It was decided that Dr. Ackrington should take the stretch of kitchen garden and rough paddock behind the house, Dikon the hill, Smith and Simon the hot springs, their surrounding path, and the rough country round the warm lake. Mr. Falls proposed to follow the path across the native thermal reserve until he came within a short distance of Taupo-tapu. The Colonel had suggested that Questing might have broken his ankle and fallen. Nobody believed in this theory. Gaunt said hurriedly that there seemed nowhere for him to go. “I am ready to do anything, anything possible, anything in reason,” he said, “but I am deeply shaken and if you can manage without me I shall be grateful.” They decided to manage without him. Dikon was uncomfortably aware that the other men had dismissed Gaunt as useless and that Simon, at least, had done so with contempt. He watched Simon speak in an undertone to Smith and was miserably angry when Smith glanced at Gaunt and sniggered. So far from being an understatement, Gaunt’s description of himself was, Dikon realized, accurate. Gaunt was profoundly shocked. His hands were unsteady and his face pinched. Lines, normally dormant, netted the corners of his eyes. It was not in Gaunt to conceal emotion but it was an error to suppose that because his distress was unchecked, it was not authentic.
Dikon set out along the path by the Springs to the hill. While they were indoors the moon had risen. Its light brought into strange relief the landscape of Wai-ata-tapu. Plumes of steam stood erect above the pools. Shadows were graved like caverns in the flanks of the hill, but while the higher surfaces, as it drawn in wood by an engraver, were strongly marked in passages of silver and black, the lower planes were wreathed in vapour through which rose manuka bushes, stiffly pallid. These, when Dikon brushed against them, gave off an aromatic scent. As always, in moonlight, there was a feeling of secret expectancy in the air.
Simon caught up with Dikon by the brushwood fence. “Here,” he said. “I want you.”
Dikon felt unequal to Simon but he waited. “Don’t you reckon we’re dopey if we let that bloke go off on his pat?” Simon demanded.
“Who are you talking about?” asked Dikon wearily.
“Falls. He seems to think he amounts to something, shooting out orders. Who is he anyway? If I got him right this morning when he did his stuff with the pipe he’s the bird that knows the signals. And if he knows the signals he was in with Questing, wasn’t he? He’s just a bit too anxious about his cobber, in my opinion. We ought to watch him.”
“But if Questing’s dead what can Falls, if he is an agent, do about it?”
“I’m not a mathematician,” said Simon obscurely, “but I reckon I can add up the fifth column when the answer’s two plus two.”
“But he telephoned the police.”
“Did he? He says he did. The telephone’s in Dad’s office. You can’t hear it from the dining-room. How do we know he used it?”
“Well, stop him if you like.”
“He’s lit off. Streaked away before we got started. Where’s his lumbago?”
“How the hell do I know! He’s shed it in your marvellous free sulphuric-acid baths,” said Dikon, but he began to feel uneasy.
“O.K., call me a fool. But you’re doing the hill. If I were you I’d keep a look-out across the reserve while you’re at it. See what Mr. Falls’s big idea is when he goes along the path. Why does he want to keep everyone off it except himself? How do we know he won’t go over the ground above the mud pot? Know what I reckon? I reckon he’s dead scared Questing dropped something when he took the toss. He’s going to look for it.”
“Pure conjecture,” Dikon muttered. “However, I’ll watch.”
Smith, like some unattractive genie, materialized out of a drift of steam. “Know what I reckon?” he began and Dikon sighed at the repetition of this persistent phrase. “I reckon it’s blind justice. After what he tried on me. I’d rather a train killed me than Taupo-tapu, by God. Give you the willies, wouldn’t it? What’s the good of looking for the poor bastard when he’s been an hour in the stock pot?”
Dikon swore at Smith with a violence that surprised himself. “It’s no good howling at me,” said Smith, “you can’t get away from the facts. C’mon, Sim.”
He moved on towards the lake.
“He reeks of alcohol,” said Dikon. “Is it wise to let him loose?”
“He’ll be O.K.,” said Simon, “I’ll keep the tags on him. You look after Falls.”
Dikon stood for a moment watching them fade into wraiths as they turned into the Springs’ enclosure. He lit a cigarette and was about to strike out for the hillcwhen he heard his name called softly.
“Dikon!”
It was Barbara in her red flannel dressing gown and felt slippers, running across the pumice in the moonlight. He went to meet her. “You called me by my first name,” he said, “so perhaps you’ve forgiven me. I’m sorry, Barbara.”
“Oh, that!” said Barbara. “I expect I behaved stupidly. You see, it hasn’t happened to me ever before.” And with an owlish imitation of somebody else’s wisdom she quoted: “It’s always the woman’s fault.”
“You little goat,” said Dikon unsteadily.
“I didn’t come out to talk about that. I wanted to ask you what’s happened.”
“Hasn’t your father—?”
“He’s talking to Mummy. I know by his voice that it’s something frightful. They won’t tell me, they never do. I must know. What are you all doing? Why are you out here? Uncle James has brought his car round and I saw Sim and Mr. Smith go out together. And when I met him on the verandah he looked so terrible. He didn’t answer when I spoke to him — just walked away to his room and slammed the door. It’s something to do with what we heard, isn’t it? Please tell me. Please do.”
“We think there may have been an accident.”
“To whom?”
“Questing. We don’t know yet. He may have just wandered off somewhere. Or sprained his ankle.”
“You don’t believe that.” Barbara’s arm in its red flannel sleeve shot out as she pointed to the hill. “You think something’s happened, out there. Don’t you? Don’t you?”
Dikon took her by the shoulders. “I’m not going to conjure up horrors,” he said, “before there are any to conjure. If you take my tip you’ll follow suit. Think what a frightful waste of the jim-jams if we find him cursing over a fat ankle, or if he merely went home to supper with the Mayor. I’m sure he adores mayors.”
“And so, who screamed?”
“Sea-gulls,” said Dikon shaking her gently. “Banshees. Maori maidens. Go home and do your stuff. Make cups of tea. Go to bed. Men must search and women must sleep and if you don’t like me kissing you don’t look at me like that.”
He turned her about and shoved her away from him. “Flaunting about in your nightgown,” he said. “Get along with you.”
He watched her go and then, with a sigh, set out for the hill.
He thought he would climb high enough to get a comprehensive view of the native thermal reserve and the land surrounding it. If anything stirred down there he should stand a good chance of seeing it in the bright moonlight. He found the track that Rua used on his evening walks and felt better for the stiff climb. Someone had suggested half-heartedly that they should at intervals call out to Questing but Dikon could not bring himself to do this. A vivid imagination stimulated by the conviction that Questing was most horridly dead made the idea of shouting his name quite appallingly stupid. However, he had promised to search so he climbed steadily until he reached a place where the reserve was spread out before him in theatrical relief. It had the curious and startling unreality of an infra-red photograph. “If it wasn’t so infernally alive,” he thought, “it would be like a lunar landscape.” He could see that the reserve was more extensive than he had imagined it to be. It was pocked all over with mud pots and steaming pools. Far out towards its eastern border he caught a glimpse of a delicate jet that spurted from its geyser and was gone. “It’s a lost world,” Dikon thought. He reflected that a man lying in one of the inky shadows would be quite invisible and decided that he had had his climb for nothing. He looked at the slopes of the hill immediately beneath him. The short tufts of grass and brush were motionless. He wandered about a little and was going to turn back when he sensed, rather than saw, that beneath him and out to his left, something had moved.