It was then that I discovered that I couldn’t replace the battens from the inside. One, yes, but even then only roughly in place, but it was impossible to manoeuvre the other through the six-inch gap that was left. There was nothing I could do about it. I left it as it was and went down the tunnel.
Thirty yards and the tunnel turned abruptly to the left. I was still guiding myself as I had done earlier on, by brushing the back of my right hand against the wall, and suddenly the wall fell away to the right. I reached in cautiously and touched something cold and metallic. A key, hanging on a hook. I reached beyond it and traced out the outlines of a low narrow wooden door hinged on a heavy vertical post of timber. I took down the key, located the keyhole, softly turned the lock and opened the door a fraction of an inch at a time. My nostrils twitched to the pungent combined smells of oil and sulphuric acid. I eased the door another two inches. The hinges creaked in sepulchral protest, I had the sudden vision of a gibbet and a swaying corpse turning in the night wind and the corpse was myself, then I snapped abruptly to my senses, realized that the time for pussy-footing was over, passed quickly round the door and closed it behind me as I switched on the torch.
There was no one there. One quick traverse of the torch beam round a cave no more than twenty feet in diameter was enough to show me that someone had been there, and very recently.
I moved forward, stubbed my toe heavily against something solid, looked down and saw a large lead-acid accummulator. Wires from this led to a switch on the wall. I pressed the switch and the cave was flooded with light.
Perhaps ‘flooded’ is the wrong word, it was just by comparison with the weak beam from my torch. A naked lamp, forty watts or thereabouts, suspended from the middle of the roof: but it gave all the illumination I wanted.
Stacked in the middle of the chamber were two piles of oiled yellow boxes, I was almost certain what they were before I crossed to examine them, and as soon as I saw the stencils on top I was certain. The last time I had seen those boxes with the legend ‘Champion Spark Plugs’ stencilled on them was in the hold of Fleck’s schooner. Machine-gun ammunition and ammonal explosive. So perhaps I hadn’t been imagining things after all when I thought I had seen lights that night we’d been marooned on the reef. I had seen lights. Captain Fleck unloading cargo.
By the right-hand wall were two wooden racks, holding twenty machine-pistols and automatic carbines of a type I had never seen before: they were heavily coated with grease against the drippingly damp atmosphere of the cave. Stacked beside the racks were three squarish metal boxes, for a certainty ammunition for the guns. I looked at the racked guns and the boxes and for the first time in my life I could understand how a gourmet felt when he sat down to an eight-course dinner prepared by a cordon-bleu chef. And then I opened the first box, the second and the third, and I knew exactly how the same gourmet would have felt if, while adjusting his napkin, the maître d’hôtel had come along and told him that the shop was shut for the night.
The boxes contained not a single round of carbine or machine-pistol ammunition. One box contained black blasting powder, another beehive blocks of amatol explosive and a drum of .44 shotgun ammunition, the third primers, fulminate of mercury detonators, about a hundred yards of R.D.X. fuses and a flat tin case of chemical igniters, most of it stuff, presumably, that Hewell used in his blasting operations. And that was all. My pipe dreams about a loaded machine-pistol and the radical difference it would make to the balance of power on the island were just that, pipe dreams and no more. Ammunition without guns to fire them, guns without ammunition to let them. Useless, all useless.
I switched out the light and left. It would have taken me only five minutes to wreck the firing mechanisms on every carbine and machine-pistol there. I was going to spend the rest of my days bitterly regretting the fact that the thought had never even occurred to me.
Twenty yards farther on I came to a similar door on the right of the tunnel wall. No key to this one, it didn’t need it for the door wasn’t locked. I laid a gentle hand on the knob, turned it and eased the door open a couple of inches. The stench of fetid air that issued through the narrow crack was an almost physical blow to my face, a putrescent mephitis that wrinkled my nostrils in nauseated repugnance and lifted all the hairs on the back of my head. I felt suddenly very cold.
I opened the door farther, passed inside and shut it behind me. The switch was in the same place as it had been in the previous cavern. I pressed it and looked round the cave. But this was no cave. This was a tomb.
