An Awkward Lie Read Free

It’s their breakfast.’
    ‘And they run to a pretty powerful car.’ The appearance which the girl had spotted was really too far off to be made much of, and it was only from this slightly more elevated perch that it was visible at all. ‘They look as if they were packing up,’ Bobby said. ‘And I’m fairly sure we oughtn’t to let them go. Or not without getting the number of their car. It’s just possible they may have seen something that’s important in this business. I’ll sprint over to them.’
    ‘I’ll do that. I don’t run too badly. And if they do get on their way, they’re more likely to stop at a wave from a girl than a man. And you get off to the telephone. The…the corpse can look after itself for the inside of ten minutes.’
    ‘Right!’ It seemed to Bobby there was sense in this. ‘If they’re not cooperative, scare them with the police.’
    Hardly waiting for this last injunction, the girl turned and ran. It was true that this was something she knew how to do. For a brief moment Bobby watched her. Then he himself swung round and made for the club-house.
    He remembered as he ran that he hadn’t, after all, managed to glimpse the features of the dead man. So he didn’t yet know – although he must soon – whether it could really, by some amazing chance, be Bloody Nauze who was lying in the bunker. Nauze (whose name rhymed with ‘rose’) had always been called that – partly because of the joke and partly because he was bloody. Although he couldn’t, that was to say, have been called with the slightest fairness a pathological sadist (supposing small boys to have been able to command such an expression), he had certainly been much too free with a gym-shoe to be an agreeable feature of a private school. Bobby had heard of this propensity of Bloody Nauze during his first night in dorm. He hadn’t, he seemed to recall, been a particularly timid infant. On the other hand, since he had never once been hit up to that point in his young life, he had no means of estimating how much a gym-shoe would hurt. He had therefore been alarmed, on the following morning, to learn that Mr Nauze was going to be responsible for guiding his first steps in the Latin tongue. Looking back later, Bobby had never had any inclination to suppose that it had been other than a mild and compassable alarm. But perhaps, in an instantly suppressed sort of way, it had really been a wild terror. For that was what he felt when Bloody Nauze suddenly shouted and pointed at him. The man had merely shouted ‘Next boy!’ when in quest of something like the genitive plural of mensa . And he had pointed at Bobby similarly without any sinister intent. Bobby was the next boy, and he had simply wanted to make that fact rapidly clear. But – had it been for seconds, or had it been for a whole day? – Bobby had been really bothered. He had been really bothered (he had imagined) at being pointed at with an index finger which wasn’t there.
    It wasn’t the action – Bobby, a child of precociously reflective habit, had soon concluded – of what you could call a well-regulated mind. The chap did, after all, have a left hand, and why couldn’t he use that? He’d used it for the gym-shoe. Not that that had turned out, after all, much to darken Bobby’s days. Bobby had ended up getting on rather well with Bloody Nauze. For one thing, the chap had taught Latin admirably.
    But all that had been at least twelve years ago. Bobby almost slackened his pace to a more elderly sort of run as this shocking fact was borne in upon him. If you could look back a dozen years like that, then in no time you would be looking back twenty or forty. His parents were fond of doing just that in their table-talk, and sometimes he had to repress an irrational panic as he listened. Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws . That sort of feeling.
    There still seemed to be not a soul around the club-house, and to get to the telephone he had to let himself