Death in the Caribbean, page 11
I raised my arm. Ruth put the wheel hard over, the schooner came on the wind and lost way quickly. Just before we began to go astern I let go the anchor. It bit quickly, and we came to rest gently in about six fathoms.
*
We had our breakfast-lunch – rice, salt fish and a few peppers – on deck before going ashore. There was a certain sameness about Caval’s cooking, but his readiness to take over the galley was a godsend, and he was sadly limited in raw materials. It was a magical anchorage. The sky-blue water of the lagoon curled away to the reef at one end, and to a low, palm-fringed promontory at the other. Ashore, the white coral beach rose to a green hill, the dark tropical green broken here and there by patches of vivid primary colours from some flowering tree or shrub.
‘Yes, I think this must be the island,’ Caval said. ‘If I’m right a little river flows into the lagoon at the far end – you can’t see it from here because of that clump of coconut trees. A few yards up the river there’s a small waterfall. We used to have fresh water baths in the pool below it, and of course the water from the fall is pure spring water, uncontaminated by the tide, or anything. Above the fall are the remains of an old plantation, where we should find some bananas and things.’
‘The problem is going to be to get the water on board,’ I said. ‘We don’t seem to have much in the way of containers. There’s an old barrel in the galley – it probably leaks, but I daresay it will take up when the wood gets wet. I wonder if we could fix up one of the pumps to pump water from the barrel in the dinghy into the tanks. I’ll have a go, anyway.’
There was a pump to get water from the tanks to the galley sink. The two tanks in the hold were connected by a pipe. I managed to undo this at one end, and to attach the hose normally used for filling the schooner’s tanks from a stand-pipe on a quay. Fortunately there was a fair length of hose, and if I could get this to the barrel we could pump water to the galley tap. With the dinghy brought alongside amidships, there was enough hose and to spare. If we cut it, there would be sufficient hose to run from the galley tap to the water-point on deck provided for piping water to the tanks. Having worked out that all this could be done, I decided not to cut the hose until we’d got a barrel of water alongside. The next job was to investigate the stream.
I launched the dinghy from the davits, and got the barrel down to her by a sling attached to the main halliard. As we could find only one four-gallon can of petrol for the outboard I decided not to use the motor, but to row ashore. The three of us got into the dinghy with the empty barrel and a variety of jugs with which to fill the barrel, and set off.
We found the stream, just as Caval remembered it, and got the dinghy to within half a dozen yards of the waterfall. Filling the barrel with our jugs was an excessively tiresome job. The barrel held around forty gallons, and our biggest jug held about half a gallon. It wasn’t practicable to get the dinghy right up to the fall, so every jugful meant a trip ashore. After a dozen such trips, using three jugs, we had about ten gallons of water in the barrel.
Then I had an idea: why not use the cut end of the hose? It would reach from the dinghy to the fall, and with luck would just pipe water into the barrel. Leaving Caval and Ruth I rowed back to the schooner, cut off a length of hose, and rowed back. It worked splendidly, and we had the barrel full in a few minutes.
A gallon of water weighs ten pounds, so the full barrel added some 400 pounds to the dinghy’s weight. There seemed no point in carrying passengers as well, and as I thought I could manage the pumping on my own Caval and Ruth went off to explore the old plantation while I ferried the barrel back to the schooner.
My pumping system was a bit tiresome at first, because of air in the hose, but at last I got the pump to suck, and after that it was plain sailing: the pump brought water to the galley tap, and a hose from the tap to the water-point on deck sent it below to the tanks. They were sixty-gallon tanks, and three barrel loads would fill them.
