"You mean they're trapped the other side of the fall?"
"I guess so. But no worry. Kotiadis is there and in the morning we will take timber over to support the roof. Also a caique leaves here for Levkas an hour ago with instructions for the patrol boat to come here with more timber." A hairy hand gripped my arm. "Don't you worry. Two days and we have them out. Okay? That's not too much. Just time to decide if there is a god or not, eh?" And he patted my shoul-
der, smiling gently. "Tomorrow we load timber and begin to dig. Maybe we're inside in one day. And there is a friend of yours arrived by caique tonight—the old guy who is with you when you first come."
"Dr. Gilmore?"
"Yeah, that's him. He's gone to sleep with the Pappas at his house."
"Is he all right?" Sonia asked.
"Sure, he's okay. I guess he's tougher than he looks. Two days in a caique—that's a long time for a man his age." And he added, "You go and see him in the morning. I tell him what happens, but I think he is too tired to understand. He kept shaking his head and saying the Professor and Dr. Van der Voort should not be together. It seemed to worry him that Professor Holerod was trapped inside the cave with the Doctor."
It worried me, too, and Sonia's face was a white mask in the darkness. But at least she hadn't heard Bert's rambling reference to a body.
We arranged that the baulks of timber to shore up the roof would be ferried out to Coromandel first thing in the morning, and then Zavelas went off to his house. Sonia went with him, leaving me to pull back to Coromandel on my own. It wasn't at all what I had planned.
I made the dinghy fast to the cleat aft and then relieved myself by the light of the stars. The night was soft and very still, the water brilliantly phosphorescent. It was the first time I had had the ship to myself, and when I went below the saloon seemed strangely empty. Complete and utter silence enveloped me. I poured myself a brandy and sat for a moment thinking about the cave with its unstable roof, Holroyd and the Greek marooned in the dark by the new fall.
A faint buzzing invaded the silence. Leaning my head back I could hear it vibrating in the hull, gradually getting louder. An outboard.
I went up on deck. The sound came from the entrance to the inlet. And soon I could make out the dim, dark shape of
the boat. It passed quite close, Vassilios bringing Kotiadis back. But though I hailed them, they held on for the quay, my voice drowned in the ugly band-saw noise of the engine. I went down into the workshop then and looked over Bert's diving equipment, noting that there were still two cylinders full, mentally checking over the routine.
It was almost one o'clock before I got to bed. It had been a long, exhausting day, and I was tired, too tired perhaps, for in spite of the brandy, my mind kept going over all the details, particularly the details of Bert's dive.
I was woken shortly after six-thirty by the bump of a boat alongside and the sound of Greek voices. The first baulk of timber had been dumped on deck by the time I had my shorts on and had reached the wheel house. It was a glorious day, the sun already warm and a slight haze shimmering on the water. The timber was rough, the Greeks none too gentle, and by the time I had seen to the stowing of it, Zavelas was alongside with Dr. Gilmore.
He didn't look tired at all. Bright as a button, I thought, as I helped him aboard, whilst Sonia held the boat steady. "I haven't kept you waiting, I hope." He shook my hand, formal and dapper in his grey suit and panama hat. "A beautiful morning." He stood smiling and gazing round him. "It's so nice to be on the water again. London was very hot—a heat wave. But I had a day at Wimbledon—some very good tennis, a superb men's four." Sonia passed me his suitcase and a hand-grip. "Book presents," he said. "That's why it's so heavy. I managed to get an excellent treatise on submarine archaeology for Mr. Barrett. Do you think he'll like that?"
"I'm sure he will," I murmured.
"Good, good. And there's a book by Holroyd. I thought it would interest you. Also a typescript of the paper he read. Most revealing." And then, almost without pausing for breath, "And I'm sorry to hear about Mr. Barrett. Poor fellow. I was so looking forward to seeing him again. Is he in much pain?"
"He'll be all right," I said.
Sonia swung her leg over the bulwark. "Dr. Gilmore. I think we should leave now."
