The Man from the Sea

by Michael Innes

  “Turning my coat again, I think you mean? I suppose it might be put that way.”

  “You have plans?”

  “I have a very simple plan.”

  “But not so simple that you don’t require help?”

  “It’s possible that I need only a bowl of water – in addition, that is, to what are clearly these admirable clothes. If I can get rid of this sand and reasonably see–” Day broke off – and a moment later uttered in a strange voice a single word. “Harris!”

  “What’s that?” Cranston was startled.

  “This jacket – or whatever it is. Harris tweed. I suddenly got the smell of it – and smell’s a damned queer thing. It’s four years since I’ve had decent – since I’ve had western clothes in my hands. Clothes are damned queer too, by the way.”

  Cranston made no reply. Sally’s delay was disturbing, but nevertheless he hoped now that it would last a little longer. If he said nothing Day might fall silent – and then he could think. He desperately needed to. He was aware that some great responsibility had descended upon him, and that he must put himself the right questions and find himself the right answers. When Day – as a mere unknown – had come a fugitive from the sea Cranston had prided himself on finding one right answer at once. In his own private affairs he had guessed very badly – had behaved very badly. He had been becoming aware of it. And the ability suddenly to decide rightly about the fugitive – to acknowledge that he must be given simple human solidarity until he had a chance to declare and explain himself: this ability had brought him its odd comfort for a time. But how was he to act now – suddenly caught up by the necessity not for some merely private decision but for a decision very conceivably involving vast public issues?

  His first duty was to remember his years. He saw this at once – and felt a faint flicker of intellectual satisfaction, of intellectual pride, in so seeing it. At least he still had a clear head. There was a sense in which he had the largest confidence in himself, and of this not even his having so mucked things could substantially rob him. But at the same time he knew that here was something which he ought not to be taking on alone. He paused on this. Where did such an acknowledgement lead? Ought he to leave the summerhouse, affecting perhaps to search for Sally, and go straight to the house and rouse Alex Blair? And, if he turned this suggestion down, ought he not to be very sure that his reason for doing so had nothing to do with the privately disastrous disclosures that would almost certainly follow?

  For a moment it seemed to him that here was the obvious course. Blair was the nearest person of standing and of mature judgment. More than this, he was himself an eminent scientist, already knowing something of Day both as a man and as a physicist.

  Cranston extinguished his cigarette and walked out to the verandah. Day did nothing to stop him. The sky was faintly luminous and there was a bar of orange in the east. He fancied that he heard peewits crying very far away. He couldn’t go to the house. Abruptly he knew this absolutely. But he was unable to find the reason. Only he thought it wasn’t funk about Caryl. He turned back into the summerhouse and found that there was at least a line of enquiry in his head. “The police,” he said boldly. “This must mean the police for you, sooner or later. Why not now?”

  “The police? No. They’re no part of my plan.”

  “I don’t understand you. You’ve come back as the only way of – of recovering your watch. You can’t expect a reception by the Lord Mayor of London. And if you really believe that the fellow off the ship will presently be raising a whole hunt against you – well, I’d have thought you might as well get yourself safely locked up sooner rather than later.”

  “You’d like me safely locked up?”

  “I can’t be sure about you. Suppose your eyes clear up with a little bathing, and you are able to get along by yourself. Ought I just to let you disappear? Oughtn’t I to be more – more suspicious of you than that? You left this country meaning mischief to it, and it seems very possible that you’ve come back to it meaning more. If it isn’t your intention to contact the authorities, oughtn’t I to be very suspicious of your story indeed? If you can be said to have produced a story at all.”

  “You’d like to listen to the confessions of a penitent traitor? My Life of Disillusionment behind the Iron Curtain – that sort of thing?”

  “Not that. But you mayn’t be at all as you represent yourself. For instance, it seems very queer that you should just arrive like this. I don’t see how you can have done it. You must have been quite tremendously a marked man – watched and guarded right round the clock. How on earth could you have smuggled yourself on a ship due to skirt the Scottish coast?”

