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

was unaware of the fragmentary and inconsequent nature of such information as he was giving, and that this was probably the consequence of extreme fatigue. ‘When did you last get some sleep?’ he asked.
    ‘Sleep?’ The word was repeated by Tim as if it was something he’d just heard of but couldn’t very certainly identify. ‘Oh, quite some time ago, it must have been.’
    ‘Then hadn’t we better go to bed now, and tackle this in the morning?’
    ‘This?’
    ‘Look, Tim. I always wake up quite early. I’ll make some tea and bring it to you, so that we can get things sorted out before the household’s up and around – or your new plan has to be mooted.’
    ‘It’s an idea.’ Tim moved uncertainly on his chair. He seemed quite to have lost the power of action which had taken him round the house, locking it up; and he had lost, too, the incisiveness with which he had ordered his womenfolk about. He didn’t even seem to be remembering his gun. ‘There was a boy at school who said he always did his maths when asleep. The answer was ready to write down when he woke up. The working, too, I suppose. They always insisted on the working. I can’t think why, provided the answer was correct.’ Tim produced an enormous and quite healthy-seeming yawn. ‘Perhaps it will come to me in a dream. Just how it started, I mean. Or why it started. Do you think?’
    ‘It’s worth a try. And, by the way, I’m a very light sleeper myself, Tim. So if there was the slightest disturbance round the place I’d be aware of it, and rouse you at once.’
    ‘Super, Uncle Gilbert.’ Surprisingly and rather touchingly, Tim got meekly to his feet. ‘Is there anything I can get you first?’ Tim glanced at Averell in a kind of sleepy appraisal, and was possibly made aware of his advancing years. ‘A hot water bottle, perhaps?’
    ‘No thank you, my dear Tim. I’ll be fine.’
    So they went upstairs to bed. And it was Averell who took charge of the gun. He had renewed doubts about Tim’s entire sanity. And this made him feel there was something to be said for the fantastic and arbitrary plan of packing Ruth off with her daughters on the following morning. If Tim could manage the livestock, he could manage Tim – or so he believed – until any brain-storm was over. And if there was no brain-storm but, on the contrary, some real if still wholly mysterious threat – then with luck the two of them might manage that together.

 
     
8
     
    On these occasions – rare in recent years – when Averell spent a night at Boxes it was his habit to take a turn in the garden before going to bed. Tonight Tim’s persuasion that danger lurked there had to be deferred to, even if it was hard quite to believe in it. But at least it was possible to take a glance through the bedroom window, and Averell treated himself to this as soon as he had got into his pyjamas. He pulled back the curtain, and made to raise the sash thus exposed. It proved to come up no more than some four inches, and was then held by a catch which it took him a few moments to locate. He now recalled that all the windows were equipped in this way, and he even had a dim memory that this had been done on his own advice. The house being regularly occupied only by the three women, and quite often by Ruth alone, it had seemed an obvious measure of prudence. And it must have been these catches, among other things, that Tim had been checking on the ground floor.
    The garden was bathed in moonlight, and when Averell switched off the electric lamps he had previously turned on this milder illumination tumbled into the room in a pleasing way. He threw up the sash when he had released it, stuck his head out, and told himself that, for April, it was an uncommonly mild night. Far away, the line of the downs stood out against a clear sky in gentle undulations the traversing of which he would normally be looking forward to as a principal employment while at Boxes. In the garden itself he