Appleby Plays Chicken

by Michael Innes

  ‘Capital – capital.’ Faircloth stopped scraping at himself to nod vigorously at this. ‘A fine day, solitude, and th Republic in your pocket: it’s not a bad definition of happiness.’

  David had to remember not to grind his teeth too loud. Retired clergymen – particularly if of ample means – are adept profaners of mysteries. ‘I must be off,’ he said, ‘or I’ll miss that bus.’ He gave a wave – a nice man’s wave – and then dived under the archway, scowling furiously.

  The quiet village street was comforting, so that it was only half-heartedly that he damned Pettifor and Pettifor’s lot once more as he made his way down it. As for Dr Faircloth, he was a thoroughly decent chap. And here was the bus, that would take him straight away from all of them. He got into it and did a good five miles. Then he walked in the loneliest direction he could spot on his map. He lit his pipe. He swung the heavy, knobbly walking stick that had been his grandfather’s. He said scraps of verse aloud.

  Well, that was all right. The knobbly stick, the pipe that was now so respectably ancient, his khaki shorts, his sky-blue windcheater, his well-worn Gunner’s shoes: they were all extremely right and comforting. It was indeed a gorgeous day, with a light wind that you could get out of whenever you wanted to soak in warm spring sunshine. He found a sheltered corner by a stream and read for what he felt was hours and hours. Plato’s subject was justice – not an easy subject, it seemed. Once David looked up and said aloud – and rather to his own confusion – ‘The man can write.’ And once he filled another pipe. Then the sunshine became fitful for a time, and he decided to move on. He would get right up somewhere on the moor.

  In the valley out of which he was presently climbing the stream was lined with heavily pollarded willows; they were thrusting up abundant withies of an astonishing red, like ginger-haired giants sprouting from earth, or explosions from a stick of accurately dropped bombs. At first he could hear tractors in the fields behind him and somewhere somebody was shooting. But presently there was nothing at all. He was on a narrow track the course of which was marked by posts carrying a single telephone wire; on every fourth or fifth post there would be a hawk, and as he approached, the bird would flap away, deceptively heavy like an owl, before rising and wheeling buoyantly over the empty moor. Presently he struck off across the turf. It was spongy in places, but he found it possible to tramp briskly more often than not. He had no goal in view – except that he vaguely felt himself to be looking for prehistoric hut circles.

  David’s imagination was much possessed at this time by the notion of unfathomable antiquities, by what Thomas Mann had called time-coulisses, by the sense that today’s most immemorial legends had been equally immemorial legends long ago. So he climbed happily, his mind mooning around what he vaguely knew of the Early Iron Age. The sling – a new and deadly weapon – had advanced into Britain across this country. The hill forts, with their multiple ramparts, were a memorial of that sort of warfare – outer defences of the coveted iron in the Forest of Dean. Then as now, battle had the same objectives – and they weren’t romantic. Or almost the same. Iron then; oil or uranium today. And so with the weapons: now the guided missile; yesterday the smooth pebble or the baked clay bullet hurled from the leather loop. A sling would still be an engine to reckon with on bare ground like this. But he wondered if it had ever been any sort of weapon of precision, as the tale of David and Goliath would suggest. Or had it needed organized companies of slingers to be effective? He had an idea he’d read that in the La Tène culture things had been organized that way.

  Mooning along like this, he hadn’t been attending to the map, and presently he had a thoroughly satisfactory sense of having lost himself. Ahead of him, the moor rose to a succession of rock-crowned eminences. Two – a big and a little one – were close together; and he thought he’d now stop and identify them. It wasn’t difficult. The little one was called the Loaf, and the big one was Knack Tor. It was Knack Tor that Faircloth had been burbling about, and that he himself had rather snootily turned down. Well, he’d have a go at it after all.

