When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘I forgot about the accounts,’ MacDonald said slowly. ‘And all the other points – I’m afraid I’m not good at this sort of thing.’ He looked at Uncle Arthur. ‘I know this is the end of the road for me. They said they would kill my boys, sir.’

  ‘If you will extend us your full co-operation,’ Uncle Arthur said precisely, ‘I will personally see to it that you remain the Torbay police sergeant until you’re falling over your beard. Who are “they”?’

  ‘The only men I’ve seen is a fellow called Captain Imrie and the two customs men – Durran and Thomas. Durran’s real name is Quinn. I don’t know the others’ names. I usually met them in my house, after dark. I’ve been out to the Shangri-la only twice. To see Imrie.’

  ‘And Sir Anthony Skouras?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ MacDonald shrugged helplessly. ‘He’s a good man, sir, he really is. Or I thought so. Maybe he is mixed up in this. Anyone can fall into bad company. It’s very strange, sir.’

  ‘Isn’t it? And what’s been your part in this?’

  ‘There’s been funny things happening in this area in the past months. Boats have vanished. People have vanished. Fishermen have had their nets torn, in harbour, and yacht engines have been mysteriously damaged, also in harbour. This is when Captain Imrie wants to prevent certain boats from going certain places at the wrong time.’

  ‘And your part is to investigate with great diligence and a total lack of success,’ Uncle Arthur nodded. ‘You must be invaluable to them. Sergeant. A man with your record and character is above suspicion. Tell me. Sergeant, what are they up to?’

  ‘Before God, sir, I have no idea.’

  ‘You’re totally in the dark?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. This is the way the very top men operate. And you will have no idea where your boys are being held?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘How do you know they’re alive?’

  ‘I was taken out to the Shangri-la three weeks ago. My sons had been brought there from God only knows where. They were well.’

  ‘And are you really so naive as to believe that your sons will be well and will be returned alive when all this is over? Even although your boys will be bound to know who their captors are and would be available for testimony and identification if the time came for that?’

  ‘Captain Imrie said they would come to no harm. If I co-operated. He said that only fools ever used unnecessary violence.’

  ‘You are convinced, then, they wouldn’t go to the length of murder?’

  ‘Murder! What are you talking about, sir?’

  ‘Calvert?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘A large whisky for the sergeant.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ When it came to lashing out with my private supplies Uncle Arthur was generous to a fault. Uncle Arthur paid no entertainment allowance. So I poured the sergeant a large whisky and, seeing that bankruptcy was inevitable anyway, did the same for myself. Ten seconds later the sergeant’s glass was empty. I took his arm and led him to the engine-room. When we came back to the saloon in a minute’s time the sergeant needed no persuading to accept another glass. His face was pale.

  ‘I told you that Calvert carried out a helicopter reconnaissance to-day,’ Uncle Arthur said conversationally. ‘What I didn’t tell you was that his pilot was murdered this evening. I didn’t tell you that two other of my best agents have been killed in the last sixty hours. And now, as you’ve just seen, Hunslett. Do you still believe. Sergeant, that we are dealing with a bunch of gentlemanly lawbreakers to whom human life is sacrosanct?’

  ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ Colour was back in the brown cheeks again and the eyes were cold and hard and a little desperate.

  ‘You and Calvert will take Hunslett ashore to your office. You will call in the doctor and ask for an official post-mortem – we must have an official cause of death. For the trial. The other dead men are probably beyond recovery. You will then row out to the Shangri-la and tell Imrie that we brought Hunslett and the other man – the Italian – to your office. You will tell them that you heard us say that we must go to the mainland for new depth-sounding equipment and for armed help and that we can’t be back for two days at least. Do you know where the telephone lines are cut in the Sound?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I cut them myself.’

  ‘When you get back from the Shangri-la get out there and fix them. Before dawn. Before dawn to-morrow you, your wife and son must disappear. For thirty-six hours. If you want to live. That is understood?’

  ‘I understand what you want done. Not why you want it done.’

