Free The Man from the Sea by Michael Innes

terrain. So they sent me. And then they let me slip. You are still sceptical?”
    “I don’t know that I can be – just about that. What I came in on didn’t look like a put-up show. But wasn’t it pretty feeble of them?”
    “Perhaps so. But it was outside their expectations, outside their very comprehensive system of suspicions. An act of sudden individual initiative, proceeding from an entirely private and personal – what shall we call it? – movement of the spirit. It’s what sometimes takes people their way, you may say. But they’re slow to realise that it can be a two-way traffic.”
    “What did your movement of the spirit prompt you to stuff in that belt?” Cranston paused – and thought that he sensed Day stiffen. “The inner secrets of the Kremlin? Chats on nuclear physics?”
    “Money – dollars and francs and pounds sterling.” Day’s familiar laugh was at its easiest. “In quite astonishingly large amounts – which I had the devil of a job getting together. If you care to hit me on the head and bury me in the garden, you can set yourself up on the proceeds handsomely.”
    For a moment Cranston said nothing, and the ugly little joke hung in air. “Money?” he asked presently. “Do your simple plans need such a lot of it? You’ll have free keep in Pentonville or Brixton.” There was a further silence, and he realised that this, too, had been ugly enough. “I just want to make sense of you,” he said.
    “I hadn’t much idea, you see, where my break-away might happen. Or who might have to be bribed to do what. I envisaged a great many possibilities. Science, you know, trains one to that sort of thinking ahead.”
    “It doesn’t seem to have trained you to think sufficiently ahead in the first instance.”
    “We can all get things wrong.”
    They were back, Cranston felt, where they had started. He went again to the door and listened. Sally’s absence was now alarming. He turned round. “It would be easier, wouldn’t it, if you could bribe me?”
    “Very much easier.” Day spoke whimsically. “But of course you are incorruptible – in matters of this sort. And I don’t think you are to be blackmailed either – which is a suggestion I rather carelessly made to you. It is awkward about Lady Blair and so on. But it would no longer count with you.”
    “It certainly wouldn’t. Not now that I know who you are.”
    “But what does still count is the fact that we’ve both mucked it. My chance seems to be to trade on that.” The words came softly to Cranston with the effect of cards dropped deliberately on a table. “Each of us has let himself down.” Day broke off. “Surely it’s growing light? What’s the time?”
    “Dawn is certainly coming. But I can’t tell you the time. I haven’t–”
    “You haven’t got a watch either. And your word for the condition is the precise one. Dishonour. And, just because you have let yourself down, you won’t now let me down – until you’re certain that I’m no good. Until you’re certain that my deep, deep dive is bogus. Isn’t it queer? Isn’t it extraordinary that, staggering at random from the sea, I should run straight into a full-blown young romantic idealist?”
    “She’s coming!” Cranston had moved swiftly to the door. Now he was back again. “Can’t you speak out – straight? What are you going to do? What’s this plan you talk about?”
    It was perhaps because Sally’s footsteps could already be heard on the path that Day replied in the softest voice he had yet used. “I’ve told you that my plan is very simple. It’s the simplest of all plans.”
    “The simplest – ?”
    “Ssh!”

 
     
6
    The girl was in the doorway. She carried a bowl and a large jug, and there was a basket over her arm. “It’s no good,” she said, “trying to beat the dawn at this time of year.”
    Cranston took the jug from her. “As a matter of fact, you’ve been rather a long time. It wasn’t…your mother