‘I was wondering about the total ethos of a movement that could accommodate Mr Williamson and his peculiarities with such ease. My brother joined the Scouts when he was a boy, but he’s eight years older than me so we didn’t discuss the experience while it was happening. All I heard was grown-ups discussing it. He dropped out. I’m not sure why. I do remember one thing he quoted from the Baden-Powell book on scouting. It was the twelfth edition my brother had, an enlarged and revised one. I know that because when he quoted from it, my father pricked up his ears. Thought it might be the Edwardian first edition and therefore valuable.’
‘Because the thing quoted was an Edwardian value judgement?’
‘Not exactly. The book said that a tenderfoot was sometimes timid about handling dead or injured men or seeing blood.’
‘Here’s one tenderfoot who still is.’
‘Well, Baden-Powell said that if you were to visit a slaughter house you’d soon get used to it. It didn’t say how often you had to go. Until you were used to it, I suppose.’
‘Used to seeing dead men in a slaughter-house?’
‘Used to the sight of blood. That’s a problem Mr Williamson’s never experienced, I imagine. Did you like the shark worship thing? We have an anthropologist who did her doctoral thesis on one of those island groups. I’ve never completely trusted her or her Pacific-island colleagues. I mean the khaki-shorts-and-beard brigade. You know? Out there, with all those animistic tribes for them to batten on, they can’t go wrong. You fancy a sub-culture that’s taken to keeping the souls of the departed in used Coca-Cola bottle-caps? All you have to do is seek, find, and then get lots of sixteen-millimetre colour footage before anyone else can. Your reputation’s made. If shark-worship hadn’t existed Mr Williamson would have had no trouble at all in inventing it.’
‘The way I heard it, Williamson has no trouble at all doing anything, ever. That bit about his enjoying being told he’s a god had a certain ring. And there were other bits I thought un-Firmanlike too. Our host may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he wouldn’t get his kicks out of brain-washing domestic help who couldn’t talk back, and I doubt if he’d be, capable of dreaming up the entrails story. Hell, I’m beginning to buy his Number-Two pitch.’
‘I bought that after hearing Yamatoku. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first call up with advance warning of the holocaust.’
‘It isn’t only the gods who like to do things in that order.’
‘Sorry, my fault. I wasn’t thinking just about sour marriages though.’
There was a pause. I waited patiently while they made themselves more comfortable. Then she went on.
‘Mafeking was what made me think. Or, rather, the mirror image of it that was held up so thoughtfully to demonstrate the nature of our predicament. It’s got everything, nearly everything anyway, that we’ve got here, hasn’t it?’
‘Almost nearly everything, yes.’
‘A garrison besieged, but somewhat short of field-guns to snipe with? That sort of almost-nearly do you mean?’
‘I was thinking more along the lines that, in this mirror version of the siege, the good old Chief Scout’s on the outside doing his whistling and weaving of spells, instead of standing firm on the inside, and either socking it to the enemy with bombs on fishing lines or writing sardonic notes about cricket.’
‘There’s that, I agree.’ But she sounded doubtful. She was nearly there. ‘What bothers me isn’t in the mirror.’
‘Nothing to do with Mafeking?’
‘Oh, very much to do with Mafeking. The reason why the siege of Mafeking is remembered and why it added to the language a new word for crowd euphoria, you’ll recall, isn’t that it made Baden-Powell a popular hero, but that its long-awaited relief caused such wild rejoicing. The relief of Mafeking, that’s what’s remembered, not the siege. So, what bothers me is not that Baden-Powell is shown on the wrong side, but that there’s no relief column on the way.’
‘I see what you mean. No distant trumpeter, no cut-away of the cavalry galloping through murderous enemy fire to the rescue.’
‘The police here have motor bikes. But yes, that’s part of what I mean.’
‘The old man’s already rejected the police once. Okay, the situation seems to have changed. But what do we, or they, complain of to the local commissaire. The burns in Mr Boularis’s shoe? Mr Yamatoku’s used-car-lot courtliness?’
‘Don’t you think, friend, that we may still be missing the point? That phone call was a threat, but only if one knew enough to understand why. When we began to see that our leader had made a number of quite bad mistakes, you asked Firman a question. What kind of danger were we in and what was the extent of it?’
‘A question he didn’t answer.’
‘A question that he didn’t answer immediately. Supposing he’d told us, there and then, that his boss and partner, Williamson, had decided to terminate that uninsurable risk we all represented by killing us. What would your reaction have been? The same as mine, I expect. We’d have tittered merrily then moved on to the next question. “What must we do to be saved?” ‘
‘Still tittering merrily?’
‘Merrily enough, I think, to make it certain that any answer we received would be either facetious or evasive. Boularis is no longer even nominally polite to us. Firman’s still doing his best, but our academic conceits must bore him stiff.’
‘I’m afraid you may be right.’
‘So, I think that Firman has answered your question.’
‘With all this stuff about spell-casting and Mafeking studies?’ He was having doubts again.
‘Authentic anecdote, I call it. What other currency has the wretched man left? What currency, I mean, that we’d accept from him without saying that it was unquestionably forged?’
‘All right. We have our answer. “Yes, you’re all for the chopping-block. Sorry.” Now, how do we tackle the matter of survival? I think we’d both be grateful if his answer to that was a little less Delphian and didn’t have to be interpreted. Always assuming, naturally, that there is an answer and that he has it.’
‘Perhaps we should try asking him about that first. I have another suggestion.’
‘Shoot.’
‘That we don’t ask Firman anything more in front of Professor Krom.’
A pause, then he sighed. ‘Difficult.’
‘Why? Krom, if he ever gets back to civilization, will undoubtedly write all this up as if everything turned out exactly as he had planned it. It’ll be back to the dream world for him. We decline to comment on anything except the authenticity of those papers we’ve seen. End of obligation. What’s difficult about that? Do you mind passing me my cigarettes?’
Two reliable allies would be sufficient for what I had in mind. I switched off and went downstairs to the garage.
When I’d found the things I’d been looking for I hid them under the stairs.
Back in the loft, I went through the carton with the tapes in it. The boxes containing the ones Yves had used were numbered. I removed the tapes, adding the one I had just recorded to the pile, but left the numbered boxes in the carton.
In my bedroom I put the tapes away in a safe place before going up to the attic.
Melanie had Yves’s binoculars on her lap with her hands folded over them. She looked up as I came in but had obviously been dozing.
I told her to go to her room and have a nap and that I would keep watch for a while.
When she had gone, I used the binoculars to see where Yves had got to on his tour of the perimeter. I spotted him down near the coast-road gate, well away from the house.
I returned to the garage. The job I had to do there should have taken no more than half an hour, but it took me much longer than that. I have never been much of a handyman.
Persons like Yves who can work so quickly and surely with their hands have always made me envious.