When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘You’re what?’ The grey-blue eyes were wide, the eyebrows still up under the fringe, but with alarm, this time, not astonishment. ‘You’re leaving? You’re leaving me here?’

  ‘I’m leaving. If you think I’d stay a minute longer in this damned castle than I have to, you must be nuts. I’ve played my hand far enough already. Do you think I want to be around here when the guards change over or when the toilers on the deep get back here?’

  ‘Toilers on the deep? What do you mean?’

  ‘Skip it.’ I’d forgotten she knew nothing about what our friends were doing. ‘It’s Calvert for home.’

  ‘You’ve got a gun,’ she said wildly. ‘You could – you could capture them, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Capture who?’ The hell with the grammar.

  ‘The guards. They’re on the second floor. They’ll be asleep.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Eight or nine. I’m not sure.’

  ‘Eight or nine, she’s not sure! Who do you think I am, Superman? Stand aside, do you want me to get killed? And, Susan, tell nothing to anybody. Not even Daddy. Not if you want to see Johnny-boy walk down that aisle. You understand?’

  She put a hand on my arm and said quietly but with the fear still in her face: ‘You could take me with you.’

  ‘I could. I could take you with me and ruin everything. If I as much as fired a single shot at any of the sleeping warriors up top, I’d ruin everything. Everything depends on their never knowing that anybody was here to-night. If they suspected that, just had a hint of a suspicion of that, they’d pack their bags and take off into the night. To-night. And I can’t possibly do anything until to-morrow night. You understand, of course, that they wouldn’t leave until after they had killed everyone in the cellar. And your father, of course. And they’d stop off at Torbay and make sure that Sergeant MacDonald would never give evidence against them. Do you want that, Susan? God knows I’d love to take you out of here, I’m not made of Portland cement, but if I take you the alarm bells will ring and then they’ll pull the plug. Can’t you see that? If they come back and find you gone, they’ll have one thought and one thought only in their minds: our little Sue has left the island. With, of course, one thought in mind. You must not be missing.’

  ‘All right.’ She was calm now. ‘But you’ve overlooking something.’

  ‘I’m a great old overlooker. What?’

  ‘Harry. He’ll be missing. He’ll have to be. You can’t leave him to talk.’

  ‘He’ll be missing. So will the keeper of the gate. I clobbered him on the way in.’ She started to get all wide-eyed again but I held up my hand, stripped off coat and wind-breaker, unwrapped the razor she’d brought me and nicked my forearm, not too deeply, the way I felt I needed all the blood I had, but enough to let me smear the bottom three inches of the bayonet on both sides. I handed her the tin of Elastoplast and without a word she stuck a strip across the incision. I dressed again and we left, Susan with the whisky bottle and torch, myself with the rifle, shepherding Harry in front of me. Once in the hall I relocked the door with the skeleton key I’d used to open it.

  The rain had stopped and there was hardly any wind, but the mist was thicker than ever and the night had turned bitterly cold. The Highland Indian summer was in full swing. We made our way through the courtyard across to where I’d left the bayonet lying on the cliff edge, using the torch, now with the Elastoplast removed from its face, quite freely, but keeping our voices low. The lad maintaining his ceaseless vigil on the battlements couldn’t have seen us five yards away with the finest night-glasses in the world, but sound in heavy mist has unpredictable qualities, it can be muffled, it can be distorted, or it can occasionally be heard with surprising clarity, and it was now too late in the day to take chances.

  I located the bayonet and told Harry to lie face down in the grass; if I’d left him standing he just might have been tempted to kick me over the edge. I gouged the grass in assorted places with heel and toe, made a few more scores with the butt of a bayonet, stuck the blade of the gatekeeper’s bayonet in the ground at a slight angle so that the rifle was just clear of the ground, laid Harry down so that the blood-stained bayonet tip was also just clear of the ground, so preventing the blood from running off among the wet grass, scattered most of the contents of the whisky bottle around and carefully placed the bottle, about a quarter full now, close to one of the bayonets. I said to Susan: ‘And what happened here do you think?’

