Free Mysterious Aviator by Nevil Shute Page A

locals took what was left. Not a bad sale, and I went home at the end feeling that I’d done a pretty good day’s work.
    It was about five o’clock when I moved off. I went by theUnder road, because I wanted to drop in at the office to sign my letters. I stayed there for a quarter of an hour or so, and then drove back to the Hall.
    Now Under Hall lies about two and a half miles from the town, on the other side of the Rother. You come out of the town past the station and go on for about a mile or so, till you come to a humpy stone bridge across the river. Under Hall is about a mile farther on from that. I came swinging along that road in the Morris, thinking no evil, and pulled up with a squeal of brakes as I came upon the bridge. Sheila Darle was there, Arner’s niece, sitting on the stone parapet in one of the triangular recesses.
    She hadn’t got a hat on, and I can remember that the wind was ruffling her short brown hair. That meant that she’d just strolled down from the Hall. She was sitting there on the bridge waiting for someone, and I had a feeling when I saw her that probably she was waiting for me.
    I pulled up beside her.
    “Good evening, Miss Darle,” I remarked.
    Well, it was. It had been a fresh, windy sort of day. Now in the evening the wind had dropped, the clouds had turned white and the sky deep blue. The sun was setting behind the down.
    She slid down from the parapet and came and leaned her arms upon the hood, on the opposite side of the car to me.
    “Good evening, Mr. Moran,” she said. Somewhere behind her there was a thrush—the first I’d heard that year.
    “Can I give you a lift back?” I asked. “I’m going straight home.”
    She shook her head absently. “It’s a nice evening for walking. I wanted the walk.”
    She glanced up at me. “Mr. Moran,” she said. “Who’s that you’ve got in your house?”
    There was no point in wasting petrol. I leaned forward to stop the engine, and took my time over answering that question.
    “A chap I used to know in the Flying Corps,” I replied, andstared her down. “I met him in Winchester, and brought him back with me last night. His name’s Lenden—Maurice Lenden.”
    She smiled at me across the car. “Maurice Lenden,” she observed. “Now that’s about the only thing I didn’t know about him.”
    I eyed her thoughtfully for a minute. “I see,” I said at last. “You’ve been doing a bit of Lady Investigating.”
    She nodded.
    I had known Sheila Darle since first I came to Under. When first I came here she was still at school. She used to spend her summer holidays with her uncle at the Hall. One day that summer she went to London and had her hair bobbed in the Children’s Department at Harrod’s, and came back looking about ten years older. Fired by that, on the same evening, she took her uncle’s little Talbot two-seater—that we kept for running in and out of town—and proclaimed her intention of driving it. Drive it she did, too—very neatly and accurately into the gatepost of the stable-yard and the dog-kennel. That was my first acquaintance with Sheila Darle, when she came to me very nearly in tears about it, and wanted to know what she was to do. I was younger then than I am now, but not so young as to miss the implication that the damaged wing and radiator should be repaired before Lord Arner came back from Town. I got it done in time, but I made her go and tell him about it. That set the keynote to our relations. Since those days I had sent off a couple of men with a horse to bring her car in about once every six months. Sometimes it was too bad for that, and then we had to get the garage to go and fetch it in.
    I knew she wouldn’t let me down in this.
    “You’ve been talking to him?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “He’s been talking, but not to me. He’s very ill.”
    I wrinkled my brows. “He’s got a touch of fever,” I said. “He took a cold a few days ago, and made it worse last night. But he