Appleby on Ararat (7 page)

They had soft drinks compounded by Diana and there was an awkward halt which could have been adequately filled only by the reading of a will. “I think,” said Appleby, “that a search ought to be made. We have to hope – unlikely as it seems – that Unumunu’s death is evidence of danger from without. So we ought to stick together and find her. And if the danger is domestic – well, the same thing applies. But since a search will miss her as likely as not, I will remain at the base. Perhaps you should all go east – she has been wandering that way – keeping together and getting back before sundown.”

Diana finished an enormous drink. “She may be dangerous,” she said.

“Any of us may be that.” Appleby bestirred himself, hoping for a move. A sudden desire of solitude was upon him – an instinct too that the less said at the moment the better.

But Diana was obstinate. “We should find out who saw him last. And what we have all been doing since. That sort of thing. It’s always done.” She looked regretfully into her empty gourd. “I thought I saw him just a bit before he – he turned up. But quite likely I was wrong.”

“We were all together at breakfast,” said Glover. “And then Miss Curricle went off by herself. And then–”

“And then,” Hoppo interrupted, “Unumunu went off. He said he was going to make another attempt on the east range. And that left the four of us as we now are.” Suddenly he looked extremely acute. “And then until you came back with the news Glover and I were together all the time.”

“John and I were together too.” Diana nodded sagely.

“Practically hand in hand. Practically–” She stopped as if searching for some even more emphatic statement. “Well, practically like that.”

Glover coughed. “Hoppo, you are right.” He frowned. “No, I don’t know that you are. Surely when you were dredging for the oysters and decided to try the farther pool–”

“My dear Glover, you must recall that it proved empty and that not more than five minutes–”

Appleby held up a hasty hand. “I don’t think it will be useful to work along these lines at present. Although we were in a sense – er – paired–”

“John” – Diana looked suddenly accusing – “you
did
leave me once – for nearly five minutes, it must have been. Why–”

More urgently this time, Glover coughed. “Really, I agree with Appleby. In the course of a whole day it is natural” – he coughed ferociously – “
strictly
natural, that–”

“We had better be off.” Hoppo shaded his eyes and gazed determinedly into distance. “I must confess that I shall be happier in my mind if we find Miss Curricle before dark.” They set out, Diana reluctantly, and Glover and Hoppo somewhat self-consciously armed with cudgels. Appleby watched them depart and then turned to what, in this out-of-the-way hole, must now be called the scene of the crime. Where had the black man been killed? It would be best to begin with the spot where his body was found, consider the possibilities there, and then move progressively farther afield. The body had been found on a submerged rock surrounded by water. And the water was surrounded on one side by a broad sickle of sand and on the other by a reef sometimes exposed by the tide and sometimes covered to the depth of about a foot. The body had been found with the head smashed in from behind with what might have been either a boulder or some smooth and heavy fabricated weapon.

This was the setting. Suppose, then, Unumunu and another bathing as he and Diana bathed that morning. And suppose them to have reached the submerged rock and the thing to have happened there. It was impossible: the weapon could scarcely have been conveyed there, and certainly not conveyed with concealment; moreover the necessary purchase for a crushing blow could not have been obtained in water or on a fragmentary foothold of rock awash with the sea. Short of such an unknown factor as a boat the crime had no feasibility here.

But in two places in the bay there emerged rocks more considerable than this; on both of them Diana and he had found space to bask in the sun. On one of these the deed might have been done, but again there were difficulties. Boulders or loose rock there were none, so that a weapon would have to be hidden beforehand. And for a premeditated deed of violence such a site was inconveniently open to observation by such tiny population as the island had.

So next came the beach. Appleby tried to imagine himself killing Unumunu there. It would mean walking with him or towards him in an attitude or with a burden which was almost certain to attract attention; it meant then stepping behind him to strike. There was the possibility of approach entirely from behind and unbeknown. But this would not be easy; with a black man who had not some scores of generations of tolerable physical security in his make-up it would probably not be possible at all. And again the site was public.

