‘Australian registry?’ I sent.
‘Yes. Position, repeat position.’ Getting testy and understandably so: when a man’s shouting for help he shouldn’t first of all inquire into the pedigree of his rescuer. I hesitated for a second before sending, I had to make an immediate impact on the operator or I’d likely get as short shrift as I’d had from the U.S. Navy. The distress frequency is sacrosanct to all nations.
‘Special British Government investigator John Bentall requesting immediate relay coded message via Portishead radio to Admiralty Whitehall London. Desperately urgent.’
‘Are you sinking?’
I waited for a few assorted blood vessels to burst but when none did I sent: ‘Yes.’ In the circumstances it seemed that it might save a great deal of misunderstanding. ‘Please prepare receive message.’ I was almost certain that the glare outside was beginning to die down: there wouldn’t be much of the hut left by this time.
There was a long pause. Someone was taking time to make up his mind. Then the single word ‘Priority’. It was a question.
‘Telegraphic address carries over-riding priority all signals to London.’
That got him.
‘Proceed with message.’
I proceeded, forcing myself to tap it out slowly and accurately. The red glow was fading on the inside of the walls of the room. The fierce roar of flames had died away to a lazy crackling and I thought I could hear voices. My neck was stiff from glancing back over my shoulder through the window nearest the fire, but I didn’t need my eyes to transmit with and I got the message through. I finished: ‘Please dispatch immediately.’
There was a pause of maybe thirty seconds then he came through again. ‘Master authorises immediate transmission. Are you in danger?’
‘Vessel approaching.’ I sent. That would keep them quiet. ‘O.K.’ A sudden thought occurred to me. ‘What is your position?’
‘Two hundred miles due east Newcastle.’
For all the help that was they might as well have been orbiting the earth in a satellite, so I sent: ‘Thank you very much’ and signed off.
I replaced the transmitting key and headphones, closed up the doors and went to the window, poking a curious head round the corner. I’d been wrong about the value of those big salt-water butts; where the workers’ hut had been there remained now only a five-foot-high pile of glowing red embers and ashes. I’d get no Oscars for counter-espionage but as an arsonist I was neck and neck with the best. At least I wasn’t a complete failure. Hewell and the professor were standing together, presumably talking, as the Chinese dumped buckets of water on the smouldering remains and as it didn’t seem that there was much that they would be able to do at this late stage they’d likely be along any minute. Time to be gone. I went along the centre passage, turned right to pass through the still lit kitchen and then halted in a way that would have made an observer think that I had run into an invisible brick wall.
What had brought me up so short was the sight of a pile of canned beer empties lying in a wicker basket. My God, the beer! Good old Bentall, never missed a thing, not if you held it six inches from his nose and beat him over the head with a club to attract his attention. I’d drained two full beer glasses back in the living-room there, and just left the empties standing: even with all the excitement neither the professor nor Hewell struck me as a man who would be liable to forget that he had left a full glass behind him – certainly the Chinese house-boy wouldn’t – and they wouldn’t put it down to evaporation from the heat of the fire either. I picked up another couple of cans from the crate on the floor, opened them in four seconds flat with the steel opener lying on the sink unit, ran back to the desk in the living-room and filled up the two glasses again, holding them at a shallow angle so that too suspiciously high a head wouldn’t be formed on the beer. Back in the kitchen again I dropped the cans among the other empties – in the pile that had been consumed that night another two were liable to go unnoticed – and then left the house. I wasn’t any too soon, for I could see the houseboy making for the front door, but I got back to our house unobserved.
I entered under the seaweed screen and saw the outline of Marie against the front doorway where she was still watching what was left of the fire. I whispered her name and she came to me.
‘Johnny!’ She seemed glad to see me in a way that no one I could ever remember had been glad to see me before. ‘I’ve died about a hundred times since you left here.’
Is that all?’ I put my good arm around her and squeezed and said: ‘ I got the message through, Marie.’
