Eating game pie, Appleby acquiesced readily enough in half an hour’s desultory talk. It was decent of Murray to receive him in this friendly way. ‘Does everything have to come to you by helicopter?’ he asked, when they had finished their meal.
‘Nearly everything does. We do have a harbour of sorts, but it takes some navigating. Nice when you get into it, though – if you can stand the row.’
‘The row?’
‘Like stage thunder. Whole set-up always reminds me of Covent Garden. If you don’t mind being blown about, we’ll go and have a look.’
They left the Admiral’s hut and were at once standing on the bare windswept rock. ‘No hope of raising your own vegetables,’ Appleby said.
‘Decidedly not. Backside of the world, I call it. How does it go? Ever-threatening storms of Chaos blustering round, and so forth. Great poet, Milton – despite his damned bad politics. Mind a ladder, Appleby?’
Appleby intimated that he didn’t mind a ladder. He had been led past two of the queer craters with which the flat surface of the island was pitted, but he hadn’t been invited to inspect them. Instead, he was guided to the eastern extremity of Ardray, where the sheer cliff which everywhere else constituted its perimeter appeared to break down into a narrow cleft. This itself almost immediately became perpendicular, and appeared to have been adapted to serve as something like the shaft of a lift. There was a steam winch with a naval rating guarding it, and from an iron gantry cables disappeared into near-darkness below. So did a narrow iron ladder, clamped into the rock. The Admiral slung an electric torch on a lanyard round his neck, and went down without a word. Appleby, under the friendly but slightly ironical eye of the rating, followed with amateur circumspection.
The torch was needed only during the middle section of the descent. After that there was daylight again – but of a quality so unusual that Appleby judged the comparison with Covent Garden to be quite in order. The cave into which the cleft dropped seemed at first to be a great pillared hall with a floor of green marble. But the floor was water, and the pillars – red and brown and green and gold – were nature’s handiwork alone; massive basalt formations, fantastically hung with seaweed and lichen. Appleby, finding his feet at length on firm rock, looked round at his leisure. The sea, he saw, was in soft perpetual movement up and down. It must be this that was responsible for the sound – as of a vast creature gently breathing – with which the place was filled.
‘The Hermit’s Chapel,’ the Admiral said. ‘You may have seen the same sort of thing on Staffa. Curious, isn’t it?’
Appleby agreed that it was curious. At the same time, he reflected with a faint impatience that it wasn’t as a tourist that he had come to Ardray. The sights were, as they say, well worth a visit. But they didn’t seem to bring him any nearer to Howard Juniper. ‘The hermit,’ he said, ‘being Wulfius?’
‘Certainly. And perfectly historical, you know. Not a doubt about him. Great man. Sailed these seas as if they were a duck pond. There was a move to call our brainchild the Wulfius. But I wouldn’t have it. Inappropriate. Blasphemous, almost. Or in howling bad taste – which is, of course, worse.’
‘Your brainchild? The project you’re all working on?’
‘Yes, yes. I’ll show it to you presently. Glad to have somebody it
can
be shown to.’
Appleby was still looking round the cave. ‘But you don’t work down here?’
‘Lord, no. But it’s useful. We can get craft in at low tide. On the less stormy days, that is. At other times it would be uninhabitable. Extraordinary effects from compressed air. They deserve study – or would in a sane world. That produces the terrific row I was speaking of. Sorry you can’t hear it.’
‘This is quite striking enough. By the way, what
did
you decide to call the brainchild?’
The Admiral chuckled. ‘Come and see one or two of them,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll give you three guesses.’
They went back up the ladder. Appleby was glad to see the end of it. ‘Probably,’ he said, ‘I’d need more than three guesses to get at why you’re all here at all. It can’t be just for privacy. And all the transport must make it enormously expensive.’
‘You’re in the target-area – but actually barking up precisely the wrong tree.’ Murray was now striding across the island. ‘Enormously expensive is just what it’s not. The point about Ardray is that Mother Nature has done a big preliminary job for us, absolutely gratis. Just go carefully, will you? Up to the edge and peer over.’
They had reached one of the craters which had been among Appleby’s first observations on the island. It proved to be a natural shaft of not more than eight yards in diameter. It seemed to Appleby not informative. It was a mere pit of blackness.
‘Not in use, this one,’ Murray said. ‘Drop something.’
Appleby found a loose fragment of rock and dropped it. He listened. ‘Good lord!’ he said.
‘Quite a tidy depth – eh? We’ll go on to the next.’