"Yes, yes, of course, my dear." He smiled at me, that same quick, bird-like glance. "I talk too much and you're in a hurry, naturally. But it is so nice seeing you again."
She took him below and I started the engine, whilst the two Greeks, who had been stowing the timber, dealt with the anchor. Zavelas took them off, and as I headed up the inlet, Sonia poked her head up the saloon companionway. "Paul. Have you had any breakfast?"
"It'll wait," I told her. I wasn't all that hungry.
"No it won't. Not if you have to make that dive." She was tense, excited, and it showed in her eyes. "Coffee and eggs? I know there are eggs on board. I got them for Florrie myself—fresh laid and about the size of ping pong balls."
Soon the smell of coffee began to drift up from below. And then Gilmore came up into the wheelhouse, looking a little incongruous in pale seersucker trousers and a blue shirt decorated with crimson sea horses. "I hope my rather strange apparel doesn't put you off your course."
"Very suitable," I said.
He smiled, a little self-consciously. "One of my students— a very distinguished professor now—insisted on taking my wardrobe in hand. It was really quite fun—I think he enjoyed it." He was silent for a moment, gazing at the bulk of Levkas straight ahead, his eyes crinkled at the glare. "Now, I want to talk to you about your father and this man Holroyd. There may not be time after we get to the cave, so I'd better tell you briefly now." He perched himself on the flap-seat at the side of the wheelhouse.
Quickly he ran over the situation as he had found it on his return to Cambridge. Holroyd had been entirely cooperative, submitting his specimens to the test called for by the committee, with only one proviso, that he was present throughout and that the bones and artefacts were never out of his sight. This the committee had regarded as reasonable.
since he was not only being accused of pilfering another man's work, but also of faking the basis of his paper.
Gilmore had reached Cambridge on June 1, only two days before the decisive meeting of the committee. By then all the tests had been completed, and the results known. Without exception they had proved satisfactory. He gave me a short summary of the results, covering chronometric and relative dating, with reference to the geological structure in which they had been found, and finally the carbon-14 method. "This last gave a date for all three skull fragments of around twenty-seven thousand years ago, and the teeth and bones were of the same period. They'd even passed the fluorine test, so that when I arrived fellow members of the committee greeted me with a certain coolness, in some cases outright hostility. They were all, of course, considerably younger than I was, a fact that Holroyd had used to advantage, the implication being that my ideas were antediluvian and the doubts I had expressed about his discovery and theory due to senility."
Sonia appeared with a tray, wafted into the wheelhouse by the smell of coffee. "You might have waited. I want to hear it too." She poured the coffee, while he repeated what he had just told me. "Well, if Professor Holroyd regards you as senile, he'll get a shock when he sees you in that shirt."
"It wasn't just Holroyd. It was most of the committee." He was smiling, his arms folded, and so pleased he seemed to be hugging himself. "Even Stefan thought I had gone too far. And Grauers made it clear that he doubted whether I had any evidence whatsoever to support my attack on such a distinguished member of the academic world."
We were off Spiglia then and Sonia took the wheel, while I sat on the starboard flap-seat eating my breakfast and listening, fascinated, to Gilmore's account of the scene as the Investigating Committee gathered in the lecture-room at Trinity College. Including Holroyd and himself, there were eight men and one woman present. The proceedings were not expect
ed to tak^ long, a mere formality to clear Holroyd's
name. The specimens were laid out on the table before him.
"I must tell you," Gilmore said, "that his statement that the skull fragments had been found by himself and the two other members of the expedition, and that their discovery was not in any way connected with Pieter Van der Voort had been accepted, and for reasons that will become self-evident I did not challenge this.
