The Dark Crusader (14 page)

Professor Witherspoon explained, rather haltingly, what had happened-at least, his version of what had happened, a convincing amalgam of jammed combinations, top-heavy safes and sagging floors which made safes unstable-and Marie listened to him in stormy silence. If she was acting, she'd missed out on her profession: the quick breathing, the compressed lips, the slightly flared nostrils, the tightly clenched fists, those I could understand: but to get your face as pale as she did hers you really have to put your heart into it. When he'd finished I really thought she was going to start in on him, she didn't seem the slightest scared or awed by Hewell's towering bulk, but she seemed to control herself and said in an icy voice: "Thank you both very much for bringing my husband home. It was most kind of you. I'm sure it was all an accident. Good-night."

That hardly left the door open for any further conversational gambits and they took themselves off hoping aloud that I would be better the next day. What they were really hoping they kept to themselves and they forgot to say how they expected a broken bone to set overnight. For about ten seconds more Marie stood staring through the door by which they'd left, then whispered: "He's-he's terrifying, isn't he? He's like something left over from the dark ages."

"He's no beauty. Scared?"

"Of course I am." She stood still for some seconds longer, sighed, turned round and came and sat on the edge of my bed. For a long moment she looked down at me, like a person hesitating or making up her mind, then she touched me lightly on the forehead with both cool hands, smoothed her fingertips past my
hair
and looked down at me, propped up by a hand on either side of my head. She was smiling but there was no amusement in the smile and her hazel eyes were dark with worry.

"I'm sorry for all this," she murmured. "It-it's pretty bad, isn't it, Johnny?" She'd never called me that before.

"Terribly." I reached my hands up, put them round her neck and pulled her down till her face was buried in the pillow. She didn't resist any, recovering from the shock of a first-time close-up of Hewell would always take time or maybe she was just humouring a sick man. She had a cheek like a flower petal and she smelled of the sun and the sea. I put my lips close to her ear and whispered: "Go and check if they've really gone."

She stiffened as if she'd touched a live wire, then pushed herself upright and rose. She went to the door, peered through some interstices in the side screens, then said in a quiet voice: "They're both back in the professor's living room. I can see them lifting the safe into position."

"Put the lights out."

She crossed to the table, turned down the wick, cupped her hands above the top of the glass funnel and blew. The room was plunged into darkness. I swung off the bed, unwound the couple of yards of medical plaster they'd wrapped round splints and ankle, cursing softly as it stuck to the flesh, put the splints to one side, stood up and gave two or three experimental hops on my right foot. I was hopping almost as good as ever, the only pain was on the outside of my big toe which had taken the brunt of the weight of the safe when the sole had bent. I tried it again and it was still O.K. I sat down and began to pull on sock and shoe.

"What on earth are you doing?" Marie asked. The soft concern, I noticed with regret, had gone from her voice.

"Just testing," I said softly. "I think the old foot will carry me around a bit yet."

"But the bone-I thought the bone was broken."

"Just a natural fast healer." I tried the foot inside the shoe and hardly felt a thing. Then I told her what had happened. At the end she said: "I suppose you thought it was clever to fool me?"

I'd become used to a lot of feminine injustice in my life so I let it pass. She was too smart not to see how unfair she was, not, at least, when she'd cooled down. Why she had to cool down I didn't know, but when her temperature dropped she would realise the immense advantage I'd gained by having created the impression that I was completely incapacitated. I heard her moving across the room back to the bed and as she passed me she said quietly: "You told me to count the Chinese going in and out of the long hut."

"Well?"

"There were eighteen."

"Eighteen!" All I'd counted in the mine was eight.

"Eighteen."

"Notice what any of them was carrying when he came out?"

"I didn't see any come out. Not before it was dark."

"Uh-huh. Where's the torch?"

"Under my pillow. Here."

She turned in and shortly I could hear her slow even breathing, but I knew she wasn't asleep. I tore up strips of the plaster and stretched them across the face of the torch until there was only a quarter inch diameter hole left in the middle. Then I took up position by a crack in the side-screens where I could watch the professor's house. Hewell left shortly after eleven o'clock, went to his own house. I saw a light come on, then go out after about ten minutes.

I crossed to the cupboard where the Chinese boy had put our clothes, hunted around with the tiny spotlight of light until I'd found a pair of dark grey flannels and a blue shirt and quickly changed in the darkness. Taking a midnight walk in white shirt and white ducks was something that Colonel Raine wouldn't have approved of at all. Then I went back to Marie's bed and said softly: "You're not sleeping, are you?"

"What do you want?" No warmth in the voice, just none at all.

"Look, Marie, don't be silly. To fool them I had to fool you too when they were there. Don't you see the advantage of being mobile when they think I'm completely immobilised. What did you expect me to do? Stand there at the door supported by Hewell and the prof and sing out cheerily: 'Don't worry about this, dear. I'm only kidding'?"

"I suppose not," she said after a minute. "What did you want? Just to tell me that?"

"As a matter of fact it wasn't that, it was your eyebrows."

"My
what?"

"Eyebrows. Your hair is so blonde, the eyebrows so black. Are they real? The colour, I mean?"

"Are you all right?"

"I want to blacken my face. Mascara. I thought you might have-"

"Why didn't you say that in the first place instead of trying to be clever?" Whatever her intelligence said about 'forgive' some other part of her mind was against it. "No mascara. All I have is black shoe polish. Top drawer, right side."

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.