Appleby Plays Chicken (5 page)

‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked. ‘Has there been an accident?’

David felt his confidence flicker. If that man had answered to his notion of a crook or a thug he’d have had a better idea how to handle him. But the man was like Pettifor – or if not like him then like someof the successful middle-aged men who came to Nymph Monachorum for the fishing. Authoritative and incisive, but at the same time benevolently disposed to the young. If he suggested anything particular it was perhaps a soldier – and one high enough up to be thoroughly affable in a clipped way. Not, you might say, the colonel. Rather a visiting brigadier.

This train of association was rather daunting. But David managed to say gravely: ‘Yes, something’s badly wrong. I think you’d better come up here.’

The stranger nodded. He might have been giving David instant credit for not being the sort of lad who fusses or flaps. Then he threw a rapidly appraising glance at the rocks. ‘It’s not in the orders,’ he said, ‘but we needn’t make any bones about that.’ And he slipped off his rucksack.

‘Shall I come down a bit and give you a hand?’ David wasn’t at all sure why he said this. Perhaps he had noticed that the stranger’s hair was iron-grey, and at once put him down as really old.

‘That’s very kind of you. But I’ve known rather worse bits. Gimmer Crag, for instance.’

This was clearly ironical, and David said nothing. He watched the elderly stranger come up – it took him only a few seconds – and realized that his own performance on the other side of the summit had been a comically inexpert affair. It was going to be a bit of an effort, he saw, to keep hold of the fact that he himself must control the situation as it developed during the next few minutes.

And now the stranger was standing beside him, smelling of tweed and tobacco. His glance went instantly to the dead man. ‘Bad show?’ he asked quietly.

‘Very bad.’

‘Took a purler, eh?’ The stranger frowned. ‘But – dash it all – he ought to be at the bottom, not the top. You haven’t hauled him up, boy?’

‘Of course not.’ Despite the substantial horror of what he had been involved in, David found himself rather resenting this address. ‘And it hasn’t anything to do with a fall. Just take a look.’

The stranger walked over to the body and seemed about to kneel beside it. Then, as if he had suddenly read the unmistakable truth written on that forehead, he checked himself and turned rather slowly back to David. ‘My dear lad, it’s not your… It’s not a relation?’

‘I don’t know him. I never saw him before.’ David spoke abruptly. The man had been going to say ‘your father’, and had checked himself. There had been quick kindness, controlled solicitude in his tone. It seemed almost impossible to believe ill of him. Everything counted in his favour, as far as the immediate stark issue was concerned – everything down to the way his moustache was trimmed.

David knew that judgement on these principles was damned silly. It was even naively snobbish. One might as well judge the chap by his tweeds or his shoes. Incidentally, his shoes were just like the other fellow’s – the dead man’s.
And
his tweeds too. For what the point was worth, they were both from the same social bracket. They weren’t exactly like Pettifor, after all. Pettifor was their unworldly brother, you might say. They themselves were the kind of men one used to listen to when one was in uniform and had to travel first-class. They always had a boy who had just left Winchester to go into the regiment – meaning the Coldstreams – and who would eventually take over the family bank in Burma, if he shaped well.

David, as he thus rather imaginatively placed his companions, quick and dead, wasn’t at all sure that he liked their tribe – if it
was
their tribe, and he wasn’t simply romancing to himself as usual. Nevertheless he was habituated to paying it a young man’s formal respect. And even if it was in some ways a particularly wicked class of society, he found it very hard to believe that gunplay on the summits of West Country hills was a common, or even conceivable, part of its drill. All this made it particularly difficult for him now to find and keep a line. Presently, and perfectly naturally, this chap – the living one – would be giving him orders. And that wouldn’t do at all.

‘You never saw him before?’ The stranger, puzzled, was repeating David’s last words.

‘I do find something faintly familiar about him. But it’s only some trick of memory, I think. In fact, I’m confident I never saw him before – and I never saw him alive, either.’

‘You mean, you didn’t see him do it?’

‘Do it, sir?’

