Appleby on Ararat (20 page)

The jungle was very still; there was not even the slither of a sleepy lizard and the winding path to the bungalow was as noiseless as if its overreaching greenery were a giant algae on the floor of ocean. It was like moving through a trance, a dream, an island under an enchanter’s spell. Appleby put out his hand and rustled a clump of grasses as he passed; the sound was loud and threatening, like rain on a tin roof. “It’s as if everything had died with the Heavens,” he said.

“John, what about that strange man – the body?”

He laughed softly. “Diana, you didn’t think Mrs Heaven was a woman, did you? Not with that voice and beard and stride? He was just Heaven’s business partner, and for running a hotel man-and-wife was the convenient thing. Perhaps he was the sort of nerve-case who has a hankering for woman’s clothes: I don’t know. But Dunchue used the queer truth of the matter brilliantly to reinforce the notion of a raid. They stripped the poor fellow’s body, shaved it, gashed it about the face – and there you are. Mrs Heaven had been carried off and the body of a strange man left lying about. I took care to offer Jenner the explanation he would presently have advanced himself: the cannibals had been carrying a wretched captive round… But the truth about Mrs Heaven will be one of the things we don’t know.”

“I see. No use being brighter than need be.”

“That’s it.”

They were near the bungalow. “George ought to meet us about here,” Diana said. But there was no George – and they realised that his appearance would have been something friendly and vital in a scene so utterly drained of life. The tree ferns stood around them like motionless inverted cascades. To their left was a momentary glimpse of beach – invisible beneath its myriads of those strange sea apples which now were inert and dead once more. Brilliantly white against an arc of darkening sky a single sea-gull, startlingly mobile, dipped and wheeled. Then again the jungle was around them. “It seems farther this time,” Diana said.

“We’re just there.” He put his arm round her waist, tightened his grip as she looked at him in surprise. “We walk like this. And feel like it too.”

She stopped. “John, what do you mean? Feel like what?”

He looked at her anxiously. “Not as we really do. Not pleased with each other and independent too. Rather messed up with one another – and not awfully trustfully. The loves of the octopuses. Think of that.”

She shivered. “You do put things neatly. Alright.”

“All right.”

They laughed low together and stepped out into the glade.

The little bed of English cottage flowers. The veranda blinds, trim and gay. And on the veranda Jenner. He stared at them and without turning his head called something back into the darkness behind him. Appleby dropped his hand reluctantly from Diana’s side. “Good afternoon,” he called out. There was something like a ring of defiance in his voice.

Jenner said nothing at all. They mounted the veranda steps. Hailstone’s voice came from the shadowy living room beyond. “Appleby? Come in – come in.” They entered. And Jenner slipped in behind them and stood by the door.

Beethoven and archaeology: the room was unchanged. Dunchue was unchanged; he rose and bowed to Diana, fell back clumsily in his chair, “Something filthy coming up,” he said. “Filthy tropics… Find a drink.” He looked vague and lowering round.

Appleby glanced at Jenner, hesitated. “I didn’t think you would be having other visitors this afternoon.” He nodded Diana brusquely into a chair; sat down rather sulkily himself.

“Ah.” Hailstone was making tea with a spirit kettle; there was no sign of any of the native boys. “Well, as a matter of fact, we have been becoming rather friendly with Jenner just recently. We don’t hide our plans from him.”

Suddenly and harshly Appleby laughed. “Why pretend? Why pretend you kicked George – eh, Mr Jenner?” He laughed again. “You see we know the whole thing – Mrs Kittery and I, that is.”

There was a moment’s tense silence. Dunchue’s right hand, as he slouched in his chair, crept to a pocket. Hailstone held the spirit kettle suspended.

“And we needn’t quarrel.” Appleby looked warily round him. “We’ve no desire to go the way the Heavens went – or that poor chap we found this morning. Did you set the savages on him too?”

Hailstone put down the kettle. “I don’t understand you,” he said quietly. “We are not responsible for any of those deaths.”

“Aren’t you?” Appleby looked momentarily uncertain of himself. “I suppose you deny that Heaven knew?”

There was another pause. Dunchue’s hand came out of his pocket. The tension in the room just perceptibly slackened. “Suppose Heaven did know something,” asked Hailstone, “you don’t think we’d take to murder, do you? The savages just happened.”