‘The message?’ I was pretty well worn out that night, mentally as well as physically, but even so it took a pretty slow type to miss the fact that he’d just been paid the biggest compliment of his life. But I missed it. ‘You – you got it through? How wonderful, Johnny!’
‘Luck. A sensible sparks on an Aussie ship. Halfway to London by this time. And then things will happen. What, I don’t know. If there are any British, American or French naval craft near, they’ll be nearer still in a few hours. Or detachments of soldiers by flying boat, maybe from Sydney. I don’t know. But what I do know is that they won’t be here in time –’
‘Sshh.’ She touched my lips with her finger. ‘Someone coming.’
I heard the two voices, one quick and sharp, the other like a cement truck grinding up a grade in low gear. Witherspoon and Hewell. Maybe ten yards away, maybe not even that: through the interstices in the screen wall I could see the swinging of the lantern that one or other of them was carrying. I leapt for the bed fumbled desperately for a pyjama jacket, found one, shrugged into it and buttoned it up to the neck and dived under a blanket. I landed on the elbow of my injured arm and when I propped myself up on the other as a knock came and the two men entered without benefit of invitation, it was no difficulty at all to look sick and pale. Heaven knows I felt it.
‘You must excuse us, Mrs Bentall,’ the professor said with that nice mixture of smoothness, concern and undiluted unctuousness that would have made me sick if I hadn’t been that way already. But I had to admire his terrific powers of dissimulation under any and all circumstances: in the light of what I had seen, heard and done it was difficult to remember that we were still playing games of make-believe. ‘We were naturally anxious to see if you were all right. Most distressing this, really most distressing.’ He patted Marie’s shoulder in a paternal fashion that I would have ignored a couple of days ago, and brought his lantern closer to have a good look at me ‘Merciful heavens, my boy, you don’t look well at all! How do you feel?’
‘It’s only during the night that it gives me a little trouble,’ I said bravely. I had my head half-turned away ostensibly because the bright beam from the lantern was hurting my half-closed eyes but actually because, in the circumstances, it seemed hardly advisable to waft too many beer fumes in his direction. ‘I’ll be fine tomorrow.
‘That was a terrible fire, Professor. I wish I’d been fit to give you a hand. How on earth could it have started?’
‘Those damned Chinks’ Hewell growled. He was looming massively just outside the direct radiance of the light and the deep-sunk eyes were quite lost under the craggy overhang of his great tufted brows. ‘Pipe-smokers and always making tea on little spirit stoves. I’ve warned them often enough.’
‘And against all regulations,’ the professor put in testily. ‘They know it very well. Still, we won’t be here so much longer and they can sleep in the drying shed until then. Hope you haven’t been too upset about this. We’ll leave you now. Nothing we can do for you, my dear?’
I didn’t think he was talking to me so I lowered myself down to the pillow with a stifled moan. Marie thanked him and said no.
‘Good night, then. Incidentally, come across for breakfast when it suits you in the morning and my boy will be there to serve you. Hewell and I will be up betimes tomorrow.’ He chuckled ruefully. ‘This archaeology is like a mild poison in the blood – once it gets there it never lets you
go.’
He patted Marie’s shoulder a bit more and took off. I waited till Marie reported that they’d reached the professor’s house, then said: ‘As I was saying before the interruption, help will come but not in time to save our bacon. Not if we stay here. Got the lifebelts and the shark-repellant ready?’
‘They’re a horrible pair, aren’t they?’ she murmured. ‘I wish that murderous old goat would keep his hands to himself. Yes, they’re ready. Must we, Johnny?’
‘Damn it all, can’t you see that we must leave?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘We can’t go by land. Sheer mountain on one side, a cliff on the other and a couple of barbed-wire fences and assorted Chinese in between make that impossible. We could go through the tunnel, but though three or four fit men might pickaxe their way through the last few feet in an hour, I couldn’t do it in a week the way I’m feeling.’
