An Awkward Lie Read Online Free PDF Page A

relax. ‘There’s another very possible reason why this girl may, as you express it, have cleared out. She may have been cleared out – say at the point of a gun. A man needn’t have taken a First in Greats, or even have written an anti-novel or whatever it’s called, to tumble to that. Now, if Bobby sees the thing that way – persons unknown making off, for some mysterious reason, with a murdered man and a living girl – what is he likely to do?’
    ‘Go after them, I suppose.’
    ‘It’s a fair enough bet.’ Appleby’s asperity vanished. ‘By the way, do you happen to know whether he told Howard of any notion he had about the dead man’s possible identity?’
    ‘I don’t think Bobby came forward with anything of that kind.’
    ‘Um.’ For the first time, Appleby confessed to himself an uneasy sense that Bobby had perhaps gone hazardously out on a limb.
    ‘I believe he said he’d once known a man with a missing index finger. But you can’t mean that. Howard took it for rather a trivial remark.’
    Appleby checked an impulse to say ‘Um’ again. He wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t have to revise his opinion of Howard.
    ‘You mean,’ he asked, ‘that Howard brushed the information aside?’
    ‘My dear John, I don’t know that that’s altogether fair. If you think there could be anything in it, you must have a word with Howard yourself. And it can be taken up again as soon as Bobby gets home.’
    ‘Perfectly true.’ Appleby again reminded himself that he wasn’t playing Bobby’s hand for him. It was, of course, extremely serious to withhold a scrap of information from the police – even from a policeman convinced that one had been made some sort of ass of. But this didn’t mean that Appleby himself need start talking about an obscure schoolmaster called Nauze here and now. ‘Wherever Bobby’s gone off to,’ he said pacifically, ‘I expect he’ll ring up this evening. I’ll let you know at once if he has anything sensible to say.’
    But Bobby didn’t ring up – or not by eleven o’clock, the hour after which the senior Applebys discouraged telephone calls from their children. Appleby was far from alarmed. He had very little doubt where Bobby had gone off to, since there was only one spot in England in which he had any immediate prospect of picking up a trail on the man who used to be called Bloody Nauze. And at least at his old private school Bobby was more likely to pick up something useful about the man than would be an officer from a CID. Old hands at Overcombe would be prepared to go up with Bobby (a distinguished Old Boy) as they wouldn’t be with a policeman.
    Appleby was restless, all the same. He wished that his wife hadn’t gone off on one of her London jaunts. In Judith’s absence – and Bobby’s – the establishment at Dream was a little lacking in intellectual calibre. Mrs Colpoys in the kitchen had her heart in the right place, and expressed extreme indignation at Mr Robert’s having had his early-morning golf interrupted in that nasty way. She thought it likely that the dead man had fallen out of an aeroplane – probably a helicopter, which had then descended and picked him up again. She believed that people fell out of such contraptions far more frequently than was known. It was the sort of thing the authorities kept quiet about.
    Out in the garden the aged Hoobin, pausing in his day’s work (which chiefly consisted in issuing directions to his nephew and assistant young Solo Hoobin), had offered a number of remarks too gnomic in manner to be very certainly understood, but having apparent relevance to the darkest recesses of sexual crime. The aged Hoobin was the owner of a pair of spectacles (which had been given him by old Lady Killcanon along with a copy of the Bible) and had as a consequence set himself up in the dignity of what he called a perusing man. He still read the Bible on weekdays, but on Sundays he read The News of the World . He thus achieved, no