CHAPTER 7
Friday 1.30 a.m.–3.30 a.m.
Some freak in the atmosphere of the cave, possibly a combination of the moisture and the phosphate of lime, had maintained the bodies in a state of almost perfect preservation. Decomposition had set in, but to a negligible extent only, certainly not enough to mar any of the essential features of the nine corpses lying where they had been flung in a rough row at the far end of the cave. The dark stains on white and khaki shirt-fronts made it easy to see how they had died.
With my hand on my nose and breathing through my mouth only, I switched on my torch to give extra illumination and scanned the dead faces.
Six of the dead men were complete strangers to me, labourers by the looks of their clothes and hands, and I knew I had never seen them before. But the seventh I recognized immediately. White hair, white moustache, white beard, here was the real Professor Witherspoon, even in death his resemblance to the impostor who had taken his place was startling in its closeness. Beside him lay a giant of a man, a man with red hair and a great red handlebar moustache: this beyond any doubt, would be the Dr ‘Red’ Carstairs whose portrait I had been shown in a magazine. The ninth man, in a much better state of preservation than the others, I identified without a second glance: his presence there confirmed that the men who had advertised for a second fuel research specialist had indeed been in need of one: it was Dr Charles Fairfield, my old chief in the Hepworth Ordinance and Fuel Research, one of the eight scientists who had been lured out to Australia.
Sweat was pouring down my face but I was shivering with cold. What was Dr Fairfield doing here? Why had he been killed? Old Fairfield was the last man to stumble upon anything. A brilliant man in his own field, he was as short-sighted as a dodo and had a monumental incuriosity about everything and anything except his own work and his consuming private passion for archaeology. And the archaeological tie-up between Fairfield and Witherspoon was so blindingly obvious that it just didn’t make any sense at all. Whatever reason lay behind Dr Fairfield’s sudden disappearance from England nothing was more certain than that it was entirely unconnected with whatever pick and shovel expertise he might show in abandoned mine-workings. But then what in the name of God was he doing here?
I felt as if I were in an ice-box but the sweat was trickling more heavily than ever down the back of my neck. Still holding the torch in my right hand – the knife was in my left – I worked a handkerchief out of my right trouser pocket and mopped the back of my neck. To the left and front of me I caught a momentary flash of something glittering on the wall of the cave, something metallic, obviously, reflecting on the beam of the still burning torch. But what? What metallic object was there? Apart from the dead men the only other objects in that cave were the light fitting and the light switch, and both were made of Bakelite. I held the torch and handkerchief, both still over my shoulder, perfectly steady. The glimmer of light on the cave wall was still there. I stood like a statue, my eyes never leaving that gleam on the wall. The light moved.
My heart stopped. The medical profession can say what it likes, but my heart stopped. Then slowly, carefully, I brought down both torch and handkerchief, transferred the torch to my left hand as if to enable me to shove my handkerchief away with my right, then dropped the handkerchief, clutched the hilt of the knife in my right hand and whirled round all in one half second of time.
There were two of them, no more than four feet inside the cave, still fifteen feet distant
from me. Two Chinese, already moving wide apart to encircle me, one in dungaree trousers and cotton shirt, the other in a pair of cotton shorts, both big muscular men, both in their bare feet. Their unwinking eyes, the oriental immobility of the yellow faces served only to emphasize, not mask, the cold implacability of the expressions. You didn’t have to know your Emily Post to realize that they just weren’t paying a social call. Nor would Emily have given them any medals for their calling cards, two of the most lethal-looking double-edged throwing knives I’d ever seen: the books on etiquette covered practically every possible situation in which strangers first made the other’s aquaintance, but they’d missed out on this one.
It would be ridiculous to deny that I was frightened, so I won’t. I was scared, and badly scared. Two fit men against one semi-invalid, four good arms against one, two undoubtedly skilled and cunning knife-fighters against a man who’d never even carved up a lump of cooked dead meat far less a live human being. And this wasn’t the time to learn. But it was the time to do something, and do it very quickly indeed before one or other of them caught on to the idea that at five yards I was a target that could hardly be missed and changed over from a stabbing to a throwing grip on his knife.
