Read Online Going It Alone by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

mind’s eye the entire layout of Boxes. It was scarcely well-calculated, he decided, to repel organized assault. But that, surely, was something altogether too extravagant to conceive.
    Tim returned to the drawing-room, and quietly laid the gun down beside his chair.
    ‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘would you say you had a certain authority with my mother and sisters?’
    ‘I don’t know. I’ve certainly never done all that to earn anything of the kind, Tim. But, yes – perhaps.’
    ‘They must be got away.’
    ‘Got away!’
    ‘All of them, I mean. Mummy must go with the girls to Rome tomorrow. We can bring it off, if we’re firm. I’ll be staying to look after the livestock. And they all three simply adore last-moment plans.’
    ‘There would be room on any flight at this time of year, I suppose.’ Averell, not unnaturally, was astounded by all this, but found Tim’s earnestness and vehemence persuasive. ‘Only we’d have to be pretty brisk at putting it across at the breakfast table.’
    ‘We’ll manage it. We must. I’m telling you.’
    ‘Tim, I don’t know what to make of you. Begin at the beginning, for heaven’s sake! Just what is this all about?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘But that simply doesn’t make sense.’
    ‘I simply don’t know. But there it is – what’s been happening.’
    ‘Precisely what – ?’
    ‘I decided not to come home, you see, because I felt they might follow me. I’d lie low somewhere else until I got the hang of it. But then I had this other thought.’
    ‘Just what other thought?’ There must have been complete bewilderment in Averell’s voice. Tim wasn’t given to speaking in riddles.
    ‘They’d know where my home was – or they’d find out. So they might come to Boxes anyway. And it sounds as if they had.’
    ‘Tim, who on earth are “they”?’ Deranged persons, Averell believed, frequently got round to talking about a ‘them’ who were essentially figments of the imagination. Had Tim turned into such a one? Averell discovered with relief that he thought not. But from this it followed that the boy had actually got into deep water of some sort. And it could scarcely be with the police, or with the law in any form. You don’t, if you’re sane – and Tim, he reiterated to himself, was sane – load a shotgun in any such exigency as that. But at least there was something to explore here.
    ‘Tim,’ he said, ‘you talk as if some gang of criminals was after you. If that’s so, why don’t you go to the police?’
    ‘ I can’t do that. You know I can’t.’
    ‘What nonsense! Anybody can go to the police.’ As he said this robustly, Averell was just conscious of the fact – and it was a mere oddity – that at this moment he himself might find contact with the police something he’d avoid if he could. Not, of course, in a situation of any real gravity. But if he did so contact them, there was a probability that, sooner or later, he’d have an awkard misdemeanour – or was it a felony? – to explain.
    ‘The fuzz aren’t my friends exactly,’ Tim elaborated with an air of patience. ‘They sat me down and they stood round me. I wasn’t clobbered, or anything like that. But it wasn’t nice.’
    ‘It certainly can’t have been.’ Averell was perfectly willing to acknowledge to himself that here was territory legitimately traumatic, so to speak, in the experience even of an entirely level-headed young man.
    ‘But it isn’t just that, Uncle Gilbert. It’s all so confused, and I have to try to think it out. As I said, at the moment I simply haven’t a clue. But, first, there’s this urgent thing. They might do a kidnap, mightn’t they? Here at Boxes. And then I’d be helpless. I’d have to do anything they asked.’ Tim paused. ‘For it would be like that, wouldn’t it?’
    ‘I suppose it might.’ Averell saw that the proposition he was acquiescing in was comprehensible in itself but surrounded by total mystery. He also saw that Tim