by Nevil Shute
She leaned both arms upon the hood of the car and looked straight at me. “He was saying such funny things,” she remarked.
I nodded ruefully. “I expect he was. What did he say?”
She considered for a minute. “It was all so mixed up,” she said. “He seemed to be talking most of the time about a long night flight that he had made in the dark. In the cold.” She glanced at me. “Do you know where that was?”
I shook my head.
“It was over snowy country, and it was very cold. He was frozen in his seat so stiff that he couldn’t move, and his head kept dropping forward with the sleepiness of it. And to keep himself awake he raised his goggles, and the cold bit his face and made his eyes water, and the tears froze on his cheeks. And he was most terribly frightened.”
She paused. “That’s one of them. He gets a sort of cold fit every now and again, and whenever he gets that he comes back to talking about that cold flight. He shivers.”
“Poor old soul,” I remarked. “What else did he say?”
“He was talking a lot about his wife. But I don’t want to repeat that, and there wasn’t anything that really mattered. Except to them.”
“All right. What else?”
It was very quiet by the river. “He was talking about a man called Poddy Armstrong that he used to meet at the Royal Aero Club. It was rather horrid, that. Where’s the Royal Aero Club, Mr. Moran?”
“It’s a London club,” I said. “In Clifford Street.” I glanced at her. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that Poddy Armstrong was chasing him in another machine, and trying to shoot him down in the dark.”
She stared at me. “How did you know?”
“Why,” I said simply, “he told me.”
“Why was Poddy Armstrong going to shoot at him?”
I took a long time over answering that question. “Perhaps they’d had a quarrel,” I suggested in the end.
She was about to say something to that, but checked herself. I knew that I had hurt her. In the end she smiled at me. “I know it’s not my business,” she said. “But one can’t help being curious.”
“Neither yours nor mine,” I said. “It’s his own affair. He’s been in a good bit of trouble lately, one way and another. He told me some of it last night, when we didn’t go to bed. Did he say any more?”
She considered for a little. “No. Only one funny thing happened. He woke up at about three o’clock, and we gave him a drink of barley water. He was quieter then, and he seemed so hot. We thought it’d be a good thing. He asked for you. And I said that you were away, but you’d be back presently. And then he said a funny thing.” She eyed me steadily. “He said you played the Spring Song at him.”
“Is that all he said?”
“That’s all. It didn’t seem to make sense. He just rolled over and went to sleep when we’d given him his drink. I think he’s sleeping still.”
I sat there staring at the last gleams of sunshine upon the radiator thermometer of my car. It wanted polishing.
“Did you?” she inquired.
I turned to her. “I don’t play at people,” I replied. “I play because I want to. Lenden’s a sick man, and sick men have fancies. You mustn’t pay any attention to them.”
The sun was just disappearing behind the down; in the fading light the soft brown hair clustered about her neck was all streaked and shot with gold. I had loved her for two years, and I had given up being hurt by things like that.
There was silence for a moment. Then I pulled my gauntlets farther on to my hands, leaned over, and slipped the catch of the door. It swung open by its own weight.
“Would you care for a lift home?” I said. “I must get back.”
She got in without a word, and I started off for the Hall. That was a silent drive. It wasn’t till I had driven into the yard and stopped the engine of the car in the coach-house that we spoke again.
“Of course,” I said as the engine came to rest, “he’s a man who’s had a pretty rough time of it. You can see that for yourself.” I paused, and chose my words. “He may even have got himself into trouble. If that were so, it would be a pity to remember anything that he may have said in fever, when he wasn’t himself.”
She glanced up at me in surprise. “But he didn’t say anything that he need be ashamed of. Rather the opposite.”
“No. But he may have said things that he’d rather not have talked about.
“In fact,” I said, “he did.”
There was a long silence after that. Finally she stirred, and got out of the car. “I knew it was something like that, of course,” she said, and sighed. “It’s a pity, because he’s a nice man.” She turned away. “All right, Mr. Moran, I’ll not give him away. And I’ll see Mrs. Richards.”
She left the coach-house, and went walking across the yard towards the mansion. I sat there in the car staring after her for a little, wondering how much she knew.
Lenden was asleep when I got back to my house, and a maid was sitting in the adjoining room. I sent her back to the mansion and went in and had a look at him. I stood in the door for a while, staring moodily at him as he lay in bed. He was sleeping fairly quietly, though there was an odd, flushed look about him; his head was tousled and unshaven. There was a glass of barley water on the table by his side, and a few biscuits. Clearly the sleep was doing him a world of good; in view of the life that he had been leading during the last few days, that was hardly a matter for surprise. I stood there in the doorway for a long time staring at him, and wondering what the devil was going to happen about it all.
CHAPTER THREE
LENDEN SLEPT TILL about nine o’clock that night, and woke up more or less himself. I was working at the rent rolls in the sitting-room when I heard him stirring through the open doors, because it was getting on towards Quarter Day, and I’m always pretty full up about that time. I went in to have a look at what he was up to, and found him sitting up in bed.
“Evening,” I said. “How d’you feel now?”
