The Singing Sands ag-6

by Josephine Tey

  ‘Sounds like a prison. Why does she stay?’

  ‘A prison! No Prison Committee would consider it for a moment; questions would be asked in the House immediately about its lack of light, heating, sanitary conveniences, colour, beauty, space, and what not. She stays because she loves the place. I doubt if she can stay much longer, however. Death duties have been so heavy that she will have to sell.’

  ‘But will anyone buy it?’

  ‘Not to live in. But some speculator will buy it, and cut down the woods. The lead on the roof would probably fetch something; and they’d have to take the roof off anyhow to avoid paying tax on the house.’

  ‘Hah! Dust-bowl stuff,’ remarked Mr Cullen. ‘It hasn’t a moat, by any chance?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I must see a moat before I go back to OCAL.’ And then, after a pause, ‘I’m really very worried about Bill, Mr Grant.’

  ‘Yes, it is certainly very odd.’

  ‘That was nice of you,’ Mr Cullen said unexpectedly.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Not to say: “Don’t you worry, he’ll turn up all right!” I can hardly keep my hands off people who say: “Don’t you worry, he’ll turn up.” I could strangle them.’

  Moymore Hotel was a tiny version of Kentallen, without the turrets. But it was whitewashed and cheerful, and the trees behind it were coming into leaf. In the little flagged entrance-hall Mr Cullen hesitated.

  ‘In Britain I notice people don’t ask you up to their hotel bedroom. Would you like to wait in the sitting-room, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh, no; I’ll come up. I don’t think we have any feeling about hotel bedrooms. It is probably just that our hotel sitting-rooms are so near our bedrooms that there is no need to go up, and so we don’t suggest it. When a public lounge is a day’s journey from your own room it is easier to take a guest with you, I suppose. That way you are at least in the same hemisphere.’

  Mr Cullen had a front room, looking across the road to the fields and the river and the hills beyond. With his professional eye Grant noticed the log fire ready-laid in the hearth and the daffodils in the window: Moymore had standards; with his personal mind he was concerned for this Tad Cullen, who had interrupted his leave and come to the wilds of Caledonia to find the friend who meant so much to him. A foreboding that he could not shake off had grown in him with every step of the way to Moymore, and now it filled him to the point of nausea.

  The young man took a letter-case from his travelling-bag and opened it on the dressing-table. It contained practically everything but the wherewithal for writing letters. Among the mess of papers, maps, travel folders and what not, there were two leather articles: an address-book and a pocket-book. From the pocket-book he took some photographs and riffled through the feminine smiles until he found what he was looking for.

  ‘Here it is. I’m afraid it isn’t a very good one. It’s just a snapshot, you see. It was taken when a crowd of us were at the beach.’

  Grant took the proffered piece of paper, almost reluctantly.

  ‘That’s—’ Tad Cullen was beginning, lifting his arm to point.

  ‘No, wait!’ Grant said, stopping him. ‘Let me see if I—if I recognise anyone.’

  There were perhaps a dozen young men in the photograph, which had been taken on the verandah of some beach-house. They were clustered round the steps and draped over the rickety wooden railing in various stages of deshabille. Grant swept a swift glance over their laughing faces and was conscious of a great relief. There was no one there that he had ever—

  And then he saw the man on the bottom step.

  He was sitting with his feet pushed away from him into the sand, his eyes screwed up against the sun and his chin tilted back a little as if he had been in the act of turning to say something to the men behind. It was just so that his head had been tilted back against the pillow in Compartment B Seven on the morning of the 4th of March.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Is that your friend?’ Grant said, pointing to the man on the bottom step.

  ‘Yes, that’s Bill. How did you know? Have you met him somewhere, then?’

  ‘I–I’m inclined to think that I have. But of course, on that photograph, I could hardly swear to it.’