  “I couldn’t – and I didn’t. I wasn’t any sort of a stowaway, my dear chap. I was the star turn on board. We were on a little scientific cruise.”

  “Scientific?” Cranston reached for another cigarette. “You mean some sort of devilry?”

  “Just that. You can guess the sort of thing.” Day was ironic. “Call it doing something sinister to the Gulf Stream. Or perhaps the Sargasso Sea.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “Quite so. Still, the motive of our cruise was simple enough. Forty years ago its equivalent would have been, say, charting the other fellow’s minefields. Nowadays one noses out other things, and the job requires far higher technical skill. Not that I didn’t have the deuce of a time getting the assignment.”

  “Because you were any number of cuts above it?”

  “Just that. But I persuaded them that I had a valuable and intimate knowledge of the terrain. So they sent me. And then they let me slip. You are still sceptical?”

  “I don’t know that I can be – just about that. What I came in on didn’t look like a put-up show. But wasn’t it pretty feeble of them?”

  “Perhaps so. But it was outside their expectations, outside their very comprehensive system of suspicions. An act of sudden individual initiative, proceeding from an entirely private and personal – what shall we call it? – movement of the spirit. It’s what sometimes takes people their way, you may say. But they’re slow to realise that it can be a two-way traffic.”

  “What did your movement of the spirit prompt you to stuff in that belt?” Cranston paused – and thought that he sensed Day stiffen. “The inner secrets of the Kremlin? Chats on nuclear physics?”

  “Money – dollars and francs and pounds sterling.” Day’s familiar laugh was at its easiest. “In quite astonishingly large amounts – which I had the devil of a job getting together. If you care to hit me on the head and bury me in the garden, you can set yourself up on the proceeds handsomely.”

  For a moment Cranston said nothing, and the ugly little joke hung in air. “Money?” he asked presently. “Do your simple plans need such a lot of it? You’ll have free keep in Pentonville or Brixton.” There was a further silence, and he realised that this, too, had been ugly enough. “I just want to make sense of you,” he said.

  “I hadn’t much idea, you see, where my break-away might happen. Or who might have to be bribed to do what. I envisaged a great many possibilities. Science, you know, trains one to that sort of thinking ahead.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have trained you to think sufficiently ahead in the first instance.”

  “We can all get things wrong.”

  They were back, Cranston felt, where they had started. He went again to the door and listened. Sally’s absence was now alarming. He turned round. “It would be easier, wouldn’t it, if you could bribe me?”

  “Very much easier.” Day spoke whimsically. “But of course you are incorruptible – in matters of this sort. And I don’t think you are to be blackmailed either – which is a suggestion I rather carelessly made to you. It is awkward about Lady Blair and so on. But it would no longer count with you.”

  “It certainly wouldn’t. Not now that I know who you are.”

  “But what does still count is the fact that we’ve both mucked it. My chance seems to be to trade on that.” The words
came softly to Cranston with the effect of cards dropped deliberately on a table. “Each of us has let himself down.” Day broke off. “Surely it’s growing light? What’s the time?”

  “Dawn is certainly coming. But I can’t tell you the time. I haven’t–”

  “You haven’t got a watch either. And your word for the condition is the precise one. Dishonour. And, just because you have let yourself down, you won’t now let me down – until you’re certain that I’m no good. Until you’re certain that my deep, deep dive is bogus. Isn’t it queer? Isn’t it extraordinary that, staggering at random from the sea, I should run straight into a full-blown young romantic idealist?”

  “She’s coming!” Cranston had moved swiftly to the door. Now he was back again. “Can’t you speak out – straight? What are you going to do? What’s this plan you talk about?”

  It was perhaps because Sally’s footsteps could already be heard on the path that Day replied in the softest voice he had yet used. “I’ve told you that my plan is very simple. It’s the simplest of all plans.”

