‘What!’ She suddenly sat forward in her armchair, hands reaching for the fronts of the arm rests as if about to pull herself to her feet. Something touched a switch inside Skouras and the smiling eyes went bleak and hard and cold, changing their direction of gaze fractionally. It lasted only a moment because his wife had caught it even before I did, because she sat forward abruptly, smoothing down the short sleeves of her dress over sun–tanned arms. Quick and smooth, but not quite quick enough. For a period of not more than two seconds the sleeves had ridden nearly all the way up to her shoulders – and nearly four inches below those shoulders each arm had been encircled by a ring of bluish-red bruises. A continuous ring. Not the kind of bruises that are made by blows or finger pressure. The kind that are made by a rope.
Skouras was smiling again, pressing the bell to summon the steward. Charlotte Skouras rose without a further word and hurried quickly from the room. I could have wondered if I’d only imagined this momentary tableau I’d seen, but I knew damned well I hadn’t. I was paid not to have an imagination of that kind.
She was back inside a moment, a picture frame maybe six by eight in her hand. She handed it to Skouras and sat down quickly in her own chair. This time she was very careful with the sleeves, without seeming to be.
‘My wife, gentlemen,’ Skouras said. He rose from his armchair and handed round a photograph of a dark-eyed, dark-haired woman with a smiling face that emphasised the high Slavonic cheek-bones. ‘My first wife. Anna. We were married for thirty years. Marriage isn’t all that bad. That’s Anna, gentlemen.’
If I’d a gramme of human decency left in me I should have knocked him down and trampled all over him. For a man to state openly in company that he kept the picture of his former wife by his bedside and then impose upon his present wife the final and utter humiliation and degradation of fetching it was beyond belief. That and the rope-burns on his present wife’s arms made him almost too good for shooting. But I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do anything about it. The old coot’s heart was in his voice and his eyes. If this was acting, it was the most superb acting I had ever seen, the tear that trickled down from his right eye would have rated an Oscar any year since cinema had begun. And if it wasn’t acting then it was just the picture of a sad and lonely man, no longer young, momentarily oblivious of this world, gazing desolately at the only thing in this world that he loved, that he ever had loved or ever would love, something gone beyond recall. And that was what it was.
If it hadn’t been for the other picture, the picture of the still, proud, humiliated Charlotte Skouras staring sightlessly into the fire, I might have felt a lump in my own throat. As it happened, I’d no difficulty in restraining my emotion. One man couldn’t, however, but it wasn’t sympathy for Skouras that got the better of him. MacCallum, the Scots lawyer, pale-faced with outrage, rose to his feet, said something in a thick voice about not feeling well, wished us good night and left. The bearded banker left on his heels. Skouras didn’t see them go, he’d fumbled his way back to his seat and was staring before him, his eyes as sightless as those of his wife. Like his wife, he was seeing something in the depths of the flames. The picture lay face down on his knee. He didn’t even look up when Captain Black came in and told us the tender was ready to take us back to the Firecrest.
When the tender had left us aboard our own boat we waited till it was half-way back to the Shangri-la, closed the saloon door, unbuttoned the studded carpet and pulled it back. Carefully I lifted a sheet of newspaper and there, on the thin film of flour spread out on the paper below it, were four perfect sets of footprints. We tried our two for’ard cabins, the engine-room and the after cabin, and the silk threads we’d so laboriously fitted before our departure to the Shangri-la were all snapped.
Somebody, two at least to judge from the footprints, had been through the entire length of the Firecrest. They could have had at least a clear hour for the job, so Hunslett and I spent a clear hour trying to find out why they had been there. We found nothing, no reason at all.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least we know now why they were so anxious to have us aboard the Shangri-la.’
‘To give them a clear field here? That’s why the tender wasn’t ready – it was here.’
‘What else?’
‘There’s something else. I can’t put my finger on it. But there’s something else.’
