Mayhem in Greece

By arrangement, they picked up a private guide outside the Tourist Office at the end of the town and soon covered the twenty-odd kilometres up the slope to the prehistoric capital of Greece. It had once covered a considerable area, but the visible remains were concentrated in three places not very far apart: the Acropolis on the crown of the hill, which contained the palace; the royal burial ground with its adjacent courts some way down the slope and, still lower down, the famous beehive tombs.

As they arrived there by a quarter to nine, they had the place to themselves with little likelihood of coachloads of people on conducted tours arriving for over an hour and a half; so they took their time going round the Acropolis. There was no Temple there with standing pillars so Stephanie found it disappointing, and Robbie was soon irritated by their little guide reeling off facts and figures in parrot fashion. Although he had never before been to Mycenae, he knew so much about the place that he felt he could have done the job better himself.

On the lower level, the famous Lion Gate and the cyclopean walls, similar to those at Tiryns, forming courts and narrow passages, were impressive. It was intriguing to think of the vast fortune that had remained undiscovered for so many centuries in the oblong graves which pitted the stone-flanked circular enclosure that had formed the burial ground. But it was several hundred yards away down the slope that the most remarkable survival of Mycenaean building was to be seen.

This consisted of a great underground chamber, known as the Treasury of Atreus. It is a perfectly symmetrical hollow cone, over forty-five feet in diameter at its base and gradually narrowing in a graceful curve up to a small circular slab over forty feet above floor level. The inner surface of every stone in its walls is curved, and their courses are graduated from big blocks at the bottom to small ones at the top. Between there is no cement, yet there is not enough space to put the blade of a knife. The chamber is reached by a broad, deep corridor, having cyclopean walls, and the lintel stone above the seventeen-foot-high doorway is said to weigh one hundred and twenty tons.

Their guide said that no one knew how, with only human labour, it could ever have been got into position. Robbie could have told him. It had been dragged up a ramp, then rocked into place, in the same way as the Egyptians had built the Pyramids; but that did not detract from his admiration for the wonderful craftsmanship of those ancient people.

Just below the steep entrance to the Acropolis, there was a similar, though smaller, underground chamber called the Tomb of Clytemnestra and, as they walked back to their car, Stephanie asked why it was that Agamemnon should have been buried in the Royal Cemetery but his Queen outside it.

'She was a bad woman,' the guide replied. 'She murdered her husband; so, when she died, the people would not agree to her being buried in the Acropolis.'

As they had breakfasted early, they had brought biscuits, fruit and drinks with them. Leaving the guide by the car, they found a comfortable bank nearby and sat down to their 'elevenses'. When Stephanie had unpacked the basket, she said:

'What rotten luck for Agamemnon that, having survived ten years of fighting outside Troy, he should have been murdered.'

Robbie nodded. 'Yes; and when he got back, he didn't enjoy even one night in his old home. His cousin, Aegisthus, was the nigger in the woodpile, although Clytemnestra played the part of a Lady Macbeth. She never forgave Agamemnon for being the cause of her losing her eldest daughter, Iphigenia, and no sooner had he sailed for Troy than she took Aegisthus for what old-fashioned authors call her "paramour".

'After a while, they gave out that they'd had news from Troy and that Agamemnon had copped it; so they could live together openly as man and wife, and they ruled the kingdom between them. The ten years went by, then they had secret intelligence that Troy had fallen and that Agamemnon was on his way home.

'Some of the Heroes never got home, and others had very rough trips. Odysseus took years and years, because Poseidon had a grudge against him and kept on wrecking his ship in places where he had all sorts of terrifying adventures; but that's another story. Agamemnon was not delayed for very long, and as his wife had arranged for a chain of beacons to be lit as soon as his ship was sighted she had ample warning of his coming.

'His people were delighted when they learned that he wasn't dead after all, and the two younger children he had had by Clytemnestra, a girl named Electra and a boy named Orestes, gave him a terrific welcome. Clytemnestra, too, pretended to be overjoyed to see him; but Cassandra, Priam's daughter, whom Agamemnon had brought with him, threw a fit. You may remember that she had the gift of foreseeing the future, and she implored him not to go into the palace. But Apollo had decreed that no one should ever believe her prophecies, so Agamemnon ignored her warning.

'Everyone was bustling about preparing a huge banquet, and Agamemnon said that he would first like a bath. As soon as he was in it, Clytemnestra came into the bathroom with a big openwork woollen blanket made like a net. She chucked it over his head, and when he tried to push it off his hands got entangled in it. Then out popped her boy friend Aegisthus from behind a curtain. He was armed with a battle-axe and he sliced poor old Agamemnon to pieces with it, so that the water in the big silver bath turned scarlet with his blood.'

'What a horrible business. Did the people rise up and kill them?'

'No, they got away with it; at least, for some years. But Agamemnon's children avenged his death later on. Apparently Clytemnestra hated her younger daughter, Electra, and made her into a sort of Cinderella; but she was a good girl and very attached to her brother Orestes, who was only about twelve at the time. She found out that Aegisthus was planning to do a "Princes in the Tower" act on Orestes-'

'Who were the Princes in the Tower?' Stephanie interrupted to ask.

Robbie smiled. 'I forgot you might not know. They were two young English Princes who were believed to have been murdered by their wicked uncle. Anyhow, when Electra learned that Aegisthus intended to do Orestes in, so that he could not grow up and claim the throne, she managed to have him smuggled out and away to Phocis, where King Strophius gave him a home.

'Orestes and King Strophius's son, Pylades, became terrific buddies and when they reached "man's estate", as the saying is, they decided to take a trip to Mycenae. Of course, they went in disguise and with them they took an urn containing wood ash. On their arrival they went to pay their respects at Agamemnon's grave, and there they found Electra putting flowers on it.

'She didn't recognize Orestes; so he told her that they had come from Phocis, that Orestes was dead and that they had brought his ashes to be buried in the family vault. She was frightfully upset; so Orestes then told her the truth, and when she had dried her tears she took the two chaps into the palace.

'Producing the urn, Orestes told the same yarn to Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. They were so pleased to hear that they no longer need fear Orestes turning up one fine morning with an army at his back, that they got up from the cellar a special bottle for their guests. No sooner was the butler out of the way than Pylades pulled a knife out of his stocking and stuck in into Aegisthus's middle and Orestes, only pausing to tell his mama who he was, did the same to her.'

Stephanie frowned. 'Whatever she had done, it was a terrible thing to kill his own mother.'

'Yes; that's just what his people thought. They were glad to be rid of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, but scared stiff that the gods would show what they, too, thought of Orestes' deed, by putting a curse on the country. None of them would even sit down to a cut off the joint with him. In fact, some of them actually suggested stoning him to death; but their priests said the gods would not take it out of them provided they drove him out of the country.

'By then the thought of what he had done was giving him awful nightmares and daily fits of the staggers; so, seeing that he was in such poor shape, his sister and his faithful friend went into exile with him. Apollo then appeared to him in a dream and told him that he must dree his weird for a year in the forests of Arcadia.'

'What is one's "weird" and how does one dree it?' Stephanie

asked.

'I gather it means traipsing around with everyone hating you on sight, and being haunted by every sort of bugaboo. Anyhow that's what happened to Orestes, and Electra and Pylades didn't fare much better. They got married; but they couldn't have had much of a honeymoon, living like gipsies in the woods and watching Orestes gradually going crackers. The Furies made the poor chap's life such hell that he seriously considered doing himself in, but before taking the plunge he thought he would try begging Apollo to let up and call off his tormentors.

'Apollo told him that if he could get back a statue of Artemis that had been carried off by a barbarous people called the Taurians, who lived up in the Crimea, the gods would call a Council to consider his case and perhaps give him a new deal. So he and Pylades got hold of a galley manned by fifty oarsmen from somewhere and set out for the Black Sea.

'Barbarous people are always scared that strange gods may do them a mischief if they are not polite to them, and to keep Artemis in a good humour the Taurians had built a little temple to house her statue. This temple was not far from the shore, so when Orestes and Pylades reached Tauris and landed to have a snoop round they soon came upon it. But their luck was out that night. They were caught by the guards and lugged before the priestess, whose job it was to sacrifice any foreigner turning up in those parts.

'Now you may remember that when Iphigenia was about to be sacrificed, Artemis had relented at the last moment and whipped her up to the heavens. But instead of keeping her there, as everyone had believed to be the case, she had promptly dumped her down in Tauris to act as priestess to the stolen statue.

'Of course, Iphigenia didn't much care for her job of slitting castaways' throats, and was longing to get back to her family in Greece. When the two young prisoners told her they were Greeks she was particularly put out at the thought of having to kill them, so she said:

"Look, chaps, the horrid hairy man who is King here is not altogether a bad sort. When there are several shipwrecked mariners for me to do my stuff on, he sometimes lets me beg a few of them off. But it's sure as that Zeus made little apples that he won't agree to let both of you beat the rap. Of course Artemis loathes these human sacrifices, but the King can't get it out of his head that unless I spill some blood on her altar now and again she may come after him one night with a carving knife. So I can save one of you, but not both. Now, which is it to be?"

'Being frightfully loyal types the friends naturally said to one another: "My dear old boy, what a splendid break. I'm so glad for you. As for me, not to worry. I've always wanted to die by having my throat slit. In fact, I've been hoping that would happen to me for years."

'Hearing all this, Iphigenia got the idea that neither of them was telling the truth but just putting on the sort of act that two Englishmen would have done when dressed in boiled shirts and threatened by cannibals in the jungles of darkest Africa.'

'Wouldn't that have been a bit after Iphigenia's time?' Stephanie remarked.

Robbie grinned. 'Yes, I suppose it would. But you know the sort of thing I mean. And being the "whitest girl that anyone ever knew", Iphigenia felt that these chaps were just up her street; so she became more than ever reluctant to do either of them in.

'To put off the evil hour she asked them about themselves, and it then emerged that Orestes was the kid brother that she hadn't seen since he was two years old. She didn't let on for the moment who she was but pretended to be very tough and had them thrown into a dungeon to await slaughter.

'That evening she went to see the hairy King, and said to him: "Sire, I find myself in a bit of a fix. A couple of young Greeks have been cast ashore and I couldn't be more anxious to give them the works but my goddess has tipped me off that they are criminals of the deepest dye. Unless they are purified first they will pollute her altar and she would be so annoyed that she might even cause your beard to drop out."

'The King clutched his face fungus and asked: "What's the drill then? You'll be for the high jump yourself unless you can get me out of this."

' "I can sort it for you," Iphigenia reassured him. "Both these thugs and the statue of the goddess must be dipped in the sea. That will wash their sins away; then I'll be able to stick a knife in their gullets without fear of any unpleasant after-effects."

' "Go to it, then," said the King, "and good luck to you."

'But he must have been a very trusting type, as later that night Iphigenia was allowed to lead both the prisoners from their cell with only a dog leash attached to their wrists and no escort. What is more, they took the wooden statue of Artemis with them.

'Orestes had left his galley with its fifty oarsmen hidden behind a headland, so all they had to do was to go aboard her and get the crew to row like hell for Greece. The King's coastguards told him what was doing, so he sent his fleet after them; but Artemis was very pleased with her own people, so she got her brother Apollo to put up the sun an hour or so early that day and it blinded the pursuers.

'When they got the statue back to Greece it was set up in Athens so that it could be duly honoured by Artemis's worshippers. Then, the year being up, a Council of the Gods was called to assemble on the Areopagus there and judge Orestes. It is rather interesting that they should have used white stones and black stones in their ballot, just as a committee do when voting whether to receive or reject a candidate who has been put up for membership of a modern club; although in their case it had to be a majority of black balls to exclude. At the count the whites and the blacks came out even, but suddenly Athene winged her way down to the meeting and threw a white ball into the urn.

'That saved Orestes and gave him a new lease of life. He returned to Mycenae and, suddenly, everybody there became frightfully pleased to see him. Then he married Hermione, the beautiful daughter of Helen and Menelaus, that Helen had borne before skipping off with Paris to Troy. So Orestes and Hermione and Pylades and Electra lived happily ever after.'

Stephanie sighed. 'How pleasant it is to think that at least a few of the ancients escaped from some frightful fate decreed for them by the gods.'

They were back at Navplion in time for a bathe before lunch and slept in the afternoon. In the early evening Stephanie gave Robbie another driving lesson. At dinner that night he noticed at a table on the other side of the room the elderly American who had spoken to him the previous evening of getting an air-passage home. As he had not, after all, left for Athens that morning, Robbie assumed that the situation with regard to the trapped submarine had not deteriorated. Then he again forgot all about it.

The next four days went all too quickly. On two occasions, Stephanie half-heartedly suggested that she ought to make a start on typing Robbie's manuscript; but he knew that if she did, he would have to leave her to it, and he took such delight in her company that he assured her that there would be plenty of time later for typing it.

Besides, there seemed so many things to do. One day, they drove the twenty miles across the isthmus to Epidauros. It had been the Greek equivalent of Bath, and the Greeks of classical times had gone there in their thousands for treatment by the priests of the healer-god Asclepius. There were no cyclopean walls, but the ruins of the great temple to the god, of the rotunda and of other buildings still standing were sufficient to give a good idea of what this famous spa of a later age must have looked like. Above all, there was its theatre. It was the best-preserved of any in the ancient world and so cleverly constructed that no modern auditorium could equal the perfection of its acoustics.

During part of another day, they explored the much less

H 221

interesting remains of ancient Argos. That city, too, had had its theatre. It had once seated twenty thousand spectators and was the largest in Greece, but the greater part of it had since fallen into ruin. Then there were their daily bathe, long naps in the afternoons and a driving lesson for Robbie every evening. It was, therefore, with the greatest reluctance that, while they were at lunch on the Thursday, he said:

Tt's a week today since we arrived here, so our hoi. is pretty well over. We must hit the trail again tomorrow morning.'

'Oh no!' Stephanie exclaimed. 'Do let's stay on here a few days longer.'

He shook his head. He had never even hinted to her that he had pledged himself to Athene; so he had, naturally, made no mention of the owl that had hooted on the evening of their arrival and checked his impulse to give in to her plea that he should abandon his mission. But the owl evidently had its nest somewhere up on the cliff behind the hotel. Every evening since, after dusk had fallen, he had heard it hooting. These hoots had been a nightly reminder to him that he must not linger at Navplion for longer than might serve to make the Czechs believe that they had no more to fear from him. Now he said firmly:

'No; and please don't try again to persuade me to throw in my hand. My mind is made up. We are leaving tomorrow morning, so you had better pack tonight.'

There was a quiet authority in his voice that would have been quite foreign to it ten days earlier; so, instead of attempting to argue with him, she asked: 'Where are we going?'

'To Olympia,' he replied. 'It is about two hundred kilometres. That may not sound very much for a day's drive, but the hall porter tells me that four-fifths of the way lies through the mountains, so we ought to allow at least five hours. I hope you won't find it too tiring. If we start at ten o'clock, we should be at Tripolis by twelve. That is the only town of any size through which we pass, so we could take a two-hour break for lunch there and do the longer stretch in the afternoon.'

She shrugged. 'That suits me all right. But why Olympia? I thought all those groups of Czechs you are interested in were taking up their quarters near the sea.'

'They are, and the group that I have decided to try and get a a good look at will be somewhere near Pirgos. I have chosen that lot because it must be ten days since they landed there, so by now they will have had plenty of time to get to work. But I decided against staying in the city, because there is just a chance that Barak, or some of the others who saw me either in Patras or Corinth, might be there. If I happened to run into one of them, it would put them on their guard. Pirgos is only a little over twenty kilometres from Olympia, so I can easily work from there. Also, by staying at Olympia, I can keep going, for what it's worth, my cover that I'm writing a book about ancient Greece.'

The first ten miles of their journey the following morning were easy, as the road was almost flat. It ran in a great semicircle, through Argos right round the head of the gulf. On the far side they passed through the little town of Miloi, on the site of the ancient Lerna, near which Hercules had slain the Hydra; and thereabouts the country was very pretty. There were many plantations of oranges and lemons and, in several places, the road was lined with pepper and mimosa trees. The latter, as Robbie had noticed in several other low-lying parts of the country, had much larger .blossoms than the varieties imported into England, but that was more than offset by the fact that they had no scent.

Soon after leaving Miloi, the road began to rise in a series of sharp curves, and in a quarter of an hour they had climbed over a thousand feet. As the road zigzagged to and fro round sharp spurs of the mountain, they frequently drove back in the direction from which they had come, only on a higher level; so time and again they got an increasingly bird's-eye view of the great gulf that they were leaving behind them, with the little castle of Burzi in its centre and Navplion on its further shore.

For a stretch of over fifteen miles the road was cut out of the mountain side and, even on the most dangerous curves, it had no parapet or row of posts which might have prevented a recklessly driven car from going over. There was not much traffic, and during the first hour they met only two tourist coaches, three private cars and half a dozen lorries. Stephanie drove at a fair pace, but carefully, and Robbie was relieved to see that she showed no trace of nerves when passing other vehicles. For that he gave her full marks, as he found his own muscles tensing slightly every time they approached a blind corner, from dread that a long coach would appear just as they were about to go round it.

By eleven o'clock they were up to two thousand five hundred feet and wisps of cloud, coming down from the peaks on either side that were shrouded in it, drifted across the road. But by that time they had reached the pass and for a few miles there were only gentle gradients. Then once more the way became a succession of hairpin bends, now sloping downward and seeming even more dangerous; for, had the car brakes failed when approaching any of the corners, nothing could have stopped them from going straight over the edge of a precipice.

A little before midday they entered Tripolis, the largest town in the interior of the Peloponnesus and almost in its centre. Like most Greek country towns, the streets were crowded with donkey carts, ageing motor vehicles of all descriptions and shouting peasants trying to keep their herds of goats together. Most of the buildings looked shoddy and there were few of more than two stories; but there was a pleasant, arcaded square in the centre of the town and at a restaurant there they had quite a passable lunch.

They still had two-thirds of the journey before them, and Stephanie was in favour of pushing on; so at about half past one they drove out of the town. After a few miles the road began to twist and mount again and, at a height of over three thousand feet, it took them round bend after bend, through a great area of steep slopes covered with firs. At times the road spiralled downward for some distance until the drop over the edge was reduced to a mere hundred feet, but only to snake up again to still loftier heights.

Up there in the mountains the villages were few, small and very far apart. Occasionally, at the bottom of the valleys, there were patches of olive trees, and small strips of vines or corn, but by far the greater part of the land was wild scrub, upon which only goats could browse, rising to vast masses of barren rock. The scenery was magnificent but, as this was a fair sample of two-thirds of Greece, it could not be wondered at that its people were so poor. The great ranges of barren mountains, shutting off the fertile valleys from one another, explained too why in ancient times there had been so many Kings in Greece. Most of them had, in fact, been no more than petty chieftains, submitting only for comparatively short periods to the overlordship of aggressive monarchs such as Agamemnon and, later, the powerful City States of Athens and Sparta.