  “The simplest – ?”

  “Ssh!”

  6

  The girl was in the doorway. She carried a bowl and a large jug, and there was a basket over her arm. “It’s no good,” she said, “trying to beat the dawn at this time of year.”

  Cranston took the jug from her. “As a matter of fact, you’ve been rather a long time. It wasn’t…your mother again?”

  “I’ve no doubt Mother is asleep – ankle and all.” Sally put down the bowl and basket composedly. “Alex.”

  “Alex!” He was startled.

  “I thought your friend would at least be dressed.” She turned to Day. “You’re not a doctor – or anything like that? You have no special knowledge of what to do? The water’s warm, and with boracic. I’d simply try opening your eyes in it. And I’ve brought some of the dark stuff – argyrol, isn’t it? – and a dropper. Will you come over here?”

  She was as impersonal as a nurse, and Day submitted to her. Cranston watched from a corner. There was still no more than a pale grey light in the summerhouse, but objects and actions could be distinguished. Certainly there could now be no question of getting away under cover of any approximation to darkness.

  “Sally,” he said, “you mean that Sir Alex knows?”

  “Knows what, Dick?”

  The cool question seemed to him like a flash of lightning on what Sally herself must now know. But he went through with answering steadily. “About this chap – and what we’re up to.”

  “I’ll empty out this water. And then you can try again. Do you want a towel?” Sally made various dispositions at the table before she turned again to Cranston. “I’d just got into the house when there was – Alex. He was up and prowling. I can’t think why.”

  “The shots, perhaps. If he heard them he’d know at once it wasn’t aircraft practising.”

  “No doubt. It was awkward.”

  “I’m frightfully sorry, Sally.”

  “Really?” For a second she was rather coldly mocking. “It was one of those occasions on which one has to risk a great deal of the truth in order not to give away the whole of it.”

  There was a little silence. The words, quietly uttered in the fresh young voice, seemed to hang oddly in the air. It was Day who spoke. “Did you feel that you had so much truth at your disposal?”

  She made no reply to this. It was as if she was determined to have only the most businesslike relations with him. Instead she turned again to Cranston. “I told him that it was you – here in the summerhouse, Dick. I told him that you had wakened me by throwing gravel at my window, and that it was a question of some poaching exploit gone wrong. You and a friend had been guddling Lord Urquhart’s trout – and had lost nearly all your clothes and come by a great many scratches. Of course I’m sorry to have represented you in rather a juvenile light. You’re the last person I’d really think of as – getting into mischief. But I had to consider what would amuse Alex – amuse him without really interesting him. I gather you don’t want him out here.”

  “I don’t think we do.”

  “If he does come out it will be in the most good-natured way in the world – a matter of what he calls jollying you up.” She spoke with her flicker of fastidious disdain. “But you can bank on his laziness, no doubt.”

  Day raised his head from the big bowl. “Is Sir Alex Blair so very lazy?”

  “If he weren’t wealthy and lazy he’d be in the very top flight of British scientists today. And he knows it, I imagine.” Her voice was indifferent. “Has all this helped?”

  “It has made me much more comfortable. But I still can’t really see.”

  “Hadn’t we better get a doctor?”

  Day shook his head. “My guess is that time, and only time, will clear it up. A doctor would do no more than produce reassuring talk and a roll of bandages.”

  “I haven’t any talk. But I can produce dark glasses. I slipped some into the basket. Also a flask of brandy, a packet of biscuits and a block of chocolate. And, Dick, here’s the pullover. Canary, I’m afraid – but it won’t go too badly with your tan. I shall go in now – and leave you to evolve whatever further adventure you have a mind to.”

  She was gone – before Cranston could speak. But he strode after her and caught her on the verandah. “Sally–” He broke off, confused and finding himself without words.

  They were facing each other. He had a sense that – inexplicably – she was trembling all over. But for the moment they stood confronted, her gaze at least was perfectly steady. “I know how you feel,” she said. “At least… I know how you feel.”

