Dinner over, I pulled myself to my feet, reached for the crutches, thanked the professor for the meal and said that we couldn’t possibly trespass on his kindness and hospitality any more that night. We knew, I said, that he was a busy man. He protested, but not too violently, and asked if there were any books he could send across to our house. I said we would be pleased, but that I’d like to take a few steps down to the beach first and he clucked his tongue and wondered whether it would not be too much for me but when I said that he had only to look out of the window and see for himself how little I was exerting myself, he supposed doubtfully it would be all right. We said goodnight and left them.
I’d some difficulty in negotiating the steep bank overhanging the top of the beach, but after that it was easy. The sand was dry and hard-packed and the crutches scarcely sank in at all. We went about a couple of hundred yards down and along the beach, always keeping in line of sight of the professor’s windows, till we came to the edge of the lagoon. There we sat down. The moon was as it had been the previous night, one moment there, the next vanished behind drifting cloud. I could hear the distant murmur of the surf breaking on the reef of the lagoon and the faint rustling whisper of the night wind in the nodding palms. There were no exotic tropical scents, I supposed that suffocating grey phosphate dust had crushed the life out of all but the trees and the toughest plants, all I could smell was the sea.
Marie touched my arm with gentle fingers. “How does it feel?”
“Improving. Enjoy your afternoon out?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. You were too happy by half. Learn anything that might be useful?”
“How could I?” she asked disgustedly. “He did nothing but babble and talk nonsense all afternoon.”
“It’s the Night of Mystery and those clothes you wear,” I pointed out kindly. “You’re driving the man out of his mind.”
“I don’t seem to be driving you out of your mind,” she said tartly.
“No,” I agreed, then, after a few seconds, added bitterly: “You can’t drive me out of what I haven’t got.”
“What strange modesty is this?”
“Look at this beach,” I said. “Has it ever occurred to you that four or five days ago in London, before we even took off, that someone knew that we would be sitting here tonight? My God, if ever I get out of this I’m going to devote the rest of my life to tiddley-winks. I’m out of my depth in this line. I knew I was right about Fleck, I knew I was. He was no killer.”
“You’re hopping about too much,” Marie protested. “Sure, he wasn’t going to kill us. Not nice Captain Fleck. He was just going to tap us on the head and push us over the side. The sharks would have done the dirty work for him.”
“Remember when we were sitting on that upper deck? Remember I told you that I felt there was something wrong but that I couldn’t put my finger on it? Remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Good old Bentall,” I said savagely. “Never misses a thing. The ventilator-the ventilator we used as a hearing aid, the one facing the radio room. It shouldn’t have been facing the radio shack, it should have been facing forward. Remember we got no air down there. No bloody wonder.”
“There’s no need to-”
“Sorry. But you see it all now, don’t you? He knew that even a fool like me would discover that voices from the radio room could be heard down that pipe. Ten gets one he had a concealed mike down in that hold which let him know whenever Bentall, the Einstein of espionage, made such shattering discoveries. He knew there were rats there, and he knew that the rats would discourage us from sleeping on a low bunk, so Henry pushes back some battens which coincidentally happen to be at the very spot where we can start searching for tinned food and drink after we’d passed up that deliberately awful breakfast they gave us. More coincidences: behind the tinned food are battens with loose screws and behind them are lifebelts. Fleck didn’t exactly hang up a sign saying ‘Lifebelts in this box”-but he came pretty close to it. Then Fleck puts the wind up me good and proper, without in any way appearing to do so, and more or less lets us know that the decision to execute or not will be coming through at seven. So we latch ourselves on to that ventilator and when the word comes through we leave, complete with lifebelts. What do you bet that Fleck hadn’t even loosened the screw on the hatch to make things easy-I could probably have forced it with my little finger.”
“But-but we could still have drowned,” Marie said slowly. “We might have missed the reef or lagoon.”
“What-miss a six-mile wide target? You said old Fleck seemed to be changing course pretty often and you were right. He wanted to make good and sure that when we jumped we did so opposite the middle of the reef where we couldn’t miss. He even slowed right down so that we couldn’t hurt ourselves when we jumped overboard. Probably standing there killing himself laughing when Bentall and Hopeman, two stooges in search of a comedian, pussy-footed it down the stern. And those voices I heard on the reef that night? John and James out in their canoe, seeing that we didn’t even put a foot wrong and sprain an ankle. God, how much of a sucker can you be?”
There was a long silence. I lit a couple of cigarettes and gave her one. The moon had gone behind a cloud and her face was only a pale blue in the darkness. Then she said: “Fleck and the professor-they must be working hand in hand.”
“Can you see any other possibility?”
“What do they want with us?”
“I’m not sure yet.” I was sure, but this was one thing I couldn’t tell her.
“But-but why all the fake build-up? Why couldn’t Fleck have sailed right in and handed us over to the professor?”
“There’s an answer to that, too. Whoever is behind this is a very smart boy indeed. There’s a reason for everything he does.”
“You-do you think the professor-is he the man behind-”
“I don’t know what he is. Don’t forget the barbed wire. The Navy is there. They may have come to play skittles, but I don’t think so. There’s something big, very big, and something very secret going on on the other side of the island. Whoever is in charge there will be taking no chances. They know Witherspoon is there, and that fence doesn’t mean a thing, that’s just to discourage wandering employees, they’ll have investigated him down to the last nail in his shoes. The Services have some very clever investigators indeed and if they’re content to have him there that means he’s got a clean bill of health. And he knows the Navy is there. Fleck and the professor in cahoots. The professor and the Navy in cahoots. What kind of sense do you make out of it?”
“You trust the professor, then? You’re saying, in effect, that he is on the level?”
“I’m not saying anything. I’m just thinking out loud.”
“No, you’re not,” she insisted. “If he’s accepted by the Navy, he must be on the level. That’s what you say. If he is, then why the Chinese crouching in the darkness down by the fence, why the man-killing dog, why the trip-wire?”
“I’m just guessing. He may have warned his employees to keep clear of that place and they know of the dog and the wire. I’m not saying those were his Chinese employees I saw, I only assumed it. If there’s something big and secret happening on the other side of the island, don’t forget that secrets can be lost by people breaking out as well as by people breaking in. The Navy may well have some top men on this side, to see that no one breaks- out. Maybe the professor knows all about it-I think he does. We’ve lost too many secrets to the communist world during the past decade through sheer bad security. The government may have learned its lesson.”
“But where do we come in?” she said helplessly. “It’s so-so terribly complicated. And how can you explain away the attempt to cripple you?”
“I can’t. But the more I think of it the more convinced I am that I’m only a tiny pawn in this and that nearly always tiny pawns have to be sacrificed to win the chess game.”
“But why?” she insisted. “Why? And what reason can a harmless old duffer like Professor Witherspoon have for-“