And now the jungle – or whatever it was properly to be called. Here in the half-light of the tree ferns and amid a maze of thicket and creeper was the likely place – secrecy, concealment and the cover of a multitude of small alien sounds…

Appleby, standing yet in the beating sunlight, stared dubiously into this abrupt cavern of vegetation. He moved towards it up a hillock of loose sand; slithered and fell. The sand was fine and hot, and there was a kind of drifting skin to it stirred by an imperceptible breeze. It was toilsome stuff. And over it and out of the secrecy of the jungle, over it and across a further stretch of wet sand, public and taking the lightest imprint of a foot, the body of Unumunu had presumably been dragged – dragged for the purpose of pitching it into what was virtually a small sealed lagoon.

Appleby sat down in the shade and longed for tobacco; perhaps, it occurred to him, one might find it growing wild on the island if one looked. One might find much on the island; after all, there was still a stretch of it unexplored… He returned to the problem of that dragging of a dead and unusually heavy body out of the jungle and into the bay – in daylight, as it must have been. Unumunu had wandered off after breakfast; a couple of hours later Appleby and Diana had been here with the whole beach under their eye. So here at least were certain limits in point of time.

And time was a factor now, for the tide was coming up. He rose and walked the moist sand from end to end, confirming an impression he had already received; the sand took a clear print which held for minutes only, being rapidly obliterated from below. He tried again higher on the beach, and here he came presently upon traces of movement not accountable by anything known to have happened that day. They told him little except that they had been deliberately confused; he followed them laboriously up the soft sand to the jungle. Just here Unumunu’s body had been lugged out on the beach…he moved into the shadows and sat down to let his eyes accommodate themselves to the shade.

For a moment the air about him was alive with the whirr of tiny wings; then it fell stagnant again – hot, moist and of the earth. The cricket outvoiced the distant fall of breakers beyond the farther reef; the clumsy stealth of lizards was about his feet; before his nose the fleshy mouth of a monstrous scarlet flower closed suddenly on a fly. Never, he thought, could mortal have essayed criminal investigation in an atmosphere more blatantly assertive of the irrelevance of human justice, of the fictitiousness of the conception that nature moves because before it there beckon desirable goals. Here evidently things moved only because there was always a shove from behind; things happened exclusively because other things had happened before. And Unumunu’s murder interested him – as all his other murders and allied horrors had done – simply because it was a species of occurrence in which the identity of the shoves from behind was particularly teasing. Particularly teasing and therefore, in the solution, particularly capable of gratifying that appetite for power, for assertive shoving on from behind, which seems to be the only dynamic principle nature will reveal…

Appleby, who was not a philosopher, straightened his back in sudden reproach and dismay. It was probably over a hundred in the shade, and these speculative inclinations must be put down to that. He turned his inner eye to the contemplation of his companions and found them papery and thin, as if they obstinately preserved the phantasmic nature of their final days on the waters. Hoppo, indeed, had been more real when implicated with the Seven Sacred Cataracts; Glover more considerable when much was to be suffered and little to be done. As for Diana, although it would be extremely irrational in him to deny her the most emphatic physical existence, she had the character of evaporating from the mind when any picture of the dead man and his fate rose in it. Miss Curricle alone remained for anything resembling agreeable professional speculation. And Appleby suspected that Miss Curricle, in theory so deviously determined to lie with men, was in fact of those who incurably walk with the gods – with Proteus or the great Poseidon in the Tonga Trench, with Lilith the mother of all living in a fable that has long grown dim. She was not a woman with more than a veneer of the practical mind. She would murder an antipathetic notion, supposing notions to be susceptible of summary elimination in that way. She might murder a man if he stood for or embodied a notion. But it was difficult to see how Unumunu could have done that.

