The Man from the Sea by Michael Innes

the lighthouse. But this smooth middle-aged man was inexplicable.
    “I’m sorry about Lady Blair’s ankle.” Cranston spoke these words simply as being no worse than any others. Anything he said to Sally must be abominable. He realised – and his realisation was like a further turn of the screw – that he had no notion what Sally felt or believed. It seemed incredible that she shouldn’t know the truth. But perhaps a girl like Sally was like that – incapable of conceiving evil, or that sort of evil. At least she must be on the brink of knowledge. And Caryl had put her there deliberately; had put her there with the particularly ugly deliberation of the unconscious mind. No doubt Caryl had sprained an ankle. But it was, at this moment, the ingenious thing to do. It had enabled her to play what he now understood to be her morbidly compulsive fear-game; to wake Sally with a story as thin as paper. Perhaps – for he felt his new view of Caryl becoming fuller and fuller – perhaps there was a sort of cruelty in it. Perhaps she enjoyed the thought of constraining her daughter desperately to repel what could be to her only a vile suspicion.
    “Can I do anything more for your friend?” The girl asked the question carefully as if she were an agent only, involved in this nocturnal hugger-mugger simply because of an order that had come to her.
    “He isn’t a friend.” Cranston swiftly spoke the truth where it could be spoken. “He’s a stranger straight out of the sea, and he has a cock-and-bull story about smuggling diamonds.”
    “But I’m not sticking to it.” The man from the sea spoke with an air of easy candour. “I don’t smuggle diamonds.”
    “Then is it some sort of joke?” Sally turned towards Cranston in the darkness. “Or is he mad?”
    “If he’s mad then others are mad too. You didn’t hear a racket?”
    “Not that firing?” Sally spoke swiftly, so that he remembered with ignoble fear how intelligent she was. “It didn’t sound like the usual stuff out at sea.”
    “It wasn’t. It was a chap with a gun. And he tried it out on us.”
    For a moment she was silent. “Honour bright?”
    It was an old challenge between them, and now he hated it. “Honour bright,” he answered. “He ended by losing his gun. But he did some damage first.”
    “To you?”
    His heart leapt in a sort of dreadful joy at something in her voice. “Not me.”
    “He got my eyes.” The man from the sea had been very still in the darkness, and Cranston knew that he was making it his business to gather all he could of the relationship at play before him. But his speech was almost casual. “Only, I think, to the extent of bunging them up with sand. I hope I can get rid of it. For I have to get south, you see – and it will have to be done unobtrusively. Is there any water here?”
    “I’ll fetch water – and an eye-bath and lotion if I can find them.” Sally became brisk and moved at once towards the door. She had her sex’s instinct for practical action in any obscure exigency. “But I shall be at least a quarter of an hour. You can work out your plans together.” She had given an edge to this – but now as she passed Cranston she whispered to him on another note. “Dick – are you really involved with him?”
    “In a limited way, yes.” This time he felt merely awkward. “But I know absolutely nothing about him.”
    “Then I don’t see–” She checked herself. “And it’s something that has to be kept from… Alex?”
    She had made the little pause before her stepfather’s name by which she commonly seemed to distance him. He knew that for some reason she didn’t find Alex Blair easy to take. “Yes,” he said. “I think it better had be.”
    “Very well.” She was suddenly indifferent. “There are cigarettes and matches on the table, if you want them. Although I can’t think who put them there.”
    He was silent. Caryl and he had smoked three or four. It was a small squalid moment as