Levkas Man (Mystery)

by Hammond Innes

  enough to think that I could carry on where he had left off.

  When I got back to the boat, Bert was on deck to take the painter. "Can you give me a hand at the work bench?" he said. "I'm rigging a battery-operated spotlight. It'll be better than trailing a long cable, but I need help with the waterproofing."

  I suppose you could call it a displacement activity. Give a man like Bert a technical problem and he lost himself in it completely, everything else forgotten. It took us just over two hours to fix and test that spot, and all the time he was talking about how he'd get through the crevice if he found the cave opening out beyond it.

  Afterwards we tuned in to Radio Athens and listened to the English news broadcast. Florrie had gone to bed and we were alone in the wheelhouse, a drink in our hands and the announcer telling of gun duels across the Suez Canal, air strikes and Cairo in an uproar of militant demonstration. The Security Council of the Ignited Nations was meeting in the morning. Florrie used to get tracts from an outfit called the British Israelites," Bert said as he switched the radio off. "That was when we were in Great Yarmouth. Bloody queer stuff, too; prophecies based on the pyramids and the Bible, that sort of thing. Didn't go for it myself, but one thing I remember—they were convinced Armageddon would start in the Middle East." He raised his drink, his battered face creased in a smile. "It's times like this I'm glad I'm just a simple bloke with a boat of my own and things to occupy my mind. Give me a cave to explore or a bit of engineering to do and I don't give a damn whether the human race is hell-bent on self-destruction or not. There's so much in the world, why the hell aren't we content with what we've got? We go to the moon. Space platforms next. And yet we can't sort out a little matter like the Jews and the Arabs living together. And right here beneath our keel a whole underwater world, virtually unexplored, full of marvels and so bloody beautiful. Makes you sick, don't it?"

  That was the longest speech I had heard him make in

  the two months I had been with him. "Well, to hell with the human race!" He grinned and downed his drink. We went to bed then. Tomorrow they would dig out my father's body, and then I'd have to bury it again and we'd sail for Pan-telleria. I lay in my bunk, sleepless, thinking about the future, and about Sonia. A new dimension. I'd never had to think about anybody but myself before.

  IT

  We were up at seven next morning, and after tea and a cigarette, began winching in the anchor chain. A boat put out from the quay, and by the time we had the anchor stowed, Zavelas was alongside with Kotiadis. "You do not mind if I come with you?" He climbed on board, smiling politely. The patrol boat had returned to Levkas and he was taking no chances.

  The day was overcast, hot and very humid, the sea a sheet of glass. Bert and I took it in turns to go below for breakfast. Kotiadis had coffee, nothing else, and he didn't talk much, his eyes watching us warily. By eight forty-five we were in the Meganisi Channel, and as I wolfed my bacon and eggs, I wondered what he'd do if we continued straight through it, heading for the open sea. He came on deck with me as the engine slowed and we coasted in to the shore below the brown gash of the overhang. A boat lay in the gut, nobody in it and no sign of life on the rocks above. "They are working in the cave," Kotiadis said. "Today we discover the truth."

  I turned on him angrily. "You won't be satisfied till you see his body, will you?"

  He looked at me, his eyes hooded against the cloud-glare. "No. The evidence of my own eyes—that is important in my business."

  Bert was manoeuvring close in, positioning Coromandel over the shelf to the south of the gut. I dropped the kedge over the stern and then, after taking the bow warp ashore in the dinghy and making it fast to the rock it had been looped over the previous day, Kotiadis and I hauled her in close while Bert paid out astern. When everything was fast, Coromandel was lying as before, bows-on to the shore with lines out fore and aft. Moored in this way, she was broadside to the direction of the channel and this had a bearing on what happened later.

  "Don't be too long," Bert said as I got into the dinghy with Kotiadis. "Conditions are ideal and it may not last." His mind was set on the dive he had planned. It was a tricky one and Florrie had very sensibly insisted that he wait till I was back on board.

  "I'll be right back," I told him. "They're not likely to have discovered anything yet."

