The Dark Crusader

CHAPTER THREE

After the numbing stinging cold of that torrential rain the water in the sea was almost blissfully warm. There were no waves, any that dared show their heads were beaten flat by that deluge, and what little swell there was was long enough to be no more than a gentle undulation on the surface of the sea. The wind still seemed to be from the east: that was if my assumption that the schooner had still been travelling south had been correct.

For the first thirty seconds or so I couldn't see Marie. I knew she could be only yards away but the rain bouncing off the water raised so dense and impenetrable a curtain that nothing at sea level could be seen through its milky opacity. I shouted, twice, but there was no reply. I took half-a-dozen strokes, towing the can behind me, and literally bumped into her. She was coughing and spluttering as if she had swallowed some water, but she still retained hold of her water drum and seemed otherwise unharmed. She was high in the water so she must at least have remembered to operate the CO2 release switch on her lifebelt.

I put my head close to hers and said: "All right?"

"Yes." She coughed some more and said: "My face and neck. That rain-they feel cut."

It was too dark to see whether her face was, in fact, cut. But I could believe it, my own face felt as if it had blundered into a wasp's nest. Black mark for Bentall. The first and most obvious thing that I should have done after opening that hatch and feeling the lash of that cannonading rain should have been to dig some of the left-over clothes out of our suitcases and wrap them round our heads, bandanna-fashion. But too late for tears now. I reached for the plastic bag attached to my drum, ripped it open and spread the blanket over our heads. We could still feel the impact of that rain like a shower of huge hailstones but at least our skins were no longer exposed. It was better than nothing.

When I'd finished arranging it Marie said: "What do we do now? Stay here in our tent or start swimming?"

I passed up all the obvious remarks about wondering whether we should swim for Australia or South America, they didn't even begin to seem funny in the circumstances, and said: "I think we should try to move away from here. If this rain keeps up Fleck will never find us. But there's no guarantee that it will last. We might as well swim west, that's the way the wind and the swell are running, it's roughly the direction in which the island would lie if Fleck hasn't altered course too much, and it's easiest for us."

"Isn't that the way Fleck would think, and move to the west looking for us?"

"If he thinks we're only half as twisted as he is himself, he'll probably figure we've gone in the other direction. Heads you win, tails you lose. Come on."

We made poor speed. As she'd said, she was no shakes as a swimmer, and those two drums and the soggy heavy blanket didn't help us much, but we did cover a fair bit of ground in the first hour, swimming for ten minutes, resting for five. If it hadn't been for the thought that we could do this sort of thing for the next month and still not arrive anywhere, it would have been quite pleasant: the sea was still warm, the rain was beginning to ease and the sharks stayed to home.

After an hour and a half or what I guessed to be approximately that, during which Marie became very quiet, rarely speaking, not even answering when I spoke to her, I said: "Enough. This'll do us. Any energy we have left we'll use for survival. If Fleck swings this far off course it's just bad luck and not much that we can do about it."

I let my legs sink down into the sea, then let out an involuntary exclamation as if I had been bitten or stung. Something large and solid had brushed by my leg, and although there are a lot of large and solid things in the sea all I could think of was of something about fifteen feet long with a triangular fin and a mouth like an unsprung bear-trap. And then it came to me that I'd felt no swirl or disturbance in the water and I cautiously lowered my legs again just as Marie said: "What is it? What's the matter?"

"I wish old Fleck would bring his schooner by here," I said yearningly. "That would be the end of both of them." It wasn't that something large and solid had brushed by my leg, it had been my leg brushing by something large and solid, which was a different thing altogether. "I'm standing in about four feet of water."

There was a momentary "pause, then she said: "Me, too." It was the slow dazed answer of one who cannot believe something: more accurately, of one who can't understand something, and I found it vaguely puzzling. "What do you think-"

"Land, dear girl," I said expansively. I felt a bit lightheaded with relief, I hadn't given tuppence for our chances of survival. "Must be that island we thought we saw. The way the sea-bed is sloping up it can be nothing else. Now's our chance to see those dazzling sands and waving palms and the brown-skinned beauties we've heard so much about. Give me your hand."