Between half-past-two and half-past-three, they passed between peaks rising to six thousand feet on either side of them, and in places the drop from the road to the valley was close on four thousand. The bends seemed to grow still sharper and at scores of them it needed only a small error of judgment on Stephanie's part to send them both hurtling to their deaths. She kept her eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead, but Robbie was free to look about him. From time to time he could not resist the temptation to glance over the unprotected edge of the road down into the valley three-quarters of a mile below, but each time he swiftly looked away again and tried to comfort himself with the thought that coaches, lorries and cars made this journey safely every day and night; so there was really no reason to fear that they, too, would not do so.

Soon after four o'clock, at a place where there was one of the most precipitous drops from the road, they came upon a small township. Why such a spot should ever have been chosen, and how its houses had been built into the almost perpendicular mountainside above the road were mysteries. But it had a cafd with a few tables outside; so they pulled up there to give Stephanie a rest and to have a drink. Opposite the caf6 there were only the road, a strip of pavement and a railing. When they had finished their drinks, they walked across and looked over. There were more houses perched precariously below, and beyond them nothing. A running jump from the front door of any of them would have taken the jumper well over a thousand feet to land in the bottom of the valley.

'What a place to live!' Robbie muttered, turning away with a shudder. Tve no head for heights and within a week I bet I would have thrown myself over.'

'Fortunately, I don't mind them,' Stephanie replied. 'But all the same, I'd hate to live here, especially if I had children. I should be worried out of my wits. But I suppose the mothers in these places get used to it aod the children soon become as surefooted as goats/

The township, as they saw from the map, was called Tropaia, and soon after leaving it they began the long descent. For the better part of another hour they again slewed round bend after bend, occasionally slowing down to pass another vehicle, until they reached the fertile plain through which runs the river Alfios. The last lap was through charming woodland country, and it was just on five o'clock when they drove up a slope to the Spap Hotel.

Its main block, with a fine entrance hall and broad staircase, gave it something of the atmosphere of a big, private villa; but it had recently been built on to, and was now one of the few deluxe hotels in Greece, outside Athens. From the rooms they were given they could see, about a mile away, a part of the famous ruins and beyond them the curve of the broad river, but most of the ruins were hidden by tall Scotch pines which grew among them.

Their day had been a tiring one, so after resting they dined early with a view to getting in a long night. But before they went to bed, Robbie told Stephanie that he wanted her to drive him into Pirgos in the morning.

She expressed surprise that he was not anxious to see the temples; but he said that, as the next day was Saturday, if he did not make a start with his business in the morning he would have to waste the whole week-end.

As it was quite a short run, they reached the port by ten o'clock. It was nowhere near as large as Patras, but a little bigger than Tripolis, and most of the buildings were of the same shoddy variety. A few sites were occupied only by cracked walls and heaps of rubble, as the town had suffered from a long series of earthquakes.

They parked the car and Stephanie went off to have a 'hair-do' while Robbie set about locating the Czech group by the same means he had used in Corinth. In this somewhat larger town it took him longer, and he had to announce himself as a representative of United Kingdom Petroleum at three estate agents before he had any luck. Eventually, he learnt from a Mr. Levantis that the Czechs had bought a small factory some three kilometres to the south of the port. The factory had been partially destroyed by the last earthquake and then abandoned.

At half-past-twelve he rejoined Stephanie and asked her to drive him out of the town along the coast road until they were in sight of the factory. The solitary chimney had broken off about twenty feet up and some of the walls were jagged, with big gaps in them. But a small house to one side of it, in which the owner or manager had probably lived, still appeared intact, and several of the smaller buildings had their roofs on. After Robbie had studied the place for some minutes, Stephanie turned the car round and they drove back to Olympia in time for a late lunch.

Later in the afternoon they paid their first visit to the ruins, set so attractively among the sprinkling of tall pine trees. But Robbie seemed unable to get up much interest in them because his mind was now once more fuliy occupied with the Czechs.

On the Sunday morning he suggested to Stephanie that they should have a swim in the river; so they collected their bathing things and strolled down to it. The Alfios was several hundred yards wide there, but at that season the greater part of its bed consisted of dry, stony patches, between which the main stream and a few smaller ones meandered. However, after walking some way along the bank, they came upon a good-sized pool about five feet deep where water had collected from a little stream that flowed through it. They changed behind some bushes and on going in found the water delightfully warm, so they spent most of the morning either in it or sunbathing on the sandy bank.

It was not until they were seated at lunch that Robbie announced that he wanted to be driven into Pirgos again that afternoon. He then went on to say that he thought it fairly certain that the Czechs, like other people, would take Sunday off; so the odds were that most, if not all, of the group would have gone into the town, and that would give him a better chance than at any other time during the week to take some photographs without being caught.

Stephanie made no demur and by three o'clock she brought the car to a halt behind a group of tamarisks about two hundred yards from the factory. Instead of making for it, Robbie walked down to the beach, then sauntered slowly along it as though he were looking for pretty shells or brightly coloured stones. One wail round the half-ruined building merged into a stone jetty that ran out into the sea and barred his further progress along the beach. Turning inland, he followed the wall until he reached the first gap in it. He saw at once that it had recently been rendered impassable by a score of strands of barbed wire stretched at intervals of nine inches or less across it. But he had chosen his hour well. It was the middle of the siesta period and, on peering through the wire, he saw that, even if all the Czechs had not gone into the town, none of them was about.

The gap in the wall gave on to a spacious yard. Near the middle there stood a tall, steel tripod with very stout legs, the upper part of which he had already seen from a distance over the top of the wall. Near it, there was a small crane and a bulky piece of machinery, which he took to be some form of powerful motor or electric engine, under a shelter that had been rigged up to protect it from rain. The barbed wire was no impediment to his taking photographs so, resting his camera on one of the strands, he took two shots.

He then moved along the wall to another gap. That, too, was sealed off with barbed wire, and the view through it was the same from a slightly different angle; but it did include a better sight of a big pile of spiral screws, each about six feet long and one foot in diameter, so he took two more shots from there. Lastly, through a third gap round the corner of the wall, he got two photographs of a line of trolleys on rails that were evidently being used for running the earth churned out by the drills down to the jetty and from there into the sea. He then made his way back to the beach, sauntered along it again and so returned to the car.

'Did you get what you wanted?' Stephanie asked.

He nodded. 'Yes; and they are drilling after all.'

'Drilling?' she repeated interrogatively.

'Perhaps I didn't tell you; but the information my firm secured was that this Czech company meant to drill for oil. We couldn't believe it because there are not supposed to be sufficient oil deposits in Greece to make it worth while. We thought they might be up to something else. I mean . . he added hastily, 'establishing depots with storage tanks, and that sort of thing.'

'But you are satisfied now that what you were told is right?'

'Yes. There's no doubt they are drilling. I've got photographs of the plant and the tip-trucks they're using to run the churned-out earth down into the sea. One can only suppose that by some new radar process, or something, they have been able to detect oil deposits that no one else believed to exist.'

Stephanie gave a sigh of relief. 'Thank God for that, then. Now you have done your job you won't have to take any further risks of being beaten up. We can forget all this and concentrate on your book. That is if your firm will give you a few weeks' leave, and they jolly well ought to.'

Robbie smiled. 'Oh, I can fix that, all right. I must get these photographs developed as soon as possible and send them in. Then, so far as I am concerned, that will be the end of the matter.'

She drove the car back through Pirgos then, when they were a little way out of town, let him take the wheel. The road back to Olympia was on low ground, so if he had run off it there would have been no great danger of a fatal accident; and by this time she felt that he was driving quite well enough to apply for a provisional licence as soon as they were again in a town where one could be obtained.

That evening, while he was lying in his bath before dinner, he took stock of the situation and found his feelings very mixed. For his self-imposed mission to be over was a great relief. On the other hand, it was annoying to think that for the past month he had been scheming and exerting himself to no purpose. His belief that there was some sinister design behind the Czech tobacco-oil deal had turned out to be only a figment of his imagination. That meant, too, that he would not now enjoy the triumph of having pulled off a fine coup as a secret agent and so gain the astonished respect of his uncle.

Then, as he thought further about it, he began to wonder if he really had got to the bottom of the matter. That the Czechs were definitely drilling indicated that he had, but the fact remained that Luke Beecham had assured him both that no one believed there was oil in Greece and, that if some new scientific device for discovering it had been invented, he would have heard about it. Could it be then that the Czechs were drilling for some other purpose—perhaps to sink concrete pylons on which rocket launchers could be based? That idea certainly gave much food for thought, and perhaps the photographs he had taken would provide the answer to it. Luke would know if the machinery in them was of a type used for sinking oil wells and, if not, he might be able to deduce from them what the Czechs were up to.

First thing next morning, Robbie walked down to the pharmacy in the village. Handing his camera to the man behind the counter, he asked him to take the spool out because, not being used to a camera, he was not quite certain how to do it. Then he asked that the film should be developed as quickly as possible.

After a glance at the camera, the man said: 'You have used only six of the eight films on the spool. Don't you wish to take something with the other two?'

'No,' Robbie told him. Tm in a great hurry for the six I've taken. How soon can you let me have two sets of prints? If possible I'd like to get one off to Athens by the evening post.'

The man wound up the unused part of the film, removed the spool, handed the camera back to Robbie, and said:

'Usually we ask people to call the following morning, but if it is all that urgent, I'll oblige you. Come back at half past four this afternoon and I'll have them ready.'

Returning to the hotel, Robbie collected Stephanie and they paid a visit to the little museum on the slope below it. The museum contained a number of fine Roman as well as Greek statues, but the outstanding exhibits were the world-famous Hermes of Praxiteles and the Victory of Paeonios. The former occupied a central position at the far end of the main hall, and its base was raised on a square, deep bed of sand that extended for some way all round it. On Stephanie's asking the reason for this, an attendant standing nearby told her that it was a precaution against earthquakes. Should one cause the masterpiece to be toppled over, the sand would save it from being damaged.

Going round the museum took them only three-quarters of an hour, so they had ample time for a bathe in the pool they had discovered. Then, after lunch, they went to their rooms for their usual read and nap. Soon after four, Robbie set off down to the village, eager to see the results of his first efforts as a photographer.

As he entered the pharmacy, the man behind the counter looked up and said: 'I'm sorry about your photographs, but the whole lot has been ruined.'

'Ruined!' exclaimed Robbie. For once there was anger in his voice.

'Oh, not by me,' the man retorted with asperity. 'You said you were not used to handling a camera, and you must have opened the back of it to have a look inside. If you remember, you hadn't used the whole of the film; so, until I wound it off to take out, it would have been loose. It was the light getting in that spoiled your pictures. The tops and bottoms are quite gone, and whichever way I held them up I couldn't make anything out of the middles. It would have been a waste of time and paper to print them.'

19

A Bolt from the Blue

Robbie had the man put a new film in his camera, then left the shop, angry and puzzled. He had certainly not opened the camera and he could not recall having dropped or knocked it— which the man had also suggested might account for light having filtered in.

When he joined Stephanie for tea on the broad terrace of the hotel his expression was so woebegone that she asked with quick concern what was the matter. On his telling her, she said:

'What rotten luck. But, of course, that is liable to happen at times with inexpensive cameras. Since you can't remember giving it a knock yourself that would have sprung its back, someone else must have. Perhaps when the chambermaid was in your room last night, turning down your bed, she moved and dropped it; or perhaps the man at the pharmacy made a mess of developing the film and told you this story to cover up his clumsiness.'

⁴Ah! Now I believe you've hit on it!' Robbie exclaimed. 'He seemed a bit on the defensive when he told me about it. That was probably because he had a guilty conscience. How infuriating— the results of the lucky break I had yesterday simply chucked away.'

'Do the photographs really matter?' Stephanie asked gently. 'After all, you have found out that these people are drilling for oil. Surely your firm will take your word for that.'

'Yes, I ... I suppose so,' he replied, a shade hesitantly. He had never even hinted to her his original belief that the Czechs might be up to something sinister, and was averse to mentioning that possibility now; so he added after a moment: 'All the same, I would like to have sent to Athens some photographs of the plant that is being used. I think I'll go to Pirgos again and take another lot.'

'Oh, Robbie!' she protested. 'You said yesterday that you were definitely finished with this dangerous business.'

He shrugged. 'Then, the photographs I took hadn't been ruined. But I won't risk going in while they are likely to be working on the site; so you've no need to worry about me. We'll think no more about it for the next few days.'

Next morning, after their swim, Robbie hired a guide to take them on a proper tour of the ruins. They lay between Mount Kronion and the river, on level ground covering an area of a quarter of a square mile. The whole of it was thick with the remains of temples, porticoes, baths, treasuries and other edifices, so that in its heyday it must have formed a great town consisting entirely of beautiful public buildings. Even in ruin, its broad flights of steps, huge, fluted pillars and still-standing arches were immensely impressive in the dappled shade of the tall Scotch pines that grew among them.

They visited in turn the Philippeion, the Heraion, the terrace with the twelve Treasuries, the great temple of Zeus, the house that had been built for the Emperor Nero, the Beuleuterion and the Leonidaion. This last had been a building as big as many modern hotels, in which distinguished guests lived while attending the Games. In its interior there had been small grass courts and round the outside a quadruple row of pillars supporting a shady colonnade, which must have made it very beautiful. Further on lay the workshop in which Phidias had carved his greatest masterpiece—the forty-foot-high ivory-and-gold statue of Zeus. Beyond it lay the gymnasia in which the athletes had practised under the eyes of their trainers before competing in the Games.

Crossing the area of ruins again, they left the sacred precincts by a tunnelled way and entered the Stadium where the Games had been held. From the first Olympiad in 776 b.c.—which had afterwards been taken by the Greeks of classical times as the starting date of their history—the Games had been held there every fifth year, with very few breaks, right up to the fifth century a.d. For over a thousand years the most perfectly-formed young men from all over the country, proudly displaying the beauty of their naked bodies, had competed there in running, jumping, wrestling, throwing the javelin and the discus, and in other sports. The victors of the contests won not only honour and life-long security from want for themselves, but also renown for the cities which had bred them.

Yet the Games brought to Greece a benefit far exceeding the pleasure and excitement of following a great athletic contest. When their date was announced, any wars that were being waged in the country automatically ceased. Kings and Democracies alike declared a truce for the period of the Olympiad. Not only that, but every State sent its great men as Ambassadors to the Games, with valuable gifts to be laid in the Treasuries of the gods. ITien, meeting to witness the Games provided the perfect opportunity for discussing terms of peace in an atmosphere of goodwill; so many a bitter conflict between States was temporarily stopped by an Olympiad and was never resumed after it, to the relief and benefit of their peoples.

It was next day, after they had enjoyed a swim and were sitting sunning themselves on the sand beside their pool, that Stephanie asked:

'About your book, Robbie. Will there be much more of it than the parts you have already written and those you have told me about?'

'No,' he replied after a moment. 'Not much more. The only long piece would be about Odysseus and his return from the Trojan War, and I'm in two minds whether to include that or leave it out.'

'Why?'

'Well, owing to Poseidon's having a grudge against him, he was ten years on the way, and his adventures nearly all have to do with overcoming giants and monsters; so, apart from tricks he played to get away from people who were trying to hold him up, it would read rather like a repetition of the deeds of Perseus and Hercules. Also, unlike the Iliad, which tells of the siege of Troy, the Odyssey seems to have very little in it based on real history.'

'Oh, come!' Stephanie laughed. 'Surely that applies also to lots of other matters you have written about. For instance, the war of the gods and giants in which they heaved mountains at one another.'

'But that was historical; or, at least, a race memory of an historical event. So was the account of Phaethon's terrible end.'

'He had something to do with the sun, hadn't he?'

'Yes. He was the son of Apollo by Glymene. When he grew up, she told him that his father was a god and he became so bumptious about it that all his school friends said he was only boasting. That made him so wild that he went to his father and demanded to be publicly recognized. As he had grown up into a real maiden's dream, Apollo felt quite proud of him and promised him any proof he liked to ask.

To show his friends what a fine fellow he was, Phaethon asked to be allowed for one day to drive the Chariot of the Sun. Apollo was frightfully against letting him, but he had sworn by the Styx to grant his son's wish; and as that oath was to the gods like having sworn on the Bible, he couldn't refuse.

The chariot was drawn by a team of tremendously powerful steeds and, in spite of Apollo's advice about how to hang on to them and prevent them from charging into one of the constellations, a stripling like Phaethon hadn't got a hope. In no time at all, he lost control and the chariot was zigzagging all over the heavens. It came swooping down over the earth, drying up rivers and burning up forests with its heat as it passed. Whole cities went up in flames and vast tracts of fertile land were scorched into barren desert. Great rifts appeared in the land, the earth trembled and the volcanoes erupted. It was on that day, so it is said, that what remained of the negro races were burnt black.

'Naturally, everyone who had escaped death from heat-stroke sent up frantic prayers to Zeus to do something about it, and that woke the old boy from his noonday nap. Whatever one may think about his morals, he was a good man in an emergency. He grabbed one of his thunderbolts and heaved it at Phaethon. That not only settled the young man's hash but freed the horses from his futile jerking on their reins; so they galloped back to their stalls beneath the eastern horizon and on earth it became night at midday.'

Stephanie smiled, but shook her head. 'How can you possibly say that has anything to do with history?'

'But it has,' Robbie insisted. 'It has been scientifically proved that all the other planets revolve with their axes at ninety degrees to the sun. Earth is the only exception and our axis is tilted to an angle of twenty-three degrees. The only possible explanation for that is that at one time a big comet came so near that it threw the earth off balance. And it is easy to imagine the sort of thing that would have happened while the comet was passing. Its pull would have brought about tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Whole peoples would have been annihilated, the courses of rivers would have changed and the sun would have appeared to have gone haywire in the sky. Here and there groups of people would have survived, of course, just as in remote places some people would survive an all-out atomic war. Those who did handed down their memories of the cataclysm, and gradually the powers of Nature came to be attributed to the gods; so the accounts took the form of Phaethon's losing control of the chariot of the sun, and the Immortals waging a ten-year war in which whole mountains were thrown about.'

'Yes, I see,' murmured Stephanie. 'There certainly seems something to that.'

'The Deluge is another example,' Robbie told her. 'At the time of the Flood there was not just one Noah but several. They lived in different countries, some as far apart as Babylonia and Mexico; but all of them, by forethought or luck, managed to save their families and some of their domestic animals, and their descendants re-populated their parts of the world.

'The Greek Noah was named Deucalion. He was one of the first race of men created by Prometheus, who tipped him off that the Flood was coming and told him to build an Ark. He did, and shut himself up in it with his wife, Pyrrha, a daughter of Pandora. They floated round for nine days and nights, then the Ark beached itself on Mount Parnassus. When the water had gone down a bit, they hiked it to Delphi and begged the gods to create another human race. As usual, the reply that they got was pretty obscure. They were told to veil their heads and cast behind them the bones of their first ancestor. That foxed them for a bit, but they worked it out that Gaea, the Earth-Mother, was the beginning of all things; so they went about throwing stones over their shoulders, and the stones turned into men and women.

'Of course, no one takes the stone-throwing part of the story literally, but that's not to say that Deucalion and Pyrrha were not real people who lived at the time of the Flood. No one who has read Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough can doubt that the Flood happened, because there are memories of it in the folklore of scores of different races on both sides of the Atlantic. It wasn't world-wide, but it affected the whole of Central America, Western Europe and the Mediterranean countries, and such a terrific cataclysm can only be accounted for by the same great comet, or perhaps another one, having nearly collided with the Earth.'

