An Awkward Lie Read online

  It would all have been rather good ground for hide-and-seek of the outdoor variety. Or it would serve for those primitive war-games which Bobby had appeared to enjoy as a schoolboy in his OTC. You had a section or (if you were grand) a platoon, and you had quite a lot of blank cartridges, and you were told that there was an enemy machine-gun in this position or that, and that you had to work out how to capture it without losing quite all your men. And indeed in these broad moonlit spaces and dark enfilading woods and sudden impassable thickets it was perfectly possible to imagine much more sinister carryings-on than that. Or at least it was possible to do so under Solo Hoobin’s luminary. By daylight any golf-course is a place banal enough.

  The hitch had been either Bobby or the girl. Counting his paces from the club-house to the first green, Appleby repeated this conviction. He did so by way of reminding himself that he mustn’t jump to the conclusion that the hitch had assuredly been Bobby. Bobby had said something to the girl suggesting that the corpse might be known to him, and it was after this that the corpse had vanished. The inference seemed as open as a Dutch barn. The girl had got Bobby off the scene, had alerted confederates to an unexpected danger, and they had made off, dead body and all – and after putting on that turn in the bunker with a rake. The body, in fact, had been brought from some remote place. It had been dumped where it was overwhelmingly improbable that it would ever be identified. Then Bobby had come along, had noticed the missing index finger, had divulged to the girl –

  Appleby broke off this train of speculation. In one aspect it seemed almost too easy. In another, there were things it just didn’t start to explain. So it might be radically wrong. For example, it might get the girl – the totally unaccountable girl – quite on the wrong side of the fence. She might be totally unconnected with the crime; might be no more than an innocent early-morning stroller over the golf-course. That, after all, was clearly how Bobby had seen her. When Bobby had made for the club-house and the telephone, she had made for the road and the two men with the caravan and the car. It had been her business to make them stay put until the police arrived, so that it might be discovered whether they had anything useful to tell. Mightn’t she, tumbling out her story, have explained that there was a young man who thought he was possibly in a position to identify the corpse? And mightn’t the men be in fact the murderers – for it seemed impossible that anything short of murder could be in question – and might not the issue be that, in deciding they must take the body elsewhere, they decided that the girl was too dangerous to leave behind? That was almost certainly what Bobby had decided. And the further possibilities seemed very grim. By this time there might be two corpses instead of one – and the second would be a wholly innocent girl’s.

  Appleby walked on to the first green, or rather to the fatal bunker guarding it. He walked by the direct route, which was straight through the little spinney. That was how a voice would travel. One had to reckon, of course, that the screen of trees would exercise a certain blanketing effect. Even so, on a still morning and with no distracting noise coming from the high-road, a woman’s voice raised full-pitch here by the bunker ought to be audible at the club-house. But not, perhaps, to a young man preoccupied with making a telephone-call. Coming to a halt on the lip of the bunker, Appleby shook his head over this unresolvable point. If his nocturnal jaunt was not to be merely fruitless, he must find some other aspect of the affair which might yield something to reconnaissance.

  Bobby had said the body was quite cold, and its clothes wet with dew, when he came upon it. At a rough guess, therefore, the man had been dead round about midnight, and exposed to the air through the small hours. But of course he hadn’t necessarily been thus exposed in the bunker. He might have been flung in there only shortly before Bobby turned up. And the police had found no traces of blood. Given the very short space of time available to whoever had carried the body off again, it thus seemed doubtful that it had been in the bunker that the man was killed. So why had he been dumped in it at all? Could it be in order to time – if only approximately – the hour at which it was likely to be found?

