Judith signed her letter and reached for blotting paper. ‘Sleep on it,’ she said.
Preparing to get out of his aeroplane, Appleby regarded the waiting helicopter with disfavour. ‘Have I to get into that thing?’ he asked the pilot.
‘I’m afraid so, sir. They don’t go in for airstrips out on Ardray. I doubt whether there’s as much as a bowling green.’
‘A bowling green? What would they want that for?’
‘All egg heads and boffins out there, except for a few service chaps to look after them. Bowls would be about their mark, I’d say. And badminton for the youngsters in their early fifties.’ The pilot smiled cheerfully. ‘Jolly game, badminton would be, in an Ardray gale.’
‘Gales are the thing out there?’
‘Oh, very much so. It’s quite supernatural, it seems. Freezing temperatures, howling blizzards and tempestuous seas when the whole of the rest of the Atlantic ocean is like a millpond.’
‘You disturb me.’ Appleby took another look at the helicopter. ‘Do you think it will have – um – a safe driver?’
‘Reasonably safe, sir, as long as he doesn’t drop off to sleep. Jumbo Brown. A frightful old drunkard, but quite a nice chap. Only reckless when he’s been in trouble with women. Of course, he often is. Even up here, I believe – although they brought him north to get him away from them. Jumbo has been ferrying people to and from Ardray for months now. That’s why he sometimes drops into a doze.’
‘I shall endeavour to combat his somnolence with stimulating conversation.’
‘Not under those rotors, you won’t. Goodbye, sir. I’m sure you’ll have a lovely trip.’
Appleby climbed from the plane. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘By the way, I’d ask for a parachute, if I were you. They may have one lying around.’
‘Thoughtful of you,’ Appleby said. ‘Goodbye.’
Jumbo Brown provided his passenger not with a parachute but a rug. He tucked him up in this with all the respectful solicitude of an old family coachman.
‘I say, sir’ – and Jumbo jerked a thumb in the direction of the craft which Appleby had just quitted – ‘did they send you north in that?’
‘Certainly they did.’
‘Criminal, isn’t it? Not as if you were an everyday chore, like an Air-Vice or an MP. And was that Batty Tarratt?’
‘I understand Tarratt to have been the young man’s name.’
‘Dear, dear! They’ve put him on that job, you know, because of his poor tortured nerves. What luck you’ve had. So far, that’s to say. I suppose Batty will take you south again. By the way, did he smell of drink?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘That’s bad. Drink steadies old Batty wonderfully. But when he’s keeping off it – well, he just isn’t safe. Nice day, isn’t it? Of course, we’ll bounce about a bit later on.’
Appleby settled himself in his seat. I may be given to scowling from time to time, he was telling himself, but commonly I must have a really nice face. To provoke all this unabashed juvenile fun. Mr Clwyd, now, wouldn’t care for it at all.
‘All prepared, sir? I just have to wait a signal from the island. Nothing must take off for it from here without the official come-hither.’
‘I see. By the way, what about getting there by surface? If I lost my nerve at the sight of your horrible machine, Mr Brown, and insisted on going by water, just what would it be like?’
‘Well, sir, it would depend on whether you hit anything.’
‘There’s plenty to hit?’
‘Lord, yes. Not such another piece of water in the world. Littered with wrecks. Viking ships, Spanish galleons, German pocket battleships. Anything you care to name, positively on view from dawn to dusk.’
‘Not a part of the world to do a little amateur cruising in?’
‘It would depend upon how one felt about heaven, and that sort of thing. St Wulfius must have had a pretty strong line there.’
‘St Wulfius?’
‘A missionary type, one gathers. Sailed about these waters a long time ago. And had a cell or something on Ardray. Retired there eventually to be an anarchist.’
‘An anarchist? How very odd.’
‘Or is it an anchorite? Kind of a hermit, you know. And he must have been about the last chap on the island until all this hush-hush got going. Ah, there’s my signal. I’d put on the helmet, sir, if I were you. Not one of those noiseless flying hearses, this craft of mine.’