  David strode on, peopling the next slope with lurking men in skins, in woad; imagining he heard the pebble or the flint sing suddenly past his ear. It was all nonsense – utterly remote from him, and yet quite easily to be conjured up in this way. Its charm lay in that. And he didn’t, as he moved his ghostly warriors over the moor, cast himself for any hero’s role. At least he wasn’t childish enough for that – and anyway it was all too unformed and shadowy for drama. Now there was a lark singing above his head. Its song seemed to set a seal on the absolute silence surrounding him.

  The effect of a great loneliness was remarkable; it was as if he had been in one of the uninhabited places of the earth. A quarter of a mile away two dark ponies were browsing, and nothing else moved. They might have been prehistoric creatures, innocent of human association. No new animal had been domesticated, David told himself inconsequently, since man first learned to leave any record of himself other than his bones. And there was no impress of humanity upon all this landscape except a false one: the piles of slabbed and tumbled rock on the summits of many of the tors. They looked like savage, like Cyclopean altars – so that one expected to see a thin curl of smoke going up from their flat tops. But it was merely the interior economy of the earth that had voided them and set them there; they possessed no meaning save what the fancy cared to lend them.

  Knack Tor was now straight ahead. A tiny stream ran down from a spring on the shoulder linking it to the Loaf, and David followed this. The wind had sunk to nothing and he was still in bright sunshine, although to the south he could see a mist coming up from the sea. So entire was the silence around him that the small trickle of water at his feet seemed to hold all the elaboration of a symphony. It would have been impossible to chant aloud scraps of verse now – an act of presumption, of naked hubris, to be promptly visited with its due penalty by some indwelling spirit of the place. The height above sea level of Knack Tor was nothing tremendous – yet here in this bleakness and in its setting of lesser hills, one could easily endow it with all the magic of a great mountain.

  David looked again at the tumble of stone at the top, and found himself pretending that here was something stiff and ultimate, a grim face of rock challenging the powers of climbers already exhausted by a long struggle from valleys almost infinitely far below. It was a silly fancy; one that would make Timothy and Ian and the rest think him an absolute sap. But perhaps they thought him that already? David paused in his tracks, frowning and aware of some elusive doubt about himself, deep in his own mind. Perhaps, there was something queer in slipping away like this, without saying a word to anybody except the inescapable Faircloth. He turned and gazed back the way he had come, acknowledging an irrational sense that it would be cheerful to see one of Pettifor’s lot – Timothy, Arthur, even the infant Ogg – trudging towards him. But the emptiness was complete; it seemed to extend right to the light mist that now formed the horizon.

  He turned back and faced the Tor. A fine column of smoke was rising from the dark rude table of rock on the summit.

  4

  He must have been wool-gathering even beyond his common measure, David thought. For he had experienced for a moment, as he glimpsed that thin pillar of smoke on Knack Tor, the feeling they call déjà-vu – ‘this has happened before’ – which usually comes to a mind off guard. Only it hadn’t been, as it usually is, a sense of the repetition of something from his more or less immediate personal past. It was like coming again upon a sight familiar to him thousands of years ago, when smoke did go up from hills like these, no doubt – and upon some decidedly unpleasant occasions.

  In other words – David told himself as he strode on – he had gone mildly dotty. It was what happened, one might suppose, if one went on imagining that one had a date with the Early Iron Age. In sober fact, what was happening up there was clearly a picnic; chaps preparing to boil a kettle or grill a chop. And
this reminded him that he himself had set out without so much as a biscuit in his pocket. Perhaps he would pick up some sort of tea on the other side of the moor; and anyway there would be a good dinner when he got back to Nymph Monachorum.

  It was rather consciously that David pursued these prosaic reflections; he wanted to be sure that it wasn’t in the least a case of his imagination getting out of hand. And now he had probably better give the top of the Tor a miss. Whoever was there seemed to have scrambled to the very summit – which looked from here to be a slab of bare rock no bigger than a billiard table, although it was probably a good deal larger. It seemed a funny place to cook. But there was no reason why he should butt in on the proceedings at what would necessarily be very close quarters. It was a nuisance; he had rather looked forward to the final climb; but he’d skirt Knack Tor and make for the Loaf instead.

