“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 shark-repellent 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 mountains 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 completely seal off the end of the tunnel and then our pals could 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 old 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 pajama 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 of 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 close 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 was 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 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 sputtering 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-repellent canister and a darkish evil-smelling 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-repellent did to the sharks, but it certainly repelled me.