  ‘Just do it. One last thing. Hunslett has no relations – few of my men have – so he may as well be buried in Torbay. Knock up your local undertaker during the night and make arrangements for the funeral on Friday. Calvert and I would like to be there.’

  ‘But – but Friday? That’s just the day after tomorrow’

  ‘The day after to-morrow. It will be all over then. You’ll have your boys back home.’

  MacDonald looked at him in long silence, then said slowly: ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I’m not sure at all.’ Uncle Arthur passed a weary hand across his face and looked at me. ‘Calvert is. It’s a pity, Sergeant, that the Secrets Act will never permit you to tell your friends that you once knew Philip Calvert. If it can be done, Calvert can do it. I think he can. I certainly hope so.’

  ‘I certainly hope so, too,’ MacDonald said sombrely.

  Me too, more than either of them, but there was already so much despondency around that it didn’t seem right to deepen it, so I just put on my confident face and led MacDonald back down to the engine-room.

  SEVEN

  Wednesday: 10.40 p.m. – Thursday: 2 a.m.

  Three of them came to kill us, not at midnight as promised, but at 10.40 p.m. that night. Had they come five minutes earlier then they would have got us because five minutes earlier we were still tied up to the old stone pier. And had they come and got us that five minutes earlier, then the fault would have been mine for, after leaving Hunslett in the police station I had insisted that Sergeant MacDonald accompany me to use his authority in knocking up and obtaining service from the proprietor of the only chemist’s shop in Torbay. Neither of them had been too keen on giving me the illegal help I wanted and it had taken me a full five minutes and the best part of my extensive repertoire of threats to extract from the very elderly chemist the minimum of reluctant service and a small green-ribbed bottle informatively labelled ‘The Tablets.’ But I was lucky and I was back aboard the Firecrest just after 10.30 p.m.

  The west coast of Scotland doesn’t go in much for golden Indian summers and that night was no exception. Apart from being cold and windy, which was standard, it was also black as sin and bucketing heavily, which if not quite standard was at least not so unusual as to excite comment. A minute after leaving the pier I had to switch on the searchlight mounted on the wheelhouse roof. The western entrance to the Sound from Torbay harbour, between Torbay and Garve Island, is a quarter of a mile wide and I could have found it easily on a compass course: but there were small yachts, I knew, between the pier and the entrance and if any of them was carrying a riding light it was invisible in that driving rain.

  The searchlight control was on the wheelhouse deckhead. I moved it to point the beam down and ahead, then traversed it through a forty-degree arc on either side of the bows.

  I picked up the first boat inside five seconds, not a yacht riding at its moorings but a rowing dinghy moving slowly through the water. It was fine on the port bow, maybe fifty yards away. I couldn’t identify the man at the oars, the oars wrapped at their middle with some white cloth to muffle the sound of the rowlocks, because his back was towards me. A very broad back. Quinn. The man in the bows was sitting facing me. He wore oilskins and a dark beret and in his hand he held a gun. At fifty yards it’s almost impossible to identify any weapon, but his looked like a German Schmeisser machine-pistol. Witho
ut a doubt Jacques, the machine-gun specialist. The man crouched low in the stern-sheets was quite unidentifiable, but I could see the gleam of a short gun in his hand. Messrs. Quinn, Jacques and Kramer coming to pay their respects as Charlotte Skouras had said they would. But much ahead of schedule.

  Charlotte Skouras was on my right in the darkened wheelhouse. She’d been there only three minutes, having spent all our time alongside in her darkened cabin with the door closed. Uncle Arthur was on my left, descrating the clean night air with one of his cheroots. I reached up for a clipped torch and patted my right hand pocket to see if the Lilliput was still there. It was.

  I said to Charlotte Skouras: ‘Open the wheel-house door. Put it back on the catch and stand clear.’ Then I said to Uncle Arthur: ‘Take the wheel, sir. Hard a-port when I call. Then back north on course again.’

  He took the wheel without a word. I heard the starboard wheelhouse door click on its latch. We were doing no more than three knots through the water. The dinghy was twenty-five yards away, the men in the bows and stern holding up arms to shield their eyes from our searchlight. Quinn had stopped rowing. On our present course we’d leave them at least ten feet on our port beam. I kept the searchlight steady on the boat.

