallen silent. The little ragged procession was nearing its aircraft. Two or three rude persons, having a mind to some favourite seat, began a sort of modified jostling designed to get them to the front. The Scandinavians stood politely aside. George decided to do the same. Without assertiveness – one couldn’t indeed quite see how it was done – Sir Alex was first aboard after all, with his step-daughter beside him. George glimpsing them together as they went past, had an odd sensation of hearing with her inner ear the voice of old Lord Urquhart, repeating something he had already said that afternoon. Then she was on board herself. She didn’t want to sit down beside a conversable Swede, and she moved forward. When she found a seat it was directly in front of the pair from Dinwiddie.

  They were still, as far as she could judge, silent. But the engines were now roaring, and in a minute they were moving forward. It was only when they had been airborne for some time that she felt at all confident of being able to catch even fragments of anything that was said. It was years since she had eavesdropped in a serious way. She settled down to it now.

  “There are a great many difficulties, you know, still.” It was Sir Alex’s voice. But its quality had changed. The tone matched the words. It was worried and almost sombre. “The biggest is the mere uncertainty.”

  “Are you so uncertain?”

  “We have this one specific indication. Day is
making for his wife. But it may be all lies. Do you think young Cranston realises that?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose he would. Wouldn’t he?” Sally Dalrymple’s voice, although distinguishable only with difficulty, came to George as oddly uncomfortable and constrained. It was as if she found talking about Richard difficult. And that, George thought, might well be.

  “I know precious little about him.” Sir Alex sounded impatient. “I suppose he’s a fool. Most young people are.”

  “Thank you!” Now Sally’s voice seemed to tremble. It might almost have been with anger. George frowned. Probably the impression was no more than a trick of the queer acoustics of the hurtling cylinder in which they were seated.

  “Now, don’t go off into idiocy, Sally. And stick to the point. We have this one positive line. Marlow.”

  “Marlow?”

  “Weren’t you listening? That’s what Mason’s telegram said. For the last twelve months the wretched woman has been living in a cottage at Marlow. So if it’s not lies–”

  “Yes – I see.” Sally’s voice sank, and George could only just catch the words. They sounded desperate. “I don’t think I can take it. Dick–” Sir Alex said something that George didn’t catch. Nor did she hear Sally Dalrymple’s reply. She had an impression indeed that it was less an articulate response than a quickly drawn breath or a gasp. And then neither said anything at all. The young lady in uniform had put on a different jacket and was handing out cups of coffee and sandwiches. The sandwiches were so sharply triangular that they might have been the product of precision instruments normally concerned with turning out components for the aircraft itself. Perhaps the people behind were munching them. For their silence continued.

  England, slightly tilting from time to time as if it floated on a gently heaving sea, drifted beneath them on a leisurely trip to the North Pole. The Scandinavians, tired of cricking their necks in order to contemplate its dull mottle, buried themselves in guide-books to Cambridge, Oxford, Stoke-upon-Trent and other serious places. George began to think that her eavesdropping was over. At least she already had plenty to think about.

  But perhaps half an hour later something more was said. Indeed, the two must have been murmuring inaudibly together for some time, since what she now heard plainly hitched on to other words just spoken.

  “And if it is?” Sally’s question seemed to be at once sharp and weary. “If it’s an utterly false cast, is there anything else you can try?”

  “Certainly there is. I can think of a good many possibilities. Perhaps Day has deserted his recent friends simply because he has secured a promise of more advantageous employment elsewhere. And he’ll have brought with him on paper everything he can’t carry in his head.”

  “But, Alex, where else–”

  “My dear girl, plenty of countries are anxious to start up on all that. For instance, some in South America.”

  “South America? I don’t see how–”

  “You have no idea what I’m talking about.” He was impatient again. “You seldom have. It’s one of the points in which I find you rather like your mother. But you may think comparisons are–” George heard no more. Two Scandinavians across the gangway on her left hand had started a noisy argument. It was earnest and good-humoured and went on interminably. For a long time she sat very still. She found herself wondering why she felt chilly. These things were air-conditioned, surely. And the late-afternoon sunshine was beating in on her right cheek as she sat. She had a queer impulse to look at the people behind her. If she could see them again it might help her to make sense of what she had heard. But she could do nothing by just turning round. The seats were more than head-high. She would have to stand up and deliberately stare.

  That would never do. For a time the impulse left her and she felt sleepy. It had been a tearing-around sort of day. She must really – at least for minutes or seconds – have dropped off, because presently she had the sensation of starting suddenly awake. And again she wanted to have a look.

