The Man from the Sea by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

appeared.
    The moonlight fell upon him as for a photograph. He had rounded the curve and was standing still, so that for a moment he was like a dummy in a tailor’s window. And the first thing noticeable was his clothes. They were absurdly urban to have come direct from shipboard. Moreover, the man himself had the same suggestion. He was plump and pale – and he was peering into the shadows through rimless spectacles and from beneath a trilby hat. The whole appearance thus presented was so incongruously mild that Cranston for a moment felt almost persuaded that there must be some bizarre mistake. Then he saw that the man really had a gun. He was raising it now. He knew just where his quarry lurked. He was making his kill.
    Something came free under Cranston’s fingers. It was about the size of a cricket-ball. He looked fixedly at the man’s spectacles glinting with a sort of treacherous reassurance in the moonlight and tried to imagine them a pair of bails. The distance wasn’t much farther than from cover point. He raised his arm. The movement must have betrayed him, for in the same instant the man levelled his gun – a glinting short-barrelled affair. There was no time for a more careful aim, and Cranston threw. The stone – for it was that – had scarcely left his hand when he knew that it was going wide. And he would never have a chance to reach for another. The stone was flying wide of the spectacles by eighteen inches – by a couple of feet. And then he saw the gun magically flicked from the man’s hands, and in the same instant heard a sharp crack. The stone had taken it on the muzzle and it was spinning in air. A fraction of a second later there was a tiny splash. The weapon was in the sea. The enemy had been disarmed.
    “Can we go for him?” It was the man from the sea who spoke. Whether or not his sight was coming back to him, he appeared to know perfectly what had happened. “Could we chuck him into the water?”
    “I could take him over with me – like Sherlock Holmes with Dr Moriarty.” Cranston was moved to sudden sarcasm. “And then you could just carry on. Shall we try that?”
    “Or have you a knife?” The voice of the man from the sea was quite level. “Could we collar him lower down and cut his throat?”
    “He looks as if he’ll just clear out. Won’t that do?”
    “I’d rather we killed him.”
    Cranston was silent. He realised that the man from the sea meant precisely what he said. And this realisation, more than the deadly danger he had himself been in seconds before, brought home to him the queer fact that he had dropped into an utterly unknown world. It occurred to him that the man with spectacles might have another weapon – perhaps a revolver – and that it was of this danger that the man from the sea was thinking. But there was no sign of anything of the sort. For a further couple of seconds their late pursuer held his ground – harmlessly and irresolutely, like a pedestrian become aware of being in the wrong street or meditating a cautious encounter with a stream of traffic. The circumstances of the affair seemed to require from him a grimace of rage, a howl of baffled fury. But all that the man with the spectacles did was to clear his throat as if about to address the darkness. No words came – and the commonplace sound was followed by a gesture yet more uncannily commonplace. The man produced a handkerchief, removed his trilby hat and mopped his forehead. Then he replaced the hat, stowed away the handkerchief, turned, and walked off down the path. In a second he had vanished; for some seconds more they could hear his composed retreat; and then that was the end of him. Cranston was alone with his first and equally problematical companion.
     
    “I can see the moon – or at least I’m aware of it.” The man from the sea was moving forward cautiously, his hand on Cranston’s arm. “But that’s all. It presents a complication.”
    “In getting to Hatton