by Mary Stewart
The injured boy lay at the far side of the cave, on a bed pushed up against a row of crates. The bed was a makeshift affair which nevertheless looked extremely comfortable – a couple of spring mattresses laid one above the other, with blankets galore, and feather pillows, and a vast eiderdown. Some sort of cage had been rigged up under the bedclothes to keep their weight off the injured leg.
Spiro, lying there in what looked like a pair of Sir Julian’s pyjamas (pale blue silk with crimson piping), looked comfortable enough, and not at the moment particularly ill. He was propped up on his pillows, drinking coffee.
He looked up across the cup, a little startled at the sight of me, and threw a quick question at Max, who answered in English:
‘It’s Kyria Forli’s sister. She’s my friend, and yours. She’s going to help us, and I want her to hear your story.’
Spiro regarded me steadily, without noticeable welcome, the round dark eyes, so like his sister’s, wary and appraising. I could recognise the boy in the photographs, but only just; there was the thick, springing hair and the stocky body, with obvious strength in the shoulders and thick neck; but the bloom of health and sunlight – and happiness – was gone. He looked pale, and – in the pyjamas – young and unprotected-looking.
Max pulled a box forward for me to sit on. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked the boy. ‘Is it hurting?’
‘No,’ said Spiro. That this was a lie was quite obvious, but it was not said with any sort of bravado. It was simply that one did not admit to weakness, and pain was weakness.
‘He has slept,’ said Adoni.
‘Good.’ Max perched himself half sitting against the cask which held the lantern. His shadow, thrown hugely up the walls, arched brooding and gigantic across the cave. He studied the younger boy for a minute or two, then said, briskly:
‘If you’re feeling better, I want you to tell us exactly what happened to you. All the details this time, please.’
‘All the what?’
‘Everything you can remember,’ said Max, and Adoni, from the head of the bed, added a soft gloss in Greek.
‘All right.’ Spiro drained the coffee-cup and handed it up, without looking, to Adoni. The latter took it, set it quietly aside, then crossed back to the bed and sat down, curling up gracefully, naturally, like a cat, near the head of the bed away from the injured leg. He reached into a pocket for two of the cigarettes he had got from Max, stuck them in his mouth, lit them both, and handed one to Spiro. Spiro took it without word or glance, but there was no suggestion, as there had been with me, of anything withdrawn or unfriendly. It was obvious that these two young men knew each other almost too well to need words. They sat there side by side against the pillows, Adoni relaxed and graceful, Spiro square and watchful and smoking jerkily, with his hand cupped working-class fashion round the cigarette.
He sent one more wary glance at me, then took no more notice of me: all his attention was on Max, almost as if the latter were judging him – at once judge and saviour and final court of appeal. Max listened without moving, the huge, curved shadow thrown right up the wall and over half the ceiling of the cave.
The boy spoke slowly, with the signs of fatigue deepening in his face. I have no recollection now of what language he spoke; whether his English was good, or whether Max and Adoni eked it out with translation: the latter, I suspect; but whatever the case, the story came over vividly and sharply in that darkened cellar-cave, with the lantern light, and the smell of the cigarettes, and the two boys curled in the welter of bedclothes, and the faint tangy scent from the silk of Julian Gale’s dressing-gown.
I suppose that the strange, secret surroundings, the time of night, my own weariness and recent emotional encounter with Max, had edged the scene somehow; but it seemed real now only as a dream is real. In the dream I found I had already accepted Godfrey’s guilt; I only waited now to hear how he had done it. Perhaps in the light of morning things would take a different dimension; but now it seemed as if any tale could be true, even the old man’s romantic theory that this was Prospero’s cave, and that here on this rough floor the Neapolitan lords had waited to hear the story from the long-drowned Duke, as I now waited to hear Spiro’s.
