My Brother Michael

by Mary Stewart

  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 min
utes, 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.

  17

  As there is Justice in heaven,

  And fire in the hand of God,

  The reckoning must be made in the end.

  SOPHOCLES: Electra.

  (tr. E. F. Watling.)

  THE man relaxed, but his voice, pitched low, was angry. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  She had stopped at the edge of the torchlight. She looked at once younger and much prettier than I had seen her. She had on the turquoise blouse and scarlet cotton skirt, and her haste had flushed her face and hurried her breathing, making her seem more normal and less cynically in control of herself. She hadn’t looked at Angelos. Her eyes were riveted on what remained of the cache of boxes.

  ‘So that’s it?’ Like him, she spoke in French.

  ‘That’s it.’ He regarded her sourly. ‘I told you last night we’d located it, didn’t I? So why the devil didn’t you do as you were told and stay out of sight till I came for you?’

  She walked forward slowly while he was speaking, her eyes still on the stuff at his feet. Now she looked up under her lashes with that provocative gamine grin. ‘I wanted to see for myself what was going on. Don’t be angry … nobody saw me come.’

  ‘Did you see Dimitrios on your way up?’

  She shook her head. She was stooping over the pile, prodding with a toe at the broken box that showed the gleam of gold. I saw her breasts rise and fall quickly as if with excitement. He said sharply: ‘No sign of him?’

  ‘No.’

  He swore and struck the spade almost savagely into the stones. ‘Then where the hell is he? I came by the high way – it’s shorter if you know your road … if you didn’t see him either—’

  ‘I came by the high way, too.’ Again that smiling look up through the lovely lashes. ‘How did you think I found my way here? I waited where I thought you’d come, and then I followed you.’

  He grunted. ‘Clever, eh? Then that means he’s gone down the other way to look for me. Blast the man; he’s as jumpy as a bean on a griddle, and about as much use. And you – you should have stayed away till I came for you. I told you I didn’t want you up here.’

  She laughed. ‘Maybe I didn’t trust you, Angelos. Maybe you wouldn’t have come for me.’

  He gave a short laugh. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well, I wanted to see this,’ she said, almost childishly, ‘and besides, I didn’t want to hang about down there all day. That damned jeep’s dynamite anyway.’

  ‘Why? The stuff’s not in it.’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Did you park it where I told you?’

  ‘Of course I did. Angelos, why d’you have to do this in daylight? You’re crazy.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing. There’s next to no moon just now, and this country’s murder with a mule on a black night, and I daren’t use a light. There’ll be nobody about between here and the place where I’m stacking the stuff, and we can ferry the whole lot from there to the jeep in a couple of hours after dusk.’ He added, with a sort of heavy irony: ‘Always providing, of course, that you do as you’re told, and that my cool-headed cousin gets back in time to give me a bit of help with the hard work!’

  She laughed. She had recovered her breath now, and with it her own particular brand of throaty charm. She straightened up and gave him one of her long-lidded glinting looks. ‘Well. I can help instead, can’t I? You won’t send me back now? Don’t you think, Angelos mou, that you might pretend to be a little bit pleased to see me?’

  She moved up close to him as she spoke, and he pulled her to him and kissed her in a way that managed to be perfunctory and yet lustful. I saw her press her thin body against him, and her hands crept up to move among the thick curls on the back of his head.

  I drew back a little in my crevice, shutting my eyes momentarily as if against this new discovery. Angelos her lover. Angelos. Through the whirl of fear and confusion the facts twisted and readjusted themselves into a different pattern.

  It had been Angelos, not Dimitrios, who had scraped acquaintance with Danielle on those long afternoons at Itea; this deliberately, not only to while away the boredom of inaction, but because she had the use of the jeep, whereas to buy or hire other transport would involve inquiries later, and provoke the very gossip the cousins had to avoid.

  And by the same token it had been Angelos, not Dimitrios, who had broken into the studio last night. I remembered now, quite clearly, that the hand which had reached back for the torch had not had a torn thumb. And I remembered Danielle’s little smile when I had so swiftly identified her lover as Dimitrios …

  Angelos pushed her away, not too gently. ‘You know damned well you should have stayed away. There’s no room in the games I play for anyone with baby-nerves.’

  She was lighting a cigarette and said, almost snappishly: ‘It wasn’t nerves; it was curiosity, and I’ve a right to know what’s going on. Baby-nerves, indeed, after what I’ve done for you! You’d never have got the jeep but for me, and I got you the tools and the mule on Monday night, didn’t I? And I’ve played spy on the Englishman and that wretched girl he’s taken in tow – and all you do is walk in last night out of the blue, stay with me half an hour, and tell me damn all except that today’s the day, and I’m to get the jeep to the quarry, and you expect that to be that! You might have landed me in the hell of a jam last night, but you never said a word to me!’

  ‘Whatd’you mean?’ He was working again, levering at a solid lump of rock that was wedging down a couple of boxes. The dislodged dirt and small stones hissed down to the floor. He seemed hardly to be listening to her.

  She said sharply: ‘You know quite well what I mean. When you came to my room last night, you said you hadn’t seen Nigel, and—’

  ‘Nigel?’

  ‘
The English artist. I told you. He was throwing out hints on Monday night about getting rich and famous, and he was drunk. After the others had left I gave him another couple of ouzos and took him for a walk … Did I tell you that?’ She was watching the man through the wisping smoke of her cigarette, and her tone was provocative. He neither looked up nor took the slightest notice.

  She tapped ash off with a sharply pettish movement. ‘Well? It was obvious he’d found something up here on the hill. You said you were going to wait for him yesterday and find out what it was, and where—’

  ‘So what? We didn’t need to, did we? Your English friends came and showed us the way.’

  ‘They showed you the cave, too?’

  He laughed shortly: ‘Hardly. If they’d found the cave yesterday we’d not have been able to get near it now for troops three deep round the door!’

  She moved impatiently. ‘I didn’t mean that way. Of course they didn’t find it, or they wouldn’t be trailing harmlessly off to Levadia today. But you did find it pretty quickly, didn’t you? Dimitrios told me at the Shining Ones that you’d found the place, and that you were working on it then while he came down to do some final clearing-up.’

  He had laid aside the crowbar, and was using the spade to shift some of the smaller debris. The thud of digging echoed dully. He didn’t look up. He said: ‘When Stephanos showed them the spot where I broke Michael’s neck I knew where the cave lay. Everything was changed, but I knew the crack must open on the cave. I couldn’t get through it the way it was, but after I’d sent Dimitrios down I got to work and opened it up.’

  ‘I know. You told me this last night.’ She wasn’t, as usual, letting the cigarette hang from her lips as she talked. She was smoking in jerky movements that spoke of tightly-strung nerves. She said, making it sound like an accusation: ‘But you never mentioned Nigel.’

  He straightened up from his work, eyeing her, his head thrust forward like a bull’s, his look at once formidable and wary. The fixed half-moon smile on the thick mouth was in its own way terrifying. He said roughly: ‘Come on. What is all this? Why the hell should I mention Nigel?’