An Awkward Lie (3 page)

So now it occurred to him that he ought to ring up home and give an account of himself. As this couldn’t be done on 999 he had to fish out some money. But again he got through quickly. And it was his father who answered.

‘It’s me,’ Bobby said. ‘Look – I’ve found a dead man in the bunker near the first green. It looks as if somebody had blown the chap’s brains out. So I’ve sent for the police.’

‘Not an excessive response, I’d say, to such a situation. Shall you be back to breakfast?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Unless they run me in on suspicion or something.’

‘That
would
be excessive.’ The voice of Bobby’s father dropped carefully to a casual note. ‘You all right?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Good – then we’ll hear about it at breakfast. By the way, if it’s a Sergeant called Howard who comes along, he’s a very sound man. Goodbye.’

There was a click, and Bobby too put down the receiver. It hadn’t remotely occurred to him that he needed to be, as they say, steadied. But, he thought, steadied he had been. He went outside again – wondering whether, when he did get home, it would be with the astonishing news that Bloody Nauze was the dead man. Meanwhile, if he walked to some point well beyond the first tee, he could probably get a glimpse of the bunker beyond the tip of the spinney. Perhaps he would be able to give the girl a wave. It was odd about the girl. He hadn’t learnt her name – nor she his – and there had been about her a curious air of detachment, of floating loose above the local scene.

He was passing the first tee when he heard the telephone ring in the still empty club-house behind him. He hesitated, and decided it might quite well be the police again. Perhaps they had some system of checking up on calls which were possibly no more than attempts at a stupid hoax. So he turned and went back at the double. He had, after all, undertaken to stay put. The call turned out to be a wrong number. When he got outside once more, it was to find a car drawing to a halt in front of him. It was a large black saloon, with one of those little lighthouse-things on the middle of its roof. And it had POLICE written on it, fore and aft, in what immediately suggested itself as the colour of blood. Bobby Appleby, the most blameless of citizens (and a talented writer), felt a wholly irrational twinge of apprehension at the spectacle. A sign of the times, he told himself. A token of the spirit of the age. These were the people who, all over the world, beat up your contemporaries in the streets, tore down their banners, hustled them into vans.

Mr Robert Appleby, admiring son of a retired Police Commissioner, noted in himself with some sobriety this strong if fleeting reaction. Then he stepped forward.

‘Sergeant Howard?’ he asked politely.

Sergeant Howard it was. He didn’t suggest a world in which sinister things happened to you as soon as they got you inside. In a decently restrained way, there was something fatherly about Sergeant Howard. He started off, it was true, with a steady and frankly appraising scrutiny of the young man who had made the telephone call. The effect was the more impressive because Sergeant Howard had eyes of an almost unnaturally light blue. This gave his stare a chilly quality. But if Bobby was alarmed, it was only for a second. He had a sense – perhaps a little too habitual with him, since he was a personable young man – of being, at least provisionally, approved of.

‘We’d better get straight to it,’ Howard said briskly. ‘We’ meant Bobby, Howard himself, and a constable who had driven the car. It also looked like meaning several other men who had turned up by now – early-morning golfers who were aware that something strange must have occurred, and who saw no reason why they shouldn’t discreetly bring up the rear of the procession. A certain publicity was going to attend the next stage of the affair. ‘Where about, sir?’ Howard asked.

‘Close to the first green. We go round that spinney, and there it is.’

‘I think you said something about a car, Mr Appleby. And about some men making an escape in it. We met nothing of the sort as we came from Linger. Of course, they may have made off in the direction of Drool. Did they seem to be armed?’

‘Well, no. I think they were having a picnic, as a matter of fact.’

‘A picnic?’ the constable asked. ‘Did you say a picnic, sir?’

‘That was what the girl called it. It might have been breakfast. They had a caravan. And a big car – I think a Mercedes.’ Bobby felt he wasn’t doing too well. ‘I didn’t mean they actually
looked
like murderers–’

‘Mr Appleby, did I understand you to say something about a girl?’ It was with an effect almost of curiosity that Sergeant Howard asked this.

‘Yes. I don’t know who she is. She just walked up. She’ll be waiting there now. I hope she’ll have persuaded the people with the car to wait as well.’