There was no answering levity or even gladness from her, she just took my hand in silence as I transferred the blanket to my other hand and started feeling my cautious way up the rapidly shelving sea-floor. In less than a minute we were standing on rock, and on any other night we would have been high and dry. In that rain, we were high and wet. But we were high. Nothing else mattered.

We lifted both water drums on to the shore and I draped the blanket over Marie's head: the rain had slackened, but slackening on that night was a comparative thing only, it was still fierce enough to be hurtful. I said: "I'm just going to take a brief look round. Back in five minutes."

"All right," she said dully. It didn't seem to matter whether I came or went.

I was back in two minutes; not five. I'd taken eight steps

and fallen into the sea on the other side and it didn't take me long to discover that our tiny island was only about four times as long as it was broad and consisted of nothing but rock. I would have liked to see Robinson Crusoe making out on that little lot. Marie hadn't moved from where I had left her.

"It's just a little rock in the middle of the sea," I reported. "But at least we're safe. For the present anyway."

"Yes." She rubbed the rock with the toe of her sandal. "It's coral, isn't it?"

"I suppose so." As with many others, the sun-drenched coral islands of the Pacific had formed a staple part of my earlier reading diet, but when I incautiously sat down to take the weight off my feet and stock of the situation my youthful enthusiasms vanished pretty rapidly. If this was coral it felt like the sort of thing an Indian fakir might graduate to after he'd mastered the easier stuff, like sleeping on a bed of red-hot nails. The rock was hard, broken, jagged and with frequent spiny razor-sharp edges. I pushed myself quickly to my feet, careful not to cut my hand on the coral, picked up the two drums and set them down on the highest part of the reef. I went back for Marie, took her arm and we sat down side by side on the drums with our backs to the wind and the rain. She offered me part of the blanket as protection, and I wasn't too proud to take it. It at least gave the illusion of shelter.

I talked to her for some time, but she had only monosyllables to offer in return. Then I dug a couple of cigarettes out from the packet I'd stowed in my water drum and offered her one, which she took, but that wasn't very successful either for the blanket leaked like a sieve and inside a minute both cigarettes were completely sodden. After ten minutes or so I said: "What's the matter, Marie? I agree that this is not the Grand Pacific Hotel, but at least we're alive."

"Yes." A pause, then matter of factly: "I thought I was going to die out there tonight. I expected to die. I was so sure I would that this-well, it's a sort of anti-climax. It's not real. Not yet. You understand?"

"No. What made you sure you were going to-" I broke off for a moment. "Don't tell me that you're still thinking along the same daft lines as you were last night?"

She nodded in the darkness. I felt the movement of the blanket rather than saw that of her head.

"I'm sorry, I really am. I can't help it. Maybe I'm not well, it's never been like this before," she said helplessly. "You look into the future but almost all the time there isn't any but if you do catch glimpses of it you're not there yourself. It's a kind of curtain drawn between you and tomorrow, and because you can't see past it you feel that there is none. No tomorrow, I mean."

"Superstitious rubbish," I said shortly. "Just because you're tired and out of sorts and soaked and shivering, you start having recourse to those morbid fancies. You're no help to me, just no help at all. Half the time I think Colonel Raine was right and that you would make a first-class partner in this godforsaken racket of ours: and half the time I'm convinced that you're going to be a deadweight round my neck and drag me under." It was cruel, but I meant to be kind. "God knows how you've managed to survive in this business until now."

"I told you it's new, something completely new for me. It is superstitious nonsense and I'll not mention it again." She reached out and touched my hand. "It's so terribly unfair to you. I'm sorry."

