The Singing Sands Page 5

  He stumped his way into the back of the car and sat there simmering, the despised "gravat" flung in a limp disavowed heap at the far end of the scat.

  "Heathen aren't supposed to go to church," he offered, as they slipped down the sandy road to the gate, the loose stones spurting from under the tires.

  "Who is heathen?" his mother asked, her mind on the road.

  "I am. I'm a Mohammedan."

  "Then you have a great need to go to a Christian church and be converted. Open the gate, Pat."

  "I've no wish to be converted. I'm fine as I am." He held the gate open for them and shut it behind them. "I disapprove of the Bible," he said, as he got in again.

  "Then you can't be a good Mohammedan."

  "What for no?"

  "They have some of the Bible too."

  "I bet they don't have David!"

  "Don't you approve of David?" Grant asked.

  "A poor soppy thing, dancing and singing like a lassie. There's not a soul in the Old Testament I'd trust to go to a sheep sale."

  He sat erect in the middle of the back seat, too alive with rebellion to relax, his bleak eye watching the road ahead in absent-minded fury. And it occurred to Grant that he might equally have slumped in a corner and sulked. He was glad that this cousin of his was a rude and erect flame of resentment and not a small, collapsed bundle of self-pity.

  The injured heathen got out at the church, still rude and erect, and walked away, without a backward glance, to join the small group of children by the side door.

  "Will he behave, now he is there?" Grant asked as Laura set the car in motion again.

  "Oh, yes. He really likes it, you know. And of course Douglas will be there: his Jonathan. A day when he couldn't spend part of it laying down the law to Duggie would be a day wasted. He didn't really believe that I would let him come to Scoone instead. It was just a try-on."

  "It was a very effective try-on."

  "Yes. There's a lot of the actor in Pat."

  They had gone another two miles before the thought of Pat faded from his mind. And then, quite suddenly, into the blank that Pat's departure left, came the realisation that he was in a car. That he was shut into a car. He ceased on the instant to be an adult watching, tolerant, and amused, the unreasonable antics of a child, and became a child watching, gibbering and aghast, the hostile advance of giants.

  He let down the window on his side to its fullest extent. "Let me know if you feel that too much," he said.

  "You've been too long in London," she said.

  "How?"

  "Only people who live in towns are fresh-air fiends. Country people like a nice fug as a change from unlimited out-of-doors."

  "I'll put it up, if you like," he said, although his mouth was stiff with effort as he said the words.

  "No, of course not," she said, and began to talk about a car they had ordered.

  So the old battle started. The old arguments, the old tricks, the old cajoling. The pointing out of the open windows, the reminding himself that it was only a car and could be stopped at any moment, the willing himself to consider a subject far removed from the present, the self-persuading that he was lucky to be alive at all. But the tide of his panic rose with a slow abominable menace. A black evil tide, scummy and revolting. Now it was round his chest, pressing and holding, so that he could hardly breathe. Now it was up to his throat, feeling round his windpipe, clutching his neck in a pincer embrace. In a moment it would be over his mouth.

  "Lalla, stop!"

  "Stop the car?" she asked, surprised.

  "Yes."

  She brought the car to a standstill, and he got out on trembling legs and hung over the dry-stone dyke sucking in great mouthfuls of the clean air.

  "Are you feeling ill, Alan?" she asked anxiously.

  "No, I just wanted to get out of the car."

  "Oh," she said in a relieved tone. "Is that all!"

  "Is that all?"

  "Yes: claustrophobia. I was afraid you were ill."

  "And you don't call that being ill?" he said bitterly.

  "Of course not. I nearly died of terror once, when I was taken to see the Cheddar caves. I had never been in a cave before." She had switched off the motor and now she sat down on a roadside boulder with her back half-turned to him. "Except those rabbit burrows that we called caves in our youth." She held up her cigarette case to him. "I'd never been really underground before, and I didn't mind going in the least. I went all eager and delighted. I was a good half-mile from the entrance when it struck me. I sweated with terror. Do you have it often?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know that you're the only person who still calls me Lalla sometimes? We are getting very old."

