When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  I went into my cabin and laboriously dressed myself in fresh clothes, not forgetting the Paisley scarf. The rainbow coloured bruises that Quinn had left on my neck had now swollen and spread to such an extent that I had to bring the scarf right up to the lobes of my ears to hide them. I looked in the mirror. It might have been my grandfather staring back at me. My grandfather on his deathbed. My face had that drawn and waxy look that one normally associates with approaching dissolution. Not an all-over waxiness though, there was no blood on my face now but the pine needles had left their mark, I looked like someone with galloping impetigo. I felt like someone with galloping bubonic plague.

  I checked that the Luger and the little Lilliput – I’d put them both back in their waterproof covering after leaving Dubh Sgeir – were still in working order. They were. In the saloon I poured myself a stiff three fingers of whisky. It went down my throat like a ferret down a burrow after a rabbit, one moment there, the next vanished in the depths. The weary old red corpuscles hoisted themselves to their feet and started trudging around again. It seemed a reasonable assumption that if I encouraged them with some more of the same treatment they might even break into a slow gallop and I had just closed my hand around the bottle when I heard the sound of an approaching engine. I put the bottle back in the rack, switched out the saloon lights – although they would have been invisible from outside through the velvet curtains – and took up position behind the open saloon door.

  I was pretty sure the precautions were unnecessary, ten to one this was Hunslett coming back from shore, but why hadn’t he taken the dinghy, still slung on the davits aft? Probably someone, for what Hunslett had regarded as an excellent reason, had persuaded him to go ashore and was now bringing him back.

  The motor-boat’s engine slowed, went into neutral, astern, then neutral again. A slight bump, the murmur of voices, the sound of someone clambering aboard and then the engine opening up again.

  The footfalls passed over my head as the visitor – there was only one set of footfalls – made his way towards the wheelhouse door. The springy confident step of a man who knew what he was about. There was only one thing wrong with that springy confident step. It didn’t belong to Hunslett. I flattened myself against the bulkhead, took out the Luger, slid off the safety catch and prepared to receive my visitor in what I had now come to regard as the best traditions of the Highlands.

  I heard the click as the wheelhouse door opened, the louder click as it was shut by a firm hand. A pool of light from a flashlamp preceded the visitor down the four steps from the wheel-house to the saloon. He paused at the foot of the steps and the light moved away as he made to locate the light-switch. I stepped round the door and did three things at once – I hooked an arm around his neck, brought up a far from gentle knee into the small of his back and ground the muzzle of the Luger into his right ear. Violent stuff, but not unnecessarily violent stuff, it might have been my old friend Quinn. The gasp of pain was enough to show that it wasn’t.

  ‘This isn’t a hearing aid you feel, friend. It’s a Luger pistol. You’re one pound pressure from a better world. Don’t make me nervous.’

  The better world seemed to have no appeal for him. He didn’t make me nervous. He made an odd gurgling noise in his throat, he was trying either to speak or breathe, but he stood motionless, head and back arched. I eased the pressure a little.

  ‘Put that light switch on with your left hand. Slowly. Carefully.’

  He was very slow, very careful. The saloon flooded with light.

  ‘Raise your hands above your head. As high as you can reach.’

  He was a model prisoner, this one, he did exactly as he was told. I turned him round, propelled him into the centre of the room and told him to face me.

  He was of medium height, nattily dressed in an astrakhan coat and a fur Cossack hat. He had a beautifully trimmed white beard and moustache, with a perfectly symmetrical black streak in the centre of the beard, the only one of its kind I had ever seen. The tanned face was red, either from anger or near-suffocation. From both, I decided. He lowered his hands without permission, sat on the settee, pulled out a monocle, screwed it into his right eye and stared at me with cold fury. I gave him look for look, stare for stare, pocketed the Luger, poured a whisky and handed it to Uncle Arthur. Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason, K.C.B. and all the rest of the alphabet.

  ‘You should have knocked, sir,’ I said reproachfully.

  ‘I should have knocked.’ His voice sounded half-strangled, maybe I had exerted more pressure than had been necessary. ‘Do you always greet your guests this way?’