  She remembered – it was absurd to have forgotten it – that there was some sort of wash-place at the tail of the plane. She had only to stand up and make for that. But now, oddly, she was reluctant. She tried to interest herself in the argumentative Swedes. They had got out some coins and bank-notes. The whole dispute appeared to be about the mysteries of British currency. She wondered whether she should lean across and explain it to them. She could do it in French. But that was stupid. They mightn’t know French, and almost certainly they had a lot of English…

  Abruptly George stood up, turned, and began to walk down the gangway. She looked straight at Sally Dalrymple – Richard’s Sally – and Sir Alex Blair. It was only a fleeting glance, and now she was moving steadily on.

  But she felt very cold indeed.

  17

  Lord Urquhart’s town car turned into the quiet Kensington square, glided smoothly and silently halfway round and stopped. Lord Urquhart’s chauffeur got out and impassively opened the door. Lord Urquhart had said goodbye at the airport and left them to give their own directions. Rather like a man who is careful of the stabling of his horse, he had explained that he had immediate instructions to give about his machine. But his quick withdrawal had been a matter of delicate feeling. Cranston wondered whether the chauffeur, when orders had been telephoned to him from Scotland, had been told that his destination was one of the big London hospitals. If he had, he had shown no surprise at this different destination.

  Still sitting in the car, John Day peered intently round the square. Cranston knew that his sight had been clearing steadily all through the afternoon. The effect he gave was myopic, but he was in no difficulty. “It seems all clear,” he said.

  Cranston agreed. He was experiencing a sense of mingled relief and anticlimax. The more he thought about this moment, the more he had been inclined to see it in terms of melodrama. The enemy agents had lost their quarry in Urquhart Forest. Their next move – unless they simply decided to give up – would be to man any point where he was likely to reappear. And they would be bound to think of his wife. That they did not know her whereabouts was most improbable. And if they could raise, within a matter of hours, a force of a dozen agents in a remote part of Scotland, it was very clear that they would have no difficulty in finding whatever they required in London.

  “But it would seem all clear.” Day’s former ironical manner had returned. “They wouldn’t, when you come to think of it, have a couple of machine-guns waiting on the pavement. What one likes about these London squares is the gardens in the middle. Trees and shrubs galore. You could hide a small army in them.” For a moment he sat back in the big limousine. “And, of course, a lot can be done from windows, too.”

  “No doubt.” Cranston spoke shortly. Day’s were certainly pertinent observations, but there seemed nothing to be gained by not getting the thing over. The chauffeur, moreover, was listening to these remarks with a wooden expression which Cranston found embarrassing. Cranston had been remembering the bullets spraying about the beach at Dinwiddie. But although it was a recollection which he found thoroughly uncomfortable, it did not exclude from his consciousness the absurdly incongruous discomfort of talking and behaving incomprehensibly before this waiting man. “We must chance it,” he said. “We’ll get out.”

  “Are you getting out?” Day appeared surprised.

  “Of course I am.” Cranston stepped on the pavement. “Thank you very much,” he said to the chauffeur. “We don’t want you to wait.”

  “Very good, sir.” The man was looking not at Cranston but at Day, who was now descending from the car. “Good afternoon, sir.” He was about to close the door when he glanced inside and stopped. “Excuse me.” He reached forward to a seat. “I think these are yours, sir?” What he had picked up was Sally Dalrymple’s dark glasses. He was still looking at Day as he handed them over. Perhaps, Cranston thought, he was quartered from time to time at Urquhart, and had on some occasion been more noticing than his employer of the neighbo
uring Sir Alex Blair’s clothes. But this was unlikely. And now the man had climbed back into his seat. In a moment the car had drawn away from the kerb and was gone.

  “Well – thank you very much.” Day, standing on the pavement, had turned to Cranston as a man might do to a friend by whom he has been given a casual lift.

  It was the moment, Cranston knew, for which he ought to have been better prepared. He glanced round the square, almost wishing for the missing melodrama. But there was no hint of it. Behind its high iron railings the garden in the centre appeared deserted. The score or so of cars parked round about were all empty. The dusty London summer light was draining away, and sucking the dusk down into the great grey tank of a square. A boy was delivering evening papers, and down a side street a woman with high heels returned from shopping – the superior sort of shopping that declares itself in cartons and band-boxes of modish design. There was no help in this commonplace scene. Cranston turned and looked at the doorway by which they stood. “It’s here?” he asked. “Your…home?”

  Day nodded. “The top flat.”

  “You’re going to stay?”

  “In a sense – yes.”

  The man was inscrutable. One could be certain of nothing except that some inflexible purpose drove him. “You want me to go?” Cranston asked.

  “To go?” For a moment Day looked at him as at somebody he had forgotten about. “Well – yes. Don’t think me ungrateful. But for the moment – decidedly yes. It’s scarcely an occasion, is it, for outsiders?”

  “I suppose not. Shall you be here if I come back tomorrow?”