There had been nothing, he said, that had struck him as unusual about the trip that night. The only thing that had surprised him was that the sky was none too clear, and from what the wireless had said, it might well be stormy at dawn. He had pointed this out to Godfrey, but Godfrey had said, a little abruptly, that it would clear. They had got the boat out, and gone shortly before midnight. As Spiro had anticipated, the night was black and thick, but he had said nothing more to Godfrey, who had stayed in the cabin, allegedly busying himself with his camera and equipment.
‘He seemed much as usual?’ asked Max.
Spiro frowned, considering this. ‘I cannot say,’ he said at length. ‘He was quiet, and perhaps a bit sharp with me when I protested about the weather, but all day he had been the same. I thought he was still angry with me because I had gone into the boat-house that morning on my own to service the engine, so I said nothing, and thought nothing. He pays me, and that is that.’
‘All the same, that might be interesting,’ said Max slowly. ‘But go on now. You were out in the strait, and the night was black.’
Spiro took a quick drag on the cigarette, and reached awkwardly, hampered by the leg, to tap the ash on to the floor. Adoni slipped the saucer from under the empty coffee-cup, and slid it within his reach.
‘I reckoned we were about half-way over,’ said Spiro, ‘in the strait between Kouloura and the mainland. We had gone close to the Peristeroi Islands; there was enough of a sea running to see the white foam quite distinctly. I asked Mr Manning if we should lie up a little in the lee of them, and wait for the cloud to clear; there were gaps under the wind, where you could see stars; but he said no, we would go further across. We went on for a time, till I reckoned we were about two miles out. He came out of the cabin then, and sent me in to make some coffee.’ The boy glanced up under his thick brows at Max. ‘The camera was there, on the table, but I did not think he could have been looking at it, because he had had no light on, only a storm lantern hardly lit. At the time I did not think of these things; while we took pictures at night, we always – naturally – ran without lights. But afterwards, when I had all that time lying in bed, and nothing to do but think, and wonder … then I remembered all the things that seemed strange. It was strange that we were going at all on that dark night to take pictures; it was strange that he lied to me about the camera; and the next thing that happened was more strange still.’
Adoni grinned. ‘I know, the engine failed. And what was so strange about that, when you’d been taking it to bits that morning, my little genius?’
Spiro smiled for the first time, and said something in Greek which nobody bothered to translate for me. ‘If that had happened,’ he added, with fine simplicity, ‘it would indeed have been strange. But it did not.’
‘But you told us before—’
‘I told you the engine stopped. I did not say that it failed. There was nothing wrong with the engine.’
Max stirred. ‘You’re sure, naturally.’
The boy nodded. ‘And it didn’t need a genius with engines to know there was nothing wrong. Even you’ – a glint at Adoni – ‘even you would have known, my pretty one.’ He ducked aside from Adoni’s feint, and laughed. ‘Go on, hit me, no doubt you could do it now.’
‘I’ll wait,’ said Adoni.
Spiro turned back to Max. ‘No, the engine was all right. Listen. I heard it stop, then Mr Manning called me. I put my head out of the door and shouted that I would take a look – the engine hatch is under the cabin steps, you understand. But he said, “I don’t think it’s there, Spiro, I think something’s fouled the screw and stalled it. Can you take a look?” I went to the stern. He was standing there, at the tiller. He said, “Steady as you go, boy, she’s pitching a bit. Here, I’ll hold the torch for you.” I gave him t
he torch, and then I leaned over to see if the shaft was fouled. The boat was pitching, and the toe-rail was wet, but I was holding on tightly. I should have been quite safe.’
He paused, and stirred in the bed, as if the leg was hurting him. Adoni slipped to the floor and padded across to where a bottle stood on a box beside two empty glasses. He slopped some of the wine – it looked like the dark, sweet stuff they called demèstica – into one of the glasses and took it to the other boy, then glanced inquiringly at Max, who shook his head. Adoni set the bottle down, and returned to his place on the bed, adjusting his body, cat-like, to the new position of the injured boy.
