Levkas Man (36 page)

I found one for him and lit it. ‘Silly of me, but I never carry them now. They're supposed to be bad for me.' He drew on it gratefully, holding it as usual between finger and thumb as though he had never smoked before in his life. ‘Now, where was I?'

‘Dr Van der Voort's intentions,' Sonia said. ‘I don't quite understand. He couldn't have intended anything.'

‘Oh, but he did, my dear. This was his revenge. He planned it, every move.' He was smiling gently to himself, as though enjoying some private joke, and his eyes were far away, back in that lecture room at Trinity. ‘You remember I told you both about the Piltdown skull, how it had fooled everybody for years. And I also told you how Pieter had been caught faking the evidence. Piltdown had always had a fatal fascination for him. Now, unless my reading of human nature—his in particular—was quite inaccurate, he had done it again. But this time, he had rigged it so that the man who had made use of his work before, and was doing so again, would take the rap. At least, that was the supposition I was relying on when I reiterated my charges and accused Holroyd to his face of planting the skull fragments in that dig to substantiate a theory he had borrowed from another man.'

‘But I don't see—' Sonia had turned to him, fascinated, her eyes bright. ‘How could you be certain? How could you prove it?'

She was too excited to concentrate and I took the wheel from her, for we were close in under the cliffs, making the turn into the Meganisi Channel. Behind me I heard Gilmore say, ‘That was what they wanted to know, all of them hostile. And I wasn't sure I could prove it. I was playing a hunch, nothing more. I had been just two days in the country and the experts had been working on those specimens for almost a week. With the whole Committee against me, even Stefan Reitmayer, I wasn't going to play my hand until I had seen theirs. Everything depended, you see, on their not having used a Geiger-counter. I didn't think they had. Too simple for them. And anyway, too obvious. A man of Holroyd's standing, if he was salting a dig with fake specimens, wouldn't slip up on a thing that had bust the Piltdown hoax wide open. However, they had done a fluorine test. But in the main, Holroyd's case rested on the carbon-14 tests, which had given a similar dating for all his specimens. The Committee were prepared to accept this as conclusive evidence.'

‘But it was, surely,' Sonia said. ‘If they were all of the same date—'

‘They could still be from different sites.'

‘You mean Dr Van der Voort had deliberately collected together the fragments from different sites? I can't believe it. To be certain they'd stand up to tests, they'd all have had to be carbon-dated.'

‘Precisely.' Gilmore was smiling happily.

‘But he had no facilities for testing—either out here or in Amsterdam.' She stared at him. ‘You mean they were from Russia?'

‘Of course. All of them. Approximately the same date—27,000 BP. All with about the same flourine content. And the site in which he buried them was right, too. But there had to be something, otherwise there was no point in his doing it. There had to be some simple way in which Holroyd could be discredited, and I was relying on my hunch that he would use Piltdown as his model.'

He paused, still smiling, almost hugging himself with enjoyment. ‘They were sitting there, all of them looking at me, and I was thinking what an old fool I was, risking my own reputation for the sake of a man I'd only seen once since he'd been a student. There's no quarter in the academic world and to attack a man as influential as Holroyd was tantamount to suicide. I got up and went to the door, not saying a word. They probably thought I was walking out, defeated.' He gave a little chuckle and tossed the end of his cigarette out through the wheelhouse door into the sea. ‘At least, that's what it looked like when I came back into the room with the young technician and the equipment I had borrowed from Geology. They were all talking, and then suddenly they stopped and stared at me, and a sort of stunned silence gripped the room.'

I had cut down the revs and now he stood up so that he could see down the channel. ‘That island must be Tiglia. That was the site of the dig. I remember now.' He reached absent-mindedly for the packet of cigarettes that I had left lying on the shelf above the instrument panel. ‘If I'd gone ashore that day, I might have been the one to discover those skull fragments.'

‘But you wouldn't have claimed it as your own discovery,' I said.

‘No. And I suppose that's the difference.'

‘But what happened?' Sonia demanded. ‘You haven't told us what happened.'