  ‘I don’t want you to do any swearing. Just give me a general weather report. Just tell me roughly when and where you saw him and I’ll track him down, don’t you be in any doubt about it. Do you know where you met him? I mean, do you remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I remember. I saw him in a compartment—a sleeping-berth compartment—of the London mail when it was running into Scoone early in the morning of the 4th of March. That was the train I came north on.’

  ‘You mean Bill came here? To Scotland? What for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t he tell you? Did you talk to him?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Grant put out his hand and pushed his companion gently backwards so that he sat down in the chair that was behind him.

  ‘I couldn’t because he was no longer alive.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘I’m truly sorry, Cullen. I wish I could pretend to you that it might not be Bill, but short of going into a witness-box on oath I am prepared to back my belief that it is.’

  After another little silence Cullen said: ‘Why was he dead? What happened to him?’

  ‘He had had a fair load of whisky and he fell backwards against the solid porcelain wash-basin. It fractured his skull.’

  ‘Who said all this?’

  ‘That was the finding of the coroner’s court. In London.’

  ‘In London? Why in London?’

  ‘Because he had died, according to the post-mortem, very shortly after leaving Euston. And by English law, a sudden death is investigated by a coroner and a jury.’

  ‘But all that’s just—just supposition,’ Cullen said, beginning to come alive and be angry. ‘If he was alone, how can anyone tell what happened to him?’

  ‘Because the English police are the most painstaking creatures as well as the most suspicious.’

  ‘Police? There were police in on this thing?’

  ‘Oh, assuredly. The police do the investigating and report in public to the coroner and his jury. In this case there had been the most exhaustive examination and tests. They knew in the end almost to a mouthful how much neat whisky he had drunk, and at what intervals before his—his death.’

  ‘And that about his falling backwards—how could they know that?’

  ‘They went prowling with microscopes. The oil and broken hair were still evident on the edge of the basin. And the skull injury was consistent with a backwards fall against just such an object.’

  Cullen calmed down at this, but he looked disorientated.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ he asked, vaguely; and then with growing suspicion: ‘How did you come to see him anyway?’

  ‘When I was on my way out I came across the sleeping-car attendant trying to rouse him. The man thought he was just sleeping it off, because the whisky bottle had rolled all over the floor and the compartment smelt as if he had been making a night of it.’

  This did not satisfy Tad Cullen. ‘You mean that was the only time you saw him? Just for a moment, lying—lying dead there, and you could recognise him from a snapshot—a not very good snapshot—weeks later?’

  ‘Yes. I was impressed by his face. Faces are my business; and in a way my hobby. I was interested in the way the slant of the eyebrows gave the face a reckless expression, even—even as it was, without any real expression whatever. And the interest was intensified in a way that was quite accidental.’

  ‘What was that?’ Cullen was not giving an inch.

  ‘When I was having breakfast, in the Station Hotel at Scoone, I found that I had picked up by accident a newspaper that had been tumbled off the berth when the attendant was trying to waken him, and in the Stop Press—the blank space, you know—some
one had been pencilling some lines of verse. “The beasts that talk, the streams that stand, the stones that walk, the singing sand—” then two blank lines, and then: “that guard the way to Paradise.”’

  ‘That was what you advertised about,’ Cullen said, his face growing momentarily blacker. ‘What was it to you that you went to the trouble of advertising about it?’

  ‘I wanted to know where the lines came from if they were lines from some book. If they were lines in the process of being made into a poem, then I wanted to know what the subject was.’

  ‘Why? What should you care?’

  ‘I had no choice in the matter. The thing ran round and round in my head. Do you know anyone called Charles Martin?’

  ‘No, I don’t. And don’t change the subject.’

  ‘I’m not changing the subject, oddly enough. Do me the kindness to think of it seriously for a moment. Have you ever, at any time, heard of or known a Charles Martin?’

  ‘I’ve told you, no! I don’t have to think. And of course you’re changing the subject! What has Charles Martin got to do with this?’

  ‘According to the police, the man who was found dead in Compartment B Seven was a French mechanic called Charles Martin.’