‘It all happened very fast. The boat gave a lurch, very sharp, as if Mr Manning had turned her across the wind too quickly. I was thrown against the rail, but still safe enough, because I had a good grip, but then something hit me from behind, on the head. It does not stun me, but I think I try to turn and put an arm up, then the boat pitches again, and before I know what has happened, I am falling. I try to grip the rail, but it slips from me. Something hits me across the hand – here – and I let go. Then I am in the water. When I come up, the boat is still near, and I see Mr Manning in the stern, peering out for me in the darkness. I shout – not loudly, you understand, because I am full of water, and too cold, gasping for air. But he must have heard me.’
He shot a look up at Max, all of a sudden vivid, alive with pure hatred.
‘And if he did not hear me, then he saw me. He put the torch on, and shone it on me in the sea.’
‘Yes?’ said Max. His voice was expressionless, but I got the impression of a cold wind stirring in the cellar. Adoni felt it, too. He glanced fleetingly up at Max before his eyes went back to Spiro.
‘I was not afraid, you understand,’ said Spiro, ‘not of him. It did not occur to me that it was he who had hit me, I thought it had been some accident. No, I was not afraid. I am a good swimmer, and though he had no engine, the boat was drifting down towards me, and he could see me. In a moment he could pick me up again. I called out again and swam towards him. I saw he had the starting-handle in his hand, but I still did not imagine what this was for. Then as I came within reach, he leaned down and hit me again. But the boat was pitching and he had to hold the rail, so he could not point the torch properly. The blow touched me, but this time I saw it coming, and I ducked away, and he hit my arm and not my head. I think he felt the blow, but did not see, because the torch went out, and a big wave swept me away from the boat’s stern and out of his sight. You can imagine that this time I let it take me. I saw the light go on again, but I made no sound, and let myself be carried away into the dark. Then I heard the engine start.’ He drained the glass, and looked up at Max. ‘He looked for me for a little while, but the current took me away fast, and the waves hid me. Then he turned the boat away, and left me there in the sea.’
There was silence. Nobody moved. For me, the dreamlike feeling persisted. The cave seemed darker, echoing with the sounds of the sea, the mutter of the receding boat, the empty hissing of waves running under the night wind.
‘But the Saint was with you,’ said Adoni, and the deep human satisfaction in his voice sent the shadows scurrying. The cave was warm again, and full of the soft light from the English Victorian lantern.
Spiro handed the empty glass to Adoni, pulled the bedclothes more comfortably round him, and nodded. ‘Yes, he was with me. Do you want the rest, Kyrie Max? You know what happened.’
‘I want Miss Lucy to hear it. Go on, but make it short. You’re tired, and it’s very late.’
The rest of the story was pure classic, made predictable and credible by half a hundred stories from Odysseus to St. Paul.
It was the murderer’s bad luck that the wind that night had set a fast current in to the Albanian coast. Spiro was a fair swimmer, and the Ionian Sea is very salt, but even so he would have been hard put to it to survive if he had not gone overboard into the stream of the current. Between that, the buoyancy of the water, and his own stubborn efforts, he managed to keep afloat long enough for the sea-race to throw him ashore some time just before dawn.
By the time he neared the shore he was almost exhausted, all his energy taken by the mere effort of keeping afloat, and at the mercy of the tide. He was not even aware that he had come to shore, but when a driving swell flung him against the cruel coastal rocks, he found just enough strength to cling there, resisting the backward drag once, twice, three times, before he could pull himself clear of it and crawl further up the slimy rock.
And here the luck turned. St Spiridion, having seen him ashore, and out of his own territory, abandoned him abruptly. Spiro slipped, fell back across a jut of sharp rock with a broken leg twisted under him, and at last fainted.
He had no recollection of being found – by an old shepherd who had clambered down a section of cliff after a crag-fast ewe. When Spiro woke he was bedded down, roughly but dry and warm, in the shepherd’s cottage, and it appeared that the shepherd had some rough surgical skill, for the leg had been set and strapped up. The old woman produced a drink that sent him to sleep again, and when he woke for the second time, the pain was a good deal easier, and he was able to remember, and think …
‘And the rest you know.’ He yawned suddenly, tremendously, like an animal, and lay back among the blankets.