They walked on about twenty paces. The next shaft had a low fence round it. A number of pipes and wires ran up to its lip and disappeared.
‘Air and so on,’ Murray said. ‘Nobody down there now. But we’ve got one of
them
there. Just take a look.’
Again Appleby peered down. As he did so, Murray stooped and flicked a switch. The black pit was instantly illuminated. At the bottom it was probably a good working light. But from the bright daylight above it gave only an uncertain view.
‘Well, what do you see?’ Murray was whimsically challenging.
‘Nothing very clearly,’ Appleby said. ‘But at least I think I see the idea. It’s this business of getting off rockets from very deep underground, isn’t it? Absolute invulnerability for the launching of thermonuclear jobs?’
Murray nodded soberly. ‘Just that. And here, on Ardray, a devilishly inscrutable providence, Appleby, has provided us with a dozen or more of these infernal pits ready-made – just by way of encouragement.’
‘Mysterious,’ Appleby said drily.
‘Just that. Fortunately, the real problems are left for us to solve. And they’re enormous, as you can imagine. Doing the sums, and all that, keeps us sane. If we
are
sane, which I sometimes take leave to doubt. But look again, will you? There’s a little fellow down there now.’
Appleby looked again. ‘Yes, I see. But I don’t know I’d call it all that little.’
Murray chuckled. ‘How would you describe it?’
Appleby shook his head. ‘I really can’t make much of it, in this violently foreshortened aspect. But I’d describe it as a dumpy pear-shaped object, with what look like rather ineffective flippers halfway up.’
‘Capital!’ Admiral Murray was delighted. ‘You’ve caught the essence of it very nicely. And that, you know, is why I’ve christened it as I have. Not that “christen” is perhaps the right word. Another piece of confounded blasphemy, come to think of it.’
Appleby turned and stared at his host. He wasn’t going to need three guesses. ‘Would I be right,’ he asked, ‘in supposing that you’ve named the thing after an earlier visitor to this island?’
‘Absolutely right. Brilliant shot, if I may say so. The Great Auk it is.’
‘Well,’ Appleby said when they had returned to the Admiral’s office, ‘at least I know now how this rumour about Garefowl on Ardray got around. Incidentally, the thing would make quite a good study of how rumours augment themselves as they travel. Have you heard the version about the young man who was working for you here, who believed himself to have seen the birds, and who was later killed in an accident?’
Murray shook his head. ‘That’s a new one to me. But I do know that my modest flight of fancy has caused confusion. If I’d just dubbed the thing the Pink Streak or the Grey Crusader or something like that, no excitement would have been caused. But of course the fellows who know about birds wouldn’t be taken in for a moment. Come to think of it, I wish I’d called it the Golden Eagle.’
Appleby laughed. ‘Wouldn’t you have done better still to call it the Dodo?’
‘In the hope that a little rationality in the world might render it obsolete? But the Great Auk carries that idea too.’ Abruptly, Murray dropped this vein of whimsy. ‘Well, now – what have you come about?’
‘About a fellow who may be described as in another branch of your lethal trade, and who has very awkwardly vanished. His name is Howard Juniper.’
Murray sat up straight ‘Vanished! Howard Juniper? I’m most concerned to hear it. I know him quite well.’
‘The dickens you do!’ Appleby sat up in turn. ‘And do you imagine he knows you work here?’
‘Certainly he does. Why, I had dinner with him the last time I was in London. That’s about two months ago.’
‘Did you talk about birds?’
Murray shook his head emphatically. ‘I’m sure we didn’t. Why should we?’
‘Well, it seems that Juniper was interested in them at one time. Do you know that as a young man he went in for extravagant hoaxes, and so on?’
‘I believe I’ve heard of it. But I shouldn’t suppose him to be much by way of that sort of thing now.’
‘Would it surprise you to learn that, shortly after you last met him, he was meditating a plan to make a secret raid on Ardray?’
‘It would.’ For the first time, Admiral Murray spoke a shade testily. He plainly thought the conversation was veering into nonsense.
Appleby caught the note. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to ask all these idiotic-seeming questions. But, I assure you, it’s not for fun. Do you know Lord Ailsworth?’
‘Ailsworth? I seem to have heard the name. No more than that.’
‘He’s not a person of any prominence, except among ornithologists.’
Murray made an impatient gesture. ‘For heaven’s sake! We keep on coming back to birds. What’s this supposed to be in aid of?’