‘Let me know in the morning. When you call Uncle at midnight, ask him to dig up what information he can on those characters on the Shangri-la and about the physician who attended the late Lady Skouras. There’s a lot I want to know about the late Lady Skouras.’ I told him what I wanted to know. ‘Meantime, let’s shift this boat over to Garve Island. I’ve got to be up at three-thirty -you’ve all the time for sleep in the world.’
I should have listened to Hunslett. Again I should have listened to Hunslett. And again for Hunslett’s sake. But I didn’t know then that Hunslett was to have time for all the sleep in the world.
FOUR
Wednesday: 5 a.m. – dusk
As the saying went in those parts, it was as black as the earl of hell’s waistcoat. The sky was black, the woods were black, and the icy heavy driving rain reduced what little visibility there was to just nothing at all. The only way to locate a tree was to walk straight into it, the only way to locate a dip in the ground was to fall into it. When Hunslett had woken me at three-thirty with a cup of tea he told me that when he’d been speaking to Uncle Arthur at midnight – I’d been asleep – he was left in no doubt that although the helicopter had been laid on Uncle had been most unenthusiastic and considered the whole thing a waste of time. It was a rare occasion indeed when I ever felt myself in total agreement with Uncle Arthur but this was one of those rare occasions.
It was beginning to look as if I’d never even find that damned helicopter anyway. I wouldn’t have believed that it could have been so difficult to find one’s way across five miles of wooded island at night-time. It wasn’t even as if I had to contend with rivers or rushing torrents or cliffs or precipitous clefts in the ground or any kind of dense or tangled vegetation. Torbay was just a moderately wooded gently sloping island and crossing from one side to the other of it would have been only an easy Sunday afternoon stroll for a fairly active octogenarian. I was no octogenarian, though I felt like one, but then this wasn’t a Sunday afternoon.
The trouble had started from the moment I’d landed on the Torbay shore opposite Garve Island. From the moment I’d tried to land. Wearing rubber-soled shoes and trying to haul a rubber dinghy over slippery seaweed-covered rocks, some as much as six feet in diameter, to a shore-line twenty interminable yards away is, even in broad daylight, a bone-breaking job: in pitch darkness it’s almost as good a way as any for a potential suicide to finish off the job with efficiency and dispatch. The third time I fell I smashed my torch. Several bone-jarring bruises later my wrist-compass went the same way. The attached depth-gauge, almost inevitably, remained intact. A depth-gauge is a great help in finding your way through a trackless wood at night.
After deflating and caching the dinghy and pump I’d set off along the shore-line remote from the village of Torbay. It was logical that if I followed this long enough I’d be bound to come to the sandy cove at the far end of the island where I was to rendezvous with the helicopter. It was also logical that, if the tree line came right down to the shore, if that shore was heavily indented with little coves and if I couldn’t see where I was going, I’d fall into the sea with a fair degree of regularity. After I’d hauled myself out for the third time I gave up and struck inland. It wasn’t because I was afraid of getting wet – as I hadn’t seen much point in wearing a scuba suit for walking through a wood and sitting in a helicopter I’d left it aboard and was already soaked to the skin. Nor was it because of the possibility that the hand distress flares I’d brought along for signalling the helicopter pilot, wrapped though they were in oilskin, might not stand up to this treatment indefinitely. The reason why I was now blunderin
g my blind and painful way through the wood was that if I’d stuck to the shoreline my rate of progress there wouldn’t have brought me to the rendezvous before midday.
My only guides were the wind-lashed rain and the lie of the land. The cove I was heading for lay to the east, the near-gale force wind was almost due west, so as long as I kept that cold stinging rain on the back of my neck I’d be heading in approximately the right direction: as a check on that, the Island of Torbay has a spinal hog’s back, covered in pines to the top, running its east-west length and when I felt the land falling away to one side or the other it meant I was wandering. But the rain-laden wind swirled unpredictably as the wood alternately thinned and became dense again, the hog’s back had offshoots and irregularities and as a result of the combination of the two I lost a great deal of time. Half an hour before dawn – by my watch, that was, it was still as black as the midnight hour – I was beginning to wonder if I could possibly make it in time.
