Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  I passed him over a tumbler. “I take it that you don’t want me to say anything about that gun,” I remarked.

  He shook his head. “If you don’t mind. I wouldn’t have brought you into it if I didn’t know that you can keep your mouth shut.”

  I laughed. “No need to worry about that,” I said. “I’ve got nobody to talk to here. Nor likely to have.”

  He glanced across at me. “No,” he said quietly, “I can’t imagine how you stick it here alone. I can’t imagine why you don’t pick up some girl and marry her.”

  I was gingerly manipulating a very full siphon as he spoke; it went off suddenly and I squirted half the whisky from my glass. I refilled it carefully. “This gun,” I said. “Would it be stretching professional reticence to breaking point if I was to ask where it came from?”

  He considered for a moment. “I don’t think so. We got it off a burning motor lorry last night, on the Exeter road. There were three of them. The other two were burnt.”

  I crossed over to the fire. “Oh,” I said. “What had the driver got to say about it?”

  “There wasn’t any driver,” he replied. I raised my eyebrows. “The lorry was deserted. It was found at about four o’clock this morning, about a mile this side of Ideford, burning like a furnace. There wasn’t a soul with it — just the lorry blazing by the side of the road.”

  “What about the gun, then?” I inquired. “That gun wasn’t burnt.”

  He nodded. “That case was found behind the hedge, about fifty yards up the road from the lorry. It was found about lunchtime by the farmer, who gave it to the police. When the lorry cooled off they found the other two in among the wreckage — all burnt up, of course. And that’s literally all about it. No owner — nothing. Nothing but this one packing case behind the hedge.”

  I smiled. “It looks as if the owner’s got a packet coming to him,” I remarked. “You’ll be able to trace him by the numbers on the lorry, I suppose.”

  “We could do if they happened to be genuine,” said Fedden cynically. “But they’re not. That’s what worries me most about the whole business. It makes it look so bad.”

  I frowned. “Is there no way of tracing the lorry?”

  “That isn’t my department. I should think it’s going to be pretty difficult for them. The lorry was an old one, and it’s pretty well burnt out.”

  He got up, and swallowed the remainder of his drink. “I was going up to town this week anyway,” he said, “so it’s not much loss.” He turned to me. “You’ll be very careful about this, though?”

  “I’ll not talk,” I said shortly. And so he went away, and when he had gone I filled myself a nightcap and sat down again before the fire for a few minutes before going up to bed.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, or how much the decanter held when Fedden went away; I know how much it held when I went up to bed. I must have been a little drunk that night, because I was beset with dreams and memories. I lay and tossed in bed and watched the moonlight on the wall, consciously trying to sleep and resolutely preventing myself from thinking. I forced myself to think about the gun. Then, with an active mind running round in circles, I found myself going over and over my memories of the night before my crash in the Bentley; I lay and felt the wombat in my arms again and saw the white, glimmering surf running up upon the shore beneath the moon. I rolled over on to a cool patch of pillow, and I was in Leeds listening to the dancers and the dance music, and talking to rather a pathetic, painted girl that I had hired to entertain me for the night. Her brother ran a motor-lorry. I turned restlessly again and listened for the soft muttering of the sea down by St Petrox to see what sort of a night it was, and I was with Stenning listening to the ripple of the water on Irene’s topsides, talking about the safeguarding of industries and carpet sweepers from the Continent.

  And suddenly I was most startingly awake. I lay on my back in bed for a minute and looked about me at the dim outlines of the furniture around the room, no longer feverish and sleepy but with a cool forehead, a clean mouth, and a clear and understanding mind.

  “My God,” I said aloud. “I wonder if there’s anything in that?”

  I did not know, I think, quite what I meant, except that I had the peculiar feeling which I sometimes get in business, that I was on to something important. I got out of bed and went and had a drink of water at the wash stand, and passed a cold sponge over my face. And then I went and stood beside the open window, and listened to the sea. It was a fine moonlight night; I could see all the rocks and hazards of the entrance, and the chequered buoys. There was a gentle southerly night wind and the tide was running out; the black weed on the rocks showed that it was near low water.

  “I must go over and have a look in the morning,” I said quietly. “To see if the place is really like I think it is.” And with that I went back to bed with an easy mind, and fell asleep at once, and slept quietly till I was called.

  I went down next morning as usual to the office, but I finished up about eleven. I went up home and took the Bentley from the stables, and started out upon the Slapton road. I passed the corner where they told me that my car had been discovered in the ditch and went on, puzzled and a little disconcerted at seeing nothing that I knew. At last I reached Slapton and drew up, and thought about it for a little. Then I turned round and drove back along the road that I had come, with eyes half closed and with a lazy mind, and at a considerable speed. Till suddenly I trod on everything and drew the car in beside a gate which led into a grassy pasture on the right. Beyond that lay the sea.

  It was about a couple of hundred yards short of the corner where my crash had taken place.

  I got out of the car slowly and went through the gate, and on across the pasture. And presently I came to a place where the field petered out into sandhills that ran down to the beach, and the line of the surf perhaps two hundred yards away. There was a little valley in the sandhills straight ahead of me, and I moved a little way down it in the loose, powdery sand.

