Mysterious Aviator
Read Mysterious Aviator Online
Authors: Nevil Shute
And then none shall be unto them so odious and disdained as the traitours … who have solde their countrie to a straunger and forsaken their faith and obedience contrarie to nature or religion; and contrarie to that humane and generall honour not onely of Christians but of heathen and irreligious nations, who have always sustained what labour soever and embraced even death itself for their countrie, prince, and commonwealth
.
—S
IR
W
ALTER
R
ALEIGH
A
S
I
HAVE SAID
, this matter started in the night. I was agent to Lord Arner at that time; steward and agent, for most of the family affairs passed through my hands, and I ran the outdoor business of the house itself. I lived by myself in the Steward’s House at Under Hall, about a couple of miles from the little town of Under, in West Sussex. I live there still.
Very late, on the night of which I am writing, I was driving home over the South Downs, after a dinner in Winchester. I forget for the moment what that dinner was about; I do not think it can have been connected with my old school; because I was driving home in a very bad temper, and so I think it must have been the Corn Association. They tell me that I am reactionary. Very likely they are right, but they should give a man a better dinner than that before they tell him so.
In any case, all that is beside the point. I started home to drive the forty odd miles from Winchester to Under at about half-past eleven that night. It was March; a fine night with a pack of loose cloud in front of the moon that gradually turned to rain. I was in a dinner-jacket, but the hood of my old Morris is pretty watertight. I could take the rain phlegmatically, and so I set the wiper going, jammed my foot down a bit harder, and wished I was in bed with a fire in my bedroom instead of bucketing along at forty miles an hour over the black country roads.
Now, on that run from Winchester to Under, you pass over give-and-take sort of country for most of the way, but about ten miles from Under the road gets up on to the high ground by Leventer, and runs along the top for a couple of miles. That two miles runs with a fairly good surface straight over the unfenced down. You can let a car out there in the daytime, but at night you have to be careful, because of the cattle.
It was about half-past twelve when I came swinging up over that bit of down that night, doing about forty and keeping a sharp look-out for sheep. The night was as black as the pit. By that time the rain was coming down pretty hard. There was no traffic on the road at that time of night; I sat there sucking my dead pipe and thinking no evil, watched the rain beat against the windscreen, watching the wiper flick it off again, and thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t out in it.
About half-way along that stretch of down I passed a man on the road.
He was walking along in the direction of Under. I didn’t see very much of him as I passed, because the rain blurred the windscreen except just where the wiper caught it, and I was going at a fair pace. He seemed to be a tallish well-set-up fellow in a leather coat, but without a hat. The water was fairly streaming and glistening off him in my headlights. I drove past. Then it struck me that it was a pretty rotten trick to drive by and leave a man out on the road in a night like that. I jammed both feet hard down, and we stopped with a squeal about twenty yards beyond him.
I stuck my pipe in my pocket, switched on the dashboard light, leaned over, and opened the door.
“Want a lift into Under?” I called.
On a night like that I should have expected to hear his footsteps squelching along at the side of the road. When I didn’t, I turned and looked out of the little window at the back. He seemed to have stopped dead. I fancied that I could see him dimly in the rain, standing by the side of the road in the red light of my tail lamp.
The rain came beating steadily against the car, with little patterings. To put it frankly, I thought it was our local idiot. In a job like mine one gets to know the look of those chaps and the way they wander about the country in the worst weather, often with no hat on. We have a good few naturals about my part of the world, and they don’t come to much harm. Their people seem to like to have them about the place, and they’re good with animals.
In any case, it was a rotten night for an idiot to be out. It didn’t much matter to me what time I got to bed now, and I had a fancy to collect this chap and see him safely home. His people live at a farm about five miles off that road, more or less on the way to Under.
I thought that he was frightened at the sudden stopping of the car, and so I slid along the seat and stuck my head out of the door to reassure him.
“All right, Ben,” I said. They call him Ben. “I’m Mr. Moran from Under Hall. I’ll take you back home in the car if you’ll come with me. It’s a rotten wet night for walking. That’s right. Stay where you are, and I’ll bring the car back to you. Then you can come in out of the wet.”
I slipped the gear into reverse and ran the car back along the road to him. He was still standing motionless by the grass; I could see him in the gleam of the tail lamp through the little window. I stopped the car when he was opposite the door.
“Come on in,” I said. “It’s all wet out there. You know me—Mr. Moran.”
He moved at last, and stooped towards the door. “It’s very good of you,” he said. “It’s not much of a night for walking.”
I knew he wasn’t an idiot as soon as I heard his voice, of course. And while I was wondering why he had held back from accepting a lift upon a night like that, he stuck his head in under the hood and followed it with his body.
He settled himself into his seat and turned to face me. “I’m going as far as Under,” he said quietly. “If you could put me down at the station I’d be very grateful.”
He had a lean, tanned face, which he was wiping with a khaki handkerchief; his hair was straight and black, and fell down wetly over his forehead towards his eyes. In the road the rain dripped monotonously from the car in little liquid notes that mingled with the purring of the engine. I stared at him for a minute. He returned my stare unmoved.
