“Alone?”

“Alone except for the two of us, but that’s really the same thing, isn’t it? For all the good it did him. He wanted to take Estrilla in case...in case she could go for help when he found out whatever it was he hoped to find out. And I couldn’t...couldn’t stay there alone, and he understood that.”

“No shells from the Navy, then?”

“No shells. He refused to have anything to do with it. He said...he said there must be another way, and we came down here to find one. Everyone had gone from the Alentejano, there were just the three of us there, and when it became light, he couldn’t wait anymore. So we came down to the beach, taking a long way round. There was nothing we could see, of course, and...in a little while, he told us to stay among the rocks down there, below that abandoned shack, you know where I mean?”

“Yes, I know where you mean.”

“He told us to hide there, not to move at all, while he looked for a way into the Bocca through the lagosteria. There are a lot of interconnecting tunnels, and he knew about them.”

It was a small point, but I had to know. “How did he know about them? He doesn’t know this coast as well as all that.”

“No...Estrilla does, though. She’d told him about them and get through to you without being seen.”

He would have had his head blown off the moment he’d gotten within a hundred yards of us, but I didn’t tell her that.

I said quietly: “And then?”

“Then...he was crawling along a ledge above the cave. From where we were, we could see him quite clearly, and...and... and then...Estrilla was a little higher up than I was, and she said suddenly: there’s someone below him! And I ran up the rock to look, and just at that moment my uncle turned around and fired his revolver, and this man below him fired too, at almost the same moment. If I hadn’t seen the flash of his gun...”

“A shotgun?”

“I think so. A shotgun or a rifle, I wouldn’t know really, not at that distance. But Uncle fell, and it was...Oh God, Cabot, it’s a hundred feet down to the rocks below there. He fell, and...” She was crying again, very quietly, trying to hold herself in check and not succeeding. How can you hide such pain?

There was a long, low moan from Estrilla. She was out of it all, lost completely in the depths of her anguish. I knew it would be a long time before she’d recover; a girl from northern Portugal, where emotion is the strongest, the most vital of all the senses, a passion so crippling in its intensity that only death can put an end to it. Up in the north I’ve seen a fado singer break down on stage and have to be led away in hysterics, quite carried away by her own imaginings. Estrilla knelt there now, with her hands down at her sides, her eyes glazed, as though she weren’t part of us anymore.

I went to her and lifted her to her feet I said: “You’ll have to pull yourself together, Estrilla. You must!” She just stared at the ground as though she hadn’t heard me. I sat her down on the heavy cover of the hatch; I wished I had some cognac, not only for her. But there was something else I had to know.

I said: “When he fell, did you see where he landed?”

Astrid shook her head. “No, it was too far down. We ran towards the place, both of us, and we found...we found the other man there, and he was dead. There was a bullet hole in his shoulder, just...just here.” She touched her own shoulder, close by the neck. From where Fenrek had been, high above him, it was straight down and into the heart. Fenrek was the best snap shot I’d ever met.

I asked: “You searched? And found no sign of him at all?”

She shook her head again. “Nothing. Just rocks and deep water, and...and heavy waves breaking over them. But...he’s down there somewhere, and he’s...he’s dead.”

I said: “We can’t be sure of that, can we? Not till we see for ourselves.”

“I am sure.” There was no sign of any hope there, just a statement of fact. She said: “We were trying to get down there, down the cliff, but there’s no way down, and then...then we saw this other man at the bottom, close by the entrance to the big cavern. It was the man with the bow and arrow, and he was shooting into the water, like a bow fisherman. But I don’t think he was fishing.”

I said: “No, he wasn’t. Van Reck his name is. Perhaps the most dangerous of all of them.”

“So we came into the lagosteria to hide from him.”

I said sharply: “Oh? Had he seen you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think so isn’t good enough.”

She hesitated. “No. He couldn’t have seen us.” She looked to the other girl for confirmation. “Could he? Could he have seen us, Estrilla?”

But Estrilla didn’t hear her; she was out there somewhere in the distant past, living over the long days and nights again with a man she had loved, seeing his broken body now down there on the rocks.

Soon, the shock would leave her and the real pain would come, and that would be the danger time, when anything could happen.

But there was an elation creeping over me, entirely emotional and having nothing whatever to do with the logic of the intellect. Somehow, it was too hard to imagine Fenrek dying so easily. I was positive, as positive as I’d ever been about anything, that somehow or other, somehow, Fenrek was still alive. He just wasn’t the kind of man to die, at all, ever, from any cause. He’d lived through assassins’ bullets, and murderers’ guns, and the knives of a dozen assorted hooligans and villains and if his time had come now, at last...Well, I wasn’t ready to believe it. I thought it would be cruel to voice my hopes, but Astrid saw my face and said:

“Do you think...perhaps...you think he could survive a fall like that?”

I had to be very careful now. If we found him there, dead, the letdown would be too savage.

I said: “There is a chance, a chance in a hundred. He might easily have landed in deep water. The shot may have missed him after all. Perhaps he just lost balance when he turned to fire. We’ll never know unless we go and see.”

She was already halfway to the steps that led to the upper exit.

I said urgently: “Wait! Van Reck’s out there somewhere, the man with the bow and arrow. And there’s Estrilla.”

I went over to Estrilla and pulled her to her feet. I held her by the shoulders and said, very distinctly: “He may not be dead, Estrilla, we’ve got to find out. He may be down there in the water waiting for us to come and help him.”

For a moment, the life came back to her eyes; and then, just as quickly, it was gone. A moment of clarity, and then darkness again. She said dully: “Nao, e morto, he’s dead, I know it.” The eyes were glazing over again.

I shook her roughly. “And if he’s not? If he’s wounded and waiting for your help? Are you going to let him wait out there till he is dead, is that all you can do?”

The light came back once more, flooding her face. The moment of hope went as soon as it had appeared, but it was enough. She shook herself free and said, her lips tight and angry: “We will go and see.”

I held her still. “Do you have a gun, Estrilla?”

“Yes.” She fumbled briefly, a vague sort of gesture, and then said: “No...no. In my purse, I left it over the rocks there. When we ran...”

“Well, that’s useful.”

Astrid said impatiently: “Come on then.”

I told her to take it easy. There was a major question now. Should I leave the two of them here together, or not? What if Van Reck came in while I was out there searching for him? He could have guessed why I hadn’t come up in the open water, where he would have been waiting for me, that deadly little bow ready. I looked at my watch; Loveless had been gone just over forty minutes, and he had expected to be back within the hour. I knew that it could easily be a great deal less.

I said to Astrid, urgently: “Did your uncle call off the men who were looking for Histermann?”

“Histermann?”

“The escaped prisoner, the man who is lying dead on the rocks there now. Did he call off the hunt as I asked him to?”

“Yes, he did. He called Lisbon to do that just after you left.”

“Well, thank God for small mercies. If they tracked him down here...Van Reck’s the kind of man who’d sit there calmly and pick them off one by one till he ran out of shafts, one by one and the hell with everybody.”

It had always seemed to me to be the crucial aspect of this case, that we were dealing with men to whom the ordinary kind of risks meant nothing at all, to whom the most terrible gamble was nothing much more because they spent all their lives in an even bigger one. It was an aspect that had clearly shown itself on Loveless’ face, in his eyes, in his manner of talking and in his behavior as well. When the odds are too great, most men will give up, even the best of them. But not these mercenaries.