There was no one there. One quick traverse of the torch beam round a cave no more than twenty feet in diameter was enough to show me that there was no one there: but there were signs that someone had been there, and very recently.
I moved forward, stubbed my toe heavily against something solid, looked down and saw a large lead-acid accumulator. Wires from this led to a switch on the wall. I pressed the switch and the cave was flooded with light.
Perhaps ‘flooded’ is the wrong word, it was just by comparison with the weak beam from my torch. A naked lamp, forty watts or thereabouts, suspended from the middle of the roof: but it gave all the illumination I wanted.
Stacked in the middle of the chamber were two piles of oiled yellow boxes. I was almost certain what they were before I crossed to examine them, and as soon as I saw the stencils on top I was certain. The last time I had seen those boxes with the legend ‘Champion Spark Plugs’ stencilled on them was in the hold of Fleck’s schooner. Machine-gun ammunition and ammonal explosive. So perhaps I hadn’t been imagining things after all when I thought I had seen lights that night we’d been marooned on the reef. I had seen lights. Captain Fleck unloading cargo.
By the right-hand wall were two wooden racks, holding twenty machine-pistols and automatic carbines of a type I had never seen before: they were heavily coated with grease against the drippingly damp atmosphere of the cave. Stacked beside the racks were three squarish metal boxes, for a certainty ammunition for the guns. I looked at the racked guns and the boxes and for the first time in my life I could understand how a gourmet felt when he sat down to an eight-course dinner prepared by a cordon-bleu chef. And then I opened the first box, the second and the third, and I knew exactly how the same gourmet would have felt if, while still adjusting his napkin, the maitre d’hotel had come along and told him that the shop was shut for the night.
The boxes contained not a single round of carbine or machine-pistol ammunition. One box contained black blasting powder, another beehive blocks of amatol explosive and a drum of .44 short-gun ammunition, the third primers, fulminate of mercury detonators, about a hundred yards R.D.X. fuses and a flat tin case of chemical igniters, most of it stuff, presumably, that Hewell used in his blasting operations. And that was all. My pipe dreams about a loaded machine-pistol and the radical difference it would make to the balance of power on the island were just that, pipe dreams and no more. Ammunition without guns to fire them, guns without ammunition to fit them. Useless, all useless.
I switched out the light and left. It would have taken me only five minutes to wreck the firing mechanisms on every carbine and machine pistol there. I was going to spend the rest of my days bitterly regretting the fact that the thought had never even occurred to me.
Twenty yards further on I came to a similar door on the right of the tunnel wall. No key to this one: it didn’t need it for the door wasn’t locked. I laid a gentle hand on the knob, turned it and eased the door open a couple of inches. The stench of foetid air that issued through the narrow crack was an almost physical blow in my face, a putrescent mephitis that wrinkled my nostrils in nauseated repugnance and lifted all the hairs on the back of my head. I felt suddenly very cold.
I opened the door further, passed inside and shut it behind me. The switch was in the same place as it had been in the previous cavern. I pressed it and looked round the cave.
But this was no cave. This was a tomb.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Friday 1:30 A.M.-3:30 A.M.
Some freak in the atmosphere of the cave, possibly a combination of the moisture and the phosphate of lime, had maintained the bodies in a state of almost perfect preservation. Decomposition had set in, but to a negligible extent only, certainly not enough to mar any of the essential features of the nine corpses lying where they had been flung in a rough row at the far end of the cave. The dark stains on white and khaki shirt-fronts made it easy to see how they had died.
Again the ice-chill hand of fear touched the back of my neck. I looked quickly around as if expecting to see the old man with the scythe still waiting patiently in some dark corner of the cave. Waiting for Bentall. Only, there were no dark corners. Nothing, except the round smooth dank walls, the shabby stained bundles on the floor and the battery supplying feeble power to the dim yellow lamp, barely more than head high, that dangled from the centre of the low-vaulted roof.
With my hand to my nose and breathing through my mouth only, I switched on my torch to give extra illumination and scanned the dead faces.
Six of the dead men were complete strangers to me, labourers by the looks of their clothes and hands, and I knew I had never seen them before. But the seventh I recognised immediately. White hair, white moustache, white beard, here was the real Professor Witherspoon: even in death his resemblance to the impostor who had taken his place was startling in its closeness. Beside him lay a giant of a man, a man with red hair and a great red handle-bar moustache: this, beyond any doubt, would be the Dr. ‘Red’ Carstairs whose portrait I had been shown in a magazine. The ninth man, in a much better state of preservation than the others, I identified without a second glance: his presence there confirmed that the men who had advertised for a second fuel research specialist had indeed been in need of one: it was Dr. Charles Fairfield, my old chief in the Hepworth and Ordnance Fuel Research, one of the eight scientists who had been lured out to Australia.
Sweat was pouring down my face but I was shivering with cold. What was Dr. Fairfield doing there? Why had he been killed? Old Fairfield was the last man to stumble upon anything. A brilliant man in his own field, he was as shortsighted as a dodo and had a monumental incuriosity about everybody and everything except his own work and his consuming private passion for archaeology. And the archaeological tie-up between Fairfield and Witherspoon was so blindingly obvious that it just didn’t make any sense at all. Whatever reason lay behind Dr. Fairfield’s sudden disappearance from England, nothing was more certain than that it was entirely unconnected with whatever pick and shovel expertise he might show in abandoned mine-workings. But then what in the name of God was he doing here?
I felt as if I were in an ice-box, but the sweat was trickling more heavily than ever down the back of my neck. Still holding the torch in my right hand-the knife was in my left-I worked a handkerchief out of my right trouser pocket and mopped the back of my neck. To the left and front of me I caught a momentary flash of something glittering on the wall of the cave, something metallic, obviously, reflecting the beam of the still burning torch. But what? What metallic object was there? Apart from the dead men the only other objects in that cave were the light fitting and the light switch, and both were made of bakelite. I held the torch and handkerchief, both still over my shoulder, perfectly steady. The glimmer of light on the cave wall was still there. I stood like a statue, my eyes never leaving that gleam on the wall. The light moved.
My heart stopped. The medical profession can say what it likes, but my heart stopped. Then slowly, carefully, I brought down both torch and handkerchief, transferred the torch to my left hand as if to enable me to shove my handkerchief away with my right, then dropped the handkerchief, clutched the hilt of the knife in my right hand and whirled round all in one half second of time.
There were two of them, no more than four feet inside the cave, still fifteen feet distant from me. Two Chinese, already moving wide apart to encircle me, one in dungaree trousers and cotton shirt, the other in a pair of cotton shorts, both big muscular men, both in their bare feet. Their unwinking eyes, the oriental immobility of the yellow faces served only to emphasize, not mask, the cold implacability of the expressions. You didn’t have to know your Emily Post to realise that they just weren’t paying a social call. Nor would Emily have given them any medals for their calling cards, two of the most lethal-looking double-edged throwing knives I’d ever seen: the books on etiquette covered practically every possible situation in which strangers first made the other’s acquaintance, but they’d missed out on this one.