And I was beginning to wonder if the helicopter could make it either. There was no doubt in my mind that it could land – that eastern cove was perfectly sheltered – but whether it could get there at all was another question. I had a vague idea that helicopters were unmanageable above certain wind speeds but had no idea what those wind speeds were. And if the helicopter didn’t turn up, then I was faced with the long cold wet trudge back to where I had hidden the dinghy and then an even longer, colder and hungry wait until darkness fell at night and I could get out to the Firecrest unseen. Even now, I had only twenty-four hours left. By nightfall I would have only twelve. I began to run.
Fifteen minutes and God knows how many iron-hard tree trunks later I heard it, faint and intermittent at first, then gradually swelling in strength – the clattering roar of a helicopter engine. He was early, damn him, he was far too early, he’d land there, find the place deserted and take off for base again. It says much for my sudden desperate state of mind that it never occurred to me how he could even begin to locate, far less land in, that sandy cove in a condition of darkness that was still only a degree less than total. For a moment I even contemplated lighting a flare to let the pilot know that I was at least there or thereabouts and had the flare half-way out of my pocket before I shoved it back again. The arrangement had been that the flare would be lit only to show the landing strip in the sand: if I lit one there and then he might head for it, strike the tops of the pine trees and that would be the end of that.
I ran even faster. It had been years since I’d run more than a couple of hundred yards and my lungs were already wheezing and gasping like a fractured bellows in a blacksmith’s shop. But I ran as hard as I could. I cannoned into trees, I tripped over roots, fell into gullies, had my face whipped time and again by low-spreading branches, but above all I cannoned into those damned trees. I stretched my arms before me but it did no good, I ran into them all the same. I picked up a broken branch I’d tripped over and held it in front of me but no matter how I pointed it the trees always seemed to come at me from another direction. I hit every tree in the Island of Torbay. I felt the way a bowling ball must feel after a hard season in a bowling alley, the only difference, and a notable one, being that whereas the ball knocked the skittles down, the trees knocked me down. Once, twice, three times I heard the sound of the helicopter engine disappearing away to the east, and the third time I was sure he was gone for good. But each time it came back. The sky was lightening to the east now, but still I couldn’t see the helicopter: for the pilot, everything below would still be as black as night.
The ground gave way beneath my feet and I fell. I braced myself, arms outstretched, for the impact as I struck the other side of the gully. But my reaching hands found nothing. No impact. I kept on falling, rolling and twisting down a heathery slope, and for the first time that night I would have welcomed the appearance of a pine tree, any kind of tree, to stop my progress. I don’t know how many trees there were on that slope, I missed the lot. If it was a gully, it was the biggest gully on the Island of Torbay. But it wasn’t a gully at all, it was the end of Torbay. I rolled and bumped over a sudden horizontal grassy bank and landed on my back in soft wet sand. Even while I was whooping and gasping and trying to get my knocked-out breath back into my lungs I still had time to appreciate the fortunate fact that kindly providence and a few million years had changed the jagged rocks that must once have fringed that shore into a nice soft yielding sandy beach.
I got to my feet. This was the place, all right. There was only one such sandy bay, I’d been told, in the east of the Isle of Torbay and there was now enough light for me to see that this was indeed just that, though a lot smaller than it appeared on the chart. The helicopter was coming in again from the east, not, as far as I could judge, more than three or four hundred feet up. I ran half-way down to the water’s edge, pulled a hand flare from my pocket, slid away the waterproof covering and tore off the ignition strip. It flared into life at once, a dazzling blue-white magnesium light so blinding that I had to clap my free hand over my eyes. It lasted for only thirty seconds, but that was enough. Even as it fizzled and sputtered its acrid and nostril-wrinkling way to extinction the helicopter was almost directly overhead. Two vertically-downward pointing searchlights, mounted fore and aft on the helicopter, switched on simultaneously, interlocking pools of brilliance on the pale white sand. Twenty seconds later the skids sank into the soft sand, the rackety clangour of the motor died away and the blades idled slowly to a stop. I’d never been in a helicopter in my life but I’d seen plenty: in the half-darkness this looked like the biggest one I’d ever seen
The right-hand door opened and a torch shone in my face as I approached. A voice, Welsh as the Rhondda Valley, said: ‘Morning. You Calvert?’