I didn't feel proud of myself at all. I let the subject go and returned to the consideration of the South Pacific. I was coming to the conclusion that I didn't much care for the South Pacific. The rain was the worst I'd ever known: coral was nasty sharp dangerous stuff: it was inhabited by a bunch of homicidally-minded characters: and, another shattered illusion, the nights could be very cold indeed. I felt clammy and chilled under the clinging wetness of that blanket and both of us were shaken by uncontrollable bouts of shivering which grew more frequent as the night wore on. At one stage it seemed to me that the sensible and logical thing for us to do would be to lie down in the very much warmer sea water and spend the night like that, but when I went, briefly, to test this theory, I changed my mind. The water was warm enough, what changed my mind was a tentacle that appeared from a cleft in the coral and wrapped itself round my left ankle: the octopus to which it belonged couldn't have weighed more than a few pounds but it still took most of my sock with it as I wrenched my leg away, which gave me some idea of what to expect if its big brother happened by.

It was the longest, the most miserable night I have ever known. It must have been about midnight when the rain eased off, but it continued in a steady drizzle until shortly before dawn. Sometimes I dozed off, sometimes Marie did, but when she did it was a restless troubled sleep, her breathing too shallow and quick, her hands too cold, her forehead too warm. Sometimes we both rose and stumbled around precariously on the rough slippery rock to get our circulation moving again, but mostly we just sat in silence.

I stared out into the rain and the darkness and I thought of just three things during the interminable hours of that night: the island we were on, Captain Fleck and Marie Hopeman.

I knew little enough about Polynesian islands, but I did recall that those coral islets were of two types: atolls, and barrier reefs for larger islands. If we were on the former, a broken, circular and probably uninhabited ring of coral islets, the future looked bleak indeed: but if it were part of a reef enclosing the lagoon round a large and possibly inhabited island, then we might still be lucky.

I thought of Captain Fleck. I thought of how much I would give for the chance of meeting him again, and what would happen then, and I wondered why he had done what he had done and who was the man behind the kidnap and attempted murder. One thing seemed certain and that was that the missing scientists and their wives were going to stay missing: I had been classified as redundant and would never now find out where they were or what had happened to them. Right then I wasn't so worried about them, the longing to meet up with Fleck was the predominant emotion in my mind. A strange man. A hard callous ruthless man but a man I would have sworn was not all bad. But I knew nothing of him. All I did know now with certainty was his reason for deciding to wait till nine o'clock before getting rid of us: he must have known that the schooner had been passing a coral reef and if they'd thrown us overboard at seven o'clock we might well have been washed up before morning. If we had been found, identified.and traced back to the Grand Pacific Hotel, Fleck would have had a great deal of explaining to do.

And I thought of Marie Hopeman, not as a person but as a problem. Whatever dark forebodings had possessed her had had no validity in themselves, they were just symptomatic of something else, and I no longer had any doubts about what that something else was. She was sick, not mentally but physically: the succession of bad flights from England to Suva and then the night on the boat and now this all added up to far too little sleep and too little food, and the lack of those coupled with physical exhaustion had lowered her resistance till she was pretty open to anything that came along and what was coming along was fever or chill or just plain old-fashioned flu: there had certainly been plenty of that around when we had left London. I didn't like to think what the outcome was going to be if she had to spend another twenty-four hours in sea-soaked clothes on this bare and exposed islet. Or even twelve.

Sometime during the night my eyes became so tired from staring into the rain and the darkness that I began to have some mild forms of hallucination. I thought I could see lights moving in the ram-blurred distance, and that was bad enough: but when I began to imagine I could hear voices, I resolutely shut my eyes and tried to force myself into sleep. Sitting hunched forward on a water-can with only a soaking blanket for cover, falling off to sleep is quite a feat. But I finally made it, about an hour before the dawn.

I awoke with the sun hot on my back. I awoke to the sound of voices, real voices, this time. I awoke to the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

I flung back the overhanging blanket as Marie stirred and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was a gleaming glorious dazzling world, a peaceful sun-warmed panorama of beauty that made the long night just gone a dark nightmare that could never have been.

