Free Marazan by Nevil Shute Page A

may want to bite a girl in the pictures oneself.
    I stayed in there till the end of the show and then strolled back to my hotel. There was nobody about in the hall and I got up to my room without meeting a soul; a circumstance for which I was thankful. I was getting very nervous; I was half sorry that I hadn’t spent the night in the fields somewhere. It was a warm night; I could have done so quite well.
    I undressed slowly, pondering my plans. I came to the conclusion that I must lay two more red herrings before I got away to sea—good smelly ones. One I would leave next day in Exeter or the neighbourhood; the other I would lay in Salcombe itself on the Saturday morning, so that there should be no difficulty in connecting me with the departure of the
Irene
. I cannot remember that at any time I worried very much as to what would happen when eventually I brought the
Irene
back to Salcombe and took up my ordinary life again. That didn’t worry me at all, oddly enough. I think that even then I must have realised that things were unlikely to go exactly to plan. For one thing, I thought that Compton would be caught by the police long before I landed to pick him up on the little beach at the entrance to the Helford River.
    Still pondering deeply, I got into bed and snuggled down beneath the clothes. Then I swore, more in astonishment than in pain, because it was clear that somebody had been being damn funny with my bed. There was something in it, down at the foot. I lit my candle again and groped about at the bottom of the bed,and presently fished up a small china candlestick ornamented with a wreath of blue roses and the legend: ‘A Present from Plymouth.’ And then I saw that it had a little china ring for a handle, and through this ring there was stuffed a piece of notepaper, rolled up into a little cylinder. On the paper was the direction, scrawled carefully in pencil:
    ‘Mr. Compton.’
    ‘Good God!’ I said weakly, and sat staring at it for a moment. Then I pulled myself together, took the paper from the candlestick, and unrolled it. It was quite a short note.
    ‘The party you coshed at Abingdon got free at 4 and made hell you was a fool to tell him. Mattarney comes to England before the 15th and goes on with the boat. Write to RLT he can fix up for you to see him. You’re OK now but move on to-morrow.’
    Short, snappy, and probably very much to the point. It wasn’t signed.
    I must have lain in bed staring at the ceiling for fully half an hour, the paper in my hand and the candle guttering by my side. At last I roused myself, blew out the candle, and tried to summarise my conclusions before I went to sleep. The note I placed carefully in the pocket of my coat. I would have burned it there and then but for the reflection that if I did so I should think in the morning I had been under the influence of alcohol.
    First of all, my unknown correspondent was in touch with a pretty efficient intelligence bureau of some sort. This bureau was evidently illicit or it would hardly be priming me with information of that sort. They knewall about Compton and were well disposed towards him. There was the information that Mattarney was to do something on the 15th, ‘and goes on with the boat’. Compton’s important day had been the 15th, and he had spoken about Mattani to the girl. I wondered who Mattani was and whether he was Irish or Italian. Lastly, it was evident that the bureau didn’t know everything, because they hadn’t tumbled to the fact that I had changed places with Compton.
    I hoped most devoutly that the police would prove a shade slower at the uptake than this lot.
    One thing was clear; that some organisation was keeping a benevolent eye on me in the belief that I was Compton. Whether they would continue to do so when they learned the truth was another matter. I began to feel that I was not the important person that I thought I was; that I was a mere pawn in some game that Compton was playing which I knew