It wasn’t quick work because of all the ferrying, and each round trip took about an hour. But it got done, and when I’d emptied the third barrel I slung the barrel back on board and went back for a cargo of Ruth and Caval’s foraging. They’d done remarkably well. They got four huge bunches of bananas, several dozen oranges and a nice pile of limes. Caval had hoped for yams or sweet potatoes, but there didn’t seem to be any. There were, however, masses of coconuts. On Caval’s advice we ignored those that had fallen, and picked the ripest fresh from the palms. Caval showed me how to climb a coconut palm by making a loop of a rope end, putting it round my ankles, and going up the trunk on the grip of the rope: you put your arms round the trunk, lifted your feet in the rope, gripped the trunk with the rope, and then did it again. It was just like going upstairs.
We ferried two dinghy-loads of fruit and coconuts out to the schooner, and with this substantial addition to our stores we felt well enough provisioned for anything. By this time it was late in the afternoon, and there seemed no point in setting sail again forthwith. By staying in our anchorage we could also get a full night’s sleep, and depart in the morning, with the light of a whole day instead of an approaching night ahead of us. Caval was rather tired, but insisted that he would look after our supper. Leaving him to get on with this in his own time, Ruth and I went back to the beach for a walk ashore.
Instead of going to the river-end of the beach we walked straight up it, first on sand, then through a fringe of coconut palm, and then, as the ground rose and became more soil than sand, we met much denser bush. There was no sort of path, but by sticking to the edge of the bush and walking under the coconuts where the going wasn’t too bad we got to the foot of a rocky slope that led up to the highest point of the island. Here there was less vegetation, and by scrambling round and over the rocks we reached the summit.
It wasn’t in any sense a mountaineering feat; the walk took about ten minutes, and I doubt if the crest was more than 350 feet or so above sea level. But it was our peak, and we could see over the whole island, perhaps half a mile across at its widest part and about three-quarters of a mile long. The Grand Duchess looked like a schooner on a picture postcard, peacefully at anchor in her blue lagoon, and nicely sheltered by the enclosing reef. Waves were breaking on the outer edge of the reef, but the lagoon itself was still, with only miniature wavelets coming to the beach. The faithful dinghy drawn up on the sand had the homely look of a friendly dog.
There was about an hour of daylight left, and as the descent would take only a few minutes there was no need to hurry back. We sat on a rock, enjoying the view and the sense of unbroken peace only to be found, perhaps, on an uninhabited island.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I think I’ve got something of yours.’ I took the black notebook from my pocket and gave it to her.
VII
THE MAN IN THE CAVE
I DON’T KNOW what I expected to happen, but whatever it was I didn’t expect her to throw her arms round my neck and burst into tears. ‘Is it never going to end?’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, Peter, tell me what to do.’
I was conscious of the fragrance of her hair, no scent that I could identify, but a warm fragrance that seemed to mingle the sun and the sea and the hibiscus flowering in the bush. I disengaged myself as well as I could, surprised to find her hands quite cold, in sharp contrast with the sun in her hair. ‘It might help if you told me a bit more of the truth,’ I said.
It was late afternoon, but it was still the tropics, and in spite of the tropics she shivered slightly. She said nothing, and I went on rather brutally, ‘I think you know a good deal about the dead man in the cave. Is he your former husband?’
‘Charles? If only it were!’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Whose side are you on?’
‘I didn’t know there were sides to be on. I appear to be a fugitive from the Nuevan Army, and I think it quite likely that they’re after you and Edward Caval as well. Since we’ve escaped together, you can take it that I’m with you for the moment. I can’t say any more, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Poor Peter. And you only came to Nueva to sell guns!’ She paused for a minute. ‘Or did you come only to sell guns? There’s something very odd about you. Why are you so close to the Prime Minister?’
‘I’m not at all close to the Prime Minister. His Government invited me to Nueva as a technical representative of the British Government to discuss the re-equipment of the Nuevan Army. It’s purely official business, and naturally I’ve discussed it with Mr Li Cook.’
‘Suppose we both tell each other the truth. You don’t believe me, and I don’t wholly believe you.’