He moistened his lips. “I’m better,” he said thickly. He shivered suddenly, and slid down beneath the bedclothes again. “I’ve had the hell of a go . . . this time. A proper searcher.”
I went and sat on the foot of his bed. “Want a drink? There’s something there — barley water, or something. Or I’ll get you a whisky.”
He craned his head to look at the tumbler. “No. Thanks. Not now. I’ll go to sleep again in a bit. I don’t ever remember being like this. What’s the time?”
“About nine o’clock.”
He passed one hand heavily across his forehead. “There was a girl here this afternoon,” he muttered. “She gave me some stuff to drink.”
I nodded. “Miss Darle,” I said. “She told me she’d been with you.”
“Oh.” He was silent for a minute. “I was talking a good bit,” he said thickly. “I hope to God I wasn’t telling stories.”
I laughed. “I don’t know what you said,” I remarked. “But, anyway, you didn’t say anything to shock her.”
He smiled faintly. “That’s all right, then,” he muttered. “Matter of fact, I don’t know what I was talking about, but I know I was talking.”
I made him comfortable for the night, persuaded him to have a drink, and he rolled over on his side to go to sleep again. I left him to it.
I went back into the sitting-room and shut up my books. There were a couple of ledgers and the cash-book of the mansion there among the others; I piled these three together and went to put them in the safe. The top of the safe is a sort of repository for all the odds and ends that lie about my rooms and never get tidied up. I was brought up sharply as I approached it by the sight of that box of plates.
There it was, lying on the top of the safe with all the other junk. One of the maids must have put it there when she tidied up the room in the morning. I opened the safe and put away my books, and then picked this thing up and carried it over to the fire. It was a rectangular, flat metal box, roughly half-pla
te size, made of brass oxidised or blackened in some way, and neatly finished.
I sat down uneasily before the fire, and had a good look at the thing. It wasn’t mine. It hadn’t anything to do with me, really. It belonged to Lenden, and to him it was worth approximately one thousand pounds — the fee that he had taken. He had that money in his bank.
It was nothing to do with me at all. That was the basic conclusion that I came to, at the end of a quarter of an hour.
I sat there for a long time, turning the thing over uneasily in my hands, wondering what the devil they were up to at Portsmouth, and why the Soviet wanted to know about it. I didn’t see what interest it could hold for them; they couldn’t possibly be contemplating naval action against us. They hadn’t got a navy, for one thing. I didn’t see why they should be interested in our dockyards, other than from a purely academic stand-point. It seemed to me that their attitude might very well be: “That’s a nice-looking dockyard; let’s have one like that at Tkechkrotsz” — but it was hardly likely that they would be interested in the proposition— “That’s the place to hit this handsome dockyard a cruel blow when we want to put it out of action next week.”
And yet, it must be something like that. The people at Portsmouth evidently thought it was important, to judge from the precautions they were taking. Sending up aeroplanes to shoot him down . . . It seemed to me that he couldn’t possibly have been right about that. His nerves had been running away with him. Three long night flights on end. They must have been.
In any case, it didn’t seem to me that I could do anything about it. It was Lenden’s business. I’ve never been a man to go butting into another chap’s affairs, and it didn’t seem to me that I could go to him and talk about Our Dear Old Country, and what a sin and a shame it was to go and take photographs of it when it wasn’t looking. No, I could only leave it to him to do what he thought best, though I knew what that would be. He’d taken their money, and he’d do their work. Still, it was none of my business, and in that resolve I went to bed.
I didn’t sleep very well. I was still worried about those photographs. And in the intervals of that I was thinking of the quiet time I had had at Under since the war. I kept sleepily conning over the details of that sale at Pithurst, and the way I’d been able to run up the auction on that stock to make the price. And then I got to thinking of all the other times that Arner had set me on to do that sort of thing, and the way we’d been running the estate since the war. And I thought that really, taking it by and large, we’d made a pretty good show of it. Mind, we’ve got good land and a good crowd of farmers, and that helps. But we’d made that part of Sussex pretty prosperous. We’d been stuffing back into the land pretty well all that we took out of it. And I knew that Ellersleigh, whose land marched with ours to the north and west, was doing the same.
And then I got to worrying about those photographs again, and to thinking what a corking good county Sussex was. It was about three in the morning before I fell asleep.
Next day was a day of accounts. I spent it entirely at the office with my clerk, deep in the usual Quarter Day rush. I saw Lenden in the morning before I went out. He was looking a bit the worse for wear, but his temperature was practically normal. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get away. I sat and talked to him for a little after breakfast, but avoided any direct or indirect question as to what he was going to do. I didn’t think he knew himself. Till he had made up his mind there was very little to be done; I just encouraged him to stay in bed for another day, and left him to it.
That was Saturday. Arner was in Town that week, living at the house in Curzon Street and oscillating between the Foreign Office and the Athenæum. In the middle of the afternoon I had a trunk call from him.
“Is that Moran?”
“Speaking, sir.”
“Moran. I shall be coming down this afternoon by the four-fifty. You’d better send the car to Petersfield, I think.”