  ‘It’s obvious. They had a drunken fight and both of them slipped on the wet grass over the edge of the cliff.’

  ‘And what did you hear?’

  ‘Oh! I heard the sound of two men shouting in the hall. I went on to the landing and I heard them shouting at the tops of their voices. I heard the one tell Harry to get back to his post and Harry saying, no, by God, he was going to settle it now. I’ll say both men were drunk, and I won’t repeat the kind of language they were using. The last I heard they were crossing the courtyard together, still arguing.’

  ‘Good girl. That’s exactly what you heard.’

  She came with us as far as the place where I’d left the gate-keeper. He was still breathing. I used most of what rope I’d left to tie them together at the waist, a few feet apart, and wrapped the end of it in my hand. With their arms lashed behind their backs they weren’t going to have much balancing power and no holding power at all on the way down that steep and crumbling path to the landing stage. If either slipped or stumbled I might be able to pull them back to safety with a sharp tug. There was going to be none of this Alpine stuff with the rope around my waist also. If they were going to step out into the darkness they were going to do it without me.

  I said: ‘Thank you, Susan. You have been a great help. Don’t take any more of those Nembutal tablets to-night. They’d think it damn’ funny if you were still asleep at midday to-morrow.’

  ‘I wish it were midday the next day. I won’t let you down, Mr Calvert. Everything is going to be all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  There was a pause, then she said: ‘You could have pushed these two over the edge if you wanted to, couldn’t you. But you didn’t. You could have cut Harry’s arm, but you cut your own. I’m sorry for what I said, Mr Calvert. About you being horrible and terrible. You do what you have to do.’ Another pause. ‘I think you’re rather wonderful.’

  ‘They all come round in the end,’ I said, but I was talking to myself, she’d vanished into the mist. I wished drearily that I could have agreed with her sentiments, I didn’t feel wonderful at all, I just felt dead tired and worried stiff for with all the best planning in the world there were too many imponderables and I wouldn’t have bet a brass farthing on the next twenty-four hours. I got some of the worry and frustration out of my system by kicking the two prisoners to their feet.

  We went slowly down that crumbling treacherous path in single file, myself last, torch in my left hand, rope tightly – but not too tightly – in my right hand. I wondered vaguely as we went why I hadn’t nicked Harry instead of myself. It would have been so much more fitting, Harry’s blood on Harry’s bayonet.

  ‘You had a pleasant outing, I trust?’ Hutchinson asked courteously.

  ‘It wasn’t dull. You would have enjoyed it.’ I watched Hutchinson as he pushed the Firecrest into the fog and the darkness. ‘Let me into a professional secret. How in the world did you find your way back into this pier to-night? The mist is twice as bad as when I left. You cruise up and down for hours, impossible to take any bearings, there’s the waves, tide, fog, currents – and yet there you are, right on the nose, to the minute. It can’t be done.’

  ‘It was an extraordinary feat of navigation,’ Hutchinson said solemnly. ‘There are such things as charts, Calvert, and if you look at that large-scale one for this area you’ll see an eight fathom bank, maybe a cable in length, lying a cable and a half out to the west of the old pier there. I j
ust steamed out straight into wind and tide, waited till the depth-sounder showed I was over the bank and dropped the old hook. At the appointed hour the great navigator lifts his hook and lets wind and tide drift him ashore again. Not many men could have done it.’

  ‘I’m bitterly disappointed,’ I said. ‘I’ll never think the same of you again. I suppose you used the same technique on the way in?’

  ‘More or less. Only I used a series of five banks and patches. My secrets are gone for ever. Where now?’

  ‘Didn’t Uncle Arthur say?’

  ‘You misjudge Uncle Arthur. He says he never interferes with you in – what was it? – the execution of a field operation. “I plan,” he said. “I co-ordinate. Calvert finishes the job”.’

  ‘He has his decent moments,’ I admitted.

  ‘He told me a few stories about you in the past hour. I guess it’s a privilege to be along.’

