Read Online The Daffodil Affair by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page B

emerged from the long black tunnel of the night into this other and cerulean void; every twenty-four hours, without a glimmer of protesting light, she disappeared again. Just such a monotonous voyaging Appleby remembered in a scenic waterway of his youth; so long in a winding papier mâché tunnel, so long floating beneath some dome-like structure garishly lit from below.
    With closed decks and sealed portholes the ship would nose through the night, a throb in the centre of her and a thud and a swish, a thud and a swish everlastingly at her side. And everlastingly by day the prow rose and fell, rose and fell across the horizon towards which she drove with an energy growing daily more mysterious in its evident transcendence of any merely human scale of effort. The prow rose and fell. And always there were two men watching, their immobile bodies thrown against a background now of sky and now of sea. They were looking for submarines. And now for long stretches of the day Hudspith was there beside them – Hudspith too watching, but with an eye that swept neither to port nor starboard, Hudspith looking straight ahead at the Lord knew what. Buenos Aires, Appleby thought, Rio de Janeiro, phoney social experiments vaguely reported from far up the Parana. Hudspith was one of those people upon whose nervous system the sea had a marked effect. Appleby would be glad to see him on dry land again. One does not want a loopy colleague when embarked upon so distinctly rummy an investigation as the present.
    We have followed a Harrogate cab-horse across the equator, Appleby said to himself, and have no idea where it is leading us. Wohin der Weg? Kein Weg! Ins Unhetretene . That was Mephistopheles, and ought to appeal to Hudspith – before whom it was clear that the Devil might appear in visible shape… Appleby moved to the rail and looked down at the sea. The Whale Road, the Angles had called it. But the road was invisible; there was no road; the ship drove mysteriously towards a goal beyond the present reach of sense. And rather like that was the hue and cry after Daffodil.
    Appleby thought of it chiefly as the Daffodil affair – no doubt because Hudspith so singly saw it as the affair of Hannah Metcalfe and Lucy Rideout. But actually, thought Appleby, it was the Affair of the Haunted House. In that lay the promise of future contact with a somewhat complex mind. For it was not as if the absconding house were a mere decorative flourish or grace note. Its theft must have cost incomparably more than the abductions of Hannah, Lucy and Daffodil put together. Not that it had been particularly difficult. Just expensive.
    It sounded, said Appleby to himself as he paced the deck, like one of the impossible tasks imposed upon the heroes of fairy stories. Steal a large Bloomsbury house and walk out of England with it – this in time of war. But it had been war that made the stealing easy; when whole streets are vanishing, a single house is scarcely missed. And the walking out of the country with it depended on war too. What happens when an English port is blitzed? The rubble is promptly shipped to America as ballast and used there as the foundations of new docks and quays – a sober fact so fantastic that one would hesitate to put it in a magazine story. Your churches are bombed; whereupon they become the causeways across which AA guns are rolled aboard your waiting freighters. It is very odd; and makes it just possible for an ingenious person – or organization, surely – to make off with an edifice once critically inspected by Dr Johnson. But why steal a reputedly haunted house? Appleby could see only one reason. And it cohered with his present view of the matter – or ought he to say his aunt’s view? – no better than with Hudspith’s.
    From somewhere aft a bugle sounded. Hudspith turned and strode across the fo’csle head. At least he still ate. Appleby stared again at the vacant horizon. One could easily lose one’s bearings. All at