For a few minutes they sat silent, then Stephanie picked up a small stone and threw it so that it made a loud plop in the pool. Robbie had been looking at her as she raised her arm, and her right breast was forced outward by the action. She was wearing only a bikini. It was of white satin and showed up her golden skin to perfection. For the hundredth time his eyes drank in her loveliness, and he toyed with the thought of attempting to take the role that Zeus had so often played with beautiful mortal maidens in this sunny land of Greece.

He had only to stretch out his arms, seize her in an overpowering embrace and smother her with kisses. Yet he dared not do it. He felt certain that, instead of responding, she would do her utmost to fight him off. Then, whether he succeeded in having his way with her or not, everything between them would be finished. She had come to mean so much to him that the thought of losing her was unbearable. It would have sent him mad with grief.

Again and again since he had met her he had cursed his upbringing and his total lack of experience with young women.

During their youth other men all seemed to have gradually acquired the ability to attract girls be semi-serious chaff and clever little compliments, leading up to declarations of their feelings; but he simply did not know how to begin on such a normal type of courtship. In the three weeks they had been together his self-confidence in handling all other situations had enormously increased and, with her, he had for the first time really found his tongue. He could talk, laugh or sit silent with her more naturally than with anyone he had ever met. Yet the one thing that still froze him with shyness and embarrassment was the thought of saying anything which would reveal that his feelings for her were more than those of a friend.

While his thoughts were still racing, she threw another stone into the pool and said: 'What else are you going to put in your book? Aren't there some love stories that would counterbalance a bit those full of horrors?'

Her mention of 'love' brought him back with a start. It was a golden opportunity for him to begin talking of love, not as between the ancient Greeks but living people, then reveal how much he had come to care for her. But, even before he thought of taking it, he found himself replying:

'Oh yes; there are several. Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion and Galatea, Hero and Leander. Then there's Cupid and Psyche.'

'Tell me some of them.'

By that time he felt he had lost his chance so, after a moment, he started off. 'Pyramus and Thisbe lived in Babylon, and theirs was the original case of "the girl next door". As children, they planned to marry. By the time they were well into their 'teens, their love had developed into a grand passion; but their fathers hated each other's guts, and were so dead against their getting hitched-up that they forbade them to see one another. A high wall separated the gardens of the two houses, but it was built only of mud and straw; so they made a hole in it just large enough to whisper sweet nothings through when no one was looking.

'At last they became so fed-up with not being able to get together that they decided to elope. Thisbe was to slip out of her home at midnight and make for a place in the woods outside the city, known as "The Tomb of Ninus", and Pyramus was to be there to meet her. But she was so impatient to have Pyramus cuddling her that she set off too early. With a white veil wrapped round her head, she scurried through the dark streets and into the wood, only to find when she reached their dating place that her boy friend was not there.

'She knew that she hadn't mistaken the place because a big tree with white mulberries grew beside the tomb.'

'White mulberries?'

'Yes, I'm coming to that. When she had stood round for a bit, she heard a rustling in the bushes, and ran forward to get

Pyramus in a clinch. But instead of Pyramus she found herself face to face with a lion slobbering blood from a prey that it had just devoured. Letting out a yell, she threw her veil at the lion and sprinted off down the track for dear life. However, the lion had had his supper; so he just mauled her veil about a bit, then went off on other business.

Ten minutes later Pyramus turned up. He recognized her veil, saw that it was all bloody and concluded that a lion must have killed his sweetie-pie, then dragged her body off into the bushes. Frantic with grief, he drew his good and trusty and killed himself.'

'How awful!'

'Wasn't it? But worse is to follow. Thisbe, meanwhile, finding the lion was not after her, had pulled up; then, half an hour later, she plucked up the courage to creep back to the tomb. There she found Pyramus lying on his side, apparently asleep. With a yodel of joy, she threw herself upon him, only to find herself clutching a corpse. Snatching up his sword, she stuck it into herself and fell dead upon his body.'

'Oh dear,' sighed Stephanie. 'I think that must have been the original from which Shakespeare got Romeo and Juliet. But what about the mulberries?'

'The blood of the two lovers soaked into the roots of the tree and that is v/hy the fruit of most mulberry trees afterwards became dark purple.'

'Now tell me about Hero and Leander.'

'Leander was a handsome Trojan and he lived at Abydos on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles, or the Hellespont as the ancients called it. Hero was a priestess who served in Aphrodite's temple at Sestos on the European side, and all Aphrodite's mortal stand-ins had plenty of what it takes. These two fell for one another in a big way, but they were separated by about three or four miles of water.

'As Leander was a strong-limbed chap, he didn't let that deter him from get-togethers with his honey-bunch. Every night she came down to the shore with a lamp and he swam over to her. For them every night of the spring and summer was a night of gladness, and he swam back in time to get to the office, or whatever he did, every morning.

'But autumn came, then winter, and the Hellespont got colder and rougher. Still drawn like a magnet by what was waiting for him on the other side, Leander continued to take the nightly plunge; then one night there was a terrible storm. The wind blew out the lamp Hero was holding. In the pitch darkness and swirled about by the strong current, Leander could no longer tell in which direction the shore lay. Lost, and with the icy water numbing his limbs, he swam round until he was exhausted, then he went under once, twice, thrice. By the time dawn came, Hero was right off her rocker, because by then she felt pretty sure he must have had it. Gazing desperately round, she suddenly caught sight of his body washed up on some rocks; so she rushed into the water and was drowned, too.'

Stephanie pulled a face. 'What a gloomy ending.'

'Never mind,' Robbie smiled. 'I'll cheer you up with the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. He was a king of Cyprus and immensely rich. But he didn't care about power or lolly or the things it could buy. He was interested only in his art, and he was the all-time sculptor of his day. Girls left him cold, because he said he had never seen one half as well made as the beauties he could carve himself, and at length he made a life-size ivory statue of one that was an absolute smasher.

'He called the statue Galatea, and the more time he spent looking at it the more it got him under the fifth rib, until he was hopelessly in love with it. His statue was so life-like that he almost thought he could hear it breathing, and he fondled it and kissed it madly, hoping that it would come to life; but, of course, it didn't. The only warmth it had was from his embraces, otherwise it remained just cold ivory.

'Then the feast of Aphrodite came round. Being a pious type, Pygmalion took a whole lot of rich gifts to her temple, and although he knew that it was a silly thing to ask, because statues don't come alive, he begged the goddess to take pity on him and give life to Galatea. The altar fire flared up three times, which was usually taken as a sign that the supplicant's prayer was to be granted. He simply couldn't believe it; but, all the same, he ran all the way home. When he entered the studio, Galatea smiled at him, stepped down from her throne and melted into his outstretched arms.'

'That's much nicer,' Stephanie commented. 'Now let's have Cupid and Psyche.'

Robbie smiled at her. 'All right. I think we'll just have time for that before we have to get dressed and go up to lunch. Psyche was one of three Princesses. They were all good-lookers, but she was something out of this world. The other two hooked husbands, but she was so devastatingly lovely that no one could pluck up the courage to ask her to name the day, and so dumb that she hadn't the know-how to bring any of the chaps up to scratch. But no one was interested in her mind, and people thought her such an eyeful that they even deserted the shrines of Aphrodite to come and strew flowers under Psyche's feet when she went out shopping.

'Aphrodite got to hear of this and became frightfully steamed up. She sent for her son Cupid, or Eros as the Greeks called him, and packed him off on a special mission. Her orders were that he was to shoot Psyche with one of his arrows, so that she should go absolutely goofy about the most horrid, mean, brutal man he could find, who would beat her and make her life a misery. Eros located Psyche, but he made a mess of things. The very sight of her beauty made him gasp, and he dropped the arrow on his own foot; so, of course, from that moment he was head-over-heels in love with her himself.

'Just about this time, Psyche's father got a bit tired of having an unmarried daughter on his hands; so he went and consulted the Oracle at Delphi on what to do about her. The answer was to fit her up with a first-class trousseau, then take her up to the top of a high mountain and leave her there. Her parents were very upset about this, but they were afraid that if they disobeyed the Oracle they would get it in the neck. Poor Psyche—who, you can bet, was jolly upset too—was decked out as a bride, accompanied by all and s\mdry up to the mountain top, kissed her good-bye and left, as she and everyone else supposed, to be devoured by some horrible monster.

'But things didn't pan out like that at all, and although the chronicles don't say so, it's pretty clear that Eros must have fixed with Apollo what his Oracle should decree. As dusk fell, Zephyr arrived and whisked Psyche, complete with trousseau, on a light breeze to what the estate agents would describe as a very desirable property. She was set down in a lovely garden outside the most enchanting small palace that ever you did see. Having smelt a few of the flowers, she took a peep inside the mansion then, as nobody was about, had a good look round. She found that it had all mod. cons., and that by comparison the furnishings made those in her old home palace look as if they had come out of a junk shop. She was just thinking that the curtains in the dining room must have cost about twenty times as much as her papa gave her as a dress allowance each year when a voice said in her ear: "I expect you must be pretty peckish. Please ask for anything you fancy and it will be here in a jiffy."

'That must have shaken her a bit, because there was still no one to be seen. But she plucked up her courage and opted for a boiled egg, to keep her figure down, to be followed by lashings of strawberries and cream and a stick of nougat to round it off with.'

'Really, Robbie!' Stephanie interjected. 'I'm sure that's not in the chronicles.'

'Well, no,' he admitted. 'But I imagine that's the sort of meal a sylph-like young girl without much brain might have asked for; and putting in little touches like that makes me see the characters in these stories better. Anyhow, in the flicker of an eyelid, there was her supper on the table, with gold spoons and forks to eat it with and a milk-shake to wash it down.

'When she had finished licking her fingers after the nougat, she felt a bit drowsy; so she tripped lightly up the marble staircase to the best bedroom. A look in some of the cupboards showed her that, while she had been having supper, someone had unpacked for her. All her trousseau had been put neatly away, and to it had been added a full-length chinchilla coat. She put it on and was just preening herself a bit before the cheval glass when she got another shock. A voice said: "Not for now, dearie," then invisible hands removed the coat and started to undress her.

'As this voice had been a female one, she let herself be stripped, then led into the next room and popped into a silver bath full of scented asses' milk. When the hands had helped her dry herself, she was taken back to the bedroom where she lay down on a bed of rose petals. That bit really is in the chronicle.'

Stephanie laughed. 'What does it matter? You would have made up something just as suitable. But what happened then?'

'All the lights went out, plunging the whole place into complete darkness.'

'I think I really would have been scared by that.'

'Psyche didn't have time. There was a stir in the rose-leaves beside her, and a charming male voice said: "You may never see me, but you can hear and touch me, and I've been absolutely crackers about you from the moment I set eyes on you. This palace and everything in it is yours. The servants will remain unseen, but they will obey your every wish. I am the husband that the gods chose for you, and I shall come to you like this every night. Now, in about ten seconds, I'm going to start kissing and caressing you all over. I promise you there is nothing to be frightened of. You are going to enjoy this."

'The voice was that of Eros, of course, who had taken the form of an athletic young man. Before the first crack of dawn he left her; and he had been dead right. She had enjoyed it; in fact so much that she could hardly wait for night to fall so that he would come back and do whatever he had done to her all over again.

'Well, for a month or two everything went splendidly. Psyche was perfectly content to stooge round her lovely palace and garden during the day, wondering what new kissing game her invisible husband would teach her that night. But, very understandably, the time came when, with not a soul to talk to day after day, she became lonely; so she begged him to stay on for lunch just now and again.

'He said: "There's nothing I'd like better, sweetie; but it's just not on. If you ever set eyes on me our lovely romance would go right up the spout. I'll send you some copies of Woman's Own so that you can amuse yourself with some knitting." But Psyche said she wasn't a knitting sort of girl, and begged him to let her pay a short visit to her family, or to have them to stay for the week-end. He was dead against that, too; but she became so unhappy that at length he did agree that she should have her sisters up for the day.

'When her two sisters arrived their eyes fairly popped on seeing the luxury in which Psyche was living. At first, when she told them that invisible hands brushed her hair and painted her toenails, they wouldn't believe her; but when they asked for Lobster Newberg and Crepe Suzette for lunch and these items instantly appeared on golden platters on the dinner table they simply had to.

'On their asking about her husband, she confessed that she had never seen him either. At that the sisters, having become green with jealousy, began to work on the poor girl. They told her that very soon she would be paying for that chinchilla coat in no uncertain manner. It was all very well for her to say that her chap felt like a beautiful young man, but demons could assume any form they liked. At any time he might turn into a terrible monster and tear her limb from limb. To escape such an awful fate, there was only one tiling for her to do. As he was afraid of her seeing him, it was evident that when asleep he resumed his true, hideous form, and when looked on would lose much of his power. They advised her to put an oil lamp under her bed and, when her husband had dropped off to sleep, to get it out and light it. They added that she must also conceal one of the kitchen knives somewhere handy; so that when she set eyes on the horror that had been making love to her, she could plunge the knife into him before he could do her any harm.

'As I have said, Psyche was no great brain; so she believed all her envious sisters said, and acted accordingly. As soon as her husband was sound asleep that night, she got out the carving knife and lit the lamp. The gullible little idiot got such a surprise that she dropped her knife. Instead of a three-headed baboon, or something of that kind, on the crushed rose petals, snoring slightly, lay the sort of boy friend that Helen of Troy, Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba, had they been around at that time, might have fought to get their hands on.

'Eros's bow and arrows lay on the floor beside the bed. Psyche was so knocked all of a heap by her luck that she hardly knew if it was Easter or Christmas. Still in a swoon, she picked up one of the arrows and tried it on her finger. The point drew a bead of blood, and instantly the yen she felt to cuddle up alongside the slightly snoring young man redoubled. But wounding herself with the arrow caused her to jerk the oil lamp and a drop of the hot oil fell on Eros's shoulder.

'He started awake, yelling: "Murder! Fire! Thieves! Rape!" Then he realized that his little nitwit had ignored the warnings that he had been at such great pains to instil into her. Sadly he told her that she had bitched the whole shooting match, and that now they must part for ever. His wings sprouted from his shoulders and he took off. At the same instant the enchanted palace vanished, lock, stock and barrel, and Psyche found herself back on the barren mountain top.

'After a bit she began to scramble down. Coming to a river, and being by then cuckoo with despair, she chucked herself into it. But she was washed ashore further down, and I suppose someone took her in, gave her some clothes and sent her on her way. Her sisters handed her the frozen mitt. Instead of condoling with her, they both hurried up to the mountain top, hoping that Eros would take a good view of them; but a mist came down, so they walked over a precipice and broke their necks. That served them right, but it didn't do Psyche any good; and for quite a time she wandered all over the place, distractedly seeking a way to make contact with Eros.

'He had winged it like smoke back to Olympus, yelling blue murder about his tiny little burn; but perhaps he had a very delicate skin. At all events he tearfully begged his beautiful mama to nurse him well again, although he refused to tell her how he had come by his burn.

'Aphrodite then put her Intelligence Service on the job, and a little bird brought her a report of her son's affair with Psyche. The goddess was absolutely furious; largely, I suppose, because it was Psyche at whom people had deserted her temples to go and stare. All the same, I think she behaved very unreasonably in being beastly to her son just because he had had fun with a mortal, when she was practically on the Dilly herself.'

'What does "on the Dilly" mean?'

Robbie smiled. 'Oh, it's an old-fashioned expression I happened to see in a book, for the girls who used to saunter up and down Piccadilly on the look-out for chaps they could persuade to come home with them for the night as paying guests; although, of course, Aphrodite never took money for that sort of thing. Generally, she was a very kind and easy-going goddess, but evidently in this case she felt that her supremacy as the Queen of Beauty was being challenged; so she pursued Psyche like a she-wolf after a ewe lamb.

'She persuaded Zeus to send Hermes down to proclaim that anyone who took Psyche in would suffer the wrath of the gods, and offered seven kisses from her own lips to anyone who would give up her mortal rival. As you can imagine, down on earth poor Psyche was having a very thin time; so thin, in fact, that after a while she decided to hand in her checks.

'That didn't do her any good at all. No sooner had she given herself up at one of Aphrodite's temples than she was hauled before the goddess by her golden hair, beaten, made into a slave and given all sorts of impossible tasks to perform.

'First Aphrodite mixed up a great heap of wheat, barley, millet, peas and beans, told Psyche to sort them out by evening, then went off in her latest creation to a wedding feast. Of course, Psyche hadn't a hope; but a kind little ant came on the scene, then brought all his pals to help; so when Aphrodite came back, trying to smother occasional burps from the amount of champagne she had drunk, she found that the job had been done.

'Next morning the goddess took her hated daughter-in-law to the bottom of a rocky hill and pointed out to her a thicket at its top, in which was feeding a flock of sheep with golden fleeces. She told Psyche that they were as fierce as lions, but she must go and get her a good handful of their golden wool. Again Psyche knew that she just was not up to it, so she decided to make an end of herself by taking a header into a deep pool that lay close by. But the nymph who was the tenant of the pool popped up just in time and said:

⁴ "Hi, you! I don't want your body going rotten and making a nasty smell in my water. Have some sense and the job you've been given will be easy. While those vicious rams are playing tag with the sheep among the bushes, you have a nap down here. By afternoon they will be tired out and want a nap, too. Then you can go up the hill without their seeing you, and pick off the golden wool they have left on the thorns."

'Naturally Psyche took this advice; but even the lapful of golden wool she brought Aphrodite did not appease the goddess. She gave the wretched girl other impossible tasks to do, but one way or another Psyche was always helped out with them.

Then at last Eros felt well enough to come downstairs, and he discovered that Psyche was sleeping under the scullery sink or some place like that. When he heard of all she had suffered on his account he loved her more than ever, and rushed off to beg Zeus to make his mother stop being so beastly to his beloved.

'Zeus, never having seen anything against a god uniting with a mortal, lent a sympathetic ear and summoned a Council of the Gods, ordering Aphrodite to bring Psyche with her. His Address from the Throne amounted to: "You all know that I've never been altogether sold on true love myself, but I admire it in others; so it is my intention to bless the banns of these two young people. What is more, since we can't have outsiders as members of the Club, I'm going to make the bride an Immortal." Then he beckoned to Psyche and, holding out a beaker of nectar to her, added: "Come here, my dear. Take a sup of this, and it will do the trick."

'When Psyche got her breath back everyone was queueing up to kiss her; and when Aphrodite saw how deliriously happy Eros looked, her mother's heart softened and she promised to love Psyche, too. Then they held the biggest-ever wedding feast. Hephaestus cooked fabulous dishes, Dionysus got up the best bottles from the cellar, the Seasons produced wonderful flowers, the Muses sang their sweetest songs, Ganymede went round filling all their goblets with nectar-'

'I thought Hebe was the Cupbearer of the Gods,' Stephanie put in.

Robbie hesitated a second. 'Well, she was at one time, but she lost her job. As I think I've told you, the Immortals were distinctly prudish when they were in company. I suppose the truth is that Hebe had been lifting the elbow herself too frequently. Anyhow, one night when they were feasting, she tripped up, and she can't have been wearing much in the way of undies because, as she fell, everyone saw all there was to see. Apparently they were so shocked by this that Zeus gave her the sack and brought in handsome young Ganymede to do butler instead.'

