Appleby on Ararat by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

anything.”
    “I could beat any homicide you’ve tackled. I could.” She had sprung up too, brown and gold. “I could take you and run you for years, John Appleby.” She became a flashing arc and vanished.
    He hitched decorously at his pants and dived too – a sound but inferior performance. The setting was all hers and perhaps she was right; with sun and sea and beach about she commanded invisible armies and could possibly have it all her own way. Or at least here he was, diving as instinctively as a bull seal after a favourite cow… He rose to the surface and rebelled. “I wish,” he said to the appalling emptiness about them, “this was all different. I wish the story would take a quirk, the key change, the canvas grow.”
    Diana’s laugh, ringing from the unexpected quarter to which she had swum underwater, mocked his prayer. “I’ll race you,” she called out, “right across the bay. Go!”
    The idea had come to her, characteristically, because she saw she would have a start; and as she spoke she was off at a spectacular crawl. Reduced to the same deplorable mental level, he gave a moment to estimating whether he could win, and then swam powerfully after her. The water was warm and limpid, deep but – they had discovered – locked by shallows from the hazards of the main lagoon. So one could just swim straight ahead and hope to avoid the two kinds of jelly-fish: those that stung and those that gave a mild electric shock. There was no danger – “John, go back! Shark !”
    He felt a stab of horrible fear; it must be true, for this was the one fool trick she would not play. He plunged ahead. And then her voice came again. “It’s OK! It’s stranded! And it’s not a shark; it’s a porpoise – a stranded porpoise!” She was as absurd, as eagerly exclamatory, as a child who has found a dead cat. “John, do come on!”
    He swam forward vigorously. Heroism was off and the idyll on again; the shark had evaporated and the siren grown more alluring from the shock. “All right,” he called – and added, as automatically one does to the very young: “Don’t touch it till I come.”
    Just ahead now the water was eddying over some barely submerged rock; he saw the black oily curve of the creature half awash. Gulls rose in air and sharply broke the silence with their cries; a shoal of tiny, long-snouted fishes flashed by his nose. He raised himself in the water. The sheen of the stranded porpoise was beautiful in the sunlight. And somewhere – recently – he had seen it before. He caught his breath. It was Unumunu’s body that lay sprawled on the rock. The sea lapped lazily over the thighs, covered the head. Only the torso was exposed. The black man was dead.
    Another shoal of fish flashed past, swerving with the precision of an automobile in knock-about comedy. Somewhere on the island a kookaburra cackled; another and another took up the sound; the air was filled with a brief and diabolic laughter which ebbed to a silence in which there was only heard the faint slap of the water against the dead man’s flanks.
    “Diana, it’s Unumunu; he’s drowned. Go ashore and I’ll try to bring him in.”
    But she was swimming forward still, although she must have realised the truth before he spoke. Now she turned round and trod water; she was pale and opened her lips cautiously, as if doubting what would emerge. “I’ll help.” She tossed water from her hair and the sound of her voice seemed to give her confidence. “It’s difficult, a body. Even if it’s well gassed-up.” She was groping for a foothold on the submerged rock.
    For Appleby a dead man was scarcely an event, and he was still chiefly interested in the girl. So this, perhaps, was the Song the Sirens sang – bodies well gassed-up being a natural region of their singing. “Don’t get worried,” he said by way of discounting his thoughts. “And if we go one on each side–”
    “No.” Whether worried or not, Diana abruptly took