  ‘Apart from the four hundred thousand quid or whatever?’

  ‘Apart, as you say, from the green men. Where to, Calvert?’

  ‘Home. If you can find it in this lot.’

  ‘Craigmore? I can find it.’ He puffed at his cigar and held the end close to his eyes. ‘I think I should put this out. It’s getting so I can’t even see the length of the wheelhouse windows, far less beyond them. Uncle Arthur’s taking his time, isn’t he?’

  ‘Uncle Arthur is interrogating the prisoners.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say he’d get much out of that lot.’

  ‘Neither would I. They’re not too happy’

  ‘Well, it was a nasty jump from the pier to the foredeck. Especially with the bows plunging up and down as they were. And more especially with their arms tied behind their backs.’

  ‘One broken ankle and one broken forearm,’ I said. ‘It could have been worse. They could have missed the foredeck altogether.’

  ‘You have a point,’ Hutchinson agreed. He stuck his head out the side window and withdrew it again. ‘It’s not the cigar,’ he announced. ‘No need to quit smoking. Visibility is zero, and I mean zero. We’re flying blind on instruments. You may as well switch on the wheelhouse lights. Makes it all that easier to read the charts, depth-sounder and compass and doesn’t affect the radar worth a damn.’ He stared at me as the light came on. ‘What the hell are you doing in that flaming awful outfit?’

  ‘This is a dressing-gown,’ I explained. ‘I’ve three suits and all three are soaked and ruined. Any luck, sir?’ Uncle Arthur had just come in to the wheelhouse.

  ‘One of them passed out.’ Uncle Arthur wasn’t looking very pleased with himself. ‘The other kept moaning so loudly that I couldn’t make myself heard. Well, Calvert, the story.’

  ‘The story, sir? I was just going to bed. I’ve told you the story.’

  ‘Half a dozen quick sentences that I couldn’t hear above their damned caterwauling,’ he said coldly. ‘The whole story, Calvert.’

  ‘I’m feeling weak, sir.’

  ‘I’ve rarely known a time when you weren’t feeling weak, Calvert. You know where the whisky is.’

  Hutchinson coughed respectfully. ‘I wonder if the admiral would permit –’

  ‘Certainly, certainly,’ Uncle Arthur said in a quite different tone. ‘Of course, my boy’ The boy was a clear foot taller than Uncle Arthur. ‘And while you’re at it, Calvert, you might bring one for me, too, a normal-sized one.’ He had his nasty side to him, had Uncle Arthur.

  I said ‘good night’ five minutes later. Uncle Arthur wasn’t too pleased, I’d the feeling he thought I’d missed out on the suspense and fancy descriptions, but I was as tired as the old man with the scythe after Hiroshima. I looked in on Charlotte Skouras, she was sleeping like the dead. I wondered about that chemist back in Torbay, he’d been three parts asleep, myopic as a bam owl and crowding eighty. He could have made a mistake. He could have had only a minimal experience in the prescribing of sleep-inducing drugs for those who lived in the land of the Hebridean prayer: ‘Would that the peats might cut themselves and the fish jump on the shore, that I upon my bed might lie, and sleep for ever more.’

  But I’d done the old boy an injustice. After what was, to me, our miraculous arrival in Craigmore’s apology for a harbour it had taken me no more than a minute to shake Charlotte into something resembling wakefulness. I told her to get dressed – a cunning move this to make her think I didn’t know she was still dressed – and come ashore. Fifteen minutes after that we were all inside Hutchinson’s house and fifteen minutes still later, when Uncle Arthur and I had roughly splinted the prisoners’ fractures and locked them in a room illuminated only by a sky-light that would have taken Houdini all his time to wriggle through, I was in bed in another tiny box-room that was obviously the sleeping-quarters of the chairman of the Craigmore’s art gallery selection committee, for he’d kept all the best exhibits to himself. I was just dropping off to sleep, thinking that if the universities ever got around to awarding Ph.D.s to house agents, the first degree would surely go to the first man who sold a Hebridean hut within sniffing distance of a flensing shed, when the door opened and the lights came on. I blinked open exhausted eyes and saw Charlotte Skouras softly closing the door behind her.