  Here you are – Appleby told himself as he surveyed the moon-blanched scene – with a corpse on a golf-course. With a corpse on this golf-course. What do you do if you want its discovery delayed for rather a long time? You give yourself (or, more probably, your several selves) an uncomfortable ten minutes getting it more or less into the heart of one of those big gorse thickets – where it will perhaps be months until some player penetrates to it while hunting, with quite exceptional pertinacity, for a lost ball. What do you do if you want it never to be found at all? You go to the great labour of getting it well underground and then obliterating the traces of your grave digging. What if you don’t care when it’s found? You simply leave it where, conceivably, it is – bang in the middle of one of these fairways. But at this end of the course this means on terrain largely commanded from the high-road; and in bright moonlight your body might be spotted from the first passing car. All right, if you don’t care a bit. But suppose you want some time to elapse – enough, say, for a good get-away – but that the body should certainly be found soon after that? You shove it in the bunker. It is invisible from the road. But, next day, the first man to play the first hole will come upon it.

  Appleby wondered whether he would be better in bed. Reasoning like this was sound enough in itself, but all it led to was another conundrum. Why, with a murdered man on his hands, should anybody want to make sure of that murdered man’s being stumbled upon in anything between, say, six and nine hours’ time? It wasn’t the sort of question to which Appleby’s professional experience was at all likely to find him stumped for an answer – some answer. It might, for example, be desirable to have witnesses to the fact of death having occurred before a certain bank opened on a certain morning. Again, although a good part of the man’s head had – according to Bobby – been shot or similarly blasted away, the dead man might actually have been poisoned. There are poisons which break up even in a dead organism, and are thus not detectable after a time. The people who had chosen the bunker for their corpse had been minded to ensure the successful post-mortem detection of something of the sort. Or yet again –

  Appleby broke off from these hopeful reflections. He had been continuing to gaze at the bunker. His own shadow cut across it laterally – a shadow as hard as clear sunlight would cast, and showing like a chasm between two surfaces which sparkled and glittered like finely powdered glass. And suddenly the chasm had widened as if the impulsion of some small seismic disturbance – or as if Appleby (the sole cause of its existence, after all) were in some frog-like way monstrously distending himself. A moment later this figure of unnatural girth had split in two. Appleby’s shadow lay distinguishably across the bunker once more. And so did the shadow of another man.

  Appleby swung swiftly round – much as Bobby, from a similar stance, had done before him. Appleby was perhaps more alarmed than Bobby had been; he had known some very tight corners leap into being rather in this fashion. But at least the man now behind him was making no move to bash him on the head. The man’s hands, indeed, were both in the pockets of a light overcoat – which was a garment not really needed on so mild a night. Nor did the man much require a Homburg hat – but a Homburg hat he had, tilted well down over the eyes. These facts, and the further fact of his standing, relatively to Appleby, in sharp silhouette, did produce something conceivably to be termed sinister in effect. Certainly they rendered the man momentarily unidentifiable, so that he had spoken before Appleby could put a name to him.

  ‘Good evening, Sir John,’ Sergeant Howard said.

  The moment was faintly awkward, although it was not quite clear why it need be. The hour was now late. Or rather it was very early, since it was substantially past midnight. Appleby’s presence on the golf-course was perhaps odd. But Howard’s, after all, was a good deal odder. Appleby decided to begin by making this point.

&nb
sp; ‘Good evening, Sergeant. This affair must be as much on your mind as on mine.’

  ‘Properly so, I hope.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Appleby was checked momentarily by the stiffness of this. ‘But it’s simply the day’s work with you – whereas, on any reading of the thing, it’s my own son who has had a fairly shocking experience on this golf-course. So I’m surprised to find it haunting you in the small hours. Particularly as I gather you feel it may have been a joke.’

  ‘I’m not treating it as a joke, sir.’ Howard produced this soberly. ‘That’s just one possible interpretation.’

  ‘You seem to have stressed it to the Chief Constable.’

  ‘True enough. But it won’t do any harm – wouldn’t you agree? – if Colonel Pride, who is a communicative gentleman, airs that notion here and there.’

  ‘Well, I’m blessed!’ Appleby was astonished, but not unattracted, by this bold manner of regarding a superior. ‘You mean to say you’re actually concerned to have it get around that the police are inclined to regard the thing as a prank either by my son or by somebody else?’

