The Shortest Way to Hades

length without discomfort there — opened on to an almost sheer cliff-face and looked down to the rocks some hundreds of feet below. The boy was quite wrong, of course, in referring to it as a catacomb; but the thought crossed my mind that it must be curiously similar in size and shape to the sacrificial chamber in the Temple of the Dead, where Sebastian had stumbled and grazed his wrist. I called out to inquire of Leonidas whether Sebastian and Selena were indeed there.

“No.” His voice was blurred by its own echo. “No, they’re not here — I can’t think where they are. But I’ve found something rather extraordinary — do come down and see, Professor Tamar.”

Looking at the dilapidated staircase, I asked if he could not come above ground again, bringing with him whatever it was he thought might engage my interest.

“No, Professor Tamar, I can’t do that — it’s sort of attached. It isn’t really difficult to get down here, you know — if you sit on the edge, you have your feet on quite a solid bit of the stairway, and after that it’s all right.”

There are few hardships, as I have written elsewhere, which the Scholar is unwilling to endure in pursuit of knowledge. Following his advice, I managed to lower myself without misadventure into the underground chamber; but wondered, as I tried to accustom my eyes to the gloom, whether the ascent would be equally straightforward. The boy stood in the dark angle between the wall and the staircase with something in his hand which seemed to glitter in the remnants of light penetrating the embrasures: I drew closer, intending to study it.

“I’m really very sorry about this, Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas, holding me by the shoulder and the knife against my throat.

By declining the duties of examiner I had hoped to avoid this sort of treatment on the part of the young. I now saw that I had, on the contrary, deprived myself of the specialized experience required to deal with such contingencies. I also saw how much better it would have been to allow Timothy to come to Corfu in my stead.

“My dear boy,” I said, “you are making a grave mistake.”

“No,” said Leonidas, “no, Professor Tamar, I don’t think so. I understand now what you meant when you said you didn’t believe that Deirdre had killed herself. I was never quite sure that you meant you thought she had died by accident — and now I know you didn’t.” The blade of the knife seemed to draw even closer to my throat.

There appeared to be some misunderstanding. I had long discarded the notion of Leonidas having any responsibility for his cousin’s death; and if the view I now held were well-founded, nothing could be more absurd than any attempt on his part to protect the person culpable. The prospect, however, of having one’s throat cut has a remarkably stimulating effect on the mental processes: after only an instant or two of bewilderment, there came to me some notion of what was troubling him. He had thought again about the events of Boat Race Day; and he knew there had not been time for Dolly to have left the roof before Deirdre fell or was thrown from it.

“My dear boy,” I said again, striving with some difficulty to maintain that evenness of tone which is desirable when dissuading the young from behavior they may afterwards regret, “my dear boy, you don’t imagine that I believe your mother had any hand in Deirdre’s death?”

He seemed to relax a little, and the knife blade receded by about a millimeter; but then he grew tense again, as if fearing that I spoke from expedience rather than from conviction.

“If she was there when Tancred did it and didn’t say anything, she’d be an accessory, wouldn’t she?”

It was in the abstract sense a not unattractive theory, which under happier conditions I would have commended for its ingenuity. I had no doubt that the solicitor had formed for Dolly a passionate attachment of the kind which she was accustomed to inspire, and to encourage, perhaps, to an extent which might be misunderstood by both admirer and husband. If Deirdre had become aware of it — and to do so would have been not uncharacteristic of her; if she had seen an opportunity for profit or malevolence — and again, it would have been not uncharacteristic; if all three of them had been gathered together on the roof of Rupert’s flat… psychologically, however, it was inconceivable; besides—

“It is,” I said, “an ingenious suggestion. But it won’t do. It does not explain, you see, the most curious aspect of the whole episode. It does not explain how it happened that Deirdre fell to her death while your brother Lucian was still attentively watching the race from the balcony — and your brother did not see her fall.”

From above came the sound of voices: I was able to identify them, with some relief, as those of Selena and Sebastian.

“Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas very quickly, still holding me pinned at knife-point in the dark corner between the wall and the staircase, “you wouldn’t be so foolish, I hope, as to call out.” His lapis lazuli eyes shone like a cat’s in the darkness. I believed, however, that he would not wish to cut my throat without knowing my explanation for the curious circumstance to which I had just referred.

Then there was another voice, seeming to come from much closer at hand: a voice of great beauty and resonance, which I had never heard before but had no doubt was that of Constantine Demetriou. He spoke as if ill or injured, in halting and disjointed phrases which I could not think to be characteristic of him; though in his actual tone I could detect no note of alarm or anxiety.

“Is that you?… Sebastian?… I’m down here… Can you help me?… Sebastian… I’m down here.”

I tried in vain to imagine where he could be. His voice had seemed to come from within the underground chamber of which I supposed Leonidas and myself to be the only occupants. Although the further end of the room was in shadow, the darkness was not so impenetrable as to have concealed his presence; besides, it did not seem to me that his voice came from that direction. I could only suppose that he had descended the staircase unheard by Leonidas and myself, had stumbled perhaps on the last step, and was now lying hidden from our view by the projection of the supporting wall.

“Sebastian… I’m down here… Can you help?” The same disjointed phrases in the same even and unagitated tone.

“Constantine? Is that you? Don’t worry, I’ll be down in a few seconds.” I could hear Sebastian’s voice sufficiently clearly to know that he had already begun the descent. There followed a slithering of stones, the sound of a fall and of the mild imprecations to be expected from a young man of gentle and poetic disposition who has missed his footing and been thrown headlong on to a hard, uneven surface.

I must have made some involuntary movement as if to go to the assistance of my unfortunate young colleague: a slight increase in the pressure of the boy’s hand on my shoulder and the pricking of the knife point against my skin suggested that this would be imprudent.

“Sebastian, what’s happened? Are you all right?” Selena’s voice also was now clearly audible.

“More or less — I’ve tripped over some kind of netting and I can’t get free. And I can’t see Constantine — Constantine, are you there?”

He was answered by silence. My perplexity deepened, since he was now in the only part of the chamber which was hidden from my own view.

Not doubting that Selena would accomplish the descent with her customary elegant agility, I was astonished, a few seconds later, to hear further sounds of stumbling and a cry of vexation which suggested that she also had fallen.

I became conscious that one of the meager sources of light had been partially obscured. A tall, dark figure, holding what seemed to be a spear, stood in the embrasure nearer to the stairway: not Constantine: Camilla.

“Amazing how easy it is to trip on those stairs, isn’t it?” said Camilla. “Specially if someone’s chucked a bit of old fishing-net over the bottom step. Don’t try to move, by the way — Sebastian’s tummy’s just nicely in line with the point of this fishing-spear, and it’s sharp enough to go straight through.”

“Camilla,” said Sebastian, “what on earth do you think you’re doing? And where’s Constantine? We heard him calling out from here less than a minute ago.”

“Oh,” said the girl, “you don’t need to worry about Constantine. That was just a sort of selection of the great man’s conversation put together on my dinky little tape-recorder. I didn’t think you’d come down here if it was me you heard calling, so I spent a day last week getting it ready. Quite clever, don’t you think?”

“Most ingenious,” said Selena. “You have evidently been to some trouble to arrange this little gathering. And to some risk, if you got up there from the pathway. It’s quite a precipitous climb, and a long way down to the rocks.”

“Oh,” said Camilla, as if deprecating any praise for her athletic accomplishments, “that wasn’t difficult. I left a rope hanging down there earlier this afternoon, the same time I fixed up the ‘No Entry’ sign to make sure we weren’t disturbed. So when I was certain you were on your way up here, I just came round the other side and