Mysterious Aviator (8 page)

My office is in the main street of the town, about a hundred yards from the market. I rent a couple of rooms there for the business, in the same building as the Rural District Council and the Waterworks Company. I had a good bit to do that morning, I remember, because it was getting on towards Quarter Day. However, at about half-past eleven I left my clerk to cope with the rest of it, and got going on the road for Pithurst.

I had to go. There was a chap there who’d made a real effort to get a pedigree herd of shorthorns together. Arner was keen on all pedigree stock, and we’d helped him quite a lot. This chap had put every bean he’d got into this herd, and borrowed a lot he hadn’t, and then died. It really was rather important that I should be there to watch the sale. I had a long chat with Arner about it a couple of days before. We fixed it that if things began to go badly I was to start running the price up on one or two of the young bulls; if they came to us by the hammer we could ship them out to Las Plantas and get a good bit of our money back that way.

As it happened, that wasn’t necessary. There was a fellow there who’d come up from Devon for the sale and really wanted the whole lot, I believe. Or at any rate, the heifers and young bulls. I’m not sure that if I’d gone to him privately he wouldn’t have made an offer for the whole issue as it stood; still, we’d arranged an auction, and there were a good many of the local people interested. This Devon chap would have had it all his own way in spite of that, if I hadn’t been there. Time after time I ran him up to a decent price for the beast when the locals had dropped out, and then left him to it. As things turned out he paid a pretty fair average price for what he had, and by the time we’d finished he was ready to see me dead. The locals took what was left. Not a bad sale, and I went home at the end feeling that I’d done a pretty good day’s work.

It was about five o’clock when I moved off. I went by the
Under road, because I wanted to drop in at the office to sign my letters. I stayed there for a quarter of an hour or so, and then drove back to the Hall.

Now Under Hall lies about two and a half miles from the town, on the other side of the Rother. You come out of the town past the station and go on for about a mile or so, till you come to a humpy stone bridge across the river. Under Hall is about a mile farther on from that. I came swinging along that road in the Morris, thinking no evil, and pulled up with a squeal of brakes as I came upon the bridge. Sheila Darle was there, Arner’s niece, sitting on the stone parapet in one of the triangular recesses.

She hadn’t got a hat on, and I can remember that the wind was ruffling her short brown hair. That meant that she’d just strolled down from the Hall. She was sitting there on the bridge waiting for someone, and I had a feeling when I saw her that probably she was waiting for me.

I pulled up beside her.

“Good evening, Miss Darle,” I remarked.

Well, it was. It had been a fresh, windy sort of day. Now in the evening the wind had dropped, the clouds had turned white and the sky deep blue. The sun was setting behind the down.

She slid down from the parapet and came and leaned her arms upon the hood, on the opposite side of the car to me.

“Good evening, Mr. Moran,” she said. Somewhere behind her there was a thrush—the first I’d heard that year.

“Can I give you a lift back?” I asked. “I’m going straight home.”

She shook her head absently. “It’s a nice evening for walking. I wanted the walk.”

She glanced up at me. “Mr. Moran,” she said. “Who’s that you’ve got in your house?”

There was no point in wasting petrol. I leaned forward to stop the engine, and took my time over answering that question.

“A chap I used to know in the Flying Corps,” I replied, and
stared her down. “I met him in Winchester, and brought him back with me last night. His name’s Lenden—Maurice Lenden.”

She smiled at me across the car. “Maurice Lenden,” she observed. “Now that’s about the only thing I didn’t know about him.”

I eyed her thoughtfully for a minute. “I see,” I said at last. “You’ve been doing a bit of Lady Investigating.”

She nodded.

