Appleby Plays Chicken (12 page)

‘Certainly.’ Appleby paused – apparently for the purpose of putting down his foot with some deliberation on the accelerator, so that David realized they would be abreast of Knack Tor in no time. ‘One does, of course, get gangs of various sorts. There are still race-course gangs, for instance. But they don’t have quite this polite touch you seem so allergic to.’

David felt it was time Appleby had dropped this Poona joke. But he didn’t venture to say anything.

‘Winchester and New College,’ Appleby continued affably. ‘They don’t contribute much at the razor-slashing level of society. Balliol men, although they sometimes get together for curious purposes, seldom whistle for each other to come lolloping up for a manhunt. In fact the classes of criminal activity that produce phenomena at all corresponding to your story are not at all numerous. That’s my point… Now, would this be the hollow where you came on the girl with the car?’

Again they had come rapidly to a stop. David felt that his inquiries were going to get no further. Besides, he was now all eagerness for any trace of the girl. ‘Certainly it was here,’ he cried, and jumped out. ‘I expect you can tell an awful lot by just poking around.’

Appleby made no reply to this. But he did poke about very thoroughly, and ask a great many questions. It was as if he had come to some aspect of the affair that really puzzled him. ‘At least they didn’t slug your friend’, he said, ‘and throw her into the ditch.’ He gave David one of his long straight glances, as if interested to see how he took this sudden brutality of speech. ‘But I think you said you had an idea about her?’

‘Only that she might have driven the man I found dead. Suppose he had made a date, sir, for what you called a quiet chat on the top of Knack Tor. He might have had himself brought so far, and then told this girl – perhaps his daughter – to wait. She
was
waiting, you know. Eating a sandwich and – well, doing a bit of sunbathing. I felt rather butting in.’

Appleby didn’t conceal that he found this amusing. David wondered why – and then realized that there was perhaps something funny in the notion of a young man indulging this delicate sentiment while bolting for his life. But now they were climbing into the car again. Another half-mile, and they would have to leave it and strike across the moor. It seemed suddenly odd to David that anything in the world should have persuaded him to return here. And he hadn’t come back under the protection of a squad of police. There was just this middle-aged person, whose habitual employment must be sitting in a London office and sifting through the reports of more mobile subordinates. Appleby seemed to be treating the affair as if its active phase, so to speak, was securely over, and everything would now stay put until he had tidied it up. And David experienced a sharp misgiving. That was probably how you felt, if you normally dealt with criminals without stirring from some fastness in Scotland Yard. But what if the affair wasn’t over at all?

David glanced at his companion. Appleby had filled a pipe during their last halt. He was puffing contentedly as he drove – and indeed his satisfaction in the process was so evident that David felt a spasm of irritation. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ he asked, ‘that they may still be about?’

‘Your friends?’ For a second Appleby took his eyes from the road to glance at David in mild surprise. ‘But naturally. That’s rather our hope, is it not?’

‘Oh.’ To David this was, in fact, quite massively a new idea. ‘It would be rather good if they were after me still?’

‘Well – say both of us.’ Appleby offered this addendum as if it must hold the largest comfort. ‘It would be a great simplification, certainly. The needle emerging from the haystack, you might say, in the hope of getting us in a nice soft place.’

David was aware of silence. The car had stopped. The engine was shut off. There was a lark singing. And straight ahead stood Knack Tor, crowned with its great dark slab of rock, and with the Loaf a little to the left. David felt that things must be kept in hand. ‘It’s remarkable’, he said conversationally, ‘how lonely it suddenly gets out here. I was struck by it this morning.’

‘I dare say you were.’ Appleby was looking at him with what a conceited young man would have taken to be at least provisional approval. ‘Well, now, shall we take our stroll?’

They took their stroll. In other words, David supposed, they set out to find the body – and anything else they might encounter. Appleby still had his pork-pie hat and his binoculars. Indeed, he still had his shooting stick. And from his buttonhole – it was something David now noticed for the first time – there dangled a cardboard label, presumably indicative of some obscurely official function at the Point to Point. He had the appearance, in fact, of one walking out to inspect the course.