  Twenty yards separated us and I could see Jacques lining up his machine-pistol on our light when I thrust the throttle lever right open. The note of the big diesel exhaust deepened and the Firecrest began to surge forward.

  ‘Hard over now,’ I said.

  Uncle Arthur spun the wheel. The sudden thrust of our single port screw boiled back against the port-angled rudder, pushing the stern sharply starboard. Flame lanced from Jacques’ machine-pistol, a silent flame, he’d a silencer on. Bullets ricocheted off our aluminium foremast but missed both light and wheelhouse. Quinn saw what was coming and dug his oars deep but he was too late. I shouted ‘Midships, now,’ pulled the throttle lever back to neutral and jumped out through the starboard doorway on to the deck.

  We hit them just where Jacques was sitting, breaking off the dinghy’s bows, capsizing it and throwing the three men into the water. The overturned remains of the boat and a couple of struggling figures came slowly down the starboard side of the Firecrest. My torch picked up the man closer in to our side. Jacques, with the machine-pistol held high above his head, instinctively trying to keep it dry though it must have been soaked when he had been catapulted into the water. I held gun-hand and torch-hand together, aiming down the bright narrow beam. I squeezed the Lilliput’s trigger twice and a bright crimson flower bloomed where his face had been. He went down as if a shark had got him, the gun in the stiffly-upstretched arms. It was a Schmeisser machine-pistol all right. I shifted the torch. There was only one other to be seen in the water and it wasn’t Quinn, he’d either dived under the Firecrest or was sheltering under the upturned wreck of the dinghy. I fired twice more at the second figure and he started to scream. The screaming went on for two or three seconds, then stopped in a shuddering gurgle. I heard the sound of someone beside me on the deck being violently sick over the side. Charlotte Skouras. But I’d no time to stay and comfort Charlotte Skouras, she’d no damned right to be out on deck anyway. I had urgent matters to attend to, such as preventing Uncle Arthur from cleaving Torbay’s old stone pier in half. The townspeople would not have liked it. Uncle Arthur’s idea of midships differed sharply from mine, he’d brought the Firecrest round in a three-quarter circle. He would have been the ideal man at the helm of one of those ramheaded Phoenician galleys that specialised in cutting the opposition in two, but as a helmsman in Torbay harbour he lacked something. I jumped into the wheelhouse, pulled the throttle all the way to astern and spun the wheel to port. I jumped out again and pulled Charlotte Skouras away before she got her head knocked off by one of the barnacle-encrusted piles that fronted the pier. Whether or not we grazed the pier was impossible to say but we sure as hell gave the barnacles a nasty turn.

  I moved back into the wheelhouse, taking Charlotte Skouras with me. I was breathing heavily. All this jumping in and out through wheel-house doors took it out of a man. I said: ‘With all respects, sir, what the hell were you trying to do?’

  ‘Me?’ He was as perturbed as a hibernating bear in January. ‘Is something up, then?’

  I moved the throttle to slow ahead, took the wheel from him and brought the Firecrest round till we were due north on a compass bearing. I said: ‘Keep it there, please,’ and did some more traversing with the searchlight. The waters around were black and empty, there was no sign even of the dinghy. I’d expected to see every light in Torbay lit up like a naval review, those four shots, even the Lilliput’s sharp, light-weighted cracks, should have had them all on their feet. But nothing, no sign, no movement at all. The gin bottle levels would be lower than ever. I looked at the compass: north-twenty-west. Like the honey-bee for the flower, the iron filing for the magnet, Uncle Arthur was determinedly heading straight for the shore again. I took the wheel from him, gently but firmly, and said: ‘You came a bit close to the pier back there, sir.’

  ‘I believe I did.’ He took out a handkerchief and wiped his monocle. ‘Damn’ glass misted up just at the wrong moment. I trust, Calvert, that you weren’t just firing at random out there.’ Uncle Arthur had become a good deal more bellicose in the past hour or so: he’d had a high regard for Hunslett.

