I helped her. Not so much because the desperation in the voice was unquestionably genuine as because of the fact that it as unquestionably belonged to Charlotte Skouras.
I pushed through between the scuppers and the lowest guardrail, a rubber tyre fender that was permanently attached to one of the guardrail stanchions and lowered it to water-level. I said: ‘Lady Skouras?’
‘Yes, yes, it’s me. Thank God, thank God!’ Her voice didn’t come just as easily as that, she was gasping for breath and she’d water in her mouth.
‘There’s a fender at the boat’s side. Catch it.’
A moment or two, then: ‘I have it.’
‘Can you pull yourself up?’
More splashing and gasping, then: ‘No. No, I can’t do it.’
‘No matter. Wait.’ I turned round to go for Uncle Arthur but he was already by my side. I said softly in his ear: ‘Lady Skouras is down there in the water. It may be a trap. I don’t think so. But if you see a light, shoot at it.’
He said nothing but I felt his arm move as he took the Luger from his pocket. I stepped over the guard-rail and lowered myself till my foot came to rest on the lower part of the tyre. I reached down and caught her arm. Charlotte Skouras was no slender sylph-like figure, she had some bulky package tied to her waist, and I wasn’t as fit as I’d been a long, long time ago, say about forty-eight hours, but with a helping hand from Uncle Arthur I managed to get her up on deck. Between us, we half carried her to the curtained saloon and set her down on the settee. I propped a cushion behind her head and took a good look at her.
She’d never have made the front cover of Vogue. She looked terrible. Her dark slacks and shirt looked as if they had spent a month in the sea instead of probably only a few minutes. The long tangled auburn hair was plastered to her head and cheeks, her face was dead-white, the big brown eyes, with the dark half-circles, were wide open and frightened and both mascara and lipstick had begun to run. And she hadn’t been beautiful to start with. I thought she was the most desirable woman I’d ever seen. I must be nuts.
‘My dear Lady Skouras, my dear Lady Skouras!’ Uncle Arthur was back among the aristocracy and showed it. He knelt by her side, ineffectually dabbing at her face with a handkerchief. ‘What in God’s name has happened? Brandy, Calvert, brandy! Don’t just stand there, man. Brandy!’
Uncle Arthur seemed to think he was in a pub but, as it happened, I did have some brandy left. I handed him the glass and said: ‘If you’ll attend to Lady Skouras, sir, I’ll finish getting the anchor up.’
‘No, no!’ She took a gulp of the brandy, choked on it and I had to wait until she had finished coughing before she went on. ‘They’re not coming for at least two hours yet. I know. I heard. There’s something terrible going on, Sir Arthur. I had to come, I had to come.’
‘Now, don’t distress yourself. Lady Skouras, don’t distress yourself,’ Uncle Arthur said, as if she weren’t distressed enough already. ‘Just drink this down, Lady Skouras.’
‘No, not that!’ I got all set to take a poor view of this, it was damned good brandy, then I realised she was talking of something else. ‘Not Lady Skouras. Never again! Charlotte. Charlotte Meiner. Charlotte.’
One thing about women, they always get their sense of priorities right. There they were on the Shangri-la, rigging up a home-made atom bomb to throw through our saloon windows and all she could think was to ask us to call her ‘Charlotte.’ I said: ‘Why did you have to come?’
‘Calvert!’ Uncle Arthur’s voice was sharp. ‘Do you mind? Lady – I mean, Charlotte – has just suffered a severe shock. Let her take her time to –’
‘No.’ She struggled to an upright sitting position and forced a wan smile, half-scared, half-mocking. ‘No, Mr Petersen, Mr Calvert, whatever your name, you’re quite right. Actresses tend to over-indulge their emotions. I’m not an actress any longer.’ She took another sip of the brandy and a little colour came back to her face. ‘I’ve known for some time that something was very far wrong aboard the Shangri-la. Strange men have been aboard. Some of the old crew were changed for no reason. Several times I’ve been put ashore with the stewardess in hotels while the Shangri-la went off on mysterious journeys. My husband – Sir Anthony – would tell me nothing. He has changed terribly since our marriage – I think he takes drugs. I’ve seen guns. Whenever those strange men came aboard I was sent to my stateroom after dinner.’ She smiled mirthlessly. ‘It wasn’t because of any jealousy on my husband’s part, you may believe me. The last day or two I sensed that everything was coming to a climax.
