Appleby Plays Chicken (11 page)

David had the impression of other people close behind him. But he didn’t turn. Suddenly he seemed to hear – with an inner ear but nevertheless as if it were quite outside his head – Timothy Dumble’s voice, remarking calmly that this was it. He tensed his muscles and gathered himself for the final show. The man in front of him seemed to know he was doing this. But he just continued to watch him keenly.

‘If it’s not a hospital, then just what is it?’ David heard a surprisingly steady voice put this reasonable question, and recognized it with some difficulty as his own.

‘It’s a police station.’

David gave a snort. This time it really was indignation, pure and simple. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And I suppose you’re a policeman?’

And then – in what was the most unexpected occurrence of the day – the grim man with the binoculars smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am. My name’s Appleby.’

Appleby. The name meant nothing to David Henchman. But now he looked around him, and was constrained to believe what he was told. It was a police station, all right. Not the most resourceful gang of crooks could fake up such a decor. There was a sergeant – stolid, but plainly not disposed to regard this man Appleby as an everyday event – amiably getting him a cup of tea. There was a constable who, with equal amiability, had gone off to fetch sandwiches – for David was enormously hungry. He was much more hungry than exhausted now, so that he found it hard to believe that lately he had been behaving in such an end-of-the-tether way. ‘Frightfully kind of you,’ he said between mouthfuls. ‘I haven’t had anything since breakfast, as a matter of fact.’

‘And now it’s nearly three o’clock.’ The man called Appleby offered this with what appeared to be perfect solemnity. ‘Still, you’ve pulled through.’

David blushed. ‘You’ll think me quite idiotic. But this morning does, as it happens, seem to me an enormous time off. I’d better tell you about it.’

‘Quite so. But I think you’ll find another cup of tea in the pot.’ Appleby, who seemed in no hurry, turned to the sergeant. ‘You don’t mind our being here a little longer? No need for you to bother about us.’

‘Certainly, Sir John. You’ll stay as long as you like, of course. And we’ll be getting back to work.’ With this the sergeant vanished, taking his subordinate with him.

David was impressed. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘it’s frightful cheek to ask. But are you the Chief Constable or something?’

Sir John Appleby shook his head. ‘Dear me, no. I’ve no standing down here at all. And I’m sure I’ll never be a Chief Constable. I work at Scotland Yard.’

David found himself receiving this information with a most unsophisticated awe. ‘Criminal investigation?’ he asked.

‘Yes – that sort of thing. And it involves me in queer activities from time to time. But I don’t think I’ve ever kidnapped anybody before. I must really apologize.’

‘Oh – not at all.’ David blushed again, judging this reply to have been exceedingly fatuous. ‘Only, I don’t see why you should have – well, bothered. I mean to say, there I was behaving like a moron with a horse, and so on. But I don’t see why you should have been interested.’

‘But aren’t you interesting, Mr – I think you said Henchman?’

‘Yes, Henchman.’ David’s confusion grew. ‘I don’t think I’m a bit interesting, sir. Not, I mean, as a chap, and that sort of thing. But I suppose what’s been happening to me is interesting. It’s not just been fooling on another fellow’s horse, and then trying to get carried off to hospital on false pretences. Of course it must look like some witless joke, I know.’ By this time David was rather incoherent. ‘But I don’t see why you should take the trouble to switch me from hospital to police station because of that. Not unless you want to charge me with obstruction or disorderly behaviour or something.’

Appleby shook his head. ‘I can assure you’, he said courteously, ‘that I do comparatively little on those lines.’

David wasn’t sure why he took no exception to this elderly irony. It was something one got quite enough of from dons. Perhaps it was just that this Appleby wasn’t after him with a rifle or a pistol, and that in these circumstances he felt a little verbal sniping to be neither here nor there. ‘You still haven’t explained’, he said firmly, ‘why you found me interesting at all.’

‘You were mildly interesting from the moment you appeared on young Dancer’s horse.’

‘You know Ian!’ David heard, with disapproval, a sort of inane surprise in his own voice.

‘I met him before that race. My wife’s people know his relations down here – who, incidentally, provided the horse. I was a little more than mildly interested when I saw that you had taken Dancer’s place on that stretcher. But it wasn’t until seven-eighths of you were in the ambulance that my interest became really pronounced. Take a look at the heel of your left shoe.’