And that was precisely what it had been, with David himself running a very pretty race over it. But now it all appeared on a smaller scale, less remote, less formidable. Appleby – get-up, manner and all – was certainly responsible for this effect. His car, left unattended on the track, was like a confident gesture of security; the man himself, pausing now and then to admire a vista now bleakly golden under the afternoon sun, had no appearance of one proceeding to view a corpse. And presently he began to take a circuitous course, so that they were making something like a sweep round Knack Tor. And the farther distance now took up only part of his attention; he stopped once or twice as if prompted mildly to botanize among the grasses and mosses at their feet. ‘Visitors,’ he said at length. ‘I think they’ve paid a little call, and left again.’

‘Visitors? You mean to the Tor?’ David was startled. ‘Since this morning?’

‘That’s the probability.’ And Appleby pointed to the ground. ‘Don’t you see?’

David was immediately astonished that he hadn’t seen. The turf here was hard and springy, but nevertheless the tracks of some sort of vehicle were clearly visible. ‘This bit’s all right,’ he said. ‘But there must be some stretches where you couldn’t bring a car.’

Appleby shook his head. ‘Not an ordinary car, perhaps. But some sort of jeep – anything with a four-wheel drive – would do it easily. That’s to say, if it avoided the boggy bits. And I think it must have got close up to the Tor.’

‘Might it still be there, but round at the other side?’

For a minute Appleby made no reply, but simply walked on, his eyes bent on the ground. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said presently. ‘My impression is that it came back pretty well in its own tracks.’

‘Do you think it may have been brought here so that…’

‘Of course I do.’ For the first time, Appleby’s tone sounded faintly impatient. David guessed that he didn’t at all like this development. ‘Well, we’ll get on.’

They moved forward more quickly. Although the westering sun was still shining over the moor, all warmth had gone out of it, and there was a thin chill wind. Over the summit of the Tor a hawk swung, hovered, and dropped – dropped like a stone destined to smash itself on the brute rock. Actually, its concern must have been with something on the farther slope. On the summit there could be nothing except a human body, and a hawk would hardly concern itself with that.

But would the body still be there? Very probably, David realized, it would have gone. That could be the only meaning of the recent passage of a motor vehicle here. Nobody, unless he were a cripple, would elect to ride, rather than to walk, to the Tor, unless he had in view some definite end for which transport was required. Yes, that was it. The enemy had come back and collected the body.

David’s first reaction to this notion was regrettably childish. He would have nothing to show Appleby. It was true that Appleby could no longer very reasonably conclude his whole story to be an invention. There was now too much objective evidence for that. But, after all, the body was the big thing. It was just like those beastly thugs to make away with it… This was certainly a foolish line of thought, and it was immediately succeeded by one equally unpresentable. If the body wasn’t there – the body of a middle-aged man with a hole in the middle of his forehead – then probably David would never see it again. There would have been no point in the thugs taking the risk of coming back here and collecting it, if all they were going to do was to abandon it in some other place. If it had vanished, it had vanished for good. David would never again have to look at it. He was surprised to discover what a relief this would be.

They were now at the foot of the rock. It was just the point at which David had scaled it. Suddenly Appleby bent down and drew something out of the heather. ‘Ever seen this before?’ he asked.

‘It’s my walking stick.’ David stared at the unexciting object as if it had been a vast surprise. ‘Of course I dropped it when I began to climb. How awfully funny that I just haven’t remembered it since. It belonged to my grandfather.’

‘It’s a good stick.’ Appleby stuck it upright in a tump of heather. ‘We’ll collect it when we come down. Now up we go.’

Appleby went first and David followed. Appleby climbed rather as the principal enemy had done – with a professional touch. But David was conscious that he himself made at least a better job of it than he had managed that morning. He was on his mettle – for no better reason, it seemed, than that Appleby had commended his stick. And when he got his head over the top he saw just what he hadn’t expected to see again: a pair of rather good shoes, not far from his nose, and heels in air.

‘Well, here it is.’ There was a note of satisfaction in Appleby’s voice. ‘Not a dream, you see. You were as wide awake as you’ll ever be.’

