Vassos was waiting for them. When they reached his boat he said gravely, ‘Kyrie Cartnee, kyrie Barans, I entreat you not to do as you intend.’
‘We have to do it, Vassos,’ said Courtenay. ‘It is duty.’
‘I know nothing of that. Then you will go?’
‘Of course. Do you expect us to turn back at this stage?’
‘No, kyrie, but remember that I entreated you to.’
‘Very well. Now let us move.’
By midnight they had reached the spot carefully chosen through the telescope. The two Englishmen disembarked; Vassos took his boat a few yards off into deep shadow. The climb ahead of Courtenay looked a good deal more formidable than they had had reason to expect, but he indicated that he could manage it and was soon out of sight. Barnes himself was in shadow and settled down to wait, till half an hour before dawn if need be. If Courtenay had not rejoined him before then, it was to be assumed, as agreed, that he had been forcibly prevented from doing so. In that eventuality, Barnes was to return whence he had come and inform the British authorities in the island. Meanwhile he was to be on hand to cover the withdrawal.
In fifty-five minutes he heard Courtenay returning. This surprised and dismayed Barnes: the junior officer was famous in the Department for his ability, unexpected perhaps in so big a man, to move over the most difficult ground in silence. Was he who approached indeed Courtenay? Barnes shifted position and drew his revolver.
Courtenay came into view, but it was not the Courtenay who had set off to climb the face of the headland. The dimly seen figure lurched and tottered from side to side, as if almost over come by intolerable lassitude.
‘Courtenay,’ called Barnes, softly but urgently. ‘Over here.’
With obvious, toilsome effort, the other changed direction and took half a dozen weary steps towards the voice. Then he fell forward and did not move. Barnes, revolver in pocket, ran to him and turned him over on to his back. Blood was spreading from a wound in his chest. The eyes were open. After a moment they recognized Barnes; another moment later the whole face took on a look of enormous loathing.
‘Don’t go up there,’ said Courtenay.
‘What did you find?’ Barnes became aware that Vassos, disinclination to set foot on the headland forgotten, was at his side.
Courtenay made another great effort, this time to speak again. ‘Terror,’ he seemed to say, ‘to fill…’ After a single indistinct further sound he fainted.
‘He has seen,’ said Vassos.
‘Let’s get him into the boat,’ said Barnes.
When Courtenay was lying unconscious in the bows, Vassos lifted his hand to help Barnes aboard. It was refused.
‘Take him back and fetch a doctor,’ said Barnes. ‘You have never seen this man before; you found him on the beach. Then return here and wait for me. If I don’t come by first light, everything is changed. Go to the English bey in the town and tell him what you know.’
Vassos signified consent and rowed away into the darkness.
Since Courtenay had not been pursued and no observable alarm had been raised, it seemed probable that he had killed or otherwise silenced his assailant. At any moment this might become known; Barnes must hurry. Here was his only chance, for once Count Axel’s men were alerted no outsider would ever afterwards be able to reach the objective unseen.
Barnes, taxed though he was by the ascent, managed to do so. He stood in shadow at the corner of the main house and listened for five minutes; nothing and nobody stirred. When, after another five minutes, he rounded the further corner and came in view of the outbuilding with the bricked-up windows, he at once caught sight of a human body lying near the door in full moonlight. With the utmost speed he went to it and dragged it into the comparative darkness under a carob tree. It was that of a strongly built man in his thirties with Courtenay’s knife still deep in his side. Barnes turned the corpse face down and made for the door of the outbuilding. Its lock had not yet responded to his attentions when, behind him, he heard another door open. In no time he was hidden and watching.
A lamp approached from the house. Soon Barnes was able to recognize Count Axel in a white dressing-gown and Turkish slippers. His look of pleased expectation changed to one of mild puzzlement when, it could be assumed, he noted the absence of the man now lying under the carob. He glanced about for a moment while Barnes crouched very still and hoped very much that the small patch of blood where the man had first lain was small enough not to be noticed; then, evidently deciding that the matter could be left, the Count took a key from his dressing-gown pocket, opened the outbuilding door, entered, shut it behind him, and relocked it.
At once Barnes hurried over and went on with his work. The lock was confoundedly stubborn and the need for complete silence a severe constriction. Some seven or eight minutes went by before the lock allowed itself to be turned. In that interval it occurred to Barnes that Courtenay must have been attacked while re-locking the door, then that that was precisely when he could not have been attacked, or not effectively, because his wound was in front. So he had allowed himself to be disabled by an antagonist who had met him face to face. But his reflexes were known to be outstandingly quick. What had deprived him of the initiative?
Slowly Barnes pushed the door open an inch, two inches. Inside it was almost dark. He pushed further. A little light came through gaps in the curtain that covered a portal at the far end of a short passage straight in front of him; beyond it, he had learned, lay the main room of the building. On each side of the passage were smaller rooms, just then seemingly deserted. Barnes crossed the threshold and shut the door. Soon he was standing at the portal in an excellent position to see what was on the other side of the curtain without being seen. Some rhythmical movement and the sound of heavy breathing could be heard, but no speech. He put his eyes to the most promising gap.
A lamp, the Count’s or another, gave illumination that, while not bright, was clear enough. The room held five day-beds or couches, each with an occupant. All of these were naked. All were female. On the couch nearest Barnes there lay a girl of about twenty-five with pretty brown hair and three legs, two normally placed, the third, somewhat withered, growing out above the left hip. Opposite: was it two negro women or one? — at the shoulders certainly two, at the hindquarters as certainly one; it was easy to see why Vassos had been undecided about how many people had landed that night. Next to the two or the one, another double entity was disposed, a slim girl of about the same age as the first, evidently an Asiatic half-caste with exquisite features and the look of being some months gone in pregnancy; emerging under her left arm was something like the top half of a five-year-old child, which now stirred in its sleep. It was impossible to tell anything as to the age of the fourth occupant, because it — she — had no face, none, that is, in the human sense, only as we speak by analogy of the face of a dog or a horse or, more applicable, a tapir.
This being was actually the last to come to Barnes’s attention. The first rocked and strained in Count Axel’s arms, and Barnes had thought her normal, her face, a true face unlike that other poor creature’s, half-turned in his direction, but now, when he gazed at her again, that face turned away, and as it did so another began to come into view, another face on the same head, a Janus-head, another true face that gaped its mouth and half-closed its eyes in pleasure.
Somehow Barnes took himself out of that building without being heard, somehow he climbed and ran and stumbled down the headland without serious injury; he was bruised and bleeding in twenty places when he came to the boat and Vassos. He had waited till he was out of hearing of the house before letting himself start to sob and whimper and managed to keep almost completely quiet after they landed, though he let Vassos give him raw brandy and bread and hot goat’s milk and put him to bed and sit up with him for the rest of the night. He gives these details himself in his report, a painful chronicle with its abrupt swings from the style of a conscientious, highly trained officer to that of a sensitive man still in a state of shock and semi-hysteria. But, as he says, he could not afford to wait till such time as he might feel better: he must have orders, and a replacement.