“And I suppose they just happened to Unumunu too – Unumunu who would know you weren’t going to dig out of that barrow anything at all like what you professed?” Appleby laughed again, the laugh of a knowing and unscrupulous man. “But I’m not here to talk about corpses.”

Abruptly Dunchue sat up and was sober. “We understood you were a police officer. If you really believe we have been putting people out of the way–”

“I’d better explain.” Appleby glanced quickly at Diana.

“Things have changed for me since I came to the island. Mrs Kittery here – Diana.” He put up his chin arrogantly. “She’s my mistress.”

Dunchue raised his eyebrows. It was, Appleby noted with discomfort, a genuine gesture. “I am sure we congratulate you both,” he said suavely. And his eye went keenly to Diana. Diana looked sulky, put her toes together and smoothed her shorts with noticeable modesty. She had got the idea.

“And I’m going to marry her.”

“To be sure.” Dunchue, who had so recently signed the death warrant of several people, was faintly disdainful. “And are we to take it that at the same time she will marry you?”

“Of course.” Appleby was obtuse, slightly angry. “Only there’s Kittery. An ugly bastard, by all accounts. And he won’t arrange to be divorced.”

Hailstone poured out tea. “May I ask,” he said mildly, “how you know that?”

Appleby looked at Diana. And Diana noisily sniffed. “It was like that once before,” she said – and looked slyly from Hailstone to Dunchue. “After all, it’s natural, in a way.”

“But we think he’ll be willing to do the divorcing. So that’s all right; we don’t mind. Only it will be the end of me at the Yard.”

“I won’t be without anything,” said Diana, suddenly practical and sharp. “I’ve told him that.” And she contrived to look at her lover with a sort of infatuated mistrust.

“So you see” – Appleby appeared to find some difficulty in expressing himself – “we have to keep an eye to the main chance.”

Hailstone handed tea. “I am sorry that George isn’t here to witness this. It would extend his knowledge of human nature. But the pertinacious creature is still burrowing away at the dig. He puts us all to shame.” He smiled at Appleby. “Don’t you feel?”

Appleby scowled. “I don’t give a curse for your dog. But your dig’s another matter. It’s time we got to that.”

“It is, indeed. We ought to have got to it long ago.” Dunchue was sipping tea. He was tall, upright, handsome, arrogant, with pale-blue Saxon eyes. “This island, as I have said before, has a bad effect on one. Character rapidly degenerates on it, Mr Appleby.” He smiled thinly beneath searching eyes.

It was fifty-fifty, Appleby thought, or perhaps less good than that. Hailstone, yes; he lacked a final knowledge of western man. But Dunchue had an informed critical intelligence which it would require something like inspiration to deceive. Better acknowledge oneself stung… He sprang to his feet. “Damn your superior airs, Mr bloody-clever Dunchue! Do you think I take you for any better than the pirate-scum you’re jackalling after? Talk business, or I’ll know what to do.” He turned to the door, where Jenner stood silent and immobile still.

“Don’t be silly, John!” Diana had flashed into temper. “I tell you I won’t have nothing. Sit down.”

Appleby sat down, Dunchue looked at him impassively and in silence for some seconds. “Well,” he said at length, “what’s your proposition?”

“I’ll take five thousand pounds.”

Dunchue turned to Hailstone, lazily smiled, said nothing.

“No less. I know you’re after a big hidden treasure and are waiting to get at it quietly; that you were just getting at it when the hotel came. I know Heaven found out; stole the chart that told the story. I know he showed it to you under my nose, up there on top of the stuff.” Appleby grinned cunningly. “And I know what happened to him. I know you can bring down a pack of murdering natives; I was a fool once to think myself too smart to believe in them. I believe in them now – and I’ve taken certain steps accordingly.”

“Would it be too much to ask what they are?” Dunchue was looking thoughtful now.

“I don’t think you’ll care to risk a wholesale slaughter. And I’ve taken means you won’t easily hit on to tell what I know when those people make some sort of civilisation again. So it’s no good Jenner standing by the door there with a gun in his pocket. He may as well sit down and take it easy.”

Dunchue sighed, gave an almost imperceptible nod. And Jenner moved aside and sat down sullenly in a chair.

“Five thousand pounds. May I ask if we are to have anything but the uncertain prospect of your silence in return?”