Appleby surveyed the terrain – an activity facilitated by the fact that the floor of the helicopter was for the most part transparent. Apart from the airstrip and its small huddle of sheds, there was no sign of human habitation. In an increasingly crowded world, there are nevertheless spots that are being progressively denuded of inhabitants. And this was one of them. On one of the nearby hillsides, it was true, he could see a thinly spread-out flock of sheep. But the shepherd would come bumping over the moors on a motorbike, perhaps from some clachan a dozen miles away. And the only other irruption, from year’s end to year’s end, would be by companies of gentlemen concerned to prove their skill at shooting pheasants and grouse. But although it was near the end of August, there was no sign of anybody after the grouse yet. Perhaps there weren’t any there to be shot. Perhaps what Dr Brimblecombe called the ecological balance had gone against them.
A helicopter was a very unnatural affair – much more so than an ordinary aeroplane. Perhaps it would be all right if one had done a lot of pioneering with balloons; this business of being sucked straight up above a uniformly widening horizon might then seem entirely unalarming. The contours were already flattening out, but presumably Mr Jumbo Brown wouldn’t continue for long to climb in this perpendicular way. Unless, of course, he had dropped off to sleep in earnest. But now there was a change in the note of the engine; the rotorblades were doing whatever they did to ferry one along; the landscape tilted, turned subtly on an axis and began to flow away in a normal-looking fashion beneath them. They were on the way to Ardray.
Appleby wondered why. Another wild-goose chase, he told himself. The quintessential red herring. The perfect turn round Robin Hood’s barn. Tomorrow he would find himself back in London – always supposing that Batty Tarratt’s poor tortured nerves held out so long – at precisely the point at which he had departed from it.
He paused in his gloomy reflections to take another look at the natural scene. To the east the moors stretched away in unbroken sullen purple to tumble themselves like some unnatural sea against the bastions of the North-West Highlands. And beneath him was a green and racing ocean, tossing itself in spray and spume on jagged rocks, and in one place running far up a golden beach overhung by low cliffs topped with heather. The little boat of St Wulfius, Appleby thought, might with perfect propriety emerge from behind a headland at any moment. For the scene was in all probability utterly unchanged since the ninth century – except that two men were floating through the sky, so securely that they had to keep up boring jokes about their danger, and proposing presently to drop effortlessly upon the remote rock to which the saint could have come only through sheets of foam and past the innumerable submerged fangs of rock that constituted, along with the seethe and suck of small hideous currents, the special hazard of the place.
A dinghy with an outboard motor. Well, Wulfius had certainly had even less than that. But this didn’t make Howard Juniper’s plan, as reported by Lord Ailsworth, any less ridiculous. A glance at the map showed that mere distance made nonsense of it. Jumbo Brown’s helicopter would be more than an hour on the job. No man could seriously have proposed such an exploit. Either Juniper had been romancing to Lord Ailsworth or Lord Ailsworth had been romancing to Appleby. And even suppose that Juniper had in fact had command of some much more powerful craft. It was inconceivable that he could have piloted it, undetected, to one of the most elaborately guarded spots on the surface of the earth. And, if detected, his whereabouts wouldn’t be unknown now. On the contrary, Howard Juniper would probably be in gaol. With luck, he might be on bail, with a number of persons quietly keeping an eye on him.
Appleby glanced at Jumbo Brown. The helicopter had every appearance of looking after itself, but it was nevertheless clear that Jumbo’s whole being was concentrated on it. A happy man, Appleby thought. Like riding. It’s second nature, and you’re not thinking about it, and yet you’re putting everything you have into it all the time. Happy Jumbo, for whom every wild-goose chase is another jaunt with his enchanting bride. He never makes a fool of himself. Nothing ever eludes him, since the elusive doesn’t come his way. And therefore he never scowls.
Appleby scowled. What was eluding him now was any rational occasion for having come here. But perhaps he had never had such occasion. Perhaps he was acting on mere instinct – like Jean Howe’s Lemmings. At least, like the Lemmings, he was going straight out to sea. Scotland had virtually cleared off the horizon; had picked up its trailing purple skirts and moved off east. There was nothing to be seen but sea – sea and a few points of leaping white that must mean rock. Round Ardray, he understood, these would be as thick as the hazards on a pin-table. Wulfius must have threaded his way through them with prayer – with that, and a steady hand on the sheet, a steady hand on the tiller.