  ‘Something of the kind, Sir John – although I’m speaking of what is past history now, as I’ll explain in a moment. I’ve felt, if I may say so, what may be called an upper-class slant to this mystery. I don’t see that girl, for instance, as only casually connected with it, and she seems to have been out of that drawer, if your son is to be believed. Very well. It struck me that there might be somebody with his ear to the ground somewhere in the society Colonel Pride frequents. It might be useful to circulate at least a persuasion that we have been taken in more or less as we were plainly meant to be taken in. That we are not hot-foot after murder.’

  ‘But we are?’ It was with increased astonishment that Appleby employed the drenching moonlight to scrutinize more closely the expression of this unusual police sergeant. ‘You haven’t a doubt of it?’

  ‘It stands to reason, doesn’t it?’ There was a frankly reproachful note in Howard’s voice. ‘Of course, I told your son he had landed himself with something uncommonly awkward. That was only fair. But I think I’m correct in believing his head to be screwed on the right way?’

  ‘I’m not an impartial witness, Sergeant. But you’re probably not far wrong.’

  ‘And he has eyes in it, for that matter. So we know what we’re facing, clearly enough. But why let on that we do? That’s why I persuaded the Chief Constable to let me try to keep it out of the press, and just have a bit of rumour going around. To repeat, sir: the people who killed the unknown man were careful to leave this’ – Howard gestured towards the bunker – ‘neat and tidy – as one might hope to find it, you might say. They did so in the hope that your son’s story would be discounted. Don’t let’s disabuse them yet. That was the line I worked on. Only this afternoon, sir, it went wrong. And it went wrong because I slipped up badly.’

  ‘I’m surprised to hear it,’ Appleby said quietly.

  ‘There was a telephone-call from the Home Office. They wanted information.’

  ‘The Home Office?’ Appleby was puzzled. ‘But you’d been getting data from Missing Persons at Scotland Yard, hadn’t you? Why on earth should the Home Office–’

  ‘Yes, Sir John. But I didn’t work out that one until five minutes too late. It was a Principal. He gave his name, and sounded uncommonly steamed up. He said there had been a gross irregularity of procedure, and that the Minister himself was gravely concerned.’

  ‘The Home Secretary gravely concerned about this! My dear man–’

  ‘Yes, sir But you must remember that I don’t have your familiarity with Whitehall. And all he wanted was confirmation that we had good reason to believe there had been the body of a dead man with a missing finger discovered on this golf-course during the early morning of–’

  ‘I see. So you confirmed it – and then began to wonder? And your wondering took just five minutes?’

  ‘Just about that. So I called back the Home Office – which took a bit of nerve, Sir John, as you will understand – and nobody knew what I was talking about. They weren’t too pleased at being bothered by a rural policeman who’d plainly been taken in by some joker in a call-box.’

  ‘Too bad, Sergeant.’ Appleby laughed in rather a muted way. Standing just where he did, he had an irrational sense of being in the presence of the dead. ‘But I’ve been taken in often enough in rather the same fashion, I must confess.’

  ‘Well, there’s consolation in that.’ Howard paused on what was his own first ray of humour. ‘But something further followed. One of my men brought me the midday edition of one of the evening papers. Somewhere or other, there’s been a leak. It carried a fairly full account of your son’s adventure. But perhaps you’ve seen it?’

  ‘We don’t take an evening paper.’ Appleby thought for a moment. ‘You think the telephone-call was precipitated by the newspaper report? It was an attempt to get official police confirmation of what the paper might, or might not, have got accurately?’

  ‘It looks that way to me.’

  ‘Tell me, Sergeant – is the newspaper precise about the time of the discovery?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But the fellow on the telephone got that out of you?’

  ‘Certainly he did. And I’m bound to say I feel a fool. It’s not how one wants to feel, when an affair of this sort comes one’s way. It’s an uncommon chance – here in a country situation.’

