Levkas Man

by Innes, Hammond;

  I had cut down the revs and now he stood up so that he could see down the channel. ‘That island must be Tiglia. That was the site of the dig. I remember now.’ He reached absent-mindedly for the packet of cigarettes that I had left lying on the shelf above the instrument panel. ‘If I’d gone ashore that day, I might have been the one to discover those skull fragments.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have claimed it as your own discovery,’ I said.

  ‘No. And I suppose that’s the difference.’

  ‘But what happened?’ Sonia demanded. ‘You haven’t told us what happened.’

  He smiled. ‘You want it all spelled out for you. Well, just what I’d expected. We didn’t have to go beyond the skull fragments. The Cro-Magnon skull gave one count, the two Neanderthal-type skulls quite a different count. There was no argument. There couldn’t be with the Geiger-counter clicking away, proving beyond any doubt that the two types of skull could not have come from the same dig. Of course, Holroyd started to try and bluster it out. But they were all sitting there, staring at him, dumbfounded at first, then accusingly, and the words just stuck in his throat. Finally he got to his feet and walked out, leaving the skulls lying there on the table. In a way, that was more damning than anything—his sudden complete lack of interest in them.’

  ‘Has there been any public announcement?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no, my dear fellow, of course not. The Press were never in on it, and officially it will all be hushed up. But no doubt it will leak out. There’s a lot of talk already. Though Holroyd hasn’t yet resigned from any of the committees and other bodies he serves on, it will be the finish of him. Unless …’ He paused to light the cigarette he had taken.

  ‘Unless what?’ I asked, for he was staring out through the windshield, his mind apparently on something else.

  ‘He’s a very clever talker, very convincing. A political, rather than an academic animal, and not to be underrated on that account. If he were to come up now with something spectacular—’ He looked at me quickly, a darting glance. ‘Last night—that ex-policeman—he said there was a rhinoceros drawn on the wall of this cave and that Holroyd was very excited about it.’

  ‘There’s a reindeer too,’ Sonia said. ‘And what looks like an elephant—just scratch marks, very faint.’

  ‘And these gravures were discovered by Pieter Van der Voort, not by Holroyd?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. And I told him how I had found my father working on the rock fall that night, his desperate urgency to break through into the cave beyond.

  He nodded. ‘It’s what I suspected, that he was on to something of real importance. That’s why I hurried out here, as soon as I knew Holroyd had left for Greece. I was afraid …’ He hesitated, staring at me, strangely agitated. ‘However, this is an accident. An earth tremor, they tell me.’ He shook his head. ‘Something nobody could have foreseen. Nevertheless, if Pieter is dead, then Holroyd can reasonably claim …’ He gave a little shrug. ‘Well, we’ll just have to hope for the best.’

  We were past Tiglia then, the rock gut opening up and a boat lying there, the scar of the overhang just visible. I pointed it out to him and he shaded his eyes against the glare, staring at it, his interest quickening: ‘A perfect site, very typical—provided, of course …’ He moved to the wheelhouse door, looking back over the port quarter at the site on Meganisi below the rock pinnacle. ‘Two of them, and both natural observation posts. Tell me, did your father say anything about the sea-level here—what it would have been like twenty thousand years ago?’ And when I explained that all to the south of us, as far as the African shore, he believed to have been one vast plain, with Meganisi the western flank of a volcano, he nodded his head vigorously.

  ‘You think that’s possible?’ I asked.

  He smiled. ‘Anything is possible. But proof—that’s another matter. We know so little.’ He was staring at the Meganisi shore. ‘A volcano, you say.’ His eyes gleamed, bird-like in the sun.

  ‘He thought it might have erupted—a bigger eruption than Santorin.’