‘Yes, the rest we know.’ Max got to his feet, stretching. ‘Well, you’d better get some sleep. In the morning – my God, in about three hours! – I’m going to get you out of here, don’t ask me how, but I’ll do it somehow, with Mr Manning none the wiser. I want to get that leg of yours properly seen to, and then you’ve got to tell your story to the right authorities.’
The boy glanced up, weariness and puzzlement lending his face a sullen, heavy look. ‘Authorities? Police? You mean you are going to accuse Kyrios Manning of trying to drown me? On my word alone? They will laugh at you.’
‘It’s not just a question of accusing Mr Manning of throwing you overboard. What I want to know is why? There’s something here that must be investigated, Spiro. You’ll have to trust me. Now, just for a few minutes longer, I want you to think back. You must have thought about it a lot yourself, while you were lying in bed … Why do you think he did it? Have you any idea at all? You surely don’t imagine it was because he was irritated with you for overhauling the engine without being told?’
‘Of course not.’
‘There was nothing else – nothing had happened at any other time?’
‘No. I have thought. Of course I have thought. No.’
‘Then we come back to the morning of the trip. When one has nothing to go on, one looks for anything, however slight, that’s out of pattern – out of the ordinary. Did you usually overhaul that boat by yourself?’
‘No, but I have done so before.’ Spiro stirred, as if his leg hurt him. ‘And I have been alone on it before.’
‘You have always asked him first?’
‘Of course.’
‘But this time you didn’t … Why did you go to work on the boat this time without asking him?’
‘Because he had told me that he meant to go out, and he wanted the engine serviced. I was to go that morning after breakfast, and work on it. But I had got up very early, to swim, and when I had done, I thought I would go straight along and start work. I knew where he kept the extra key, so I let myself in, and made some coffee in the galley, then opened the big doors for the light and started work. It was a good morning, with the summer coming, and I felt good. I worked well. When Mr Manning had finished his breakfast and came down, I was half finished already. I thought he would be pleased, but he was very angry and asked how I got in, and then I didn’t like to tell him that I had seen where he hid the key, so I said the door was not locked properly, and he believed this, because the catch is stiff sometimes. But he was still very angry, and said he would have the lock changed, and then I was angry also, and asked if he thought I was a thief, and if he thought so he had better count the money in his wallet wh
ich he had left in the galley. As if I would touch it! I was very angry!’ Spiro remembered this with some satisfaction. ‘I told him also that I would mend his lock for him myself, and that I would never come to his house again. After that he was pleasant, and said he was sorry, and it was all right.’
Max was frowning. ‘It was then that he asked you to go out that night?’
‘I think … Yes, it must have been. He had said, before, that he did not want me with him, but he changed his mind … I thought because he was sorry he had spoken to me like that.’ He added, naïvely: ‘It was a way to give me extra money without offence.’
‘Then it looks as if that was when he decided to take you and get rid of you. You can see that it only makes sense if he thought you’d seen something you shouldn’t have seen … And that means in the boat, or the boat-house. Now, think hard, Spiro. Was there anything unusual about the boat? Or the boat-house? Or about anything that Mr Manning said, or did … or carried with him?’
‘No.’ The boy repeated himself with a kind of weary emphasis. ‘I have thought. Nothing.’
‘The wallet. You say he’d left his wallet lying. Where did you find it?’
‘Down beside the stove in the galley. It had slipped there and he had not noticed. I put it on the cabin table.’
‘Were there papers in it? Money?’
‘How should I know?’ Spiro ruffled up again, like a young turkey-cock, then subsided under Max’s look with a grin. ‘Well, I did take a look, a very small one. There was money, but I don’t know how much, I only saw the corners. It wasn’t Greek money, anyway, so what use did he think it would have been to me? But if it had been a million drachmas, I would not have taken it! You know that, Kyrie Max!’
