An Awkward Lie by Michael Innes Page B

reassuringly. ‘Nobody will see us.’
    ‘Mr Appleby, you must be quite mad.’ The girl at least wasn’t so alarmed as to take to her heels. ‘For all I know, you may be accustomed to conduct your low amours in a ditch. But a cesspool really surprises me. Good afternoon.’
    ‘Stop!’ Bobby must have put into this cry passion of a sort other than that which the young woman had apprehended in him. For she did stop – at a safe distance, indeed – and look at him. She looked at him rather carefully.
    ‘Well?’ Miss Danbury said.
    It didn’t seem to Bobby that she could be mad, despite her extraordinary conduct. But perhaps she had lost her memory. Indeed, it was very probable that something of that kind had occurred. The affair at the bunker must have been a terrific shock for a sheltered girl like this – apprehensive of improper suggestions when one spoke to her rationally across a hedge. The whole horrible episode must have suppressed itself in her mind. So naturally she was bewildered. The essential thing was to find some gentle means of assisting her to recover from this amnesia.
    ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ Bobby said. ‘I’m afraid you must find me very strange. But have you no memory of our having met before?’
    ‘None whatever. And, if I had, it could hardly be of a kind to licence you in this…this outbreak of lavatory humour.’
    ‘I suppose it is rather an unsuitable place for a conversation with a comparative stranger. Shall we go somewhere else?’
    ‘Rubbish!’ With marked feminine inconsequence, Miss Danbury suddenly pushed through the hedge, and confronted Bobby on the broad concrete expanse of the septic tank. It was an elaborate affair of its kind. Here and there a species of fat concrete pipe broke surface, doubled on itself at a height of about two feet, and disappeared again into the Tartarean world below. The effect was of a school of petrified dolphins disporting themselves on a petrified sea. On one of these Miss Danbury sat down. ‘Just where,’ she asked, ‘did we meet before?’
    ‘It was in a bunker.’
    ‘In a bunker!’
    ‘Well, beside a bunker. What was in the bunker – I don’t want this to be too much of a shock to you – was a dead body.’
    ‘Dear me! Just whose dead body, Mr Appleby?’ The girl was now looking at Bobby very steadily indeed – rather as one is told to look at a lion or tiger if it shows signs of giving trouble.
    ‘That’s just what I don’t know. Or not for certain. You see, the body disappeared again.’
    ‘Of course,’ Miss Danbury appeared to give this whole difficult business some moments thought. ‘Mr Appleby, is your home far from here?’
    ‘It’s at a place called Long Dream, near Linger. Perhaps you remember Linger?’ Bobby produced this almost coaxingly. ‘About a hundred miles away.’
    ‘I see.’ Miss Danbury paused, and then added casually, ‘Can you give me your telephone number?’
    ‘What on earth–’
    ‘I’d like you to allow me to ring up whoever is at Dream – your wife, or parents, or whoever it may be. Because, you see, I don’t think you’re very well. Please don’t think me impertinent. And I don’t expect it’s very serious. But I do feel you should be in competent hands. Have you a reliable family doctor at Dream?’
    This professional house-motherly solicitude did at least a little clear Bobby’s head. If the girl was wrong in supposing him astray in his wits it was only reasonable to admit that he might be equally wrong in supposing some aberration of the memory or the like to have befallen hers. So what other hypothesis could make sense of this extraordinary situation?
    ‘Listen,’ Bobby said urgently. ‘Tell me this. Have you got a double?’
    ‘A double? How on earth should I know? There must be plenty of people totally unkown to us, I imagine, to whom we bear a more or less close resemblance. Your question simply isn’t a sensible one, Mr Appleby.’
    ‘That’s perfectly true. So