An Awkward Lie

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An Awkward Lie

 

First published in 1971
Copyright: Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1971-2011

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 

The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

 

This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
 
Typeset by House of Stratus.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

 

		EAN			ISBN			Edition
		1842327240			9781842327241			Print
		0755117972			9780755117970			Pdf
		0755119665			9780755119660			Kindle
		0755120868			9780755120864			Epub

 

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

 

www.houseofstratus.com

 

Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio's
translation of
Montaigne's Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President's Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen's University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.

Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

Mr Robert Appleby (successful scrum-half retired, and author of that notable anti-novel
The Lumber Room
) fixed his gaze for a full thirty seconds on the flag on the first green. Then, judging that the sudden ghastly threat to his stomach and his bowels had abated, he took another look at the body in the bunker. He might as well make what he could of it (he told himself, as his normal mental processes began to return). It wasn’t the sort of thing a man was likely to come on twice.

Or only a man – his own father, for instance – who made such matters his business. Sir John Appleby’s earlier career – Bobby Appleby vaguely supposed – had been corpses all the time. But although his father was quite willing to indulge in reminiscence over some of these, he allowed himself a certain fastidiousness in point of gory detail. So Bobby had always been disposed to imagine that when somebody had a bullet directed at his brain the resulting token was one small hole, or perhaps two small holes, in the head. Intellectually, of course, he was better informed. Friends who had done a spot of VSO between university and taking up a job, and who had in consequence stumbled into one or another nasty little war in remote places, had been much less reticent than Sir John about the frequent surprising sheer messiness of homicide. But the present spectacle was his own introduction to anything of the kind. What had happened to this man’s head at least seemed to make it certain that he was dead. Quite a bit of it had vanished.

The bunker was large and quite unusually broad. If your drive had been entirely to your satisfaction, and some delusion of grandeur persuaded you that you could be snugly beside the pin in two, then this hazard was more likely to get you than not. As a matter of fact, it had got Bobby now. His ball was pretty well in the mathematical centre of the bunker. And so was the dead man. The dead man could (so to speak) have stretched out an arm and put the ball in his pocket.

There was an immediate problem, turning on the fact that Bobby was at present alone on the links. It was his habit, when spending a summer weekend at Long Dream, occasionally to run over to Linger early in the morning and play a practice nine holes before returning to his parents’ home for breakfast. It usually made him late for the meal. But nobody minded. Mrs Colpoys enjoyed being vastly put out by Mr Robert – to the extent of keeping something hot in the oven and allowing him to make fresh coffee in her kitchen. His father, looking up from his reading of
The Times
in the breakfast-room window, would politely inquire whether he had found himself in form, particularly in point of that rather uncertain command of his with a niblick. His mother would sit down at the table for a few minutes with a great air of general gossip, but with what Bobby judged to be the palpable design of suggesting some polite attention to one of the more eligible young gentlewomen of the region. Bobby would make large and disingenuous promises about activity of this sort some months ahead. On the whole he preferred what his father called Away Matches where girls were concerned.

This morning there would be something altogether more grim to talk about. And meantime there was the problem. Bobby had seen it at once.

A bunker on a golf-course is rather a special place within which to find a man who has suffered violent death. It was clear, moreover, that this bunker had been raked over by a green-keeper late on the previous evening. There were a certain number of footprints in the sand. But not very many. And Bobby would add to these the moment he stepped off the turf.

So perhaps he should simply hurry away to the club-house and telephone for the police. For the man was
certainly
dead. But what if he wasn’t? Or – and this was the real truth of the matter – what if he were? Even from a dead body one doesn’t simply turn aside. To go up to it and touch it is the human thing to do. The slightest suspicion of life, of course, and one would run like anything for a doctor. But a dead man one watches by, if possible, until somebody comes along.

These notions, surprisingly old-world in a novelist of the
avant-garde
, passed quite quickly through Bobby’s mind. It was as a result of them that he now stepped carefully into the bunker, treading only where the sand was still wholly undisturbed. He knelt beside the body. That meant an indentation made by his left knee, but again he wasn’t obliterating anything. The dead man lay prone and with his face in the sand. Bobby’s first thought was that you couldn’t tell how old he was. Not even by the colour of the hair on the back of the head. What had killed him had seen to that.

The dead man’s jacket looked expensive. It was made of a good Lovat tweed. Bobby put out a hand and touched it. It felt slightly damp. But there had been no rain since Bobby woke up at about seven o’clock, and he thought it improbable that there had been any during the night. What had produced this damp feeling was dew. Perhaps the body had been lying here throughout the night. Bobby remembered that it is on cold surfaces that moisture condenses as dew. He slipped his hand under the dead man’s jacket. Overcoming a certain reluctance, he pulled up the dead man’s shirt-tail to his waist and slipped his hand gently beneath it, so that his palm lay on the naked flesh of the dead man’s back. The body was very cold. For a confused fraction of a second Bobby felt this to be unnatural. It was as if the man’s clothing had been falling down on its job. Then he realized that this was how a dead body felt – how it felt when a certain interval of time had elapsed since death. He didn’t at all know – as his father would – what that interval of time would be. It must vary, he supposed, according to one circumstance or another. He realized that he ought to look at his watch. But his watch was on the wrist of the hand that lay on this lately living thing which had chilled to clay. For a moment he fumbled once more with the dead man’s shirt-tail, shoving it back under the waist-band of his trousers. It seemed a necessary thing to do – just because the man
was
dead and could never know indignity again. Then his hand came free, and he saw that it was ten minutes to eight. Quite often there were other people out on the course by this time – either after an early breakfast or doing as Bobby himself had proposed to do. But now there was nobody around.

The club-house, naturally, wasn’t all that far away from the first green. But a small spinney – it made the first hole a dog’s-leg affair – had edged it out of view. It probably wasn’t beyond shouting range, particularly as the morning was very still. But the mere stillness somehow made Bobby reluctant to start hallooing, and in any case there hadn’t appeared to be anybody around. He remembered that the labour force of the golf club consisted of two men and a boy, and that they all lived not even in Linger itself, but in the little clump of council houses close to Linger Junction. The club’s professional, although he spent most of his time either in the club-house or on the course, had recently attained to rather a grand little villa more than a mile away. None of these people probably arrived until half-past eight or thereabouts. So in default of another matutinal player turning up, Bobby would have to keep his wake by the body for some time. He decided that, after all, the most sensible thing would be to return to the club-house and telephone the local police.