‘Quite a reception committee.’ Sergeant Howard said this rather too dryly to suggest an attempt at humour. ‘Do you know this dead man, Mr Appleby?’

‘He’s face-downward in the sand, so I can’t really say.’ Bobby felt he had better out with the astonishing idea in his head. ‘But he has the first finger of his right hand missing, and I’ve known a man like that.’

‘I’ve known several.’ Sergeant Howard was extremely unimpressed. ‘A very common injury, sir. In the war, for instance. And self-inflicted, as often as not. Do it cleverly enough, and enemy action can’t be excluded. Takes a man right out of the line for good.’

‘I see.’ Bobby was depressed by this professional rapport with human ignobility. He also wondered whether Bloody Nauze’s mutilation had been of this order. It was queer to think of a man pointing at you a finger whose non-existence was the consequence of his own cowardice and desperation.

For some moments they walked in silence. Another couple of golfers had joined the march. Bobby wondered with irritation why they couldn’t go and start their game, rather than pad along like this in the stupid expectation of sensation. He further realized that he was himself now disliking the whole affair very much. Not that it didn’t have one bright spot. Within a couple of minutes now, he was going to see the girl again.

‘Can you tell me, Mr Appleby, for just how long you were in this vicinity before coming on the body?’

‘Not more than ten minutes, I’d say. I drove up, got my clubs out of the car, walked to the first tee, got my drive well down the fairway, and landed my second in the bunker. And there the body was.’

‘You didn’t hear anything that might have been a shot? Or sounds of a quarrel, or a cry for help?’

‘I didn’t hear anything like any of these. As a matter of fact, I’m fairly sure the chap had been dead for some hours. I noticed–’

‘Then it would be rather surprising, wouldn’t it, if his murderers were only just making off, after enjoying a leisured roadside breakfast?’

‘I never said–’ Bobby checked himself. He remembered his father saying that Howard was a very sound man. And there was no point in getting annoyed. ‘You’ll judge for yourself,’ he said. ‘For here we are.’

They had rounded the spinney, and it was somehow with an effect of dramatic suddenness that the broad yellow bunker gaped before them. And Sergeant Howard’s expectation of a reception committee was decidedly unfulfilled. There were no motorists. There was no girl. And there was no corpse. As in all the other bunkers on the course at this hour, the sand showed as neatly raked. Yet this one was not wholly like the others. For in the middle of it there still lay Bobby’s ball. Sergeant Howard looked at it for a moment in silence – and so, for that matter, did the constable and the little group of goggling golfers. And then Howard spoke.

‘Mr Appleby,’ he said dispassionately, ‘you seem to be in rather an awkward lie.’

‘Awkward for the boy.’ Colonel Pride spoke sympathetically. When a friend’s son gets into a scrape, it is best to say little – but to say that little with decent warmth. Tommy Pride, however, was obliged to say a good deal. For he was the Chief Constable of the County, and when it was John Appleby’s boy who was in question he couldn’t do other than make the matter very much his own. And there was more to it than Appleby’s being a distinguished colleague, now retired. The boy’s mother was one of Colonel Pride’s oldest friends. He and Judith Raven had been given their first ponies within a week of each other. He had been right in the van of hopeful escorts in Judith’s first season. After that, of course, she had faded out of the only sort of society that Tommy Pride knew. It was predictable, no doubt, since through some generations the Ravens had tended to take up one or another activity of the long-haired sort. And after that – for the Ravens were freakish and unpredictable too – she had married her policeman. Fortunately John Appleby, in addition to being uncommonly able at his job, had proved to be a very decent chap. And so too with the boy, Bobby. Rugger Blue, capped for England, looked you straight in the eye. A true-to-form Raven as well, however. Had written a book for which Colonel Pride had dutifully paid thirty shillings. Totally incomprehensible, but seemed to have been well-received by people going in for that kind of thing. So this affair on the golf-course was extremely vexatious. Colonel Pride was quite annoyed about it.

‘Damned stupid affair,’ Colonel Pride said.

‘Tommy – would you mind telling me frankly whether anybody is saying that in the sense of insinuating that Bobby has cooked it all up?’