I got up. She stayed sitting, or rather huddled, on the rock, looking pathetically waif-like. ‘My dear Ruth, I didn’t say I don’t believe you, but only that I don’t think you have told me the whole truth,’ I said. ‘There was no reason for you to tell me about your marriage, and the telephone call to your apartment about earthquakes. Your affairs are nothing to do with me, but if you do want to discuss them you shouldn’t go out of your way to mislead me. You said, for instance, that you thought the voice on the telephone was your ex-husband’s, somewhat disguised. But if you are divorced, and had not seen your husband since you left him, how on earth did he know about your trip to Nueva? And I think you did recognise the voice, and knew quite well that it was not your husband’s.’
‘Peter, you talk like a policeman. Are you a policeman?’
I didn’t answer, and she went on, ‘All right, I suppose I haven’t been quite fair. But I’ve been so worried I don’t know what to do. And I don’t know who to trust, except poor old Mr Caval. I think I trust him. If I trust you, are you going to let me down, and hurt me, and perhaps Mr Caval as well?’
‘I don’t go about trying to hurt people. A few minutes ago you asked me to help you. I’m perfectly ready to help you if I can, but I can’t help if I don’t know what the trouble is.’
She seemed to take a decision. ‘Well, I’m going to trust you. But you must sit down. I can’t talk looking up at you.’
I returned to the rock beside her. She didn’t look at me, but at her hands in her lap, squeezed together tightly. ‘Everything I told you about my marriage is true, except that I didn’t tell you more than the hundredth part of the hell I went through. I told you about Charles’s infidelities – I didn’t tell you about his twisted politics and totally unscrupulous attitude to life. I think I did tell you that as a physicist he is very able – I suppose that’s why the university kept him on, in spite of various scandals. Or partly that, and partly that they were afraid of the political trouble he’d cause on the campus if they tried to sack him. Ostensibly Charles is ultra-Left, a Neo-Maoist-Dynamist, or something; in fact he’s as amoral politically as in every other way, and about as utterly selfish as a human being can get. He felt it strengthened his hand to have an ultra-Left following, but that’s all.
‘I met his father a couple of times – very like Charles, except that he doesn’t have Charles’s scientific ability. They both have one obsession – to get their hands on Edward Caval’s land. Charles used to talk about it quite openly – in his view they had a natural right to it because of the old grant from Charles II. Even before I really knew much about him I thought it a bit odd for an ultra-Left socialist to want to benefit from a Royalist grant of three centuries ago. When I did know more about him I was just sickened.
‘It’s true that I’ve never met Charles after I walked out, but it’s not true that I didn’t know of some of the things he was up to. That’s because of Phil Grover – the research student I told you about, whose work Charles pinched. I told you that the boy came to me about it. I couldn’t do anything for him, except tell him to report the facts to the Dean of Studies, which he didn’t do, but I think it helped him a bit just to talk to me. Anyway, this boy was working on seismological theory, and about a year after I’d left Charles he wrote to me to ask if I could help him with the mathematics of some ideas he had. Well, it wasn’t my business, but I felt that he’d been shabbily treated by Charles, and if I could do something for him it seemed to make it better, somehow. And I can’t help being interested in any real mathematical problem. So I said he could come to see me. Do you know anything about seismology?’
‘I told you I didn’t.’
‘Well, I just wondered – that was one of the things I wondered about concerning you. I can’t give a seismological lecture now – I’m not a seismologist myself, anyhow, only a mathematician. But basically, it’s like this. The earth’s crust is built up of a series of rock platforms, of different ages and structure, resting on one another like a child’s building blocks. They’ve been there a long time, the rock masses and counter-balancing pressures are enormous, and normally they’re in a state of equilibrium.
