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

command. And her instructions were efficient in the extreme; they had the body and were making headway towards the shore.
    A current caught them momentarily and Appleby had a first glimpse of Unumunu’s face. The sight hurried him into speech. “You seem to know about it,” he said.
    “John?” She turned her head, startled.
    “Handling a body in water.”
    “Too right. I mean, yes. We have lots of this on our beach. And I’ve belonged to the life-savers for years. It’s great fun.” She paused, perhaps feeling this an inappropriate truth, perhaps because the current, catching them again, made it necessary to conserve her breath. “But I never thought it would come to bringing in poor old Ponto.” She twisted round to look at the black man’s face with the innocent interest of a child examining a dead canary.
    “ John !”
    “Yes.”
    They got the body to the beach and laid it on its back; they dropped down exhausted beside it. And Appleby looked again. Unumunu’s face would soon be dust. But now it looked like something utterly permanent, like a piece of sculpture that would have great value in a museum, like the effigy of a divine being infinitely remote in the primitive consciousness of mankind. Such things are brought from the Gold Coast, from the Congo, and they rebuke every hope, negate every category of the Western mind. The dead Sir Ponto, with Eton and anthropology evaporated from his clay and his eyes open without expectation on the sky, looked like that. And the effect of sculptural fragment was increased because he had no back to his head. The back of his head had been bashed in.
    “Has he been dead long? I thought I saw him, you know, across the lagoon.” Diana’s wondering eyes travelled the length of the ebony body. “The fish have been nibbling his toes.” She stopped, her eyes widened. “So if he had nibbled me –” Abruptly she sat up and began to cry. She cried for a long time, while Appleby stared at the sea. “I think,” she said obscurely, “he was jolly decent. Considering he was a black.” The idyll was over; the fantasy – in which she was to marry a black and he was to marry the Curricle – was broken; the story had taken its quirk and the key was changed. He stood up. “We must find the others.”
    She nodded. And then her eyebrows puckered, as if she were attempting some elementary sum. “Then it must–” She checked herself. “Could he have fallen ?” she almost whispered.
    “From a great height, yes. But there is no great height from which a body could end up in the lagoon.”
    “Then–”
    “Yes. Come along.”

 
     
6
    They stepped off the beach and into their now familiar miniature jungle – an other world which made what was behind them unbelievable at once. The bowery loneliness was like Eden, Appleby thought – and like the second Eden of our infancy was the determined innocence that trod by his side. Or rather that had just left it – for Diana had suddenly darted into the undergrowth and disappeared. Perhaps he should arrest her and everybody else; perhaps he should have affected to find Unumunu’s death explicable by natural means and bided his time…
    She was back again, tears and triumph on her face and in her hands a pigeon. “Ponto’s,” she said. “He was so good at all that.” She sniffed and felt for a handkerchief which had disappeared long ago. “We shall never get along without him.” She felt at the bird. “A nice plump one too. Let’s keep it for ourselves.”
    He laughed. She looked at him reproachfully. “John, you shouldn’t laugh. Not after such a dreadful thing. Not even if you are a policeman – you’re not really, are you?”
    “Of course I am. And a puzzled one.”
    “Puzzled?” Her look now had its quick intelligence. “Well, I don’t believe it. It’s not believable. That one of them, I mean–”
    “But, Diana, only an hour ago you were making up just such an improbability.”
    “No. I never said”