David did as he was told. ‘Well, I’m blessed!’

‘Not a direct hit, I think, or the bullet would have buried itself in the leather and be invisible. A ricochet, no doubt. And at a glance – and just from that coy corner of lead, I’d say from some very small-calibre affair.’

‘A beastly little pistol. No good at all.’ David found that this was still, most illogically, a point of resentment with him. ‘But’, he added, ‘the other fellow had a rifle.’

‘Dear me.’

‘And the frightful thing is, there was a girl. They stole her car, and piled it up when they tried to get me by running me down with it. I’ve an awful feeling they may have knocked her out, or something. I tried to get back to see, but that was when the one with the rifle headed me off. And I’ve had another horrible idea. The girl may be the daughter of the man they killed.’

‘You seem to have had quite a day.’ Appleby spoke without emotion, but his eyes never left David’s face. ‘What you say requires investigation. But it explains – well, aspects of your appearance when you turned up at that Point to Point.’

‘A chap scared out of his wits?’

Appleby smiled faintly. ‘Put it that you didn’t appear to have been enjoying yourself. Although I expect bits were enjoyable. It’s a funny thing, but they always are.’

Quite suddenly, David decided that he liked this man. ‘I enjoyed throwing the bottles,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of them.’

Appleby looked respectful. ‘I’ve never done it on quite that scale,’ he murmured. ‘And now, perhaps, if you would tell me…about the whole thing?’

David’s narrative didn’t take long, and it was completed in Appleby’s car. Its large improbability was painfully evident to him as he talked, and he even wondered whether Appleby believed a word he was listening to. Probably there was a large class of hysterical young persons, male and female, who made a business of turning up on the police with yarns of this sort. If Appleby had made any arrangements for collecting the body from Knack Tor, or for scouring the countryside for the criminals, no sign of this appeared. He had simply done some telephoning, and then they had driven away quietly and by themselves in this discreetly powerful car. Probably Appleby was considering, among other possibilities, that of a hoax or practical joke. He might even be benevolently proposing to minimize the trouble the jokers were asking for by unobtrusively denying them much publicity… David looked down at the heel of his left shoe and took comfort from the tiny gleam of lead. Surely nobody could believe that a practical joker would go to quite that length of petty ingenuity.

‘Here’s your cider factory, I suppose.’

The car had come smoothly to a halt. David realized how small had been the whole terrain over which he had spent the morning scampering. ‘Not cider,’ he said. ‘Pineapple nectar. And there are some of the bottles. I sent one crate, you see, into the road. I’m afraid it’s rather a mess.’

There was certainly a good deal of glass on the road. But Appleby seemed to take David’s remark in a larger context. ‘The extent of the mess’, he said, ‘is the first thing to determine. We’ll go on. Have you got your bearings from this point?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m pretty sure that, if we go straight ahead, we come to a road on the left. It’s not much more than a track, but it takes cars, all right. And the place where they had a go at me as a pedestrian can’t be more than a mile ahead.’

The car gathered speed again. ‘I suppose’, Appleby asked, ‘that Knack Tor isn’t a bad place for a really quiet chat?’

David considered the implications of this. ‘It’s certainly that. You’re invisible yourself, because the summit is a sort of shallow cup. And if you look over and around from time to time, you’d have plenty of warning of anybody coming to interrupt.’

‘Quite a spot for a business conference of a certain sort.’ Appleby changed gear to take a curve. ‘You hadn’t anything of that kind on hand yourself?’

David was startled. This was what is called an attempt to catch one off one’s guard – a bit of high-class police technique. And it certainly showed that Appleby continued to have an open mind. ‘I certainly had nothing on hand,’ David replied. ‘As I’ve told you, I was just doing a solitary walk.’

‘And that’s your sort of thing?’

‘Well, yes – at times. I was a bit fed up with Pettifor’s lot, as a matter of fact.’

‘Pettifor’s lot?’

David explained about the reading party in some detail. He even told the story of the game of chicken. Appleby listened in silence, and then returned to his point. ‘You hadn’t a business deal to put through on that summit. And there was nothing else? For instance, a meeting with a girl?’

