‘He wrote it,’ said George Felse, smoothing the crumpled note between his hands, ‘and he didn’t write it under any sort of compulsion, or even stress, as far as I can see. Does that make you feel any better?’
She looked at him intently, the damp wind from the swollen river fluttering the strands of hair on her cheeks, and said firmly: ‘No.’
‘It should. To some extent, at any rate. But you can be extraordinarily convincing, can’t you?’ he said, and smiled at her.
‘Does that mean we wait for word of him, and do nothing?’
‘No, it means I’ve already done what needs to be done. For good reasons we don’t want any public alarm or any visible hunt. But we’ve sent out a general call on his car, and an immediate on any news of it or him. Orders to approach with discretion, if sighted, but once found, not to lose. By evening we may hear something. Meantime, not a word to anyone else.’
The air was giving out, or else it was he who was weakening. His head swam lightly and dizzily, like a cork on storm-water, and sometimes he came round with a jolt out of spells of semi-consciousness, to find himself still doggedly crawling, and was terrified that in that state he had passed some possible channel riverwards, or left some crossing unrecorded. He had crawled his way clean through the knees of his slacks, and ripped the sole of one shoe open. There were moments, indeed when he felt as if his knee-joints were bared not to the skin, but to the bone, and suffered the alarming delusion that he was dragging himself forward on skeletal hands stripped of all their padding of flesh.
His mind remained, at least by fits and starts, as clear as ever, aggravatingly clear. He had a surprisingly sharp conception of where, by this time, he was. He had started out to proceed in orderly fashion down the left-hand limit of the caldarium to the river, and thence to the open section. And here he was, God alone knew how many hours or weeks later, forced farther and farther off-course to the right, until he must be within a few yards of the right-hand margin, and no nearer the river than when he had set out. Somewhere at this corner there had been a limited dig, he remembered, about nineteen months ago, but they’d filled in the excavation with very little gained. A disappointing affair. My God, he thought, staggered by the astringent precision of his own thoughts while his body was one blistering pain from cramp, exertion and strain, I’m going quietly crazy. I could recite the text of that article word for word, and I’d never even seen this damned place when I got the magazine as part of my briefing.
I will not go crazy, though, quietly or noisily, so help me! I’ll crawl out of this Minoan labyrinth on my own hands and knees, or die trying!
It was nearly half past five that Sunday afternoon when a courting couple in a Mini, returning from a spring jaunt and finding themselves with time for an amorous interlude before they need return to the bosoms of their families, drove off the road on the heath side of Silcaster into a certain old quarry they knew of, and parked the car carefully on the level stretch of grass above the abandoned workings. If the boy had not sensibly elected to back into position and drive out again forwards, and his girl friend had not been well-trained in all their mutual manoeuvres, and hopped out without being asked, to make sure how far back the ground was solid after the rain, a very much longer interval might have passed before George Felse got any information in response to his general call.
‘Come on, you’re all right,’ she called, beckoning him gaily back towards the sheer edge of the quarry, still some eight yards or so behind her, and thinly veiled with low bushes here and there. ‘Somebody’s been back here before us, it’s safe enough.’ And she glanced behind her, following the course of the tyre-tracks flattened deep and green into the wet grass, and suddenly flung up a hand in warning and let out a muted shriek: ‘My God, no! Stop! Eh, Jimmy, come and have a look at this! Some poor soul’s gone clean over the edge.’
The tracks ran straight to the rim, and vanished into the void; a little bush of stunted hawthorn, barely a foot high, was scraped clean of all its twigs and leaves on one side, and dangled broken into the grass. In stunned silence they crept forward to the rim of the cliff, and looked over into the deep, dark eye of the pool which had long since filled the abandoned crater. Rock-based, with only a few years’ deposit of gravel and fine matter to cloud it, and almost no weed, it retained its relative clarity even after rain, but it was deep enough to cover what it held with successive levels of darkness. Nevertheless, they could distinguish the shape of the car by the still outline of pallor, light bronze forming an oblong shoal with all its sides sloping gradually away into the blue-green of deeper water.
‘Oh, God!’ whispered the girl. ‘It’s true! He went and backed her clean over.’
The boy was sharper-sighted, and bright enough to be sure of what he saw. ‘He never did! That car went in forwards. Look at it! What’s more, look at those tracks!’
By instinct they had walked along the wheel-tracks to the edge of the quarry, the grass being longish and very wet, and the flattened channels the smoothest and driest walking. ‘Look there, between the wheel-marks!’ She looked, and there beyond doubt ran the curious feather-stitch pattern of two human legs wading through grass, midway between the grooves the tyres had laid down. Not merely walking, but thrusting strongly, for the soft turf, though it retained no details, was ground into a hollow at every step. These marks began only about fifteen feet from the edge, and ended in a patch of more trampled grass about six feet from it. Only a few yards of effort. ‘You haven’t set foot in there,’ said the boy, ‘and no more have I. Either I’m crazy, or the bloke that did was shoving that car. Put her in gear and let her run, and even then, with this growth, downhill and all she’d need a hand to send her over.’
‘What, just getting rid of an old crock?’ said the girl, relieved of the vision of two young people like themselves slowly drowning as the car filled. ‘Is that all? Well, I know they go to some funny shifts to get shot of ’em, I suppose that’d be one way.’
‘I don’t know! It doesn’t look like a job I’d throw away,’ he said dubiously, peering down at the pale shape below. ‘Suppose it was some car pinched for a job, and then dumped? And it’s recent—couldn’t be longer ago than last night it was put in there.’ He made up his mind. ‘Come on, we’d better report it. Just in case!’
It was his statement that sent a Silcaster police car out to the quarry less than half an hour later. The colour appeared, the boy had said, to be fawn or light brown. The implications were urgent, with the missing light bronze Aston Martin in mind, and they sent out, after only momentary hesitation, for a skin-diver, to settle the matter as soon as possible, one way or the other. If they were wasting time over an old hulk ditched illegally by its desperate owner, so much the worse. But they couldn’t afford to take chances.
The diving unit brought flood-lights and equipment, never being given to do things by halves. The diver went down before the daylight was quite gone, and brought up a report that set the whole circus in motion well into the night.
The first call was put through to George just before seven. ‘Got some news of the Aston Martin for you,’ said the Silcaster inspector, an old acquaintance. ‘Some bad, some good.’
‘Let’s have the bad first,’ said George.
‘We’ve found the car. Dumped in a pool in a deserted quarry up by the heath. Courting couple found the tracks where it had been driven over, and had the sense to report it. We’ve already had a diver down, and it’s the car you want, all right. We’re setting up the gear to raise it, but our frogman reckons he could see pretty well into the interior, and—’