The Man from the Sea by Michael Innes Page B

assigned her a post of danger, since she could summon both her stepfather and his men-servants readily enough at need. But he wondered whether he ought to have done it, all the same…
    There she was – so quickly that it almost seemed as if she must have had the gun ready hidden. She gave him a wave and they moved swiftly on converging paths through the garden, so that when he climbed the wall where it gave directly on the cliff she was no more than twenty yards away. He waved to her in turn and allowed himself to drop.
    He was on an outcrop of rock. He had remembered the precise spot where the thing could be done. The wall here was in places part of the outer ward of a former castle, and there were points at which it rose sheer from the cliff. This rendered impossible any walking round it on the outer side, nor could a view of it here possibly be commanded by the lurking man with the trilby hat. It was a climb – at least it was decidedly not a walk – down to sea level, and the state of the tide meant that he could then do a quick scramble along the rocks until he gained the beach. And there he would recover his bicycle and be home before breakfast was on the table.
    If he didn’t break his neck… It was trickier than he remembered – particularly at the start – and dropping the first thirty feet required absolute concentration. When he had accomplished this he paused and looked upwards. Sally was perched on the wall almost directly above him. She was attending to her job, for he knew it to be a spot from which there was a clear view of the summerhouse. But for the moment she was looking down at him. And he could distinguish – it was as if his senses were tuned to some state of hyperaesthesia by his task – the expression on her intent pale face. There was only one way of describing it. Despair.
    Despair … It was by quite a long way, he now realised, that this descent was trickier than he had supposed. And perhaps Sally realised it. Perhaps she was convinced that his chance of avoiding disaster in the next few minutes was very small. And perhaps she –
    Cranston made a tremendous effort to thrust out of his mind all speculation on how Sally might, after all, care. The surest way to end up pulped and broken on the rock below was to let his mind wander an inch from his business. And perhaps that was the way that a woman – any woman – would look if she saw a man – any man – in what she judged to be mortal peril.
    He gave a reassuring wave, examined the state of his gym-shoes and their laces carefully, and started on the next bit of the drop. When he reached the bottom and looked up again it was no longer possible to see Sally. But her image was still vivid to him. He could see that expression still. Almost, he felt that it might haunt him.

 
     
8
    It was the memory of Sally’s pallor, perhaps, that made Cranston find the appearance of the girl hiker so startling. The girl’s face was red and shining, and high on her rucksack there was sewn some species of red flag. The effect, from a little distance, was alarmingly Janus-like; approached from front or rear, she would equally present an appearance as of the blazing sun. The sun indeed was suggested by everything about her. Her hair and her khaki shorts and shirt were alike bleached by it, and her limbs – which her garments did not much obscure – were burned brown beneath a glint of fine golden hairs. If one put one’s nose to her skin and took a good sniff – Cranston supposed – one would know at last just what the sun smells of.
    But Cranston had no thought of this experiment. He had come up with her only a couple of hundred yards from his own garden gate, and he would have skimmed past her rapidly enough if she had not turned and given him a hail. She waved a map as she did so, and it was clear that she was seeking directions. Cranston jammed on his brakes and dismounted. It was something he was unable to do very graciously, for he was both