I had known Sheila Darle since first I came to Under. When first I came here she was still at school. She used to spend her summer holidays with her uncle at the Hall. One day that summer she went to London and had her hair bobbed in the Children’s Department at Harrod’s, and came back looking about ten years older. Fired by that, on the same evening, she took her uncle’s little Talbot two-seater—that we kept for running in and out of town—and proclaimed her intention of driving it. Drive it she did, too—very neatly and accurately into the gatepost of the stable-yard and the dog-kennel. That was my first acquaintance with Sheila Darle, when she came to me very nearly in tears about it, and wanted to know what she was to do. I was younger then than I am now, but not so young as to miss the implication that the damaged wing and radiator should be repaired before Lord Arner came back from Town. I got it done in time, but I made her go and tell him about it. That set the keynote to our relations. Since those days I had sent off a couple of men with a horse to bring her car in about once every six months. Sometimes it was too bad for that, and then we had to get the garage to go and fetch it in.

I knew she wouldn’t let me down in this.

“You’ve been talking to him?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He’s been talking, but not to me. He’s very ill.”

I wrinkled my brows. “He’s got a touch of fever,” I said. “He took a cold a few days ago, and made it worse last night. But he should be all right. D’you mean he’s off his head?”

She nodded. “Mm.”

I reached out and put my hand to the starter. “I’d better get along back to him.”

She didn’t move from her position, leaning against the car. “He’s all right now,” she said. “He was sleeping quite nicely when I came out, and Mrs. Richards is in the sitting-room. But you shouldn’t have left him like that. You gave Mrs. Richards a great fright.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t think he was going to be off his head. He gets this thing whenever he takes a bad chill. Malaria, or something. He picked it up out in Honduras.”

She didn’t make any reply to that, so that there was silence for a bit. Then she looked up suddenly.

“Is he an airman?” she inquired.

I nodded. “He was in my squadron in the war. He became a professional pilot after that.”

“And now,” she said casually, “he’s just come back from Russia.”

I glanced down at the river. It runs pretty fast over pebbles beneath that bridge, and with a rippling sound. I have heard that there are grayling in it, and I remember wondering then if that were true. And presently I glanced at her again.

“You’d better tell me about it,” I said quietly.

She laughed. “There’s nothing much to tell. Only it’s so funny. Mrs. Richards sent a maid over to him in the middle of the morning with a grape-fruit and some barley water, because she thought he’d like it. And the girl came back and said she couldn’t make him understand anything, but he was talking to himself all the time. Mrs. Richards thought you’d got a looney over there, and went over herself. And then she came and fetched me.”

“I see,” I muttered. “That’s how it was. Did you send for Armitage?” The local doctor.

She shook her head. “I didn’t think it was necessary unless he got worse. You see, you’d told them that he’d got malaria, and that he’d have to lie up for a bit. You hadn’t told them that he was going to be off his head, though. No, we just took it in turns to sit with him.”

“That was kind of you,” I said.

“Not a bit. He’s a nice man.”

I knew what she meant by that. There’s no better way to get to know a man’s character than to get him tight and see how he talks then. And I suppose delirium is much the same.

She leaned both arms upon the hood of the car and looked straight at me. “He was saying such funny things,” she remarked.

I nodded ruefully. “I expect he was. What did he say?”

She considered for a minute. “It was all so mixed up,” she said. “He seemed to be talking most of the time about a long night flight that he had made in the dark. In the cold.” She glanced at me. “Do you know where that was?”

I shook my head.

“It was over snowy country, and it was very cold. He was frozen in his seat so stiff that he couldn’t move, and his head kept dropping forward with the sleepiness of it. And to keep himself awake he raised his goggles, and the cold bit his face and made his eyes water, and the tears froze on his cheeks. And he was most terribly frightened.”

She paused. “That’s one of them. He gets a sort of cold fit every now and again, and whenever he gets that he comes back to talking about that cold flight. He shivers.”

“Poor old soul,” I remarked. “What else did he say?”

“He was talking a lot about his wife. But I don’t want to repeat that, and there wasn’t anything that really mattered. Except to them.”

“All right. What else?”

It was very quiet by the river. “He was talking about a man called Poddy Armstrong that he used to meet at the Royal Aero Club. It was rather horrid, that. Where’s the Royal Aero Club, Mr. Moran?”

“It’s a London club,” I said. “In Clifford Street.” I glanced at her. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that Poddy Armstrong was chasing him in another machine, and trying to shoot him down in the dark.”

She stared at me. “How did you know?”

