‘Yes, this is where we leave cover. For a start, you can let me show myself first again, in case anyone’s about.’
‘Okay. But d’you mind if we have a rest first – just for a minute? Here’s a decent place to sit.’
He clambered a little way up the south side of the gully, where there was some flattish ground, and lay down in the sun, while I sat beside him.
‘Finish your story,’ I said.
‘Where was I? Oh, Josef hiding the gun. Well, he picked up his rifle and came on upstairs. While I was trying to eat, he just sat there, with the rifle across his knees, watching me. It put me off my food.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘I’d been trying to think up some Greek, but I don’t really know any.’ He grinned. ‘You just about heard my full repertoire when you woke me up.’
‘You did wonders. If I hadn’t known, I’d just have thought you were dim, and a bit sulky. Where’d you get the fancy dress? Sofia?’
‘Yes. Anyway, in the end I managed to think up a bit of classical Greek, and tried that. I remembered the word for “brother” – “adelphós” – and tried that on him. Apparently it’s still the same word. I’d never have thought,’ said Colin ingenuously, ‘that Thucydides and all that jazz would ever have come in useful.’
‘It worked, then?’
His mouth thinned, no longer young-looking. ‘I’ll say it did. He said, “Nekrós”, and even if it hadn’t been obvious what that means, he drew his hand across his throat, like this, as if he was cutting it. Then he grinned, the stinking little sod. I’m sorry.’
‘What? Oh – it’s all right.’
‘Mark always goes down my throat with his boots on if I swear.’
‘Mark does? Why?’
‘Oh, well—’ He rolled over, staring down the gully – ‘I mean, naturally one swears at school, but at home, in front of the girls, it’s different.’
‘If Charlotte’s at RADA,’ I said dryly, ‘I’d have thought she’d have caught up with you by now.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, well, I told you he was a bit of a square. But he’s all right, old Mark, as brothers go.’ He returned briskly to his narrative. ‘After that, Josef just shut me up when I tried to speak. It was after he’d gone that I realized he’d let me see him. He’d sat there in full view, with daylight coming through the shutters. The only reason for that I could think of was that they were going to kill me anyway. I tried pretty hard to get away, that day, but I only hurt my wrists. But it wasn’t Josef, that evening, after all, it was Sofia. She came very late – nearly morning, it must have been – and she untied me. I didn’t realize at first that she’d done it – I couldn’t move. She rubbed my legs, and put oil on my wrists, and bandaged them, then she gave me some soup. She’d brought it all the way in a jug, and it was only just warm, but it was awfully good. And some wine. I ate a bit, wondering how soon my legs would work, and if I could get away from her, then I realized she was signing me to go with her. Mind you, I was scared to, at first. I thought this might be – well, the pay-off. But there wasn’t any future in staying where I was, so I followed her downstairs. She went first, and I managed to sneak the pistol from behind the tin, then went down after her. It was pretty dark, just breaking dawn. It was then I saw I’d been in a windmill. The other mills were all standing quiet, like ghosts. It was beastly cold. Oh, I forgot, she’d brought this sheepskin thing, and the stick, and I was jolly glad of them both, I may tell you; I was as shaky as a jelly for the first few minutes. She took me quite a long way, I had no idea where, through some trees and past a little cairn affair—’
‘The shrine. There’s a Madonna in it.’
‘Oh, is there? It was too dark to see that. We went quite a way, and then it was light enough to see, more or less, and we’d got to that wide track, so she stopped. She pointed the way to me, and said something I couldn’t make out. Perhaps she was telling me it was the track to the church, where they’d first found us; she’d think I’d know the way from there. Anyway, she sort of pushed me on my way and then hurried back. The sun came up with a bang, and it was light, and you know the rest.’
‘So I missed her, after all. If only I’d pulled myself together, and stayed on watch! Well, then, I suppose you just decided it was safer to lie up in the gully and hide during daylight?’
‘Yes. As a matter of fact, I was too tired and stiff to get far, so I thought I’d hole up out of sight and rest for a bit. I had the gun, after all; it made me feel a lot safer.’ He laughed. ‘I certainly never meant to go “out” like that! It must have been hours!’
