My Brother Michael (35 page)

I stooped giddily, and reached for a lump of rough rock, lifting it in hands that shook like leaves. I could hit him as I had last night … if I could have found a weapon – perhaps the torch—

The gun
.

I dropped the knob of rock and flung myself, with sobbing little breaths, at the pile of stones where the gun had gone. Here, surely, it had struck and slid out of sight? No sign. Then here? No. Here … oh, dear God,
here
…

There
, white on the limestone, a scratch had marked its passage … I drove a shaking hand down between the jammed rocks. They scraped the skin and it hurt me but I hardly noticed. I thrust my arm down as far as I could. My fingers, stretching, touched something cold and smooth … metal. I couldn’t reach it; the tips of my fingers slipped over it, no more. I could feel my lips trembling as the tears spilt salt on to them. I lay down hard against the stones and thrust my arm further into the narrowing crack. The cruel stone rasped at the skin and I felt blood running down my wrist. My fingers slid further, curled, gripped. I had the gun. I tried to withdraw it. But with my hand now curved round the butt I couldn’t pull it back between the stones. I dragged at it, hopelessly, stupidly, and my hand hurt till I cried out with the pain, but I couldn’t drag the gun out …

Simon had twisted back from the gouging thumb. The Greek lunged violently to one side as the other’s hold slackened, and then somehow, was free. With a movement incredibly quick for a man of his build he had rolled aside and was bunching to jump to his feet. As he went I saw his hand close, like mine, on a cruelly jagged chunk of rock. But Simon was as quick. The same movement that threw him back and away from the clawing hand had brought him to his feet. He saw the Greek clutch the rock. Even as the fist closed on it and the arm-muscles tightened Simon jumped. His foot stamped down on the man’s hand. The rock was undermost, and I heard the man make a dreadful sound as his hand was smashed down on to it. But he whipped over and brought his foot up with what looked like appalling force into Simon’s groin. Simon saw it coming, and tried to sidestep. The foot grazed the inside of his thigh. Simon’s hand came up under the lashing ankle: I saw a heave and a twist, and the Greek crashed back on to his side like a felled ox, and Simon plummeted down on to him again in the smother of dust. Another blow, a sick sound of flesh and bone smacking together, and then Angelos was uppermost, his fist smashing down like a hammer …

I opened my hand and let the gun go. I dropped to the base of the pile of stones, and began to claw at them with those useless, shaking fingers, trying to pull the heavy stuff aside. From behind me came the thud and slither of their bodies on the ground, the torn dreadful breathing, and, again, the sudden sharp sound of pain. I thought it came from Simon.

The stone under my hands gave way and I threw it down and tore at the next. And the next. And then a pile of dry earth and small jagged pebbles.

Then I saw the blue-dark gleam of the gun.

I thrust the last lump of rock aside and pushed my hand through. The muzzle was towards me. I grabbed it and dragged the thing out. I didn’t even think once of the danger of holding it like that. I just dragged it out between the rough stones and turned, holding it in my aspen hands. I remember thinking with surprise how heavy it was …

I’d never touched a gun before in my life. But of course it was quite easy. You simply pointed it and pressed the trigger; I knew that. Provided I got close enough … and if the men would only break apart for a moment and let me see through that stifling dust … One simply pointed the thing and pulled the trigger, and Angelos would be dead, blasted out of life in a fraction of time. It didn’t occur to me that this was in any way a wrong or a momentous thing to do. I took a couple of faltering steps in the direction of the struggling bodies on the ground …

It was funny, but it was difficult to walk. The ground was unsteady and the dust dragged at my feet and the gun was too heavy and the sky was far too bright but still I couldn’t see properly …

The locked bodies on the ground moved as the man underneath made a seemingly titanic effort. Both men were covered with dust; I couldn’t see who it was lying prone with one arm twisted into that cruel lock behind his back … or who it was who lay astride him, shifting
his grip now, straining in some final agonising effort. If only they would break apart … if only I could see which was Angelos …

The man uppermost lay clamped over the other, one hand hard round the wrist of the locked arm, his own free arm flung round the prone man’s neck in a tight embrace. As I watched, the embrace tightened still further …

The prostrate man’s head came painfully back. The red dust was thick in the black curls. The broad cruel face was smeared red with it, too, an archaic mask carved grimacing in red sandstone. It was Angelos who lay there in the dust, breath sobbing through the grinning lips, trying with weaker and weaker movements to throw Simon off his body.