I rushed at them, right hand and knife over my shoulder as if I were wielding a club, and both of them fell back an involuntary couple of paces, maybe because of the foolhardy recklessness of it, more likely because of the respectful fear which Orientals habitually show in the presence of madness. I brought the knife whistling forward over my shoulder and with the tinkling of glass from the smashed overhead light and the flick of my left thumb on the torch switch the cave became as pitch-black as the tomb it really was.
It was essential to move, and move as fast as possible before they realized that I had the double advantage of having a torch and being in the position to lash out indiscriminately with my knife in a hundred per cent certainty that I would be stabbing an enemy, whereas they had a fifty per cent chance of a friend. Reckless of the noise I made in that utterly silent chamber, I pulled away the plaster from the face of the torch, slipped off my sandals, ran three heavy steps in the direction of the entrance, stopped abruptly and sent both sandals sliding along the ground to thud softly against the wooden door.
Had they been given another ten seconds to take stock of their position, to work out the possibilities, probably the last thing they would have done would have been to rush headlong to the source of the sudden noise. As it was, they had been given barely five seconds altogether in which to think, and the immediate and inevitable reaction must have been that I was trying to escape. I heard the quick patter of bare feet, the sound of a brief scuffle, a soft thud and an explosive gasp of agony that was lost in the clatter of something metallic falling to the floor.
Four swift soundless steps on my stockinged feet, a flick of the left thumb and they were pinned in the white glare of the torch, a tableau vivant but for their unnaturally petrified rigidity which gave them for all the world the appearance of a group sculpted from marble. They stood face to face, their chests almost but not quite touching. The man on my right had his left hand twisted in his companion’s shirt front, while his right hand was pressed against the other’s body, just below waist level: the man on the left, his face averted from me, was arched over backwards like an overstrung bow, both hands locked over the right hand of his companion: the ridged and straining tendons turned the hands into waxen claws, the knuckles gleamed white like polished bone. I could see the blood-stained point of a knife sticking out two inches from the small of his back.
For two seconds, perhaps three – it seemed far longer than that – the man on the right stared unbelievingly into the face of the dying man, then the realization of his lethal blunder and the awareness that death stood now at his own elbow broke the horror-numbed spell that had held him in thrall. He struggled frantically to withdraw his knife but the last agonies of his friend had locked right hand and knife fast in an iron-bound grip. He swung round desperately on me, his left arm flying upwards and outwards in a gesture that was half-blow, half an attempt to shield himself from the beam I’d now directed into his shrinking eyes, and for a moment he had no guard left. The moment was enough and to spare. The blade of my knife was twelve inches long but for all that I jarred both wrist and knife as the hilt struck home against the breast-bone. He coughed once, a brief convulsive choked sound and drew his thin lips far back from the fast-clenched teeth into a hideous and blood-flecked grin: then the blade of my knife snapped and I was left with only the hilt and an inch of steel in my hand as the two men, still locked together, swayed over to my right and crashed heavily on to the limestone of the cave.
I shone the torch beam down on the faces at my feet, but it was a superfluous precaution, they would never trouble me again. I recovered my sandals, picked up the fallen knife and left, closing the door behind me. Once outside I leaned my weight against the tunnel wall, hands hanging by my side, and drew in great deep lungfuls of the pure fresh air. I felt weak, but put it down to my damaged arm and the foul air inside that tomb, the brief and violent episode on the other side of that door had left me curiously unaffected, or so I thought until I felt the pain in my cheek muscles and jaw and realized that my lips were strained back in involuntary imitation of the death’s-head grin of the man I had just killed. It took a conscious effort of will to relax the overstrained muscles of my face.
It was then that I heard the singing. This was it, Bentall’s tottering reason had gone at last, the shock of what I’d just seen and done had overstrained more than the facial muscles. Bentall unhinged, Bentall round the bend, Bentall hearing noises in his head. What would Colonel Raine have said if he knew his trusty servant had gone off his trolley? He would probably have smiled his invisible little smile and said in his dry dusty voice that to hear singing in an abandoned mine-working, even a mine under the control of murderous impostors and patrolled by equally murderous Chinese, was not necessarily evidence of insanity. To which his trusty servant would have replied, no, it wasn’t, but to hear a choir of Englishwomen singing ‘Greensleeves’ most certainly was.
