Читать книгу Back Room Girl: By the author of Paul Temple - Francis Durbridge, Francis Durbridge - Страница 6

It was early on the highly appropriate day of Friday that Roy Benton first saw the footprints in the sand. The surprise of it brought him up dead. Again, appropriately enough, the first thought that came into his mind as he stood staring down at them was that he was probably feeling now as Alexander Selkirk felt when he first looked on human footprints in the sands of Juan Fernandez.

But, Roy reminded himself, as he continued to stare and Angus, his Cairn terrier, sniffed excitedly up and down, this wasn’t an inaccessible desert island hundreds of years ago – it was a Cornish cove in the year 1947 and anyone had a right to come there. True, it was called No Man’s Cove, and since he had first made his home there four months ago in the disused tea chalet he had not seen anyone, or even traces of anyone, nearer the beach than the road, which roughly followed the line of the coast at the head of the wooded valley a quarter of a mile inland.

That was why the footprints were such a surprise, and why Roy’s second reaction was one of annoyance and resentment that anyone had dared to invade the privacy he had enjoyed there. His third reaction was to glance round apprehensively to see if there was anyone in sight, for he was not wearing any clothes, so sure had he become that no one would disturb him. He was relieved when he did not see anyone. It wasn’t his cove, he reminded himself, as his eyes traced out once more the line of the footprints and Angus looked up curiously, as if asking what he was going to do about it, but he was realizing now that during the past months the absence of any other human beings had led him to think of this cove as a little domain of his own upon which, as time passed, and no one, not even an occasional tripper, came near, he had come subconsciously to feel no one would ever intrude. It was absurd, of course, and now these footprints had pricked the bubble of his little world as a sharp finger-nail punctures a balloon at a Christmas party. At the moment Roy was feeling an acute sense of deflation.

The footprints appeared to come out of the sea and curved away to his left, where, as he followed them, they gradually petered out as the sand gave way to coarse grass and then to turf. Roy wondered why he had not seen them when he went for the early bathe he had enjoyed every morning since he had come to the cove. Then he remembered that, instead of running down the beach into the sea as he usually did, he had gone a little way along the point to the natural rock diving platform which jutted out into deep water. It was only when he had waded out of the sea on his way back to the chalet and had seen Angus – who wouldn’t do more than wet his paws – running frenziedly up and down like a bloodhound on the trail, that he had discovered what all the fuss was about.

When had they been made, then? They could not have been there when he had walked down to the beach, smoking a last cigarette, at eleven o’clock the night before, or he would almost certainly have seen them, for there was a bright moon, and if he had missed them Angus would undoubtedly have drawn his attention to them. He had been out for his bathe by 6.30 a.m., so the prints must have been made during the night, or very early that morning.

He bent and examined them more closely. They had been made, he judged, by several pairs of boots, probably sea boots, and it was impossible, except perhaps for an expert tracker, to say how many pairs of feet there had been, though Roy would have hazarded several. They were deep prints, he noticed, especially the heels, and as the sand here was never very soft even when the tide had just uncovered it, that probably meant – he harked back to his scouting and, more recently, his Special Air Service days – that the wearers were carrying heavy loads.

Roy walked down to the sea’s edge, Angus hanging cautiously behind a little, looking for signs of a boat, or boats. There were two indentations a few yards apart which might have been made by a keel dragged up out of the water, possibly during an unloading operation, but the tide had washed over them and he could not be sure. But why on earth, he asked himself, should anyone want to unload anything at this isolated spot? There could not be any point in fishermen landing their catches here when there was a perfectly good harbour at Torcombe, the nearest village five miles up the coast.

Smugglers? Well, there had been plenty of them here in the old days, and it was, of course, possible that their modern counterparts were active now, for lots of Black Market stuff from the Continent was being got past the Customs somehow. No Man’s Cove would certainly be a good place for that sort of thing, but if some of the Torcombe men were involved – and from what he had seen of them Roy thought it unlikely – they would be running the risk of his seeing them, and he had not noticed anything suspicious. It was generally known in the village, to which he went for his supplies once a week, that he was living in the old chalet, and his presence there had at first caused a good deal of talk, though they seemed to have accepted him now. No, Roy felt that neither fishermen nor smugglers supplied a completely satisfactory solution to the mystery, though he saw that if he ruled out both these possible explanations the problem became even more puzzling.

He followed the footprints back up the beach, Angus trotting jauntily after him. Their course, he noted again, was not straight up the beach, which would have taken the people who made them direct to the chalet, but to the right and slightly inland, though he could not think of any place in that direction to which men carrying heavy loads (assuming that he was right and they were so burdened) could be going. The nearest village in that direction was Torcombe and the going was pretty rough. He and Angus had explored the immediate coast pretty thoroughly during their wanderings together, and at the moment he could not think of any place between the cove and the village which would supply the answer he was seeking.

Roy whistled Angus, who, tired of watching his master mooning around, had wandered off on a private and more enthralling expedition of his own, and turned to go back to the chalet for a delayed breakfast, but he stopped again as his eyes fell on marks in the sand he had not noticed before. They – by Jove, yes! – they looked very much like the imprints of the heel of a woman’s shoe, a broad one; a walking shoe, perhaps. Now how the devil … Roy walked back again alongside the prints to see if there were any more of them, but although there were one or two similar indentations they were blurred by the tracks of the sea boots and were not as clear as the first he had seen near the grass.

‘This is getting really interesting,’ Roy said aloud to himself, a habit he had acquired since he had been living alone, hearing the sound of human voices only when he went to the village, or the Cliff Top Inn on the coast road. ‘A woman and sea-fishing sounds a bit unlikely; but smuggling … that would attract plenty of women.’ His mind began to play about with all kinds of interesting possibilities. ‘Now don’t go jumping to conclusions,’ he told himself. ‘You’re not a Fleet Street crime reporter now, and there aren’t any glamorous women Secret Service agents at large any more outside books. If you’re going to finish those confounded war memoirs of yours, you’ve got to work like blazes, without starting up any crazy hares about smugglers. Stick to real life, my boy …’

But he couldn’t get those neat feminine footprints out of his head. What on earth would bring a woman to No Man’s Cove? One woman and two or three men? Landing from the sea … They must have had some definite purpose … it wasn’t just a pleasure trip.

Ideas churned through his mind in quick succession, and he realized that he would do little work that day until he had found out more about the mysterious footprints.

‘What about a nice walk after breakfast, just to clear the brain, old son?’ he asked Angus, skipping along beside him. The terrier barked eagerly as he recognized the familiar word.

‘Right you are, then,’ nodded Roy. ‘But breakfast first. The most languorous female spy in christendom isn’t going to spoil my appetite.’

Angus barked his approval.