‘Nobody’s going to say that to me, John.’ Colonel Pride, who was drinking Appleby’s whisky in the library at Dream, set down his tumbler with an alarming crack on the marble chimney-piece. ‘And Howard has no such idea in his head. It was plain to him from the start, he says, that Bobby believed his own story.’ Pride paused. ‘Of course there was the constable, who was with them when they walked up to this bunker. And there was the police surgeon, who arrived a minute or two later, and there were the ambulance men, who arrived a minute or two after that. There were some idlers as well – but they probably made nothing of it at all. You’ll agree, I think, that it all adds up to something that can’t exactly be kept quiet. That being so, we might as well run the perpetrators to earth, and have it in for them. Wouldn’t you say?’

It was a moment before Appleby took in the implication of this. When he did so, he pushed his own tumbler away from him.

‘Might as well?’ he asked slowly. ‘We might debate whether to or not? You take the whole thing to have been an idiotic joke – perpetrated not by Bobby, but upon him?’

‘Howard is inclined to see it that way.’ Colonel Pride reflected for a moment, and appeared to conclude that this was not quite a straight answer. ‘I can’t say more about myself, John, than that I’m at a good deal of a loss before the whole thing.’

‘Bobby
felt
the body, you know. He got his hand on to the man’s bare back. He says it was stone cold.’

‘Howard maintains that any slightly chilly body will feel like that if you place a warm hand on it.’

‘That is true. All the same, Tommy, any such theory positively posits my son as subject to hallucination. Think what he swears to – for it comes to that – about the state of the head.’

‘Yes.’ Colonel Pride looked unhappy. ‘But there was no blood found in that confounded bunker – not even after they’d sifted down quite a way.’

‘There needn’t have been – if the man had been dead for some time before they chucked him there.’

‘Howard says that.’ Pride brightened a little at this. ‘Only, you know, the whole thing is such nonsense. As a crime, I mean.’

‘Tommy, are your people, or are they not,
treating
this as a crime?’

‘Of course they are, so far as the most rigorous inquiry is concerned.’ It looked for a moment as if Pride had been seriously offended. ‘Owe it to your boy, my dear chap, to have every man in my force looking for a criminal. Nothing turned up yet. No line on a stranger to the district with a missing finger, or on an unknown girl, or on a car with two men and a trailer-caravan. And in point of what we can usefully look for, that’s about it.’

‘Certainly it is. Or that, and any report of a man gone missing elsewhere. A missing man with a missing finger – even if it were in Chicago or Marrakesh – would be a line at once.’

‘Marrakesh?’ For a moment Pride appeared to perpend this hyperbole conscientiously. ‘Yes, of course. But we’ve had all that from your old colleagues at the Yard already. Remarkable efficiency nowadays in the way information is categorized. Several people with missing right forefingers have gone missing in the UK in the last ten years. But, dead or alive, all have turned up again. So that tells us nothing at all.’

‘In a fairly short time, Tommy, it might tell us quite a lot. If you grant that there
was
a body – and an entirely dead one – then the fact that nobody in the near future starts inquiring about a missing man mutilated in this way–’

‘That would put the corpse roughly in a category, I agree. What they call a drop-out, or the like. Incidentally, your son says the fellow’s clothes suggested reasonable prosperity.’ Pride hesitated. ‘Do you know? I gather Bobby won’t say much about the girl. She was blonde and a lady. He doesn’t go much beyond that.’

‘Gentlemen prefer blondes.’

‘Just what do you mean by that?’

‘Not a great deal, perhaps.’ Appleby hesitated. The affair of the body in the bunker was, in an important sense, very much Bobby’s own affair. He mustn’t be nudged by his father unless he asked to be nudged. He mustn’t even be too much talked about, even to a family friend like Tommy Pride. On the other hand, something patent about Bobby that Pride or Pride’s men simply hadn’t noticed might just as well be named now. ‘Only,’ Appleby said, ‘that the boy seems to have been rather struck by the girl.’

Pride drained his whisky, and shook his head as Appleby’s hand went hospitably out to the decanter. He gave a moment to examining the empty fireplace, and a couple more to finding and lighting a cigarette. It was clear that the admirable man felt this whole damnable piece of jiggery-pokery to have its delicate side.

‘Easy on the eyes, and all that?’ he asked. ‘Clean-cut girl? I’m sure your boy would have good taste where a filly’s concerned. But you don’t think he’s sitting tight on something because of having taken a fancy to her? Chivalry – that sort of thing?’