The Man from the Sea (5 page)

“It’s one chap, all right – and with some sort of tommygun out by the point. If we can make the cliff we’ve a chance. The path cuts through it so that there’s nearly always at least a foot or two of cover from down here.”

“Good. We’d better make the dash now. If we stop, the blighter has only to walk up to us and blow our brains out. On your mark?”

Cranston heard himself laugh – and distrusted the sound. “Get set,” he said. His fingernails were digging into his palms, and it was with an effort that he flattened his hands on the sand to get better purchase for a spring. He drew up one knee beneath his belly and tensed his whole body. From behind him he fancied he heard the scrape of booted feet on rock.

“Go!”

They were up and running – and instantly the bullets were spitting and singing again. The man from the sea went down and rolled in sand. There was another burst and he gave a sharp cry of pain. The fear Cranston had been expecting pounced. It came as a sickening physical clutch at his bowels and reins. But he found that he had stopped and was trying to heave the man from the sea into cover that was now only a few yards away. There was another spray of bullets which for some reason flew wide. The man from the sea was on his feet again and running. There was something odd about him, but he was making it. They had both made it. On one side of them was the main face of the cliff and on the other an almost continuous breastwork of rock, to keep in the shelter of which they had barely to stoop. Cranston thrust the man from the sea before him. “Up you go,” he said. “You can’t miss it.”

They climbed – but to Cranston’s mind too slowly. “Speed up,” he whispered. “But quietly. It’s only if he wastes time finding the path that we’ve a chance.”

“Get ahead of me, will you?” The voice of the man from the sea was still calm. “It was a graze on the ankle that brought me down. But the real mischief’s my eyes.”

“Your eyes?” As he scrambled ahead Cranston felt a queer chill.

“One of those bullets spat sand into them far too hard to be comfortable. I can’t see a thing. But I can follow you well enough.”

Suddenly Cranston felt himself rebel – rebel against the grotesque destiny that a brief hour had brought upon him. If he stuck by the man from the sea he was almost certainly going to be killed – and without so much as knowing why. It was true that in some brief span of months or years any one of a variety of horrible deaths might come to him. His whole generation walked day by day in the consciousness of that. But death in battle would be death with others of his own sort – and in a cause at least approximately definable, so that there would be a sort of meaning in it. In this there was no sense at all. It was going to be like a street accident. And he was going to be dead. Dead at twenty-two. Because of having got mixed up with some sort of crook… Cranston looked at the cliff-face on his left. He could turn aside and scale it. The light was quite good enough. He would be out of this nightmare just as quickly as he had been in. And the man from the sea could settle his own account.

Suddenly he was shivering from head to foot. It was as if these thoughts were equivalent to finding himself out on the verge of the cliff in a great wind, with his balance swaying. For a second the image held him paralysed. And then, oddly, it prompted him to think ahead and to speak. “Listen – there’s only one dangerous place. It’s about fifty yards in front of us and halfway up. The path takes a turn on an overhang, and for perhaps a dozen feet it curves round with no protection on the outer side at all. But I’ll face round and keep a hand on your right shoulder – and you’ll keep your left dug into the cliff. All right?”

“All right.”

They continued to scramble. Again Cranston thought he heard the scrape of boots, and from almost directly below. His heart sank. If they could gain a sufficient start there was a chance that they might successfully go to earth somewhere on top. But if the fellow found the path and sighted them before they were clear of the cliff then they were certainly done for. At the top he would have them in a narrow cleft and with the moon dead ahead. A single burst from that gun would settle the matter.

And now they had come to the ugly bit. The natural parapet on their right had vanished; for four or five yards the path ceased to be through the cliff and wound on a steep curve sheer across its face. Cranston turned round and dropped on all fours. The man from the sea was already crawling. Working backwards was not difficult in itself, but it was less easy when he had to keep one guiding hand almost constantly on the other’s shoulder. And suddenly their pursuer made himself unmistakably heard. He was on the path and coming up rapidly. Their plight was hopeless.

Cranston looked to his left and down. They were out on the over-hang, and the moon-blanched sea lay directly below. He wondered what would happen if one took a dive from a height like this. Probably one’s body would lose all control of itself and hit the surface in a fashion that would immediately kill. Anyway, there were rocks. He could see them just beneath the surface, like green veins in a milky marble… They went on crawling. He avoided looking directly into the face of the man from the sea, because even in this horrible situation there was a further horror in the thought that the man was perhaps blinded. Once, the man’s right knee slithered under him on some treacherously worn patch of the path, and Cranston thought that they were both going over. Then a shadow loomed behind his own left shoulder. It was the parapet again. Their death wasn’t to be by water.