“Right you are, sir. I’ll see to that.”
“And, Moran. I am bringing Wing-Commander Dermott, of the Air Ministry, down with me. He will be staying with us over the week-end. Will you ring up the Hall and let them know? We will dine at eight o’clock tonight.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll ring up at once.”
“And, Moran. I should be very glad if you would dine with us this evening. Is Sheila dining in to-night?”
“I think so. I haven’t heard that she’ll be away.”
“Oh. Then we shall be an odd number. Still, I should be very glad if you would dine with us. I want you to meet Dermott.”
“I’d like to very much, sir.”
“All right. Is there anything else?”
I stirred in my chair, and settled to the more important business of my work. “That sale of Petersen’s yesterday, over at Pithurst. It went off very well.”
I gave him a short summary of the business done and the prices the beasts went for. We had another three minutes over that, and then he rang off.
I called up the house to give them their instructions, and settled to my accounts again. But my work was spoilt. Arner’s sudden introduction of this Wing-Commander worried me and took my mind completely off my business. In all the years I had been at Under we had never entertained any officer of His Majesty’s Royal Air Force. This was something quite new. Lord Arner was over seventy at that time, and a Civil Servant of the old type. We had Admirals and Generals at Under frequently, because these were old friends of his — men that he had known at school and at Oxford and at the Athenæum. The Air Force was since his time — something new, and possibly not quite nice. I don’t think he had any definite bias against it, but . . . it was since his time. He didn’t know any of their Group-Captains, or Air Vice-Marshals, or whatever their peculiar titles were. They were all twenty years or so younger than he. And so it happened that Wing-Commander Dermott would be the first officer of that distinguished service who had ever been to Under, unless it was myself.
I wondered irritably who he was, and what the devil he was doing here. I couldn’t repress a most uneasy feeling that he was after me.
There was a book that I wanted to consult, and I gave up the pretence of work at the office early in its favour. I left the town at about tea-time, and walked back to the Hall. I crossed the stable-yard, entered the mansion by the back door, went through into the Hall, and so to the library. The volume that I wanted lives on the writing-table there, together with Whitaker and Bradshaw. I crossed the room and opened it upon the blotting pad.
“D for Dermott,” said Miss Darle reflectively.
It was a dull evening and that room faces north, as all libraries should; in the dim light I hadn’t noticed her sitting in a deep chair before the fire. She couldn’t have been reading because it was too dark; if I had thought about it at all, I had assumed that she was in the drawing-room. Now that’s a queer thing. Looking back upon those days now, it seems very strange that I shouldn’t have known that she was with me in the room. But I didn’t.
I glanced towards her chair. “Exactly,” I replied. “I always have to do this, I’m afraid. I’m not sufficiently acquainted with the beau monde.”
I turned the pages to the Ds.
“His name’s John Hilary Dermott,” she said quietly, without stirring from where she sat. “He went to school at Uppingham. And then he went to Sandhurst. And then he went into the Shropshires, and then he got transferred to the balloon service of the Sappers, before they made it into the Flying Corps.”
I had found the place by now. She was quite right, except that he was attached and not transferred. He had served with the flying branch of the Army from 1912 till it became the Royal Air Force, and so had attained the rank of Wing-Commander (Int.) at the age of thirty-eight.
“What does Int. after his name mean?” she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders casually. “I don’t know,” I replied. But I did. It meant Intelligence, and the sight of it gave me a nasty turn.
I stood ther
e blankly for a minute, wondering if I ought to get Lenden out of the place before he came.
Sheila Darle got up from beside the fire and came over towards that writing-table by the window. I was still staring at that brief account.
“Mr. Moran,” she said gently.
I raised my head to meet her eyes.
“Is this bloke coming on any sticky business?”
There was no point in beating about the bush. She knew too much already.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I hope to God he’s not. I don’t see how he could possibly be. But . . . I don’t know.”
She stood there eyeing me for a moment, silent. And then at the last she said:
“Can I do anything? Anything at all?”
I turned to face her. “I don’t think there’s anything you could do,” I replied. “It’s just that he’s got himself into the dickens of a mess. And I suppose I’m in it too. It’s a rotten business to be mixed up in, and I’d rather that you kept out of it.”
“It’s with Russia?” she inquired.
I nodded. “Yes.”
She thought about it for a minute. “I’m so frightfully sorry,” she said quietly. “If I can do anything at all to help, you must let me know.”
And went.
I put that book back in its place between Whitaker and Bradshaw, left the library, and went over to my own house. Lenden was still in bed, but sitting up and reading a novel; he was looking very much more himself. He said that he was getting up next day. He said that it had been damn good of me to let him lie up like that.
I cut him short, and went and sat on the end of his bed. “D’you know anything about a fellow called Dermott?” I inquired. “Wing-Commander Dermott?”
He wrinkled his brows, and shook his head slowly. “No. I’ve heard the name somewhere.”
“Well,” I said, “he’s coming down here to-night. Lord Arner’s bringing him down to spend the week-end.” I paused. “The only thing I know about him is that he’s in the R.A.F. Intelligence.”