  He nodded, gazing ahead to the distant shape of Ithaca. ‘Fantastic! And the skull fragments, those bones he sent for dating—thirty thousand years ago at least.’ And then, speaking quietly, as though to himself: ‘Even as far back as that man knew how to knap or flake the hardest substances to produce sharp-cutting instruments—flint, for instance, and chert. And in volcanic regions, the brittle, black, glass-like substance we call obsidian. It’s the oldest and most basic of all industries and a very good case has been made out recently for these primitive industrial centres—these city communities, you might call them, founded on the presence of a workable raw material—being the precursor of husbandry. It has put the whole conception of city centres much further back in time.’ He had apparently a theory of his own that the cave artists were a product of these first city communities, a means of encouraging the hunters on whom they depended for bartering their products, and that it was the superior organisation developed by Cro-Magnon Man that had destroyed the Neanderthals.

  ‘A little far-fetched, perhaps,’ he murmured. ‘But something I would like to have discussed with Pieter, particularly if he has discovered the work of cave artists so close to an area that could have been rich in obsidian.’ He shook his head, smiling to himself. ‘All of scientific research into prehistory is a sort of jig-saw puzzle. Fitting facts to theories until the sum of all the facts establishes withouth doubt a complete and irrefutable picture.’

  A small boat was moving out of the gut, coming towards us now. It was Vassilios, and Hans was in the bow, his blond hair immediately recognizable. He came aboard, while Vassilios took the bow warp out.

  We off-loaded the timber by throwing it into the water, where Vassilios secured it with a rope for towing ashore. And while he helped me get it overboard, Hans told me what had happened inside the cave the previous day. With the borrowed rope tied around his waist, he had descended the blowhole until he had reached the point where it entered the cavern in which Bert had surfaced. He confirmed that this cave was lozenge-shaped and that galleries entered it from either end; also that it seemed to be influenced by tidal variations or surge, since the walls and slopes of exposed rock were damp-looking and black with slime. After calling repeatedly without receiving any reply, he had untied the rope from about his waist and climbed back up the blow-hole to report to Holroyd.

  I asked him whether he had left the end of the rope hanging down into the water and he said he had. Cartwright had wanted to go down then, but Holroyd had ruled that mere was no point until they had some means by which they could be certain of climbing out of the cave after they had lowered themselves into it. Finally, it was decided to construct some sort of a rope ladder, and he and Cartwright had climbed back through the gap opened in the rock fall to do this. Holroyd had stayed on inside the cave to examine the walls for gravures and make rough drawings.

  ‘Presumably he had a torch with him?’

  ‘Yes. And the Greek stayed there to hold it for him.’

  ‘What about the rope? Was the upper end secured to anything?’

  ‘The crowbar. We had it wedged across the upper end of the blow-hole.’

  I then asked him if he could remember the exact time of the roof collapse.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As soon as I was told what had happened, I looked at my watch. I thought the time might be important. The fall occurred just before 11.30.’

  ‘And how long since you had left Holroyd?’

  ‘Oh, about a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes—something like that.’

  Which meant that if Holroyd’s urge to examine the cave was so great that he was willing to go down the rope on his own, he could have been into the lower galleries about the time Bert was starting to work his way into the underwater entrance.

  Vassilios was waiting and Hans climbed down into the boat, Sonia calling to him to be careful. He grinned, mouthing a reply against the scream of the labouring outboard. Slowly the raft of timbe
rs drew away from the side. There was nothing now to hold me back and I was suddenly trembling as I stood there by the bulwarks, staring at the beauty of that sun-bright scene, the mountains falling to the narrow channel, the shallows by Tiglia bright emerald against the sea’s deep blue, and white clouds hanging like puffs of smoke over the mainland heights. A fish broke the surface, a gleam of silver gone in a flash, and up by Spiglia a lone cottage poked a white face round a brown shoulder of rock. And above me the sun god riding high. All that beauty, and my mind six fathoms deep in the dark bowels of a sea-filled cave.

  ‘Does that mean Holroyd has access to the gallery Pieter is in?’ I turned to find Gilmore close behind me, peering at me with an intent bird-like expression. ‘Is that what he meant?’

  I thrust my hands behind me, forcing my mind to concentrate. ‘He has access to where I think my father is. But that doesn’t mean he’s availed himself of it. Anyway, my father may be dead.’