But now their pursuer was upon them. He was somewhere just short of the hazard they had so painfully negotiated. And they were utterly helpless. He was again in the position that the man from the sea had crisply defined. He had nothing to do but walk up and blow their brains out.

The path was less steep and they had got to their feet. There were at least a few more paces that they could take, and it seemed a point of honour to take them. Cranston had the man from the sea by the hand. And suddenly he realised that they were in almost complete darkness.

It was the point at which the path turned again sharply into the cliff – and its direction was such that, for no more than a matter of feet, the clear moonlight made no impression on its shadows. But in another couple of yards there would be no shadows at all. Cranston stopped, turned, and took a couple of backward paces. As he edged past the man from the sea his mouth was close to his ear. “It’s the only place,” he whispered.

“To fight?”

“To have a shot at it.”

He’s more likely to have several shots at us.”

“Ssh!”

From quite close to them there had come the rattle of a pebble displaced on the path. Cranston took one further backward step and had before him a panel of moonlight and a strip of sea. It was the last few feet of that hazardous curve. If the man with the gun could be stopped anywhere, it was decidedly here. Cranston turned to claw at the cliff face for a loose stone, a clot of clay. And as he did so the man 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 Garden?”

“We’ve agreed, I think, that Hatton Garden is a fiction.” The man from the sea produced his accurately contrived yet spurious effect of humour. “I can’t expect you to believe that diamond smugglers go to quite the lengths we’ve just been witnessing.” He paused. “I wish that fellow hadn’t got away.”

“He can do more damage – arm himself again?”

The man from the sea shook his head. “He can contact…others. Again, it’s a complication.”

“There’s the house.” Cranston pointed, momentarily forgetful of his companion’s condition. “We skirt this wall, and then go through a gate to the summerhouse. The clothes will be waiting. And that will be a start. It could be an end, as far as I’m concerned, except for this business of your eyes. If you want more help, you must tell the truth.”

“My dear young man!” The voice beside Cranston had taken on a tone of mock alarm. “That might be stiff, you know – very stiff, indeed. Patricide, fratricide and all unmentionable crimes may be on my hands.”

“I’m bearing that in mind.” Cranston spoke grimly.

“My advice to you is to give me more help – just a little more help – while asking no questions. It will be more comfortable…all round.”

“Is that a threat again?”

“I suppose it is.” The man from the sea paused. “Would you have Sir Alex Blair know?”

“Blast Blair.”

“Or…the daughter?”

There was a long silence. Cranston was waiting for the blood to stop hammering in his head. “Aren’t you,” he asked carefully, “a pretty great blackguard?”

“I am what you knew me to be in the first minutes of our meeting. The right word for it is desperate. Do you know what it is to be desperate?”

“I’m learning.”

The man from the sea had paused in his halting walk. Now he moved on. “One can talk to you,” he said unexpectedly. “You’re beyond your years.”

“So wise, so young – ?”

“You’ll live long enough, so far as I’m concerned. It’s not all that catching.”

Cranston looked sharply at the man treading carefully beside him. But he could distinguish no play of expression accompanying this odd speech. What the moonlight did sufficiently reveal was the fact that the man’s face was a mess. He must be in considerable pain – but after that first sharp cry he had given no sign of it. If he was a blackguard he was other things as well. And his real life – it came to Cranston – lay far below any facet of himself that he had yet revealed. He had come naked out of the sea – but in an impenetrable disguise. There was nothing about him that one could be sure of – except some underlying intensity of purpose, some dark obsession, which it was impossible to define. There was that – and there was this last queer little speech. It had seemed to slip up, eluding the vigilance of some censor, from a hitherto hidden stratum of his mind. But even of that one could not be certain. The man from the sea was subtle and formidable. His most spontaneous-seeming utterance might be a premeditated and planted thing.

“We go through here.” Cautiously, Cranston eased open a door in the high stone wall. “I hope I’m right about those dogs. Better take my hand again. There’s a winding path to the summerhouse. I can just make it out. The moon’s going down.”

“And that means dawn in no time. We can be clear in half an hour?”

“We could be. But it all needs thinking about. And what’s possible depends upon the truth of your situation, you know, and the risks you may actually have in front of you.” Cranston was briskly practical. “That’s why it’s just no good keeping me in the dark.”