When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  I rounded the corner of the boat-house and stopped abruptly. I always stop abruptly when I’m struck in the stomach by a batteringram. After a few minutes I managed to whoop enough air into my lungs to let me straighten up again.

  He was tall, gaunt, grey, in his middle sixties. He hadn’t shaved for a week or changed his collar-less shirt in a month. It wasn’t a battering-ram he’d used after all, it was a gun, none of your fancy pistols, just a good old-fashioned double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun, the kind of gun that at close range – six inches in this case – can give points even to the Peacemaker Colt when it comes to blowing your head off. He had it aimed at my right eye. It was like staring down the Mersey tunnel. When he spoke I could see he’d missed out on all those books that laud the unfailing courtesy of the Highlander.

  ‘And who the hell are you?’ he snarled.

  ‘My name’s Johnson. Put that gun away. I –’

  ‘And what the hell do you want here?’

  ‘How about trying the ‘Ceud Mile Failte’ approach?’ I said. ‘You see it everywhere in those parts. A hundred thousand welcomes –’

  ‘I won’t ask again, mister.’

  ‘Air-Sea Rescue. There’s a missing boat –’

  ‘I haven’t seen any boat. You can just get to hell off my island.’ He lowered his gun till it pointed at my stomach, maybe because he thought it would be more effective there or make for a less messy job when it came to burying me. ‘Now!’

  I nodded to the gun. ‘You could get prison for this.’

  ‘Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t. All I know is that I don’t like strangers on my island and that Donald MacEachern protects his own.’

  ‘And a very good job you make of it, too, Donald,’ I said approvingly. The gun moved and I said quickly: ‘I’m off. And don’t bother saying “haste ye back” for I won’t be.’

  As we rose from the island Williams said: ‘I just caught a glimpse. That was a gun he had there?’

  ‘It wasn’t the outstretched hand of friendship they’re always talking about in those parts,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘Who is he? What is he?’

  ‘He’s an undercover agent for the Scottish Tourist Board in secret training to be their goodwill ambassador abroad. He’s not any of those I’m looking for, that I know. He’s not a nut case, either – he’s as sane as you are. He’s a worried man and a desperate one.’

  ‘You didn’t look in the shed. You wanted to find out about a boat. Maybe there was someone pointing a gun at him.’

  ‘That was one of the thoughts that accounted for my rapid departure. I could have taken the gun from him.’

  ‘You could have got your head blown off.’

  ‘Guns are my business. The safety catch was in the “On” position.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Williams’s face showed how out of his depth he was, he wasn’t as good at concealing his expression as I was. ‘What now?’

  ‘Island number two to the west here.’ I glanced at the chart. ‘Craigmore.’

  ‘You’ll be wasting your time going there.’ He sounded very positive. ‘I’ve been there. Flew out a badly injured man to a Glasgow hospital.’

  ‘Injured how?’

  ‘He’d cut himself to the thigh-bone with a flensing knife. Infection had set in.’

  ‘A flensing knife? For whales? I’d never heard -’

  ‘For sharks. Basking sharks. They’re as common as mackerel hereabouts. Catch them for their livers – you can get a ton of liver oil from a good-sized one.’ He pointed to the chart, to a tiny mark on the north coast. ‘Craigmore village. Been abandoned, they say, from before the First World War. We’re coming up to it now. Some of those old boys built their homes in the damnedest places.’

  Some of those old boys had indeed built their homes in the damnedest places. If I’d been compelled to build a home either there or at the North Pole I’d have been hard put to it to make a choice. A huddle of four small grey houses built out near the tip of a foreland, several wicked reefs that made a natural breakwater, an even more wicked-looking entrance through the reefs and two fishing boats swinging and rolling wildly at anchor inside the reefs. One of the houses, the one nearest the shore, had had its entire seaward wall cut away. On the twenty or thirty feet of sloping ground that separated the house from the sea I could see three unmistakable sharks. A handful of men appeared at the open end of the house and waved at us.

  ‘That’s one way of making a living. Can you put me down?’

  ‘What do you think, Mr Calvert?’

  ‘I don’t think you can.’ Not unless he set his helicopter down on top of one of the little houses, that was. ‘You winched this sick man up?’

  ‘Yes. And I’d rather not winch you down, if you don’t mind. Not in this weather and not without a crewman to help me. Unless you’re desperate.’