  ‘I got Jacques and Kramer. Jacques was the handy one with the automatic arms. He’s dead. I think Kramer is too. Quinn got away.’ What a set-up, I thought bleakly, what a set-up. Alone with Uncle Arthur on the high seas in the darkness of the night. I’d always known that his eyesight, even in optimum conditions, was pretty poor: but I’d never suspected that, when the sun was down, he was virtually blind as a bat. But unfortunately, unlike the bat, Uncle Arthur wasn’t equipped with a built-in radar which would enable him to shy clear of rocks, headlands, islands and such-like obstructions of a similarly permanent and final nature with which we might go bump in the dark. To all intents and purposes I was singlehanded. This called for a radical revision in plans only I didn’t see how I could radically revise anything.

  ‘Not too bad,’ Uncle Arthur said approvingly. ‘Pity about Quinn, but otherwise not too bad at all. The ranks of the ungodly are being satisfactorily depleted. Do you think they’ll come after us?’

  ‘No. For four reasons. One, they won’t know yet what has happened. Two, both their sorties this evening have gone badly and they won’t be in a hurry to try any more boarding expeditions for some time. Three, they’d use the tender for this job, not the Shangri-la and if they get that tender a hundred yards I’ve lost all faith in demerara sugar. Four, there’s mist or fog coming up. The lights of Torbay are obscured already. They can’t follow us because they can’t find us.’

  Till that moment the only source of illumination we’d had in the wheelhouse had come from the reflected light of the compass lamp. Suddenly the overhead light came on. Charlotte Skouras’s hand was on the switch. Her face was haggard and she was staring at me as if I were the thing from outer space. Not one of those admiring affectionate looks.

  ‘What kind of man are you, Mr Calvert?’ No ‘Philip’ this time. Her voice was lower and huskier than ever and it had a shake in it. ‘You – you’re not human. You kill two men and go on speaking calmly and reasonably as if nothing had happened. What in God’s name are you, a hired killer? It’s – it’s unnatural. Have you no feelings, no emotions, no regrets?’

  ‘Yes, I have. I’m sorry I didn’t kill Quinn too.’

  She stared at me with something like horror in her face, then switched her gaze to Uncle Arthur. She said to him and her voice was almost a whisper: ‘I saw that man, Sir Arthur. I saw his face being blown apart by the bullets. Mr Calvert could have – could have arrested him, held him up and handed him over to the police. But he didn’t. He killed him. And the other. It was slow and deliberate. Why, why, why?’

  ‘There’s no “why” about it, my dear Charlotte.’ Sir Arthur sounded almost irritable. �
��There’s no justification needed. Calvert killed them or they killed us. They came to kill us. You told us that yourself. Would you feel any conpunction at killing a poisonous snake? Those men were no better than that. As for arresting them!’ Uncle Arthur paused, maybe for the short laugh he gave, maybe because he was trying to recall the rest of the homily I’d delivered to him earlier that evening. ‘There’s no intermediate stage in this game. It’s kill or be killed. These are dangerous and deadly men and you never give them warning.’ Good old Uncle Arthur, he’d remembered the whole lecture, practically word for word.

  She looked at him for a long moment, her face uncomprehending, looked at me then slowly turned and left the wheelhouse.

  I said to Uncle Arthur: ‘You’re just as bad as I am.’

  She reappeared again exactly at midnight, switching on the light as she entered. Her hair was combed and neat, her face was less puffy and she was dressed in one of those synthetic fibre dresses, white, ribbed and totally failing to give the impression that she stood in need of a good meal. From the way she eased her shoulders I could see that her back hurt. She gave me a faint tentative smile. She got none in return.

  I said: ‘Half an hour ago, rounding Carrara Point, I near as dammit carried away the lighthouse. Now I hope I’m heading north of Dubh Sgeir but I may be heading straight into the middle of it. It couldn’t be any blacker if you were a mile down in an abandoned coal mine, the fog is thickening, I’m a not very experienced sailor trying to navigate my way through the most dangerous waters in Britain and whatever hope we have of survival depends on the preservation of what night-sight I’ve slowly and painfully built up over the past hour or so. Put out that damned light!’