David scrambled to his feet. It was a relief, after all, that the body was still
in
situ
. But he saw that there was something queer about it. He had known there was something queer as soon as he had seen the shoes… ‘It’s turned over,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ Appleby swung round on him.

‘The – the body has turned over. It was on its back. It’s managed to get on its face.’

‘And it seems to have managed to get back that pistol.’ As Appleby pointed, his voice was grim. And it was true. There was a pistol in the dead man’s hand.

David stared. ‘I don’t think it’s the same pistol.’

Appleby took a step forward, knelt by the body, and with a strong careful movement turned it over. The head hung limp. There was a hole in the middle of the forehead. David heard Appleby’s voice as if from a distance. ‘Not the same pistol. But is it the same man?’

‘No… No – it’s not.’ David’s own words came jerkily. ‘It’s the other one.’

‘Then somebody has arranged us a little surprise.’ Appleby, who had sat down on a ledge of rock, said this unemotionally. ‘At least it looks like that. But we may be flattering ourselves. We mayn’t have been in their heads at all.’

David realized that he was being given time to compose himself. Even so, some further seconds passed before he trusted himself to ask: ‘You
believe
it’s the other man?’

‘My dear chap, I haven’t the slightest reason to disbelieve you.’

Again David was silent for a moment. He wasn’t quite certain that this form of words was wholly comforting. ‘I mean’, he said, ‘it seems so wildly and utterly improbable. One body up here is unlikely enough. But two successive bodies…and getting themselves switched round like this…’ He broke off rather helplessly. ‘It’s awful, feeling so – so implausible.’

‘Of course you may be a thoroughly muddle-headed young man.’ Uttering this frank sentiment, Appleby produced his pipe again with a matter-of-factness suggesting he had seen violent death before. ‘The one incontrovertible circumstance is that there has been a bit of ugly business on this summit, and that you are mixed up with it.’

‘A mixed-up kid.’

Appleby stared. ‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing…I’m sorry. Just something people were talking about last night. It sounds as if I
am
muddle-headed – quite damnably.’

‘It’s a possibility, as I say.’ Appleby had now got to his feet again and put his pipe aside to examine the body. ‘Quite dead, I need hardly tell you. And no time ago – no time ago, at all. Even if you are very clearheaded, Henchman – quite the master criminal, indeed – I doubt whether you can possibly have done
this
.’ And Appleby tapped the shoulder of the corpse lightly as he got to his feet again. ‘At a guess, I’d say that you and I had made each other’s acquaintance before this fellow died. And that gets several things clear for a start. All your memories of today’s events may, of course, be enormously confused and utterly unreliable. When an affair like this comes along, that’s a fact a policeman must reckon with at once. Tough or not so tough, you see, it’s all the same. A shock can precipitate no end of muddle as soon as the individual who has received it tries to think back. People have been known to swear with absolute conviction and sincerity that they saw Jack murder Jill, when in fact what they saw was Jill murdering Jack. But this corpse, you see, was alive and kicking when you told me your story. So that does a little simplify things.’

‘I see.’ If David hadn’t entirely followed Appleby’s long speech, he had at least got his wits in tolerable order again – which had perhaps been the idea. ‘And what do we do next?’

‘Confront the awkward fact that we’re deucedly short of
dramatis personae
.’ As he made this unexpected reply, Appleby contentedly lit his pipe again. ‘There’s you, of course – but I honestly don’t place much reliance on you.’

‘Thank you very much.’ David was now sufficiently composed to grin at this.

‘That’s to say, the possibility of your being what may be called a principal personage is remote.’

‘A master criminal?’

‘That sort of thing. So what are we left with? Not the initial victim of this morning – unless, of course, you just don’t know a dead man when you see one.’

‘He was dead all right.’

Appleby nodded. ‘Very good. For the moment, I accept that as a fact. And here’ – and he pointed to the body – ‘is another fact. Call him the First Murderer. He’s knocked out of the cast too. So what have we left? Only Second Murderer – meaning your friend the knickerbockers – and an obscure First Assistant Conspirator.’