A string of coral isles and reefs, reefs painted in the most impossible greens and yellows and violets and browns and whites, stretched away on both sides from us in two huge curving horns that all but encircled and enclosed a huge lagoon of burnished aquamarine, and, beyond the lagoon, the most remarkably-shaped island I'd ever laid eyes on. It was as if some giant hand had cut a giant Stetson down the middle, and thrown one half away. The island reached its highest point in the extreme north, where it plunged vertically down into the sea: from this peak, it sloped down steeply to the east and south-I could only guess that it would be the same on the west-and where the wide brim of the Stetson would have been was a flat plain running down to beaches of dazzling white sand which, even at that hour of the morning and at a distance of three miles, was positively hurtful to the eyes. The mountain itself, a rich bluish-purple in that early sunlight, was bald and bare of any vegetation: the plain below was bare, too, only scrub bushes and grass, with scattered palms down near the water's edge.

But I didn't spend much time on the scenery: I'd like to think I'd be right in there with the next man when it came to appreciating the beauties of nature, but not after a rain-soaked and chilly night on an exposed reef: I was far more interested in the out-rigger canoe that was coming arrowing in towards us through the mirror-calm waters of that green lagoon.

There were two men in it, big sturdy brown-skinned men with huge mops of crinkly black hair, and their paddles were driving in perfect unison into and through the gleaming glass of those waters faster than I would have believed possible, moving so quickly that the flying spray from the paddles was a continuously iridescent rainbow glitter in the rays of the rising sun. Less than twenty yards away from the reef they dug their paddles deep, slowed down their outrigger canoe and brought it slewing round to a standstill less than ten feet away. One of the men jumped out into the thigh deep water, waded towards us then climbed nimbly up the coral. His feet were bare but the sharp rock didn't worry him any that I could see. His face was a comical mixture of astonishment and good humour, astonishment at finding two white people on a reef at that hour in the morning, good humour because the world was a wonderful place and always would be. You don't see that kind of face often, but when you do you can never mistake it. Good humour won. He gave us a huge white grin and said something that meant just nothing at all to me.

He could see that it meant nothing at all and he wasn't the kind of man to waste time. He looked at Marie, shook his head and clucked his tongue as his eyes took in the pale face, the two unnaturally red patches on her cheeks and the purplish shadows under her eyes, then grinned again, ducked his head as in greeting, picked her up and waded out to the canoe. I made it under my own steam, lugging the two water drums along.

The canoe was fitted with a mast, but there was no wind yet, so we had to paddle across the lagoon to the island. At least the two brown men did and I was glad to leave it to them. What they did with that canoe would have had me gasping and wheezing in five minutes and in a hospital bed in ten. They'd have been a sensation at Henley. They kept it up non-stop for the twenty minutes it took us to cross the lagoon, churning up the water as if the Loch Ness monster was after them, but still finding time and energy to chatter and laugh with each other all the way. If they were representative of the rest of the island's population, we had fallen into good hands.

And that there were others on the island was obvious. As we came close to the shore, I could count at least half a dozen houses, stilted affairs with the floor about three feet off the ground and enormously deep-eaved thatched roofs that swept down steeply from high ridge-poles to within four or five feet of the ground. The houses had neither doors nor windows, understandably enough, for they had no walls either, except for one, the largest, in a clearing near the shore, close in to a stand of coconut palms: the other houses were set further back and to the south. Still further south was a metal and corrugated iron eyesore, grey in colour, like an old-fashioned crushing plant and hopper in a quarry. Beyond this again was a long low shed, with a slightly sloping corrugated iron roof: it must have been a real pleasure to work under that when the sun was high in the sky.