  Gilmore nodded. ‘And that, of course, we won’t know until they’ve cleared this roof fall and got Holroyd out. Unless, of course …’ He hesitated, watching me speculatively, and I knew he was thinking of the underwater entrance. ‘How long will they take, do you think, to get through the fall?’

  ‘Zavelas said maybe tomorrow.’

  Sonia was staring at me, her eyes wide, indignant with disbelief. ‘You’re not going to wait till then, surely. He’s been down there three days already.’

  ‘No, of course not. Only …’ But I stopped there. I couldn’t tell her about the body, and Bert could have imagined it. ‘Give me a hand with the gear,’ I said, but she had already turned into the wheelhouse to get it.

  Gilmore had followed her, but in a moment he popped out again, smiling, a book in his hand. ‘A present for you.’ He held it out to me. Homo Sapiens—Asia or Africa? by Professor W. R. Holroyd. I stared at it, thinking the old boy had chosen one hell of a moment to present me with a book on arthropology by Holroyd. ‘The book can wait,’ he said as I took it from him. ‘But I would like you to read what I have written on the flyleaf. Sonia has told me about this dive, that you hope to get into the cave by an underwater passage. If you succeed, I fear you may find yourself involved in tragedy.’

  I stared at him, wondering what he meant. But he didn’t say anything further and I opened the book. On the blank page at the beginning he had written: For Paul Van der Voort:—This book, which was published eighteen months ago, would appear to be largely based on your father’s writings—the theory propounded in his unpublished work balanced against the arguments he used in The Asian Origins of Homo Sapiens, the second of his two books published in Russia and other Communist countries. He had signed it—Adrian Gilmore.

  ‘I’m afraid he may know about that book.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, glancing idly through it. ‘Yes, I think he does.’ A piece of paper fell out, fluttering to the deck. I stooped and retrieved it, a brief cutting from a newspaper headed Search for Embassy Official’s Killer Switched to Continent. D. T. Mar 28 had been pencilled against it. ‘Dear me,’ he said as I read it. ‘I’m sorry. I quite forgot about that.’

  I looked at him. ‘You knew it referred to me?’

  ‘Van der Voort is not a very common name—not in England, anyway.’

  ‘But this is from the Daily Telegraph presumably, of March 28. It wasn’t something you happened on by accident.’

  ‘No. No, I’m afraid I was curious—I asked a young friend of mine to check the newspaper files for me.’

  ‘I see.’ I put the cutting back between the pages and closed the book. So Interpol had been informed. That meant that Kotiadis knew, had known probably since we had left for Samos, certainly since our return to Meganisi. Zavelas, too, I thought, remembering how he had watched me that first evening. ‘Well, if I make a balls of this dive …’ I laughed, an attempt to dispel the tension. ‘Solve a lot of problems, wouldn’t it?’ But it wasn’t Kotiadis that worried me, or any information about my background that had been passed on to Interpol. It was the dive I was scared of—the dive and what I might find down there. Trembling, I reached for the jacket of the wet suit Sonia was holding out to me and struggled into it. By the time I had zipped it up she had dumped the cylinder on the deck beside me. It was heavy, 72 cubic feet of air compressed to 2250 p.s.i., and the stem indicator showed that it was full. It should last me an hour if I controlled my rate of breathing—if I didn’t panic in that cave entrance and start sucking in air like a locomotive. I held out my hand for the demand valve and she handed it to me, watching as I screwed it on and checked that it was working properly. Then she helped hoist the tank on to my back, passing the straps over my shoulders as I settled the weight and secured it in position. Watch, depth meter, diving knife, torch and mask; finally, the heavy lead-weighted belt. I was all set then, the mask pushed up on my forehead, the gum pad in my mouth. I cracked the valve and heard the air hiss as I drew a shallow, tentative breath. It was okay. Everything was okay. Except for my heart, which was thumping nervously as I thought about that cave.

