N or M_ - Agatha Christie [63]
So here he was–a failure–an ignominious failure–trussed up like a chicken, with no one to guess where he was.
If only Tuppence could have second sight! She might suspect. She had, sometimes, an uncanny insight…
What was that?
He strained his ears listening to a far-off sound.
Only some man humming a tune.
And here he was, unable to make a sound to attract anyone’s attention.
The humming came nearer. A most untuneful noise.
But the tune, though mangled, was recognisable. It dated from the last war–had been revived for this one.
‘If you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy.’
How often he had hummed that in 1917.
Dash this fellow. Why couldn’t he sing in tune?
Suddenly Tommy’s body grew taut and rigid. Those particular lapses were strangely familiar. Surely there was only one person who always went wrong in that one particular place and in that one particular way!
‘Albert, by gosh!’ thought Tommy.
Albert prowling round Smugglers’ Rest. Albert quite close at hand, and here he was, trussed up, unable to move hand or foot, unable to make a sound…
Wait a minute. Was he?
There was just one sound–not so easy with the mouth shut as with the mouth open, but it could be done.
Desperately Tommy began to snore. He kept his eyes closed, ready to feign a deep sleep if Appledore should come down, and he snored, he snored…
Short snore, short snore, short snore–pause–long snore, long snore, long snore–pause–short snore, short snore, short snore…
II
Albert, when Tuppence had left him, was deeply perturbed.
With the advance of years he had become a person of slow mental processes, but those processes were tenacious.
The state of affairs in general seemed to him quite wrong.
The war was all wrong to begin with.
‘Those Germans,’ thought Albert gloomily and almost without rancour. Heiling Hitler, and goose-stepping and over-running the world and bombing and machine-gunning, and generally making pestilential nuisances of themselves. They’d got to be stopped, no two ways about it–and so far it seemed as though nobody had been able to stop them.
And now here was Mrs Beresford, a nice lady if there ever was one, getting herself mixed up in trouble and looking out for more trouble, and how was he going to stop her? Didn’t look as though he could. Up against this Fifth Column and a nasty lot they must be. Some of ’em English-born, too! A disgrace, that was!
And the master, who was always the one to hold the missus back from her impetuous ways–the master was missing.
Albert didn’t like that at all. It looked to him as though ‘those Germans’ might be at the bottom of that.
Yes, it looked bad, it did. Looked as though he might have copped one.
Albert was not given to the exercise of deep reasoning. Like most Englishmen, he felt something strongly, and proceeded to muddle around until he had, somehow or other, cleared up the mess. Deciding that the master had got to be found, Albert, rather after the manner of a faithful dog, set out to find him.
He acted upon no settled plan, but proceeded in exactly the same way as he was wont to embark upon the search for his wife’s missing handbag or his own spectacles when either of those essential articles were mislaid. That is to say, he went to the place where he had last seen the missing objects and started from there.
In this case, the last thing known about Tommy was that he had dined with Commander Haydock at Smuglers’ Rest, and had then returned to Sans Souci and been last seen turning in at the gate.
Albert accordingly climbed the hill as far as the gate of Sans Souci, and spent some five minutes staring hopefully at the gate. Nothing of a scintillating character having occurred to him, he sighed and wandered slowly up the hill to Smugglers’ Rest.
Albert, too, had visited the Ornate Cinema that week, and had been powerfully impressed by the theme of Wandering Minstrel. Romantic, it was! He could