I shuddered at the thought but said thanks and left her. An hour later I left her altogether. I’d made up a rough dummy in my bed, checked every side of the house for interested spectators and left by the back, lifting a corner of the side-screens just sufficiently to squirm under. There were no cries or shouts or shots, Bentall abroad unobserved and mighty glad of it. Against a dark background you couldn’t have seen me from five yards although you could have smelled me at ten times the distance down wind. Certain makes of boot polish are like that.
On the first part of my trip, between our house and the professor’s, it wouldn’t really have mattered whether my foot had been in commission or not. To anyone looking out from Hewell’s house or the workers’ hut, I would have been silhouetted against the lightness of the sea and the white glimmer of the sands, so I made it on my hands and elbows and knees, heading for the rear of the house, out of sight of all the others.
I passed the corner of the house and rose slowly and soundlessly to my feet, pressing close in against the wall. Three long quiet steps and I was at the back door.
Defeat had come almost before I’d started. Because there had been a hinged wooden door at front I had assumed that there would be the same at the rear: but it was a plaited bamboo screen and as soon as I’d touched it it rustled and clicked with the sound of a hundred distant castanets. I flattened myself against the door, hand clenched round the base of my torch. Five minutes passed; nothing happened, nobody came, and when finally a passing catspaw of wind brushed my face the reeds rustled again, just as they had done before. It took me two minutes to gather up twenty reeds in one hand without making too much racket about it, two seconds to pass through into the house and another two minutes to let those reeds fall one by one into place. The night wasn’t all that warm, but I could feel the sweat dripping down my forehead and into my eyes. I wiped it away, hooded my hand over the already tiny hole in the centre of the torch face, slid on the switch with a cautious thumb and started going over the kitchen.
I didn’t expect to find anything there that I wouldn’t have found in any other kitchen, and I didn’t. But I found what I was after, the cutlery drawer. Tommy had a fine selection of carving knives, all of them honed to a razor’s edge. I picked a beauty, a 10-inch triangular job, serrated on one side and straight on the other, that tapered from two inches below the hilt to just nothing at all. It had the point of a surgeon’s lancet. It was better than nothing. It was a lot better than nothing: if I could find the gap between the ribs not even Hewell would think I was tickling him. I wrapped it carefully in a kitchen cloth and stuck it under my belt.
The inside kitchen door, the one giving on the central passage, was made of wood, to keep the cooking smells from percolating throughout the house, I supposed. It opened inwards on oiled leather hinges. I eased myself through into the passage and stood there listening. I didn’t have to listen very hard. The professor was something less than a silent sleeper and the source of the snoring, a room with an opened door about ten feet up the passage on the right, was easy to locate. I had no idea where the Chinese boy slept, I hadn’t seen him leaving the house so I assumed that he must be in one of the other rooms and I didn’t intend to find out which. He seemed to me like a boy who would sleep very lightly indeed. I hoped the professor’s adenoidal orchestration would blanket any noise I might make, but for all that I went up the passage towards the living-room door with all the rush and clatter of a cat stalking a bird across a sunlit lawn.
I made it in safety and closed the door behind me without even a whisper of sound. I didn’t waste any time looking around the room, I knew where to look and went straight for the big kneehole desk. If the direction of the burnished copper wire not quite buried in the thatch that had caught my eye when first I’d sat in the rattan chair that morning hadn’t been guide enough, my nose would have led me straight there: the pungent smell, however faint, of sulphuric acid is unmistakeable.
Most kneehole desks are lined on either side with a row of drawers, but Professor Witherspoon’s was an exception. There was a cupboard on either side and neither of them was locked. There was no reason why they should have been. I opened the left-hand door first and shone the pencil beam of light inside.
The compartment was big, thirty niches high by eighteen wide and perhaps two feet in depth. It was packed with lead acid accumulators and dry batteries. There were ten of the accumulators on an upper shelf, big glass-sided 2.5 volt cells, wired together in series: below were eight Exide 120 volt dry-cell batteries, wired up in parallel. Enough power there to send a signal to the moon, if a man had a radio transmitter.
And the man had a radio transmitter. It was in the locker on the other side. It took up the entire space of the locker. I know a. little of transmitter-receivers, but this metallic grey mass with its score or more of calibrated dials, wave-bands and tuning knobs was quite unknown to me. I peered closely at the maker’s name and it read: ‘Kuraby-Sankowa Radio Corporation, Osaka and Shanghai’. It didn’t mean a thing to me, any more than the jumble of Chinese characters engraved beneath it. The wave-lengths and receiving stations on the transmitting waveband were marked in both Chinese and English and the needle was locked on Foochow. Perhaps Professor Witherspoon was the kind-hearted sort of employer who allowed his homesick workers to speak to their relatives in China. But perhaps he wasn’t.
I closed the door softly and turned my attention to the upper part of the desk. The professor might have known I was coming, he hadn’t even bothered to pull down the roll-top. After five minutes’ methodical search I was beginning to understand why he hadn’t bothered, there was nothing in the desk-top drawers and pigeon-holes worth concealing. I was about to give it up and fold my tent when I looked again at the most obvious thing on that desk-the blotting pad with its four-cornered leather holder. I took the blotters out of the holder and looked down at the piece of thin parchment paper that had been concealed between the lowest blotter and the pad.
It was a type-written list of six lines, each line consisting of a double-barrelled name followed by figures, eight figures every time. The first line read: ‘Pelican-Takishmaru 20007815’, the second: ‘Linkiang-Hawetta 10346925’ and so on with the other four lines containing equally meaningless names and combinations of figures. Then there was a space of an inch, then another line which read: ‘Every hour 46 Tombola’.
I could make nothing of it. It seemed to be about the most useless information-if that’s what it was-that anyone could ever want. Or I could be looking at the most important code I’d ever seen. Either way, it didn’t seem much help to me. But it might help later. Colonel Raine reckoned I’d a photographic memory, but not for this kind of junk. I took pencil and paper from the professor’s desk, copied the writing, put the parchment back where I’d found it, took off my shoe, folded the paper and placed it, wrapped in some waterproof cellophane, between the sole of my foot and my sock. I didn’t fancy making that traverse through the passage to the kitchen again, so I left through a window remote from Hewell’s and the workers’ houses.
Twenty minutes later I was well clear of all the houses and rose painfully to my feet. I hadn’t travelled so far on my hands, elbows and knees since my nursery days and I’d lost the hang of the thing: moreover, years of not moving around on them had made mine quite unsuitable for this kind of locomotion and they ached fiercely: but they weren’t in any worse condition than the clothes that covered them.
The sky was almost completely overcast, but not quite, and every now and then a sudden unveiling of the almost full moon made me drop quickly into the shelter of some scrub or bush and wait until the sky darkened over again. I was following the line of the railway tracks which led from the crushing mills and drying shed round to the south and then, presumably, west of the island. I was very interested in this line and its destination. Professor Witherspoon had carefully refrained from making any mention of what lay on the other side of the island, but for all his care Professor Witherspoon talked too much. He’d told me that the phosphate company used to take 1,000 tons a day out of the hillside, and as it wasn’t there any more they must have taken it away. That meant a ship, a big ship, and no big ship would ever have used that tiny floating pier of logs below the professor’s house, even if it could have approached it closely enough in the shallow lagoon water, which it couldn’t. Something bigger was needed, something much bigger: a stone or concrete pier, maybe one made from coral blocks, and either a crane or a raised hopper with a canted loading chute. Maybe Professor Witherspoon hadn’t wished me to walk in this direction.