  After a moment Cullen said: ‘Look, Mr Grant, maybe I’m not very bright, but you’re not making sense. What you’re saying is that you saw Bill Kenrick lying dead in a compartment of a train, but he wasn’t Bill Kenrick at all; he was a man called Martin.’

  ‘No, what I’m saying is that the police believe him to be a man called Martin.’

  ‘Well, I take it they have good grounds for their belief.’

  ‘Excellent grounds. He had letters, and identity papers. Even better, his people have identified him.’

  ‘They did! Then what have you been stringing me along for! There isn’t any suggestion that that man was Bill! If the police are satisfied that the man was a Frenchman called Martin, why in thunder should you decide that he wasn’t Martin at all but Bill Kenrick!’

  ‘Because I’m the only person in the world who has seen both the man in B Seven and that snapshot.’ Grant nodded at the photograph where it lay on the dressing-table.

  This gave Cullen pause. Then he said: ‘But that’s a poor photograph. It can’t convey much to someone who has never seen Bill.’

  ‘It may be a poor photograph in the sense that it is a mere snapshot, but it is a very good likeness indeed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cullen said slowly, ‘it is.’

  ‘Consider three things; three facts. One: Charles Martin’s people had not seen him for years, and then they saw only a dead face; if you are told that your son has died, and no one suggests that there is any doubt as to identity, you see the face you expected to see. Two: the man known as Charles Martin was found dead on a train on the same day as Bill Kenrick was due to join you in Paris. Three: in his compartment there was a pencilled jingle about talking beasts and singing sands, a subject that on your own showing had interested Bill Kenrick.’

  ‘Did you tell the police about the paper?’

  ‘I tried to. They weren’t interested. There was no mystery, you see. They knew who the man was, and how he died, and that was all that concerned them.’

  ‘It might have interested them that he was writing verse in English.’

  ‘Oh, no. There is no evidence that he wrote anything, or that the paper belonged to him at all. He may have picked it up somewhere.’

  ‘The whole thing’s crazy,’ Cullen said, angry and bewildered.

  ‘It’s fantastic. But at the heart of all the whirling absurdity there is a small core of stillness.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. There is one small clear space on which one can stand while taking one’s bearings.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Your friend Bill Kenrick is missing. And out of a crowd of strange faces, I pick Bill Kenrick as a man I saw dead in a sleeping-compartment at Scoone on the morning of the 4th of March.’

  Cullen thought this over. ‘Yes,’ he said drearily, ‘I suppose that makes sense. I suppose it must be Bill. I suppose I knew all the time that something—something awful had happened. He would never have left me without word. He would have written or telephoned or something to say why he hadn’t turned up on time. But what was he doing on a train to Scotland? What was he doing on a train anyhow?’

  ‘How: anyhow?’

  ‘If Bill wanted to go somewhere he would fly. He wouldn’t take a train.’

  ‘Lots of people take a night train because it saves time. You sleep and travel at the same time. The question is: why as Charles Martin?’

  ‘I think it’s a case for Scotland Yard.’

  ‘I don’t think the Yard would thank us.’

  ‘I’m not asking for their thanks,’ Cullen said tartly, ‘I’m instructing them to find out what happened to my buddy.’

  ‘I still don’t think they would be interested.’

  ‘They’d better be!’

  ‘You have no evidence at all that Bill Kenrick didn’t duck of his own accord; that he isn’t having a good time on his own until it is time to go back to OCAL.’

  ‘But he was found dead in a railway compartment!’ Cullen said in a voice that was nearly a howl.

  ‘Oh, no. That was Charles Martin. About whom there is no mystery whatever.’

  ‘But you can identify Martin as Kenrick!’

  ‘I can say, of course, that in my opinion that face in the snapshot is the face I saw in Compartment B Seven on the morning of March the 4th. Scotland Yard will say that I am entitled to my opinion, but that I am without doubt misled by a resemblance, since the man in Compartment B Seven is one Charles Martin, a mechanic, and a native of Marseilles, in the suburbs of which his parents still live.’