'I see. And did Eros and Psyche live happily ever after?'

'Yes. They never seem to have become tired of one another, and they had a beautiful daughter whom they named Joy.'

'Well, I am glad about that,' Stephanie said, getting up. 'And now it really is time for us to dress and go up for lunch.'

Late in the afternoon they had a ramble on their own round the ruins and it was on their return from it that they heard more about the submarine. During their stay at Navplion the weather had been good, so they had spent nearly the whole of every day out of doors. In consequence, they had not exchanged more than a few words with any of their fellow guests. Here, too, at Olympia, they had kept themselves very much to themselves; but there was one English couple who had the next table to theirs in the dining room, and with them they had become on casual conversation terms. The name of the couple was Jackson. He was middle-aged and a partner in a well-known firm of London auctioneers; his wife, a smart and pretty woman, was some years younger.

As Robbie and Stephanie came into the lounge, the Jacksons were sitting near the door. Glancing up from a newspaper, Mr. Jackson said: 'Things don't look too good, do they?'

Stephanie caught sight of the banner headline of the copy of the New York Herald Tribune that he had just lowered and, pausing at their table, said: 'I suppose you mean about the submarine?'

'Why, yes,' Mr. Jackson replied with a somewhat hesitant smile. 'I don't know of any other international headache at the moment; but this seems a really nasty one.'

'To tell the truth,' Robbie admitted, 'I've hardly given it a thought. We heard about it last week in Navplion, but English papers are not easy to come by in these places, and I haven't seen one for days; so I got the impression that the trouble had blown over.'

'It will,' declared Mrs. Jackson optimistically. 'Come and sit down and join us for a drink. Frank here has been indulging in such a fit of the blues since he got that paper that I badly need cheering up.'

Chairs were pulled round from another table, a waiter summoned and the order given; then Robbie said: 'I must confess that I don't even know how the trouble started.'

'Well, there are two versions about that,' Frank Jackson told him. 'The Americans say their sub. was making an under-ice cruise for scientific purposes. She left Honolulu in mid-March, came up through the Bering Straits, went west well inside the edge of the Arctic Circle, cruising some way north of Russia, and should have come down south of Greenland to New York. But, when passing between Franz Joseph Land and Novaya

Zemblya, something went wrong with her steering apparatus; so her course was deflected too far south and she found herself in very shallow water, which turned out to be off the Russian coast near Murmansk.'

'I know nothing about such things,' Robbie remarked, 'and my geography is not too good. But it seems extraordinary that, with all those wonderful scientific gadgets they have now, she should have got so far off her course.'

That's just the point. Both Franz Joseph Land and Novaya Zemblya are Soviet territory, and the captain of the sub. states that in the ice-free passage-between them there was a number of Soviet warships. In the coded radio report he made, extracts from which have since been published by the American Government, he puts up the theory that the Russians have some new scientific device by which the ships of theirs that he passed, and which followed him down, were able to throw his compass out by several degrees. In fact, that they deliberately drove him on to their coast; and that, on learning where he was, he took refuge under the nearest ice.'

'And what do the Soviets say?' Stephanie asked.

'Oh, they naturally deny that. They say that, following normal procedure, they tracked the sub. down from Novaya Zemblya to see that it did not enter their territorial waters. But it did, and began to snoop round the defences in the neighbourhood of Murmansk. It was only then that they took action and sent out everything they had to head it into the bay, where it is now lying virtually captive.'

'I gathered from an American I met at Navplion,' Robbie said, 'that the Russians had demanded that it should come out and that its captain should surrender the ship and her crew to them.'

'That's right. Of course, the Americans firmly denied that it had been sent on a spying mission and refused. The Russians then did the correct thing and put the question to the United Nations. That eased the tension, as most people thought that, after a lot of talk, some solution would be arrived at. There was plenty of talk all right and yesterday the United Nations gave its verdict. Most of the Afro-Asian countries ganged up against the West, and that gave the Soviet bloc a majority. They say that there is no evidence to show that the sub. was forced into Soviet waters, but the fact is that it is there, and got there under its own power. Therefore, the Russians are in the right in demanding that it should be handed over.'

'Looked at fairly,' Stephanie remarked, 'I don't see how they could have come to any other decision.'

Mrs. Jackson nodded. 'That's just what I say. But Frank gets all worked up and says that is absolutely out of the question.'

'Of course it is, Ursula,' her husband took her up a trifle shortly. 'That submarine must contain the fruit of years of nuclear research by the Americans, ai.J by British and Canadian scientists, too. In addition, it almost certainly has in it all sorts of other secret devices for under-water navigation, air-conditioning, guiding missiles to their targets, and so on. To surrender her would be to hand the Russians on a plate the key to all our latest methods of defence. The West would be left naked in the breeze.'

Robbie fully agreed with him, but the two women stuck to their opinion that the Americans had once again asked for trouble which, whether it was or was not true, was neither here nor there; so, over further drinks, they argued round the subject until it was time to freshen up for dinner.

Next morning, while Robbie was having his coffee, rolls, Hymettus honey and the little, sweet buns that were always sent up in Greek hotels on the breakfast trays, he again thought over the question of the trapped submarine. He still could not believe that it would lead to war; but there could be no doubt that the two Great Power blocs were still giving the highest possible priority to every activity which might put either one ahead of its enemy, if things did blow up.

That led his thoughts again to the Czechs and the conclusion to which he had come just on a month ago—that if there were no oil in Greece, their operations could only be a cover for some other project that boded no good to the N.A.T.O. countries. In view of the crisis that was now developing, he began to wonder if he had been justified in wasting the past few days. The site near Pirgos having been completely deserted on the previous Sunday had led him, on learning that the photographs he had taken had been ruined, to decide to wait until the coming Sunday before going there again to take another set. Had he attempted to do so earlier, it seemed certain that some of the Czechs would be about, and, mindful of his escape from serious injury in Corinth, he had naturally been averse to risking another encounter with them. But now, in view of a possible emergency, to find out quickly what they were up to assumed a new importance. By the time he had had his bath, he had decided that, when he went down for a bathe with Stephanie that morning, he would tell her the full truth about his self-imposed mission; so that, if anything happened to him, she could let Luke Beecham know. Then he would tell her that he meant to try to take another set of photographs at Pirgos during the siesta hours that afternoon.

Half an hour later, carrying his bathing things, he was on his way to the lounge to wait for her. As he passed the office, the porter held out a letter to him and said: 'This is for Miss Stephanopoulos, sir. Perhaps you will give it to her?'

As he took the letter, Robbie wondered how anyone could have found out that she was staying at the Spap Hotel, Olympia. Then he remembered that, on their last night in Navplion, she had written and posted a letter that she had told him was to her closest girl friend, asking aer to let her mother know, without disclosing her whereabouts, that she was well and happy. In the letter she had evidently said that she was going on to Olympia and this was a reply.

Glancing at the letter, as he turned into the lounge, he saw that it had an Athens postmark, and was addressed in a bold, vigorous hand. The writing did not look like that of a girl, and it struck him that there was something familiar about it. Sitting down, he turned it over, striving to remember where he had seen that heavy, rather old-fashioned writing before.

Suddenly he seemed to go cold all over and his big hands began to tremble. He had seen the writing a score of times. It was that of Marak Krajcir, the manager of the Czech Travel Agency.

20

No Holds Barred

For a full minute Robbie sat stunned, holding the letter in his hand and staring at it. During the whole of the time they had been together, Stephanie had made no reference to any Czech except when they had been talking of his own investigation. She had never mentioned Czechoslovakia or any wish to travel. Then what possible explanation could there be for her receiving a letter from Krajcir?

Having asked himself that question, Robbie's brain temporarily stuck. Then the awful thought that had come to him when he had first recognized the writing on the envelope returned with renewed force. Could it be . . . No, that was utterly unthinkable. And yet . . . how else could one possibly account for her being in communication with his enemies?

His heart seemed to turn over inside him, and he suddenly felt sick. It simply could not be true that Stephanie was betraying him. Why should she? What had she to gain? She was not a Czech, but was half Greek and half English. Money apparently meant little to her for, on several occasions when he had tried to press a generous wage upon her, she had refused to accept more than one or two hundred-drachma notes. She always said that the holiday she was having amply repaid her for driving him and that it would be time enough to give her more money when she had done some work on his book. Besides, while he did not regard it as remotely possible that she had, in secret, the same feelings for him as he had for her, she had shown great concern for him when he had gone into danger, and had treated him with a warmth of friendship that could almost be said to be affection.

And yet ... ?

After another long minute of soul-shaking agitation, he decided that he must find out for certain. He had never spied on other people, let alone opened a letter addressed to someone else. But unless he resolved this horrible doubt once and for ail, how could they possibly go on together? Their lovely companionship, their carefree laughter, those long talks about his beloved Immortals in whom she seemed to share his interest, their planning of things to do that would fill other happy days, those delightful dinners during which he could gaze his fill at her every night across the table—how could they be resumed as long as suspicion of her motives never ceased to nag at his mind?

Had he been a professional secret agent, he would have gone to the kitchen and given the chef a handsome tip to let him steam open the letter over the spout of a kettle. Then, if his worst suspicions had been realized, he would have re-sealed the letter, given it to her and beaten her at her own game by acting a part while she remained ignorant that he knew the truth about her. But by nature he was far too straight-forward to adopt such finesse, even had he thought himself capable of carrying it off. As it was, the idea never occurred to him, or how he should try to excuse himself if he opened Stephanie's letter, found some innocent explanation for it, and had to give it to her afterwards. Unable to bear remaining in ignorance of its contents another moment, he ripped it open.

The letter it contained had neither opening nor signature. It was typed on a single sheet of thin paper and was in Czech. At the sight of the language, Robbie shut his eyes. Sickly, warm saliva ran in his mouth. With an effort he swallowed it, opened his eyes and read:

N. is pleased with you. Since there was no way in which you could prevent him from taking the photographs, it was an excellent idea to render the film useless by opening the back of the camera. Had you stolen and destroyed the film, that would have revealed that we have him under observation, and he might even have suspected you. As he remains in ignorance of the fact that his visit to Pirgos is known to us, it seems likely that he will make a second attempt to get photographs of our plant there. Now that he is showing a greater inclination to confide in you, it should be easier for you to find out his plans in advance, and it is of the utmost importance that we should be informed if and when he decides to go to Pirgos again, so that we may be ready for him. N. says that as he shows such persistence, we now have no alternative to putting him out of the way for good, and another visit by him to Pirgos would provide an excellent opportunity. As soon as you have anything to report, ring Pirgos 8721. A day and night service has been installed, so at any hour there will be someone there to receive your call.

Robbie's eyes misted over. It was really true then. She was working for the Czechs. She might even be one herself. As the letter was in Czech, she must know that language; so the odds were that she was. If so, that would explain a lot of things: for one, her ignorance about Greek mythology; for another, her blue eyes and the fact that her colouring was much lighter than that of the great majority of Greek women—although he had put that down to her story that her mother was English. Then there was the curious accent with which she spoke Greek. He had attributed that, too, to her associations with England, although it was sufficiently marked for him, a foreigner, to have noticed, and it should not have been if she had spent all but her early childhood in Greece. He thought it probable now that her accent was much more noticeable to the Greeks than to himself, and that it was unlikely that she had ever been in England. To tell him that she had been brought to Greece when still a child had been a clever precaution, enabling her to say, should he attempt to check up on her, that her memories of England were only very vague ones.

But how cleverly she had deceived him from the very beginning. He closed his eyes again and winced as he thought of the way in which he had taken as gospel truth her story that she, a woman of twenty-four, was being forced into a repugnant marriage and that, if he did not take pity on her, she could see no alternative to becoming a hostess in a Piraeus night club. In this day and age, it was so highly improbable that only a simpleton like himself would have believed it.

As he opened his eyes again, he caught sight of her passing some remark to the page boy, who was holding the door of the lounge open for her. Stuffing the letter into the pocket of his jacket, Robbie stood up. Next moment she was coming towards him, smiling her usual morning greeting.

Somehow he found his voice and, to his surprise, it sounded quite normal as he automatically made his usual response— hoping that she had had a good night and was looking forward to their swim.

As he picked up his swimsuit and towel, she remarked how lucky they were that the weather still remained so lovely; then, side by side, they left the lounge and walked down the broad staircase out into the sunshine.

Robbie's brain was still racing. He knew now why it was that the Czechs had been waiting for him in Corinth and why, after he had escaped from them, he found her about to drive off with Barak. He knew, too, why she had constantly pressed him to confide in her. Should he blurt out his discovery here and now, and charge her with her perfidy? No; there were other guests from the hotel about, making their way down to the ruins. It would not do to start a blood-row within their hearing. Better to wait until they reached the river. They passed the little museum and descended the slope to a bridge that spanned one of the tributaries of the river. As they walked along she chatted away lightly, first about a group of Germans who were a little way ahead of them, then about the Jacksons. She said that on the previous night, before going to bed, she had returned to the lounge to get a magazine, and had run into Ursula Jackson, who had asked her how long she had known Robbie, and several other vaguely leading questions. She added with a laugh that she was sure that charming lady had not accepted Robbie's statement that he was a business man and herself his chauffeuse-secretary, but believed them to be lovers enjoying an unofficial honeymoon.

Had Stephanie made such a remark the day before, Robbie just might have plucked up the courage to break the ice by saying: 'How 1 wish we were.' But now he could think only of the horrible deception she was practising upon him. The letter, which seemed to be burning a hole in his pocket, proved beyond any shadow of doubt that she was only waiting for the chance to betray him into the hands of his enemies. He thought of Jael, who had driven a tent-peg through Sisera's head only an hour or two after she had slept with him; of Delilah who had cut off Samson's hair and so sent him to be slaughtered. That sweetly smiling, gentle-seeming creatures could calmly carry out such acts of treachery upon men who loved them seemed unbelievable; yet history provided scores of examples of such betrayals, and there seemed no escaping the fact that Stephanie was just one more of that hideous breed.

When they had covered another few hundred yards, she glanced at him and said: 'Why are you so silent this morning, Robbie? Aren't you feeling well?'

'I'm all right,' he managed to reply. 'I had rather a bad night, but I'll feel better when I've had a swim.'

Reassured about him, she went on to suggest that next day they should cut out their bathe and run down to Phygalia and Theatron where, she had learned from a folder in the hotel, there were some interesting ruins.

He said he thought that was a good idea, and they would talk about it over lunch. But it brought home to him more sharply than ever that there could be no such next day. Those runs in the car and jolly picnics while he told her stories of the ancient Greeks were over for ever. The sweet companionship with her that he had enjoyed more than anything in his whole life was a thing of the past, and only bitter loneliness lay ahead.

His thoughts then turned to another case of woman's treachery that was for him nearer home. The city of Megara had once been besieged by Minos, King of Crete. The siege was long; so Scylla, the daughter of Megara's King, Nisus, often saw from the battlements Minos in his shining armour and fell in love with him. Her father had one lock of purple hair, and he confided to her that an Oracle had predicted that the city would never be taken unless he was shorn of this lock.

Scylla's passion for Minos became so great that one night she crept into her father's chamber and cut off the lock. Then she secretly left the city, made her way to Minos's tent and offered him the strand of purple hair, with her undying love.

Minos, being a chivalrous King, refused to take it, gave King Nisus honourable terms and spurned Scylla, telling her that he would not demean himself by having anything to do with a woman capable of betraying her country.

For a moment, Robbie imagined himself in the place of Minos. He thought of the satisfaction he would derive from having Stephanie clinging to his knees and beseeching him to make love to her, then breaking her evil heart by haughtily thrusting her from him.

But the cases were not parallel. Stephanie did not love him. She had exerted all her charm and woman's guile on him only to lead him to confide in her; so that she could pass on his intentions to unscrupulous men who, it seemed, were now prepared to go even to the length of killing him. Far, far from loving him, she probably despised him for not even having had the courage to make a pass at her, when for these past weeks she had been in such a situation that, if she were to keep her job with her employers, she would have been put in a spot had she shown her resentment at his attentions.

It then struck Robbie that Minos had behaved like a fool. It was said that Scylla had been a very beautiful girl. Why, before throwing her out, had he not had the sense to enjoy himself with her? The humiliation earned her by her treachery would afterwards have been all the greater.

Robbie took a swift, sideways glance at Stephanie. There she was, in height barely up to his shoulder. But a fine, strong, square-shouldered little figure with a beautiful bust and broad hips that curved gracefully away under the thin skirt she was wearing to legs having perfect proportions.

'Why not?' he thought. 'Why not? It would give her something to remember me by. It would teach her a lesson for life; that even poor simple devils like myself are not to be trifled with.'

By that time they had reached their pool. With a smile over her shoulder, Stephanie disappeared into the clump of bushes behind which she always changed into her bathing things. Robbie went behind another clump some ten yards distant. His mind in a ferment, he tore off his clothes, but did not put on his swimming trunks. For a few minutes he stood there with his heart throbbing wildly. He could feel it beating like a hammer under his ribs. From experience gained during their previous bathes he knew how long Stephanie took to get undressed. Imbued with inflexible purpose, he suddenly strode towards the other clump of bushes.

At a glance, he saw that he had timed things perfectly. Stephanie had fastened on her white satin top but was only in the act of stepping into her bathing skirt.

The sound of his approaching footsteps crunching twigs and dead leaves caused her to look up. As she saw him advancing on her, she uttered a low cry, tripped on the garment into which she had put one foot, and staggered sideways. Next moment he was upon her.

With one hand he ripped the bikini-top from her breasts; the other hand he flung round her waist. Her blue eyes, distended by shock and fright, stared into his. Jerking herself backward, she attempted to break away from him, but his grip on her waist was firm. With a sudden movement, he drew her to him, forcing her body against his. Then his head came downward and his mouth fastened greedily upon hers. She wrenched her face sideways, but his devouring lips fastened on her neck below the chin. Another moment, and one of his legs had curled round hers. Under the pressure, her knees gave and she fell backward. Robbie came down on top of her, temporarily driving the breath from her body.

'No, Robbie, no!' she managed to gasp. 'Not like this!' Then she suddenly relaxed, gave a little moan, and offered no further resistance.

In less than a minute it was all over. At one moment he had been smothering her face with kisses, the next he had thrust himself away from her and was up on his knees. Sobbing for breath, he lurched to his feet and staggered away towards the bushes where he had left his clothes.

As he collapsed beside them, he was conscious of bitter disappointment. Apart from the softness of her lips under that first, snatched kiss and the delicious feeling of her warm, satinlike skin against his, seizing her like that had given him no pleasure.

Then, within a few moments, a reaction set in to the urge he had felt. Because she had turned out to be a secret agent that was no justification for treating her as though she were a whore. She was unmarried and had never given him the least reason to suppose that she was unchaste. However much she had lied to him had still given him no right to punish her by abusing her physically. It had been a swinish thing to do, and the very antithesis of the conduct of the paladins of chivalry, whom he had for so long admired.

