THE SANDS OF THYME Michael Innes THE SEA SPARKLED and small waves splashed drowsily on the beach. Donkeys trotted to and fro bearing the children of holiday-makers who themselves slumbered under handkerchiefs and newspapers. On the horizon lay the smoke of a Channel steamer, on a day trip to Boulogne. And at all this the vicar glanced down with contentment from the promenade. “Fastidious persons,” he said, “would call it vulgar.”
“I like a deserted beach myself,” said the Doctor.
Appleby looked up from his novel. “Do you know Thyme Bay?” he asked. “No? It’s as lonely as you could wish, Doctor.”
The Vicar removed his pipe from his mouth. “You have a story to tell us,” he said.
Appleby smiled. “Quite frankly, Vicar, I have!”
I was there (said Appleby) on special duty with the Security people at the experimental air station. It was summer, and when the tide allowed it I used to walk across the bay before breakfast.
Thyme is a tremendous stretch of sand; you may remember that in the old days they held motor races there.
But the great thing is the shells. Thyme is the one place I know of to which you can go and feel that sea-shells are still all that they were in your childhood. Both on the beach itself and among the rocks, you find them in inexhaustible variety.
On the morning of which I’m speaking, I was amusing myself so much with the shells that it was some time before I noticed the footprints.
It was a single line of prints, emerging from the sandhills, and taking rather an uncertain course towards a group of rocks, islanded in sand, near the centre of the bay. They were the prints of a fairly long-limbed man, by no means a light-weight, and more concerned to cover the ground than to admire the view. But I noticed more than that. The tracks were of a man who limped. I tried to work out what sort of limp it would be.
This had the effect, of course, of making me follow the prints. Since the man had not retraced his steps, he had presumably gone on to the rocks, and then found his way back to the coastal road somewhere farther on. So I continued to follow in his tracks.
Presently I was feeling that something was wrong, and instead of going straight up to those rocks I took a circle round them. No footprints led away from them. So I searched. And there the chap was—tall, heavy, and lying on his tummy.… He was dead.
I turned him over—half-expecting what, in fact, I found. There was a bullet-hole plumb center of his forehead. And a revolver was lying beside him.
But that wasn’t all. Suicides, you know, are fond of contriving a little decor of pathos.
On a flat ledge of the rock a score or so of shells—the long, whorled kind—had been ranged in straight lines, like toy soldiers drawn up for battle. Beside them lay an open fountain-pen, and a scrap of paper that looked as if it had been torn from the top edge of a notebook. There was just a sentence: “As a child, I played with these for hours.”
Of course I did the routine things at once. The dead man was a stranger to me.
He carried loose change, a few keys on a ring, a handkerchief, a gold cigarette-case, and a box of matches—absolutely nothing else. But his clothes were good, and I found his name sewn inside a pocket of the jacket. A. G. Thorman, Esqre. It seemed familiar.
I made one other discovery. The right ankle was badly swollen. I had been right about that limp.
Thorman was in late middle-age, and it turned out that I was remembering his name from the great days of aviation—the era of the first long-distance flights. He had made some of the most famous of these with Sir Charles Tumbril, and he had been staying with Tumbril at the time of his death.
But he had belonged to the district, too, having been born and brought up in a rectory just beyond Thyme Point. So it seemed likely enough that he had chosen to cut short his life in some haunt holding poignant memories of his childhood.
I took Tumbril the news of his guest’s death myself. It was still quite early, and he came out from his wife’s breakfast-table to hear it. I had a glimpse of both the Tumbrils from the hall, and there was Thorman’s place, empty, between them.
Tumbril showed me into his study and closed the door with a jerk of his shoulder. He was a powerful, lumbering, clumsy man.
He stood in front of an empty fireplace, with his hands deep in his trouser pockets. I told him my news, and he didn’t say a word. “It comes completely as a surprise to you, Sir Charles?”
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