I stood there, the gun drooping in my hand, the driving purpose snapped in me, staring like someone in a dream at the two bodies that heaved, breathing as one, on the ground at my feet.

A muscle bunched in Simon’s shoulder. The Greek’s head moved back another fraction. The grin was a rictus, fixed, horrible. His body gave one last desperate heave to rid itself of its killer, threshing sideways across the dusty rock. But Simon’s grip didn’t shift. Even as the two bodies, still locked, slithered a yard or so across the dusty rock to fetch up hard against the cairn where Michael had been murdered, I saw Simon’s arm tense, and jerk tightly back, and heard Angelos’ breath tear out of his throat in a sort of whistling gasp that broke off short …

I knew then that Simon didn’t need me or the gun. I
turned aside and sat down on the boulder. I leaned back very wearily against the hot rock and shut my eyes.

After a while there was silence.

Angelos lay still, sprawled face downward against the little cairn. Simon got very slowly to his feet. He stood for a moment looking down. His face was filthy with dust and blood, and lined with fatigue. I could see how his muscles slumped with weariness as he stood there. He put up the back of his hand to wipe the blood from his face. His hands were bloody too.

Then he turned away and for the first time looked at me. He made as if to speak, and then I saw his tongue come out to wet the dust-caked lips. I answered his look quickly.

‘I’m quite all right, Simon. He–he didn’t hurt me.’ My voice had come back, hoarse and not too steady. But there was nothing to say. I whispered: ‘There’s a rope on the mule. It’s down by the cave.’

‘Rope?’ His voice wasn’t his own either. He was coming slowly towards me. ‘What for?’

‘Him, of course. If he came round—’

‘My dear Camilla,’ said Simon. And then, as he saw the look in my face, in a kind of anger: ‘What else did you expect me to do?’

‘I don’t know. Of course you had to kill him. It’s just – of course you did.’

His mouth twisted. It wasn’t quite a smile, but nothing about him seemed, just at the moment, to be like himself. It was a stranger who stood in front of
me in the blazing sunlight, with a stranger’s voice, and something gone from his face that I remembered there. He stood there in silence, looking down at his hands. I still remember the blood on them.

The nausea had gone, and the world steadied. I said quickly, almost desperately, out of a rush of shame: ‘Simon. Forgive me. I – I guess I can’t think straight yet. Of course you had to. It was only … coming so close to it. But you were right. There comes a time when one has to … accept … things like this. It was damnable of me.’

He did smile then, a trace of genuine amusement showing through the weariness ‘Not really. But – just exactly what were you planning to do with that?’

‘With what?’ Following his look, I stared stupidly down at the gun in my hand.

He leaned forward and took it from me gently. The blood-stained fingers avoided mine. They were shaking a little. He laid the gun carefully to one side. ‘I think perhaps it’s safer there.’

Silence. He stood over me, looking down still with that stranger’s look.

‘Camilla.’

I met it then.

‘If you hadn’t got rid of that thing,’ he said, ‘I should be dead.’

‘And so should I. But you came.’

‘My dear, of course. But if he’d got to that gun …’ A tiny pause, so slight it didn’t seem that what he said could be important. ‘Would you have shot him, Camilla?’

Quite suddenly, I was shaking uncontrollably. I said, with a sort of violence: ‘Yes. Yes, I would. I was just going to, but then you … you killed him yourself …’

I began to cry then, helplessly I reached out blindly with both hands, and took his between them, blood and all.

He was sitting beside me on the boulder, with his arm round me. I don’t remember what he said: I think part of the time he was swearing under his breath, and this seemed so unlike him that I had to fight harder to control the little spurts of laughter that shook me through the sobbing.

I managed to say: ‘I’m sorry. I’m all right. I’m not hysterical. It’s–it’s reaction or something.’

He said with violence, the more shocking because it was the first time I had heard it from him: ‘I’ll not forgive myself in a hurry for dragging you into this, by God! If I’d had any idea—’

‘You didn’t drag me in. I asked to be in, so I had to take what came, didn’t I? It wasn’t your fault it turned out as it did. A man does what he has to do, and since you
did
feel like that about Michael after all, you did it. That’s all.’

