An Awkward Lie (19 page)

‘Yes.
They
had to get to Linger. Or rather, that’s quite wrong. They just had to get somewhere. With the body, that is.’

‘But why?’

‘It’s routine, more or less. You dump your corpse at least a hundred miles from where you killed it, and there’s always a chance it may never be so much as identified. And you see what put a golf-course in their heads. They could dump the body of Nauze there in such a way that they could themselves make an undisturbed getaway after doing so, while at the same time making quite sure that it would be discovered fairly early in the morning. You remember the dead-line. It
had
to be discovered, if their employers were to be satisfied. No dead Nauze on time, no pay. Well, they had a van. They shoved the body in the back of it, and drove off. I travelled with them.’

‘What!’ Bobby stared at Susan dumbfounded. He realized that this girl was going to terrify him intermittently all his life. ‘You just went along?’

‘It was quite easy. I simply hopped in with the corpse. For one thing, it seemed essential to make sure that it was a corpse. Not that I know quite what I’d have done if the poor man had been faintly alive. And remember that this was a shattering defeat.
Some
sort of reply was essential. To go for the buggy ride was a reply of sorts. Besides, I was assisted by the marvels of modern science.’

‘Just what do you mean by that?’

‘I had my walkie-talkie. It’s something we’re never allowed to move without. As soon as the van got going, I could murmur into it quite safely. So I wasn’t exactly incommunicado. The real difficulty was in keeping track of where we were. But occasionally I managed to see a signpost in the headlights of another car. And within an hour we had been picked up and were being tailed.’

‘A car, a caravan, and two men!’

‘Just that – and one of the men rather high up. So I’d become just an attendant lord again. If you think the subsequent conduct of Her Britannic Majesty’s secret agents absurd, you can reflect that it wasn’t me who was giving the orders.’

‘I don’t know whether they were absurd, but I do suspect that I myself was treated a little hardly by them.’

‘Well, yes – that’s true. My own difficulty, of course, was getting out of the van without being spotted, but I managed it when our bearded friends halted to make a preliminary survey of the course. I had to do a bit of rather cautious walking after that, if I wasn’t to give myself away. But I didn’t need to hurry, since the control of the operation was now in other hands. And that’s how it was that I came on you just when I did. The killers of Nauze had been allowed to drive off – which no doubt seems very shocking to your lay mind. But there was, as you’ll gather, method of a sort in that particular piece of madness. My colleagues were just finishing up making an innocent business of an early-morning cup of tea by the roadside. And there, gaping at the bunker, was a perfectly gorgeous young man.’

‘True,’ Bobby said. ‘Continue.’

‘By what was obviously sheer coincidence this young oaf–’

‘Hey!’

‘This young Apollo showed signs of being in a position to identify the body. I doubted whether that would be a good idea. We’re taught, you see, to keep the outside world
out
. You understand? At least I had to invent delaying tactics. So I got you off to the club-house, and then beat it for the car. Susan Danbury – or 009 or somebody – reporting for orders. You know what happened then.’

‘The whole precious lot of you made off with the body, and even left that bunker nicely raked over. I’m damned if I can see why.’

‘It’s quite fair you should have a mild sense of grievance.’ Susan was amused. ‘But surely you
can
see why? Nauze duly killed, and body left in bunker on Linger golf-course. That’s what the engaging couple would report. But no body is ever found there – nor is Nauze, dead or alive. They may be making the whole thing up, just in the hope of getting their pay. Uncertainty and confusion are sown in the minds of the enemy, and so we have made the best of a very poor show. We’re often doing that.’ Susan sipped her coffee. ‘Are you beginning to come clear?’

‘If you
call
it clear.’ Bobby broke off. He might have been trying to find some small point of sanity in the middle of all this dangerous nonsense. ‘It must have been quite a shock to you,’ he said with satisfaction, ‘when I turned up at Overcombe. I must say you carried it off well in old Hartsilver’s hut. But you had to produce some shocking lies afterwards.’

‘It was a little awkward, I admit. And it was rather nice when I got orders this afternoon to let you in on it all.’

‘Just how did that happen?’

‘Something to do with your father.’