Appleby shook his head – and found a little crowd of flies rise in air. This was not the way to solve a mystery. It was not thus that he had plumbed the matter of Dr Umpleby and the bones, of the stylish homicides at Scamnum Court, of the daft laird of Erchany; it was not thus that he had exposed the Friends of the Venerable Bede or preserved ten persons from the blackest suspicion by recollecting a line in
The Ancient Mariner
. It was not thus – He stood up with a groan. A cursed climate. He should not so be floored, even by the devious exertions of an odd day. He was a prematurely aged young man, aimlessly reminiscing.

Unumunu had been hauled on and across the beach here. The disturbance in the fringe of jungle was visible; there was a distinguishable trail in the undergrowth, as one might expect when a heavy body had recently been dragged through. He followed the trail for perhaps twenty yards, only to find himself cheated. With the tropical unaccountability which marked it in more ways than one, the jungle changed character; everywhere was a rubbery and resilient growth that had taken no impression from whatever had passed. He cast about for some time and in vain; he could find no further trail. So he reflected on what he had found – reflected until its unreason stared out at him. For the trail as he had traced it ran parallel to the beach, and so continued, likely enough, where it was invisible. Very laboriously the black man’s body had been lugged through the shelter of the jungle’s fringe to the point at which cover had been broken in a scramble to the beach. But throughout that twenty yards or more of stumbling progress the beach and the bay had lain equally accessible and near… Appleby foraged an armful of sticks and went down once more to the water.

Sticks, thrown far into the bay, came sluggishly but invariably back. As the tide was coming in this was scarcely surprising. But Appleby, seeming to ignore the labour-saving principle of induction, walked slowly along the beach throwing in more sticks. As he came near the point at which the body had been dragged down their behaviour became uncertain; when he was abreast of the point it changed. The sticks now floated away and disappeared.

Impelled by some inner excitement, he turned and doubled up the beach; he found a hollow log and into each end jammed a stone; he collected more sticks. He returned to the water’s edge and pitched in the log. Almost awash, it floated away; he doubled back once more to higher ground from which it could be observed. The nearer reef, all above water still, appeared to stretch continuously across the bay. But on reaching the barrier the log momentarily disappeared from sight, to become visible again in the farther bay. Somewhere there was a channel and, ebb or flow, a current ran out through it to ocean.

And now Appleby threw stick after stick from the same point, and stick after stick disappeared. It was a strong and certain current, stronger even than those which he and Diana had tackled that morning… He continued to throw sticks. And the fortieth stick defied prediction, glided on an aberrant course, ended by eddying round the now wholly submerged rock where Unumunu’s body had been found.

Appleby threw away his remaining sticks and turned a sober face towards what, conventionally, might be called home. The island’s short twilight was drawing on.

The glade – cautiously approached – proved untenanted; the search-party had not yet returned. That it ever would return was now a purely speculative proposition, and Appleby was inclined to regret that he had encouraged it to set out. But probably you were as safe on one corner of the island as another – perhaps safer on the move than waiting amid a gathering darkness at a base.

The crickets had fallen silent. From the reef the breakers murmured their message of isolation and of the world forgot and, inland, an unknown creature screamed in short, decisive agony. There was now a star, terribly remote, in the irregular patch of darkening sky above; underfoot, the jacaranda carpet glowed momentarily vivid before being taken by the night… Appleby paused on the edge of the glade and summarised the position as best he could.

He was on an island. For this he had the evidence of his eyes, laboriously transported to a central eminence the day before. From this point, perhaps two thousand feet up and inevitably named Mount Ararat, there could be seen a girdle of unbroken ocean. That the island formed part of a group there was no sign, nor was there any sign of an objective correlative to the mirage which, at sea-level, sometimes appeared at sunset. The island stood alone, and a fair amount of wandering had disposed them to believe that they stood alone on the island. Its total extent was not great, and only one area – screened both from sight and from ready access by a spur running east from Mount Ararat – was unknown to them; it could be little more, this, than a strip of coast.