‘About Michael?’

‘Yes. You said the tragedy was over, but of course once you knew Angelos was still alive—’

‘My dear girl,’ said Simon, ‘you didn’t imagine that I really killed him for Mick, did you?’

I looked up at him rather numbly. ‘No? But you told Angelos—’

‘I was talking the language he’d understand. This is still Orestes’ country, after all.’ He looked down at the scuffled dust between his feet. ‘Oh, I admit it was partly Mick – once I found myself here, and facing him. I felt murderous enough about him when I knew he was still alive, even before Dimitrios told me the rest.’

‘Dimitrios? Of course. He told you?’

‘He was persuaded to, quite quickly. Niko turned up and helped me.’ A pause. ‘He told me what the two of them had done to Nigel.’

‘Then you know …’ The breath I drew was three parts relief. I remembered that look in Simon’s eyes, and the smooth single-mindedness with which he had killed Angelos. I shivered a little. ‘I see.’

‘And then,’ he said, ‘there was you.’

I said nothing. My eyes were on two – no, three specks in the bright air, circling slowly, high above the corrie. Simon sat beside me without moving, looking at the trampled dust. He looked all at once unutterably weary. If it hadn’t been for the evidence sprawled across the stones one might almost have thought that he, not Angelos, had been beaten.
Any man’s death diminishes me
… I thought of Nigel, tumbled grotesquely behind the pile of dirt, and understood.

The silence drew out. Away somewhere on the mountain I thought I heard something, the clatter of stones, a breathless call. Simon didn’t move. I said: ‘Tell me about Angelos. How did he get into it? Why did he wait till now to come back?’

‘He’s been before. We were right in our guesses
about the search for the gold – the lights and voices, and Dimitrios’ questions – but we were wrong about the name of the seeker. It wasn’t Dimitrios himself. He knew nothing about the cache originally. When Angelos left Greece for Yugoslavia at the end of 1944, he intended to come back as soon as he could. But he committed murder – political murder this time – in his adopted country, and was put away for “life”. He was released two years ago, and came back secretly to look up his cousin. He let him into the secret, since he had to have somewhere to hide, and an agent to help him. They looked for the stuff – just as we guessed – but failed to find it. Dimitrios did his best to pump Stephanos, and the two of them must have searched desperately over the earthquake area at intervals through the spring and summer, then they gave up for the time being, and Angelos went back to live in Italy. I imagine he intended to come back again in the spring of this year, as soon as the snows had melted, but by then I had written to Stephanos, and the rumours were going about that I was coming to Delphi. He decided to wait and let us show him the place. That’s all.’

He glanced down at me. ‘And now what happened to you?’ Why on earth did you come out of the cave? Surely he never found you in there, in sanctuary?’

‘No.’ I told him then all that had happened since he had left me to follow Dimitrios. I found that I could tell it all quite calmly now, with that queer detachment I had felt in the cave, as if it were a play; as if these things had happened, not to me, but in some story I had read.
But I remember being glad of the feel of Simon’s arm round my shoulders, and of the heat of the sun.

He listened in silence, and when I had finished he still didn’t speak for some minutes. Then he said: ‘I seem to have rather more to forgive myself for than just bringing you in on – that.’ For the first time his eyes went back to the cairn where the body lay. They were as I first remembered them, vivid and hard and cool. ‘Quite a score,’ he said. ‘Mick, Nigel, poor silly little Danielle. And then, of course, you … It would almost take an Orestes, wouldn’t it?’ He took in his breath. ‘No, I doubt if the Furies, the Kindly Ones, will haunt me for this day’s work, Camilla.’

‘No, I don’t think they will.’

There was a shout from the gateway behind us. With a clatter of stones, Niko hurled himself into the corrie and raced down towards us.

‘Beautiful miss!’ he yelled. ‘
Kyrie
Simon! It’s all right! I’m here!’

He slithered to a halt in front of us. His startled gaze took us both in – my torn and filthy dress, the bruises, my scraped wrists and hands, and Simon covered with blood and dust and the marks of battle. ‘Mother of God, then he
was
here? Angelos was here? He got away? He—’