  ‘I don’t have guests, sir. I don’t have friends, either. Not in the Western Isles. All I have is enemies. Anyone who comes through that door is an enemy. I didn’t expect to see you here, sir.’

  ‘I hope not. In view of that performance, I hope not.’ He rubbed his throat, drank some whisky and coughed. ‘Didn’t expect to be here myself. Do you know how much bullion was aboard the Nantesville?’

  ‘Close on a million, I understand.’

  ‘That’s what I understood. Eight millions! Think of it, eight million pounds’ worth. All this gold that’s being shovelled back from Europe into the vaults at Fort Knox usually goes in small lots, 108 lb. ingots at a time. For safety. For security. In case anything goes wrong. But the Bank knew that nothing could go wrong this time, they knew our agents were aboard, they were behind with their payments, so they cleverly loaded fourteen hundred and forty ingots without telling anyone. Eight million. The Bank is hopping mad. And everyone is taking it out on me.’

  And he’d come up here to take it out on me. I said: ‘You should have let me know. That you were coming.’

  ‘I tried to. You failed to keep your noon-day schedule. The most elementary of crimes, Calvert, and the most serious. You failed to keep a schedule. You or Hunslett. Then I knew things were going from bad to worse. I knew I had to take over myself. So I came by plane and R.A.F. rescue launch.’ That would have been the highspeed launch I’d seen taking a bad battering in the Sound as we had headed down towards the cove. ‘Where’s Hunslett?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ He was using his quiet unemphatic tone, the one I didn’t care for very much. ‘You’re out of your depth in this one, Calvert, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid he’s been removed by force. I’m not sure how. What have you been doing in the past two hours, sir?’

  ‘Explain yourself.’ I wished he’d stop screwing that damned monocle into his eye. It was no affectation, that monocle, he was nearly blind on that side, but it was an irritating mannerism. At that moment, anything would have irritated me.

  ‘That R.A.F. launch that dropped you off here just now. It should have been here at least two hours ago. Why didn’t you come aboard then?’

  ‘I did. We almost ran the Firecrest down in the darkness as we came round the headland. No one here. So I went and had some dinner. Nothing but baked beans aboard this damned boat as far as I could see.’

  ‘The Columbia hotel wouldn’t offer you much more. Toast below the beans, if you were lucky’ The Columbia was Torbay’s only hotel.

  ‘I had smoked trout, filet mignon and an excellent bottle of hock. I dined aboard the Shangri-la.’ This with the slight hint of a smile. Uncle Arthur’s Achilles’ heel was showing again: Uncle Arthur loved a lord like nobody’s business, and a knight with a seven-figure income was as good as a lord any day.

  ‘The Shangri-la?’ I stared at him, then remembered. ‘Of course. You told me. You know Lady Skouras well. No, you said you knew her very well and her husband well. How is my old Sir Anthony?’

  ‘Very well,’ he said coldly. Uncle Arthur had as much humour as the next man, but discussing titled millionaires in tones of levity was not humorous.

  ‘And Lady Skouras?’

  He hesitated. ‘Well –’

  ‘Not so well. Pale, drawn, unhappy, with dark smudges under her eyes. N
ot unlike myself. Her husband mistreats her and mistreats her badly. Mentally and physically. He humiliated her in front of a group of men last night. And she had rope burns on her arms. Why would she have rope burns on her arms, Sir Arthur?’

  ‘Impossible. Quite fantastic. I knew the former Lady Skouras, the one who died this year in hospital. She –’ ‘She was undergoing treatment in a mental hospital. Skouras as good as told me.’

  ‘No matter. She adored him. He adored her. A man can’t change like that. Sir Anthony – Sir Anthony’s a gentleman.’

  ‘Is he? Tell me how he made his last millions. You saw Lady Skouras, didn’t you?’

  ‘I saw her,’ he said slowly. ‘She was late. She arrived with the filet mignon.’ He didn’t seem to find anything funny in that. ‘She didn’t look very well and she’s a bruise on her right temple. She’d fallen climbing aboard from the tender and hit her head against a guardrail.’

  ‘Hit her head against her husband’s fist, more like. To get back to the first time you boarded the Firecrest this evening. Did you search it?’

