My Brother Michael (30 page)

My hands were spread flat against the inner side of the slab. My eyes ached with the darkness. It was cold again. I had to exert all my self-control to stop myself running out and across the cave after him into the blessed sunlight.

At length I turned and made my way rather drearily back to the bright solitude of Apollo’s sanctury.

* * *

How long I waited there I don’t know. At first I sat quietly enough in a corner where the sun fell unmasked by leaves, gazing at the statue of the god and trying to empty my mind of all worry about what was going on outside.

But after a while the very beauty and stillness of the place began to oppress me. I found I could sit still no longer, and, getting to my feet, I picked up Nigel’s water-pot and carried it over to the spring. Under the thin trickle I rinsed it carefully, and drank. I rummaged in Simon’s haversack and found what remained of our food, half of which I ate. After that I got myself another drink. Then I fidgeted about the little glade, examining the statue more closely, looking – but without touching them – at the broken pieces of gold in the grass, fingering the leaves and ferns …

When I found myself stooping for a third time to drink at the spring, I realised that fear had given place to a sort of impatient irritation. Sunlight and peace had done their work too well; I was now thoroughly on the fidget. I found myself glancing almost second by second at the watch on my wrist – an automatic act which irritated my nerves still further, as I hadn’t the remotest idea what time it had been when Simon left me. I hovered near the mouth of the tunnel, fingering my torch …

After all, I told myself, I was perfectly safe. Simon was with Dimitrios, and I wasn’t in the least afraid of Nigel. I wanted something to do; I wanted to know what was going on; I wanted Simon’s presence …

I went cautiously along the tunnel, back into darkness, hesitated in the shelter of the slab, then let myself through into the main cave.

I, too, used my torch this time. A last absurd jump of the nerves made me send the light skating once round the vaulted darkness, almost as if I expected to find that, after all, Dimitrios had not gone. But the place was empty. There really was nothing to be afraid of; if he came back I would hear him, and would have ample time to take sanctuary again. Moreover, Simon was on his tail, and if Dimitrios returned I could depend on Simon to come with him.

The torch-beam was steady now. I went softly across to the arch of the other tunnel, and then turned off the light. I felt my way carefully along the wall of the curving passage, until, as I rounded the first bend, the darkness slackened, and I could see my way.

There was no box standing beside the entrance. Dimitrios must have set off carrying it. So much the better, I thought vaguely. It meant he did intend to go right down to the jeep; and it would slow him down and make it easier for Simon to follow him.

I edged forward until I could see out into the corrie.

Here, too, that faint sense of surprise assailed me to see it unchanged; dazzlingly-hot, still, deserted …

The glare hit at the eyes. I could smell the dust and the mule dung, and some dried aromatic plant that crumbled to powder under the hand I put up to the rock beside me. There was no sound at all. Nothing moved; even the hot air hung still.

I hesitated. The temptation to get out of the cave was strong, to climb the cliff-path above me, and take refuge somewhere higher up the mountain where I could at once be free and yet hidden, and, more important, see any movement that there might chance to be near the corrie. But Simon must know where to find me, and he had told me to stay here. I must stay.

I went back into the cave.

I remember that I stood there for some minutes, looking round me almost idly. I was trying to picture the place before the earthquake that had first shaken down some of the stuff that blocked the aisles and recesses between the pillars. It was very possible that this had been a sacred cave. Here the Apollo had been carried by hasty, reverent hands; here, perhaps, sacrifices and other acts of worship had been made before the holy place had been finally sealed and hidden and left to its two thousand years of silence.

The beam of my torch suddenly dimmed, then brightened again. But the warning spurred me into movement. With only one brief glance back at the entrance, and a couple of seconds’ pause to listen for sounds of Dimitrios’ approach, I set myself to a careful exploration of the cave.

I don’t quite know what I was looking for. I certainly wasn’t consciously hoping to find further ‘treasure’ – either of the kind in Angelos’ hoard, or relics of Apollo’s worship. But it wasn’t very long before I did in fact come on evidence of another cache. In a deep bay between two pillars, at the edge of the cave
not far from the stack of boxes, a pile of rubble – a shallow barrow of the stuff heaped away in a bay of rock – looking as if it had been recently disturbed.