‘My father!’ Bobby didn’t sound at all pleased. ‘What had my father to with it?’

‘He seems to be somebody very important. And he tumbled, I imagine, to the kind of affair this is. The hush-hush aspect of it would tell him at once, if he happens to be clued up in these matters. And he seems to have guessed, perfectly correctly. that you were pushing in on the situation in a dangerous state of ignorance and innocence. So he made no bones about getting on the blower to M himself.’ Susan paused. ‘Or even,’ she added solemnly, ‘to M’s boss. No doubt he raised firm but gentle hell – the way top people know how to do.’

‘Would it have been with that dangerous uncle of yours?’

‘Might be. Anyway, the report was that you were well meaning, conscientious, reliable, and likely to be modestly competent in a rough house – and therefore to be recruited forthwith. Temporary appointment and no pay. Still, Bobby Appleby’s dream comes true. He’s 008.’

‘And now he’s going to ask for his bill.’ Bobby signed to the waiter. ‘Let’s hope no pay doesn’t mean no expenses.’

Outside, the night was very dark.

Bobby found this unexpected. He wondered why. He also found it rather menacing and sinister. He wondered about that too. But the feeling of unexpectedness was easily explained. He had a well-developed sense of times and seasons, and unconsciously he was prepared to step into moonlight. Those wild nocturnal events on Linger golf-course had transacted themselves just before the full of the moon. That had been in the small hours of Tuesday. It was late on Friday night now, and a splendid moon – Solo Hoobin’s moon – must definitely be on duty. And so, of course, must be the punctual and untiring stars in their courses. But nothing was on view. Above the Three Feathers and its puny festal lights the heavens were overcast.
Come, seeling night…

That the darkness felt far from benign was also explicable. Like hundreds, indeed thousands, of agreeably circumstanced young men around England that evening, he had been entertaining a girl to dinner in a country pub – differing from the majority, it might be said, only in that his intentions were strictly honourable. But this, of course, was to neglect the wider context of the occasion. The girl was a working girl, and she had elected to earn her keep within a small lurid world in which people got great chunks of their heads blown off… Bobby recalled reading a French
roman policier
with the engagingly simple title of
Danger!
(One can’t dwell with
la nouvelle écriture
all the time.) And
danger
was hovering all around now.

‘Do you know about
danger
?’ he heard himself ask.

‘Danger?
Do you mean danger?’

‘Yes and no.’ They were now more or less groping their way to Bobby’s car. ‘When one was a lover within the medieval code of Courtly Love–’

‘L’amour courtois.’

‘Yes. I see you didn’t leave Somerville or wherever without the ghost of an education. When one was that sort of lover, one thought of oneself as within one’s lady’s
danger
. It was a relationship, really, between a vassal and his lord. Within the code, the lady’s the lord, of course, and the lover’s the vassal. The Lord (or mistress) can require the vassal (or lover) to do his stuff – to be modestly competent, for example, in that rough house.’

‘Yes?’

‘In requital, the vassal (or lover) is entitled to enjoy the favour of his lord (or mistress). And the reciprocal relationship between the two is called
danger
. See?’

‘Do see.
Danger
is definitely on.’

The head-swimming business assailed Bobby Appleby again. ‘Pray God,’ he said, ‘I’m not too madly drunk on you to drive this bloody car.’

Cars are best at night. Their engines seem to take on a new smoothness and power. One seems to be a better driver, too. The darkness parted before the speed of Bobby and Susan, and closed again behind them.

‘We’re going back to Overcombe,’ Bobby said. ‘Is that right?’

‘Yes, Quite right. I’ve had my holiday.’

‘Listen, Susan. What I don’t understand, really, is what might be called the continuing situation. Nauze is dead, and will solve no more conundrums about anti-ballistic missiles, or anything else. So just what’s going on?’

‘We’re lying low.’

‘Are those bearded chaps lying low?’

‘They puzzle me rather, I’m bound to say. I’ve told you they’re just low-class killers. And they killed Nauze, all right. They ought really to have their pay, too. Because of the leak.’

‘The leak?’