  ‘I searched it. All except the after cabin. It was locked. I assumed there was something in there you didn’t want chance callers to see.’

  ‘There was something in there that callers, not chance, didn’t want you to see,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Hunslett. Hunslett under guard. They were waiting for word of my death, then they’d have killed Hunslett or kept him prisoner. If word came through that I hadn’t been killed, then they’d have waited until my return and taken me prisoner too. Or killed us both. For by then they would have known that I knew too much to be allowed to live. It takes time, a long time, to open up a strong-room and get all those tons of gold out and they know their time is running out. They’re desperate now. But they still think of everything.’ ‘They were waiting for word of your death,’ Uncle Arthur said mechanically. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘That helicopter you laid on for me, sir. We were shot down tonight after sunset. The pilot’s dead and the machine is at the bottom of the sea. They believe me to be dead also.’

  ‘I see. You go from strength to strength, Calvert.’ The absence of reaction was almost total, maybe he was getting punch-drunk by this time, more likely he was considering the precise phrascology that would return me to the ranks of the unemployed with economy and dispatch. He lit a long, thin and very black cheroot and puffed meditatively. ‘When we get back to London remind me to show you my confidential report on you.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ So this was how it was coming.

  ‘I was having dinner with the Under-Secretary just forty-eight hours ago. One of the things he asked me was which country had the best agents in Europe. Told him I’d no idea. But I told him who I thought, on the balance of probabilities, was the best agent in Europe. Philip Calvert.’

  ‘That was very kind of you, sir.’ If I could remove that beard, whisky, cheroot and monocle, at least three of which were obscuring his face at any given moment, his expression might have given me some faint clue as to what was going on in that devious mind. ‘You were going to fire me thirty-six hours ago.’

  ‘If you believe that,’ Uncle Arthur said calmly, ‘you’ll believe anything.’ He puffed out a cloud of foul smoke and went on: ‘One of the comments in your report states: “Unsuitable for routine investigation. Loses interest and becomes easily bored. Operates at his best only under extreme pressure. At this level he is unique.” It’s on the files, Calvert. I don’t cut off my right hand.’

  ‘No, sir. Do you know what you are, sir?’

  ‘A Machiavellian old devil,’ Uncle Arthur said with some satisfaction. ‘You know what’s going on?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Pour me another whisky, my boy, a large one, and tell me what’s happened, what you know and what you think you know.’

  So I poured him another whisky, a large one, and told him what had happened, what I knew and as much of what I thought I knew as seemed advisable to tell him.

  He heard me out, then said: ‘Loch Houron, you think?’

  ‘Loch Houron it must be. I spoke to no one else, anywhere else, and to the best of my knowledge no one else saw me. Someone recognised me. Or someone transmitted my description. By radio. It must have been by radio. The boat that was waiting for Williams and myself came from Torbay or somewhere near Torbay, a boat from Loch Houron could never have made it to the eastern end of the Sound of Torbay in five times the time we took. Somewhere near here, on land or sea, is a transceiver set. Somewhere out on Loch Houron there’s another.’

  ‘This University expedition boat you saw on the south shore of Loch Houron. This alleged University expedition. It would have a radio transmitter aboard.’

  ‘No, sir. Boys with beards.’ I rose, pulled back the saloon curtains on both sides, then sat down again. ‘I told you their boat was damaged and listing. She’d been riding moored fore and aft in plenty of water. They didn’t hole it themselves and it wasn’t holed by any art of nature. Somebody kindly obliged. Another of those odd little boating incidents that occur with such profusion up and down the west coast.’

  ‘Why did you pull those curtains back?’

  ‘Another of those odd little boating incidents, sir. One that’s about to happen. Some time tonight people will be coming aboard. Hunslett and I, those people think, are dead. At least, I’m dead and Hunslett is dead or a prisoner. But they can’t leave an abandoned Firecrest at anchor to excite suspicion and invite investigation. So they’ll come in a boat, up anchor, and take the Firecrest out into the Sound, followed by their own boat. Once there, they’ll slice through the flexible salt-water cooling intake, open the salt-water cock, take to their own boat and lift their hats as the Firecrest goes down to join the helicopter. As far as the big wide innocent world is concerned, Hunslett and I will just have sailed off into the sunset.’