To-night, just after you were gone, I was sent to my stateroom. I left, but stayed out in the passage. Lavorski was talking. I heard him saying: “If your admiral pal is a unesco delegate, Skouras, then I’m King Neptune. I know who he is. We all know who he is. It’s too late in the day now and they know too much. It’s them or us.” And then Captain Imrie – how I hate that man! – said: “I’ll send Quinn and Jacques and Kramer at midnight. At one o’clock they’ll open the sea-cocks in the Sound”.’
‘Charming friends your husband has,’ I murmured.
She looked at me, half-uncertainly, half-speculatively and said: ‘Mr Petersen or Mr Calvert – and I heard Lavorski call you Johnson ’
‘It is confusing,’ I admitted. ‘Calvert. Philip Calvert.’
‘Well, Philip,’ – she pronounced it the French way and very nice it sounded too – ‘you are one great bloody fool if you talk like that. You are in deadly danger.’
‘Mr Calvert,’ Uncle Arthur said sourly – it wasn’t her language he disapproved of, it was this Christian name familiarity between the aristocracy and the peasants – ‘is quite aware of the danger. He has unfortunate mannerisms of speech, that’s all. You are a very brave woman, Charlotte.’ Blue-bloods first-naming each other was a different thing altogether. ‘You took a great risk in eavesdropping. You might have been caught.’
‘I was caught, Sir Arthur.’ The smile showed up the lines on either side of her mouth but didn’t touch her eyes. ‘That is another reason why I am here. Even without the knowledge of your danger, yes, I would have come. My husband caught me. He took me into my stateroom.’ She stood up shakily, turned her back to us and pulled up the sodden dark shirt. Right across her back ran three great blue-red weals. Uncle Arthur stood stock-still, a man incapable of movement. I crossed the saloon and peered at her back. The weals were almost an inch wide and running half-way round her body. Here and there were tiny blood-spotted punctures. Lightly I tried a finger on one of the weals. The flesh was raised and puffy, a fresh weal, as lividly-genuine a weal as ever I’d clapped eyes on. She didn’t move. I stepped back and she turned to face us.
‘It is not nice, is it? It does not feel very nice.’ She smiled and again that smile. ‘I could show you worse than that.’
‘No, no, no,’ Uncle Arthur said hastily. ‘That will not be necessary.’ He was silent for a moment, then burst out: ‘My dear Charlotte, what you must have suffered. It’s fiendish, absolutely fiendish. He must be – he must be inhuman. A monster. A monster, perhaps under the influence of drugs. I would never have believed it!’ His face was brick-red with outrage and his voice sounded as if Quinn had him by the throat. Strangled. ‘No one would ever have believed it!’
‘Except the late Lady Skouras,’ she said quietly. ‘I understand now why she was in and out of mental homes several times before she died.’ She shrugged. ‘I have no wish to go the same way. I am made of tougher stuff than Madeleine Skouras. So I pick up my bag and run away’ She nodded at the small polythene bag of clothes that had been tied to her waist. ‘Like Dick Whittington, is it not?’
‘They’ll be here long before midnight when they discover you’re gone,’ I observed.
‘It may be morning before they find out. Most nights I lock my cabin door. To-night I locked it from the outside.’
‘That helps,’ I said. ‘Standing about in those sodden clothes doesn’t. There’s no point in running away only to
die of pneumonia. You’ll find towels in my cabin. Then we can get you a room in the Columba Hotel.’
‘I had hoped for better than that.’ The fractional slump of the shoulders was more imagined than seen, but the dull defeat in the eyes left nothing to the imagination. ‘You would put me in the first place they would look for me. There is no safe place for me in Torbay. They will catch me and bring me back and my husband will take me into that stateroom again. My only hope is to run away. Your only hope is to run away. Please. Can we not run away together?’
‘No.’
‘A man not given to evasive answers, is that it?’ There was a lonely dejection, a proud humiliation about her that did very little for my self-respect. She turned towards Uncle Arthur, took both his hands in hers and said in a low voice: ‘Sir Arthur. I appeal to you as an English gentleman.’ Thumbs down on Calvert, that foreign-born peasant. ‘May I stay? Please?’
Uncle Arthur looked at me, hesitated, looked at Charlotte Skouras, looked into those big brown eyes and was a lost man.