‘You could blast it down. You know where the supplies –’
‘Heaven help us both,’ I said. ‘You’re just as ignorant as I am. Tunnelling is a skilled occupation. If we didn’t bring the roof down on top of us we’d certainly seal off the end of the tunnel and then our pals would come along and nab us at their leisure. And we can’t go by boat, for the simple reason that both boatmen sleep in the boathouse and anyway it would be no good, if that simple method of approach was open to Witherspoon and Hewell and the doughty Captain Fleck available to them they wouldn’t tunnel all that way through rock. If the Navy takes such precautions with fences and guards against imagined friends, what are they going to take against the sea where anybody may turn up? You can bet your life that they have two or three small interlocking radar positions capable of picking up a seagull swimming ashore, with a few quick-firing guns to back them up.
‘The only thing I’m against is leaving the scientists and their wives here. But I don’t see –’ ‘You never mentioned that the scientists were there,’ she said in quick surprise.
‘No? Maybe I thought it was obvious. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m wrong. But why else in the name of heaven should the wives be there? The Navy is working on some project of clearly considerable importance and this damned murdering white-haired monster is just biding his time to pinch it. From his last remark, lying in his teeth to the end, I gather he’s biding no more. He’s going to get this thing, whatever it is, and use the wives as levers to make the back-room boys work on it and develop it further, for what purposes I can’t even guess except that they’re bound to be nefarious.’ I climbed stiffly out of the bed and pulled off the pyjama jacket. ‘What other alternative occurs to you? Eight missing wives, ditto scientists. Witherspoon’s bound to be using those wives as a lever, if they were no use to him in that capacity he wouldn’t even bother to feed them, he wouldn’t waste anything on them except for a few ounces of lead, as he did for the genuine Witherspoon and others. The man is devoid of feeling to the point of insanity. Where the wives are, there the husbands are. You don’t think Colonel Raine sent us out to the Fijis just to do the hula-hula dance, do you?’
‘That’s Hawaii,’ she murmured. ‘Not Fiji.’
‘My God!’ I said. ‘Women!’
‘I’m only teasing, you clown.’ She put her arms round my neck and came closer to me: her hands were abnormally cold and she was trembling. ‘Don’t you see I have to? I just can’t go on talking about it. I thought I was quite good – in this business – and so did Colonel Raine, but I don’t think so any longer. There’s too much – there’s too much calculated inhumanity, such an absolute indifference to good or evil or morality, just what’s expedient, there’s all those men murdered for no reason, there’s us, and I think you’re crazy to hope for us, there’s all those poor women, especially those poor women…’ She broke off, gave a long quivering sigh and whispered: ‘Tell me again about you and me and the lights of London.’
So I told her, told her so that I half believed it myself, and I thought she did too, for by and by she grew still, but when I kissed her, her lips were like ice and she turned away and buried her face in my neck. I held her so for all of a minute then, on mutual impulse at the same moment, we parted and started to fasten on the lifebelts.
The remains of the workers’ hut were now no more than an acrid-smelling dark red glow under the blackness of an overcast sky. The lights still burned in the professor’s window, I would have taken odds that he had no intention of going to sleep that night, I was beginning to know enough of his nature to suspect that the exhaustion of a sleepless night would be a small price to pay for the endless delights of savouring to the full the delightful anticipations of the pleasures of the day that was to come.
It started to rain as we left, the heavy drops spluttering to sibilant extinction in the dying fire. It couldn’t have been better for us. Nobody saw us go, for nobody could have seen us unless they had been within ten feet. We walked almost a mile and a half to the south along the sea-shore and then, as we approached the area where Hewell’s Chinese might be loitering as they’d been the night before, we took to the sea. We went out about twenty-five yards, to waist level, half-walking, half-swimming along: but when we came to the spot where I could just barely discern through the rain the dark overhang of the cliff that marked the beginning of the barbed wire, we made for the deeper water until we were over two hundred yards out. It didn’t seem likely, but the moon might just conceivably break through.