The sea had turned from green to blue, and then back not to one green but many; from high in the air it was like a strangely veined marble turned molten and seething. Appleby’s stomach told him the helicopter was bumping up and down, and less definable sensations seemed best accounted for on the supposition that every now and then it was caught into a sudden lateral drift. Bright sunshine, the uneasy angry sea, a vicious veering wind. A queer part of the world, Appleby had been told. Ardray, thrusting out of the Atlantic, was like a centre round about which the vast forces of wind and water perpetually revolved. But not itself a still centre. Nature, here wheeling and cornering in some mysterious race, reached out a hand in passing and shook the place.
And there it was – a fantastically corrugated basalt mass, rising sheer out of ocean. It was very possibly beautiful, and certainly it was surprising and majestic. But Appleby stared at it almost resentfully. Like almost everything in this Juniper affair, there was no sense to it. How did lava come to behave like that – right out here in the middle of the Atlantic? No doubt the geologists had thought up some answer, but to the lay imagination the island was a massive enigma – as a battleship would be, say, stranded in the middle of the Sahara. And why come to such a remote and sterile spot for the purpose of carrying on ballistic research? Appleby hadn’t been given the answer to this puzzle either. He knew only that the place had long been famous as a natural curiosity, and that what was specifically curious about it had proved to be unexpectedly useful. ‘You’ll find out when you get there,’ a very important personage had said to him briskly. ‘Murray will show you whatever you want to see. That goes without saying. But I don’t see that it can have anything to do with this confounded Juniper and his bugs.’
Appleby didn’t see it either. He seemed to see it less and less as the helicopter slowed, hovered, and dropped. Admiral Murray would be waiting for him – having received a signal ordering him so to do. But it didn’t follow that it would be with a beaming smile. The man was a scientist. But was said also to be a peppery old sailor who had fought at Jutland. He mightn’t welcome a jumped-up policeman talking nonsense about birds.
There was the slightest of bumps. The rotors died and Jumbo Brown whipped off his helmet. ‘Space-travel completed,’ he said. ‘If my calculations have been correct, it’s the moon.’
It might well have been the moon, Appleby thought. There was no scrap of vegetation; there was nothing but flat bare wind-whipped rock. Only here and there, he noticed, the surface was broken by what appeared to be small craters – a circumstance which naturally accentuated the lunar suggestion which the place already carried. There were several clumps of low concrete buildings, clinging to the rock like desperate barnacles. And from one of these – it was distinguished from the others by flying an ensign – a small party had just set out, apparently to meet the helicopter. There were some men in uniform and some in what appeared to be the white coats of laboratory workers. Those in uniform held caps jammed on their heads. All were leaning against a howling gale.
The conviction strengthened in Appleby that he was unlikely to be popular on Ardray.
But he turned out to have been quite wrong. This was perhaps because he himself liked the Ardray crowd as soon as Admiral Murray had introduced them to him over a glass of sherry. They were a team with a goal in view. One could imagine them as perched on the edge of the Antarctic continent, organizing for an expedition to the Pole. Only theirs was even more complicated as a co-operative task; they represented a higher percentage of technical accomplishment; and there was – Appleby guessed – an element of danger that lasted longer and was more evenly shared. All this produced a slight effect of the brakes being on so far as the expression of personality was concerned. Everybody was being quiet but not too quiet; one could feel the steady concentration that held these people together day after day and week after week in the pursuit of whatever it was that they had agreed to go after.
As he was led away to lunch in private with the Admiral, Appleby ventured to say something of this impression he had received. Murray looked at him keenly and nodded approval. ‘The long count down,’ he said. ‘If I ever write a book about Ardray – which heaven forfend – I shall call it that. But shall we eat before we tackle business? As I don’t have a visitor every day, perhaps you’ll indulge me so far. We try to keep a few tatters of civilized habit about us. It’s the first thing I tell a new boy when he arrives. Don’t only watch your cap. Watch your pants as well. Otherwise the damned gale will have them off you in no time. And, I’m bound to say, I’ve never had to speak to a chap twice yet. They’re a mixed lot, and I don’t know that I’d choose all of them to go round the world with. But they’re doing me a magnificent job. And we have a very decent chef. Uncommonly rare thing in the services nowadays. I’ve put more intrigue into nobbling him than into getting my three Fellows of Trinity and my elderly OM. Care to try his game pie? It will be better in October. But it’s not bad now.’