While the person with the donkey, who carried a pannier of fresh figs, was looking vaguely in that direction, a man came out of the little olive-grove. He wore servants’ clothing and as he approached he called out in a Peloponnesian accent, ‘What do you want, you there?’
The other swept off his straw hat and bowed. ‘Greetings to your honour.’ His accent was Cretan and rustic. ‘Would your lordship care for some of my fine fruit? Two piastres for the whole.’
‘We need none. We have our own supply.’
‘One and a half piastres.’
‘I tell you we need none,’ said the servant, halting while still some yards short of the gate. If he had a key, it was not to be seen. ‘Be off with you, fellow.’
‘One piastre. My figs are the most delicious in all Crete. His highness the Count would much enjoy them.’
‘Count? What Count?’
‘Count Axel, your master, distinguished sir.’
‘Count Axel is not here. Now go.’
The Peloponnesian turned his back and retreated the way he had come. After making a blasphemous gesture and muttering a number of imprecations, the unsuccessful vendor of figs resumed his donkey and went off down the path. Not a hint of menace, said Courtenay to himself, just total discouragement, designed to set the word going about that there was no profit to be had at the house on the headland. What meaning was to be attached to the implied denial of Count Axel’s existence, followed by the explicit denial of his presence? — his existence, and his status as the recent purchaser of the house, having been easily enough established by earlier inquiry in the port. Perhaps no more than a simple desire to be obstructive. Axel — presumably a Scandinavian name. Could Sweden or Denmark have any designs in Crete?
Early the next morning an observer at the house could have noticed (and doubtless one or more did) the antics of a large fishing kayik in the waters close to it. The wind was steady enough, the sea calm, but some inexperience or ineptitude at sail or tiller saw to it that the boat, borne only by the current, drifted past the tip of the headland at a speed low enough to keep it within a couple of hundred yards of that spot for several minutes. Shouts and curses filled the air; men ran to and fro on the deck. Courtenay, crouched below the gunwale with his binoculars, saw no more than one thing of the least significance, but it was enough to make him send for Barnes.
‘Bricked up?’ queried Barnes on the evening of the next day. ‘Are you sure? How recently?’
‘I’m sure,’ said Courtenay. ‘Not being a bricklayer I couldn’t tell how recently, but I’d wager it was brand-new work, certainly less than a year old. I’m still trying to find the man who did it. Of course, it might have been one of them.’
‘There being no point in blocking a single window…’
‘And no window-tax or anything of that sort…’
‘We’ll start looking in the morning.’
They looked for the best part of two days — through the stout naval telescope Barnes had brought on Courtenay’s advice, their vantage-point a secluded spot on the far side of the bay from the house. It was established at once that the outbuilding noted by Courtenay had had at least two of its windows bricked up, and gradually that, to go by Vassos’s figures, there were either five or six persons in the party who never ventured into the air. At morning, noon and evening someone emerged from the main house carrying a large tray covered with a cloth and disappeared round the corner of the outbuilding, to where the door must be, later retrieving it piled with empty dishes. Another visitor, on both afternoons, was a tall man with white hair and a complexion proclaiming an origin far to the north of where he now was.
‘Count Axel,’ said Barnes.
‘Yes, but who’s he going to visit?’ asked Courtenay. ‘Who can he be keeping in there? And why on earth?’
Neither had any idea.
They also looked through their telescope, taking alternate watches, for the best part of a night. The moon, approaching the full, gave them an excellent view. The man they had identified as Count Axel visited the outbuilding from 9.27 to 9.53. By eleven the house was in darkness and the grounds, as far as could be seen, deserted.
On the second afternoon, a messenger from Courtenay’s Office ran them down and said that a jobbing builder had called there, saying he was the man he had heard the English kyrios wished to see. Courtenay went and was back within the hour, looking well satisfied.
‘There are three windows and the fellow bricked them all up,’ he told Barnes. ‘But he was very helpful about the type of lock he installed in the door.’
‘It should present no difficulty?’
‘None whatever to me. You it might take some minutes. My informant also told me what I needed to know about the way the inside is laid out, and supplemented our observations of the buildings as a whole. I’ll pass it on to you later. Tonight?’
‘Midnight. I believe you about that gate, but even if you could open it in one second you’d be certain to be spotted — there must be a twenty-four-hour watch on it. So it’s a boat to the tip of the headland where you go ashore and I wait for you. We’ll be in shadow till the very last minute. Will your inquisitive fisherman convey us?’
‘Jump at it; he loves a bit of excitement.’
However, when the proposition was put to Vassos, so far from jumping at it he refused outright, and only a solemn undertaking that in no circumstances would he be required to leave his boat, together with a substantial increase in his fee, changed his mind for him. He would muffle his oars and be out of sight near the base of the headland at 11.45.
‘There’s one characteristic of the door I neglected to mention earlier,’ said Courtenay as they approached the rendezvous. ‘It has a hinged flap a hand’s-breadth deep or more at the bottom.’
‘Deep enough to allow a loaded tray to pass when the flap is raised.’
‘That was how I saw it.’
‘What do you expect to find, Courtenay?’
‘Weapons. Ammunition. Perhaps explosives. Enough to cause the authorities to institute a raid.’
‘Behind blocked windows?’
‘I’ve been thinking again about that. Vassos had a very poor view of those people when they were landing. Half a dozen of them might well have been masked or hooded. They can’t be expected to remain in that state for days on end, so they live where only one man can see them, their leader. Because if a servant saw them he might recognize them, or be able to describe them later, when the job, whatever it may be, is done.’
‘Let’s hear your views on the job,’ said Barnes.
‘Well, they have a strong enough force to seize a strategic point on the coast and hold it while their friends arrive in battalions. They certainly have enough to do for Prince George. I feel we’ll learn the whole story in the next couple of hours.’