He smiled. ‘You want it all spelled out for you. Well, just what I'd expected. We didn't have to go beyond the skull fragments. The Cro-Magnon skull gave one count, the two Neanderthal-type skulls quite a different count. There was no argument. There couldn't be with the Geiger-counter clicking away, proving beyond any doubt that the two types of skull could not have come from the same dig. Of course, Holroyd started to try and bluster it out. But they were all sitting there, staring at him, dumbfounded at first, then accusingly, and the words just stuck in his throat. Finally he got to his feet and walked out, leaving the skulls lying there on the table. In a way, that was more damning than anything—his sudden complete lack of interest in them.'

‘Has there been any public announcement?' I asked.

‘No, no, my dear fellow, of course not. The Press were never in on it, and officially it will all be hushed up. But no doubt it will leak out. There's a lot of talk already. Though Holroyd hasn't yet resigned from any of the committees and other bodies he serves on, it will be the finish of him. Unless …' He paused to light the cigarette he had taken.

‘Unless what?' I asked, for he was staring out through the windshield, his mind apparently on something else.

‘He's a very clever talker, very convincing. A political, rather than an academic animal, and not to be underrated on that account. If he were to come up now with something spectacular—' He looked at me quickly, a darting glance. ‘Last night—that ex-policeman—he said there was a rhinoceros drawn on the wall of this cave and that Holroyd was very excited about it.'

‘There's a reindeer too,' Sonia said. ‘And what looks like an elephant—just scratch marks, very faint.'

‘And these
gravures
were discovered by Pieter Van der Voort, not by Holroyd?'

‘Yes,' I said. And I told him how I had found my father working on the rock fall that night, his desperate urgency to break through into the cave beyond.

He nodded. ‘It's what I suspected, that he was on to something of real importance. That's why I hurried out here, as soon as I knew Holroyd had left for Greece. I was afraid …' He hesitated, staring at me, strangely agitated. ‘However, this is an accident. An earth tremor, they tell me.' He shook his head. ‘Something nobody could have foreseen. Nevertheless, if Pieter is dead, then Holroyd can reasonably claim …' He gave a little shrug. ‘Well, we'll just have to hope for the best.'

We were past Tiglia then, the rock gut opening up and a boat lying there, the scar of the overhang just visible. I pointed it out to him and he shaded his eyes against the glare, staring at it, his interest quickening: ‘A perfect site, very typical—provided, of course …' He moved to the wheelhouse door, looking back over the port quarter at the site on Meganisi below the rock pinnacle. ‘Two of them, and both natural observation posts. Tell me, did your father say anything about the sea-level here—what it would have been like twenty thousand years ago?' And when I explained that all to the south of us, as far as the African shore, he believed to have been one vast plain, with Meganisi the western flank of a volcano, he nodded his head vigorously.

‘You think that's possible?' I asked.

He smiled. ‘Anything is possible. But proof—that's another matter. We know so little.' He was staring at the Meganisi shore. ‘A volcano, you say.' His eyes gleamed, bird-like in the sun.

‘He thought it might have erupted—a bigger eruption than Santorin.'

He nodded, gazing ahead to the distant shape of Ithaca. ‘Fantastic! And the skull fragments, those bones he sent for dating—thirty thousand years ago at least.' And then, speaking quietly, as though to himself: ‘Even as far back as that man knew how to knap or flake the hardest substances to produce sharp-cutting instruments—flint, for instance, and chert. And in volcanic regions, the brittle, black, glass-like substance we call obsidian. It's the oldest and most basic of all industries and a very good case has been made out recently for these primitive industrial centres—these city communities, you might call them, founded on the presence of a workable raw material—being the precursor of husbandry. It has put the whole conception of city centres much further back in time.' He had apparently a theory of his own that the cave artists were a product of these first city communities, a means of encouraging the hunters on whom they depended for bartering their products, and that it was the superior organisation developed by Cro-Magnon Man that had destroyed the Neanderthals.

‘A little far-fetched, perhaps,' he murmured. ‘But something I would like to have discussed with Pieter, particularly if he has discovered the work of cave artists so close to an area that could have been rich in obsidian.' He shook his head, smiling to himself. ‘All of scientific research into prehistory is a sort of jig-saw puzzle. Fitting facts to theories until the sum of all the facts establishes withouth doubt a complete and irrefutable picture.'

