An Awkward Lie Read Free Page B

there had been about her a curious air of detachment, of floating loose above the local scene.
    He was passing the first tee when he heard the telephone ring in the still empty club-house behind him. He hesitated, and decided it might quite well be the police again. Perhaps they had some system of checking up on calls which were possibly no more than attempts at a stupid hoax. So he turned and went back at the double. He had, after all, undertaken to stay put. The call turned out to be a wrong number. When he got outside once more, it was to find a car drawing to a halt in front of him. It was a large black saloon, with one of those little lighthouse-things on the middle of its roof. And it had POLICE written on it, fore and aft, in what immediately suggested itself as the colour of blood. Bobby Appleby, the most blameless of citizens (and a talented writer), felt a wholly irrational twinge of apprehension at the spectacle. A sign of the times, he told himself. A token of the spirit of the age. These were the people who, all over the world, beat up your contemporaries in the streets, tore down their banners, hustled them into vans.
    Mr Robert Appleby, admiring son of a retired Police Commissioner, noted in himself with some sobriety this strong if fleeting reaction. Then he stepped forward.
    ‘Sergeant Howard?’ he asked politely.
    Sergeant Howard it was. He didn’t suggest a world in which sinister things happened to you as soon as they got you inside. In a decently restrained way, there was something fatherly about Sergeant Howard. He started off, it was true, with a steady and frankly appraising scrutiny of the young man who had made the telephone call. The effect was the more impressive because Sergeant Howard had eyes of an almost unnaturally light blue. This gave his stare a chilly quality. But if Bobby was alarmed, it was only for a second. He had a sense – perhaps a little too habitual with him, since he was a personable young man – of being, at least provisionally, approved of.
    ‘We’d better get straight to it,’ Howard said briskly. ‘We’ meant Bobby, Howard himself, and a constable who had driven the car. It also looked like meaning several other men who had turned up by now – early-morning golfers who were aware that something strange must have occurred, and who saw no reason why they shouldn’t discreetly bring up the rear of the procession. A certain publicity was going to attend the next stage of the affair. ‘Where about, sir?’ Howard asked.
    ‘Close to the first green. We go round that spinney, and there it is.’
    ‘I think you said something about a car, Mr Appleby. And about some men making an escape in it. We met nothing of the sort as we came from Linger. Of course, they may have made off in the direction of Drool. Did they seem to be armed?’
    ‘Well, no. I think they were having a picnic, as a matter of fact.’
    ‘A picnic?’ the constable asked. ‘Did you say a picnic, sir?’
    ‘That was what the girl called it. It might have been breakfast. They had a caravan. And a big car – I think a Mercedes.’ Bobby felt he wasn’t doing too well. ‘I didn’t mean they actually looked like murderers–’
    ‘Mr Appleby, did I understand you to say something about a girl?’ It was with an effect almost of curiosity that Sergeant Howard asked this.
    ‘Yes. I don’t know who she is. She just walked up. She’ll be waiting there now. I hope she’ll have persuaded the people with the car to wait as well.’
    ‘Quite a reception committee.’ Sergeant Howard said this rather too dryly to suggest an attempt at humour. ‘Do you know this dead man, Mr Appleby?’
    ‘He’s face-downward in the sand, so I can’t really say.’ Bobby felt he had better out with the astonishing idea in his head. ‘But he has the first finger of his right hand missing, and I’ve known a man like that.’
    ‘I’ve known several.’ Sergeant Howard was extremely unimpressed. ‘A very common