We were heading in just to the right of a small pier-not a real landing-stage with anchored piles but a thirty foot long floating platform of bound logs, secured on the shore end by ropes tied round a couple of tree stumps-when I saw a man lying on the shore. A white man, sunbathing. He was a lean wiry old bird with a lot of white hair all over his face, dark spectacles on his eyes and a grubby towel strategically placed across his midriff. He appeared to be asleep, but he wasn't, for when the bow of the canoe crunched into the sand he sat up with a jerk, whipped off his dark glasses, peered myopically in our direction, pawed around the sand till he located a pair of slightly-tinted spectacles, stuck them across the bridge of his nose, said "God bless my soul" in an agitated voice, jumped to his feet with remarkable speed for such an old duffer and hurried into a nearby palm-thatched hut, clutching his towel round him.

"Quite a tribute to you, my dear," I murmured. "You looking like something the tide washed up and the old boy about ninety-nine, but you can still knock him for six."

"He didn't seem any too pleased to see us, I thought," she said doubtfully. She smiled at the big man who'd just lifted her from the canoe and set her on her feet on the sand and went on: "Maybe he's a recluse. Maybe he's one of those remittance man beach-combers and other white people are the last he wants to see."

"He's just gone for his best bib and tucker," I said confidently. "He'll be back in a minute to give us the big hand."

And he was. We'd hardly reached the top of the beach when he reappeared from the hut, dressed in a white shirt and white ducks, with a panama on his head. He'd a white beard, flowing white moustache and plentiful thick white hair. If Buffalo Bill had ever worn tropical whites and a straw hat, he'd have been a dead ringer for Buffalo Bill.

He came puffing down to meet us, his hand outstretched in greeting. I'd made no mistake about the warmth of welcome, but I had about the age: he wasn't a day over sixty, perhaps only fifty-five, and a pretty fit fifty-five at that.

"God bless my soul, God bless my soul!" He wrung our hands as if we'd brought him the first prize in the Irish Sweepstake. "What a surprise! What a surprise! Morning dip, you know-just drying off-couldn't believe my eyes-where in all the world have you two come from? No, no, don't answer now. Straight up to my house. Delightful surprise. Delightful." He scurried off in front of us, god-blessing himself with every other step. Marie smiled at me and we walked after him.

He led us along a short path, across a white-shingled front, up a wide flight of six wooden steps into his house: like the others, the floor was well clear of the ground. But once inside I could see why, unlike the other houses, it had walls: it had to have to support the large bookcases and glass-covered show-cases that lined three quarters of the wall area of the room: the rest of the walls were given over to doors and window spaces, no glass in the windows, just screens of plaited leaves that could be raised or lowered as wished. There was a peculiar smell that I couldn't place at first. The floor seemed to be made of the mid-ribs of some type of leaf, coconut palm, probably, laid across close-set joists, and there was no ceiling as such, just steep-angled rafters with thatch above. I looked at this thatch for a long and very interested moment. There was a big old-fashioned roll-top desk in one corner and a large safe against the inside wall. There were some brightly coloured straw mats on the floor, most of which was given over to low-slung comfortable looking rattan chairs and settees, each with a low table beside it. A man could be comfortable in that room-especially with a drink in his hand.

The old boy-with that beard and moustache. I couldn't think of him as anything else-was a mind-reader.

"Sit down, sit down. Make yourselves comfortable. A drink? Yes, yes, of course, first of all a drink. You need it, you need it." He picked up a little bell, rang it furiously as if he were trying to see how much punishment it could stand before it came apart in his hands, replaced it and looked at me. "Too early in the morning for whisky, eh?"

"Not this morning."

"And you, young lady. Some brandy, perhaps? Eh? Brandy?"

"Thank you." She let him have the smile she never bothered letting me have and I could just about see the old boy's toes curling. "You are very kind."

I was just coming to the resigned conclusion that his staccato and repetitive way of talking was habitual and was going to be a little wearing if we had to stay with him for any length of time-and I had the thought, even then, that the voice was vaguely familiar to me-when a rear door opened and a Chinese youth came in. He was very short, very thin, dressed in khaki drill, and the only use he had for his facial muscles was to keep his expressions buttoned up for he didn't even bat an eyelid when he saw us.