‘You were dead to the wide. Are you all right now? Shall we go on?’
‘Sure. Man, oh man, get those birds! What are they?’
The shadows had moved across the uneven ground below us, swinging smoothly in wide, easy circles. I looked up.
‘Oh, Colin, they are lammergeiers! Bearded vultures! I thought I saw one yesterday! Aren’t they rather gorgeous?’
I could find time, today, to be moved and excited by this rare, huge bird, as I had been moved by the beauty of the speckled snake. I had seen the lammergeier before, at Delphi, and again yesterday, but never so close, never so low, never the two of them together.
As I stood up, they swung higher.
‘It’s the biggest bird of prey in the “old world”,’ I said. ‘I believe the wing span’s nearly ten feet. And they’re rather handsome, too, not like the other vultures, because they haven’t got that beastly bare neck, and – Colin? Is anything the matter? Aren’t you well?’
He had made no move to rise when I did, and he wasn’t watching the birds. He was staring, fixed, at something near the foot of the gully.
I looked. At first, I saw nothing. Then I wondered why I hadn’t seen it straight away.
Near a little clump of bushes, not very far from where we sat, someone had recently been digging. The earth lay now in a shallow, barrow-shaped heap, and someone had thrown stones and dry thorns over it to obliterate the marks of recent work. But it had been a hasty job, done perhaps without the right tools, and, at the end nearest to us, the crumbling stuff had already fallen in a bit, exposing an earthy shape that could have been a foot.
The shadows of the vultures crawled across it; and again, across it.
Before I could speak, Colin was on his feet, and slithering down the slope.
‘Colin!’ I was stumbling after him. ‘Colin, don’t go over there! Come back, please!’
He took no notice. I doubt if he heard me. He was standing over the grave. It was a foot, no doubt of that. I grabbed him by the arm.
‘Colin, please come away, it’s beastly, and there’s no point in poking around here. It’ll be that man they killed, that poor Greek, Alexandros . . . I suppose they had to bring him across here, where there was enough soil—’
‘He was buried in the field by the mill.’
‘What?’ I said it blankly, my hand falling from his arm.
‘He was buried in the field by the mill.’ Colin had turned to stare at me, with that stranger’s face. You’d have thought he’d never seen me before. ‘I heard them digging. All the first night, I heard them digging. And then again yesterday, someone was there, tidying up. I heard him.’
‘Yes. Stratos. I saw him.’ I looked at him stupidly. ‘Well, who can it be? It’s so – so recent . . . you’d think—’
‘You were lying to me, weren’t you?’
‘I? Lying to you? What do you mean?’ Then the look in his face shocked me into understanding. I said sharply: ‘It’s not Mark, don’t be so silly! I wasn’t lying, it was only a fleshwound, and he was better – better, do you hear? And last night, even if the wound was bleeding again, it – couldn’t have been as bad as that!’ I found I had hold of his arm again, and was shaking it. He stood like stone. I dropped the arm, and said, more quietly: ‘He’d be all right. Lambis wouldn’t be far off, and he’d look after him. It was healing cleanly, Colin, I’ll swear it was.’
‘W
ell, then, who’s this?’
‘How do I know? It must be the man they killed.’
‘I tell you, he was buried in the field. I heard them.’
‘All right, you heard them. That still doesn’t make it Mark. Why should it?’
‘Josef shot him. That was why Josef didn’t get back for me last night, when I’ll swear he meant to. He was up here, burying Mark. Or else Stratos . . . What time was Stratos at that shed with you last night?’
‘One o’clock, twenty past, I hardly know.’
‘Stratos went back to kill him later. He knew it hadn’t just been the cat. He only wanted to put you off and get you back to the hotel, so’s he could—’
‘Mark might have had something to say about that!’ I was still trying to sound no more than reasonable. ‘Give him a little credit!’
