Алистер Маклин - Caravan to Vaccares

‘You did this,’ she said accusingly. ‘You sabotaged their jeep.’

‘It was nothing,’ he said deprecatingly. ‘I just let a little air out of the tyres.’

‘But – but you could have killed those men! The jeep could have landed on top of them and crushed them to death.’

‘It’s not always possible to arrange everything as one would wish it,’ Bowman said regretfully. She gave him the kind of look Dr Crippen must have got used to after he’d been hauled into court, so Bowman changed his tone. ‘You don’t look like a fool, Cecile, nor do you talk like one, so don’t go and spoil the whole effect by behaving like one. If you think our three friends down there were just out to savour the delights of the night-time Provencal air, why don’t you go and ask them how they are?’

She turned and walked back to the car without a word. He followed and they drove off in a one-sidedly huffy silence. Within a minute he slowed and pulled the car into a small cleared area on the right-hand side of the road. Through the windscreen they could see the vertical limestone bluffs with enormous man-made rectangular openings giving on the impenetrable darkness of the unseen caverns beyond.

‘You’re not stopping here?’ Incredulity in her voice.

He switched off the engine and set the parking brake.

‘I’ve stopped.’

‘But they’ll find us here!’ She sounded a little desperate. ‘They’re bound to any minute now.’

‘No. If they’re capable of thinking at all after that little tumble they had, they’ll be thinking that we’re half-way to Avignon by this time. Besides, I think it’s going to take them some time to recover their first fine enthusiasm for moonlight driving.’

They got out of the car and looked at the entrance to the caverns. Foreboding wasn’t the word for it, nor was sinister: something stronger, much stronger. It was, quite literally, an appalling place and Bowman had no difficulty in understanding and sympathizing with the viewpoint of the policeman back at the hotel. But he didn’t for a moment believe that you had to be born in Les Baux and grow up hand-in-hand with all the ancient superstitions in order to develop a night phobia about those caves: quite simply it was a place into which no man in his right mind would venture after the sun had gone down. He was, he hoped, in his right mind, and he didn’t want to go in. But he had to.

He took a torch from his suitcase and said to Cecile: ‘Wait here.’

‘No! You’re not going to leave me alone here.’ She sounded pretty vehement about it.

‘It’ll probably be an awful lot worse inside.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Suit yourself.’

They set off together and passed through the largest of the openings to the left: if you could have put a three-storey house on wheels you could have trundled it through that opening without any trouble. Bowman traversed the walls with his torch, walls covered with the graffiti of countless generations, then opted for an archway to the right that led to an even larger cavern. Cecile, he noticed, even although wearing flat-heeled sandals, stumbled quite a bit, more than the occasional slight undulations in the limestone floor warranted: he was pretty well sure now that her vision was a good deal less than twenty-twenty which, he reflected, was maybe why she had consented to come with him in the first place.

The next cavern held nothing of interest for Bowman. True, its vaulted heights were lost in darkness, but as only a bat could have got up there anyway that was of no moment. Another archway loomed ahead.

‘This is a dreadful place,’ Cecile whispered.

‘Well, I wouldn’t like to live here all the time.’

Another few paces and she said: ‘Mr Bowman.’

‘Neil.’

‘May I take your arm?’ In these days he didn’t think they asked.

‘Help yourself,’ he said agreeably. ‘You’re not the only person in need of reassurance round here.’

‘It’s not that. I’m not scared, really. It’s just that you keep flashing that torch everywhere and I can’t see and I keep tripping.’

‘Ah!’

So she took his arm and she didn’t trip any more, just shivered violently as if she were coming down with some form of malaria. By and by she said: ‘What are you looking for?’

‘You know damned well what I’m looking for.’

‘Perhaps – well, they could have hidden him.’

‘They could have hidden him. They couldn’t have buried him, not unless they had brought along some dynamite with them, but they could have hidden him. Under a mound of limestone rock and stones. There’s plenty around.’

‘But we’ve passed by dozens of piles of limestone rocks. You didn’t bother about them.’

‘When we come to a freshly made mound you’ll know the difference,’ he said matter-of-factly. She shivered again, violently, and he went on: ‘Why did you have to come in, Cecile? You were telling the truth when you said you weren’t scared: you’re just plain terrified.’

‘I’d rather be plain terrified in here with you than plain terrified alone out there.’ Any moment now and her teeth would start chattering.

‘You may have a point there,’ he admitted. They passed, slightly uphill this time, through another archway, into another immense cavern: after a few steps Bowman stopped abruptly.

‘What is it? she whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know.’ He paused. ‘Yes, I do know.’ For the first time he shivered himself.

‘You, too?’ Again that whisper.

‘Me, too. But it’s not that. Some clod-hopping character has just walked over my grave.’

‘Please?’

‘This is it. This is the place. When you’re old and sinful like me, you can smell it.’

‘Death?’ And now her voice was shaking. ‘People can’t smell death.’

‘I can.’

He switched off the torch.

‘Put it on, put it on!’ Her voice was high-pitched, close to hysteria. ‘For God’s sake, put it on. Please .’

He detached her hand, put his arm round her and held her close. With a bit of luck, he thought, they might get some synchronization into their shivering, not as much perhaps as the ballroom champions on TV got in their dancing, but enough to be comfortable. When the vibrations had died down a little he said: ‘Notice anything different about this cavern?’

‘There’s light! There’s light coming from somewhere.’

‘There is indeed.’ They walked slowly forward till they came to a huge pile of rubble on the floor. The jumble of rocks stretched up and up until at the top they could see a large squarish patch of star-dusted sky. Down the centre of this rockfall, all the way from top to bottom, was a narrow patch of disturbed rubble, a pathway that seemed to have been newly made. Bowman switched on his torch and there was no doubt about it: it was newly made. He traversed the base of the rockfall with the beam of the torch and then the beam, almost of its own volition, stopped and locked on a mound of limestone rocks, perhaps eight feet in length by three high.

‘With a freshly made mound of limestone,’ Bowman said, ‘you can see the difference.’

‘You can see the difference,’ she repeated mechanically.

‘Please. Walk away a little.’

‘No. It’s funny, but I’m all right now.’

He believed her and he didn’t think it was funny. Mankind is still close enough to the primeval jungles to find the greatest fear of all in the unknown: but here, now, they knew.

Bowman stooped over the mound and began to throw stones to one side. They hadn’t bothered to cover the unfortunate Alexandre to any great depth for inside a moment Bowman came to the slashed remnants of a once white shirt, now saturated in blood. Lying in the encrusted blood and attached to a chain was a silver crucifix. He unclipped the chain and lifted both it and the crucifix away.