‘Of course you may stay, my dear Charlotte.’ He gave a stiff old-fashioned bow which, I had to admit, went very well with the beard and the monocle. ‘Yours to command, my dear lady’
‘Thank you. Sir Arthur.’ She smiled at me, not with triumph or satisfaction, just an anxious-to-be-friendly smile. ‘It would be nice, Philip, to have the consent – what do you say? – unanimous.’
‘If Sir Arthur wishes to expose you to a vastly greater degree of risk aboard this boat than you would experience in Torbay, that is Sir Arthur’s business. As for the rest, my consent is not required. I’m a well-trained civil servant and I obey orders.’
‘You are gracious to a fault,’ Uncle Arthur said acidly.
‘Sorry, sir.’ I’d suddenly seen the light and a pretty dazzling beam it was too. ‘I should not have called your judgment in question. The lady is very welcome. But I think she should remain below while we are alongside the pier, sir.’
‘A reasonable request and a wise precaution,’ Uncle Arthur said mildly. He seemed pleased at my change of heart, at my proper deference to the wishes of the aristocracy.
‘It won’t be for long.’ I smiled at Charlotte Skouras. ‘We leave Torbay within the hour.’
‘What do I care what you charge him with?’ I looked from Sergeant MacDonald to the broken-faced man with the wet blood-stained towel, then back to MacDonald again. ‘Breaking and entering. Assault and battery. Illegal possession of a dangerous weapon with intent to create a felony – murder. Anything you like.’
‘Well, now. It’s just not quite as easy as that.’ Sergeant MacDonald spread his big brown hands across the counter of the tiny police station and looked at the prisoner and myself in turn. ‘He didn’t break and enter, you know, Mr Petersen. He boarded. No law against that. Assault and battery? It looks as if he has been the victim and not the perpetrator. And what kind of weapon was he carrying, Mr Petersen?’
‘I don’t know. It must have been knocked overboard.’
‘I see. Knocked overboard, was it? So we have no real proof of any felonious intent.’
I was becoming a little tired of Sergeant MacDonald. He was fast enough to co-operate with bogus customs officers but with me he was just being deliberately obstructive. I said: ‘You’ll be telling me next that it’s all a product of my fevered imagination. You’ll be telling me next that I just stepped ashore, grabbed the first passerby I saw, hit him in the face with a four-by-two then dragged him up here inventing this tale as I went. Even you can’t be so stupid as to believe that.’
The brown face turned red and, on the counter, the brown knuckles turned ivory. He said softly: ‘You’ll kindly not talk to me like that.’
‘If you insist on behaving like a fool I’ll treat you as such. Are you going to lock him up?’
‘It’s only your word against his.’
‘No. I had a witness. He’s down at the old pier now, if you want to see him. Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason. A very senior civil servant.’
‘You had a Mr Hunslett with you last time I was aboard your boat.’
‘He’s down there, too.’ I nodded at the prisoner. ‘Why don’t you ask a few questions of our friend here?’
‘I’ve sent for the doctor. He’ll have to fix his face first. I can’t understand a word he says.’
‘The state of his face doesn’t help,’ I admitted. ‘But the main trouble is that he speaks Italian.’
‘Italian, is it? I’ll soon fix that. The owner of the Western Isles cafe is an Italian.’
‘That helps. There are four little questions he might put to our pal here. Where is his passport, how he arrived in this country, who is his employer and where does he live.’
The sergeant looked at me for a long moment then said slowly: ‘It’s a mighty queer marine biologist that you are, Mr Petersen.’
‘And it’s a mighty queer police sergeant that you are, Mr MacDonald. Good night.’
I crossed the dimly-lit street to the sea-wall and waited in the shadow of a phone booth. After two minutes a man with a small bag came hurrying up the street and turned into the police station. He was out again in five minutes, which wasn’t surprising: there was little a G.P. could do for what was plainly a hospital job.
The station door opened again and Sergeant MacDonald came hurrying out, long black mackintosh buttoned to the neck. He walked quickly along the sea wall, looking neither to left nor right, which made it very easy for me to follow him, and turned down the old stone pier. At the end of the pier he flashed a torch, went down a flight of steps and began to haul in a small boat. I leaned over the pier wall and switched on my own torch.
‘Why don’t they provide you with a telephone or radio for conveying urgent messages?’ I asked. ‘You could catch your death of cold rowing out to the Shangri-la on a night like this.’
He straightened slowly and let the rope fall from his hands. The boat drifted out into the darkness. He came up the steps with the slow heavy tread of an old man and said quietly: ‘What did you say about the Shangri-la?’