  But I was wrong there. The three of them had been working since first light, and when we reached the cave, Holroyd met us, stripped to the waist, his pale, almost hairless torso glistening with sweat. "I think we're almost there." He said it flatly, but there was a gleam of excitement in his eyes as he set the rock fragments he was carrying down on the pile, examining them almost automatically before going back into the darkness of the cave.

  Kotiadis was not interested in prehistoric caves and he had clearly mistaken the gleam in the Professor's eye. "You have found Dr. Van der Voort's body?"

  Holroyd turned and stared at him. Then he laughed, an extraordinary, almost macabre sound. "There is no body," he said. And I realized that the man was under extreme nervous tension, the laugh a sort of release. "Come on in. I'll show you."

  Cartwright and Winters stopped work as we reached the fall. They had progressed another two yards or more since dawn. "Look at this." Holroyd picked up the pressure lamp, which had been placed to illimiinate the face of the fall, and held it up. "See the way the roof rises at that point? Didn't notice it yesterday—too intent on clearing the rubble."

  "I did point it out," Cartwright said diffidently.

  "But without drawing the obvious conclusion." Holroyd turned to Kotiadis. "You want to know what happened to Van der Voort. The answer is there. You can see the line of the old fall, and there, where the roof lifts up, all this section —that's the new cave-in."

  Kotiadis lit a cigarette, the flame of his lighter illuminating his face, hard and uncomprehending. "I do not understand. Where is Dr. Van der Voort?"

  Holroyd swung the lamp close to the rock fall. "In there," he said. And he added, "Show them. Alec."

  Cartwright reached up, the crowbar in his hand, inserting the point of it into a dark gap they had opened up near the roof. The crowbar went in without meeting any resistance. "Another hour," Holroyd said, "and we'll be through the rock fall, into the gallery beyond."

  "And you think Dr. Van der Voort is there?" Kotiadis asked.

  "Where else could he be?"

  But Kotiadis was not convinced. "Why does he not call out?"

  Holroyd shrugged. "There are several possibilities. This is a sea cave. It may go in a long way. There may be other galleries, galleries on different levels even. Or we may find there has been another fall further in. As I see it. Van der Voort broke through the old fall some time during the twenty-four hours between this young man seeing him and my arrival here yesterday morning. There was that earth tremor, you remember. That would account for the new fall, and if he were in there, exploring the galleries at the time, then he would have been trapped."

  "If he is trapped, then he must wish to get out," Kotiadis

  said, his cigarette glowing in the half-darkness. "Sound in a tunnel is very loud." He moved to where Cartwright stood, standing on tiptoe, his face close to the crowbar. "Dr. Van der Voort!" he shouted. And then again, listening intently after each call. "You see. He does not answer."

  "As I say, there may be another fall. He may be injured, or possibly suffering from lack of air. He may be unconscious, even dead." The way Holroyd said it I thought he hoped it would be the latter.

  These buggers talking, arguing about it. "We're wasting time," I said, and seizing hold of the crowbar, I began to attack the remnants of the fall. No need now to carry the rubble out. I just prised the rocks loose and thrust them behind me, working with a desperate, frenzied speed. If he were injured, or lying in a coma, half-asphyxiated, the sooner we got to him the better. The others responded to my urgency, even Kotiadis. The rocks and rubble flew, dust hanging in a choking cloud.

  I had started at the point w
here Cartwright had thrust the crowbar through, hoping for a quick break-through. But the roof here was so badly fragmented that as fast as I cleared the rubble supporting it, fresh falls occurred. It meant prising all loose material out until I reached more solid rock, and this took time. In fact, it was about half an hour before I had opened up a safe gap into which I could work my head and shoulders. With the torch I had brought with me held out at arm's length, I could just see through the dust an open gallery beyond, and at the extreme limit of the torch's beam the cave seemed to narrow. But whether it was the end of it or another fall I could not be sure. I stayed wedged in the gap for a while, calling out to him, but there was no answer, and in the end I crawled back and Hans took my place.