  “This is the place, if anywhere,” I said aloud. “I’d swear to it.”

  I was certain in my own mind that I had been to that exact spot before on the night of my crash, when I was very drunk, and that I had spoken some nonsense to a girl. I stood there for a long time trying to puzzle it out; more than that I could not recollect. I could not understand how I could possibly have got into the sandhills there. To have crashed at that corner I must have passed the gate into the field at sixty miles an hour. And then I thought that I was wrong; that I was suffering from an illusion, that I was still ill and I must realise it. Till, presently, tired and a little out of sorts, I sat down on a hummock of speargrass and sand for a little before going home. Whatever were the rights or wrongs of this affair, it was pleasant in the sun.

  I had shuffled up the loose sand with my feet into a little heap while I had been puzzling about this thing. And as I sat there listening to the martins my eye fell upon this heap, and it seemed to me that the fresh sand that I had uncovered was not like ordinary sand. I turned it over with my toe and frowned at it; and then I got up and went over to the spot and knelt down, and scraped away a little area with my bare hands to see what had been there.

  And straight away I was back in the days when I was a boy. Once, coming up barefoot through sandhills on a Cornish beach, I had cut my toe rather badly on a broken bottle buried in the powdery sand, and it had bled so much that it had to have stitches put in it. For weeks the place was one of awe and veneration to us children; it was a hallowed spot — blood. We never cleaned it up. In spite of rain the sand was discoloured till we left.

  I must have cleared an area of four square feet before I found the limits of that stain. One thing was quite clear then. Whoever had been there before had bled a bucketful.

  And as I rummaged in the sand my fingers struck on something soft and round. I pulled it out and dusted it, and turned it over in my hands; and then I sat there in the sunlight holding it, quite still, while the martins swept
and wheeled about my head between the dunes. I was thinking of the little things that please us in a childish mood, that comfort us when we are quite alone.

  It was a rotten apple. Now that was a funny thing to find there in the sand.

  Chapter 4

  ALL THAT AFTERNOON I sat working with Tillotson in my office in the yard. He had got some book on management that had a chapter upon cost accounts, and we were trying to thrash out a means of harnessing the ancient art of ship repairing with the reins of modern business. I remember that particularly because it was a job that would take some doing at the best of times, and I had only half my mind on it that afternoon.

  I broke off for a minute in the middle of the afternoon, and rang up Dixon on the telephone. I wasn’t certain that he could tell me anything I didn’t know, but I made an appointment, finished up early at the office, and I went up to see him after tea. He greeted me by asking how I was.

  “Pretty fit physically,” I replied. “Mentally — perhaps not quite so good.”

  He grinned. “You’re looking very well.”

  “Lunatics often do,” I said. “You should know that. Now, what I’ve come about is this. I want you to tell me all about that injury to my head.”

  He frowned in perplexity. “Tell you about it?”

  I nodded. “I want to know exactly what sort of condition I was in when first you saw me, after the crash.”

  He raised his eyebrows a little and reached for a ledger on his desk. I watched him with some amusement while he adjusted his eyeglasses. He turned a few pages, and then stopped.

  He coughed. “I saw you at “Well, you were . seven-forty-five a.m.,” he said. . blanched appearance.” quite unconscious . He scanned the page. “A lacerated and contused wound in the occipital region. Slight hæmatoma — that’s bleeding under the scalp, you know. No hemiplegia. Reflexes sluggish. Pupils equal, slightly dilated. Smell of alcohol.”

  He glanced at me. “Is that what you want to know?”

  I sat for a little time in thought. “I suppose it is,” I said at last. “There’s just one thing. You told me that you saw my car before it was repaired. You said it had a hole in the roof. Would you say that that injury is in keeping with the hole?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well,” I said, “the car’s got a fabric roof. From the inside, there’s first a soft cloth ceiling, and then a layer of felt; and then a few small laths, and then the outer fabric. There’s nothing very hard. You say I rammed my head through the lot. Is that the sort of injury that you’d expect?”

  He smiled. “I really couldn’t say,” he replied. “I’ve never seen it done before. But it’s the sort of injury you got.”

  There was nothing to be gained by staying on. I got up and picked my hat and stick up from the chair. “Oh, well,” I said, “it’s interesting to know. Just one thing more. I suppose that injury could have been caused by any sort of blow? Of course, actually it happened in the crash. But you wouldn’t have to be in a car to get an injury like that?”

  “Oh, no. It could happen in a great variety of accidents.”

  I laughed. “It would be just like that if some kind friend had slugged me on the head from behind?”

  He laughed with me. “I should think so. Just like that.”

  I nodded. “That’s all I wanted to know. Put it down to the concussion if you like, or drink.”

  But he got to his feet, his brows contracted in a frown. “You weren’t speaking seriously?”

  I moved towards the door. “It doesn’t pay to be serious,” I said. “It only means that people laugh behind your back, instead of to your face.” And so I went away, and back to my own house to dine.