"Ah, Tommy, there you are. We have guests, Tommy. Drinks. Brandy for the lady, a large whisky for the gentleman and-let me see now, yes, yes, perhaps I rather think I will-a small whisky for me. Then run a bath. For the lady." I could get by with a shave. "Then breakfast. You haven't breakfasted yet?"

I assured him we hadn't.

"Excellent. Excellent!" He caught sight of the two men who had rescued us standing outside on the white shingles with the water drums, raised a bushy white eyebrow in my direction and said: "What's in those?"

"Our clothes."

"Indeed? Yes, yes, I see. Clothes." Any opinion he held as to our eccentricities in the choice of suitcases he kept to himself. He went to the doorway. "Just leave them there, James. You've done a splendid job, both of you. Splendid. I'll speak to you later."

I watched the two men smile broadly, then turn away. I said: "They speak English?"

"Certainly. Of course they do."

"They didn't speak any to us."

"Urn. They didn't, eh?" He tugged his beard, Buffalo Bill to the life. "You speak any to them?"

I thought, then grinned: "No."

"There you are, then. You might have been any of a score of nationalities." He turned as the Chinese boy came in, took the drinks from the tray and handed them to us. "Your excellent health."

I grunted something appropriate and as short as it could decently be and went for that drink like a thirst-stricken camel for the nearest oasis. I insulted a perfectly good Scotch by swallowing half of it at one gulp, but even so it tasted wonderful and I was about to start on the remainder when the old boy said: "Well, preliminaries over, decencies observed. Your story, sir. Let's have it."

It brought me up short and I looked at him cautiously. I could be wrong about him being a hoppity old fusspot. I was wrong. The bright blue eyes were shrewd, and what little of his face was available for expression seemed to indicate a certain carefulness, if not actual wariness. Being a little odd in your behaviour doesn't necessarily mean that you're a little odd in the head.

I gave it to him, short and straight. I said: "My wife and I were en route to Australia, by plane. During an overnight stop at Suva we were taken from our hotel room at three in the morning by a Captain Fleck and two Indians, forced to board his schooner and locked up. Last night we heard them planning to murder us, so we broke out from the hold where they'd put us-it was a bad night and they didn't see us go-jumped over the side and after some time washed up on a coral reef. Your men found us there this morning."

"God bless my soul! What an extraordinary tale. Extraordinary!" He kept on blessing himself and shaking his head for a bit, then looked up at me from under bushy white eyebrows. "If we could have it with a little more detail, perhaps?" So I gave it to him again, telling him everything that had happened since we had arrived in Suva. He peered at me through those tinted glasses all the time I was speaking and when I finished he sighed, did some more headshaking and said: "Incredible. The whole thing's quite incredible!"

"Do you mean that literally?"

"What? What? That I don't believe you? God bless-"

"This might convince you," Marie interrupted. She slipped off her shoe and peeled back the plaster to show the two deep fang marks on her foot. "The rat caused that."

"But I do believe it, young lady! It's just that everything is so bizarre, so-so fantastic. Of course it's true, how else would you be here? But-but why should this villainous fellow, this Captain Fleck kidnap you and talk of killing you? It all seems so purposeless, so mad."

"I've no idea," I said. "The only thing I can think of-and even that is ridiculous-is that I'm a scientist, a specialist in fuel technology and maybe someone wanted to extract some information from me. Why on earth they should want to do that I just can't imagine. And how the skipper of an obscure schooner knew that we should be flying out to Australia via Fiji-well, it doesn't make any kind of sense at all."

"As you say, it makes no sense at all, Mr.-ah-Bless my soul, you must forgive me! I haven't even asked your names yet!"

"Bentall. John Bentall. And this is my wife, Marie." I smiled at him. "And you don't need to tell me who you are. It's just come back to me. Dr. Harold Witherspoon-Professor Witherspoon, I should say. The doyen of British archaeologists."

"You know me then? You recognized me?" The old boy seemed quite bucked about it.