  ‘Not all that desperate. Would you vouch for them?’

  ‘I’d vouch for them. They’re a good bunch. I’ve met the boss, Tim Hutchinson, an Aussie about the size of a house, several times. Most of the fishermen on the west coast would vouch for them.’

  ‘Fair enough. The next island is Ballara.’

  We circled Ballara once. Once was enough. Not even a barnacle would have made his home in Ballara.

  We were over the channel between Ballara and Dubh Sgeir now and the Beul nan Uamh was a sight to daunt even the stoutest-hearted fish. It certainly daunted me, five minutes in that lot whether in a boat or scuba suit and that would have been that. The ebb-tide and the wind were in head-on collision and the result was the most spectacular witches’ cauldron I’d ever seen. There were no waves as such, just a bubbling swirling seething maelstrom of whirlpools, overfalls and races, running no way and every way, gleaming boiling white in the overfalls and races, dark and smooth and evil in the hearts of the whirlpools. Not a place to take Aunty Gladys out in a row-boat for a gentle paddle in the quiet even fall.

  Oddly enough, close in to the east and south coast of Dubh Sgeir, one could have taken Aunty Gladys out. In those tidal races between islands a common but not yet clearly understood phenomenon frequently leaves an undisturbed stretch of water close in to one or other of the shores, calm and smooth and flat, a millpond with a sharply outlined boundary between it and the foaming races beyond. So it was here. For almost a mile between the most southerly and easterly headlands of Dubh Sgeir, for a distance of two or three hundred yards out from the shore, the waters were black and still. It was uncanny.

  ‘Sure you really want to land here?’ Williams asked.

  ‘Is it tricky?’

  ‘Easy. Helicopters often land on Dubh Sgeir. Not mine – others. It’s just that you’re likely to get the same reception here as you got on Eilean Oran. There are dozens of privately owned islands off the West Coast and none of them like uninvited visitors. The owner of Dubh Sgeir hates them.’

  This world-famous Highland hospitality becomes positively embarrassing at times. The Scotsman’s home is his castle, eh?’

  ‘There is a castle here. The ancestral home of the Clan Dalwhinnie. I think.’

  ‘Dalwhinnie’s a town, not a clan.’

  ‘Well, something unpronounceable.’ That was good, considering that he like as not hailed from Rhosllanerchrugog or Pontrhydfendgaid. ‘He’s the clan chief. Lord Kirkside. Ex-Lord Lieutenant of the shire. Very important citizen but a bit of a recluse now. Seldom leaves the place except to attend Highland Games or go south about once a month to flay the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Lords.’

  ‘Must be difficult for him to tell which place he’s at, at times. I’ve heard of him. Used to have a very low opinion of the Commons and made a long speech to that effect every other day.’

  ‘That’s him. But not any more. Lost his older son – and his future son-in-law – in an air accident some time ago. Took the heart from the old boy, so they say. People in these parts think the world of him.’

  We were round to the south of Dubh Sgeir now and suddenly the castle
was in sight. Despite its crenellated battlements, round towers and embrasures, it didn’t begin to rank with the Windsors and Balmorals of this world. A pocket castle. But the side had the Windsors and Balmorals whacked to the wide. It grew straight out of the top of a hundred and fifty foot cliff and if you leaned too far out of your bedroom window the first thing to stop your fall would be the rocks a long long way down. You wouldn’t even bounce once.

  Below the castle and a fair way to the right of it a cliff-fall belonging to some bygone age had created an artificial foreshore some thirty yards wide. From this, obviously at the cost of immense labour, an artificial harbour had been scooped out, the boulders and rubble having been used for the construction of a horseshoe breakwater with an entrance of not more than six or seven yards in width. At the inner end of this harbour a boathouse, no wider than the harbour entrance and less than twenty feet in length, had been constructed against the cliff face, A boathouse to berth a good-sized row-boat, no more.

  Williams took his machine up until we were two hundred feet above the castle. It was built in the form of a hollow square with the landward side missing. The seaward side was dominated by two crenellated towers, one topped by a twenty-foot flagpole and flag, the other by an even taller TV mast. Aesthetically, the flagpole had it every time. Surprisingly the island was not as barren as it had appeared from the sea. Beginning some distance from the castle and extending clear to the cliff-bound northern shore of the island ran a two hundred yard wide stretch of what seemed to be flat smooth turf, not the bowling green standard but undoubtedly grass of the genuine variety as testified to by the heads down position of a handful of goats that browsed close to the castle.

