Read Online Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online Page A

eyeshade. If you’re likely to run into any trouble, take it off. I’ll slip you a pair of dark glasses when it’s time to go. Dock police reported that a chap of your build had come on board and left. I said I had been asked for a passage, and refused. If you have any papers you want to get rid of, leave them in the tank and I’ll deliver them wherever you direct.
    R. V ANER (First Officer)
    PS. Try not to upset anything. Have just remembered that if you do, it will run into the old man’s bathroom.’
    I wish I could have given the dashing Mr Vaner some convincing evidence that he was serving his country instead of a—well, I can’t call myself a criminal. If there were any crimes committed, they were committed on my person. But, as I say, I do not blame them. They had every reason to think they had caught an assassin.
    Their police organization is superb; but the finding of that paralysed thing which had crawled and bled was a casual job for foresters. Only within the last day or two, I expect, when an exhaustive search for my corpse at last suggested that there might be no corpse to find, did the House extend enquiries to road, rail, and river, and learn about the boating schoolmaster who had an eyeshade and always kept on his gloves. Then the police came into action. They hadn’t picked me up, I should guess, for the simple reason that they had just begun to look for a boat with red sails and happened to miss the little yard where I changed them; but when some official noticed an unfamiliar dinghy moored where I probably had no right to moor her, she was at once identified.
    Vaner’s suggestion that my troubles might by no means be over when I reached London was disturbing. I hadn’t given the matter any thought. One’s instinct is against looking too far forward when the present demands all available resource.
    I began to speculate on what would happen if I reappeared quite openly in England. I was perfectly certain that they would not appeal to the Foreign Office or to Scotland Yard. Whatever I might have done or intended, their treatment of me wouldn’t stand publicity. They couldn’t be sure how the English would react; nobody ever is. After all, we once went to war for the ear of a Captain Jenkins—though Jenkins was an obscurer person than myself and had, considering the number of laws he broke, been treated with no great barbarity.
    Would they, then, follow me up themselves? Mr Vaner, with his taste for romance, appeared to think they would. I myself had assumed that once I was over the frontier, bygones would be bygones. I now saw that this was a foolishly optimistic view. They couldn’t go to the police, true, but nor could I. I had committed an extraditable offence; if I complained of being molested, I might force them into telling why I was molested.
    It came to this: I was an outlaw in my own country as in theirs, and if my death were required it could easily be accomplished. Even assuming they couldn’t fake an accident or suicide, no motive or a wrong motive would be discovered for the crime, and no murderer or the wrong murderer would be arrested.
    Then I thought that I had let myself be carried away by a casual phrase of Vaner’s, and that this uneasiness was preposterous. Why on earth, I argued, should they take the unnecessary risk of removing me in my own country? Did they imagine that I was likely to put the wind up them by another of these sporting expeditions?
    I reluctantly admitted that they might very well imagine it. They knew that I was an elusive person who could quite possibly return, if he chose, and upset the great man’s nerves once more. As to whether I would so choose, there were among my opponents—I can’t call them enemies—some notable big-game shots who would realize that the temptation was not unthinkable.
    The manhole was never screwed up again, and I lay on my cushion suffering little more discomfort than I generally suffer at sea. I am a good sailor, but even