  That evening I wanted above everything to have a talk with Fedden. I rang up his house as soon as I got home, but they didn’t know when he was coming back. He was staying at his club in town. I went up and dressed for dinner, as I always do when I’m alone, and went down to the dining-room to eat. I cut it short and had coffee and my cigar in the model room; I can remember wandering restlessly about the house all evening, unable to settle down to anything.

  Finally I put in a call to Fedden at his club. I was lucky in getting on to him there, and I made an appointment to dine with him on the following night.

  I drove up to London on the next day. Looking back upon that time I am surprised that I should have gone to London upon such a whim; I think it would take more to stir me now. For many men, I suppose almost any excuse would serve for a few days in town, but not for me. I hate the place. I don’t go there more than once in six months, and then only when I can’t avoid it. When I have to go, I get into my club and stay there as much as possible; it’s a rotten town unless you’ve got a pack of womenfolk about. The best solution is to go and stay with Joan.

  Fedden dined with me that night. I told him that I had come up upon business. He told me that he had spent both days between the Home Office and Scotland Yard; I found him worried in his manner, and a little tired. In my club there is a little smoking-room at the top of the house, that looks out over St James’s Park; I took him up there after dinner because I knew that we should have the room to ourselves at that time of night, and we settled down with our cigars before the fire.

  I forget what we talked about. I only remember that he was reticent, very reticent about the business that he had been engaged on up in town. I tried once or twice to edge the conversation in the direction of the gun, but he sheered off most adroitly; Fedden is a bit of a diplomat in a quiet way. Till at last I got fed up with it. I took advantage of a pause, dropped the ash of my cigar carefully into an ashtray at my side, and said to him:

  “About that gun you showed me the other night.”

  He turned a very cold, grey eye upon me. “Well?”

  I said: “You’ll think it’s none of my business, and perhaps you’re right.” I passed my hand absently across my hair — what Dixon had described as the occipital region. “At the same time, I think I’ve got something to tell you about it which may help, if you want to hear it. In fact, that’s what I came up to town about.”

  He shifted in his chair and turned to me, frowning a little in perplexity. “You mean that you’ve come up about the gun?”

  “You’ll think me a damn fool,” I replied, “but that’s exactly what I have done.”

  He lay back into his chair again. “If you’ve got any evidence which will help us in the matter, we should be very glad to have it,” he remarked. It amused me to notice his retirement behind officialdom.

  “You mustn’t credit all I have to say,” I said. “I don’t know that I really credit it myself. You must form your own opinion.” The darkness fell slowly in the room as I sat there with him, telling him my groundless little tale of disconnected incidents. I told him my memories of the night before my crash, so different from the official story of the accident, when I thought that I had gone across the field till I had met a girl and seen a vessel on the beach. I told him about my apple, and the carpet-sweepers, and the foreigner, and the man called Peter and I described the boat to him.

  A servant came to draw the curtains of the room and take away our coffee cups, and when he had gone we sat on in the light of the fire and the one soft reading lamp behind our heads, and I told him of the girl who had been kind to me in Leeds, whose brother owned a motor lorry and took carpet sweepers by night from the boats to the factory inland, away somewhere in the south. Over the park we heard a bugle blowing the Last Post, and I told him how Stenning had been in Rotterdam and had seen or heard of carpet-sweepers being shipped in little boats for export into England. I reminded him of the label on the packing case that had contained the gun.

  And finally, I told him how I had come to find my apple in the sand, and how somebody had had a nasty accident among the dunes.

  Then he sat quiet, until at last he said: “It’s none of it evidence.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

  “It may give us a
line to go upon. I should like you to give it us again at Scotland Yard tomorrow morning, if you will?” He paused for a minute, and then he said: “There are certain features in this thing which make it very difficult.”

  I didn’t know what comment I could make on that, and so said nothing at all. And after a little time he said: “So much depends on where those guns were going to. Until we know . most that, our hands are tied . strained and worried. “If . damnably.” His tone was we could get the lorry driver, he might tell us that. The dancing-girl’s brother — if there’s anything in what you say.”

  I smiled. “There may not be,” I put in quietly. “I’ve had concussion recently, you know.”

  He turned and eyed me for a moment. “Yes, I know.” And then he said a damn queer thing. He said: “Do you believe in God?”

  I knew Fedden to be a deeply religious man — many soldiers are. I had had this sort of thing from him before, but that didn’t prevent it coming as a fresh surprise. “Well,” I said, a little awkwardly, “I don’t go to church much. But I’ve been to sea a lot. I’m a master mariner, you know.”

  He nodded slowly. “Yes, I know.” And then he said: “Personally, I believe every word you’ve said, but I’m not so sure that Carter will. I believe God sent you to help us clean up this affair.”

  I couldn’t keep my end up in a conversation conducted upon theological lines, and so I asked:

  “Who is Carter?”

  “Sir David Carter,” he replied, “the Chief Commissioner.”

  Better than God, I thought, and to direct his mind into more mundane channels I asked how he had spent the last two days. It seemed that he had been most of the time in consultation with the sleuths at the Yard. Some aspect of the matter that he had learnt there had upset him seriously, but what it was he would not say. Finally, at about midnight, he went back to his own place to sleep, having secured me for the following day.