I approached it and bent over, sending the now perceptibly dimming beam probing among the broken fragments.

I could see nothing that suggested boxes or articles concealed there, but, quite clear in the dust at my feet, there was the print of a rope-soled shoe, and the marks beside it as of something being dragged.

I went closer and stooped to peer. The beam slid over the pile, caught on something, and halted. It jerked in my hand once, then fixed, still, and far too bright now, on what lay behind the pile of rock and dirt.

The murderer hadn’t bothered to bury Nigel. His body had been dragged and then flung into this meagre hiding, and now lay, stiff and horrible and indescribably grotesque, between the heaped rubble and the wall of the cave.

In a paralysed moment before I dropped the torch from a numbed hand, and let the merciful darkness loose again, I saw what had happened to Nigel. You can see an awful lot in a split second’s acute terror and shock: the picture your brain registers then is complete, the stuff of a million lingering nightmares still to come. Nothing is missed: every bestial detail is there for the mind to come back to, turn over, re-picture without ceasing.

He had been tied. The rope had gone now – no doubt the murderer had need of it – but the boy’s
wrists were scored raw where he had struggled. He had been tied, and tortured. In that one glance I had seen the shabby green shirt ripped down off one thin shoulder, and, on the upper arm, shocking against the peeling skin, a series of marks whose sickening regularity could mean only one thing. He had been burned four or five times, deliberately. Other things I saw that, at the time, meant nothing, but which, in nightmare recapitulations of that second’s horror, I have since seen and recognised a score of times. I don’t intend to describe them. Let it remain that Nigel had died, in pain. His eyes were open. I remember how they gleamed in the light of the torch. And his teeth clenched, grinning, on some fragment that might have been skin … Dimitrios’ bitten thumb … the filthy murderous hand that had slid down my arm yesterday at the Roseate cliff.

It was on that flash of realisation that the torch dropped and the dark stamped down. I don’t know what happened then. I remember, one moment, the picture in the torchlight, vivid, terrible, complete, then the next moment it was dark, and the rock was cold; it was crushing me, tearing my clothes, tripping my running footsteps; it was soft to my falling, whimpering body …

I was lying at Apollo’s feet on the damp moss. My hair was wet, and my hands, and the breast of my frock. Something was hurting my right hand where it pressed deeply into the grass. It was the broken end of the gold arrow. I sat looking at it for a very long time before I even saw it.

Dimitrios, I was thinking stupidly, confusedly; Dimitrios … He had murdered Nigel yesterday. While we had been here in the corrie, in the bright sunlight, Nigel had been in the cave with his murderer, tied and hurt and – no, that wouldn’t do; he hadn’t been gagged, and we’d have heard him. He was dead before we got up here, and then Dimitrios had come down to Delphi to search his room …

I stared down at the beautifully-worked fragment of gold in my hand, and tried to think … But all that would come to me was that Nigel, poor muddled, eager young Nigel, who was a good artist, had been murdered by Dimitrios …

Dimitrios!
This time the thought came anything but confusedly: it whipped into my brain with a point as sharp as the one that pricked my palm. I was on my feet, and the gold arrow spun, glittering, forgotten, to the grass. Dimitrios, whom Simon and I had casually dismissed as someone who could easily be ‘dealt with’ – Dimitrios was out there on the hillside, and Simon was tailing him, waiting for a chance to attack him, unconscious of the fact that the Greek was a murderer as vile and ruthless as ever his cousin Angelos had been …

Momentarily I had forgotten poor Nigel. I ran back into the tunnel with never a thought of what lay there in the cave.

The darkness came up against me like a tangling net. As I rounded the first bend in the tunnel I had to stop short, then feel my way forward slowly, my hands shaking and slipping on the cool rock.

I reached the slab. I pressed my body into the narrow cleft, craning to peer forward into the cave. But I couldn’t see at all; the darkness boiled still against my wide-open eyes with shapes and spangles of a million fizzing colours. Without my torch, and blinded like this with my swift dive back out of the light, I would be helpless to cross the cave. I shut my eyes and waited there for the swarming dark to clear. The slab felt cold and damp under my flat-spread hands.