“You can have a lot. Heaven’s suckers won’t talk; they’ll be glad to go off and find another funk-hole quietly. And my lot won’t talk by the time I’ve spun them a tale. You see” – and Appleby hesitated, seemed almost to flush – “they believe in me.”

“Like Mrs Kittery.” Dunchue faintly smiled. “Anything else?”

“Yes. I can contact Heaven’s yacht quick and settle with it. I can do the same with any creditors or relations. If nobody loses money they won’t particularly bother in times like these about a couple of folk who came to a queer end while running a queer racket. You can have that. And I say five thousand pounds.”

“Really” – Dunchue turned to Hailstone – “it seems a very attractive proposition. Will it occur to him, I wonder, that in proportion to the probable value of the treasure he’s asking absurdly little?”

“Down,” said Appleby quickly. “I said five thousand down. And a share out later.”

Dunchue laughed with sudden convinced good humour. “I really believe we understand each other, Mr Appleby. As you know, with all my airs I’m nothing but a low-down crook; and it’s plain that you’re another. Begging Mrs Kittery’s pardon.”

Jenner, who was sitting staring out of the window, suddenly muttered something which Appleby didn’t catch. Both Dunchue and Hailstone hurried over to join him. And Diana breathed in Appleby’s ear, “John, are we winning?”

He nodded briefly. “So far. And if nothing out of the way–”

His words were drowned by a sudden shattering roar, as indescribable as the opening up of a heavy barrage. The three men had run out to the veranda and they followed. About them, everything was still perfectly still; there was no flutter in the veranda blinds, the gay little bed of flowers might have been painted on silk. It was only far over the sandhills that some gigantic and concentrated disturbance had broken out. They stared unbelievingly. For in the sky was a great pillar of sand.

“A willy-willy!” Diana was shouting in Appleby’s ear. “And it must be just over–”

“It’s over the–” Dunchue’s voice, raised high above the uproar, broke off abruptly.

And then there came another and inexplicable sound. If some giant child had tied a string of tin cans to the tail of a dragon just such a clatter might have been the result. The noise grew, faded, ceased. The pillar of sand – the great vortex of sand – began to move slowly in a lateral direction. Appleby was about to call out that it would pass them by when a new, and very tiny, noise halted him. It was the yelping of a desperately frightened dog. And in another instant George appeared scampering towards the bungalow – the figure of George, his snowy fleece strangely metamorphosed to a dirty brown.

The dog ran up the veranda steps, sticky and dripping. Appleby stooped over him and whispered, “Oil.” And in the same instant Diana saw his glance meet Dunchue’s. It was an instant of blank revelation. She felt herself seized by the arm and propelled down the steps so violently that it was as if the cyclone itself had a grip of her. But it was only Appleby. “Run!” he called; “run for your life!” Amid the uproar of the advancing storm there was yet another tiny noise – like the rattling of dry peas in a bladder. Something whistled by her ear. “Run,” she heard. “Run!”

They were in the long tunnel of greenery which was the beginning of the road back to the hotel. It echoed with a dull growing reverberation, as if a train were approaching from a long way down a tube. Swift contrary blasts swayed the ferns and grasses, so that the tunnel appeared to rock like a device in a fun fair; they staggered dizzily down it, their senses further confused by a whip and scream of hurricane overhead. From all about them came the rending crash of falling timber; in front a lithe and bending palm snapped like a match; they scrambled over it and glimpsed before them what appeared to be the ragged stump of a pale-barked tree. The stump moved and Diana saw that it was one of Jenner’s companions of the hotel; he was kneeling with some sort of dumpy weapon in his hands. Again she felt Appleby grab and they were crawling – crawling through a smell of earth and the clutch and scratch of undergrowth.

The crawl was desperate. It wrenched at her reason, so that she had to fight for her knowledge that these constricting bonds were blind nature and not the cast of cruel and cunning hands. They twined in her hair, trammelled a wrist, ripped at Miss Busst’s pants… And then the beach was before them; they were out on it and still only half in possession of themselves, half as twigs or leaves to the tyrannous strength of the storm. The wind roared more loudly; it blew and sucked like a vast defective bellows; the sea apples danced between them like thistledown under a spell.

They joined hands and ran, ran as in some nightmare obstacle race in which there were thousands of punctured tennis balls under foot. Once more the peas were rattling in the bladder. Suddenly sand spurted up all round them – and Appleby halted her, stood still. “Sorry,” he said. “They’ve got us.”