The Singing Sands Read online

  He caught his attention back to what Williams was saying.

  "What's that?"

  "I forgot to say that the sleeping-car attendant is of the opinion that Martin was seen off by someone at Euston."

  "Why is this an afterthought?"

  "Well, I gather that he wasn't much of a help anyway, the sleeping-car chap. He seemed to treat the whole thing as a personal insult, the sergeant who was there said."

  Old Yoghourt seemed to have run very true to form.

  "What did he say?"

  "He said that when he walked through the corridor, at Euston, Martin had someone with him in the compartment. Another man. He didn't see the man because Martin was facing him and the door was half open, so that all he noticed was that Martin was talking to another man. They seemed very happy and friendly. They were talking about robbing a hotel."

  "What!"

  si "You see what I mean? The coroner said 'What!' too. The railway chap said that they were talking about 'robbing the Caley,' and since no one could rob a football team it must have been a hotel. It seems that all the hotels in Scotland that are not called Waverly are called Caledonian. Popularly known as 'Caley.' They weren't serious about it, he said."

  "And that was all he saw of the seer-off?"

  "Yes, that was all."

  "He mightn't have been a seer-off at all. He might have been just a friend who came across him on the train. Saw his name on the sleeper list, or noticed him in passing."

  "Yes; except that you'd expect a friend to turn up again in the morning."

  "Not necessarily. Especially if he was far down the train. And the removal of the body would have been so discreet that I doubt if any passengers knew that someone had died. The station was clear of passengers long before the ambulance arrived. I know, because the ambulance fuss was taking place when I had nearly finished breakfast."

  "Yes. The sleeping-car chap said he took it for granted that the other man was a seer-off because he was standing in hat and coat. Mostly, he says, when people go coffee-housing along the train they take their hats off. It's the first thing they do, he says: throw their hat on a rack. When they get to their compartment, I mean."

  "Talking of names on the sleeper list, how was the berth booked?"

  "By phone; but he picked up the ticket himself. At least, it was picked up by a thin dark man. Booked a week in advance."

  "All right. Go on about Yoghourt."

  "About who?"

  "About the sleeping-car attendant."

  "Oh. Well. He said that when he came down the train collecting tickets, about twenty minutes out from Euston, Martin had gone to the lavatory, but his sleeper ticket and the outward half of his ticket to Scoone were lying ready on the little shelf below the mirror. He took them and marked them off in his book, and as he was passing the lavatory he knocked at the door and said, 'Are you in B Seven, sir?' Martin said Yes. The attendant said, 'I've taken your tickets, thank you, sir. Will you be wanting tea in the morning?' And Martin said, 'No, thank you; good-night.' "

  "So he had a return ticket?"

  "Yes. The return half was in his wallet."

  "Well, it's all straightforward enough, it seems. Even the lack of anyone to make inquiries about him, or to claim his body, may be due to the fact that he was off on a trip and people didn't expect to hear from him."

  "That and the lack of publicity. I don't suppose his people even bothered to put an announcement in an English paper; they would just announce it in their own local affair, where people knew him."

  "What did the P.M, say?"

  "Oh, the usual. Light meal about an hour before death, large quantity of whisky in stomach and a fair amount in the blood. Quite enough to make him tight."

  "No suggestion that he was a soak?"

  "Oh, no. No degeneration of any kind. Head and shoulder injuries at some earlier period, but otherwise good healthy specimen. Not to say tough."

  "So he had some earlier injury?"

  "Yes, but a long time ago. I mean, nothing to do with this. He had at some time had a fractured skull and a broken collar-bone. Would it be very bad-mannered or very indiscreet of me to ask why all this interest in a simple case?"

  "So help me, Sergeant, if I knew I would tell you. I think I must be getting childish."