Yet what was done was done. There could be no going back and seeking explanations. That, at least, he knew would have been futile, for there was no possible explanation by which she could have put herself right with him. She had been proved up to the hilt to be a whited sepulchre; fair-seeming without, but rotten as carrion within. There had had to be an end between them, and that it should have been in this fierce, vengeful way was, perhaps, the will of the ancient gods.

Some minutes later he heard a rustling of the bushes and, opening his eyes, saw Stephanie looking down on him. She was again fully dressed. Her face looked drawn and almost ugly, as tears had caused the mascara to run down from her eyelashes on to her cheeks.

'Why . . . ?' she asked in a hoarse whisper. 'Why did you do that to me, Robbie?¹

Rolling over, he got the letter from the pocket of his jacket and, without a word, threw it towards her.

Picking it up, she ran her eye swiftly over it, nodded slowly, gave a sudden sob and murmured: T see. Yes: now I understand.' Turning away she left him, and with stricken heart he listened until the sound of her footsteps had faded away in the distance.

He continued to lie there for what seemed an eternity, tortured by thoughts that went round and round: the humiliation of having been so completely fooled by her; remorse for having behaved so brutally to her; agony at the thought that those happy days he had spent with her were gone for ever; then again anger at the way she had led him to look on her as the most wonderful person in the world.

At last he dressed and, still in a daze, walked back to the hotel, to find that it was long past lunchtime. He assumed that Stephanie would be leaving as soon as she could make arrangements to do so; perhaps that afternoon, but possibly not till next morning. In the latter case she would still be there for dinner, and for them to sit down to another meal together was out of the question. He was most reluctant to see her again and he could have left a message for her, saying that he intended to dine out at one of the smaller hotels down in the village, but conscience urged him to face the unpleasant task of apologizing for the way he had treated her; so he walked along the corridor to her room.

He found the door ajar. He knocked, but there was no reply; so he went in. It was empty and the only sign that Stephanie had ever been there was some soiled face tissues on the dressing-table. Obviously she had already packed and gone. Walking over to the dressing table, he gently fingered the face tissues. A suggestion of her scent still lingered in the air, but the empty room struck him with a terrible air of finality. Tears welled up into his eyes but, with a curse, he suddenly swung about, marched out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

Going into his own room next door, he had a wash to freshen himself up. As he came out of the bathroom, his glance fell on the bedside table. Something was missing from it. Next moment, he realized what it was. He always kept his manuscript there, and it was gone. Only Stephanie could have taken it. Digging his nails into the palms of his hands, he slumped down on the bed. If anything could have added to his misery it was the loss of that bundle of papers which represented so many weeks of arduous work. She would have known that, and could have thought of no better way of revenging herself.

Yet, greatly as its loss infuriated him, it had one salutary effect. It enabled him to adjust his feelings towards her. In a way, the theft of the manuscript had evened up the score between them. It made him feel less guilty towards her, and enabled him to see her in a better perspective. He felt that he could now divorce in his mind the Stephanie in whose company he had enjoyed so much happiness from the real woman who had tricked and robbed him. Given a litle time, he would be able to remember the one with pleasure; but he would not be tormented by hopeless longings for her, because she had revealed herself as the other.

Suddenly, it occurred to him that the manuscript might not be the only thing she had taken. She might have made off with his passport and money and perhaps the car. Pulling out from under the bed the suitcase in which he kept his papers, he was relieved to find it still locked. On unlocking it, he found that his papers were intact. Leaving the room, he hurried downstairs and round to the garage, to find his fears again groundless. The Ford was out on the wash and one of the garage hands was hosing it down. He gave Robbie a friendly grin and said:

'When I got back from running your young lady into Pirgos I thought I'd better give the car a going-over.'

That solved for Robbie the question of how and where Stephanie had gone; but he thought it unlikely that Pirgos was her destination. From the little station at Olympia, the trains were slow and infrequent, and to get to Athens she would have had to change at both Tripolis and Argos. On the other hand, by going to Pirgos, she would be able to take a fast train up the coast and round the gulf of Corinth direct to the capital.

For a few moments he speculated grimly on whether, when she made her final report to Krajcir, the Czech would realize that it was his writing that had given her away. Anyhow the 'N' of the letter, who was most probably the First Secretary, Nejedly, was going to be far from pleased when he learned that she had been winkled out of her job.

As Robbie walked back into the hotel, he suddenly remembered that he had intended to go into Pirgos himself that afternoon to try and take another set of photographs. It was too late to do so now; so it would have to be the next day, unless he reverted to his original intention, put it off for two more days and lessened the risk by making his attempt on Sunday. But would that now lessen the risk? No; on the contrary, Stephanie still thought that he had meant to wait the week out, and she would certainly let them know what she believed to be his intentions. Possibly, realizing that, they would think it unlikely that he would stick to his plan; but, just in case he did, they would certainly not leave the place unguarded on Sunday, so it looked as though his chances would now be better during the siesta hours on any other day.

There was also the fact that the dispute over the submarine might just possibly lead to war. As Stephanie had been congratulated, in Krajcir's letter, on spoiling the photographs, that was a clear indication that the Czechs had something to hide. What could that something be if not a warlike preparation? Therefore, he felt more strongly than ever that his impulse first thing that morning, to get the photographs with a minimum of delay, had been a sound one.

Having decided that he would make the attempt next day, he went into the lounge and found a Greek newspaper. It was full of the Soviet-American crisis, but as yet the Russians had made no further move. Putting it down, he reverted to considering his own situation. He was in half a mind to dine down in the village, so as to escape having to give some explanation to the Jacksons of Stephanie's abrupt departure. But if he was to get those photographs, it would mean his staying in the hotel for at least another twenty-four hours. During that time he was certain to run into them; so it seemed better to face up to that rather than put himself to considerable inconvenience by taking all his main meals out.

When he met them at dinner, he announced at once that an unexpected call from Athens had necessitated his sending Stephanie off there to deal with an urgent business matter. He added that, in any case, he did not expect her back until after the week-end and that, if she proved unable to handle the affair for him, he would himself have to leave either the next night or on Saturday.

The Jacksons then insisted that he join them at their table. Much as he would have preferred to remain at his own, it was not in his nature to hurt the feelings of people who made kindly gestures towards him, and afterwards he was glad that he had accepted their invitation. Frank Jackson was a loquacious man; soignee Ursula Jackson also liked to air her views and Robbie had long been accustomed to the role of patient listener. In order to be able to make an occasional suitable comment, he had to take in what they were saying, and that kept his mind from the gloomy thoughts which would otherwise have occupied it. After dinner they continued their conversation over coffee and liqueurs in the lounge; so he went to bed much less harassed by memories, regrets and frustration than he would otherwise have been.

On the Friday morning, the very thought of going to the pool sent a wave of sickness through him, but he had somehow to get through the hours until the afternoon; so he decided to take the Ford out for a run. He had at first intended to hire one of the garage hands to drive him into Pirgos and back, but on

i 253 second thoughts he did not see why he should not drive himself. There were no high cliffs with dangerous bends on the way and, as the town was not a big one, he felt confident that he would be able to get through the traffic safely. The only snag was that he had no licence. As long as Stephanie had been with him while he was driving they could, he thought, have got away with it, had a policeman pulled them up, by saying that he had taken the wheel only for a short lesson. Should he be challenged while alone in charge of the car, he would find himself in trouble; but he decided to chance that.

His morning's spin on his own considerably increased his confidence, and after an early lunch he set out for Pirgos. At that hour the traffic in the town was at its lowest ebb; so he got through it without any difficulty, and by ten past two he halted the car at the side of the road alongside the group of tamarisks where, on his previous visit, Stephanie had waited for him. He then followed the same procedure of going down to the beach and walking slowly along it, stopping now and then as though he were collecting shells.

When he reached the wall of the ruined factory, he stood for a couple of minutes listening intently. No sound came to him, other than the gentle breaking of the surf on the shore; so it seemed that no work was at present in progress and that, as he had hoped, the Czechs had adopted the Greek custom of knocking off during the hottest hours of the day.

With high hopes now of succeeding in his intent, he walked quietly but quickly to the nearest gap in the wall. From some yards away, he saw that the barbed wire had been removed and the opening was in the process of being bricked up. A low wall about three feet high already filled the lower portion of the gap, and an unfinished row of bricks with still-fresh mortar below them showed that somebody had been working on it that morning.

Partially concealed by standing close up to the jagged edge of the original wall at one side of the gap, he cautiously peered round it. As he had supposed, all the machinery was at a standstill and, to his delight, no one was about. By stepping over the new low piece of wall, he had only to turn from side to side, so that his camera covered different sections of the yard, to take pictures that would show the whole of it. Taking out his camera, he took care not to knock the freshly laid top course of bricks, and stepped over into the yard. His camera clicked twice, then a whistle blew.

Next moment, men came running at him from all directions: from the little house, from sheds and from behind the big machine that had been installed near the derrick in the middle of the yard. Swivelling round, he dived for the gap in the wall. In his stride he put his foot down on the side of a square board on which there was a small mound of hardening mortar. His camera flew from his hand, and he fell across the length of newly made wall, dislodging half a dozen of the last-laid bricks.

Desperately he heaved himself upright, but only to find that two men had either been lying hidden in the long grass outside the wall, or had just dashed round there from some other opening. As he faced them, one of them sprang at him, aiming a blow at his head with a stout length of wood. He raised his arm to parry the blow, but the men in the yard had now come up behind him. They seized him by the shoulders and swung him round. He found himself face to face with Barak. The face of the tall, good-looking Czech still carried a symbol of the pasting Robbie had given it. The bruises had disappeared, but his nose had been broken and was now slightly crooked. While two other men hung on to Robbie's arms, Barak hit him again and again under the jaw until he slumped down unconscious.

21

Twelve Hours to Live

Robbie came to with a shock. A bucket of cold water had been dashed into his face to bring him round. His first sensation was only of a terrible pain in his chin and neck, as though the one had been broken and the other dislocated. Then, as his eyes focused, he saw Barak's face still in front of, but now above, his. He realized then that he was sitting on a stout wooden chair and that his arms and legs were bound to it. As he painfully turned his head from side to side, he became aware that he was being regarded with cold curiosity or casual amusement by a number of men on both sides of Barak. He saw, too, that he was in a shed, facing its half-open door, but there was plenty of light because the sun was streaming down on him through a great hole in the roof.

When his eyes had been open for a few moments, Barak grabbed a handful of his shirt and tie and shook him, so that excruciating pain ran through his neck and head. But he heard him snarl in Czech: 'Wake up! Wake up! I am impatient to talk to you.'

'Stop!' Robbie croaked. 'For God's.sake stop, and I'll listen.'

Barak released him, then spoke sharply to the other men, ordering them out of the shed. All but one of them trooped out, and the exception was standing a yard or so away from Robbie's left shoulder. Screwing his head round, Robbie got a quick glimpse of him. First he saw a fat little paunch, then the pink face and pig's features of Cepicka.

'Now, Mr. Grenn,' Barak began in a harsh voice. This meeting with you gives me very special pleasure. You have caused us a considerable amount of trouble, and we are determined that you shall cause us no more. I warned you in Patras to keep your nose out of our affairs. You chose to ignore my' warning, but I should have thought your narrow escape from having to spend some months in hospital in Corinth would have made you see sense. Had you a grain of intelligence in that thick head of yours, nothing would have induced you to come here again after learning yesterday that the lady you knew as Miss Stephanopou-los is a Czech agent. But that is just why you must be regarded as dangerous. By your amateurish blunderings, you may learn much more about our secrets than the N.A.T.O. professionals who are paid to do the job. Therefore, Mr. Grenn, now that you have so stupidly thrown yourself into our arms, we should be lacking in our duty to our country if we failed to take this opportunity to eliminate you.'

'Do you mean . . . that you intend to kill me?' Robbie asked hoarsely.

'Exactly,' Barak nodded and drew a finger along one side of his little tooth-brush moustache, 'and I cannot say that I am in the least sorry that your folly has landed you in this situation where your death has become necessary to protect the interests of my country. In fact, Mr. Cepicka and I spent most of last night in a train coming from Athens, on the off-chance that, within the next few days, you would pay this place another visit. You see, I wished to be, as I think you say in England, "in at the kill".'

'You bloody swine,' Robbie muttered.

Barak gave a slightly twisted smile, then shook a warning finger in front of Robbie's nose. 'Do not become abusive, Mr. Grenn, otherwise I might forget myself. Or, rather, recall too vividly that I have a personal score to settle with you. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to smash your face to pulp; but we have to remember that we are in a foreign country. Therefore your body, should it be washed up, must show no marks of violence in excess of such buffets it might receive through being thrown about by the waves.'

'So . . . so . . . you're going to drown me?'

'Yes. Presently I shall send one of my people into the town to buy the largest size in men's swimming trunks for you. At the quietest hour—shall we say three o'clock in the morning— Mr. Cepicka and I will come to you here. We shall take off your clothes and put you into the swimming trunks, then we shall take you down to the motor-boat we have here in our little harbour, run you out to sea and drop you overboard.'

Robbie's heart lightened a little. He thought it unlikely that they would take him out more than four or five miles and, unless there was a very strong current against him, he felt sure he could swim that distance back.

Next moment his hopes were dashed. With another slightly twisted smile, Barak went on: 'Miss Stephanopoulos tells me that you are a very powerful swimmer; so naturally we shall take precautions against any chance of your swimming ashore. In that, too, we must be careful not to leave tell-tale marks on your body. A loop of hose under your armpits, with its end stoutly wired so that you cannot undo it with your fingers, will serve. By it we shall troll you behind the boat, just as one trolls a hooked fish. Now and again we shall haul you in, to find out how you are standing up to the treatment. It will be interesting to see how long you take to drown. When we are quite satisfied that there is no longer life in your body we shall cut the wires at the neck of the loop of hose and cast you off.'

As Robbie listened his eyes were lowered and, when Barak spoke of trolling him in a noose of hosepipe, he noticed that his wrists were secured to the elbows of the chair in which he was sitting by short lengths of smooth, rubber hose. That ensured that, however much he wriggled his wrists, the skin would not become broken and cut as it would have against rope or cord. In consequence, when he was thrown out of the motor-boat, the only mark on his body would be a bruising where Barak had hit him under the chin and that, when he was washed up, would be taken as one of the bruises that a body normally receives through being tossed by the waves on to a beach. All this made it obvious to him that the manner of his death had been carefully planned in advance and, as he thought how idiotically foolhardy he had been to come to Pirgos again after Stephanie had returned to her employers, Barak gave him the final details of their arrangements.

'Of course,' he said, 'we shall collect your car and drive it a few miles further down the coast. Then we shall leave your clothes and an unmarked towel on a quiet stretch of beach. When your body is washed up and identified, the authorities can take their choice. Either that fine swimmer, Mr. Grenn, became bored with bathing in a pool of the river Alfios, so decided to run down to the sea for a real swim and had the misfortune to swim too far out; or that Mr. Grenn had been desperately in love with his pretty secretary, and her desertion had disturbed the balance of his mind, so he had chosen this way of putting an end to his life.'

This mocking reference to Stephanie turned the knife in Robbie's mental wound, and he was about to hurl curses at Barak when Cepicka, who had so far remained silent, gave a titter and added: 'How such a high-spirited girl survived three weeks of boredom with this fool, I cannot imagine. I congratulate you, Comrade Barak, on her fine sense of duty in not leaving him before she had to.'

So that, thought Robbie, was the impression of him that Stephanie had given these friends of hers. He could have wept with rage and humiliation, but managed to control himself by the thought that, if he showed how deeply he was hurt, they would only bait him further.

Barak gave an abrupt laugh and said to Cepicka: 'Come along, we will leave him now.' Then, when they had stepped out through the doorway, he glanced at his wrist-watch, turned and said to Robbie:

'It is now a little past three o'clock, Mr. Grenn, so you have just about twelve hours to live.'

A minute later, the door was shut and padlocked, and Robbie was left to his bitter thoughts, fears and self-reproaches. He realized now that he had been mad to pay another visit to Pirgos. He should have left Olympia and gone down to Kalamai, or across to Crete, where other groups of Czechs would not have been expecting him.

Thinking it over, he decided that the shock of finding out that Stephanie was betraying him, and all that followed, must have robbed him temporarily of all sense in handling the affair. Evidently, though, she had counted on his being fool enough to come there again, otherwise they would not have been waiting in ambush for him. How they could have found out that he intended to pay a second visit to the factory that afternoon remained a mystery. He could only suppose that their secret was of such importance to them that they had decided to lie in wait between one o'clock and four every day, in the hope of capturing him.

The fact that they had succeeded had, at first, dismayed but not particularly frightened him. But as Barak had given particulars of their programme for the coming night, it had become more and more clear that the Czech was not simply trying to scare him and that, in the end, he would get off with a very nasty beating up. By the time they had left the shed, he no longer had any doubts that they really meant to murder him. As his mind grasped the fact, real fear caused the sweat to break out on his palms and forehead.

As soon as he had regained consciousness, he had automatically attempted to free himself, only to find that he could move neither his wrists nor ankles more than half an inch. In addition, the chair to which he was bound appeared also to be made fast to a stout wooden crosspiece, immediately behind it, that formed part of the framework of the shed; for he could jiggle the chair about, but not stand up with it still tied to his back.

A more careful examination of his bonds showed that through each length of hose there ran a wire, the protruding ends of which were twisted together a dozen times below the elbows of the chair and a good six inches beyond the reach of his finger tips, however hard he stretched them. His ankles, secured to the chair legs, were even more impossible to get at. For five or six minutes he jerked the chair back and forth, hoping that he might loosen it from the wooden strut, but at the end of that time it was as firmly fixed as ever.

By squinting upward, he could see the big rent in the corrugated iron roof of the shed. Evidently several sheets had been brought down in the earthquake, and the roof had never been repaired; but as long as he remained bound to the chair it was futile to think of getting out that way. Apart from a heap of sand in one corner and a few old wooden boxes, the shed was empty; so, even if he could have moved his chair, there was no sharp metal angle in it against which, by rubbing his bonds, he might have worn them through.

In less than a quarter of an hour, he had examined and exhausted every possibility for regaining his freedom. At last he sat quiet, endeavouring to resign himself to the fate in store for him. Although Barak had said he intended to drown him, and he knew that the Czech meant that, his brain still refused to accept as a fact that in a few hours his lifeless body would be drifting about in the sea, and that he, Robbie Grenn, would be finished and gone from this world for ever.

Hour after hour through the long afternoon he sat there, his mind forming an endless series of pictures with thoughts appropriate to each: Stephanie laughing with him across a dinner table; his uncle's anger on hearing that he had got a job with the Czechs; the wan face of his beloved Aunt Emily as she lay in bed during her last illness; Stephanie naked and bending forward with one foot raised and the other through the leg of her bathing skirt just before he had seized her; the square head and pale blue eyes behind the pince-nez of the tutor whom Aunt Emily had engaged to help teach him German; the back of Nejedly's bald head and Barak's face beyond it, as they had sat lunching together that fatal day at Toyrcolimano; Stephanie wearing an absurd piece of blue veiling on her chestnut curls as he had first seen her; the sacred olive tree up on the Acropolis; old Nanny Fisher peeling an apple for his breakfast; and so on, and so on, until, in spite of the threat that hung over him, he dropped off to sleep.

