Authors: Nevil Shute
Fedden is Chief Constable in my part of the world; a quiet, youngish man of fifty, who cruises in a little yawl
Seamew
, ex-
Happy Day
, He was just back from the Bay, or at any rate the Isles de Glenan, and I wanted to hear how he’d got on down there. We sat down to dinner at about eight and talked ships, and rose at about half-past nine, and no sooner had we got settled in the library with the cigars and brandy than the telephone bell rang for him.
I listened while he spoke. They were ringing from the police station at Newton Abbot, and they wanted him to go over there at once; so much I gathered from the one-sided conversation. There was a little back-chat then, that I didn’t understand; in a few minutes he hung up the receiver and came over to me by the fire. He had to go.
I glanced out of the window. It was a fine, blue evening with the remains of a red sunset lingering in the sky. “I’ll run you over in the Bentley,” I remarked. “Then we’ll come back here for a whisky before bed. You won’t be long?”
He hesitated. “I don’t quite understand what it is that they’ve got over there,” he said. “Something about a burnt-out motor-lorry. In any case, I don’t see that we can do much to-night. No, I probably shan’t be very long. But I don’t want to drag you out.”
“I’d like the run,” I said. So we went out to the stables and got the Bentley, and drove out on to the cool, brilliant roads with our cigars.
At Newton Abbot I waited in a lobby for the greater part of half an hour. Through a glass partition I could see Fedden in the next room, in business with a superintendent and a sergeant. A constable gave me an evening paper and I sat there reading it, and studying the printed and photographed
descriptions of various miscreants on the wall, till at last the door opened behind me, and there was Fedden.
“Sorry to have kept you so long,” he said. He did not stir from the door. “I won’t be a moment now. But in the meantime, I should be glad if you would come in here for a minute, if you don’t mind. For your advice.”
I followed him into the room. There was a table, and on the floor behind the table there was a large deal packing-case, about the dimensions of a coffin, but not so long. The lid of this packing-case was standing up against the table, and looking down into the box I saw the blued glint of steel.
“This must be confidential, Stevenson,” said Fedden. “But I want you to have a look at that, and tell me if you’ve ever seen one like it before.”
I laid my gloves down on the table and stooped over the case. The gun lay neatly on chocks on the bottom of the case, surrounded by its accessories in little racks upon the sides. I stood erect again. “I’ve seen something very similar,” I said; “but they never came my way much. May I lift it out?”
He nodded, and I stooped down and lifted the gun from its case. It was a sort of light machine-gun designed to be fired from the shoulder. It was heavy; not quite so heavy as the infantry-type Lewis, perhaps, but still much heavier than the service rifle. It was served by a long clip of cartridges which fed in underneath the lock, rather in the manner of an automatic pistol. I examined it pretty thoroughly, but I found no indication of the maker’s name, nor any mark or numeral of any sort.
I looked up at Fedden. “Is this a Thompson gun?”
He shook his head. “I know the Thompson. We took a lot of them in Ireland.”
I laid it down carefully on its chocks within the case, and stood erect again. “I saw something very like it in Zeebrugge,” I said, “just after the Armistice. It was a German gun; a major in the Inniskillings had it as a souvenir. It wasn’t quite like this. It had a different lock, and it hadn’t all that cooling stuff.
I think it was lighter. He said it was an aeroplane Parabellum gun. That’s the nearest thing to it I’ve ever seen.”
I stood and eyed it for a moment. “I should say it came from Germany,” I said. “I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you about it. I’m sorry.”
I glanced at the case for any further information, and then at the lid. There was a label pasted on the lid, a large white one, coloured with a crude illustration in red depicting a vacuum-cleaner of the Hoover type sweeping a white swathe upon a spotted carpet. Below the picture there was a legend in large block lettering: “THE PANPHAGON SWEEPER.” That was all.
“No,” said Fedden. “It occurred to me that there was just the chance that you might know about these things. However. Now, if you don’t mind … just for a few minutes?”
I went out into the lobby and sat down again with the paper; in the office that I had left I heard his voice upon the telephone. After a quarter of an hour or so he came out into the lobby with the superintendent, and this time he was ready to go home.