  Slowly I waddled backwards to the ladder. The whole outfit seemed to weigh a ton as I manœuvred myself outboard, wishing to God Bert was there, if not to dive with me, at least to give me moral support. Again I tested the air supply, checked the stem indicator. Tank full. Air coming easily. I started down the ladder. ‘Good luck!’ Sonia was wearing a bright artificial smile. I didn’t say anything, thinking of all the women down through time who had seen men off into danger with that same bright smile. I pulled the mask down over my face, down over my eyes and nose, my teeth grinding on the gum pad teats as I began to breathe through the mouthpiece. I had no confidence, only a feeling of fear. And I was still afraid when I hit the water.

  3

  I had gone in backwards, both hands holding the mask to my face, the way Bert had taught me, the masts and their two faces whirling against the sky to vanish abruptly as the sea closed over my head. Then I turned over on to my belly in a froth of bubbles, hanging there in the water, blind and weightless now and sinking slowly as I exhaled, the beating of my heart seeming unnaturally loud. The froth of bubbles drifted away and the bottom leaped into vision, clear in the glass pane of the mask and looking nearer than the 18 fathoms in which we had anchored. It was rock and sand, with weed waving, and I was alone. Nobody else in all that wet world. The shape of the boat, etched in shadow, moved lazily with the weed, and the kedge warp was a pale line looping down to the anchor, which lay on its side like some forgotten toy.

  I was still trembling, my heart pounding loud in my waterlogged ears. Not because of the aqualung, the unfamiliarity of dependence on compressed air—I was already breathing gently and regularly. It was the dim buttressed shape of the underwater shore at the extreme edge of visibility, the knowledge that I had to penetrate into the interior of the rock, squeezing through a narrow hole into flooded galleries that had already nearly cost an experienced diver his life. The fear of that had been with me all night, had been building up throughout the morning.

  I lay face downwards, my head back, staring ahead through the sunlit flecks that hung suspended like dust in the water to the dark wall that edged the shelf, trying to stop the trembling, to key my nerves to action. My left hand came out, an involuntary flipper movement to hold myself on an even keel, looking white and very close, the diving watch staring at me, the dial enormous against my wrist.

  It was the sight of that watch that got me started. The moveable dial had to be set. That was the first thing—the time check. I twisted the bevelled edge until the zero mark was on the minute hand. The time was 09.47. In theory the cylinder on my back contained at least 60 minutes of air, but only if I were careful and controlled my breathing the way an experienced diver would. That was what I was doing now, the periodic hiss of the demand valve as I took in short, shallow breaths, followed by the blatter of bubbles behind my head as I breathed out. But would I be so in command of my breathing inside that cave? I thought I had better work on the b
asis of minimum duration—30 minutes. That meant being out of the cave by 10.17. And something else I had to remember, not to hold my breath if I came up in a hurry. That way you could rupture your lungs as the pressure lessened and the compressed air in the lungs expanded.

  I was still looking at the dial of my watch, magnified by the water, and the sight of the second hand sweeping slowly round the dial made me realize that time was passing and every minute spent hanging around was a minute of underwater time wasted. My reaction to that was immediate, a sort of reflex. I jack-knifed, diving down and heading for the shore, arms trailing at my side, my legs scissoring so that the flippers did the work and bubbles trailing away behind me as I exhaled to make depth.

  A school of small-fry changed from dingy grey to a glitter of silver as they skittered away from me to reform like soldiers on parade beyond my reach, all facing me, motionless, watchful. A rock grew large in a sea of grass, a starfish flattened against it and somebody’s discarded sandal lying forlorn and alien in this world of water. And everything about me silent, so that the hiss of air as I cracked the demand valve to breathe in was unnaturally loud. And every time I exhaled the rush of bubbles past my head sounded like the burbling wake of an outboard motor.

  The silence and the loneliness pressed on my nerves and at that rock I turned to stare back. I could just see Coromandel’s hull, a dark whale shape bulging from the ceiling of my wet world. The depth meter on my right wrist showed 32 feet. Everything was deadened as the pressure built up on my eardrums. With thumb and forefinger pressed into the hollows of the mask, pinching my nose, I blew my ears clear. Instantly the noise of my breathing, the pops and crackles, the hiss of the demand valve, were preternaturally loud.