  "It's more likely that you're just bored," Williams said sympathetically. "Me, 1 was brought up in the country and I was never a one for watching the grass grow. An over-rated place, the country. Everything's too far away. Once that burn of yours starts flowing, you'll forget about Mr. Martin. It's pouring stair-rods here, so you probably won't have long to wait for rain now."

  It did not, in fact, rain that night in the Turlie valley, but something else happened. The cold bright stillness gave place to a light wind. The wind was soft and warm; the air hung damp and heavy between gusts; the earth was moist and slippery; and down from the high tops came the snow water, filling the river bed from bank to bank. And up the brown racing water came the fish, flashing silver in the light as they leaped over the broken ledges of rock and up the narrow sluicing current between the boulders. Pat took his precious invention from his fly case (where it had a special compartment of its own) and presented it to Grant with the formal benevolence of a headmaster handing over a certificate. "You'll take care of it, won't you?" he said. "It took me a long time to make." The thing was, as his mother had said, a fearsome object. Grant thought that it was rather like something for a woman's hat; but he was aware that he was being singled out among men as the sole recipient worthy of such an honour and he accepted it with due gratification. He put it safely away in his own case and hoped that Pat would not supervise his efforts to the extent of making him use it. But each time he chose a new fly in the days that followed, he caught sight of the fearsome object and was warmed by his small cousin's approval of him.

  He spent his days by the Turlie, happy and relaxed about the brown swirling water. The water was clear as beer and its foam froth-while; it filled his ears with music and his days with delight. The damp soft air smurred his tweed with fine dew, and water from the hazel twigs dripped down the back of his neck.

  For nearly a week he thought fish, talked fish, and ate fish.

  And then, one evening, on his pet pool below the swing bridge, he was startled out of his complacence. He saw a man's face in the water.

  There was time for his heart to come up into his mouth before he realised that the face was not under the surface of the water but at the back of his eyes. It was the dead white face with the reckless eyebrows.

  He swore, and sent his Jock Scott singing viciously to the far side of the pool. He was finished with B Seven. He had grown interested in B Seven under a complete misunderstanding of the situation. He had thought that B Seven, too, had been hounded by demons. He had built up for himself an entirely fallacious picture of B Seven. The toper's Paradise in B Seven's compartment boiled down to an overturned whisky bottle. He was no longer interested in B Seven: a very ordinary young man, bursting with rude health to the point of toughness, who had had one over the eight on a night journey and ended his life in the highly undignified manner of falling backwards and then crawling about on his hands and knees until he stopped breathing.

  "But he wrote those lines about Paradise," a voice in him said.

  "He didn't," he said to the voice. "There's not the slightest evidence that he did any such thing."

  'There's his face. No ordinary face. It was the face that you first succumbed to. Long before you began to think of his Paradise at all."

  "I have not succumbed," he said. "In my job you take an automatic interest in people."

  "Yes? You mean, if the occupant of that whisky-sodden compartment had been a fat commercial traveller with a moustache like a badly kept hedge and a face like a boiled pudding, you would still have been interested?"

  "I might."

  "You lying dishonest bastard. You were B Seven's champion the minute you saw his face and noticed the way that Yogh
ourt was mauling him about. You snatched him from Yoghourt's grip and straightened his jacket like a mother pulling a shawl over her baby."

  "Shut up."

  "You wanted to know about him not because you thought there was anything odd about his death but because, quite simply, you wanted to know about him. He was young and dead, and he had been reckless and alive. You wanted to know what he had been like when he was reckless and alive."

  "All right. 1 wanted to know. I also want to know who is going to ride the Lincolnshire favourite, and what my shares are quoted at in today's market, and what June Kaye's next picture is going to be; but I'm not losing my sleep about any of them."

  "No, and you don't see June Kaye's face between you and the water, either."

  "I have no intention of seeing anyone's face between me and the river. Nothing is going to come between me and the river. I came here to fish, and nothing is going to muck up that for me."

  "B Seven came North to do something too. I wonder what it was?"

