Free The Man from the Sea by Michael Innes Page B

confused and finding himself without words.
    They were facing each other. He had a sense that – inexplicably – she was trembling all over. But for the moment they stood confronted, her gaze at least was perfectly steady. “I know how you feel,” she said. “At least… I know how you feel.”
    She had turned, run down the little flight of steps, and was hurrying through the dimness of the garden. He found himself repeating the banal words as if they had come to him charged with impenetrable mystery.
    “A capable girl.” Day was opening the brandy flask.
    “Yes.”
    “Knows just what she is about.”
    For a moment Cranston was silent. These last words – he strangely and intuitively knew – were not true. Perhaps Day was deceived. But Day was a liar. He had to remember that. All the stuff about diamonds: the fellow would have persisted in it if there had been a chance of sustaining that particular deception… “Shall we get back to business?” Cranston asked.
    “Brandy, biscuits and chocolate are decidedly part of our business at present. Would you pour out? It’s a thing the blind find tricky.” Day paused only for a moment. “Do you play rugger?”
    “Yes.” Cranston poured – and drank.
    “Three-quarter?”
    “Yes. But I don’t see–”
    “That we’re getting back to business? But we are, you know. You had fumbled a pass. How unforgivably, you were just coming to realise. And you remember the next stage? An absolute determination to take the ball cleanly next time. Well – I’m the ball. I think that was about as far as we had got.”
    “And I think you’ve laboured all that long enough. I’m prepared to admit that it’s not precisely nonsense. But taking the ball cleanly mayn’t at all mean anything that you greatly fancy.” Cranston reached for a biscuit and paused to munch it. “Your story may be full of psychological interest. Your wanderings – physical and spiritual – among the nations may open up all sorts of fascinating vistas upon the dilemma of modern man. Everything of that sort. High-class thriller stuff, in which recurrent chapters are devoted to an anatomy of the soul.” The small swig of brandy, Cranston realised, had gone straight to his head. “But the fact remains that you are almost certainly even more dangerous than you are interesting. Taking you cleanly ought perhaps to mean putting you inside as fast as the job can be done… I’ve halved the chocolate.”
    “Thank you – and of course you’re right. There’s a presumption, I mean, that I’m far too dangerous not to jump on. But suppose it’s otherwise. Suppose I can convince you that – well, that all that’s over and done with. Suppose you wanted to help me – to go on helping me, I ought to say. Could you do it?”
    “Could I help you?” Cranston was disconcerted at being thus abruptly placed once more in the position of the challenged party.
    “Just that. For there’s not much point in my telling you anything more – opening any of those fascinating vistas you’re so neatly ironic about – if in fact your neat undergraduate wit is altogether in excess of your practical capacities. I’ll admit you cut a pretty good figure, my dear young man, in the matter of the fellow with the gun. But are you resourceful? And are you your own master at present from day to day? Could you get a blinded man from here to London – perhaps against desperate opposition? There’s more to a good wing-three-quarter, you’ll agree, than just taking the ball cleanly. He has to carry it over the line.”
    “I think you have the most frightful cheek.” Reduced to this rather juvenile sentiment, Cranston picked up another square of chocolate. Brandy, he had decided, was an unsuitable sort of refreshment at dawn.
    “Alex Blair, I take it, is the grand person hereabouts – the laird, and all that. We’re now in the grounds of the big house.”
    “It’s a castle, as a matter of fact – Dinwiddie Castle. And