Free A Time to Kill by Geoffrey Household Page A

moths.’
    I nearly said I didn’t, and then had a flash of inspiration.
    ‘I did just meet him once,’ I replied. ‘He struck me as a nervous sort of chap.’
    ‘What made you think so?’ he asked at once.
    ‘Oh, just an impression.’
    ‘Well, you summed him up all right. He was burning something in his chimney early this morning, and now he has told Bournemouth police that he is so upset he has to go away for a week or two.’
    ‘You seem to know a lot about the case,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, as soon as your name came up, I thought I might as well find out all I could, you see.’
    ‘No,’ I assured him, ‘I wasn’t pinching his spoons for the prime minister or anything. By the way, who was that officious ass who wanted to have me run in?’
    ‘Just a journalist of some sort who has had rooms across the road from Losch for the last fortnight.’
    I wanted to suggest to the inspector that Bournemouth police should check the antecedents of the journalist; but such a lead could only mean that I knew something and that I had not been on the scene by the merest accident. I was in no mood to be questioned. I had to tell the police all or nothing. And if I told them all – you might make it impossible for me to return them Ivanovitch had said.
    I got to West Bay about six, and ran my car into a hotel garage where it wouldn’t be seen by every casual passer-by. I was sure I had not been followed, but it was well to assume that I might at any time be in Ivanovitch’s neighbourhood. I didn’t know where in all Dorset he was, and had not the least clue.
    The wind had been freshening all day. The headlands of Devon were a long black line in the west with black clouds above them; but the sun was out, and the even, white-capped seas racing across Lyme Bay looked more exhilarating than dangerous. Olwen was not in the little harbour nor in sight. I waited for half an hour, and then I saw a speck of white, part solid and part a moving fountain of spray, coming up from the west.
    I watched Pink round the breakwater with beautiful ease, and heard him exchange hails with some official on the quayside. He claimed to be making a passage from the Exe to Portland and coming in for shelter. You couldn’t have disbelieved him. He was clean-shaven and fresh and merry with the sea. His white sweater and shorts, when he peeled off his oilskins, were properly expensive and weather-beaten, and, I thought, in convenient contrast to the dark clothes known to have been worn by Dr Losch’s burglar. He was the very picture of a simple, healthy naval officer on a holiday. It might be considered a little odd that Olwen and her owner belonged to no yacht club, but their respectability couldn’t be questioned.
    It was the top of the tide, and he took Olwen up through the lock-gates into the lagoon at the mouth of the Brit. I hailed him with a surprised Good-Lord-who’d-have-thought-to-see-you. He played up splendidly and shouted something about not having met since Alexandria. Then he paddled the pram over and fetched me, and I went down into that desolatingly neat cabin.
    ‘You’re back from London soon,’ he said.
    I couldn’t bring myself to give him more than an unrevealing, brutal outline of the facts. It wasn’t that I had any resentment against Pink. He was in trouble enough himself. My story, when I came to tell it, seemed such a shameful admission of inefficiency and defeat.
    Pink was gentle as a mother. I didn’t expect him to have that characteristic. Yet I shouldn’t have been surprised, for I well remember one of my company commanders who was an angel to his men but couldn’t be trusted to obey an order without embroidering upon it some fancy of his own which could involve a whole division. Pink wouldn’t let me blame myself at all. That, I suppose, was what Cecily hoped or foresaw, knowing that she herself could only throw me into worse distress.
    ‘Any idea at all where they took you?’ he asked, after he had made me