  "How should I know?"

  "It couldn't be fishing, anyhow."

  "Why couldn't it?"

  "No one who was going five or six hundred miles to fish would be without tackle of some kind. If he was as keen as that, he would at least have his own pet lures with him, even if he was going to be let a rod."

  "Yes."

  "Perhaps his Paradise was Tir nan Og. You know, the Gaelic one. That would fit."

  "How would it fit?"

  "Tir nan Og is supposed to be away out to the west, beyond the outermost islands. The Land of the Young. The land of eternal youth, that's the Gaelic Paradise. And what 'guards the way' to it? Islands with singing sands, it seems. Islands with stones that stand up like men walking."

  "And beasts that talk? Do you find them too in the Outer Isles."

  "You do."

  "You do? What are they?"

  "Seals."

  "Oh, go away and leave me alone. I'm busy. I'm fishing."

  "You may be fishing, but you're not catching a damned thing. Your Jock Scott might as well be stuck in your hat. Now you listen to me."

  "I will not listen to you. All right, there are singing sands in the Islands! All right, there are walking stones! All right, there are gabby seals! It has nothing to do with me. And I don't suppose it had anything to do with B Seven."

  "No? What was he going North for?"

  "To bury a relation, to sleep with a woman, to climb a rock! How should I know? And why should I care?"

  "He was going to stay at a Caledonian Hotel somewhere."

  "He was not."

  "How do you know where he was going to stay?"

  "I don't. Nobody does."

  "Why should one of them be all facetious about 'robbing the Caley' if he was going to stay at a Waverley?"

  "If he was going to Cladda—and I'll bet there's no inn on Cladda called anything as reeking of the mainland as the Caledonian—if he was going to Cladda he would have gone via Glasgow and Oban."

  "Not necessarily. It's just as short and just as comfortable via Scoone. He probably loathed Glasgow. A lot of people do. Why not ring up the Caledonian in Scoone when you go back to the house tonight and find out if a Charles Martin was expected there?"

  "I shall do no such thing."

  "If you slap the water like that, you'll frighten every fish in the river."

  He went back to the house at supper time in a very bad mood. He had caught nothing and had lost his peace.

  And in the somnolent hush that filled the sitting-room when work was over for the day and the children in bed, he caught his eye wandering from his book to the telephone at the other end of the room. It stood on Tommy's desk, provocative in its suggestion of latent power, in the infinite promise of its silent presence. He had only to lift that receiver and he could speak to a man on the Pacific coast of America, he could speak to a man in the wastes of the Atlantic Ocean, he could speak to a man two miles above the earth.

  He could speak to a man in the Caledonian Hotel in Scoone.

  He resisted this thought, with growing annoyance, for an hour. Then Laura went to get bed-time drinks, and Tommy went to let the dogs out, and Grant reached the telephone in a dive that was nearer a rugby tackle than any civilised method of crossing a room.

  He had lifted the receiver before he realised that he did not know the number. He put the receiver back in its cradle and felt that he had been saved. Hi* turned to go back to his book but picked up the telephone book instead. He would have no peace until he had talked to the Caledonian in Scoone; it was cheap enough to have peace at the cost of being a little silly.

  "Scoone 1460 . . . Caledonian Hotel? Can you tell me: Did a Mr. Charles Martin book accommodation with you any time in the last fortnight? . . . Yes, thank you, I'll wait. . . No? No one of that name ... Oh ... Thank you very much. So sorry to have bothered you."

  And that was that, he thought, slamming the receiver down. That, as far as he was concerned, was definitely the end of B Seven.

  He drank his nice soothing bed-time drink, and went to bed, and lay wide awake staring at the ceiling. He put the light out, and resorted to his own cure for insomnia: pretending to himself that he had to stay awake. He had evolved this long ago from the simple premise that human nature wants to do the thing it is forbidden to do. And so far it had never failed him. He had only to begin pretending that he was not allowed to go to sleep for his eyelids to droop. The pretence eliminated in one move the greatest barrier to sleep: the fear that one is not going to, and so left the beach clear for the invading tide.