  ‘And the gulfs will have washed you down,’ Uncle Arthur nodded. ‘You are very sure of this, Calvert?’

  ‘You might say I’m absolutely certain.’

  ‘Then why open those blasted curtains?’

  ‘The scuttling party may be coming from anywhere and they may not come for hours. The best time to scuttle a boat in close waters is at slack tide, when you can be sure that it will settle exactly where you want it to settle, and slack tide is not until one o’clock this morning. But if someone comes panting hotfoot aboard soon after those curtains are opened, then that will be proof enough that the radio transmitter we’re after, and our friends who are working the transmitter, are somewhere in this bay, ashore or afloat.’

  ‘How will it be proof?’ Uncle Arthur said irritably. ‘Why should they come, as you say, panting hotfoot?’

  ‘They know they have Hunslett. At least, I assume they have, I can’t think of any other reason for his absence. They think they know I’m dead, but they can’t be sure. Then they see the beckoning oil lamp in the window. What is this, they say to themselves, Calvert back from the dead? Or a third, or maybe even a third and a fourth colleague of Calvert and Hunslett that we wot not of? Whether it’s me or my friends, they must be silenced. And silenced at once. Wouldn’t you come panting hotfoot?’

  ‘There’s no need to treat the matter with levity,’ Uncle Arthur complained.

  ‘In your own words, sir, if you can believe that, you can believe anything.’

  ‘You should have consulted me first, Calvert.’ Uncle Arthur shifted in his seat, an almost imperceptible motion, though his expression didn’t change. He was a brilliant administrator, but the more executive side of the business, the sandbagging and pushing of people off high cliffs, wasn’t exactly in his line. ‘I’ve told you that I came to take charge.’

  ‘Sorry, Sir Arthur. You’d better change that report, hadn’t you? The bit about the best in Europe, I mean.’

  ‘Touché, touché, touché,’ he grumbled. ‘And they’re corning at us out of the dark, is that it? On their way now. Armed men. Killers. Shouldn’t we -shouldn’t we b
e preparing to defend ourselves? Dammit, man, I haven’t even got a gun.’

  ‘You won’t need one. You may not agree with me.’ I handed him the Luger. He took it, checked the indicator and that the safety catch moved easily, then sat there holding it awkwardly in his hand.

  ‘Shouldn’t we move, Calvert? We’re sitting targets here.’

  ‘They won’t be here for some time. The nearest house or boat is a mile away to the east. They’ll be pushing wind and tide and they daren’t use a motor. Whether they’re rowing a boat or paddling a rubber dinghy they have a long haul ahead of them. Time’s short, sir. We have a lot to do to-night. To get back to Loch Houron. The expedition’s out, they couldn’t pirate a dinghy, far less five oceangoing freighters. Our friend Donald MacEachern acts in a highly suspicious fashion, he’s got the facilities there, he’s dead worried and he might have had half a dozen guns at his back while he had his in my front. But it was all too good to be true, professionals wouldn’t lay it on the line like that.’

  ‘Maybe that’s how professionals would expect a fellow-professional to react. And you said he’s worried.’

  ‘Maybe the fish aren’t biting. Maybe he’s involved, but not directly. Then there’s the shark-fishers. They have the boats, the facilities and, heaven knows, they’re tough enough. Against that, they’ve been based there for years, the place is littered with sharks – it should be easy enough to check if regular consignments of liver oil are sent to the mainland – and they’re well known and well thought of along the coast. They’ll bear investigating. Then there’s Dubh Sgeir. Lord Kirkside and his lovely daughter Sue.’

  ‘Lady Susan,’ Uncle Arthur said. It’s difficult to invest an impersonal, inflectionless voice with cool reproach, but he managed it without any trouble. ‘I know Lord Kirkside, of course’ – his tone implied that it would be remarkable if he didn’t – ‘and while I may or may not be right about Sir Anthony, and I will lay you a hundred to one, in pounds, that I am, I’m convinced that Lord Kirkside is wholly incapable of any dishonest or illegal action.’