An Awkward Lie Read Online Free PDF Page B

any moment. The acacia tree was a scented cascade, and a nightingale was singing amid its long racemes. All the works, Appleby told himself. Absolutely all the works.
    But the garden failed to hold him, and when he had prowled round the house he found that he had halted before the motor sheds. This cleared his mind for him. He got out the car, and drove over to Linger.
    There was nothing on the road except a hedgehog, a hare; and his mind could play as it pleased. When Bobby was at home, how regularly did he go out before breakfast and play a few holes? Perhaps, Appleby told himself, two or three times a week. Which wasn’t enough for his turning up to be gambled on. So the body hadn’t been disposed in its bunker for Bobby’s specific benefit. Or not unless one imagined a scout with an eye on Dream, and a swift telephone-message as soon as Bobby set out. But nothing of the sort would allow much time to fix up an elaborate piece of miching malicho. That it was Bobby who had come upon the body appeared, therefore, almost certainly fortuitous.
    But somebody had been expected to come upon it. Either some other specific somebody, or whoever among the morning’s golfers propelled his ball in the direction of the first green. You don’t choose the fairway of a golf-course if you are anxious to keep a dead man concealed for any length of time. Of course you may simply shoot a man down where he happens to be, and abandon him on the spot – or near the spot – in a panic. In that case, it isn’t relevant to speak of expectations at all.
    But if the dead man, already dead, had been transported quite some way, then there must at least have been a reason – although possibly a muddled or feeble one – for dumping him just where he had been dumped. But then he had been up-lifted again! This was the point of real astonishment – and one which surely counted against the notion of a muddled or feeble job. For whatever reason it had been done, nerve had been required for the doing. And think of the raking over of the sand, and the leaving of Bobby’s ball in the middle of it. More nerve had been required for that – and perhaps a grim sort of humour as well. It might have been calculated, of course, that Bobby’s story would be totally discredited; that without further inquiry the police would dismiss the whole thing. Tommy Pride had revealed, indeed, that it had almost come to that. But nobody could really have banked on it. Even if it had been the sole motive in raking over the surface of the bunker, it could hardly have been the sole motive for carrying off the body.
    Why exhibit a dead man, and then spirit him away again? There existed, no doubt, conceivable answers to this question. But Appleby couldn’t at the moment supply one, so he had to ask himself another question instead. What could precipitate a hazardous change of plan? Abandoning a murdered man on a golf-course was not in itself remarkable. It didn’t, so to speak, cry out for explanation. But whipping the murdered man away again did. And for this – at least in general terms – an explanation could be given. Something had gone wrong. There had been a hitch.
    And the hitch had been either Bobby or the girl.
    These thoughts brought Appleby to the club-house. As he walked up to it from his parked car his footfalls, first on macadam and then on gravel, sounded loud to his own ear. But nobody was going to detect him on this nocturnal expedition. There were no living-quarters, he remembered, in the club-house, and it seemed unlikely that anybody would have thought up the ploy of playing golf by moonlight. The course, it was true, was by no means remote from human habitation. On this side it was bounded for nearly half a mile by a high-road upon which Bobby and the girl had remarked a car, a trailer, and two men. And some fifty yards back from the other verge of this ran a straggle of substantial villas – mostly the homes, Appleby supposed, of retired persons who