  Tonight his eyelids dropped as usual, but a jingle ran round and round in his head like a rat in a cage:

  The beasts that talk, The streams that stand, The stones that walk, The singing sand ...

  What were the streams that stand? Was there something in the Islands that corresponded to that?

  Not frozen streams. There was little snow or frost in the Islands. Then, what? Streams that ran into the sand and stood still? No. Fanciful. Streams that stand. Streams that stand?

  Perhaps a librarian might know. There must be a goodish public library in Scoone.

  "I thought you weren't interested any more?" said the voice.

  "You go to hell."

  A mechanic, he was. What did that mean? Mechanicien. It involved an endless range of possibilities.

  Whatever he did, he was successful enough to be able to travel first class on a British railway. Which in these days made one practically a millionaire. And he had spent all that money on what, to judge by his overnight case, was a flying visit.

  A girl, perhaps? The girl who had promised to wait?

  But she had been French.

  A woman? No Englishman would go five hundred miles for a woman, but a Frenchman might. Especially a Frenchman who had knifed his girl for letting her glance stray.

  The beasts that talk

  The streams that stand ...

  Oh, God! Not again. Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey. Hickory, dickory, dock. Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair; said Simple Simon to the pieman Let me taste your ware. Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross— Your imagination had to be caught before you were fired by the need to write down a thing. You could, if your imagination was vivid, get to a stage when you were in bondage to an idea. When it became an idée fixe. You could become so enraptured by the pictured grace of a temple's flight of steps that you would work for years to earn the money and gain the leisure to take you there. In extreme cases it became a compulsion, and you dropped everything and went to the thing that had seduced you: a mountain, a green stone head in a museum, an uncharted river, a bit of sail-cloth. How far had B Seven's vision ridden him? Enough to send him searching? Or just enough to make him write it down?

  Because he had written those pencilled words. Of course he had written them.

  They belonged to B Seven as much as his eyebrows did. As much as those schoolboy capital letters did.

  "Those E
nglish capital letters?" said the voice, provocative.

  "Yes, those English letters." "But he was a native of Marseilles." "He could have been educated in England, couldn't he?"

  "In two shakes you'll be telling me that he wasn't a Frenchman at all." "In two shakes I will."

  But that, of course, was to enter the realm of fantasy. There was no mystery about B Seven. He had an identity, a home and people, a girl who was waiting for him. He was demonstrably a Frenchman, and the fact that he wrote English verse in English handwriting was entirely by the way.

  "He probably went to school in Clapham," he said nastily to the voice, and fell instantly asleep.

  In the morning he woke with rheumatism in his right shoulder. He lay considering this in slow amusement. There was no end to what your subconscious and your body could achieve between them. They would provide you with any alibi you wanted. A perfectly good honest alibi. He had known husbands who developed high temperatures and the symptoms of 'flu each time their wives were on the point of departure to visit relations. He had known women who were so tough that they could watch a razor fight unmoved and yet would pass out in the deadest of dead faints when asked an awkward question. ("Was the accused so persecuted by police cross-examination that she was unconscious for fifteen minutes?" "She fainted, certainly." "There was no question of a simulated faint, was there? The doctor says that he saw her at the material time and there was great difficulty in reviving her. And that collapse was a direct result of the police cross-examination to which she was being—" and so on.) Oh, yes. There was no limit to what your subconscious and your body could cook up together. And today they had cooked up something that would keep him off the river. His subconscious had wanted to go in to Scoone today and talk to the librarian at the public library. His subconscious had remembered, moreover, that it was market day and that Tommy would be taking the car into Scoone. So his subconscious had set to work on the eternally sycophantic body and between them they had made a tired shoulder muscle into an unworkable joint.