  The dust was very thick now, for Zavelas had arrived with Sonia and three extra men who were already at work trundling the rubble out in a wheelbarrow. "What could you see?" Holroyd asked. "Is the gallery clear?"

  "For about twenty yards." I was feeling exhausted, my

  shin sticking to me, heavy with rock dust. "After that I'm not sure. Maybe another fall. "

  "And no sign of Dr. Van der Voort?" Kotiadis's voice was barely audible against the noise of rubble being shifted, his figure a dim outline in the dust-hazed cavern.

  I shook my head. "None." I felt defeated, drained.

  A hand touched mine, Sonia's head in outline against the glow of light from the entrance. "Come outside for a moment. You're wet through." She had sensed my mood. "The fresh air will do you good."

  But there was no fresh air, only heat and a heavy, louring atmosphere, a sultry world, the clouds hanging low, a blanket of humidity. "What do you think has happened to him?"

  "How the hell do I know?" He w^as either dead, or else he had gone deeper into the cave. "He may be shut in behind another rock fall." It was the best one could hope. "Why didn't the old fool wait till I returned? He must have known it was dangerous."

  "He wouldn't think of that. Like my brother and Alec-Professor Holroyd, too—they don't think of danger when they feel themselves to be on the threshold of an important discovery. "

  "No, I suppose not." I was thinking that Holroyd didn't care whether the old man was alive or dead. All he was interested in was the cave. And Kotiadis—all he wanted was a body to satisfy his superiors that the dangerous agent of his Communist-obsessed imagination was accounted for. "I'm going back now," I said. I wanted to be there when they broke through into the gallery beyond.

  But it was another half hour before they had opened up a gap large enough and safe enough for a man to crawl in. Cartwright was at the face then so that he was the first through, calling to us that he could see the end of the cave. "Nobody here, I'm afraid." His voice came to us as a resonant whisper running through the rock.

  Holroyd had shouldered his way through the Greeks and had his head and shoulders in the gap. "Have a look at the

  walls, Alec." His voice was muffled, his broad buttocks almost filling the gap, and the distant whisper answered that there were traces of gravures, another rhinoceros, more reindeer.

  By then I was on the rubble of the fall, right behind Holroyd, tugging at his shirt-tails. "To hell with your bloody scratchings," I shouted. "Either go on in or let me pass."

  I could feel him hesitating. The gap was barely wide enough for his bulky body. But then his legs moved and he began to crawl through. I followed him, the rubble loose and jagged against my chest. Dust clouded the beam of my torch as we slithered down the rubble on the far side. And then we were on the packed dirt floor of the cave and could stand upright. Ahead of us the roof slanted down until it met the floor about thirty paces from us. No sign of Cart-wright. And then Holroyd moved and the beam of my torch showed the side tunnel, a black, gaping hole. "Are you there, Alec?" Holroyd's voice boomed in the confines of the cavern. A whisper answered us from the bowels of the earth: "Down here. There's a sort of chute. A blow hole I think. But go carefully. It slopes down quite steeply."

  I went in then, Holroyd following, both of us bent almost double. The angle of descent was about twenty degrees, the floor brown dirt, packed hard, walls and roof smooth, hollowed out by water. And then suddenly I could see the end, the roof coming doAvn, the floor falling away into black shadow. I crawled past Cartwright on my hands and knees, and where the tunnel fell away, I lay prone, probing down with my torch. It certainly looked like a blow hole, the rock walls smoothed by the pressure of air and water and almost circular in shape, like a pipe angling do^vn very steeply. I couldn't see the end of it because it curved away to the left.

  Holroyd crawled up alongside me, his breathing heavy in the still air of the tunnel. "We'll need a rope to get down there."

  "Yes," I said, knowing that my father hadn't a rope. It wouldn't be difficult to get down the pipe, breaking your

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  descent with your back against one wall, your feet braced against the other. But to climb back up again would be impossible. I was trying to reconstruct in my mind what had happened.

