"Come on, then," Ernie Bosustow was whispering in her ear. "Let's get up them stairs! You got that flashlight?"
April produced the powerful torch she had snatched from the table before they left the caravan and handed it over. "What about the boat?" she asked. "And why do we have to whisper?"
"Because sound carries like mad in here and we don't know where your friends may be. Because, anyway, if we talk naturally, the echo smashes up and swells the noise so much that you can't understand a ruddy word... and as for the boat…" She saw him shrugging. "... There's nothing to be done."
"But what did you do when you came here as kids? What did the smugglers do?"
"Went back through the tunnel and stood off until someone signalled it was time to come in again. Or, if it was very calm, left two or three in the craft to fend off. Only other thing is to drop a sea anchor and leave her in the middle — and we don't have one aboard."
"How deep is the water in here?"
"They do say eighty fathoms — but nobody's ever really found out."
"Don't you mind about the boat? I mean…"
The boy shrugged again. "She was Harry's boat. Using her to pay off his killers seems... well... right, And if she dies in the attempt — well, again, that's better'n any other way." He switched on the flashlight.
Lancing the gloom, the beam illuminated a circle of dark rock, dripping with bright green weed. As he jerked it sideways, the shaft lit up a narrow flight of stairs carved into the wall of the cave and spiralling upwards towards the chimney and the patch of sky above. They began to climb.
As they rose, the torchlight moving around the walls of the cave picked out the sparkling veins of quartz and felspar and other minerals which writhed through the rock to make the pale and glittering contrasts they had observed from below.
They had climbed perhaps forty feet, and the steps carved in the rock were no longer wet and slippery, when the hoarse booming of the swell lapping the basin below — which sounded oddly like the respiration of some great subterranean beast — was interrupted by a splintering crunch which echoed around the shaft for what seemed like minutes.
"The boat!" April gasped. "Look!"
On the heaving surface of the water, green in the green luminescence of the cavern, they saw the whaler being lifted and smashed against a spur of rock on the far side from the shelf where they had landed. As the water subsided, the boat half caught on the projection, hung crazily for a moment, and then plunged back into the swell with a splash, its reverberations hurting their ears. For a second longer, it remained on the surface — and then gently it tilted up on its bows and slid beneath, leaving only a single plank eddying on the pale water...
Now they had to get out through the passageways above: their only avenue of retreat had gone!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MISS DANCER DOES THE TRICK!
ERNIE Bosustow stopped and mopped his brow. He was panting with exertion. "I think... we'll stop here... few minutes… get my... bearings," he gasped, flopping to the ground. The torchlight showed them a widening in the tunnel almost extensive enough to be called a cave. On the far side, it branched off in three different directions — and it was floored, unbelievably, with sand.
April lowered herself beside him. Since they had watched the whaler sink, they had climbed an interminable number of stairs, negotiated a slippery platform set at a dizzying height above the underground pool, and hurried along what seemed to her to be miles of corridors carved into the rock. They had originally been made, centuries before, as exploratory workings for a projected tin mine, the boy told her, "before they found there wasn't any, this side of the Penwith peninsula!" And the smugglers of a later day had merely made use of what was already there.
"The thing is," Ernie said, levering himself to his feet again, "I can't remember all the ramifications by heart — 'tis too complicated. But there should ought to be like a map here somewhere. We used to copy her down each time we come, so's we didn't get lost, see."
For a few moments he flashed the torch around — and then, with a grunt of satisfaction, he loped across to the corner of one of the tunnels. Carved into the glistening rock, the striations filled in with some yellowish-white cement, there was a complicated diagram which looked something like an underground railway map of London. Clamping his tongue between his teeth, the boy produced a pencil and a scrap of paper and began to copy down part of the map.
While she was waiting, the girl took from her bag what looked like a flesh-coloured ear plug. She pressed a minute button on the end and then inserted it into her right ear. There was about her wrist a gold charm bracelet hung with many miniatures wrought into the shapes of elephants, cameras, tennis racquets, veteran cars and bicycles — a common enough piece of costume jewellery... except that in April's case every charm was a tiny transistorized microphone, a "bug", and the "ear plug" was the complementary receiver on which she could hear anything the bug transmitted. Before succumbing to her drugged sherry in Wright's sitting room, she had managed unseen to detach one of the charms and secrete it among the foliage of a pot of azalea. She might as well — since she felt exactly like Alice down here anyway! — improve the shining hour and listen in.
As soon as she had pressed home the plug, she sat bolt up right with an exclamation of delight. The receiver had a client! A transmission was coming in loud and clear!
Wright was talking to his wife. They appeared to be in the middle of an argument.
"... understand why you had to go and kill the wretched girl anyway," she said, "especially in so theatrical a way. What was the point?"
"Tidiness, in answer to the first question. Once I discovered she was working part-time for Waverly, was in fact a double agent, I had no alternative. You don't split allegiances with THRUSH."
"Couldn't you have kept her on, made sure she got nothing valuable from us, and milked her to gain more of their secrets?"
"They don't give 'secrets' to part-timers. But you miss the whole point, Diana: as I've said before, the fact that she knew we were THRUSH was enough to sign her death warrant. Surely that's obvious!"
"I suppose so. And the man, Bosustow?"
"A wretched, rash, intruding fool, to quote the Bard. So it had to be — to quote him again — farewell. You know the little rat made his money out of a particularly slimy line in black mail?"
"I know he had pictures of you with your doxy and tried to cash in on them, thinking an upright pillar of local society like yourself would pay anything rather than have his wife know about the affair!" There was a hint of mocking laughter in the clipped, strangulated voice.
"He didn't understand sophisticated people." Wright dismissed the point impatiently. "The point is — once he realised I didn't mind... that you knew already and you didn't mind –– then he was too much of a danger to live. Those very facts made us 'different'... and once local people know you are different, they start to poke and pry... We couldn't afford that."
"Even so, Gerry, I don't —"
"Look. What do they say in the latest Council Directive — the one with the computer analogy? When you have an input channel with one component weaker than the others — rip out the whole circuit and rewire from scratch."