"Well, you do get a good deal of newspaper space," I said tactfully. Professor Witherspoon's love of the public limelight was a byword. "And I saw your series of lectures on television, about a year ago."

He didn't look so pleased any longer. He suddenly looked downright suspicious, and his eyes narrowed as he said: "You interested in archaeology, Mr. Bentall? Know anything about it, I mean?"

"I'm like a million others, professor. I know about this Egyptian tomb and this lad Tutenkhamon who was in it. But I couldn't begin to spell his name, I doubt if I'm even pronouncing it properly."

"So. Good. Forgive my asking, I'll explain later. I am being most remiss, most remiss. This young lady here is far from well. Fortunately, I'm a bit of a doctor. Have to be, you know. Living your life at the back of beyond." He bustled out of the room, returned with a medical case, took out a thermometer and asked Marie to put it in her mouth while he took her wrist.

I said: "I don't want to appear ungrateful or unappreciative of your hospitality, Professor, but my business is rather urgent. How soon will we be able to leave here and get back to Suva?"

"Not long." He shrugged. "There's a ketch from Kandavu- that's about a hundred miles or so north of here-calls in about every six weeks. It was last here, let me see-yes, about three weeks ago. So, another three weeks."

That was handy. Three weeks. Not long, he said, but they probably had a different time scale on those islands and looking out over that shimmering lagoon with the coral reefs beyond I found it easy to understand why. But I didn't think Colonel Raine would be so happy if I just sat back and admired the lagoon for three weeks, so I said: "Any planes ever pass this way?"

"No ships, no planes, nothing." He shook his head and kept on shaking it as he examined the thermometer. "Bless my soul. A hundred and three and a pulse of 120. Dear, dear! You're a sick young lady, Mrs. Bentall, probably taken it from London with you. Bath, bed and breakfast in that order." He held up his hand as Marie murmured a token protest. "I insist. I insist. You can have Carstairs' room. Red Carstairs, my assistant," he explained. "In Suva at present, recuperating from malaria. Rife in those parts. Expect him back on the next ship. And you, Mr. Bentall-I expect you'd like a sleep, too." He gave a deprecating little laugh. "I daresay you didn't sleep too soundly out on that reef last night."

"A clean-up, shave and a couple of hours on one of those very inviting chairs on your verandah will do me," I said. "No planes either, eh? Any boats on the island I could hire?"

"The only boat on the island is the one belonging to James and John. Not their right names, those natives from Kandavu have unpronounceable names. They're here on contract to supply fresh fish and whatever food and fruit they can gather. They wouldn't take you anyway-even if they would, I'd absolutely forbid it. Absolutely."

"Too dangerous?" If it was, I was right with him.

"Of course. And illegal. The Fijian Government forbids inter-island proa travel in the cyclone season. Heavy penalties. Very heavy penalties. For breaking the law."

"No radio we could use to send a message?"

"No radio. Not even a radio receiver." The professor smiled. "When I'm investigating something that happened many thousands of years ago I find contact with the outside world disturbing in the extreme. All I have is an old-fashioned hand-wound gramophone."

He seemed a harmless old duffer, so I didn't tell him what he could do with his gramophone. Instead, while Marie bathed, I had another drink, then after a shave, change and first-class breakfast, stretched out on a low rattan armchair in the shade of the verandah.

I meant to do some heavy thinking for it seemed to me that the situation was such that it was long past time that I showed some rudimentary signs of intelligence, but I'd reckoned without my weariness, the warmth of the sun, the effects of a couple of double Scotches on an empty stomach and the soporific sound of the trade-wind whispering its sibilant clicking way through the nodding palms. I thought of the island and how anxious I'd been to leave it and what Professor Witherspoon would say if he knew that the only way to get me off now would be by sheer force. I thought of Captain Fleck and I thought of the Professor, and I thought of them both with admiration, Fleck for the fact that he was twice as smart as I'd thought-which made him at least twice as smart as me-and the Professor for the fact that he was as polished and accomplished a liar as I'd ever met. And then I fell asleep.