‘He was hurt. And if he’d been raking round the village for hours, he’d be flaked out, you know he would. If it comes to that, the blood mayn’t have been from his shoulder at all. Perhaps that was where Stratos—’
‘Colin! Shut up and don’t be silly!’ I could hear the nerves shrilling through my voice like wires. I swallowed, and managed to add, more or less evenly: ‘Stratos didn’t leave the hotel again before I went back to the shed and found Mark gone. Do you think I wasn’t watching? Give me some credit, too! And they’d hardly have killed him in the village and carried him up here to bury him . . . Anyway, what about Lambis? Where’s he in all this?’
‘Perhaps they killed him, too. Or he got away.’
‘He wouldn’t run away.’
‘Why not? If Mark was dead, and he thought I was, too, why should he stay? If he’d any sense at all, he’d go . . . with the caique.’
His stony insistence was carrying through to me. I found I was shaking. I said, more angrily than I had meant to: ‘This is all bilge! You haven’t a thing to go on! It isn’t Mark, I tell you it isn’t! It . . . this could be anyone. Why, it mightn’t even be anyone. Just because a bit of soil looks like a – Colin, what are you doing?’
‘I have to know. Surely you see that? I’ve got to know.’ And with a stiff, abrupt little movement, that somehow had whole chapters of horror in it, he reached out a foot, and dislodged a little of that dry dirt.
A small cascade of it trickled down with a whispering sound. It was the foot that was exposed, and the ankle, in a sock that had been grey. There was no shoe. A bit of the trouser-leg was showing. Dark grey flannel. There was a triangular tear in it that I remembered well.
There was a moment’s complete stillness, then Colin made a sound, a small, animal noise, and flung himself to his knees at the other end of the mound, where the head should be. Before I had quite realized what he was about, he was tearing at the bushes and stones with his hands, flinging them aside, careless of cuts and scratches, digging like a dog into the pile of dirt. I don’t know what I was doing: I believe I tried to pull him back, but neither words nor frantic hands made any impression at all. I might as well not have been there. The dust rose in a smoking cloud, and Colin coughed and scrabbled, and then, as he dug lower, the dust was caked . . .
He was lying on his face. Under the dirt now was the outline of his shoulders. Colin scooped a drift of stony earth away, and there was the head . . . Hiding it, half buried, was a branch of withered scrub. I stooped to pull this aside, but gently, as if it could have scratched the dead flesh. Its leaves crumpled in my hands, with the smell of dried verbena. And then, sticking up in obscene tufts from the red dust, I saw the dark hair, with the dirt horribly matted over a sticky blackness . . .
I’m not clear about what happened next. I must have flinched violently back, because the branch I was grasping came dragging out from the piled earth, dislodging as it did so a fresh heap of stuff which came avalanching down from above over the half exposed head and shoulders. My own cry, and Colin’s exclamation as his wrists and hands were buried deep in the falling debris, were followed, sharply, by another sound that split the still air with its own kind of terror. A shot.
I think I simply stood there, stupid and sick, with the branch in my hand, and Colin, startled into a moment’s immobility, kneeling at my feet. Then he moved. Vaguely I remember him dragging his hands out of the earth, and more stuff tumbling with its choking cloud of dust, and the branch being torn from my hands and flung down where it had been . . . then I was crouching in the shelter of a thicket a little way off, with my head in my hands, sweating and sick and cold, till Colin came pelting after me, to seize me by the shoulder and shake me, not gently.
‘Did you hear the shot?’
‘I – yes.’
He jerked his head seawards. ‘It came from over there. It’ll be them. They may be after Lambis.’
I merely stared. Nothing that he said seemed to mean very much. ‘Lambis?’
‘I’ll have to go and see. I – can come back for him later.’ Another jerk of the head, this time towards the grave. ‘You’d better stay out of sight. I’ll be okay, I’ve got this.’ His face still had that stunned, sleepwalker’s look, but the gun in his hand was real enough.
It brought me stumbling to my feet. ‘Wait. You’re not going alone.’
‘Look, I’ve got to go that way anyway, I’ve got to find the caique, it’s all I can do. But for you – well, it’s different now. You don’t have to come.’