There was a silence that seemed to David to last unbearingly long. Into it, and into this high lonely cup of stone, a lark tumbled a glittering cascade of sound. David felt his heart pounding against his ribs. But he was satisfied with his last speech. He even felt his shoulders straighten oddly, as if some burden had been out from them. And he smiled – so that the stranger was for the first time clearly startled. For some reason David was thinking tolerantly of Timothy and Ian and the others, and the game of chicken. What awful nonsense that had been!

‘I mean, shoot himself, poor devil.’ The stranger contrived a note of patient explanation. ‘You can see the thing, can’t you?’

‘The pistol? Yes, I can see that. And I heard it, for that matter. You must have heard it too.’

The stranger shook his head. ‘I heard nothing until you started shouting. And then I took it to be a shepherd calling his dog.’

David remembered that his shout had been decidedly unceremonious. It was, he supposed, just conceivable that it wouldn’t have occurred to this rather commanding person that he was being bellowed at. ‘Don’t you mean’, David said quietly, ‘that you heard a shot, but simply took it to be somebody out having a pot at something?’

Again there was a little silence. It was heavy with the implication of David’s words. The stranger, they asserted, might have thought up a more plausible line. But this didn’t – immediately at least – draw any fire. The fellow just turned back to the body. ‘We’d better make sure,’ he said.

‘You can be quite confident he’s dead.’

This time, the stranger gave David a glance of keen scrutiny. ‘I’m not quite sure’, he said, ‘what’s in your mind. But let an older man give you a word of advice. Just take it easy. An affair like this can be damned upsetting. There’s no discredit in feeling a bit rattled by it. Sit down. And I’ve got a drop of brandy, if you care for it. But barley sugar’s better – and I’ve got that too.’ He smiled. ‘Barley sugar and a pocket compass are the first things to put in your pocket when you go walking. Of course, half a crown’s useful, in case you feel like a bus at the end of the day.’

David almost found himself sitting down. This easy magistral talk was undermining. But he glanced at the body, and stayed put. ‘What’s in my mind?’ he said. ‘Well, one thing in my mind is this. The chap’s dead. And you and I are the only people who can be involved.’

‘But neither of us is.’ The stranger was suddenly impatient. ‘I know nothing about the matter whatever. As you no doubt saw, I had no intention of coming up to the summit of the Tor. As for you, sir, the chance of your having contrived this’ – and the stranger nodded grimly towards the body – ‘seems to me inconsiderable.’ And again the stranger smiled. He was the elderly experienced man, undemonstrative, but genuinely liking a youngster who shaped well. ‘Now listen. You heard a shot as you were approaching this summit from the other side?’

‘Certainly I did.’

‘But nobody appeared?’

‘Nobody.’

‘And you saw nobody on this skyline – here where we are standing now?’

David shook his head. ‘No. But one wouldn’t, unless they came close to the edge. Study the lie of the place, and you’ll see.’

‘You’re perfectly right.’ The stranger said this after a careful survey both of the rocky basin in which they stood and of the entire terrain beneath them. ‘Now, where were you when you heard a shot?’

David pointed out what had been his approximate position. For the moment he was quite prepared to let the stranger take the lead. He had a notion that, if he kept wide enough awake, it might be a way of learning something. ‘And then I came straight up,’ he said.

‘Very well. And you can see that, on either hand, the summit falls away on a perfectly bare shoulder of moor. There’s nothing remotely approaching continuous cover. Of course there’s the next Tor – the Loaf, I think it’s called. There is cover there. But one couldn’t make it all that quickly.’

David studied the terrain. He was rather powerfully aware, once more, of its loneliness. But the chap seemed right about the topography. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I agree.’

The stranger nodded. ‘So far, so good. We can be clear that, after that shot was fired, nobody could have got away without one or the other of us spotting him. You’ll admit that?’

‘Yes – if you were looking towards the Tor every now and then.’ David paused. ‘When I saw you, you seemed entirely absorbed in the view in the other direction.’

‘My dear lad, I have no doubt you hailed me within seconds of becoming aware of me. I may have been looking the other way, just then. But of course I kept glancing at the Tor, and at the skyline round it. One naturally does, in country like this.’ The stranger was again faintly impatient. ‘But my main point is simply that you are right in your general reading of the situation. If you were down there and heard a shot, and if it was that shot that killed this man, then either he shot himself, or I did. Is that right?’