  ‘You’re very smooth in the part of Scotland Yard, aren’t you! All the same—’

  ‘I ought to be. I’ve worked there for more years than I care to think about. I shall be going back there a week Monday, as soon as my holiday is over.’

  ‘You mean that you are Scotland Yard?’

  ‘Not the whole of it. One of its minor props. Props in the support sense. I don’t carry cards in my fishing clothes but if you come up to my host’s house with me he will vouch for my genuineness.’

  ‘Oh. No. No, of course I believe you, Mr—er—’

  ‘Inspector. But we’ll stick to Mr, since I’m off duty.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I was fresh. It just didn’t occur to me—You see, you don’t expect to meet Scotland Yard in real life. It’s just something you read about. You don’t expect them to—to—’

  ‘To go fishing.’

  ‘No, I guess you don’t, at that. Only in books.’

  ‘Well, now that you have accepted me as genuine, and you know that my version of Scotland Yard’s reaction is not only accurate but straight from the horse’s mouth, what are we going to do?’

  10

  When Laura heard next morning that Grant intended to go in to Scoone instead of spending the day on the river, she was indignant.

  ‘But I’ve just made up a wonderful luncheon for you and Zoë,’ she said. He was left with the impression that her dismay was rooted in some cause more valid than a miscalculated meal, but his mind was too busy with more important matters to analyse trivialities.

  ‘There’s a young American staying at Moymore who has come to ask my help about something. I thought that he might take my place on the river, if no one has any objection. He has fished quite a bit, he tells me. Perhaps Pat would like to show him the ropes.’

  Pat had come to breakfast in a state so radiant that the glow of it could be felt clear across the table. It was the first day of the Easter holidays. He looked with interest when he heard his cousin’s suggestion. There were few things in life that he enjoyed so much as showing someone something.

  ‘What’s his name?’ he asked.

  ‘Tad Cullen.’

  ‘What’s “Tad”?’

  ‘I don�
��t know. Short for Theodore, perhaps.’

  ‘M—m—m,’ said Pat doubtfully.

  ‘He’s a flyer.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Pat, his brow clearing. ‘I thought maybe with a name like that he was a professor.’

  ‘No. He flies to and fro across Arabia.’

  ‘Arabia!’ said Pat, rolling the R so that the mundane Scots breakfast table scintillated with reflections of the jewelled East. Between modern transport and ancient Bagdad, Tad Cullen seemed to have satisfactory credentials. Pat would ‘show him’ with pleasure.

  ‘Of course Zoë gets first choice of places to fish,’ Pat said.

  If Grant had imagined that Pat’s infatuation would take the form of blushing silences and a mooning adoration, he was wrong. Pat’s only sign of surrender was the constant interjection of ‘me and Zoë’ into his conversation; and it was to be observed that the personal pronoun still came first.

  So Grant borrowed the car after breakfast and went down to Moymore to tell Tad Cullen that a small boy with red hair and a green kilt would be waiting for him, with all appliances and means to boot, by the swing bridge across the Turlie. He himself would be back from Scoone in time to join them on the river some time in the afternoon, he hoped.

  ‘I’d like to come with you, Mr Grant,’ Cullen said. ‘Have you got a line on this thing? Is that why you’re going in to Scoone this morning?’

  ‘No. It’s to look for a line that I’m going in. There’s not a thing you can do just now, so you might as well have a day on the river.’

  ‘All right, Mr Grant. You’re the boss. What’s your young friend’s name?’

  ‘Pat Rankin,’ Grant said, and drove away to Scoone.

  He had spent most of last night lying awake with his eyes on the ceiling, letting the patterns in his mind slip and fade into each other like trick camera work in a film. Constantly the patterns materialised, and broke, and dissolved, never the same for two moments together. He lay supine and let them dance their endless slow interlacing; taking no part in their gyrations; as detached as if they were a display of Northern Lights.