"The proceedings were opened by Professor Grauers, a short statement of the reasons for forming an investigating committee. He then called upon me to reiterate the charges. 'Or you may wish to withdraw them, in view of the rigorous tests which have been made?' I said I did not wish to withdraw anything, except the first charge of taking credit for another man's work. I then put the question to Holroyd again, asking him point-blank—had the discovery of the skull fragments been connected in any way with Dr. Van der Voort? 'The answer to that is No,' he said, directing his reply, not to me, but to the Committee—Grauers, in particular. I suppose any man as politically astute as Holroyd learns to be a consummate liar. He said it categorically, and then, still facing the Committee and speaking in that bluff, honest, North Country voice of his, he said, 'Van der Voort had been working in the area the previous year. This I have never tried to conceal from you, gentlemen. Owing to the circumstances, which you already know about, I had no opportunity of discussing it with him. As I have said before, the information which led me to the site was from a Greek source. He may have visited the site. In fact, I believe now that he did. But he failed entirely to recognize it for what it was. Instead— and this I learned subsequently—he concentrated on quite another site, not on the island of Meganisi, but in a bay known as Dessimo on Levkas.' "
Gilmore smiled. "A half truth, you see. So much more convincing. And they believed him. But to make it absolutely clear, I asked him whether, in that case, he took full responsibility for the authenticity of the specimens. He was looking at me then, and I thought I saw a mounting flicker of doubt
in his eyes. But by then he had committed himself too deeply. 'Of course.' And that was it. I had him then, provided I had guessed Pieter's intentions correctly."
He paused, his eyes searching the wheelhouse. "You haven't got a cigarette, have you?"
I found one for him and lit it. "Silly of me, but I never carry them now. They're supposed to be bad for me." He drew on it gratefully, holding it as usual between finger and thumb as though he had never smoked before in his life. "Now, where was I?"
"Dr. Van der Voort's intentions," Sonia said. "I don't quite understand. He couldn't have intended anything."
"Oh, but he did, my dear. This was his revenge. He planned it, every move." He was smiling gently to himself, as though enjoying some private joke, and his eyes were far away, back in that lecture-room at Trinity. "You remember I told you both about the Piltdown skull, how it had fooled everybody for years. And I also told you how Pieter had been caught faking the evidence. Piltdown had always had a fatal fascination for him. Now, unless my reading of human nature—his in particular—was quite inaccurate, he had done it again. But this time, he had rigged it so that the man who had made use of his work before, and was doing so again, would take the rap. At least, that was the supposition I was relying on when I reiterated my charges and accused Holroyd to his face of planting the skull fragments in that dig to substantiate a theory he had borrowed from another man."
"But I don't see—" Sonia had turned to him, fascinated, her eyes bright. "How could you be certain? How could you prove it?"
She was too excited to concentrate and I took the wheel from her, for we were close in under the cliffs, making the turn into the Meganisi Channel. Behind me I heard Gilmore say, "That was what they wanted to know, all of them hostile. And I wasn't sure I could prove it. I was playing a hunch, nothing more. I had been just two days in the country and the experts had been working on those specimens for almost
a week. With the whole committee against me, even Stefan Feitmayer, I wasn't going to play my hand until I had seen theirs. Everything depended, you see, on their not having used a geiger-counter. I didn't think they had. Too simple for them. And anyway, too obvious. A man of Holroyd's standing, if he was salting a dig with fake specimens, wouldn't slip up on a thing that had bust the Piltdown hoax wide open. However, they had done a fluorine test. But in the main, Holroyd's case rested on the carbon-fourteen tests, which had given a similar dating for all his specimens. The committee were prepared to accept this as conclusive evidence."
"But it was, surely," Sonia said. "If they were all of the same date—"
"They could still be from different sites."
"You mean Dr. Van der Voort had deliberately collected together the fragments from different sites? I can't believe it. To be certain they'd stand up to tests, they'd all have had to be carbon-dated."
"Precisely." Gilmore was smiling happily.
"But he had no facilities for testing—either out here or in Amsterdam." She stared at him. "You mean they were from Russia?"
"Of course. All of them. Approximately the same date— twenty-seven b.p. All with about the same fluorine content. And the site in which he buried them was right too. But there had to be something, otherwise there was no point in his doing it. There had to be some simple way in which Holroyd could be discredited, and I was relying on my hunch that he would use Piltdown as his model."