Then I heard him.

I thought at first it was the surge of the knocking pulses that nailed me to the rock, but then I knew it was the soft tread of rope-soled shoes in the dust.

I stayed where I was, frozen to the rock, and opened my eyes.

I could see now. Light was moving in the cave, a powerful light. Not Simon – Simon’s torch, like mine, had begun to fail … and, in any case, the steps had not been Simon’s. But at least where Dimitrios was, Simon would be. And from the way the Greek came forward into the cave with unhurried confidence, he still didn’t know of Simon’s presence.

Even as the thought came, I heard a tiny sound outside the cave. My eyes flew in apprehension to the Greek. He was behind the light and I couldn’t see him, but the moving beam never faltered. He hadn’t heard. The sound came again, and now I knew it for what it was; the chink of metal as a bit jangled. Dimitrios had brought the mule.

The Greek passed out of my small range of vision. I waited till I heard the familiar scrape and shift of a box
and the clatter of settling stones, and the grunts and short breathing of effort. Then I inched my way nearer the edge of the slab and peered round it, a centimetre at a time.

He had put the torch down in a little niche above him, so that the beam was directed on to the rock-pile. His thick powerful body was stooping over this. His back was towards me; he had laid his jacket down beside him, and under the blue shirt I could see the bulge and play of his muscles as he heaved at one of the half-buried boxes. Then he dragged it out into his arms, and straightened up holding it. I hadn’t realised before how immensely strong he must be. He carried the box slowly over to the cave mouth, and went out of sight with it up into the tunnel. I heard him dump it there. I heard him coming back. Still with that unhurried soft tread he came out of the tunnel-mouth, into the steady beam that illumined the cave.

For the second time in those few minutes, I felt the kick of shock over the heart.

It wasn’t Dimitrios. It wasn’t anyone I had seen before.

But, hard on the moment of shock and confusion, I knew that I was wrong. I had seen him before, and more than once. Now, faced in the queerly-lit darkness with the heavy head, the thick dark curls tight like a bull’s and crisping down the swarthy cheekbones towards the smiling thick-lipped mouth, I knew him. This was the Phormis head of Nigel’s drawing: this was the face like an archaic statue’s, with the wide fleshy cheekbones and the up-cornered, tight-lipped smile.
More – this was the face I had seen, unnoticing and unremembering, bending over the engine of the jeep outside Dimitrios’ cottage. And it must after all have been
this
face, not the Apollo (which it was certain she had never seen), that Danielle had recognised among Nigel’s drawings …

But before I could follow this further, two other memories flashed, sparks into the dry tinder of fear … Nigel saying to Danielle: ‘That’s a chap I saw today on Parnassus …’ and Simon’s voice in the dark, translating for me something Stephanos had told him: ‘He’d kill, and smile while he did it. Always that smile …’

Angelos
. Angelos himself. And Dimitrios was God knew where. And Simon was with him.

Angelos turned back to the pile of rubble. The torchlight slid over the thick skin shiny with sweat. The smile never altered. No doubt he had smiled as he and Dimitrios killed Nigel between them. No doubt he would smile when Simon, having disposed of Dimitrios, came openly up to the cave to find me …

Angelos straightened his thick body and stood still, as if listening. He turned his head. There were sounds outside, not metal-shod this time, but the sounds of someone hurrying towards the cave.

I remember thinking, with a kind of numbed calmness, that if I screamed it would warn Simon – but it would warn Angelos, too. He was expecting Dimitrios, and he could have no idea that Simon and I were here. He had made no move to douse the torch. But, on the other hand, if Simon had dealt with Dimitrios, Simon, too, would be off his guard.

The steps came closer; were in the tunnel. Angelos’ hand went to his pocket. I took in my breath.

With a stumbling rush and a flurry of breathing, Danielle hurried into the cave.

T
HE
man relaxed, but his voice, pitched low, was angry. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’