We inflated our lifebelts, very slowly, although I hardly thought the sound would carry to shore. The water was cool, but not cold. I swam in the lead and as I did I turned the operating screw of the shark-repellant canister and a darkish evilsmelling liquid – it would probably have been yellow in daylight – with extraordinary dissolving and spreading qualities spread over the surface of the sea. I don’t know what the shark-repellant did to the sharks, but it certainly repelled me.
CHAPTER 8
Friday 3.30 a.m.–6 a.m.
The rain eased and finally stopped altogether, but the night stayed dark. And the sharks stayed away. We made slow time, because I couldn’t use my left arm to help me along, but we made time and after almost an hour, when I calculated that we must be at least half a mile beyond the barbed-wire fences, we started angling in slowly for shore.
Less than two hundred yards from land I discovered that our change in direction was premature, the high wall of cliff extended farther round the south of the island than I had imagined it would. There was nothing for it but to trudge slowly on – by this time ‘swimming’ would have been a complete and flattering misnomer for our laboured and clumsy movements through the water – and hope that we wouldn’t lose our sense of direction in the slight obscuring drizzle that had again begun to fall.
Luck stayed with us and so did our sense of direction, for when the drizzle finally lifted I could see that we were no more than a hundred and fifty yards from a thin ribbon of sand that marked the shore-line. It felt more like a hundred and fifty miles, at least to me it did. I had the vague impression that an undertow was pulling us out into the lagoon all the time, but I knew this couldn’t be so, otherwise we would have been swept far out long ago. It was just sheer weakness. But my awareness was not of effort or exhaustion but almost wholly of frustration: the urgency so desperate, the progress so infuriatingly slow.
My feet touched bottom and I staggered upright in less than three feet of water: I swayed and would have fallen had not Marie caught my arm, she was in far better shape than I was. Side by side we waded slowly ashore and the way I felt no one ever looked less like Venus emerging from the deeps than I did right then. Together we stumbled on to the shore, then, two minds with but one thought, we sat down heavily on the damp sand.
‘God, at last!’ I gasped. The breath was wheezing in and out of my lungs like air through the sides of a moth-eaten bellows. ‘I thought we’d never make it.’
‘Neither did we,’ a drawling voice agreed. We swung round only to be blinded by the bright white glare from a pair of torches. ‘You c
ertainly took your time. Please don’t try – Good Lord! A female!’
Although biologically accurate enough it struck me as a singularly inept term to describe Marie Hopeman, but I let it pass. Instead I scrambled painfully to my feet and said: ‘You saw us coming?’
‘For the past twenty minutes,’ he drawled. ‘We have radar and infra-red that would pick up the head of a shrimp if it stuck itself above water. My word, a woman! What’s your name? Are you armed?’ The grasshopper mind, a clear-cut case for Pelmanism.
‘I have a knife,’ I said tiredly. ‘Right now I couldn’t cut asparagus with it. You can have it if you want.’ The light was no longer directly in our eyes and I could make out the shape of three figures clad in white, two of them with the vague blurs of guns cradled in their arms. ‘My name is Bentall. You are a naval officer?’
‘Anderson. Sub-Lieutenant Anderson. Where in all the world have you two come from? What is your reason – ?’
‘Look,’ I interrupted. ‘Those things can wait. Please take me to your commanding officer, now. It’s very important. At once.’
‘Now, just a minute, my friend.’ The drawl was more pronounced than ever. ‘You don’t seem to realize –’
‘At once, I said. Look, Anderson, you sound like a naval officer who might have a very promising career in front of him but I can promise you that career stops to-day, violently, if you don’t co-operate fast. Don’t be a fool, man. Do you think I’d turn up like this unless there was something most desperately wrong? I’m a British Intelligence agent and so is Miss Hopeman here. How far is your C.O.’s place?’
Maybe he was no fool, or maybe it was the urgency in my voice because, after a moment’s hesitation, he said: ‘The better part of a couple of miles. But there’s a telephone at a radar post quarter of a mile along the way.’ He pointed in the direction of the twin barbed-wire fences. ‘If it’s really urgent –’
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