  ‘Go away’ I said. ‘I’m sleeping.’

  ‘May I come in?’ she asked. She gazed around the art gallery and her lips moved in what could have been the beginnings of a smile. ‘I would have thought you would have gone to sleep with the lights on to-night.’

  ‘You should see the ones behind the wardrobe doors,’ I boasted. I slowly opened my eyes as far as I could without mechanical aid. ‘Sorry, I’m tired. What can I do? I’m not at my best receiving lady callers in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Uncle Arthur’s next door. You can always scream for help if you want to.’ She looked at a moth-eaten armchair. ‘May I sit down?’

  She sat down. She still wore that uncrushable white dress and her hair was neatly combed, but that was about all you could say for her. Attempts at humour there might have been in her voice, but there was none in her face and none in her eyes. Those brown, wise, knowing eyes, eyes that knew all about living and loving and laughter, the eyes that had once made her the most sought-after actress of her time now held only sadness and despair. And fear. Now that she had escaped from her husband and his accomplices, there should have been no need for fear. But it was there, half-buried in the tired brown eyes, but there. Fear was an expression I knew. The lines round the eyes and mouth that looked so right, so inevitable, when she smiled or laughed – in the days when she had smiled and laughed – looked as if they had been etched by time and suffering and sorrow and despair into a face that had never known laughter and love. Charlotte Skouras’s face, without the Charlotte Meiner of old behind it, no longer looked as if it belonged to her. A worn, a weary and an alien face. She must have been about thirty-five, I guessed, but she looked a deal older. And yet when she sat in that chair, almost huddled in that chair, the Craigmore art gallery no longer existed.

  She said flatly: ‘You don’t trust me, Philip.’

  ‘What on earth makes you say that? Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘You tell me. You are evasive, you will not answer questions. No, that is wrong, you will and you do answer questions, but I know enough of men to know that the answers you give me are the ones you want to give me and not the ones I should hear. Why should this be, Philip? What have I done that you should not trust me?’

  ‘So the truth is not in me? Well, I suppose I do stretch it a bit at times, I may even occasionally tell a lie. Strictly in the line of business, of course. I wouldn’t lie to a person like you.’ I meant it and intended not to – unless I had to do it for her sake, which was different.

  ‘Why should you not lie to a person like me?’

  ‘I don’t know how to say it. I could say I don’t usually lie to lovely and attractive women for whom I have a high regard, and then you’d cynically say I was stretching the truth till it snapped, and you’d be wrong because it
is the truth, if truth lies in the eye of the beholder. I don’t know if that sounds like an insult, it’s never meant to be. I could say it’s because I hate to see you sitting there all washed up and with no place to go and no one to turn to at the one time in your life you need some place to go and someone to turn to, but I suppose again that might sound like an insult. I could say I don’t lie to my friends, but that again would be an insult, the Charlotte Skourases of this world don’t make friends with government hirelings who kill for their wages. It’s no good. I don’t know what to say, Charlotte, except that it doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not as long as you believe that no harm will come to you from me and, as long as I’m near you, no harm will come to you from anyone else either. Maybe you don’t believe that either, maybe your feminine intuition has stopped working.’

  ‘It is working – what you say? – overtime. Very hard indeed.’ The brown eyes were still and the face without expression. ‘I do think I could place my life in your hands.’

  ‘You might not get it back again.’

  ‘It’s not worth all that much. I might not want it back.’

  She looked at me for a long moment when there was no fear in her eyes, then stared down at her folded hands. She gazed at them so long that I finally looked in the same direction myself, but there was nothing wrong with her hands that I could see. Finally she looked up with an almost timid half-smile that didn’t belong to her at all.

  ‘You are wondering why I came,’ she asked.

  ‘No. You’ve told me. You want me to tell you a story. Especially the beginning and end of the story.’