An Awkward Lie (18 page)

‘You don’t mean to say that Nauze was doing his stuff – cracking codes, or whatever – back when he was a master at Overcombe?’

‘Certainly he was – and absolutely at the top of his form then. What has happened lately a bit turned on that. He had a very odd mind, it seems. A kind of
Finnegans Wake
mind as far as command of language went, but also a highly mathematical mind as well. It was the combination that put him at the head of his profession.’

‘It certainly doesn’t seem too bright to have allowed him to be captured by someone. But one’s not a spy, surely, if one simply sits in an office and cracks codes?’

‘He’d had other assignments, and there was plenty of evidence against him. So it was a fair cop, in a way.’

‘Did he manage to escape?’

‘Oh, no. It was just one of those quiet exchanges. And he was back in London before we realized – I mean, before my bosses realized – that we looked like being badly sold. Nauze was what’s called a broken man.’

‘Good God! Had they been torturing him?’

‘I don’t suppose so. No, I’m sure they hadn’t. Top-flight people like Nauze are always potentially too valuable to be treated to that.’ Susan paused. This particular aspect of things seemed not to trouble her. ‘I don’t suppose they so much as took a gym-shoe to him. But something went badly wrong. Perhaps it began with malnutrition or something. Do you remember Michaelis in
The Secret Agent?’

‘Not very well.’ Bobby was enchanted that Susan read books. He wondered whether she’d read
The Lumber Room
, anti-novel by R Appleby.

‘I do. I’ve a good memory. It’s the principal thing that enables me to hold down my job, as a matter of fact. Michaelis had been inside. He had come out of a highly hygienic prison round like a tub, with an enormous stomach and distended cheeks of a pale, semi-transparent complexion, as though for fifteen years the servants of an outraged society had made a point of stuffing him with fattening foods in a damp and lightless cellar.’ Susan finished her first glass of wine. ‘That’s more or less
verbatim
, I believe.’

‘And quite irrelevant. You’re showing off.’ Bobby got in this thrust with high delight. ‘For I don’t believe Nauze came back like that.’

‘He didn’t. He came back with what appeared a shattering nervous breakdown. The trick-cyclists got going on him. They said No, it wasn’t that, but a straight galloping psychosis. Then they had another look, and said it was a nervous breakdown after all. And some genius thought up Overcombe. Which is what was to bring me there. Bobby, I didn’t know such places
were
.’

‘You talk awfully well, Susan.’

‘I’ll talk. You’ll write.’

Bobby’s head swam even worse than it had ever done before. Susan had this queer trade. It required what was hard-boiled in her manner. But, having made up her mind, she was as direct as Perdita.
No, like a bank for love to lie and play on
. A sudden overwhelming impatience seized Bobby – not (as would have been proper in 008) to possess her forthwith, for that might be aeons off, and was certainly not now to be imagined. Bobby was simply impatient to bring this sinister and fantastic business to an end, and to stand in Susan’s presence in a context fit for so standing.

‘This has to be over by midnight,’ he heard himself say. And he heard himself add – as if with some concession to humour – ‘Or by breakfast-time, anyway.’

‘You think it might be?’ Her tone was cool and even mocking. But, just before she had spoken, her lips had parted again. ‘That would be very nice, of course.’

‘You’ll never again have anything that isn’t nice.’ Bobby stared at her – the dream girl, who must have nothing but truth. ‘Except from crass casualty and blind fate. And now, give me the rest of the gen about this wretched luckless Nauze. Straight through, please. No more bits and pieces.’

‘Very well. But, please, may I have another glass of wine? And half-a-glass later on? That means three and a half, all told, for you.’

‘Mostly,’ Bobby said, ‘it will be a half-bottle between us. And beer on Thursdays. But go ahead.’

‘Then, here goes.’ Susan glanced round the dining-room again, and then looked at her watch… ‘It’s not altogether polite,’ she said, ‘to be worried about the time, when having one’s first dinner with an eligible young man. But, you see, time has been of the essence in this whole business. Now listen.’

‘Some genius thought of Overcombe. I’d got as far as that. You see the idea. Nauze was to be got back into the environment in which he had enjoyed his first triumphs in a code-cracking way. Confidence would return to him amid the happy voices of the boys.’