  She had turned, run down the little flight of steps, and was hurrying through the dimness of the garden. He found himself repeating the banal words as if they had come to him charged with impenetrable mystery.

  “A capable girl.” Day was opening the brandy flask.

  “Yes.”

  “Knows just what she is about.”

  For a moment Cranston was silent. These last words – he strangely and intuitively knew – were not true. Perhaps Day was deceived. But Day was a liar. He had to remember that. All the stuff about diamonds: the fellow would have persisted in it if there had been a chance of sustaining that particular deception… “Shall we get back to business?” Cranston asked.

  “Brandy, biscuits and chocolate are decidedly part of our business at present. Would you pour out? It’s a thing the blind find tricky.” Day paused only for a moment. “Do you play rugger?”

  “Yes.” Cranston poured – and drank.

  “Three-quarter?”

  “Yes. But I don’t see–”

  “That we’re getting back to business? But we are, you know. You had fumbled a pass. How unforgivably, you were just coming to realise. And you remember the next stage? An absolute determination to take the ball cleanly next time. Well – I’m the ball. I think that was about as far as we had got.”

  “And I think you’ve laboured all that long enough. I’m prepared to admit that it’s not precisely nonsense. But taking the ball cleanly mayn’t at all mean anything that you greatly fancy.” Cranston reached for a biscuit and paused to munch it. “Your story may be full of psychological interest. Your wanderings – physical and spiritual – among the nations may open up all sorts of fascinating vistas upon the dilemma of modern man. Everything of that sort. High-class thriller stuff, in which recurrent chapters are devoted to an anatomy of the soul.” The small swig of brandy, Cranston realised, had gone straight to his head. “But the fact remains that you are almost certainly even more dangerous than you are interesting. Taking you cleanly ought perhaps to mean putting you inside as fast as the job can be done… I’ve halved the chocolate.”

  “Thank you – and of course you’re right. There’s a presumption, I mean, that I’m far too dangerous not to jump on. But suppose it’s otherwise. Suppose I can convince you that – well, that all that’s over and done with. Suppose you wanted to help me
– to go on helping me, I ought to say. Could you do it?”

  “Could I help you?” Cranston was disconcerted at being thus abruptly placed once more in the position of the challenged party.

  “Just that. For there’s not much point in my telling you anything more – opening any of those fascinating vistas you’re so neatly ironic about – if in fact your neat undergraduate wit is altogether in excess of your practical capacities. I’ll admit you cut a pretty good figure, my dear young man, in the matter of the fellow with the gun. But are you resourceful? And are you your own master at present from day to day? Could you get a blinded man from here to London – perhaps against desperate opposition? There’s more to a good wing-three-quarter, you’ll agree, than just taking the ball cleanly. He has to carry it over the line.”

  “I think you have the most frightful cheek.” Reduced to this rather juvenile sentiment, Cranston picked up another square of chocolate. Brandy, he had decided, was an unsuitable sort of refreshment at dawn.

  “Alex Blair, I take it, is the grand person hereabouts – the laird, and all that. We’re now in the grounds of the big house.”

  “It’s a castle, as a matter of fact – Dinwiddie Castle. And I’m not sure that ‘laird’ is quite grand enough for our host. Not that he wouldn’t be perfectly pleased with it.”

  “And you? It’s plain that you are on terms of intimacy – varying degrees of intimacy, shall we say? – with the grand folk. But who are you? And where do you come from?”

  “I’m the doctor’s son – and from three miles away. But my parents are very respectable.” No doubt because of the brandy, Cranston was unable to refrain from further sarcasm. “Our family connections are, if anything, superior to the Blairs’. So if you’re wondering if I qualify for your–”

  “And you can come and go as you please during your holidays – your vacation? You can go home this morning and simply announce that you will be away for a week?”

  Cranston flushed. “Of course I can.”

  “Borrowing a car?”

  “I’ve got a car.”