‘Yes, I think it is.’

‘And you can see that somebody coming along to investigate – as the police will presently have to do – will be obliged to consider the converse possibility?’

‘That if this is murder, I may be the murderer? Yes, of course.’ David said this steadily, although it was the first time that his mind had in fact clearly focused on the fantastic fact that he might himself fall under suspicion.

The stranger had his kindly smile again. ‘But unfortunately, you know, far more people blow their own brains out than have it done for them by another person. Suicide is far the most substantial probability we confront. No doubt you see that. But there’s another possibility, and one which I think you haven’t considered. This fellow may really have been murdered, and an appearance of suicide simply fixed on him. It’s a tenable hypothesis, allowing for the possibility of your being mistaken about that shot.’

‘How could I be mistaken about that shot?’ David asked this with a puzzled air that wasn’t wholly genuine. He really was learning something, he felt. For there was an unnatural slant to the way the stranger was going to work with this police talk. He might of course be authentically cool and unperturbed. That was quite in the middle-aged, military picture. But there was something spurious in his attitude, all the same. Could he, conceivably, be playing for time? Suddenly alert to a danger he hadn’t so far thought of, David strolled again to the verge of the rocky platform, mounted the low natural rampart that almost surrounded it, and took another survey of the moor. At least that was all right. There were no confederates of the stranger’s drawing a sinister cordon round the summit, although they might conceivably be lurking behind the Loaf. Slightly abashed at having entertained this highly melodramatic fancy, David repeated his question. ‘How could I be mistaken about the shot?’

‘There is, you know, a certain amount of shooting on the moor. You may have heard shots earlier on your walk. Then, finding this’ – and the stranger gave his curt nod again at the body – ‘your mind may have played a trick on you. Or there may have happened to be a shot quite far away, which your ear just caught. Then, when you came on a man with a bullet through his head, your memory brought the sound, so to speak, to close quarters.’

‘I’m not sure I see what you’re getting at.’

‘That’s how you may feel in court.’

‘In court?’ Despite himself, David was startled.

‘If this awkward business ever gets there. Counsel have a trick of going ahead so that it isn’t easy for the witness to see their drift. It can be unnerving.’

David felt rather cross at this. ‘I don’t think’, he said, ‘I’m very interested in that at the moment.’

‘Very well – and what I’m trying to say, then, is this: granted that any shot you heard or thought you heard
wasn’t
in fact the shot that despatched our unfortunate friend here, he may have been murdered – but murdered well before either of us came on the scene.’

‘The body’s warm.’

The stranger shook his head. ‘I’m not conjecturing that this happened last night. The inside of an hour is all we need. If the police take it into their heads that this isn’t suicide – and I can’t see why they should – there would be a perfectly reasonable line in that.’

‘I see.’ And – if rather obscurely – David thought that he
did
see. The stranger was feeling his way – and in a direction decidedly less than honest. ‘What about the smoke?’ David asked abruptly. ‘I suppose you saw
that
?’

‘Yes, I saw the smoke.’ Very surprisingly, the urbane stranger flushed. It was almost as if he had been stung to some sudden anger. Then he turned away, walked to the little heap of ashes, stared at it, and stirred it with his toe. ‘Odd, no doubt,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing up here that could catch fire by any sort of accident. Somebody carried up the materials for a little fire.’

‘A signal, perhaps?’

‘A signal?’ For a moment the stranger looked quite blank. ‘Well, that’s an idea. I hadn’t thought of it.’ He smiled. ‘I see you have a romantic imagination.’

‘Isn’t it the significant point that a dead man can’t light a fire? And a tiny fire like that couldn’t keep going for very long.’

The stranger made a gesture of agreement. ‘That’s no doubt true. But it’s again just a matter of timing. Neither you nor I had the approaches to the Tor very securely commanded for long before you got here. When you look out over the moor from this point, you get the impression that there’s no possible cover for miles. But that’s an exaggeration. If you gave me fifteen minutes, I could make myself invisible even to a fellow with binoculars. And I believe I could manage it either north, south, east, or west.’