I switched out the light and left. It would have taken me only five minutes to wreck the firing mechanisms on every carbine and machine pistol there. I was going to spend the rest of my days bitterly regretting the fact that the thought had never even occurred to me.
Twenty yards further on I came to a similar door on the right of the tunnel wall. No key to this one: it didn't need it for the door wasn't locked. I laid a gentle hand on the knob, turned it and eased the door open a couple of inches. The stench of foetid air that issued through the narrow crack was an almost physical blow in my face, a putrescent mephitis that wrinkled my nostrils in nauseated repugnance and lifted all the hairs on the back of my head. I felt suddenly very cold.
I opened the door further, passed inside and shut it behind me. The switch was in the same place as it had been in the previous cavern. I pressed it and looked round the cave.
But this was no cave. This was a tomb.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Some freak in the atmosphere of the cave, possibly a combination of the moisture and the phosphate of lime, had maintained the bodies in a state of almost perfect preservation. Decomposition had set in, but to a negligible extent only, certainly not enough to mar any of the essential features of the nine corpses lying where they had been flung in a rough row at the far end of the cave. The dark stains on white and khaki shirt-fronts made it easy to see how they had died.
Again the ice-chill hand of fear touched the back of my neck. I looked quickly around as if expecting to see the old man with the scythe still waiting patiently in some dark corner of the cave. Waiting for Bentall. Only, there were no dark corners. Nothing, except the round smooth dank walls, the shabby stained bundles on the floor and the battery supplying feeble power to the dim yellow lamp, barely more than head high, that dangled from the centre of the low-vaulted roof.
With my hand to my nose and breathing through my mouth only, I switched on my torch to give extra illumination and scanned the dead faces.
Six of the dead men were complete strangers to me, labourers by the looks of their clothes and hands, and I knew I had never seen them before. But the seventh I recognised immediately. White hair, white moustache, white beard, here was the real Professor Witherspoon: even in death his resemblance to the impostor who had taken his place was startling in its closeness. Beside him lay a giant of a man, a man with red hair and a great red handle-bar moustache: this, beyond any doubt, would be the Dr. 'Red' Carstairs whose portrait I had been shown in a magazine. The ninth man, in a much better state of preservation than the others, I identified without a second glance: his presence there confirmed that the men who had advertised for a second fuel research specialist had indeed been in need of one: it was Dr. Charles Fairfield, my old chief in the Hepworth and Ordnance Fuel Research, one of the eight scientists who had been lured out to Australia.
Sweat was pouring down my face but I was shivering with cold. What was Dr. Fairfield doing there? Why had he been killed? Old Fairfield was the last man to stumble upon anything. A brilliant man in his own field, he was as shortsighted as a dodo and had a monumental incuriosity about everybody and everything except his own work and his consuming private passion for archaeology. And the archaeological tie-up between Fairfield and Witherspoon was so blindingly obvious that it just didn't make any sense at all. Whatever reason lay behind Dr. Fairfield's sudden disappearance from England, nothing was more certain than that it was entirely unconnected with whatever pick and shovel expertise he might show in abandoned mine-workings. But then what in the name of God was he doing here?
I felt as if I were in an ice-box, but the sweat was trickling more heavily than ever down the back of my neck. Still holding the torch in my right hand-the knife was in my left-I worked a handkerchief out of my right trouser pocket and mopped the back of my neck. To the left and front of me I caught a momentary flash of something glittering on the wall of the cave, something metallic, obviously, reflecting the beam of the still burning torch. But what? What metallic object was there? Apart from the dead men the only other objects in that cave were the light fitting and the light switch, and both were made of bakelite. I held the torch and handkerchief, both still over my shoulder, perfectly steady. The glimmer of light on the cave wall was still there. I stood like a statue, my eyes never leaving that gleam on the wall. The light moved.
My heart stopped. The medical profession can say what it likes, but my heart stopped. Then slowly, carefully, I brought down both torch and handkerchief, transferred the torch to my left hand as if to enable me to shove my handkerchief away with my right, then dropped the handkerchief, clutched the hilt of the knife in my right hand and whirled round all in one half second of time.
There were two of them, no more than four feet inside the cave, still fifteen feet distant from me. Two Chinese, already moving wide apart to encircle me, one in dungaree trousers and cotton shirt, the other in a pair of cotton shorts, both big muscular men, both in their bare feet. Their unwinking eyes, the oriental immobility of the yellow faces served only to emphasize, not mask, the cold implacability of the expressions. You didn't have to know your Emily Post to realise that they just weren't paying a social call. Nor would Emily have given them any medals for their calling cards, two of the most lethal-looking double-edged throwing knives I'd ever seen: the books on etiquette covered practically every possible situation in which strangers first made the other's acquaintance, but they'd missed out on this one.
It would be ridiculous to deny that I was frightened, so I won't. I was scared, and badly scared. Two fit men against one semi-invalid, four good arms against one, two undoubtedly skilled and cunning knife-fighters against a man who'd never even carved up a lump of cooked dead meat far less a live human being. And this wasn't the time to learn. But it was the time to do something, and do it very quickly indeed before one or other of them caught on to the idea that at five yards I was a target that could hardly be missed and changed over from a stabbing to a throwing grip on his knife.
I rushed at them, right hand and knife over my shoulder as if I were wielding a club, and both of them fell back an involuntary couple of paces, maybe because of the foolhardy recklessness of it, more likely because of the respectful fear which Orientals habitually show in the presence of madness. I brought the knife whistling forward over my shoulder and with the tinkling of glass from the smashed overhead light and the flick of my left thumb on the torch switch the cave became as pitch-black as the tomb it really was.
It was essential to move, and move as fast as possible before they realised that I had the double advantage of having a torch and being in the position to lash out indiscriminately with my knife in the hundred per cent certainty that I would be stabbing an enemy, whereas they had a fifty per cent chance of stabbing a friend. Reckless of the noise I made in that utterly silent chamber, I pulled away the occluding plaster on the face of the torch, slipped off my sandals, ran three heavy steps in the direction of the entrance, stopped abruptly and sent both sandals sliding along the ground to thud softly against the- wooden door.
Had they been given another ten seconds to take stock of their position, to work out the possibilities, probably the last thing they would have done would have been to rush headlong to the source of the sudden noise. As it was, they had been given barely five seconds altogether in which to think, and the immediate and inevitable reaction must have been that I was trying to escape. I heard the quick patter of bare feet, the sound of a brief scuffle, a soft thud and an explosive gasp of agony that was lost in the clatter of something metallic falling to the floor.