“My name is Moran,” I said at last. “Aren’t you Maurice Lenden? We met in the Flying Corps. In Ninety-two Squadron, in 1917. About June or July. I remember you quite
well now.” I paused, and eyed him curiously. “It’s funny how one runs across people.”
He avoided my eyes. “You must be mixing me up with someone else,” he said uncertainly. “My name is James.”
From the way he spoke I knew that he was lying. But apart from that, I never forget a face. If I wasn’t pretty good that way I shouldn’t have been agent to Lord Arner. I knew as certainly as I was sitting there that he was Lenden. I remembered that I had met him since the war at a reunion dinner—in 1922 or ’23. I remembered that somebody had told me that he was still flying, as a civilian aeroplane pilot. And there was something else that I had heard about him in gossip with some old Flying Corps men in Town, quite recently—divorce, or something of the sort. At the moment I couldn’t bring that to mind.
I wrinkled my brows and glanced at him again, and for the first time I noticed his clothes. It was probably the clothes which brought him to my mind so readily at first. Damn it, the man was dressed for flying. He had no hat, but he wore a long, heavy leather coat with pockets at the knee. There was a map sticking out of one of these, all sodden with the rain. He had altered very little; in those clothes he might have come walking into the Mess, in 1917, when I used to play that game myself. Below the coat he was wearing sheepskin thigh-boots reaching high above the knee, with the fur inside.
I was so positive that I smiled. “James or Lenden,” I said, “I’m damn glad to see you again. Been flying?”
I suppose I was a bit riled at his refusal to know me. I was watching him as I spoke, and I saw his lips tighten irritably. But all he said was:
“I should be very grateful for a lift into Under, if you’re going that way.”
The rain streamed down into the headlights, and the wiper flicked uneasily upon the windscreen. “You won’t get a train from Under tonight,” I said, “and you’ll have your work cut out to wake them at the pub. It’s a rotten hole. If you’re Lenden, you’d better come along back with me. There’s a
spare room in my place that you can have. Dare say I can fix you up with a pair of pyjamas, too.”
He was about to say something, but hesitated. And then: “It’s very good of you,” he muttered. “But I’d rather go on.”
I sat there staring at him in perplexity. He was hugging a little square, black case in the crook of his arm, but at the moment it didn’t strike me what that was. I couldn’t understand why he had given me a false name. And then it struck me that he’d made a damn poor show of it if he wanted to get away unnoticed, and that I could have done it very much better myself. But that was in keeping with the man as I remembered him. He was a simple soul, and quite incapable of any sustained deception.
“Look here,” I said at last. “Purely as a matter of general interest—where have you come from? You’ve been flying, haven’t you? I see you’re in flying kit.”
He didn’t answer for a minute, but then: “I had a forced landing,” he said.
“Here?”
He jerked his head towards the down. “Just over there.”
I wrinkled my brows. “How long ago?”
“About an hour. Hour and a half perhaps. Just before the rain came.”
I leaned forward on the wheel and stared at him. I couldn’t make out for the moment whether to believe a word of what he said. There was something wrong about him, and I didn’t know what it was. He wasn’t drunk. I thought it might be drugs. He didn’t sound natural. His talk about a forced landing seemed to me to be all nonsense. I’ve been a pilot myself, and I know. When one is in sole charge of a machine worth several thousand pounds, and one has just put it down very suddenly and unexpectedly and hard—one doesn’t just go off and leave it. Especially on a night like that.
The rain drummed steadily upon the fabric of the hood.
“You are Lenden, aren’t you?” I inquired.
He laughed shortly, and a little self-consciously. “Yes, I’m Lenden,” he said. “Just my infernal luck, running up against
a man like you. I’ve been a regular Jonah lately.” And he laughed again.
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
He stirred uneasily in his seat. “Let’s get on,” he muttered.
“Right you are,” I said, and slipped in the gear. I didn’t want to go ferreting about in his affairs if he wanted to keep them to himself. “You weren’t speaking the truth, by any chance, when you said you’d had a forced landing?”
That stung him up a bit.
“You’ll know in the morning, I suppose,” he replied. “They’ll find the machine.”
I slipped it out again. “Damn it,” I said. “Do you mean you’ve got an aeroplane out there?”
He nodded.
“Did you crash her?”
“No, she’s all right, but for the oil pressure. It was that that brought me down.”
I could make nothing of his way of treating the affair.
“What have you done with her?” I asked. “There’s a barn about half a mile down the hill over there. Did you get her under the lee of that?”
He looked embarrassed. “I just left her where she was.”
I gazed at him blankly, hardly able to believe my ears. It was the sort of thing a novice might have said—not a pilot of his experience. After all, one expects a man to do his best for the machine.
“Do you mean she isn’t pegged down, or anything?”
He shook his head. “I just left her.”
I leaned forward and switched off the engine of the car. “But damn it all,” I said, “she’ll blow away!”
He didn’t stir.
“Let her,” he said.