‘I do. I’m not leaving you. Go on. Keep right up under the cliffs where the bushes are.’
He didn’t argue further. He was already scrambling up the side of the gully, where the cover was thickest. I followed. I only asked one more question, and then I didn’t quite dare make it a direct one. ‘Was he – was he covered right up again?’
‘Do you think I’d leave him for those stinking birds?’ said Colin curtly, and swung himself up among the trees at the gully’s edge.
15
No spectre greets me – no vain Shadow this:
Come, blooming Hero . . . !
WORDSWORTH: Laodamia
The ruined church was tiny. It stood in a green hollow full of flowering weeds. It was just an empty shell, cruciform, the central cupola supporting four half-cups that clung against it like a family of limpets clinging to the parent, and waiting for the rising tide of green to swamp them. This, it threatened soon to do: a sea of weeds – mallow and vetch, spurge and thistle – had washed already half up the crumbling walls. Even the roof was splashed with green, where the broken tiles had let fern seeds in to mantle their faded red. A wooden cross, bleached by the sea winds, pricked bravely up from the central dome.
We paused at the lip of the hollow, peering down through the bushes. Nothing moved: the air hung still. Below us now we could see the track running past the door of the church, and then lifting its dusty length through the maquis towards the sea.
‘Is that the way to the caique?’ I whispered.
Colin nodded. He opened his lips as if to say something, then stopped abruptly, staring past me. As I turned to look, his hand shot out to grip my arm. ‘Over there, see? I saw someone, a man. I’m sure I did. Do you see where that streak of white runs down, above the knot of pines? To the right of that . . . no, he’s gone. Keep down, and watch.’
I flattened myself beside him, narrowing my eyes against the bright afternoon glare.
His hand came past me, pointing. ‘There!’
‘Yes, I can see him now. He’s coming this way. Do you think?’
Colin said sharply: ‘It’s Lambis!’
He had half-risen to one knee, but I shot out a hand and pulled him down. ‘You can’t be sure at this distance. If it was Lambis, he’d be keeping under cover. Hang on.’
Colin subsided. The small figure came rapidly on; there must have been a path there; he made good speed along the hillside towards where the main track must lie, and he was certainly making no attempt at concealment. But now I saw him more clearly; brown trousers, dark-blue seaman’s jersey and khaki jacket, the way he moved . . . Colin was right. It was Lambis.
&nb
sp; I was going to say as much when I saw, a little way beyond Lambis and above the path he was following, another man emerging from a tangle of rocks and scrub where he must have been concealed. He began to make his way more slowly along, above Lambis’ path, converging downhill upon it. He was still hidden from the advancing Lambis, but he was plain enough to me . . . the loose breeches and bloused jacket, the red Cretan cap, and the rifle.
I said hoarsely: ‘Colin . . . above Lambis . . . that’s Josef.’
For seven or eight paralysed seconds we watched them: Lambis, unaware of his danger, coming steadily and rapidly on; Josef, moving slowly and carefully, and, as far as I could make out, already within easy range . . . The gun nosed forward beside me, light trembling on the barrel, which was not quite steady.
‘Shall I fire a shot to warn him?’ breathed Colin. ‘Or would Josef—?’
‘Wait!’ My hand closed on his wrist again. I said, unbelievingly: ‘Look!’
Lambis had paused, turned, and was looking around him as if expecting someone. His attitude was easy and unafraid. Then he saw Josef. He lifted a hand, and waited. The Cretan responded with a gesture, then made his way unhurriedly down to where Lambis awaited him.
The two men stood talking for a few minutes, then I saw Lambis’ arm go out, as if he were indicating some path, and Josef lifted the field glasses to his eyes, and turned them eastwards. They swept past the church, the hollow, the bushes where we lay, and passed on. He dropped them, and presently, after a little more talk, he moved off again, alone, at a slant which would bypass the hollow, and take him straight down towards the coastal cliffs.
Lambis stood watching him for a moment, then turned towards us, and came rapidly on his way. His course would lead him straight to the church. And – I saw it, as he came nearer – he now had Josef’s rifle.
Colin and I looked at one another.