He paused, still smiling, almost hugging himself with enjoyment. "They were sitting there, all of them looking at me, and I was thinking what an old fool I was, risking my own reputation for the sake of a man I'd only seen once since he'd been a student. There's no quarter in the academic world and to attack a man as influential as Holroyd was tantamount to suicide. I got up and went to the door, not saying
a word. They probably thought I was walking out, defeated." He gave a little chuckle and tossed the end of his cigarette out through the wheelhouse door into the sea. "At least, that's what it looked like when I came back into the room with the young technician and the equipment I had borrowed from Geology. They were all talking, and then suddenly they stopped and stared at me, and a sort of stunned silence gripped the room."
I had cut down the revs and now he stood up so that he could see down the channel. "That island must be Tiglia. That was the site of the dig. I remember now." He reached absent-mindedly for the packet of cigarettes that I had left lying on the shelf above the instrument panel. "If I'd gone ashore that day, I might have been the one to discover those skull fragments."
"But you wouldn't have claimed it as your own discovery," I said.
"No. And I suppose that's the difference."
"But what happened?" Sonia demanded. "You haven't told us what happened."
He smiled. "You want it all spelled out for you. Well, just what I'd expected. We didn't have to go beyond the skull fragments. The Cro-Magnon skull gave one count, the two Neanderthal-type skulls quite a different count. There was no argument. There couldn't be with the geiger-counter clicking away, proving beyond any doubt that the two types of skull could not have come from the same dig. Of course, Holroyd started to try and bluster it out. But they were all sitting there, staring at him, dumbfounded at first, then accusingly, and the words just stuck in his throat. Finally he got to his feet and walked out, leaving the skulls lying there on the table. In a way, that was more damning than anything—his sudden complete lack of interest in them."
"Has there been any public announcement?" I asked.
"No, no, my dear fellow, of course not. The press were never in on it, and officially it will all be hushed up. But no doubt it will leak out. There's a lot of talk already. Though
Holroyd hasn't yet resigned from any of the committees and other bodies he serves on, it will be the finish of him. Unless . . ." He paused to light the cigarette he had taken.
"Unless what?" I asked, for he was staring out through the windshield, his mind apparently on something else.
"He's a very cleve
r talker, very convincing. A political rather than an academic animal, and not to be underrated on that account. If he were to come up now with something spectacular—" He looked at me quickly, a darting glance. "Last night—that ex-policeman—he said there was a rhinoceros drawn on the wall of this cave and that Holroyd was very excited about it."
"There's a reindeer, too," Sonia said. "And what looks like an elephant—just scratch marks, very faint."
"And these gravures were discovered by Pieter Van der Voort, not by Holroyd?"
"Yes," I said. And I told him how I had found my father working on the rock fall that night, his desperate urgency to break through into the cave beyond.
He nodded. "It's what I suspected, that he was on to something of real importance. That's why I hurried out here, as soon as I knew Holroyd had left for Greece. I was afraid . . ." He hesitated, staring at me, strangely agitated. "However, this is an accident. An earth tremor, they tell me." He shook his head. "Something nobody could have foreseen. Nevertheless, if Pieter is dead, then Holroyd can reasonably claim . . ." He gave a little shrug. "Well, we'll just have to hope for the best."
We were past Tiglia then, the rock gut opening up and a boat lying there, the scar of the overhang just visible. I pointed it out to him and he shaded his eyes against the glare, staring at it, his interest quickening: 'A perfect site, very typical—provided, of course . . ." He moved to the wheelhouse door, looking back over the port quarter at the site on Meganisi below the rock pinnacle. "Two of them, and both natural observation posts. Tell me, did your father say anything about the sea level here—what it would have been like twenty
thousand years ago?" And when I explained that all to the south of us, as far as the African shore, he believed to have been one vast plain, with Meganisi the western flank of a volcano, he nodded his head vigorously.
"You think that's possible?" I asked.
Levkas Man (Mystery) Page 27