  He looked round and down at her, the strain fading from his expression.

  "I didn't know you had any terrors other than rats."

  "Oh, yes. I have a fine variety. Everyone has, I think. At least everyone who is not just a clod. I keep placid because I lead a placid life and collect adipose tissue. If I overworked the way you do, I'd be a raving maniac. I'd probably have claustrophobia and agoraphobia, and make medical history. One would have the enormous consolation of being something in the Lancet, of course."

  He turned from leaning over the wall and sat down beside her. "Look," he said, and held out the shaking hand that held his cigarette for her to see. "Poor Alan."

  "Poor Alan, indeed," he agreed. "That came not from being half a mile underground in the dark, but from being a passenger in a car with wide-open windows in an open countryside on a fine Sunday in a free country." "It didn't, of course." "It didn't?"

  "It came from four years of consistent overwork and an overgrown conscience. You always were a demon where conscience was concerned. Quite tiresome you could be. Would you rather have a spot of claustrophobia or a stroke?"

  "A stroke?"

  "If you work yourself half to death you have to pay in some manner or other. Would you rather pay in the more usual physical manner with high blood-pressure or a strained heart? It's better to be scared of being shut into a car than to be pushed about in a bath-chair. At least you have time off from being scared. If you hate the thought of getting back into the car, by the way, I can go on to Scoone with your letter and pick you up on the way back."

  "Oh, no, I'll go on."

  "I thought it was better not to fight it?"

  "Did you scream and yell half a mile underground in the Cheddar Gorge?"

  "No. But I wasn't a pathological specimen suffering from overwork."

  He smiled suddenly. "It's extraordinary how comforting it is to be called a pathological specimen. Or rather, to be called a pathological specimen in just those tones."

  "Do you remember the day at Varese when it rained and we went to the museum and saw those specimens in bottles?"

  "Yes; you were sick on the pavement outside."

  "Well, you were sick when we had sheep's heart for lunch because you had watched it being stulled," she said instantly.

  "Lalla, darling," he said, beginning to laugh, "you haven't grown up at all."

  "Well, it's nice that you can still laugh, even if it's only at me," she said, caught out in that flash of childhood rivalry. "Say when you want to go on."

  "Now."

  "Now? Arc you sure?"

  "Quite sure. Being called a pathological specimen has wonderfully curative qualities, I find."

  "Well, next time don't wait until you are on the point of suffocation," she said matter-of-factly.

  He did not know which he found more reassuring: her awareness that the thing was a sort of suffocation or her matter-of-fact acceptance of unreason.

  If Grant had imagined that his chief would be gratified cither by the possibility of his earlier recovery or by his punctiliousness in the matter of the newspaper, he was wrong. Bryce was still antagonist rather than colleague. And his reply contained a right-and-left that was typically Bryce. Reading it. Grant thought that only Bryce could manage to have his cake and eat i
t so successfully. In the first paragraph he rebuked Grant for his unprofessional conduct in abstructing any article from the vicinity of sudden and unexplained death. In the second paragraph he was surprised that Grant should have thought of bothering a busy Department with any matter as trivial as that of the purloined paper, but supposed that no doubt his divorce from workaday surroundings had contributed to a lack of judgment and proportion. There was no third paragraph.

  What came off the familiar thin office paper was a strong impression that he had been put, not in his place, but outside. What the letter really said was: "I can't imagine why you, Alan Grant, should be bothering us, either to report on your health or to take an interest in our business. We are not interested in the one and you have no concern with the other." He was an outsider. A renegade.