  I heard the rattle of matches in a box and Holroyd struck one, a sudden, blinding flare, and then the flame burning steady without a flicker of movement. "No air current."

  "It probably finishes below sea level." If Bert were right about that cave, then this was probably the vent for the air pressure caused by storm waves in the channel.

  "He must have been desperate to go down there."

  And Cartwright's voice behind us said, "He had no alternative."

  That was true, if he had wanted to escape. But I knew that what had driven him to explore that blow hole was his obsession with the scratched drawings of early man, his hope of finding cave paintings. He would have gone down it whilst the light of his acetylene lamp was still bright. He would be in darkness now.

  "Van der Voort!" Holroyd had inched himself forward, his hands cupped to his mouth. "Dr. Van der Voort!" The North Country accent boomed in the shaft. We listened intently for the faintest sound. But there was no answer, not the smallest whisper of a reply. "It sounds deep."

  "We're still at least a hundred and fifty feet above sea level," I said.

  "Aye. Just what I was thinking. And if it's water down there, then I'm afraid there's not much hope." He had moved back and was turning himself round. Facing Cartwright, he said, "I suppose that light nylon of ours is with the Land-Rover?"

  "We've plenty of rope on board," I told him.

  "Then the sooner we have it, the sooner we'll know what's down there." He was already moving back up the tunnel.

  Daylight and the sight of sea and sky was a welcome relief after the claustrophobic confines of that cave. Sonia came with me back to the boat, her last hopes pinned to Bert's dive. He

  was waiting for us, pacing impatiently up and down the deck, "Have you found him?" And when I shook my head, he said, "Then what the hell have you been up to all this time? I warned you conditions might not stay like this."

  "Well, they have," I snapped; no breath of air and the boat riding to her reflection, as still as if she were moored in a dock. "We want about fifty fathoms of rope, that's all. I'll take it to them and then I'll be right back." And I explained what it was for.

  "So you think he's still alive?"

  "I know he is," Sonia's voice was intensely determined.

  "There's a chance," I said, and we looked out the rope. It was under the life jackets in a deck locker, 60 fathoms coiled on a light wooden drum, and I rowed across with it while Sonia stayed to help Bert get started on his dive. Hans had come down to the gut to collect the rope. I handed it to him and backed the dinghy out, and as soon as he saw me coming back Bert climbed over the side on to the ladder. He looked big and ungainly with his flippers and the cylinder on his back, his stomach bulging where the belt carrying the weights caused the flesh to sag. He wasn't wearing his wet suit for fear of snagging it on the rocks. I saw him slip his mask down over his eyes, settle the mouthpiece in place, and then Florrie passed him the spot, and with a
wave in my direction, he flipped backwards to disappear under the oil-flat surface of the sea. Before I was halfway back to Coromandel the line of his bubbles passed me headed for the shore.

  Sonia took the painter, and as I swung my leg over the low bulwarks Florrie came out of the wheelhouse. "Bert said to tell you the engine's all set to go if you need it."

  I looked at her. "Why should I?"

  "I don't know." Her face looked worried, lines of strain showing at the corners of the eyes. "He's been in a state about this dive all morning. It was the waiting, I think—when you didn't come back for so long. It made him nervous."

  I looked up at the sky and south to the open sea, a weather check that was so automatic, so routine that I was barely

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  conscious of it. I was thinking of the blow hole, the rock pipe twisting into the bowels of the earth with one of them slithering down it, the rope taut around his waist, and of Bert, deep underwater, following the beam of his spotlight into the cave's darkness. One of them should be able to produce the answer. An hour at most and we should know for certain.

  I went into the wheelhouse and got the glasses. From our mooring the platform below the overhang was just visible. If they found him, they'd try to hail me from there. There was nobody visible at the moment. Sweat dripped into my eyes. The heat was heavier than ever. I wiped my face, envying Bert in the cool depths. "Would you like some coffee?" Florrie asked.

  I shook my head.

  "It's iced. I've had it in the fridge since breakfast."

  Iced coffee! I nodded. "Please."

  "I'll get it." Sonia left us quickly.