‘Certainly not.’ David spoke gruffly. He was much shocked and offended. But no doubt the police had to have a sexual slant on everything. And this man Appleby, although a civilized type, was plainly implacable. ‘The only girl in the affair, so far as I know, is the one I came on in the car – and may have landed in something horrid. And that’s bad enough, if you ask me.’

The logic of this last remark wasn’t very clear, but Appleby appeared prepared to acknowledge it as a reproach. ‘One asks these things,’ he said. ‘Sometimes, you see, one gets only half a story – or less – just because a fellow doesn’t want to embarrass a lady. And sometimes it’s necessary to persevere – although naturally one feels it to be a poor show.’

David suddenly grinned. ‘You talk just like my murderer,’ he said. ‘Good shows and poor shows.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

He had startled Appleby – which was most satisfactory. ‘I rather hope to hear you have a talk with him one day, sir. Poona stuff all round.’

David hadn’t uttered this speech before he regretted it. There was no charitable word for it. He had said something merely impertinent. But Appleby gave no sign of being offended. Instead, he was instantly on the spot. ‘My dear lad, of course I’m out of the ark. And so, no doubt, was this chap you had a word with up on the Tor. But he and I didn’t necessarily march in two and two. We may be animals of entirely different kinds… Is this our next stop?’

The man had an eye like a hawk. If he had ever been in the ark it must have been as just that. They had been travelling at speed. But he had noticed a disturbance on the margin of the road. And when the car had stopped they got out and walked back to it. ‘Yes,’ Appleby said, ‘this is where they tried to get you. If they’d just managed to hit you with a wing, then they could have finished you off with a spanner – or say with the jack. You might have been found tomorrow morning, and recorded as an accident of the uglier tip-and-run sort. Miles better than putting a bullet in you. Although nastier, while the bludgeoning was going on.’

Not for the first time that day, David was conscious of his stomach as feeling far from nice. This was repayment for his filthy quip about Poona. ‘It was a bit of an escape, of course,’ he said coldly. ‘But what we ought to be thinking about, surely, is that girl.’

‘Ah – you mustn’t suppose I’m not thinking about
her
.’ Appleby said this in his most enigmatical fashion. ‘And about her car. It’s gone – hasn’t it?’

‘It didn’t look entirely knocked out.’ David felt instantly defensive, as if his whole yarn were now being questioned. ‘But I doubt whether it could have been got on the road again without a bit of a tow.’

‘Quite so.’ Appleby was now prowling about, peering at the turf and heather. Sherlock Holmes stuff, David thought. He was presently going to discover a cigarette butt compounded of one of the rarer of the fifty-seven – was it? – varieties of tobacco. ‘Quite so,’ Appleby repeated. ‘But then your friends appear distinctly to possess resources. That is far the most striking thing about them. Your other Poona acquaintance’ – Appleby said this without a flicker – ‘requires a colleague. Well, all he need do is blow a whistle. That, you know, is very notable.’

‘I suppose it is.’ David was once more uneasy. This man Appleby had only to import a certain tone into his voice for the whole adventure to become grotesquely implausible. Perhaps it was that anyway.

‘You abruptly change course – being very properly concerned for the safety of that girl. And what happens? Up pops another conspirator, conveniently armed with a rifle. Later, there are two men on motorbikes. It’s true that the case against them is not wholly proven. Still, the whole set-up is striking, you’ll agree.’ Appleby paused, and appeared to note the fact that he got no reply. ‘You needn’t sulk,’ he said. ‘I mean precisely what I say.’

David was aware of his complexion as being again awkwardly out of control. ‘I thought’, he said, ‘that you were meaning that my whole yarn sounds like moonshine.’

‘Of course it does. It may
be
moonshine.’ Appleby’s open-mindedness suddenly reminded David of his American friend, Leon Kryder. ‘But even if it is, you know, we mustn’t despair. There’s a great deal that the psychiatrists can do nowadays.’ He smiled cheerfully at David. ‘Shall we drive on?’

They drove on. Presumably it was part of a high-class policeman’s technique to keep you guessing. David didn’t at all know how he stood with Appleby – although he continued to feel that the man was probably all right. ‘If you mean that it really
is
striking,’ he presently ventured, ‘will you tell me why? I mean, about the chap’s possessing resources.’