‘Don’t let me keep you. Sergeant,’ I said affably. ‘Duty before the idle social chit-chat. Your first duty is to your masters. Off you go, now, tell them that one of their hirelings has been severely clobbered and that Petersen has very grave suspicions about Sergeant MacDonald.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ he said emptily. ‘The Shangri-la – I’m not going anywhere near the Shangri-la.’
‘Where are you going, then? Do tell. Fishing? Kind of forgotten your tackle, haven’t you?’
‘And how would you like to mind your own damn’ business?’ MacDonald said heavily.
‘That’s what I’m doing. Come off it, Sergeant. Think I give a damn about our Italian pal? You can charge him with playing tiddleywinks in the High Street for all I care. I just threw him at you, together with a hint that you yourself were up to no good, to see what the reaction would be, to remove the last doubts in my mind. You reacted beautifully.’
‘I’m maybe not the cleverest, Mr Petersen,’ he said with dignity. ‘Neither am I a complete idiot. I thought you were one of them or after the same thing as them.’ He paused. ‘You’re not. You’re a Government agent.’
‘I’m a civil servant.’ I nodded to where the Firecrest lay not twenty yards away. ‘You’d better come to meet my boss.’
‘I don’t take orders from Civil Servants.’
‘Suit yourself,’ I said indifferently, turned away and looked out over the sea-wall. ‘About your two sons, Sergeant MacDonald. The sixteen-year-old twins who, I’m told, died in the Cairngorms some time back.’
‘What about my sons?’ he said tonelessly.
‘Just that I’m not looking forward to telling them that their own father wouldn’t lift a finger to bring them back to life again.’
He just stood there in the darkness, quite still, saying nothing. He offered no resistance when I took his arm and led him towards the Firecrest.<
br />
Uncle Arthur was at his most intimidating and Uncle Arthur in full intimidating cry was a sight to behold. He’d made no move to rise when I’d brought MacDonald into the saloon and he hadn’t ask him to sit. The blue basilisk stare, channelled and magnified by the glittering monocle, transfixed the unfortunate sergeant like a laser beam.
‘So your foot slipped, Sergeant,’ Uncle Arthur said without preamble. He was using his cold, flat, quite uninflected voice, the one that curled your hair. ‘The fact that you stand here now indicates that. Mr Calvert went ashore with a prisoner and enough rope for you to hang yourself and you seized it with both hands. Not very clever of you. Sergeant. You should not have tried to contact your friends.’
‘They are no friends of mine, sir,’ MacDonald said bitterly.
‘I’m going to tell you as much as you need to know about Calvert – Petersen was a pseudonym – and myself and what we are doing.’ Uncle Arthur hadn’t heard him. ‘If you ever repeat any part of what I say to anyone, it will cost you your job, your pension, any hope that you will ever again, in whatever capacity, get another job in Britain and several years in prison for contravention of the Official Secrets Act. I myself will personally formulate the charges.’ He paused then added in a masterpiece of superfluity: ‘Do I make myself clear?’
‘You make yourself very clear,’ MacDonald said grimly.
So Uncle Arthur told him all he thought MacDonald needed to know, which wasn’t much, and finished by saying: ‘I am sure we can now count on your hundred per cent co-operation, Sergeant.’
‘Calvert is just guessing at my part in this,’ he said dully.
‘For God’s sake!’ I said. ‘You knew those customs officers were bogus. You knew they had no photocopier with them. You knew their only object in coming aboard was to locate and smash that set – and locate any other we might have. You knew they couldn’t have gone back to the mainland in that launch – it was too rough. The launch, was, in fact, the Shangri-la’s tender – which is why you left without lights – and no launch left the harbour after your departure. We’d have heard it. The only life we saw after that was when they switched on their lights in the Shangri-la’s wheelhouse to smash up their own radio – one of their own radios, I should have said. And how did you know the telephone lines were down in the Sound? You knew they were down, but why did you say the Sound? Because you knew they had been cut there. Then, yesterday morning, when I asked you if there was any hope of the lines being repaired, you said no. Odd. One would have thought that you would have told the customs boys going back to the mainland to contact the G.P.O. at once. But you knew they weren’t going back there. And your two sons, Sergeant, the boys supposed to be dead, you forgot to close their accounts. Because you knew they weren’t dead.’
When Eight Bells Toll Page 16