For how long he slept he had no idea, but when he awoke night had fallen, and his limbs felt very stiff. As the realization of his position flooded back to him, he panicked and made frantic efforts to break free; but his bonds were unbreakable. After a few minutes of futile struggling, he slumped back exhausted and, from fear of what might now happen to him at any moment, began to weep.

Gradually his tears ceased, and another series of mental pictures, similar to those of the afternoon, began to drift through his mind. From time to time, he now began to feel rather hungry and distinctly thirsty. It must, he reckoned, be at least eight hours, perhaps more, since he had finished lunch, and evidently his captors did not think it worth while to bring food and drink to a man they had condemned to death. Had they come to tell him that he could have anything he chose for his last meal, he felt sure that he could not possibly have done justice to a lavish dinner; but to try and keep his mind off what it would be like to find oneself choking and gasping without hope in the sea, he began to think of all his favourite dishes.

It was not completely dark in the shed, as faint starlight came through the open portion of the roof, yet it was sufficiently dark for him to notice instantly a pale line of light that appeared about four feet up, where the double doors of the shed met. Next second he heard the key turn in the padlock. His heart gave a thump. The door was pulled open and his eyes were dazzled by the glare of a torch that was directed full on him. Sweat again broke out on his forehead. At the thought that his murderers had come for him, he began to shake with terror.

The beam of the torch swung away from him. By its diffused light he saw the outline of its bearer, who had turned at that moment to close the door. It was neither Barak nor Cepicka, but Stephanie.

Instantly hope flamed in his mind. She could have come only to rescue him. He strove for words to cry out to her his gladness and relief, but his mouth had become so dry that, for a moment, his tongue seemed to rasp in it. Before he could speak, she said in a hard voice:

T take it you don't like the idea of dying.'

Her tone and words abruptly quashed his hope. He now felt certain that she had come there only to taunt him: to tell him what a fool she had always thought him; to say how perfectly he had demonstrated that belief to her friends by so readily blundering into this trap; to compensate herself for the way in which he had humiliated her by enjoying the sight of his fear. She hoped, perhaps, to hear him scream for mercy as Barak and Cepicka stripped him and dragged him down to the motor-boat.

He swore to himself that he would not give her that satisfaction, then replied in a surly tone: 'Of course I don't want to die. Who would?'

'Well'—her voice still held no touch of warmth—'if I save you —if I release you—will you give me your signature on a document?'

His heart bounded again. She meant, after all, to give him his life—provided he was prepared to ransom it. But what did having to pay up matter? Anything, even ruin, was preferable to being dragged at the end of a hosepipe from a motor-boat until one drowned. He gave an abrupt, unnatural laugh, and said:

'I'm ready to do a business deal. It's no good asking for a sum beyond my ability to pay, but you must know that I'm pretty well off, Ask anything in reason, and if it's within my means I'll sign on the dotted line.' Then, in his bitterness, even though he might pay for it with his life, he could not resist adding: That you should be one ahead of your pals in this is hardly surprising. Double-crossing people comes so naturally to you.'

'Yes,' she replied sharply. 'I am double-crossing them, and at considerable risk to myself. But only because I don't like the idea of being a party to murder. From the very beginning I did my utmost to persuade you to stop running into danger, but you wouldn't listen. I'm not out to rob you of your dirty, unearned, capitalist money, either. The paper you are going to sign—that is, if you still wish to be alive tomorrow morning—has to do with this absurd spying of yours. Here; read it.'

Thrusting a paper under Robbie's nose, she held her torch so that the light fell on it. The document was in her own writing, in Czech, and read:

/, Robert Grenn, hereby take oath and swear by everything I hold sacred that, as from midnight on Friday, the 18th of April, I will cease from the investigation into Czech affairs on which I have been engaged for the past month. I further undertake to return forthwith to Athens, to leave Greece within forty-eight hours and not to return to that country during the next six months.

Well, Robbie thought, there it is. The only person I've ever been committed to is Pallas Athene, and she can hardly expect me to throw away my life. When she spoke to me of carrying things through to the bitter end, she must have meant the bitterness in which my association with Stephanie has ended. At least, when I pass through Athens, I can see Luke, tell him what has happened to me, and impress upon him that the Czechs being prepared to commit murder in order to guard their secret is proof enough that it must be something worth his getting our professionals to investigate. To Stephanie he said:

'Very well. I know when I'm licked. Undo me, and I promise not to lay a finger on you. Then I'll sign this thing, and carry out its stipulations.'

Moving away, she put two of the empty boxes one on top of the other, and on the rough table so formed laid the paper and her torch. She then produced a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of her skirt and, after something of a struggle, cut the wires that ran through the short lengths of rubber pipe that kept his wrists and ankles in place.

At his first attempt to lift his arms, pains shot through them, causing him to give a low moan and quickly lower them again. He found that he was so stiff from sitting for so many hours in one position that he could hardly move. But she showed little compassion.

Stepping up to him, she said: 'Come on. We haven't all night, and I don't want to be caught here. If we are, it will be curtains for you; so this is no time to sit pulling faces just because you have pins and needles.' Then, seizing his arms, she began to pinch and pummel them vigorously.

For a few minutes, her rough ministrations caused him agony; but he managed to get to his feet, upon which she thrust a Biro pen into his hand and he signed the document.

Instead of picking it up, she left it there on the top of the box, produced a letter from her pocket, which she laid beside it, and said: 'When they find those, I'm hoping they'll be satisfied, and not come after us. One can't guarantee that, because after what you did to Barak in Corinth he is thirsting for your blood; but I'm hoping that Cepicka will persuade him that my having spiked your guns in my way, it would be pointless to take any further action. Now follow me, and for God's sake keep those big feet of yours from making more noise than you can help.'

Having switched out her torch, she led the way from the shed and, keeping in the shadow of other buildings alongside it, led him to a corner of the big yard where there was a double gate. A quick glance round had shown him that there were no lights in the little house or in any other part of the ruined factory. The gate was not locked and, after they had stepped through it, he closed it carefully behind them. Beyond the gate lay the fiat, stony surface of what had once been an outer yard. Two lorries and three cars were parked there. Stephanie led the way over to one of the cars, and he recognized the Ford Zephyr. As she got in, she said in a low voice:

'If you really believe in your Immortals, now is the time to pray to them. Barak and the others went early to bed, to get some sleep before having to get up in the small hours to settle your business. If the noise of the engine wakes them, we'll be in trouble. That big Mercedes of his would overhaul us before we had gone five miles.'

'What time is it?' Robbie asked in a whisper.

'It's not yet quite twelve. I had to wait until they were well asleep before risking coming out to you. But I wanted to get as much leeway as I could before they are due to wake. If the engine doesn't rouse them, we'll have a good three hours' start. That should give us lead enough if Barak does decide to come after us.'

The engine purred and she let it run for a moment then slipped in the clutch, turned the car and headed it through a gap in the wall, down a rough track. Robbie twisted round to stare anxiously out of the back window; but no lights came on in the upper part of the house, which was all that he could see over the two walls.

When they reached the highway, Stephanie put on speed and, as the road was an open one, they were soon doing seventy miies an hour in the direction of Pirgos.

'Where do you intend to drop me?' Robbie asked.

'Athens,' she replied laconically.

'Athens!' he repeated in surprise. 'That means then that you don't trust me to go there under my own steam?'

'I don't see why I should trust you in anything.'

'No,' he agreed, as a guilty memory of their last encounter rushed back to his mind. 'I suppose not. But we can't possibly make Athens in a night. We'll have to stop off at various places, so I could easily give you th$ slip.'

'I don't advise you to try it. You would have cause to regret it if you did.'

'Apart from having broken my pledge, I don't see why. That is, unless you are toting a gun, with which you mean to shoot me if I run off into the bushes.'

'Yes; I have got a gun with me; and I would have shot you if you had set on me after I released you. But you had better not try to get hold of it. Yesterday you took me completely by surprise; otherwise things would have gone very differently. I've told you that I'm against murder, but I wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet through your leg; so I advise you not to attempt any monkey tricks.'

By then they had reached Pirgos. There were still people sitting drinking in the cafes, but the streets were almost deserted, and, reducing her speed only to forty, Stephanie drove through the town. When they had come out on the road to Olympia, she continued:

'I may as well tell you, though, that making sure that you don't feel tempted to go back on your word is not the only reason that I am taking you to Athens. For one thing, although you succeeded in driving the car twenty-odd miles this afternoon, you couldn't have hoped to get very far with it in the dark without an accident; and if you had a smash, the odds are that Barak would have caught you. Having risked my own skin to get you out, I'd naturally have felt pretty sick if I found afterwards that I had done so to no purpose.'

'Risked your skin!' Robbie turned to stare at her. 'Do you mean they would have killed you?'

'Oh no; they wouldn't do that. But Barak can be a real devil when he is angry. When he learned that I had enabled you to escape, he would have beaten hell out of me and might quite well have marked me for life.'

'But he is bound to find out . . . That letter you left.'

'Of course, and that's why I left it. If I hadn't, they would anyhow have assumed that it was I who freed you. Who else would have? You couldn't possibly have got away without help. Barak would have believed that, having spent three weeks driving you round Greece, I had fallen for you. He would then have every reason to do his utmost to recapture you. And when he got back, with or without you, he would have put me through the hoop.'

She paused for a moment, then went on: 'By leaving your pledge and my letter, I hope to show that, although I freed you, I am still doing the right thing by my own people. In the letter, I've said that I am taking you to Athens myself, to keep you, one way or the other, to your promise, and that on the 20th I intend to see you aboard a plane that will take you out of Greece. To put an end to your poking your nose into our business is the only thing that really matters and no one but Barak is going to be disappointed at being deprived of the pleasure of watching you drown.'

'I see,' said Robbie thoughtfully. 'But won't he try to take it out on you later on, when he sees you again?'

'By then, I'll be among friends at our Legation. Besides, he will have had time to calm down. That was one of my reasons for deciding that if I did mean to free you I had better accompany you to Athens. Of course, when I do come face to face with him, there will be a fine old dust-up. But that's not your worry.'

Robbie fell silent and remained so for some while. Then he remarked: 'Your room at the Spap was still unoccupied when I left, so-'

'So what!' she cut him short. 'Surely you don't suppose that I mean to spend the night at Olympia? I hope to get to Argos.'

At the thought of the road by which they had come to Olympia, Robbie exclaimed: 'What! You mean to drive through those awful mountains in the dark?'

'Why not?' she shrugged. 'Plenty of lorries and other cars make the trip by night. If I find it too much for me, we'll have to stop at Tripolis; but in case Barak does come after us, I want to keep as big a lead as I can. Argos is well over half-way to Athens—the worst half, too—but with luck we'll reach there in about six or seven hours. We'll sleep through the morning, and do the remaining hundred and twenty kilometres to Athens in the afternoon.'

The idea of skirting those terrifying precipices for hour after hour with only their headlights to keep them on the road did not seem to intimidate Stephanie and, although it appalled Robbie, he realized he was in her hands. Since she had the courage to face it, he must too, and without showing his fears. After a minute, he said:

'Well, you're doing the driving. All I ask is that, when you do feel tired, you won't press on at the risk of breaking both our necks. We could always pull off the road at some level spot and you could sleep for an hour in the car. I give you my solemn promise that I won't try to sneak off while you were sleeping. Anyhow, you'll get a first quarter of an hour's easy at the Spap while I pay my bill and throw my clothes into my suitcases.'

Stephanie gave an unpleasant little laugh. 'I always thought you were a little off the beam; now I know that you're right round the bend. You have just had a very narrow escape from death, yet you suggest risking your life again for the sake of collecting a few clothes.'

'If they did hear us drive off, Barak would have caught up with us by now; if they didn't, he won't even be getting dressed for another two and a half hours,' Robbie argued, 'so what do fifteen minutes matter?'

'They matter because I mean to keep every minute of lead I've got.'

Robbie made a face. 'All right, then. But I was hoping to get a drink at the hotel. It's over twelve hours since I had one, and I'm absolutely parched.'

'Put a hand over the back of the seat,' she told him. 'If you feel round, you'll find a basket with some biscuits and a Thermos that has milk in it. I'd have liked to have made some coffee to warm us up when we are in the mountains, but I didn't dare. One of them might have come down and found me in the kitchen with my suitcase beside me, and that would not have been at all easy to explain.'

After Robbie had found the Thermos and gratefully drunk some of the milk, he said: 'You had two suitcases and, from what you say, it sounds as if getting away with one was as much as you could manage. I hope you put my manuscript in it.'

'No,' she replied promptly. 'I didn't.'

'What . . . what have you done with it?' he asked, striving to keep out of his voice the acute anxiety he felt.

'It will serve a most useful purpose.' She paused for a moment, then went on with malicious amusement: 'In that little house there were fourteen of us, and they were running short of toilet paper; so I left it in the lavatory.'

'Oh God! You didn't!' The cry came from Robbie's heart.

For a good two minutes she let him remain a prey to utter misery, then she said quietly: 'No; as a matter of fact, I didn't, though it would have served you right if I had. The truth is that I took it in to Pirgos this evening and sent it poste restante to the G.P.O., Athens. Knowing how much you value your book, I did that as a much sounder precaution than carrying a gun against your being tempted to double-cross me. If you behave like a good little boy, I'll arrange for it to be handed back to you at the airport on your way out of Greece.'

He gave a great sigh of relief, and was just about to thank her for her promise to return it to him,, when she exclaimed: 'What on earth's the matter with the car? What have you been doing to it?'

'I—nothing,' he protested. T took it out for about two hours this morning, to practise along flattish roads on my own; then, after lunch, I drove it out to the factory. It went perfectly and I had no trouble at all.'

Stephanie's question had been caused by a cloud of steam which had suddenly issued from the bonnet. Looking quickly down at the dashboard, she saw that only a few inches of the chain working the radiator blind was hanging from its V. Turning on to Robbie, she stormed: 'You imbecile! You've been running her with the radiator blind nearly full up. Now she's blown a core plug and if I keep her running the engine will seize up.'

She drove the care into the side of the road. They both got out and, having confirmed the cause of the trouble, she said angrily: 'I don't suppose Nisio will be able to make us another core plug under four or five hours at the least.'

'Who is Nisio?' Robbie enquired.

'He is the mechanic at the Spap; and, thank goodness, it can't be much more than a mile away. It was Nisio who drove me into Pirgos yesterday. I bribed him, too, to telephone me if you either took out the car or hired one. That's how it was that Barak was all ready to receive you this afternoon. Nisio also telephoned about your taking out the car this morning, but we felt sure that you wouldn't try anything until the siesta hour.'

'Well,' Robbie shrugged, 'since we are stuck for the night, at least we are lucky to have broken down so near the Spap. As it can't yet be half past twelve, I expect it will still be open; although your friend Nisio is pretty certain to be in bed.'

'Then we must get him out,' Stephanie declared. 'If Barak does come after us later in the night and notice the Zephyr abandoned by the roadside, he'll guess at once that we are at the Spap and lie in wait for you when we leave tomorrow morning.'

Robbie got Stephanie's case out of the boot and, leaving the car lights on, they set out for the hotel. When they reached it, there were still lights on in a few of the windows. Up in the lounge, a yawning waiter was watching four guests playing a final rubber of bridge. Nisio was roused and appeared with an overcoat over his pyjamas. He agreed to go out and tow in the Ford, but jibbed at Stephanie's suggestion that he should work on it during the night.

When Nisio had gone off to get it and the tired waiter had produced brandies and ginger ales, Robbie said to her: 'I know you want to get me to Athens and out of the country as quickly as you can; but, if we don't leave here until after lunch tomorrow, we'll stand much less risk of running into Barak at Tripolis or somewhere further along the road where, if he has chased us, he may have pulled up.'

She nodded wearily. 'Perhaps you are right. If he does by-pass us, the longer lead he has the better. In fact, in the long run, our breakdown may have turned out all to the good.' Then, finishing their drinks, they went to bed.

In the morning, Robbie was woken by a sharp knocking on the door of his room. Tumbling out of bed, he pulled on his dressing gown and opened the door, to find Stephanie standing outside. She was fully dressed, but had no make-up on and her hair had not been done.

T got up early,' she said, 'to find out about the car. Nisio says that, with servicing the cars of the other guests, there's not a hope of getting ours done till three o'clock, and it may even be four or five before he's through.'

Robbie blinked at her sleepily. 'Except that we'll have to do the last part of the mountain road to Argos after dark, 1 don't see that that matters much. If Barak did give chase, he's missed us, although he can't know that. He must be in Tripolis or even further off by this time.' As he spoke he was gingerly feeling his chin, where Barak had hit him, for on his waking it had begun to throb painfully.

'You are probably right,' she agreed thoughtfully. 'But Barak is no fool. As soon as it became daylight, he would start enquiring at the villages through which they passed for someone who had seen the Zephyr go through. When he has drawn several blanks, he'll guess that we are not ahead of him after all. Then he'll think one of two things: either that we took the other road, in which case he will drive on to Athens; or that we deliberately put up here for the night, hoping to fox him. If he does think that he's by-passed us, he won't need to stop somewhere to sleep, because it is certain that he will have Cepicka with him, and they'll be driving turn and turn about. They'll turn round and come back, hoping to meet us on the road this morning. They won't, of course, but, when they get as far as this without meeting us, they are sure to stop here to make enquiries.'

'Well, what if they do learn we're here? They daren't come busting into this place as though it were a saloon in a Western, and shoot me dead. Even if they got away with it for the moment, there would be a hue and cry after them in no time. All the odds are that they would be caught, and there would be lots of people to identify them as my killers.'

'That's true. But if they do find out that we are here, they might hang round outside on the chance of getting a shot at you. For example, if they spotted you having another look round the ruins, and there was no one about. That's what I came to say to you. I've told them at the office that you've got a tummy upset, so will be staying in bed most of the day. Your meals will be brought along to you but, of course, only something light.'

'Oh dear!' Robbie exclaimed ruefully, 'and after yesterday I am as hungry as a hunter.'

'You are very lucky to be alive,' she said sharply, 'and, if you want to make sure of remaining alive, you had better do as you are told. After lunch, pack your things and be ready to leave at three o'clock. As soon as the car is ready, I'll come up for you.'

Robbie turned in again, but he spent a miserable morning. The previous night, after the twelve hours of acute strain he had passed through, he had been too exhausted to think much about his defeat; but now the knowledge that he had failed so lamentably greatly depressed him.

He was, too, most unhappy about his new relationship with Stephanie. By a miracle, as it seemed to him, after he had accepted that she had passed out of his life for good, she had returned to it. But she was not the Stephanie he had known. She was as lovely as ever in his eyes; but no longer his gay, sweet-tempered companion. He was well aware that he owed his life to her, yet could not believe that she had lifted a finger from any personal feeling for him. He felt sure that her action had been inspired by a reluctance to have it on her conscience that a man who had fallen into a trap she had laid had been murdered, and that she would have taken nearly as much risk to save a dog. Moreover, the fact remained that it was through her lies and treachery that the only undertaking he had ever ventured upon of his own accord, and one that was to make him in his own eyes and the eyes of others a man who could hold his head high in any company, had come to an ignominious end.