  This however was just what he didn’t do. He continued on his former path. Precisely why, he didn’t very clearly know. Perhaps he was recalling Faircloth’s praise of the view. Or perhaps he was vindicating himself to himself as a reasonably sociable being. To look in on the picnic wasn’t intrusive; in this lonely expanse it was merely companionable. He would climb up the rocks, exchange a word about the view with the people he found there, and then go on his way.

  So David continued to climb. When his path grew steeper he was careful not to slacken his pace. The little column of smoke was an inconsiderable affair, but his first reaction to it had only yielded to an obscure and fanciful sense that it was important – even that it was ominous or threatening. At least it was a tiny scrap of the unknown. Perhaps it was a good principle never to turn aside from that.

  The distance remaining to be covered was rather greater than he had thought. And now the smoke was fading. The kettle must have boiled, or the chops been done to a turn. It occurred to him that since he first saw the smoke there hadn’t really been time for either of these operations. Perhaps the smoke hadn’t represented cooking. Perhaps it had been a signal. David swung his stick and advanced with long strides. This was another notion out of his reading – rather earlier reading than that prompting him to fancies of sinister sacrifice on primitive altars. Reading, probably, about Red Indians. And it wasn’t just a matter of beacons. There was a language of smoke. You manipulated a blanket over a smoky fire, and the result was a sort of Morse code done in puffs of the stuff. But there had been no puffs about the smoke from Knack Tor; just a single column going straight up in this still air. A signal like that would carry a long way. And it would need to, in this solitude. Apart from whoever was on top, there probably wasn’t another human being within miles.

  But this reflection had no sooner come to David than it was falsified by a single sharp report from somewhere ahead of him. Up here too there must be a chap out shooting. Goodness knew what, at this time of year. Perhaps there were hares. You could shoot a hare at any time. Except – he remembered Timothy telling him impressively – when there was an order to the contrary by the lord-lieutenant. Or perhaps that was in Ireland, where Timothy had grand relations. Yet Ireland could hardly run to lords-lieutenant nowadays…

  That David Henchman’s mind wandered in this way as he climbed shows that his feeling of there being something odd about the smoke on top of Knack Tor didn’t go very deep. And certainly he wasn’t prepared for what he found at the end of his final scramble. Not that scramble was quite the right word. In a small way, there was something like a real spot of climbing involved at the end – at any rate on the side from which he approached the summit. Nearly twenty feet of more or less perpendicular rock had to be negotiated, and although he found plenty of hand and toe holds he had to bring some concentration to the job. It didn’t feel exactly alarming, but he wasn’t an expert. He ended up rather ingloriously by crawling over the final verge on his belly.

  His first impression was that somebody else had completed this operation immediately before him. This of course was nonsense. He had been entirely alone. He was staring, all the same, at the soles of a pair of shoes. They were a man’s shoes, with studs in them. David moved his head – it was an immediate and instinctive response to finding these things pretty well shoved in his face – and this gave him a view of the uppers. He was aware of pronouncing to himself the inconsequent verdict that these looked very good shoes. Then it struck him that they were the wrong way up, if this was really somebody doing a scramble like his own. The toes pointed skywards. David wriggled his thighs over the edge. He must have given his tummy a twist, he thought. It didn’t feel nice inside.

  A chap having a nap. That was it – nothing more. This great rock-structure on top of the Tor had the form of a shallow basin, and it was a perfect suntrap on this mild spring day. So here was somebody asleep. David stood up. At his feet an elderly man was lying face upwards on the rock. One arm was flung out oddly, the hand clasped over some small bright metal object. And the man had a hole in the middle of his forehead.