‘Now it can happen that sometimes one rock platform begins to slide over another – it may be that the angle is too steep for stability, or there may be some natural lubricant present, like graphite, or it may be that some upheaval far down in the earth has altered the pressure system, there’s an almost infinite number of possible causes for a rock slide. But the effect of a rock slide is a tremor on the surface of the earth, and if the slide goes on, an earthquake. Phil Grover was working on a theory trying to identify the conditions making for instability in the rock structure under any given area, and to use them to promote an earthquake where it wouldn’t matter, or in a place from which people could be evacuated. You see, a rock slide has got to stop somewhere, and if you can make it happen when you want it to instead of waiting for an earthquake, you can let off the pressures under more or less controlled conditions, and allow the area concerned to regain stability.
‘Actually to do any of this you’ve got to have two things – engineering technique capable of moving the masses concerned where and when you want to, and a mathematical technique capable of determining where and when to apply the engineering. Phil, who is essentially an engineering-physicist, reckoned that he’d gone a long way towards solving the engineering problems, but he was stuck over the maths. I needn’t tell you that it’s a most formidable mathematical problem, and although it may be possible to solve it theoretically, I think now that the practical application of any possible solution is at best extremely limited. But I’m getting ahead too fast. I was interested in Phil’s problem at the time, a bit flattered, I suppose, that he’d come to me, and I spent months trying to work out a way of calculating all the things he wanted. That black notebook has some of my calculations. The dead man in the cave is Phil.’
She spoke in a matter-of-fact way as if she were lecturing to a class. She had been so intent on trying to explain things, and I’d been so intent in listening to her, that both of us forgot the time. It was now quite dark. I took her hands, still cold, in mine, and kissed her lightly on the top of her head. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You need have no fear of my not believing you now, and you need have no doubt about my being on your side. There’s a great deal more that you must tell me, and there’s a great deal of work to be done, as quickly as we can do it. But we can’t stay here. Poor old Caval will be sick with worry, and we must get back to the schooner.’
She obeyed like a child, without saying anything, and like a child kept her hand in mine as we walked back to the beach. It was rough going in the dark, but it wasn’t far, and as soon as we were out of the shadow of the trees the combination of slight moon and starlight was enough to indicate the outline of the dinghy on the beach. A faint light from the schooner’s portholes showed where she lay, and I enjoyed the physical relief of rowing out to her. Caval met us at the gangway. ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ he said. ‘I was wondering whether I ought to try to swim ashore to look for you. And I’ve caught some fish, and made a really decent supper.’
‘We owe you a lot of explanation, and I think you owe us a bit of explanation, too,’ I said. ‘But it can wait. We all need that supper of yours, and as far as I’m concerned I need some of your rum. Ruth, too, could do with a good stiff drink.’
‘It’s all ready in the saloon,’ Caval said.
*
I ought to have paid more attention to Caval’s cooking. It was enterprising of him to fish for our supper, and I’m sure it was an admirable meal, but I have to admit that I have absolutely no recollection of what we ate. There was far too much sorting out to do. I was beginning to get a glimmering of the really nasty work that was going on in Nueva, and angry at being used, or so it seemed to me, as an expendable pawn in it. But I was not angry with either Ruth or old Caval.
‘Have you told Mr Caval that you recognised the dead man in the cave?’ I asked Ruth as soon as the rum was poured out.
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose that is why you were both so ready to come with me when I turned up out of the night.’
‘Only partly so,’ Caval said. ‘We felt a considerable responsibility for you.’ He was oddly impressive, the authority of a lifetime, indeed of generations of Cavals, making him a kind of natural chairman of our small meeting.
‘Do you know of the experiments in artificial earthquakes?’ I asked.
Ruth answered. ‘He knows what I’ve told you, and he knows a bit more that I haven’t yet had time to tell you. It would make things clearer if I went on where we left off on the island.’
‘Please do.’
‘Well, I told you that I tried to work out mathematical solutions for Phil’s problems. I was so interested in the maths that I didn’t think of anything else for quite some time. When I did, I got more and more puzzled. Why had Phil come to me? He had a research job at a great university, he had access to a first-class team of mathematicians, served by high-grade computers and all the rest of it. Why come to me?