‘Me. Can I come aboard?’
‘How do I know you’re Calvert?’
‘I’m telling you. Don’t come the hard man, laddie. You’ve no authority to make an identification check.’
‘Have you no proof? No papers?’
‘Have you no sense? Haven’t you enough sense to know that there are some people who never carry any means of identification? Do you think I just happened to be standing here, five miles from nowhere, and that I just happened to be carrying flares in my pocket? You want to join the ranks of the unemployed before sunset?’ A very auspicious beginning to our association.
‘I was told to be careful.’ He was as worried and upset as a cat snoozing on a sun-warmed wall. Still a marked lack of cordiality. ‘Lieutenant Scott Williams, Fleet Air Arm. Takes an admiral to sack me. Step up.’
I stepped up, closed the door and sat. He didn’t offer to shake hands. He flicked on an overhead light and said: ‘What the hell’s happened to your face?’
‘What’s the matter with my face?’
‘Blood. Hundreds of little scratches.’
‘Pine needles.’ I told him what had happened. ‘Why a machine this size? You could ferry a battalion in this one.’
‘Fourteen men, to be precise. I do lots of crazy things, Calvert, but I don’t fly itsy-bitsy two-bit choppers in this kind of weather. Be blown out of the sky. With only two of us, the long-range tanks are full.’
‘You can fly all day?’
‘More or less. Depends how fast we go. What do you want from me?’
‘Civility, for a start. Or don’t you like early morning rising?’
‘I’m an Air-Sea Rescue pilot, Calvert. This is the only machine on the base big enough to go out looking in this kind of weather. And I should be out looking, not out on some cloak-and-dagger joy-ride. I don’t care how important it is, there’s people maybe clinging to a life-raft fifty miles out in the Atlantic. That’s my job. But I’ve got my orders. What do you want?’
‘The Moray Rose?’
‘You heard? Yes, that’s her.’
‘She doesn’t exist. She never has existed.’
‘What are you talking about? The news broadcasts -’
‘I’ll tell you as much as you need to know, Lieu
tenant. It’s essential that I be able to search this area without arousing suspicion. The only way that can be done is by inventing an ironclad reason. The foundering Moray Rose is that reason. So we tell the tale.’
‘Phoney?’
‘Phoney.’
‘You can fix it?’ he said slowly. ‘You can fix a news broadcast?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe you could get me fired at that.’ He smiled for the first time. ‘Sorry, sir. Lieutenant Williams – Scotty to you – is now his normal cheerful willing self. What’s on?’
‘Know the coast-lines and islands of this area well?’
‘From the air?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been here twenty months now. Air-Sea Rescue and in between army and navy exercises and hunting for lost climbers. Most of my work is with the Marine Commandos. I know this area at least as well as any man alive.’
‘I’m looking for a place where a man could hide a boat. A fairly big boat. Forty feet – maybe fifty. Might be in a big boathouse, might be under over-hanging trees up some creek, might even be in some tiny secluded harbour normally invisible from the sea. Between Islay and Skye.’
‘Well, now, is that all. Have you any idea how many hundreds of miles of coastline there is in that lot, taking in all the islands? Maybe thousands? How long do I have for this job? A month?’
‘By sunset to-day. Now, wait. We can cut out all centres of population, and by that I mean anything with more than two or three houses together. We can cut out known fishing grounds. We can cut out regular steamship routes. Does that help?’
‘A lot. What are we really looking for?’
‘I’ve told you.’
‘Okay, okay, so mine is not to reason why. Any idea where you’d like to start, any ideas for limiting the search?’
‘Let’s go due east to the mainland. Twenty miles up the coast, then twenty south. Then we’ll try Torbay Sound and the Isle of Torbay. Then the islands farther west and north.’
When Eight Bells Toll Page 9