  His tummy, David thought, had been ahead of his eye and his brain. Fortunately it didn’t continue its demonstration. David took his eyes from the dead man – for he was certain he was that – and looked about him. In the very middle of this rocky saucer lay a little heap of ashes, with a tiny wisp of smoke still curling above them. That was what he had seen. He remembered that he had heard something too. But what was it – He struggled with his memory and found that it had gone queer – which showed that you do get a bit of a shock when this sort of thing happens. What he had heard, of course, was the shot. And the glittering thing in the man’s right hand was a revolver. He had killed himself. It had happened only a couple of minutes ago. Perhaps the man had seen David approaching, and that had hurried him up.

  It came to David that he ought not, after all, to take it for granted that this motionless figure was dead. One heard of people surviving astonishingly the most frightful injuries to the brain. So what should he do? The body would still be warm. But there was the heart. He must feel the heart.

  Fortunately he wasn’t the infant Ogg. Once, in the Canal Zone, he had seen a couple of men meet instant death, and it had been his job to give reasonably collected orders. But there one had been gradually tuned up to the possibility of violence or misadventure. Whereas this…

  He took hold of himself firmly and knelt down. The dead man seemed to have been in his late fifties. David remembered that sometimes you took to looking a bit younger again when you were dead. The forehead that had suffered such ghastly violation was broad and generous, and one would have taken the chap to be some sort of high-powered brainworker. Moreover, he seemed faintly familiar, so that for a moment David paused to gaze at his face. Perhaps he was the sort of middling-important person who gets his photograph in the papers from time to time. The hint of familiarity might be accounted for by that. Or perhaps what stirred at his recollection was not the man’s features but just his deadness. It was, he repeated to himself, a sight he’d seen before.

  And there was a job to do. But David hadn’t put out his hand to the man’s jacket before he was arrested by a sound behind him. He knew instantly what it was, for he had been making the same sound himself only seconds before. It was the scrape of a shoe on rock.

  Somebody was coming up – but from the opposite side to that on which his own approach had lain. The sound was repeated a second later, not so loudly. It happened a third time – and David found himself very tense and still. There was a possibility that it wasn’t somebody coming up. There was a possibility that it was somebody going down.

  David took a deep breath, and finished the business on hand. It seemed the urgent thing. There was a cardigan to unbutton, and then he thought he had better get beneath the shirt as well. No, the heart wasn’t beating; he was convinced of that. It was a grim bit of investigation, but he was confident he hadn’t made a muck of it. Whoever he was, the chap had had it.

  And now there was something else to find out about. David
got to his feet again and ran to the farther lip of the basin. Here, he saw, there was a rather easier route up. There was nobody on it. But down on the moor, about thirty yards away, a man with a rucksack on his back was strolling past the summit of the Tor. At least that was how it looked.

  As he had taken a deep breath to kneel by the dead man, so David now took another deep breath to shout. But he let it go unused. There was quite certainly no one else in sight. And he remembered that repeated scrape of a shoe on the rock. There was no rock down there – and, if there had been, the distance was too far for so small a sound to have carried. It sprang at David that the course the man with the rucksack was steering was a phoney course. The man had been up here. And he had climbed down again, put this respectable distance between himself and the summit, and then swung round so as to give himself the appearance of a casual passer-by.

  Or – once again – that was how it looked. David realized that he had tumbled in upon something that was not merely a mess – like the mess that might have happened in Timothy’s car the night before. He had tumbled in upon a mystery. Something had occurred of which the explanation might be very sinister indeed, and which set a perfectly plain suspicion before him from the start. Perhaps this wasn’t a real suicide – although, if not, the revolver had certainly been disposed so as to suggest it was. Perhaps it was murder. Perhaps this man with the air of walking in comfortable ignorance past it all was a murderer. He had failed to spot David’s approach to the Tor, and so had almost been detected in the very commission of his crime. But he had just managed to get away. And now he was putting on this innocent rural rambler’s turn.

  As he walked, he seemed absorbed in the view. But his interest didn’t appear to be at all in the summit of Knack Tor. He was looking steadily in the other direction, where there was certainly a wonderful vista over the moor. In a few minutes he would just be a figure in the middle distance.