Hammond Innes - Levkas man

Gilmore smiled. "A half truth, you see. So much more convincing. And they believed him. But to make it absolutely clear, I asked him whether, in that case, he took full responsibility for the authenticity of the specimens. He was looking at me then, and I thought I saw a mounting flicker of doubt

in his eyes. But by then he had committed himself too deeply. 'Of course.' And that was it. I had him then, provided I had guessed Pieter's intentions correctly."

He paused, his eyes searching the wheelhouse. "You haven't got a cigarette, have you?"

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 Feitmayer, 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-fourteen 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- twenty-seven b.p. All with about the same fluorine 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