  Williams tried to land on the grass but the wind was too strong to allow him to hold position: he finally put down in the eastern lee of the castle, close but not too close to the cliff edge.

  I got out, keeping a wary eye on the goats, and was rounding the landward corner of the castle when I almost literally bumped into the girl.

  I’ve always known what to look for in a suddenly-encountered girl in a remote Hebridean Island. A kilt, of course, a Hebridean girl without a kilt was unthinkable, a Shetland two-piece and brown brogues: and that she would be a raven-haired beauty with wild, green, fey eyes went without saying. Her name would be Deirdre. This one wasn’t like that at all, except for the eyes, which were neither green nor fey but certainly looked wild enough. What little I could see of them, that was. Her blonde hair was cut in the uniform peekaboo scalloped style of the day, the one where the long side hair meets under the chin and the central fringe is hacked off at eyebrow level, a coiffure which in any wind above Force I allows no more than ten per cent of the face to be seen at any one time. Below hair level she wore a horizontally striped blue and white sailor’s jersey and faded blue denim pants that must have been fixed on with a portable sewing machine as I didn’t see how else she could have got into them. Her tanned feet were bare. It was comforting to see that the civilising influence of television reached even the remoter outposts of empire.

  I said: ‘Good afternoon, Miss – um –’

  ‘Engine failure?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘Well, no –’

  ‘Mechanical failure? Of any kind? No? Then this is private property. I must ask you to leave. At once, please.’

  There seemed to be little for me here. An outstretched hand and a warm smile of welcome and she’d have been on my list of suspects at once. But this was true to established form, the weary stranger at the gates receiving not the palm of the hand but the back of it. Apart from the fact that she lacked a blunderbuss and had a much better figure, she had a great deal in common with Mr MacEachern. I bent forward to peer through the windblown camouflage of blonde hair. She looked as if she had spent most of the night and half the morning down in the castle wine cellars. Pale face, pale lips, dark smudges under the blue-grey eyes. But clear blue-grey eyes.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing. The end of a dream. Deirdre would never have talked like that. Where’s your old man?’

  ‘My old man?’ The one eye I could see had the power turned up to its maximum shrivelling voltage. ‘You mean my father?’

  ‘Sorry. Lord Kirkside.’ It was no feat to guess that she was Lord Kirkside’s daughter, hired help are too ignorant to have the execrable manners of their aristocratic betters.

  ‘I’m Lord Kirkside.’ I turned round to see the owner of the deep voice behind me, a tall rugged-looking character in his fifties, hawk nose, jutting grey eyebrows and moustache, grey tweeds, grey deerstalker, hawthorn stick in hand. ‘What’s the trouble. Sue?’

  Sue. I might have known. Exit the last vestige of the Hebridean dream. I said: ‘My name is Johnson. Air-Sea Rescue. There was a boat, the Moray Rose, in bad trouble somewhere south of Skye. If she’d been not under command but still afloat she might have come drifting this way. We wondered –’

  ‘And Sue was going to fling you over the cliff before you had a chance to open your mouth?’ He smiled down affectionately at his daughter. ‘That’s my Sue. I’m afraid she doesn’t like newspapermen.’

  ‘Some do and some don’t. But why pick on me?’

  ‘When you were twenty-one could you, as the saying goes, tell a newspaperman from a human being? I couldn’t. But I can now, a mile away. I can also tell a genuine Air-Sea Rescue helicopter when I see one. And so should you too, young lady. I’m sorry, Mr Johnson, we can’t help you. My men and I spent several hours last night patrolling the cliff-tops to see if we could see anything. Lights, flares, anything. Nothing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I wish we had more voluntary co-operation of this kind.’ From where I stood I could see, due south, the gently rocking masts of the Oxford field expedition’s boat in Little Horseshoe Bay. The boat itself and the tents beyond were hidden behind the rocky eastern arm of the bay. I said to Lord Kirkside: ‘But why newspapermen, sir? Dubh Sgeir isn’t quite as accessible as Westminster.’