‘Discovering Howard Juniper – which it’s vitally necessary to do. As you must know, his line is bugs. Stopping bugs. Starting bugs. Teaching bugs to turn inside out when he whistles to them. And any other damned crazy thing.’ Appleby was impatient in his turn. ‘And he told this Lord Ailsworth – if this Lord Ailsworth is to be believed – that he was coming to Ardray. He said he was coming to Ardray in a dinghy, as a matter of fact.’
‘Did he, indeed!’ The Admiral, it seemed to Appleby was becoming quite ominously red round the neck.
‘Just that. He went down to Ailsworth, got hold of this odd old fellow who’s mad on birds, and told him he was coming in a dinghy to Ardray to find the Great Auk. He was convinced that the bird was still extant, and that the rumours were of something that had authentically happened. What do you make of that?’
‘I make something perfectly clear of it.’ Murray had calmed down again. ‘Lord Ailsworth is
not
to be believed. He’s been spinning you a fairy story. It’s not my business to tell you why. But I suppose it must be out of a misjudged sense of humour. Or as a consequence of sheer lunacy.’
‘I have independent testimony that Juniper did go down to Ailsworth about six weeks ago. And I have the evidence of a thoroughly reliable girl that the old man – if only in general terms – reported the meeting to her at the time.’
‘Well, it’s all your puzzle. But I repeat that Howard Juniper didn’t tell this precious nobleman of yours that he believed in the rumour about the Great Auk.’
Appleby was silent for a moment. ‘May I ask,’ he said mildly, ‘how you can be so positive?’
‘Yes, of course you can – although I suppose that the answer convicts me of an indiscretion. I wasn’t quite accurate when I said that Juniper and I didn’t talk about birds. In a manner of speaking, that is. I told him what it was reasonable to tell him about our work here. And I mentioned my fancy for calling our confounded missile the Great Auk. He certainly took it in. I’d say he was rather tickled. In other words, Appleby, one of the few men in England who
couldn’t
believe the rumour about the actual bird’s being extant was and is Howard Juniper.’
In the bleak silence that succeeded this there was a tap at the door and a rating came in. ‘Radio telephone for Sir John Appleby, sir.’
Murray pointed to a telephone on his desk. ‘Here,’ he said.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
A moment later the instrument buzzed. Appleby picked it up. ‘Appleby?’ said a rumbling voice.
‘Yes.’
‘Clandon here. Glad they’ve run you to earth. Will that line of yours be scrambled?’
‘Certain to be. Go right ahead.’
‘The usher’s vanished.’
‘What’s that?’ For a moment Appleby could make no sense of this remark.
‘Your spurious professor. Your blasted Miles Juniper. Disappeared into thin air. First Howard and then this schoolmaster. Do you read Wordsworth? How fast has brother followed brother, from sunshine to the sunless land. I don’t know what you’ve gone rushing off about to Ultima Thule, or wherever you are. But I think you’d better return to civilization and clear this matter up.’
‘All right,’ Appleby said. ‘I will.’
It was just after midnight when Appleby got back to Scotland Yard. Cudworth appeared in his room almost at once. Between attending to reports, he had been pacing his own room restlessly for hours.
‘Grindrod,’ Cudworth said. He pronounced the name not quite impassively. It was, for him, a highly dramatic performance.
Nevertheless it was a moment before Appleby registered the name. He had been sunk in thought. ‘Grindrod?’ he repeated. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s in on this affair. In fact, he’s behind it.’
Appleby frowned impatiently. ‘I don’t know what affair you’re talking about, or why it should be keeping you here at midnight. And I don’t want to hear about it, Cudworth. The Juniper business is quite enough for me at the moment.’
Cudworth stared. ‘But I’m talking about the Juniper business. Karl Grindrod, certainly one of the greatest rascals outside gaol in this country at the present moment, is quite certainly involved.’
‘Rubbish! I don’t believe a word of it.’
Cudworth stopped staring and looked angry. ‘Do I understand, sir, that you wish me to take no further part in this particular case?’
Appleby sat down rather heavily. ‘I’m sorry, Cudworth. This rushing around in aeroplanes can’t agree with me. I know Grindrod is, in the abstract, a likely man. He’s strongly suspected of having had a hand in two or three quite tidy espionage jobs in the last couple of years. The sooner he’s locked up the better. All I ought to have said is that what you tell me appears very unlikely. Perhaps I oughtn’t even to say that. The fact is simply that the Juniper puzzle is at last beginning to arrange itself more or less coherently in my head. I’m prepared to say I’ve almost got the hang of it, although it’s quite unbelievably rum. And nobody like Grindrod has any place in the picture. But do please tell me what’s turned up.’