For that was what I was hearing. Women’s voices and singing ‘Greensleeves’. Not a recording, for one of the voices was slightly off-key and another trying to harmonize with what I could only regard as a very limited degree of success. Englishwomen, singing ‘Greensleeves’. I shook my head violently but they still kept at it. I clasped my hands over my ears and the singing stopped. I took them away and the singing started again. Noises in the head don’t stop when you put your hands over your ears. Maybe the fact that there were Englishwomen down in that mine was crazy, but at least I wasn’t. Still like a man in a trance, but careful, for all that, to make not the slightest whisper of sound, I pushed myself off the door and went padding down the tunnel to investigate.
The sound of the singing swelled abruptly as I followed a ninety degree turning to the left. Twenty yards away I could see a faint backwash of light against the left side of the tunnel where it seemed to make another abrupt turning, this time to the right. I drifted up to this corner like a falling snowflake and poked my head around with all the dead slow caution of the old hedgehog taking his first wary squint at the world after a winter’s hibernation.
Twenty feet away the full width of the tunnel was blocked by vertical iron bars, spaced about six inches apart, with an inset grille door. Ten feet beyond that was a similar set of bars, with a similar door. Halfway between the two doors, suspended close to the roof, a naked bulb threw a harsh light over the small table directly beneath it and the two overalled men who sat one on either side of the table. Between them were a pile of curiously shaped wooden blocks and I assumed they were playing a game, but it wasn’t any game I’d ever seen. But whatever it was, it was obviously a game that called for concentration to judge by the irritated looks both men gave in the direction of the darkened space that lay behind the second set of bars. The singing showed no sign of stopping. Why peopl
e should be singing after midnight struck me as inexplicable until I remembered that to people imprisoned in a darkened cave day and night must have no meaning. Why they should be singing at all I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
After maybe twenty seconds more of this, one of the men thumped his fist on the table, jumped to his feet, picked up one of two carbines that I could now see had been propped against a chair, crossed to the faraway set of bars and rattled the butt of the gun against the metal, at the same time shouting out something in an angry voice. I didn’t understand the words but it didn’t need a linguist to understand the meaning. He was asking for silence. He didn’t get it. After a pause lasting maybe three seconds the singing came again, louder and more off-key than ever. Give them time and they’d start in on ‘There’ll always be an England’. The man with the carbine shook his head in disgust and disbelief and came wearily back to the table. The situation was beyond him.
It was beyond me too. Maybe if I hadn’t been so tired, or maybe if I’d been someone else altogether, someone, say, about twice as smart as I was, I might have thought of a way to get past or even overpower the guards. But right then all I could think of was that I had one little knife and they had two big guns and that anyway I’d used up all my luck for that night.
I left.
Marie was sleeping peacefully when I finally got back to our hut and I didn’t wake her at once. Let her sleep as long as she could, she wouldn’t get any more sleep this night, maybe her dark fears of the future were justified after all, maybe she wasn’t going to have any more sleep, ever.
Mentally, physically, emotionally, I was exhausted. Completely exhausted, let down as I’d never been before. On the way out from the mine I’d come to the conclusion that there was one thing and one thing to do, I’d screwed what little was left of my nerve up to the sticking point to do it and when the doing had proved impossible the reaction had been correspondingly great. What I had planned to do had been to kill both Witherspoon – I still thought of him as that – and Hewell. Not kill them, murder them, murder them as they lay in their beds. Or maybe it was better to execute them. Obviously, from the tunnel that went clear through to the other side of the island and the armoury in the mine, a full-scale attack was about to be launched on the naval establishment on the other side of the island. With Witherspoon and Hewell dead, it seemed unlikely that the leaderless Chinese would go through with it, and to me, at that moment, the prevention of the attack was the only thing that mattered. It mattered even more than the welfare of the girl asleep beside me, and I could no longer kid myself that my feelings towards her were the same as they’d been three short days ago: but she still came second.