  ‘Perfectly true, Sergeant.’ Appleby was interested in this frank avowal on Howard’s part of some touch of the last infirmity of noble mind. ‘But it’s early days yet. And at least you know more than you knew this morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I know there are other sleuths on the trail.’

  ‘Meaning my son and myself?’

  ‘Not that, at all.’ This time, Howard managed a subdued laugh himself. ‘I don’t fancy it was an Appleby who was on the other end of that telephone-line.’

  ‘In that case, Sergeant, may I ask just what is your present reading of the affair?’

  ‘Well, Sir John, since you ask. I’ll offer a guess. We’re far from being up against a one-man show. There’s quite a little crowd of villains somewhere. And they’re not trusting one another very far.’

  PART TWO

  Dr Gulliver’s School

  3

  Overcombe didn’t seem to have changed much. Nor did Dr Gulliver. A dozen years ago the black stuff gown perpetually worn by Dr Gulliver was green with age, and it was green with age still. Only, Bobby was now able to identify it as an Oxford MA gown. He wondered – as he had certainly never done as a small boy – whether Dr Gulliver was really a Doctor of anything, or whether, as a headmaster, he was ‘Doctor’ merely in a courtesy or Dickensian sense. It had always been understood, of course, that Dr Gulliver was immensely learned. It was on this that he had, so to speak, run; and it had never occurred to anybody to reflect that unfathomable erudition is neither necessary nor customary in the proprietor – or co-proprietor – of a private school.

  It had sometimes come to Bobby to wonder why on earth he had been sent to Overcombe; or how, once there, he had ever managed to progress, through a respectable showing in Common Entrance, to a decent public school. Perhaps the flair of Bloody Nauze for driving home the Latin language with a gym-shoe was the answer. Not that there had been anything much wrong with Overcombe, apart from the mere fact that a species of total chaos reigned there from the beginning of term to the end. It had probably been different in the days of his mother’s great-uncles. They had been to Overcombe, and had all become luminaries of the Victorian Age. That, no doubt, was why Bobby had arrived there what he thought of as about a century later. That was how parents chose schools for children. They didn’t specifically hunt around for an establishment where there were people like Dr Gulliver and Mr Onslow and Mr Nauze; they just recalled how happy s
ome aged relation of their own had been rumoured to be at Overcombe or whatever.

  ‘Appleby?’ said Dr Gulliver. ‘Appleby?’ Dr Gulliver twitched his gown – and with his old nervous haste, so that it was incomprehensible that the decayed garment didn’t at once disintegrate under his finger and thumb. ‘But – to be sure – Appleby! You made some slight progress in the end towards a grasp of the Punic Wars. I trust, Appleby, that you still keep to your book.’

  The Punic Wars. The Pubic Wars. Bobby had been among the small number of precocious infants at Overcombe who could make jokes like that. The ability was gained through the pertinacious frequentation of a dictionary. Womb, Concubine, Harlot, Semen. Briefly, Bobby marvelled over his own dead life.

  ‘Are you still in partnership with Mr Onslow, sir?’ Bobby asked respectfully.

  ‘Ah – F L! Onslow is always called F L by the young rascals. Do you know what the initials F L stand for?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, I’m afraid.’

  ‘The jest must have been invented since your time. Festina lente, Appleby. It is the motto of Mr Onslow’s – um – somewhat remote kinsmen. Construe, my dear lad.’

  ‘Would it be something like “More haste, less speed”, sir?’

  ‘A most licentious translation.’ Dr Gulliver had frowned majestically. ‘We will say, if you please, “Hasten slowly”.’

  ‘I see, sir. It’s a terribly good joke. Mr Onslow being F L, I mean.’

  ‘Onslow is still with us, I am happy to say. The – um – athletic side continues in his charge, and we must not minimize its importance. Mens sana, Apppleby, in corpore sano.’