‘Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play.’

‘Don’t interrupt. When he was got some way into his right mind he might even do a little teaching, which would be another step in reconstituting the old Nauze. And they seem to have thought, too, that Overcombe would be a marvellously unobtrusive place in which to quarter him. That, of course, was a quite shocking miscalculation. It was true that in his first period as a master in the school his activities as a cryptographer had remained utterly secret. But it was equally true that he might well have mentioned it under interrogation when inside. It wouldn’t seem important, and when in prison people of that sort are always being offered small privileges in return for even scraps of information. Anyway, the fact is that we have probably been under observation from the very start of the set-up.’

‘Gulliver and Onslow must have been in on this?’

‘Certainly. I don’t know that they were very keen, and I expect they were distinctly evasive when you started sniffing after news of Nauze this morning.’

‘Yes. And Onslow was furious that Gulliver invited me to lunch.’

‘I expect that was just jealousy of a
bona-fide
athlete, Bobby dear. But they’ve both been quite good, really. Then, of course, there has been Hartsilver. He was the only other person around the place at all likely to remember or recognize Nauze. A great deal was to depend on Hartsilver.’

‘He was quite shockingly disingenuous with me when I went to see him. He seemed thoroughly communicative, but in fact kept entirely mum. I just wouldn’t have believed it of him.’

‘Hartsilver has missed his
métier
.’

‘I know. He has some sort of disease that makes it impossible for him to paint.’

‘I don’t mean that. Hartsilver would have been superb at Intelligence stuff. Absolutely a master spy.
And
tiptop at codes and so forth as well.’

‘Oh, come! I can’t–’

‘It’s perfectly true – and the fact contains the germ of any real justification for bringing Nauze back to Overcombe. These two had been very thick indeed. Hartsilver was considerably older, of course. But, in the technique of the thing, he was very much Nauze’s pupil. A posthumous pupil at this moment, one might say.’

‘Whatever do you mean by that?’

‘Hartsilver’s trying to do what Nauze might have done.’

At this point Susan was constrained to pause in her exploitation of the distinctly peculiar state of affairs at Overcombe School. This was because she and Bobby had earlier decided on concluding their meal with one of those confections which involve a lavish cracking of eggs, kindling of chafing-dishes, and flourishing of liqueur-bottles in the immediate vicinity of the gratified diners. The impressive ritual was being performed now. It required the joint efforts of the head waiter of the Three Feathers and of a man dressed like a
chef
who had emerged from the kitchens for the purpose. Bobby, since it was he who had conjured the operation into being, felt obliged to watch it with an experienced and critical eye. The big moment was when the whole thing caught on fire. It was the bigger because one was never able to tell whether or not it was an unrehearsed effect. The chaps always seemed to have it under control – but not all that under control. The satisfaction which slightly younger people get from the entry of a Christmas-pudding sheathed in a flicker of blue flame, or of a birthday-cake with candles, was what Mr Robert Appleby (
jeune écrivain anglais d’une distinction indubitable
, as he had been courteously described) and his affianced bride (as she may now virtually be called) had been proposing to themselves now. In fact, they were rather anxious that these two superior members of the staff of the Three Feathers should get through their stuff and go away.

Bobby watched carefully, nevertheless. And the conflagration, when it came, was quite notable of its kind. A very large and brilliant sheet of flame leapt up from the pan in which the
soufflé
omelette was being prepared. And in the middle of it – to a wholly Mephistophelean effect – Bobby was suddenly aware of a bearded face.

The flame flared and faded. The face vanished. Bobby found that he was staring fixedly at the door of the dining-room.

‘Did you see that?’ Bobby asked.

‘Of course. The thrill’s because it’s mildly criminal, don’t you think? Burning up perfectly good alk.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean one of your Russian friends, or whatever they are. He made a brief inspection of us from the doorway.’

‘Then it’s quite smart of him to be chasing us up.’ Susan was unperturbed. ‘But I can’t think why they keep on hanging around. They brought off their assignment, after all.’

‘Which was?’