We slid out of the town upon the Dartmouth road. “You’re coming back to my place for a drink?” I said.
He was hesitant. “I really don’t know that I ought. I’ve got to go to London over this damn business first thing to-morrow morning, and I ought to see my wife.”
“Time for a quick one,” I said. “You’ve got to come back with me, anyway, to get your car.” And so we went back into the library and took off our coats, and while I was fiddling with the siphon and the glasses he sat down in one of the chairs before the fire, and he was unusually quiet.
I passed him over a tumbler. “I take it that you don’t want me to say anything about that gun,” I remarked.
He shook his head. “If you don’t mind. I wouldn’t have brought you into it if I didn’t know that you can keep your mouth shut.”
I laughed. “No need to worry about that,” I said. “I’ve got nobody to talk to here. Nor likely to have.”
He glanced across at me. “No,” he said quietly, “I can’t imagine how you stick it here alone. I can’t imagine why you don’t pick up some girl and marry her.”
I was gingerly manipulating a very full siphon as he spoke; it went off suddenly and I squirted half the whisky from my glass. I refilled it carefully. “This gun,” I said. “Would it be stretching professional reticence to breaking-point if I was to ask where it came from?”
He considered for a moment. “I don’t think so. We got it off a burning motor-lorry last night, on the Exeter road. There were three of them. The other two were burnt.”
I crossed over to the fire. “Oh,” I said. “What had the driver got to say about it?”
“There wasn’t any driver,” he replied. I raised my eyebrows. “The lorry was deserted. It was found at about four o’clock this morning, about a mile this side of Ideford, burning like a furnace. There wasn’t a soul with it—just the lorry blazing by the side of the road.”
“What about the gun, then?” I inquired. “That gun wasn’t burnt.”
He nodded. “That case was found behind the hedge, about fifty yards up the road from the lorry. It was found about lunch-time by the farmer, who gave it to the police. When the lorry cooled off they found the other two in among the wreckage—all burnt up, of course. And that’s literally all about it. No owner—nothing. Nothing but this one packing-case behind the hedge.”
I smiled. “It looks as if the owner’s got a packet coming to him,” I remarked. “You’ll be able to trace him by the numbers on the lorry, I suppose.”
“We could do if they happened to be genuine,” said Fedden cynically. “But they’re not. That’s what worries me most about the whole business. It makes it look so bad.”
I frowned. “Is there no way of tracing the lorry?”
“That isn’t my department. I should think it’s going to be pretty difficult for them. The lorry was an old one, and it’s pretty well burnt out.”
He got up, and swallowed the remainder of his drink. “I was going up to town this week anyway,” he said, “so it’s not much loss.” He turned to me. “You’ll be very careful about this, though?”
“I’ll not talk,” I said shortly. And so he went away, and when he had gone I filled myself a nightcap and sat down again before the fire for a few minutes before going up to bed.
I don’t know how long I sat there, or how much the decanter held when Fedden went away; I know how much it held when I went up to bed. I must have been a little drunk that night, because I was beset with dreams and memories. I lay and tossed in bed and watched the moonlight on the wall, consciously trying to sleep and resolutely preventing myself from thinking. I forced myself to think about the gun. Then, with an active mind running round in circles, I found myself going over and over my memories of the night before my crash in the Bentley; I lay and felt the wombat in my arms again and saw the white, glimmering surf running up upon the shore beneath the moon. I rolled over on to a cool patch of pillow, and I was in Leeds listening to the dancers and the dance music, and talking to rather a pathetic, painted girl that I had hired to entertain me for the night. Her brother ran a motor-lorry. I turned restlessly again and listened for the soft muttering of the sea down by St. Petrox to see what sort of a night it was, and I was with Stenning listening to the ripple of the water on
Irene’s
topsides, talking about the safeguarding of industries and carpet-sweepers from the Continent.
And suddenly I was most startlingly awake. I lay on my back in bed for a minute and looked about me at the dim outlines of the furniture around the room, no longer feverish and sleepy but with a cool forehead, a clean mouth, and a clear and understanding mind.