  And it was only now, reading the snubbing letter and having the door banged in his face, that he became aware that beyond his conscientious need to put himself straight with the Department over the purloined paper had been the desire to hang on to B Seven. His letter, as well as an apology, had been a way to information. There was no longer hope of obtaining information from the Press. B Seven was not news. Every day people died in trains. There was nothing to interest the lieges in that. As far as the Press was concerned B Seven was dead twice over, once in fact and once as news. But he had wanted to know more about B Seven, and he had hoped, without knowing it, that his colleagues might be chatty on the subject.

  He might have known Bryce better, he thought, tearing up the sheet of paper and dropping it into the wastepaper basket. However, there was always Sergeant Williams, thank Heaven; the faithful Williams. Williams would wonder why someone of his rank and experience should be interested in an unknown dead body seen once for a moment or two, but he would probably put it down to boredom. In any case there would be no lack of chat about Williams. So to Williams he wrote. Would Williams find out what the result of the inquest had been on a young man, Charles Martin, who had died on Thursday night a week ago on the night train to the Highlands, and anything else about the young man that might have transpired in the course of the inquiry? And kind regards to Mrs. Williams and Angela and Leonard.

  And for two days he settled back in a sort of happy impatience to wait for Williams's reply. He inspected the unfishable Turlie, pool by pool; he caulked the boat at Lochan Dhu; he walked the hill in the company of Graham the shepherd with Tong and Zang more or less at heel; and he listened to Tommy's plan for a nine-hole private golf course between the house and the hillside. And on the third day he went homing at post time with an eagerness he had not known since he was nineteen and used to send his poems to magazines.

  Nor was his blank unbelief when there was nothing for him any less poignant than it had been in those callow years.

  He reminded himself that he was being unreasonable (the unforgivable sin, always, in Grant's estimation). The inquest had nothing to do with the Department. He did not even know which Division might have been landed with the job. Williams would have to find out. Williams had work of his own; twenty-four-hours-a-day work. It was unreasonable to expect him to drop everything to satisfy some holiday-making colleague's frivolous questions.

  For two more days he waited, and then it came. Williams hoped that Grant wasn't hankering after work. He was supposed to be having a rest, and everyone in the Department hoped that he was getting it (not everyone! thought Grant, remembering Bryce) and feeling the better for it. They missed him very badly. As to Charles Martin, there was no mystery about him. Or about his death, if that is what Grant had been thinking. He had hit the back of his head against the edge of the porcelain wash-hand basin, and although able to crawl around for a little on his hands and knees and eventually reach the bed, he had died from internal haemorrhage very shortly after falling over. The fact that he had fallen backwards at all was due to amount of neat whisky he had consumed. Not enough to make him drunk but quite enough to make him muzzy, and the tilt of the coach as it changed direction had done the rest. There was no mystery, either, about the man himself. He had had the usual bundle of French identity papers in his possession, and his people were still living at his home address, near Marseilles. They had not seen him for some years—he had left home after being in trouble for stabbing his girl in a lit of jealousy—but they had sent money to bury him so that he should not be buried in a pauper's grave.

  This left Grant with an appetite whetted rather than assuaged.

  He waited until, according to his reckoning, Williams would be happily settled down with his pipe and his paper, while Mrs. Williams mended and Angela and Leonard did their homework, and put in a personal call to him. There was always the chance that Williams was out pursuing the ill-doer through the devious ways of inhabiting, but there was, too, the chance that he was at home. He was at home.

  When he had been duly thanked for his letter, Grant said: "You said his people sent money to bury him. Didn't anyone come to identify him?" "No; they identified a photograph."

  "A live photograph?"

  "No, no. A photograph of the body."

  "Didn't anyone turn up to identify him in London?"

  "Not a soul, it seems."

  "That's odd."

  "Not so odd if he was a wide boy. Wide boys don't want trouble."

  "Was there any suggestion that he was wide?"

  "No, 1 don't think so."

  "What was his profession?"

  "Mechanic."

  "Did he have a passport?"

  "No. Just the usual papers. And letters."

  "Oh, he had letters?"

  "Yes; the usual odd two or three that people carry. One was from a girl saying she would wait for him. She's going to wait some time."

