The Man from the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

making their arrangements with punctilio. Then they were off. Cranston could tell at once that the man had been a sprinter. His own best distance was the half-mile. He gave himself to the serious business of running as fast as he could – thinking about his breathing, trying to avoid spots where the sand looked too soft to thrust from with the ball of the foot. The man from the sea was actually heading him; they were level at the turn by the farther rocks; Cranston led all the way back, but at the finish would scarcely have cancelled the fifteen yards’ handicap he had rashly thought to offer. For some moments they stood panting. For a further second they turned to each other, laughing – as if experiencing again, less tensely, the odd intimacy that had surprised them as they lurked in hiding. And then the man from the sea stooped quickly, picked up his belt and fastened it round his middle. He glanced down as he did so, making sure of the buckle. And something pricked at Cranston’s memory.
    Once already he had experienced the sensation of near-recognition. This time it prompted him to speak. “You know,” he said, “I don’t believe a word of your story.”
    The man from the sea made one further movement, settling the belt about his waist. And then he stood quite still – and for so long that Cranston had the sense of having uttered unwittingly the words of a potent immobilising spell. They had been words prompted, at least in part, by the obstinate irrational feeling that the man from the sea had something to share with him. They had borne – or been intended to bear – the character of an approach to confidence, an appeal for candour. But they were also the product – Cranston was conscious – of some piece of crucial knowledge hovering just beyond his power of recollection. Perhaps it was the nature of this – he suddenly found himself rather urgently feeling – that now gave them, retrospectively, the sense of being highly injudicious.
    “What’s wrong with my story?” When he did speak, the man from the sea spoke gently. At the same time he took a couple of steps away from Cranston, so that the rocks received him partly into their shadow and he became, once more, like a picture cast in bold chiaroscuro. “You interest me,” he said mildly. “Just where does my story strain credulity?”
    “It’s not your story; it’s yourself.” The race had not only sent Cranston’s blood coursing more swiftly. It had quickened his brain. He had lately experienced novel pleasures – but now an old one had with unexpected suddenness returned to him. It was the clever schoolboy’s pleasure in his own powers – when only lately discovered and still felt as a wonderful springboard to the world. He remembered that his wits worked well – and at the same time realised that for days, for weeks, they had hardly been working at all. But they were coming back to him now, and with them the power of lucid speech. “Or rather,” he said, “it’s the lack of adequate correspondence between the one and the other – between your story, you know, and you. You’re the wrong man for it – quite the wrong man for that diamond-smuggling yarn. If I’d thought to pick up that belt and hand it to you – and why in the world didn’t I think of it? – there would have been nothing like the feel of gems beneath that webbing. It isn’t even heavy; it didn’t fall as if it were. Papers, perhaps, or banknotes well waterproofed. But not diamonds destined for Hatton Garden.” He paused. “That’s one thing.”
    “There are others?”
    “I don’t think you jumped into the sea because some chaps were then and there going to cut your throat. You jumped on a predetermined plan – and it included the efficient little detail of shaving immediately beforehand.” Cranston paused. He was the schoolboy in the middle of a model construe. “You seem so efficient that I’m surprised you didn’t get overboard more quietly, or