  ‘Indeed, Mr Johnson.’ He smiled, not with his eyes. ‘You may have heard of – well, of our family tragedy. My elder boy, Jonathon, and John Rollinson – Sue’s fiancé.’

  I knew what was coming. And after all those months she had those smudges under her eyes. She must have loved him a lot. I could hardly believe it.

  ‘I’m no newspaperman, sir. Prying isn’t my business.’ It wasn’t my business, it was my life, the raison d’être for my existence. But now wasn’t the time to tell him.

  ‘The air accident. Jonathan had his own private Beechcraft.’ He waved towards the stretch of green turf running to the Northern cliffs. ‘He took off from here that morning. They – the reporters -wanted on-the-spot reporting. They came by helicopter and boat – there’s a landing stage to the west.’ Again the mirthless smile. ‘They weren’t well received. Care for a drink? You and your pilot?’ Lord Kirkside, for all the reputation Williams had given him, seemed to be cast in a different mould from his daughter and Mr Donald MacEachern: on the other hand, as the Archbishop of Canterbury knew to his cost, Lord Kirkside was a very much tougher citizen than either his daughter or Mr MacEachern.

  ‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. But we haven’t many hours of daylight left.’

  ‘Of course, of course. How thoughtless of me. But you can’t have much hope left by this time.’

  ‘Frankly, none. But, well, you know how it is, sir.’

  ‘We’ll cross our fingers for that one chance in a million. Good luck, Mr Johnson.’ He shook my hand and turned away. His daughter hesitated then held out her hand and smiled. A fluke of the wind had blown the hair off her face, and when she smiled like that, sooty eyes or not, the end of Deirdre and the Hebridean dream didn’t seem to be of so much account after all. I went back to the helicopter.

  ‘We’re getting low on both fuel and time,’ Williams said. ‘Another hour or so and we’ll have the dark with us. Where now, Mr Calvert?’

  ‘North
. Follow this patch of grass – seems it used to be used as a light aircraft runway – out over the edge of the cliff. Take your time.’

  So he did, taking his time as I’d asked him, then continued on a northward course for another ten minutes. After we were out of sight of watchers on any of the islands we came round in a great half circle to west and south and east and headed back for home.

  The sun was down and the world below was more night than day as we came in to land on the sandy cove on the eastern side of the Isle of Torbay. I could just vaguely distinguish the blackness of the tree-clad island, the faint silvery gleam of the sand and the semicircular whiteness where the jagged reef of rocks fringed the seaward approach to the cove. It looked a very dicey approach indeed to me but Williams was as unworried as a mother at a baby-show who has already slipped the judge a five-pound note. Well, if he wasn’t going to worry, neither was I: I knew nothing about helicopters but I knew enough about men to recognise a superb pilot when I sat beside one. All I had to worry about was that damned walk back through those Stygian woods. One thing, I didn’t have to run this time.

  Williams reached up his hand to flick on the landing lights but the light came on a fraction of a second before his fingers touched the switch. Not from the helicopter but from the ground. A bright light, a dazzling light, at least a five-inch searchlight located between the high-water line of the cove and the tree-line beyond. For a moment the light wavered, then steadied on the cockpit of the helicopter, making the interior bright as the light from the noon-day sun. I twisted my head to one side to avoid the glare. I saw Williams throw up a hand to protect his eyes, then slump forward wearily, dead in his seat, as the white linen of his shirt turned to red and the centre of his chest disintegrated. I flung myself forwards and downwards to try to gain what illusory shelter I could from the cannonading submachine shells shattering the windscreen. The helicopter was out of control, dipping sharply forwards and spinning slowly on its axis. I reached out to grab the controls from the dead man’s hands but even as I did the trajectory of the bullets changed, either because the man with the machine-gun had altered his aim or because he’d been caught off-balance by the sudden dipping of the helicopter. An abruptly mad cacophony of sound, the iron clangour of steel-nosed bullets smashing into the engine casing mingled with the banshee ricochet of spent and mangled shells. The engine stopped, stopped as suddenly as if the ignition had been switched off. The helicopter was completely out of control, lifeless in the sky. It wasn’t going to be in the sky much longer but there was nothing I could do about it. I braced myself for the jarring moment of impact when we struck the water, and when the impact came it was not just jarring, it was shattering to a degree I would never have anticipated. We’d landed not in the water but on the encircling reef of rocks.