After he had eaten a disappointingly meagre lunch, brought to him on a tray, he got up, packed and dressed; then he sat down to wait for Stephanie. Three o'clock came; then four and half past, the time dragging by wearily. At last, at about ten to five, a bang on his door brought him quickly to it, to find her there with a luggage porter behind her. With a frown she said:

These country mechanics are hopeless. Nisio ought to have been able to make a new core plug in five hours; but of course he wouldn't forgo his siesta, and it's taken nearly ten.' Thrusting a paper into Robbie's hand, she went on: 'I had your bill made up and looked through it. As far as I can judge it's correct; so pay it on your way out, and we'll get off as quickly as we can.'

Without argument he did as she had told him, and five minutes later they were in the Ford, running down on to the main road. When they reached it, she said: 'You know, last night I would have bet any money that Barak would come after us as soon as he found out that you'd escaped. But I think now I was scaring myself unnecessarily. Either that, or he thought it more likely that we had taken the road via Patras round the Gulf. I had an early lunch and spent the whole afternoon watching the main road. If the Mercedes had come back along it, I couldn't have failed to see her; and, if they had pulled up where the road is hidden by the trees and one of them had walked the last half mile here to make enquiries, I should have been bound to see him, the hotel being perched up on a cliff as it is.'

Robbie nodded: 'If they did go as far as Tripolis, then turned back hoping to meet us, they would have passed here hours ago.

Anyhow, knowing nothing of our breakdown, they wouldn't expect us to spend the day at Olympia. Whether they ever left Pirgos or stayed put, they must be assuming that, by this time, we can't be far from Athens.'

For the first three-quarters of an hour the road ran through comparatively flat country, although rising all the time. Then it gradually became steeper and its curves more frequent until, by six o'clock, they were up to two thousand feet and still mounting by a long succession of hairpin bends. At times they could see the road ahead, shaking away higher and higher, a thin, yellow line etched in the precipitous sides of the mountain chain: at others the view ahead closed rapidly from a quarter of a mile to a matter of twenty feet as they approached some tall cliff of solid rock that formed a sharp corner, completely cutting off all sight of what lay beyond it.

Soon after six they passed through the little town of Tropaia, that clung so precariously to the mountain-side; but they did not pull up as they had done on their outward journey, because Stephanie wanted to make the most of the light. For another twenty minutes or so they ran on along the narrow shelf of road, beyond the edge of which lay seemingly bottomless gorges with, on their far side, range after range of rugged heights rising to peaks, many of which were capped with cloud.

It was then that Robbie at last plucked up the courage to say something that he had been contemplating saying for an hour or more. Unlike their journeys in the past, during which he had told Stephanie stories of the Immortals, or they had laughed together over all sorts of trivialities, they had exchanged hardly a word since leaving Olympia. Now he stammered out:

'On Thursday, after . . . after what happened down by the pool, I stayed there a long time. When at last I did get back to the hotel, I went along to your room.'

'And found me gone,' she volunteered. 'I packed at once. It didn't seem to me that there was much point in my remaining there till you put in an appearance just for us to have a slanging match.'

'I suppose not. To have found out about you was a shock . . . a most frightful shock. But, all the same, I wanted to apologize. I felt absolutely terrible.'

'I'm glad to hear it,' she said slowly. 'You know, for some girls an experience like that might spoil their whole lives—give them a hatred of men and warp their natures. It was very clear that, in spite of your age, you are still completely ignorant about that sort of thing. But that wouldn't have made it any the less terrifying for a girl who was as ignorant as yourself; so I hope you will never let yourself go like that again. As far as I am concerned, it was a beastly way in which to try and take your revenge. Fortunately, though, it did me no harm. It's quite a long time since I left my mother's apron strings, and I've seen enough of the world to make allowances for you.'

Robbie threw a quick glance sideways. Stephanie's eyes were fixed steadily on the road ahead. She had spoken without the least embarrassment and her face showed no trace of heightened colour. Yet what she had said amounted to a confession entirely out of keeping with the picture he had built up of her.

'D'you mean . . .' he stammered, 'do you really mean that . . . that you've often made love . . . well, not quite like that . . . but . . . but . . . ?'

'I didn't say that,' she replied. 'But, since you've found me out, hasn't it occurred to you that, as I am twenty-four, I might quite well be married?'

'Married! No! Are you?'

'Yes. My real name is Madame Vaclav Barak.'

'Good God!'

'What is there surprising in that? You must at least have realized that the story with which I took you in, about having a father who was forcing me into marriage with a rich cement manufacturer, was all nonsense; and that I'm not a Greek but a Czech. You seem to have known all along, too, that it is Barak who is responsible for establishing the groups of Czechs on special missions. When he learnt that you were spying on them, what could be more natural than that he should use his English-speaking wife to keep an eye on you?'

'It wouldn't seem natural to me,' Robbie commented. 'After all, before you came into the game, he can have known very little about me, I might have been much more attractive to women than I am, and a Don Juan by nature. To send you off round Greece with a man who might have turned out like that seems to me an extraordinary thing for a husband to have done.'

Stephanie gave a mirthless laugh. 'Oh, that side of the matter wouldn't have worried him. He was quite mad about me once, but he isn't any more. And I've long since lost the admiration I had for him in my teens, when we married. As I told you last night, he's quite capable of beating me when he's really angry, and that sort of thing is not calculated to turn schoolgirl hero-worship into love.'

'Why do you stick to him, then?' Robbie asked.

'Because it suits me to. And I don't think he would like to lose me, either. I'm a very useful wife to him in a lot of ways, and I've helped him quite a bit in his career. Until now, I've never actively gone against him in anything that is important. How he'll take it, I don't yet know; but I'm quite prepared to stand up to him because, provided you do as you have promised and leave Greece, no one can say I've let down my country. There is no sense in committing murder when it can be avoided, and I feel that all the Comrades at the Legation will back me up in what I've done.'

That's all very well,' said Robbie gloomily. 'But, as he is your husband, you'll have to face up to him when they are not there. I . . . well, it seems silly to talk hot air about wanting to be your champion, but all the same I wish to God that when you do meet him 1 could be there to protect you.'

'How nice of you, Robbie.' Her voice was softer and it was the first time she had used his Christian name since the affair at the pool. 'But,' she added, 'I don't think you need worry. I mean to keep away from him for the next few days, and by then several other people will have talked to him about all this, and his anger will have died down.'

For the past few minutes, they had been approaching one of the great cliffs of rock jutting out from the mountain-side and making a blind corner. The bend was a sharp one, so Stephanie took it slowly. As they rounded the mass of rock, they saw the black Mercedes parked behind it, only fifty feet away. Barak was in it and Cepicka was at the wheel. Its motor whirred and the big car slid forward, blocking the way.

22

Wanted for Murder

Stephanie was forced to pull up. With the long Mercedes drawn across the road, it was impossible for her to pass it either on the near side or the off. In the one case, she would have jammed the Ford between the rock face and the boot of the big black car, in the other gone over the edge of the precipice.

As she braked the car to a halt, she cried: 'Get out, Robbie! Get out! No stupid chivalry! Run for your life! Leave this to me!'

Even as her cry echoed down the mountain valley, Barak and Cepicka were both getting out of the Mercedes. Cepicka, who had been at the wheel of the car, was the nearer. As he jumped out on to the road, he drew an automatic from an armpit holster. Robbie knew then that Stephanie was right. This was no time for heroics. Although he was completely ignorant about weapons, he would have given a lot to have been armed and to stand beside Stephanie. But he knew that, however unsatisfactory her relations with her husband might be, she was in no danger of losing her life; whereas his own clearly hung by a thread.

Flinging open the door of the Ford, he scrambled out, stepping on to the road at the same moment as Cepicka drew his gun.

There was not much more than thirty feet between them, but by the time Cepicka had swung round and aimed with his weapon there were fifty. Even then Robbie might have been shot down; but one of his flying feet hit a stone, causing him to stumble sideways. At that second, the Czech's pistol cracked, then it cracked again, but the bullets sang past Robbie.

At the sound of the shots, he threw a swift glance over his shoulder. He saw that Stephanie and Barak were now also out of the cars and standing in the road facing one another. Next moment, he was round the corner of the cliff. In front of him lay a long, down-sloping gradient, several hundred yards in length, before the road passed out of sight round another bend. With a gasp of fear he realized that, running down that open stretch with two gunmen pursuing him, he would not stand a hope. They would wing him for certain and, as he fell wounded in the road, race up to finish him off.

Desperately, he looked right and left for a chance of salvation. To his left lay the precipice, an almost sheer drop of some three thousand feet. Even if it had jutting rocks and scrub on it that would have provided tenuous hand-holds, Cepicka would be upon him and put a bullet into him before he could scramble down his own length. He would lose his hold and, with arms and legs whirling, hurtle into the chasm. To the right rose the twenty-foot-high cliff of rock. For most of its frontage it presented a flat, smooth surface; but in one place, round the corner from the cars, it had a chimney in it—a three-foot-deep gulley, broken here and there with small bushes and tufts of coarse grass growing out from the crevices in it. The chimney was narrow at the bottom, but grew deeper towards the top. It offered the only alternative to being slaughtered on the open road, and Robbie took it.

Hurling himself into the fissure, he seized on stunted bushes of myrtle and clumps of wild thyme and began to haul himself up. Half the plants he grasped broke off or came away under the pull of his weight; but fear lent him such speed that, almost as the twigs of one bush snapped, he thrust up his arm and grasped another. Meanwhile his feet scrabbled wildly on tufts of grass and little ledges of rock, forcing him further upward.

He had nearly reached the top when he heard shouts and screams below him. As he had just secured a firm handhold, he paused to look down. Cepicka stood below him at the foot of the gulley and had just raised his gun to shoot. A few feet away Stephanie, the butt of a small automatic clutched in her right hand, was wrestling with Barak. At that moment Barak wrenched the pistol from her, but she broke free and launched herself at Cepicka. She caught him sideways on, throwing him off balance just as he fired. He swore and hit out at her. She fell in the roadway and Barak lugged her to her feet.

By then, Robbie had reached the summit of the rock. When he again looked down, Barak and Stephanie had disappeared, but their voices could still be heard as they continued to shout abuse at one another round the corner of the cliff. Cepicka, with his pistol thrust back into its armpit holster, had begun to scale the chimney and was coming grimly up, hand over hand.

Robbie stared wildly about him. The top of the rock formed a small, natural citadel about forty feet in width. Round the semi-circle that overhung the road, a ragged line of rounded humps rose up from three to five feet above the level of the uneven floor on which he stood. Behind him rose another tangle of great boulders, spreading, up the slope for half a mile. In some places, there were dark gaps between them large enough to squeeze through; in others they were partially overgrown with wild vegetation.

Frantically, he cast about for big stones or a small chunk of rock that he could grab up and throw down on Cepicka. One hit on his head or face should be sufficient to dislodge him from his precarious hold in the chimney and send him crashing back on to the road. But there were no loose stones. Nothing larger than pebbles was to be seen anywhere within easy reach of where Robbie was standing.

He was left with a choice, either of which might prove fatal. He could run for cover between the great boulders thirty yards away, which meant risking Cepicka's getting to the top of the chimney and shooting him before he reached them; or he could wait where he was until Cepicka appeared, then bank on rushing him before he had a chance to take proper aim.

Deciding on the latter course, Robbie crouched down behind the big stone hump beside which the chimney emerged. As he did so he could hear Cepicka's heavy breathing as he hoisted himself up, only a few feet away. Suddenly an idea came to Robbie. If he could tackle Cepicka while the Czech still needed both his hands to clamber out of the top of the chimney, and had not one free to draw his gun again, he would be caught at a serious disadvantage.

Throwing caution to the winds, Robbie came to his feet and stepped round the buttress of rock just as Cepicka's head appeared above its level. He already had one knee on the ground at the top of the chimney. For an instant, they stared at one another. Cepicka's hand leaped to his gun, but Robbie stooped and seized the weapon before the Czech could aim it. In striving to wrench the pistol from Cepicka's grasp, Robbie stepped backwards, dragging Cepicka after him, up over the edge of the cliff. As the Czech found his feet, he struck out at Robbie with his left fist, catching him a blow on the right ear that made him dizzy. But Robbie had shifted his grip to Cepicka's wrist and gave it such a violent twist that he was forced to drop his pistol. Next moment they had seized one another in a bear-like clinch, and were staggering to and fro across the platform of rock.

In spite of his little paunch and pasty face, Cepicka was very strong and he knew all the tricks. Suddenly he thrust his leg between Robbie's so that his right heel was behind Robbie's left heel, then threw forward the full weight of his powerful shoulders. Robbie staggered, lost his balance and went over backwards. As he fell, he lost his hold. The Czech came down on top of him. Now that Cepicka's hands were free, he used the left to seize Robbie by the throat and raised the right to smash into his face. Just in time, Robbie jerked his head aside. The clenched fist came down with terrific force on the bare rock. Cepicka let out a yell and his whole body twitched with the agony he had caused himself. Robbie seized his opportunity. With a violent upward jerk of his thighs, he threw off his enemy. They both scrambled to their feet simultaneously. Panting as though they had run a mile, they stood a few feet apart, facing one another, poised like wrestlers seeking an opening for a crippling hold.

Blood was dripping from Cepicka's right hand, where he had smashed the side of it on the rock; but, in spite of this handicap, he showed no sign of retreating. His small, pale eyes glared murder into Robbie's. Suddenly he took a pace forward, feinted with his right foot as though to kick, but came down on it and shot out his left. Robbie had acted almost at the same second. His right fist had been aimed at Cepicka's jaw but the Czech threw his head up, and his own movement caused the blow to land on his left shoulder. He was already off balance, so his kick missed Robbie's shin and the force of the blow swung him round. For a moment he swayed, striving to regain his balance, sideways on to Robbie and unable to use his uninjured fist to protect himself. Rushing in, Robbie grabbed him with one hand by the back of the collar, and with the other by the seat of the pants. Exerting all his great strength, Robbie gave one terrific heave, lifting Cepicka as though he were a sack of potatoes. For a moment, he held his enemy high above his head, then threw him over the low battlement of boulders down into the road.

For twenty or thirty seconds Robbie stood, legs splayed, gasping for breath; then he stumbled to the boulders and looked over. Twenty feet below, Cepicka lay sprawled, his limbs twisted at unnatural angles.

From where Robbie stood, Barak and Stephanie could not be seen. Straightening himself, he ran the few paces across the curve of the rocky platform and crouched again over the boulders there, to look down into the road round the corner. Stephanie was standing near the bonnet of the Ford. Her back was to the precipice and she was only a few feet from its edge. Barak stood facing her and was shaking his fist in her face. Robbie heard him shout:

'How dare you upset my plans? How dare you? You shall be disciplined for this. I'll teach you to sneak off with your boy friend. Cepicka will deal with him within the next few minutes, then we'll take you back and I'll deal with you.'

His mind whirling, Robbie wondered how he could possibly get the better of Barak. To scramble down the chimney to the road would have been suicidal. He would have had a bullet in him before he could get within yards of his enemy. From where he stood, up on the shoulder of the mountain, he could see the road winding away for a considerable distance in both directions, and it was empty. During the two hours or more since he and Stephanie had set out from Olympia, they had met only one coachload of tourists, three lorries and one private car, and the traffic going in their direction could be assumed to be no more frequent. The odds were, therefore, against Barak's being forced to abandon his hold-up through a vehicle arriving on the scene in the next ten minutes or quarter of an hour.

As Robbie's glance swept the distant road, he suddenly caught sight of a solitary figure some way to his left and about half a mile away on the slope above it. The man was evidently a goatherd and from up there he must have had a clear view of Robbie's struggle with Cepicka, but he was too far off to be called on for immediate assistance. Swinging round again, Robbie once more stared down at Stephanie and her husband.

Her voice, shrill with anger, came up to him clearly: 'You murderous brute! I'll stay with you no longer! I'm sick to death of you and the Party and all its filthy work. But don't think you can get me sent back to Czechoslovakia. I know too much about you. If you refuse me my freedom or fake a lying report about me, I'll give Janos chapter and verse about the bribes you've taken. Then it's you who'll be sent back, and you'll find yourself in the uranium mines.'

For the space of a minute they stood glaring at one another, and there was complete silence on the mountainside. Then Barak took a pace forward. Suddenly his hand shot out. It landed on Stephanie's chest. She staggered back. Robbie saw the earth on the edge of the precipice crumble under her heel. Her eyes instantly became round with terror. Her mouth opened wide and she gave a piercing shriek. Then, as though a trap-door had opened under her, and with her hands wildly clutching empty air, she shot downwards into the abyss.

Barak stepped back and passed a hand over his eyes. Robbie, twenty feet above him, remained for some seconds paralysed by horror at the awful scene he had witnessed. Then he found his voice and shouted:

'You fiend! You fiend! I'll kill you for this. I'll kill you! I'll kill you! I swear I will!'

Swinging round, Barak stared up at him. His hand went to his shoulder holster and he jerked out a gun. It was not the small pistol he had wrested from Stephanie, but a big blue-barrelled automatic. As he raised it, Robbie ducked down behind the boulder. Realizing that Robbie was well under cover, Barak did not fire, but Robbie heard his footsteps as he walked quickly round the corner of the cliff to the gully. A loud exclamation told Robbie that he had just come upon Cepicka's body.

Robbie wondered if his enemy would come up the chimney. On all fours he wriggled over to the boulder nearest to it, to be ready for him; but after he had crouched behind it for a minute, the footsteps moved away. For what seemed an age he continued to crouch there, then he heard the engine of a car start up. Crawling quickly back to the other side of the bastion, he risked a quick look over.

Barak was seated at the wheel of the Mercedes. He had run it back as far as it would go. As Robbie watched him, he let in the clutch and sent the big car forward, so that it hit the bonnet of the Ford sideways on with a loud metallic clang. According to the rule of the road in Greece, a vehicle going towards Olympia on that route would have had the right to the inner side; so, had the Mercedes not blocked the way, Stephanie would have passed it on the outer. In consequence, the Ford had been halted alongside the precipice and only some four feet from it. On the Mercedes charging it, the front wheels slithered another two feet nearer the edge. Backing the Mercedes, Barak charged the Ford again. This time one of its wheels went over and it tilted sharply, retaining a precarious balance only owing to its weight. For the third time, Barak launched the Mercedes at it. Churning up a cloud of small stones and dust, its whole body lifted, showing for a moment its underside, then it disappeared without a sound into the gorge far below.

Robbie had no doubts about Barak's reason for forcing the Ford over the precipice. Fie meant to account for Stephanie's death by an accident. The battered buffers of his own car could be produced as evidence that there had been one, and Stephanie might easily have tried to jump out, or have been thrown clear, as the Ford went over.

As Robbie was thinking that he must get to the police as soon as he possibly could, a motor horn sounded. Unnoticed by him, a lorry coming from the direction of Olympia had approached to within a few hundred yards. Standing up, he waved and shouted to the driver; but the man had his eyes fixed on the road ahead and a moment later, had he glanced up, the roof of the cab would have prevented him from seeing Robbie.