‘It seems we didn’t get away, after all, with the picture of Bobby Appleby as just imagining things in that bunker. There was a bit in a paper. And the other side – the bearded chap’s bosses, that is – were smart enough to winkle a confirmatory statement out of the local police. So these two chaps ought to have cleared out by now. Incidentally, Bobby, I’ve only your word for it that they
haven’t
cleared out. It was you who saw them when you were coming back from your prowl to the Great Smithy. It was you who saw one of them peering at us through that dining-room door.’

‘Bobby Appleby imagining things, after all?’

‘Well, no. But it’s a puzzle. Where can they be hanging out? We’ve had the whole countryside combed in vain for the slightest trace of them. And
why
should they be hanging out? Perhaps–’

‘That’s the one I want answered. Why should that fellow have peered in on us? What are they after
still
?’

‘They can’t have tumbled to Hartsilver. It’s just not possible.’ It was suddenly clear to Bobby that Susan was wrong. She was too close up to the thing. He himself had arrived from outside, with perhaps a certain power of fresh assessment. And what seemed not possible to Susan seemed not impossible to him.

‘This document,’ he said. ‘About missiles being taught to hit missiles that are being taught to hit missiles that are being taught to hit you. You know it’s absolute nonsense, don’t you?’

‘These things exist.’

‘But they’re just something other than human life. We mustn’t bother our heads with them – any more than with the fact that one day San Francisco is bound more or less to vanish in another earthquake.’

‘What utter rot! Earthquakes are God. Missiles are men. And likely to leave mere genocide standing.’

‘Well, yes. We will all go together when we go–’

‘Every Hottentot and every Eskimo. But that doesn’t mean–’ Susan broke off, and laughed softly in the darkness. Knowing the same song had pleased them. ‘Bobby, what on earth are we talking about?’

‘That missile document.’

‘Yes. Well, it’s in London, being worried at by a whole college of cryptographers. But I photographed it first.’

‘Off your own bat?’

‘Off my own bat.’

‘I like a girl to have a certain nerve. Would the photograph be an attractive proposition to the bearded characters and their employers?’

‘Not to their
original
employers. There’s obviously nothing in it that
they
don’t know.
Their
concern was to prevent our getting hold of the thing, or cracking its code once we had got it. But it’s beginning to seem possible to me’ – Susan was suddenly speaking rather slowly – ‘that your bearded characters may be thinking of
changing
employers. A lot of these affairs are three-cornered, you know.’

‘Three-cornered?’

‘Three Great Powers, each playing for its own hand. Or four, at times.’

‘So they might like your photograph – to sell to some other concern?’

‘Yes – but they’d like it much more if it was no longer in code, but already in clear.’

‘If some Nauze had done his stuff on it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Susan, you said something about Hartsilver – that he was trying to do what Nauze might have done. It’s he who has your photograph? He’s working on it – with everything Nauze taught him? And that’s your private gamble?’

‘We’re taught to take the initiative now and then.’

‘But it won’t be too good if this goes wrong?’

‘No, it won’t.’

Bobby drove in silence for the rest of the way back to Overcombe. He hadn’t drunk much, but he didn’t drive fast. This was less because of road-mindedness than because of quite a lot going on in his head. Susan must be – or must have been – incredibly good at this MI5 stuff or she wouldn’t, at her age, have got as far as she had with it. At the same time, it was an outrageous walk of life for any girl who was even approximately like Susan. He was entirely clear about that. Doing very, very dangerous things – yes. Tiptop rock-climbing, for instance. Flying solo round the world. Or sailing ditto. Or working way-out in hazardous research with lethal substances. All that. But this, no.

A certain grim fastidiousness hadn’t much impeded the career of Appleby Senior in the field of low life and criminal practice. Deep down, Bobby had inherited the same slant of mind. This did mean (he judged) that he wouldn’t be a terribly good authentic 008. But that was irrelevant. The point was that – at a crunch – Susan Danbury wouldn’t be all that good as 00 – and – whatever. She too had disabilities, although they might not be the same disabilities as those of Appleby Junior. This business of chancing her hand with old Hartsilver: it was imaginative and courageous, but it wasn’t, in the last analysis, the winning thing in a world in which cautious cunning was all. To clear this up and yank Susan out was the purpose for which the gods had conducted him to that bunker.