“Why,” I said simply, “he told me.”

“Why was Poddy Armstrong going to shoot at him?”

I took a long time over answering that question. “Perhaps they’d had a quarrel,” I suggested in the end.

She was about to say something to that, but checked herself. I knew that I had hurt her. In the end she smiled at me. “I know it’s not my business,” she said. “But one can’t help being curious.”

“Neither yours nor mine,” I said. “It’s his own affair. He’s been in a good bit of trouble lately, one way and another. He told me some of it last night, when we didn’t go to bed. Did he say anymore?”

She considered for a little. “No. Only one funny thing happened. He woke up at about three o’clock, and we gave him a drink of barley water. He was quieter then, and he seemed so hot. We thought it’d be a good thing. He asked for you. And I said that you were away, but you’d be back presently. And then he said a funny thing.” She eyed me steadily. “He said you played the
Spring Song
at him.”

“Is that all he said?”

“That’s all. It didn’t seem to make sense. He just rolled over and went to sleep when we’d given him his drink. I think he’s sleeping still.”

I sat there staring at the last gleams of sunshine upon the radiator thermometer of my car. It wanted polishing.

“Did you?” she inquired.

I turned to her. “I don’t play at people,” I replied. “I play because I want to. Lenden’s a sick man, and sick men have fancies. You mustn’t pay any attention to them.”

The sun was just disappearing behind the down; in the fading light the soft brown hair clustered about her neck was all streaked and shot with gold. I had loved her for two years, and I had given up being hurt by things like that.

There was silence for a moment. Then I pulled my gauntlets farther on to my hands, leaned over, and slipped the catch of the door. It swung open by its own weight.

“Would you care for a lift home?” I said. “I must get back.”

She got in without a word, and I started off for the Hall. That was a silent drive. It wasn’t till I had driven into the yard and stopped the engine of the car in the coach-house that we spoke again.

“Of course,” I said as the engine came to rest, “he’s a man who’s had a pretty rough time of it. You can see that for yourself.” I paused, and chose my words. “He may even have got himself into trouble. If that were so, it would be a pity to remember anything that he may have said in fever, when he wasn’t himself.”

She glanced up at me in surprise. “But he didn’t say anything that he need be ashamed of. Rather the opposite.”

“No. But he may have said things that he’d rather not have talked about.

“In fact,” I said, “he did.”

There was a long silence after that. Finally she stirred, and got out of the car. “I knew it was something like that, of course,” she said, and sighed. “It’s a pity, because he’s a nice man.” She turned away. “All right, Mr. Moran, I’ll not give him away. And I’ll see Mrs. Richards.”

She left the coach-house, and went walking across the yard towards the mansion. I sat there in the car staring after her for a little, wondering how much she knew.

Lenden was asleep when I got back to my house, and a maid was sitting in the adjoining room. I sent her back to the mansion and went in and had a look at him. I stood in the door for a while, staring moodily at him as he lay in bed. He was sleeping fairly quietly, though there was an odd, flushed look about him; his head was tousled and unshaven. There was a glass of barley water on the table by his side, and a few biscuits. Clearly the sleep was doing him a world of good; in view of the life that he had been leading during the last few days, that was hardly a matter for surprise. I stood there in the doorway for a long time staring at him, and wondering what the devil was going to happen about it all.

L
ENDEN SLEPT
till about nine o’clock that night, and woke up more or less himself. I was working at the rent rolls in the sitting-room when I heard him stirring through the open doors, because it was getting on towards Quarter Day, and I’m always pretty full up about that time. I went in to have a look at what he was up to, and found him sitting up in bed.

“Evening,” I said. “How d’you feel now?”

He moistened his lips. “I’m better,” he said thickly. He shivered suddenly, and slid down beneath the bedclothes again. “I’ve had the hell of a go … this time. A proper searcher.”

I went and sat on the foot of his bed. “Want a drink? There’s something there—barley water, or something. Or I’ll get you a whisky.”

He craned his head to look at the tumbler. “No. Thanks. Not now. I’ll go to sleep again in a bit. I don’t ever remember being like this. What’s the time?”