  "Were the letters in French?"

  "Yes."

  "What money had he?"

  "Wait a minute till I find my notes. Um-m-m. Twenty-two, ten, in mixed notes; eighteen and tuppence ha-penny in silver and copper."

  "AH English?"

  "Yes."

  "Between the lack of passport and the English currency, it looks as if he had been in England a good long time. I wonder why no one came to claim him."

  "They may not know yet that he is dead. It didn't get much publicity."

  "Didn't he have any address in Britain?"

  "He had no address on him. The letters were not in envelopes: just in his wallet. His friends will probably turn up yet."

  "Does anyone know where he was going? Or why?"

  "No; seemingly not."

  "What luggage had he?"

  "An overnight case. Shirt, socks, pyjamas, and bedroom slippers. No laundry marks."

  "What? Why? Were the things new?"

  "No, oh, no." Williams sounded amused at Grant's overt suspicion. "Very well worn."

  "Maker's name in the slippers?"

  "No; those hand-made thick leather things you find in North African bazaars and in the Mediterranean ports." "What else?"

  "In the case? A New Testament in French, and a yellow paper-backed novel, also in French. Both well worn." "Your three minutes are up," said the operator. Grant had another three minutes, but he got no nearer an explanation of B Seven. Apart from the fact that he had no record, either in France (the stabbing had been merely a domestic incident, it seemed) or in Britain, nothing was known of him. It was indeed typical that the one positive thing about him should be a negation.

  "By the way," Williams said, "when I was writing I quite forgot to answer your postscript."

  "What postscript?" Grant asked, and then remembered that he had written as an afterthought:

  "If you ever have nothing better to do you might ask the Special Branch if they are interested at all in a man called Archibald Brown. Scottish patriot. Ask for Ted Hanna and tell him I was asking."

  "Oh, yes, of course. About the patriot. Did you have time to do anything about it? It wasn't important."

  "Well, as it happened, I met your reference on a Whitehall bus, day before yesterday. He says he has
nothing against your bird but they would very much like to know who the ravens are. Do you know what he was talking about?"

  "I think I do," Grant said, amused. "I'll do my best to find out for them. Just as a piece of holiday homework, tell him."

  "You keep your mind off your work, if you please, and get well enough to be back here before the place falls to pieces without you."

  "The shoes he was wearing: where were they made?"

  "Who was wearing? Oh. Yes. Karachi."

  "Where?"

  "Karachi."

  "Yes, that's what I thought you said. He seems to have got around. No name on the fly-leaf of the Testament?"

  "Don't think so. I don't think I made any note of that when I read the evidence. Just a minute. Oh, yes, I did. No name."

  "And no one in 'missing persons' that fits him?"

  "No. No one. No one even approximately like him, it seems. He isn't 'missing' from anywhere."

  "Well, it was wonderful of you to go to all that trouble for me instead of telling me to go fish in my burn. I'll do as much for you some day."

  "Are the fish in your burn biting?"

  "There's hardly any burn, and the fish are cowering in the deepest recesses of the remaining pools. That is why I am reduced to taking an interest in cases that aren't worth a flicker of real interest in busy places like South-West One."

  But he knew that that was not so. It was not boredom that had driven him to this interest in B Seven, this—he had almost said—alliance. He had a curious feeling of identification with B Seven. Not in the sense of being one, but in the sense of having an identity of interests. This, in view of the fact that he had seen him only once and knew nothing whatever about him, was highly unreasonable. Was it perhaps that he had thought of B Seven as also wrestling with demons? Had the feeling of personal interest, the championship, begun in that?

  He had supposed that B Seven's Paradise had been oblivion. He had supposed that because of the whisky-sodden fug in the compartment. But the young man had not after all been sodden. He had not, indeed been very drunk. Just tipsy. His backwards fall against the solid round bulk of the basin had been the kind of thing that might happen to anyone. His so strangely guarded Paradise had not after all been oblivion.