An Awkward Lie Read Online Free Page A

but seemed to have been well-received by people going in for that kind of thing. So this affair on the golf-course was extremely vexatious. Colonel Pride was quite annoyed about it.
    ‘Damned stupid affair,’ Colonel Pride said.
    ‘Tommy – would you mind telling me frankly whether anybody is saying that in the sense of insinuating that Bobby has cooked it all up?’
    ‘Nobody’s going to say that to me, John.’ Colonel Pride, who was drinking Appleby’s whisky in the library at Dream, set down his tumbler with an alarming crack on the marble chimney-piece. ‘And Howard has no such idea in his head. It was plain to him from the start, he says, that Bobby believed his own story.’ Pride paused. ‘Of course there was the constable, who was with them when they walked up to this bunker. And there was the police surgeon, who arrived a minute or two later, and there were the ambulance men, who arrived a minute or two after that. There were some idlers as well – but they probably made nothing of it at all. You’ll agree, I think, that it all adds up to something that can’t exactly be kept quiet. That being so, we might as well run the perpetrators to earth, and have it in for them. Wouldn’t you say?’
    It was a moment before Appleby took in the implication of this. When he did so, he pushed his own tumbler away from him.
    ‘Might as well?’ he asked slowly. ‘We might debate whether to or not? You take the whole thing to have been an idiotic joke – perpetrated not by Bobby, but upon him?’
    ‘Howard is inclined to see it that way.’ Colonel Pride reflected for a moment, and appeared to conclude that this was not quite a straight answer. ‘I can’t say more about myself, John, than that I’m at a good deal of a loss before the whole thing.’
    ‘Bobby felt the body, you know. He got his hand on to the man’s bare back. He says it was stone cold.’
    ‘Howard maintains that any slightly chilly body will feel like that if you place a warm hand on it.’
    ‘That is true. All the same, Tommy, any such theory positively posits my son as subject to hallucination. Think what he swears to – for it comes to that – about the state of the head.’
    ‘Yes.’ Colonel Pride looked unhappy. ‘But there was no blood found in that confounded bunker – not even after they’d sifted down quite a way.’
    ‘There needn’t have been – if the man had been dead for some time before they chucked him there.’
    ‘Howard says that.’ Pride brightened a little at this. ‘Only, you know, the whole thing is such nonsense. As a crime, I mean.’
    ‘Tommy, are your people, or are they not, treating this as a crime?’
    ‘Of course they are, so far as the most rigorous inquiry is concerned.’ It looked for a moment as if Pride had been seriously offended. ‘Owe it to your boy, my dear chap, to have every man in my force looking for a criminal. Nothing turned up yet. No line on a stranger to the district with a missing finger, or on an unknown girl, or on a car with two men and a trailer-caravan. And in point of what we can usefully look for, that’s about it.’
    ‘Certainly it is. Or that, and any report of a man gone missing elsewhere. A missing man with a missing finger – even if it were in Chicago or Marrakesh – would be a line at once.’
    ‘Marrakesh?’ For a moment Pride appeared to perpend this hyperbole conscientiously. ‘Yes, of course. But we’ve had all that from your old colleagues at the Yard already. Remarkable efficiency nowadays in the way information is categorized. Several people with missing right forefingers have gone missing in the UK in the last ten years. But, dead or alive, all have turned up again. So that tells us nothing at all.’
    ‘In a fairly short time, Tommy, it might tell us quite a lot. If you grant that there was a body – and an entirely dead one – then the fact that nobody in the near future starts inquiring about a missing man mutilated in this