A small boat was moving out of the gut, coming towards us now. It was Vassilios, and Hans was in the bow, his blond hair immediately recognizable. He came aboard, while Vassilios took the bow warp out.

We off-loaded the timber by throwing it into the water, where Vassilios secured it with a rope for towing ashore. And while he helped me get it overboard, Hans told me what had happened inside the cave the previous day. With the borrowed rope tied around his waist, he had descended the blowhole until he had reached the point where it entered the cavern in which Bert had surfaced. He confirmed that this cave was lozenge-shaped and that galleries entered it from either end; also that it seemed to be influenced by tidal variations or surge, since the walls and slopes of exposed rock were damp-looking and black with slime. After calling repeatedly without receiving any reply, he had untied the rope from about his waist and climbed back up the blow-hole to report to Holroyd.

I asked him whether he had left the end of the rope hanging down into the water and he said he had. Cartwright had wanted to go down then, but Holroyd had ruled that mere was no point until they had some means by which they could be certain of climbing out of the cave after they had lowered themselves into it. Finally, it was decided to construct some sort of a rope ladder, and he and Cartwright had climbed back through the gap opened in the rock fall to do this. Holroyd had stayed on inside the cave to examine the walls for
gravures
and make rough drawings.

‘Presumably he had a torch with him?'

‘Yes. And the Greek stayed there to hold it for him.'

‘What about the rope? Was the upper end secured to anything?'

‘The crowbar. We had it wedged across the upper end of the blow-hole.'

I then asked him if he could remember the exact time of the roof collapse.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘As soon as I was told what had happened, I looked at my watch. I thought the time might be important. The fall occurred just before 11.30.'

‘And how long since you had left Holroyd?'

‘Oh, about a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes—something like that.'

Which meant that if Holroyd's urge to examine the cave was so great that he was willing to go down the rope on his own, he could have been into the lower galleries about the time Bert was starting to work his way into the underwater entrance.

Vassilios was waiting and Hans climbed down into the boat, Sonia calling to him to be careful. He grinned, mouthing a reply against the scream of the labouring outboard. Slowly the raft of timbers drew away from the side. There was nothing now to hold me back and I was suddenly trembling as I stood there by the bulwarks, staring at the beauty of that sun-bright scene, the mountains falling to the narrow channel, the shallows by Tiglia bright emerald against the sea's deep blue, and white clouds hanging like puffs of smoke over the mainland heights. A fish broke the surface, a gleam of silver gone in a flash, and up by Spiglia a lone cottage poked a white face round a brown shoulder of rock. And above me the sun god riding high. All that beauty, and my mind six fathoms deep in the dark bowels of a sea-filled cave.

‘Does that mean Holroyd has access to the gallery Pieter is in?' I turned to find Gilmore close behind me, peering at me with an intent bird-like expression. ‘Is that what he meant?'

I thrust my hands behind me, forcing my mind to concentrate. ‘He has access to where I think my father is. But that doesn't mean he's availed himself of it. Anyway, my father may be dead.'

Gilmore nodded. ‘And that, of course, we won't know until they've cleared this roof fall and got Holroyd out. Unless, of course …' He hesitated, watching me speculatively, and I knew he was thinking of the underwater entrance. ‘How long will they take, do you think, to get through the fall?'

‘Zavelas said maybe tomorrow.'

Sonia was staring at me, her eyes wide, indignant with disbelief. ‘You're not going to wait till then, surely. He's been down there three days already.'

‘No, of course not. Only …' But I stopped there. I couldn't tell her about the body, and Bert could have imagined it. ‘Give me a hand with the gear,' I said, but she had already turned into the wheelhouse to get it.

Gilmore had followed her, but in a moment he popped out again, smiling, a book in his hand. ‘A present for you.' He held it out to me.
Homo Sapiens
—
Asia or Africa
? by Professor W. R. Holroyd. I stared at it, thinking the old boy had chosen one hell of a moment to present me with a book on arthropology by Holroyd. ‘The book can wait,' he said as I took it from him. ‘But I would like you to read what I have written on the flyleaf. Sonia has told me about this dive, that you hope to get into the cave by an underwater passage. If you succeed, I fear you may find yourself involved in tragedy.'