Neither, to Robbie's surprise, did the driver notice Cepicka's body and pull up. Then, on looking over, he saw that it was no longer there. Evidently, on finding it, Barak had removed it, and either pushed it over the precipice or carried it to his car. Meanwhile, on hearing the long hoot, he had backed the Mercedes alongside the rock face and, rounding the corner, the lorry ran past him on its way, the driver still in ignorance that his arrival there five minutes earlier might have prevented a ghastly tragedy.

When the lorry had passed, Barak ran the Mercedes to and fro again several times, until he had turned it round; then, at a slow pace, he drove off towards Tripolis. As he did so, Robbie could see, through the back window of the car, a pink cropped head lolling forward and rolling limply from side to side. This confirmed his idea that Barak might have carried Cepicka's body to the car and hoisted it into the back seat. But Barak drove no more than three hundred yards, then he pulled up and got out.

The cliff on which Robbie stood was not continuous. The edge sloped down to the level of the road further on, and it was just at that point that Barak had halted the Mercedes. By taking this longer way round, instead of struggling up the chimney, he had only to walk up the slope to reach Robbie's redoubt. Although Robbie's brain was still half-bemused by Stephanie's terrible death, he realized his enemy's intention. In his hands lay Barak's life. As long as he remained alive, he could charge Barak with murder; therefore, to be safe, Barak dare not leave him unaccounted for. He was coming up the slope to hunt out and kill him.

Robbie knew that his enemy was carrying two pistols—his own and Stephanie's—and neither of them had been fired. They must contain anything from a dozen to eighteen bullets. To attempt, weaponless, to face Barak would, Robbie felt certain, be to throw away his life. The only alternative was to take to his heels while there were still several hundred yards between them. As he turned to run, a sudden thought struck him. While he had been struggling with Cepicka, the Czech had dropped his pistol.. Stephanie's murder, so soon after, had put it right out of his mind. Now he swerved, dashed for the place where they had fought, and began frantically to hunt for it.

The pistol was nowhere on the barren platform of stone, so it must have fallen among the long grass and scrub growing at the head of the chimney. Going down on his knees, Robbie thrust his fingers agitately in among the greenery, unheeding the tears in his hands made by the long thorns of a low bush that had little yellow flowers on it. The knowledge that Barak was coming up the slope behind him made him half choke with fear. At any moment, his enemy might breast the rise and put a bullet through his back. Turning this way and that, he scrabbled in the undergrowth like a maniac, but to no avail. The automatic must have fallen further off, and to give more time to searching would prove fatal.

As he jumped to his feet, he cursed the thought that had led him to giving precious time hunting for Cepicka's gun. By so doing, he had greatly lessened his chances of remaining alive. Had he run for it directly he saw Barak leave the road, he would have had a good lead, well out of pistol-shot, and might have got away. Now he would be easily in range when Barak appeared over the crest, and could have little hope of escaping some of the many shots with which Barak would attempt to maim, then kill, him.

His eyes staring, his mouth hanging open, he jerked his head from side to side. For a moment he even thought of jumping over the parapet of low boulders, but he knew that there could be little hope of surviving the twenty-foot drop. He would either break his neck, or break both his legs, fracture a dozen other bones and die soon after from an internal haemorrhage. It was then that his eye lit on the tangle of great boulders only thirty yards away, separated here and there by gaps. Without losing another second, he dashed up the slope and threw himself headlong into a narrow opening between two of them.

Most of the tumbled rocks were no more than six feet high; so the places where they were not actually touching were narrow tunnels, rather than caves, and these formed a small, irregular maze. Some were impassable, others partly obstructed by scrub, and most of them could have been looked down into by anyone patient enough to clamber over the top of the whole area.

Robbie wriggled in for about eight feet, then found that the cleft he was in led to a small open space, where there grew a fine crop of stinging nettles; so, panting heavily, he stayed where he was. He could only pray that Barak had not seen him dive in among the rocks, but he thought it unlikely that he had. They would not have been in view until Barak had breasted the rise and, had he caught sight of Robbie, it seemed certain that he would have taken a pot shot at him.

When Robbie's breathing eased he lay very still, listening intently. After a few minutes he heard the sound of footsteps brushing through scrub, then, to his amazement, voices. Barak's came quite clearly; he was speaking in Greek and said: 'He can't be far away. He must be in among these rocks somewhere.'

The voice that replied also spoke in Greek, but it was rough and so near a patois that Robbie had difficulty in understanding it. After a moment, it flashed upon him that the speaker must be the goat-herd whom he had seen in the distance just after he had thrown Cepicka down into the road. Evidently, during the past quarter of an hour, he had made his way down the mountainside to find out what was going on.

As far as Robbie could understand, he was saying that, had he had his dog, it would have been easy to flush out the man they were after; but he had left his dog to look after the goats. By the time he had been up to fetch him, it would be sundown. There was some further discussion; but Robbie did not catch it as the two men moved away, presumably to skirt the tangle of rocks and see if they could find any traces of him.

It occurred to him then that, now Barak was no longer alone, it would be safe to come out, as his enemy would not dare to shoot him in front of the goat-herd. But, on second thoughts, he decided that to be a rash assumption. Only by killing him could

Barak save himself from being charged with Stephanie's murder. To escape that he might well be prepared, after shooting Robbie, to shoot the goat-herd, too. Afterwards, he would have only to carry their two bodies into the middle of the tangle of rocks, wedge them into two of the narrow tunnels and block up the entrances; then, in that incredibly desolate country, the odds would be a hundred to one against anyone finding them until they had long since become unidentifiable skeletons. Restrained by this grim possibility, Robbie remained where he was for the next ten minutes.

When he did crawl to the. entrance of his tunnel and peep out, he could not see Barak; but on emerging a little further, he caught sight of him and the goat-herd going over the crest of the rise in the direction of the Mercedes. Having given them another few minutes, Robbie crawled through the scrub on his hands and knees until he could see over the crest. By that time, the two men had nearly reached the car; then, much to Robbie's surprise, the goat-herd got into it with Barak and it drove off in the direction of Tripolis.

At last, Robbie was freed from the fear that he was fated to die out there on that lonesome mountain-side, riddled with bullets. But, mentally, he was still in a state of distress that defied description. Although Cepicka had been gunning for him and he had acted in self-defence, the fact that he had actually killed a fellow human being had, as he had stared down on the twisted body in the road, appalled him. Yet even that had faded into insignificance beside the tragedy that had followed so swiftly upon it. He felt that his dreams would for months be harrowed by that terrible scene in which he had been powerless to intervene, and that to his dying day he would be unable to blot out from his mind the terror on Stephanie's face as the earth gave way beneath her and she slid down the side of the precipice. That he was marooned there without transport, miles from anywhere and with night coming on, seemed by comparison of no consequence.

Instead of risking a slip and fall by going down the chimney, he walked down the slope, the way Barak had gone, and, on reaching the road, turned back along it till he came to the place where the Ford had gone over. The sideways marks the front wheels had made in the dust as the car had been forced towards the precipice were quite clear, but he did not think they would provide evidence that Barak had rammed it three times. The marks might just as well have been made had it been a genuine accident and he had crashed into the Ford when taking the corner at a fair speed.

Kneeling down, Robbie nerved himself to look over the edge. From it, evidently as part of the road's construction, there was a slope, about ten feet wide, at an angle of forty-five degrees. Below that, the cliff dropped sheer for some two hundred feet, then the ground sloped again, but very steeply; so the car would have bounced on the lower slope, probably several times, before it was finally dashed to pieces in the distant bottom of the ravine.

To the west, the sun was now setting in a glory of gold, rose and crimson; so the bottom of the valley was already in deep shadow. Even in full daylight it might have been difficult to spot the wreckage of the car at that distance; but Robbie thought he could detect a smear of smoke lingering down there from its having been burnt out.

Looking down had already given him a touch of vertigo, and he was about to draw back. Then his heart missed a beat. Twenty feet to his right, and about six feet down, protruding round the corner of the cliff, there was something white. It looked ... it was . , . it could only be an outflung hand and forearm.

Leaping to his feet, he ran to the corner, knelt again and peered over. Stephanie was lying there, near the bottom of the short slope. She was on her side, supported only by one elbow which had caught in the V of a tough root. Her head was thrown back and her eyes were closed. It looked as if she had been knocked unconscious by hitting her head on a rock, or had fainted.

'Stephanie!' he called to her. 'Stephanie! Oh, thank God you didn't go over.'

At the sound of his voice, her eyes opened. They stared up at him transfixed by terror. As he stared back, his relief at finding her still alive was suddenly submerged by a wave of apprehension. Her body was more than half-way down the slope. How could he possibly get her up? He had no head for heights. His only asset was his strength, and he had no rope or anything of that kind he could throw to her.

He drew back, stood up and looked round, his eyes searching feverishly for something which might enable him to rescue her. The long stretch of road to either side of the cliff was empty: there were no tough creepers that he might have twisted into a rope; no long, stout branch broken from a tree, one end of which he could have lowered for her to cling to. As his glance darted this way and that, an anguished cry floated up from her.

'Don't leave me! For God's sake, don't leave me!'

The inference that he might even contemplate abandoning her angered him; yet at the same time it fixed upon him more firmly than ever the obligation to drag her up to safety, and he trembled at the thought of having to set about it. Kneeling down again, he stretched out his hands and legs until he was lying at full length, with his head and arms protruding over the edge, then he called to her.

'Don't worry. Don't worry. Everything will be all right. I'll get you up somehow.' Yet even as he sought to reassure her, he felt that he could not possibly do it. His arms, when thrust downward to their fullest extent, did not bring his fingertips within two feet of her and, each time his glance left her face for a second, it took in the yawning gulf that lay beyond her head and shoulders. From where he lay, he could not actually see down into the chasm, but the fact that no more than eighteen inches beyond Stephanie's feet the slope abruptly ended, with nothing between it and the now shadowy far side of the valley, made him feel sick and giddy.

An inch at a time he edged forward, his chest gradually protruding further over until the weight of his hips and legs, still lying on the flat, was no longer sufficient to anchor the upper part of his body. His hands were now within a few inches of hers. He was already having to dig his fingers into the soft earth to prevent himself slipping further down the slope. Had he attempted to take her weight, they must inevitably both have gone over.

For a few minutes he remained in that position, knowing that to attempt to haul her up must prove fatal, yet his mind in revolt at the thought of beating a retreat. As he stared downwards, he imagined what must follow if his hands suddenly lost their grip on the earth.

He would slither head first down the slope, cannon into her, tearing her from her precarious hold, and the two of them would shoot out into space. There would be the sensation of rushing downwards more swiftly than in the swiftest lift. The plunge into the abyss would not rob them of consciousness, and time was an illusion. Everyone knew that hours spent in school dragged on leaden feet, while those spent at a jolly party sped on silver wings. It might take only seconds by the clock for them to hurtle downward the first two hundred feet with the uprush of air whistling through their hair but, in their terror-stricken minds, it would seem long minutes of waiting to be smashed to pieces. With luck, when they hit the lower slope, they would break their necks, but the odds were against their striking the mountain-side head first. It was more likely that their bodies, twisted grotesquely out of shape and tortured by splintered bones, would bounce and bounce onward, accumulating still further injuries while they continued to remain conscious for several minutes longer.

As these nightmare thoughts raced through Robbie's mind, the sight of the razor edge beyond which death lay began to have a terrible influence upon him. It seemed to be exerting a physical pull on his shoulders. He was seized with the impulse to kick out with his legs and throw himself over. A wave of nausea swept over him. He closed his eyes and somehow fought it down. But when he opened them again he knew that if he remained where he was, even a few minutes longer, he would be overcome by vertigo and that that would be the end of him. Meeting Stephanie's eyes again, he whispered hoarsely:

T can't make it. I'm sorry. There will be a lorry or car along soon. You must hang on till help comes.⁵

Her face was chalk-white. For the past few minutes, while he had been edging himself down towards her, she had remained silent and unmoving, courageously conserving her strength for the effort that would be needed to take as much of her own weight as possible, while he hauled her to safety.

At his admission of defeat, terror showed in her eyes again, and she gasped: 'No! No! The earth under me may give at any moment.'

Then, rendered desperate by her fears, she shifted her position and made an upward grab at one of Robbie's hands. She missed it by inches; and worse. Her sudden movement snapped off one prong of the V of root that had been supporting her. With a piercing scream, she slithered down another two feet. Now on her stomach, she clawed frantically at the earth. He fingers dug into it, getting a dubious hold, but, before she managed to check her slide, her feet and legs up to the knees were dangling over the precipice.

'Hang on!' yelled Robbie, 'Hang on! Hang on!' But there could now be no question of waiting for help to arrive. Had she not moved, there would have been a good chance that the root would have supported her until a vehicle had come on the scene with the means to rescue her. Now she was clinging to the steep slope only with her bare hands. In a matter of minutes, her muscles must tire, her hold relax and with one last scream she would disappear into the abyss.

Impelled by instinct rather than conscious courage, Robbie accepted the challenge that this crisis had forced upon him. He slithered forward until only the toes of his shoes still retained a purchase on the edge of the road above him. He could now have grasped one of Stephanie's hands but, as she was supporting herself by them, he dared not. Instead, he seized her by the hair.

As she felt the pull on it, she only gritted her teeth and, now that he was holding her from slipping backwards, threw her hands upward, clawed at the earth again, then drew her legs in from over the yawning gulf.

For a full minute they remained like that, while the sweat poured off Robbie's face and he could hear her breath coming in short, harsh gasps. He had saved her from going over; but for him to wriggle up the slope backwards, much less draw her after him, he knew to be impossible. It seemed that they were now stuck there, until she croaked:

'Let go my hair and dig both your hands into the earth. If you can support yourself like that, I think I can clamber up alongside you.'

He did as she said, striving to embrace the earth with his whole body; then he closed his eyes to check another wave of nausea. To him, the next few minutes seemed an age. He could feel her beside him and now and then she laid a hand lightly on him while steadying herself in her upward climb. Once she slipped and bore heavily upon him to save herself. His heart missed a beat, but his grip on the surface of the slope held.

'I'm up!' she shouted suddenly. 'I'm safe. But stay where you are. Don't move for a moment.'

A minute later, he felt her grasp on his right ankle. Both her hands were round it, and she was pulling on it. 'Now!' she cried. 'Wriggle yourself backwards.'

Again he did as she told him. As he levered himself up, hand over hand, she knelt above Ifim, hauling with all her might on his leg. The support that gave him enabled him to thrust himself back up the steep gradient. After three minutes of frantic exertion, he rolled over beside her on the edge of the road.

Both of them were so exhausted that for several minutes they lay quite still; then he slowly sat up and muttered: 'That was a near one for both of us.'

Stephanie propped herself on an elbow, looked at him and replied, 'It came to that. But you didn't have to come down for me, Robbie. I owe my life to you. I . . . I'm terribly grateful.'

He gave her a faint smile. 'I owe my life to you. If you hadn't got me out last night, by now I'd be feeding the fishes. That makes us quits. But it was a piece of luck for both of us that I was still alive and kicking to come down and get you. Up there on that cliff above us, first Cepicka did his best to murder me, then that charming husband of yours came after me with a gun.'

'Tell me what happened after . . . after Vaclav pushed me over.'

'I had already dealt with Cepicka. I threw him down into the road and he broke his neck. Barak didn't know that, because it happened round the corner from where you and he were standing. About a minute later, I was looking down here and saw you having a row with him, then he gave you a shove and over you went. I yelled something and he turned. I suppose he thought that Cepicka would have made a corpse of me by that time. Anyhow, when he realized that I'd seen him murder you—or that's what we both thought then—he pulled a gun to take a pot at me. But I dived down behind the boulders. When next 1 looked, he was ramming the Ford with the Mercedes, and he kept on until he had sent it over the precipice. I suppose he means to say that there has been an accident and you went over in it. When he had put an end to the Ford, he came up to put an end to me; knowing, of course, that as 1 had seen him do you in, unless he killed me it was a sure thing that I'd get him for murder.

T took cover again in a sort of outsize rabbit warren of great, tumbled rocks. Thank God, he failed to find me. But, by that time, another character had come on the scene—a goat-herd whom 1 had noticed half a mile away up on the mountain-side just after I had pitched Cepicka down into the road. Barak and the goat-herd sniffed round for a bit, then they went off together. Shortly after you ceased to play an active part in matters, and while I was under cover, Barak must have carried Cepicka's body to his car. I saw it later, rolling about on the back seat, and it was still in the car when Barak finally drove off towards Tripolis, taking the goat-herd with him.'

After a moment, Robbie added: 'As you are still alive, for which thank God, I can't get him for murder now; but we can get him for attempted murder.'

'Where was the goat-herd at that time?' Stephanie asked. 'Did .he see everything that happened?'

'Oh no. He was up on the mountain-side. He must have seen me throw Cepicka over the cliff, because up there our figures would have stood out clearly. But he couldn't have seen you and Barak quarrelling down here, or Barak when he used the Mercedes to push the Ford over, because the cliff would have masked this section of road from his view.'

'Then I'm afraid you wouldn't get anywhere by accusing Vaclav of attempted murder,' Stephanie said thoughtfully. 'It would only be your word against his, and my testimony wouldn't be worth much because it would be believed that I was lying to help you defend yourself by bringing a counter-charge.'

'A counter-charge?' Robbie echoed. 'Why should I be charged with anything?'

Stephanie shook her head unhappily. 'How Vaclav will handle it I don't quite know; but he's very clever. I've an idea, though, that he will soon be telling the police something like this. You took me away from him. He came after us with his friend Cepicka. They first missed us, then ran into us on this bend. I was driving and tried to pass them. There was an accident. The Zephyr went over with me in it. Remember he believes me to be dead. You managed to jump out. Naturally, you were half off your head with rage. Cepicka had been driving the Mercedes and you held him responsible for my death. He got out. There was a violent quarrel and you threatened to kill him. In an endeavour to escape you, he shinned up that gully. You went after him, seized him, threw him down into the road and broke his neck.'

Having paused for a moment, Stephanie went on: 'You see, Robbie, that is all the goat-herd can actually have seen; so that is all the evidence he can give, and he will be an independent witness. That, I'm sure, is why Vaclav took him with him into Tripolis. It is a wicked twist of Fate ... wicked. But we must face it. Within a few hours, the police will be hunting for you, and it is you who will be wanted for murder.'

23

On the Run

Robbie could not deny the logic of Stephanie's reasoning. 'I suppose you're right,' he admitted. 'But, damn it all, I was acting in self-defence. If I hadn't •killed Cepicka he would have killed me.'

'I know.' Stephanie sat up and began to brush some of the dirt off her clothes. 'You can't prove, though, that it was Cepicka who chased you up that chimney, and not you who chased him. Nor can you prove that Barak forced the Zephyr over the precipice or that he did his best to kill me. And no one is going to believe what I say. After all, would you? It will be said that we ran away from Athens together and that for three weeks my husband lost all trace of me. Then he learned that we were at Olympia, and persuaded me to return to him. But, after one night, you turned up at Pirgos and carried me off again. He and his friend Cepicka gave chase; then comes his version of what happened.'

'There is one thing that won't fit. According to the story you suggest he will tell, the cars met by accident head on and you went over in the Ford. Only I managed to jump out. Yet you are still alive.'

'Seeing the crash coming, I might have opened the car door and tumbled on to the slope where you found me, without any of you realizing that I hadn't gone over with the car.'