“My God,” I said aloud. “I wonder if there’s anything in that?”
I did not know, I think, quite what I meant, except that I had the peculiar feeling which I sometimes get in business, that I was on to something important. I got out of bed and
went and had a drink of water at the wash-stand, and passed a cold sponge over my face. And then I went and stood beside the open window, and listened to the sea. It was a fine moonlight night; I could see all the rocks and hazards of the entrance, and the chequered buoys. There was a gentle southerly night wind and the tide was running out; the black weed on the rocks showed that it was near low water.
“I must go over and have a look in the morning,” I said quietly. “To see if the place is really like I think it is.” And with that I went back to bed with an easy mind, and fell asleep at once, and slept quietly till I was called.
I went down next morning as usual to the office, but I finished up about eleven. I went up home and took the Bentley from the stables, and started out upon the Slapton road. I passed the corner where they told me that my car had been discovered in the ditch and went on, puzzled and a little disconcerted at seeing nothing that I knew. At last I reached Slapton and drew up, and thought about it for a little. Then I turned round and drove back along the road that I had come, with eyes half closed and with a lazy mind, and at a considerable speed. Till suddenly I trod on everything and drew the car in beside a gate which led into a grassy pasture on the right. Beyond that lay the sea.
It was about a couple of hundred yards short of the corner where my crash had taken place.
I got out of the car slowly and went through the gate, and on across the pasture. And presently I came to a place where the field petered out into sandhills that ran down to the beach, and the line of the surf perhaps two hundred yards away. There was a little valley in the sandhills straight ahead of me, and I moved a little way down it in the loose, powdery sand.
“This is the place, if anywhere,” I said aloud. “I’d swear to it.”
I was certain in my own mind that I had been to that exact spot before on the night of my crash, when I was very drunk, and that I had spoken some nonsense to a girl. I stood there for a long time trying to puzzle it out; more than that I could
not recollect. I could not understand how I could possibly have got into the sandhills there. To have crashed at that corner I must have passed the gate into the field at sixty miles an hour. And then I thought that I was wrong; that I was suffering from an illusion, that I was still ill and I must realise it. Till, presently, tired and a little out of sorts, I sat down on a hummock of speargrass and sand for a little before going home. Whatever were the rights or wrongs of this affair, it was pleasant in the sun.
I had shuffled up the loose sand with my feet into a little heap while I had been puzzling about this thing. And as I sat there listening to the martins my eye fell upon this heap, and it seemed to me that the fresh sand that I had uncovered was not like ordinary sand. I turned it over with my toe and frowned at it; and then I got up and went over to the spot and knelt down, and scraped away a little area with my bare hands to see what had been there.
And straight away I was back in the days when I was a boy. Once, coming up barefoot through sandhills on a Cornish beach, I had cut my toe rather badly on a broken bottle buried in the powdery sand, and it had bled so much that it had to have stitches put in it. For weeks the place was one of awe and veneration to us children; it was a hallowed spot—blood. We never cleaned it up. In spite of rain the sand was discoloured till we left.
I must have cleared an area of four square feet before I found the limits of that stain. One thing was quite clear then. Whoever had been there before had bled a bucketful.
And as I rummaged in the sand my fingers struck on something soft and round. I pulled it out and dusted it, and turned it over in my hands; and then I sat there in the sunlight holding it, quite still, while the martins swept and wheeled about my head between the dunes. I was thinking of the little things that please us in a childish mood, that comfort us when we are quite alone.
It was a rotten apple. Now that was a funny thing to find there in the sand.
A
LL
that afternoon I sat working with Tillotson in my office in the yard. He had got some book on management that had a chapter upon cost accounts, and we were trying to thrash out a means of harnessing the ancient art of ship-repairing with the reins of modern business. I remember that particularly, because it was a job that would take some doing at the best of times, and I had only half my mind on it that afternoon.
I broke off for a minute in the middle of the afternoon, and rang up Dixon on the telephone. I wasn’t certain that he could tell me anything I didn’t know, but I made an appointment, finished up early at the office, and went up to see him after tea. He greeted me by asking how I was.