An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  ‘It’s his right index finger.’

  ‘You are very observant. I hadn’t noticed.’ Now the girl was looking away – out over the golf-course. It was as if this last small thing was more physically discomposing than everything else. Bobby had felt the same. But then Bobby had a particular reason for it. ‘Perhaps,’ the girl added, ‘I thought it was just curled up. If I thought anything at all.’

  ‘It may be coincidence. I think perhaps I will have a look. I can just turn the head a very little.’

  ‘Why not?’ The girl seemed almost amused. ‘One mustn’t be squeamish. Go ahead.’ She had moved to the farther lip of the bunker, and so was on a higher level than Bobby. ‘I can see somebody,’ she said. ‘No, it’s a couple of people. On the verge of the road. Shall I go and disturb their picnic?’

  ‘People don’t picnic at this hour of the morning.’ Bobby – rather carefully watching where he put his feet again – walked round the bunker to join her. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not the technical word. They have a caravan – a trailer. It’s their breakfast.’

  ‘And they run to a pretty powerful car.’ The appearance which the girl had spotted was really too far off to be made much of, and it was only from this slightly more elevated perch that it was visible at all. ‘They look as if they were packing up,’ Bobby said. ‘And I’m fairly sure we oughtn’t to let them go. Or not without getting the number of their car. It’s just possible they may have seen something that’s important in this business. I’ll sprint over to them.’

  ‘I’ll do that. I don’t run too badly. And if they do get on their way, they’re more likely to stop at a wave from a girl than a man. And you get off to the telephone. The…the corpse can look after itself for the inside of ten minutes.’

  ‘Right!’ It seemed to Bobby there was sense in this. ‘If they’re not cooperative, scare them with the police.’

  Hardly waiting for this last injunction, the girl turned and ran. It was true that this was something she knew how to do. For a brief moment Bobby watched her. Then he himself swung round and made for the club-house.

  He remembered as he ran that he hadn’t, after all, managed to glimpse the features of the dead man. So he didn’t yet know – although he must soon – whether it could really, by some amazing chance, be Bloody Nauze who was lying in the bunker. Nauze (whose name rhymed with ‘rose’) had always been called that – partly because of the joke and partly because he was bloody. Although he couldn’t, that was to say, have been called with the slightest fairness a pathological sadist (supposing small boys to have been able to command such an expression), he had certainly been much too free with a gym-shoe to be an agreeable feature of a private school. Bobby had heard of this propensity of Bloody Nauze during his first night in dorm. He hadn’t, he seemed to recall, been a particularly timid infant. On the other hand, since he had never once been hit up to that point in his young life, he had no means of estimating how much a gym-shoe would hurt. He had therefore been alarmed, on the following morning, to learn that Mr Nauze was going to be responsible for guiding his first steps in the Latin tongue. Looking back later, Bobby had never had any inclination to suppose that it had been other than a mild and compassable alarm. But perhaps, in an instantly suppressed sort of way, it had really been a wild terror. For that was what he felt when Bloody Nauze suddenly shouted and pointed at him. The man had merely shouted ‘Next boy!’ when in quest of something like the genitive plural of mensa. And he had pointed at Bobby similarly without any sinister intent. Bobby was the next boy, and he had simply wanted to make that fact rapidly clear. But – had it been for seconds, or had it been for a whole day? – Bobby had been really bothered. He had been really bothered (he had imagined) at being pointed at with an index finger which wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t the action – Bobby, a child of precociously reflective habit, had soon concluded – of what you could call a well-regulated mind. The chap did, after all, have a left hand, and why couldn’t he use that? He’d used it for the gym-shoe. Not that that had turned out, after all, much to darken Bobby’s days. Bobby had ended up getting on rather well with Bloody Nauze. For one thing, the chap had taught Latin admirably.

  But all that had been at least twelve years ago. Bobby almost slackened his pace to a more elderly sort of run as this shocking fact was borne in upon him. If you could look back a dozen years like that, then in no time you would be looking back twenty or forty. His parents were fond of doing just that in their table-talk, and sometimes he had to repress an irrational panic as he listened. Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws. That sort of feeling.

  There still seemed to be not a soul around the club-house, and to get to the telephone he had to let himself in with his father’s key. He himself was only some sort of guest-member, and hadn’t a key of his own. But he had no difficulty about making the call, since there was a public telephone just inside the entrance. Bobby dialled 999 – which meant, he supposed, that he didn’t even have to pay. And got through to the police station immediately. He thought he had better begin by identifying himself.

  ‘My name’s Appleby,’ Bobby said.

  ‘Yes, Sir John.’ The voice at the other end was rather notably brisk and alert.

  ‘No, that’s my father. Robert Appleby.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Appleby.’ This time, the voice suggested a relaxed attention.

  ‘I’m speaking from the club-house on the golf-course. I’ve found a dead man. In a bunker.’

  ‘Found a dead man.’ Now the voice indicated transcription in long-hand into a notebook. ‘In a bunker.’ There was a pause. ‘Are you sure he’s dead, sir?’

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  ‘Very good, sir. We’ll be with you in no time.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Bobby felt obscurely that this colloquy had been a little lacking in drama. ‘Ought I to call a doctor?’

  ‘You can leave that to us, sir. And no need to worry.’ The voice had decided to suggest reassurance and even benevolence. ‘Just stay where you are, and we’ll contact you within ten minutes.’

  ‘I rather think I ought to be getting back to the bunker. There’s a young–’

  ‘We’d prefer you to wait for us, Mr Appleby.’ For the first time, the voice was authoritative. ‘Remaining by the instrument from which a call is made cuts out confusion and often saves time. Routine request, sir.’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Bobby wasn’t too pleased, and he felt suddenly tempted to administer a smart shock. So he succumbed to decidedly stretching his existing sense of the situation. ‘But it looks like murder, and I’ve seen some men preparing to make off in a car. So you’d better hurry up.’

  And Bobby put down the receiver. It wasn’t without a sense that his last effort had been a shade childish. There hadn’t, after all, been the slightest suggestion that the chap in the police station at Linger had proposed to waste a moment. And something of the marked courtesy which he’d noticed his father was careful to employ in any relations with the country constabulary was no doubt incumbent on other Applebys as well. Bobby didn’t mean to be a policeman. But he had a high sense of the eminence to which his father had attained in that odd walk of life.

  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 droppe
d 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.’

  2

  ‘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?’