‘Killing Nauze, of course.’ Susan seemed surprised that there could be any uncertainty about this. ‘I suppose they want to pick up better proof of their achievement. For is Nauze
really
dead? Not many people know – apart from you and me. We foxed them there a bit.’

There had to be another pause, since the omelette – adequately
flambée
– was now being served. Bobby employed it by trying to pull his thoughts together. He kept on – it seemed to him – beginning to get on top of this bizarre affair, only to find it taking another turn that surpassed ready belief.

‘If they killed Nauze,’ he asked rather weakly, ‘don’t you think they ought to be arrested?’

‘We’re not in quite that sort of world at the moment.’ Susan frowned. ‘But they
oughtn’t
to be around. They can’t possibly know about Hartsilver. Aren’t you going to finish the wine?’

‘No, and neither are you. I don’t like being spied on by your bearded friend – particularly when he seems to have you guessing a bit. I think we need clear heads. And now let’s have the rest of your story.’

‘Very well. And order some coffee.’ Susan pushed away her glass. ‘The slightly strange part is still to come.’ She paused as if expecting to be challenged on this, but Bobby said nothing. ‘I mean the time-element chiefly. There’s been a date-line, you see, for getting Nauze on his feet again. Or getting him into play again. A zero-hour. And so the other side has had a zero hour too. From their point of view, there was a day and an hour by which Nauze – if at all recovered, and they were taking no risks – had to be dead. Of course we didn’t know this. We didn’t know they’d spotted our Overcombe set-up at all.’ Susan paused to light a cigarette. ‘Do you know about anti-ballistic missiles?’

‘Yes. They’re cock-eyed.’

‘No doubt. Well in some remote place or other, something bang-new had been picked up about them–’

‘Bang sounds the right word.’

‘Be quiet. A development of staggering importance, achieved by a not too friendly power. But the information about this bang-new thing was concealed in a bang-new code. The document was being flown to London. And then it would come to Overcombe–’

‘By helicopter?’

‘Certainly by helicopter. For Nauze to have a go at. It looked like Nauze or nobody.’

‘Those not-too-friendly-power chaps sound even more half-witted than our own.’

‘Don’t be so damned superior.’

‘Sorry – but you see what I mean. Exchanging this Nauze character for anybody at all.’

‘They judged he was finished, as I’ve said. And they were possibly right or possibly wrong. But they
did
decide they’d made a bloomer. Hence Nauze’s death being decided upon as soon as they got wind of the Overcombe plan – the plan to rehabilitate the poor devil. The job was assigned to a couple of quite inconsiderable and low-class killers. You’ve met them.’

‘Were they the two men with the car and the caravan on the edge of the golf-course?’

‘Bobby, for pity’s sake! I’ve told you already it was your bearded friends.’

‘But mayn’t
they
have been on the golf-course?’

‘As a matter of fact,
they were
. But not the way you think. Now go on listening. You must conceive these bearded men as simply having accepted a commission to liquidate Nauze within a certain time –
before
, that is, the coded document could be got to him. You see, if it
was
got to him, and his mind was in working order, he might take weeks to do the decoding or he might take no more than a few hours. That sort of thing can be, it seems, a highly intuitive business. Well, we regarded Nauze as at risk, of course, even although we didn’t realize that the Overcombe hide-out had been spotted. So he wasn’t altogether easy to get at. In fact, they didn’t get their chance until the eleventh hour – or well past that – and then it was largely a matter of luck. We were waiting for the helicopter to come in–’

‘The midnight helicopter that Beadon and Walcot spoke of?’

‘No doubt. Nauze had been drinking a bit – we had been instructed we mustn’t try to keep him off it altogether – and as a result–’

‘He took a gym-shoe to you.’

‘Don’t be silly. It took him as anxious to show his independence and cunning. He slipped away and went wandering through the grounds just before dawn. And that was the end of him. They pounced, and shot him dead. And it was I, as it happened, who had first tumbled to his making off. I came on the scene while his limbs were still jerking.’

‘Christ!’ Bobby looked at Susan aghast, and could find no other word to utter. For a moment he felt alarmingly sick – and then merely very cold. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘That was at Overcombe. We’ve got to get to Linger.’