When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  She nodded. ‘When I began as a stage actress, I played very small parts, but I knew what the play was all about. In this real-life play, I’m still playing a very small part. Only, I no longer know what the play is all about. I come on for three minutes in Act 2, but I have no idea what has gone before. I’m back for another minute in Act 4, but I’ve no idea in the world what’s happened between Acts 2 and 4. And I cannot begin to imagine how it will all end.’ She half-lifted her arms, turning the palms upwards. ‘You cannot imagine how frustrating this can be for a woman.’

  ‘You really know nothing of what has gone before this?’

  ‘I ask you to believe me.’

  I believed her. I believed her because I knew it to be true.

  ‘Go to the front room and bring me, as they say in these parts, a refreshment,’ I said. ‘I grow weaker by the hour.’

  So she rose obediently and went to the front room and brought me the refreshment which gave me just enough strength to tell her what she wanted to know.

  ‘They were a triumvirate,’ I said, which if not strictly accurate, was close enough to the truth for my explanation. ‘Sir Anthony, Lavorski, who, I gather, was not only his public and private accountant, but his overall financial director as well, and John Dollmann, the managing director of the shipping companies – they were split up for tax reasons – associated with your husband’s oil companies. I thought that MacCallum, the Scots lawyer, and Jules Biscarte, the lad with the beard who owns one of the biggest merchant banks in Paris, was in with them too. But they weren’t. At least not Biscarte. I think he was invited aboard ostensibly to discuss business but actually to provide our triumvirate with information that would have given them the basis for their next coup, but he didn’t like the way the wind was blowing and shied off. I know nothing about MacCallum.’

  ‘I know nothing about Biscarte,’ Charlotte said. ‘Neither he nor Mr MacCallum stayed aboard the Shangri-la, they were at the Columba hotel for a few days and were invited out twice for dinner. They haven’t been aboard since the night you were there.’

  ‘Among other things they didn’t care for your husband’s treatment of you.’

  ‘I didn’t care for it myself. I know what Mr MacCallum was doing aboard. My husband was planning to build a refinery in the Clyde estuary this coming winter and MacCallum was negotiating the lease for him. My husband said that, by the end of the year, he expected to have a large account of uncommitted capital for investment.’

  ‘I’ll bet he did, that’s as neat a phrase for the proceeds of grand larceny as ever I’ve come across. Lavorski, I think we’ll find, was the instigator and guiding brain behind all this. Lavorski it would have been who discovered that the Skouras empire was badly in need of some new lifeblood in the way of hard cash and saw the way of putting matters right by using means they already had close to hand.’

  ‘But – but my husband was never short of money,’ Charlotte objected.

  ‘He had the best of everything, yachts, cars, houses –’ ‘He was never short in that sense. Neither were half the millionaires who jumped off the New York skyscrapers at the time of the stock market crash. Do be quiet, there’s a good girl, you know nothing about high finance.’ Coming from a character who eked out a bare living from an inadequate salary, I reflected, that was very good indeed. ‘Lavorski struck upon the happy idea of piracy on a grand scale – vessels carrying not less than a million pounds’ worth of specie at a time.’

  She stared at me, her lips parted. I wished I had teeth like that, instead of having had half of them knocked out by Uncle Arthur’s enemies over the years. Uncle Arthur, I mused bitterly, was twenty-five years older than I was and was frequently heard to boast that he’d still to lose his first tooth. She whispered: ‘You’re making all this up.’

  ‘Lavorski made it all up. I’m just telling you, I wouldn’t have the brains to think of something like that. Having thought up this splendid scheme for making money, they found themselves with three problems to solve: how to discover when and where large quantities of specie were being shipped, how to seize those ships and how to hide them while they opened the strong-room – a process which in ships fitted with the most modern strongrooms can take anything up to a day – and removed said specie.

  ‘Problem number one was easy. I have no doubt that they may have suborned high-ranking banking officials – the fact that they tried it on with Biscarte is proof of that – but I don’t think it will ever be possible to bring those men to justice. But it will be possible to arrest and very successfully indict their ace informant, their trump card, our good friend the belted broker. Lord Charnley. To make a real good-going success of piracy you require the co-operation of Lloyd’s. Well, that’s an actionable statement, the co-operation of someone in Lloyd’s. Someone like Lord Charnley. He is, by profession, a marine underwriter at Lloyd’s. Stop staring at me like that, you’re putting me off.

  ‘A large proportion of valuable marine cargoes are insured at Lloyd’s. Charnley would know of at least a number of those. He would know the amount, the firm or bank of dispatch, and possibly the date of dispatch and vessel.’

  ‘But Lord Charnley is a wealthy man,’ she said.

  ‘Lord Charnley gives the appearance of being a wealthy man,’ I corrected. ‘Granted, he had to prove that he was a man of substance to gain admission to the old club, but he may have backed the wrong insurance horses or played the stock market. He either needed money or wanted money. He may have plenty but money is like alcohol, some people can take it and some can’t, and with those who can’t the more money they have the more they require.

  ‘Dollmann solved problem two – the hi-jacking of the specie. I shouldn’t imagine this strained his resources too far. Your husband ships his oil into some very odd and very tough places indeed and it goes without saying that he employs some very odd and very tough people to do it. Dollmann wouldn’t have recruited the hi-jacking crew himself, he probably singled out our good friend Captain Imrie, who will prove to have a very interesting history, and gave him the authority to go through the Skouras fleets and hand-pick suitable men for the job. Once the hi-jacking crew was assembled and ready, Messrs. Skouras, Lavorski and Dollmann waited till the victim was on the high seas, dumped you and the stewardess in a hotel, embarked the lads on the Shangri-la, intercepted the specie-carrying vessel and by one of a series of ruses I’ll tell you about later, succeded in boarding it and taking over. Then the Shangri-la landed the captured crew under guard while the prize crew sailed the hi-jacked vessel to the appointed hiding-place.’

  ‘It can’t be true, it can’t be true,’ she murmured. It was a long time since I’d seen any woman wringing her hands but Charlotte Skouras was doing it then. Her face was quite drained of colour. She knew that what I was saying was true and she’d never heard of any of it before. ‘Hiding place, Philip? What hiding place?’

  ‘Where would you hide a ship, Charlotte?’

  ‘How should I know?’ She shrugged tiredly. ‘My mind is not very clear to-night. Up in the Arctic perhaps, or in a lonely Norwegian fjord or some desert island. I can’t think any more, Philip. There cannot be many places. A ship is a big thing.’

  ‘There are millions of places. You can hide a ship practically anywhere in the world. All you have to do is to open the bilge-valves and engine-room non-return valves to the bilges and detonate a couple of scuttling charges.’

  ‘You mean – you mean that -’

  ‘I mean just that. You send it to the bottom. The west side of the Sound to the east of Dubh Sgeir island, a cheery stretch of water rejoicing in the name of Beul nan Uamh – the mouth of the grave – must be the most densely packed marine graveyard in Europe to-day. At dead slack water the valves were opened at a very carefully selected spot in the Beul nan Uamh and down they went, all five of them, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. Tide tables show that, coincidentally, most of them were sunk at or near midnight. Cease upon the midnight, as the poet says, only in this case with a very gr
eat deal of pain, at least for the underwriters involved. Beul nan Uamh. Odd, I never thought of it before. A very apt name indeed. The mouth of the grave. Damn’ place is printed far too large in the chart, it doesn’t have to be very obvious to be too obvious for Calvert.’

  She hadn’t been listening to my meanderings. She said: ‘Dubh Sgeir? But – but that’s the home of Lord Kirkside.’

  ‘It’s not but, it’s because. The hiding place was picked either by your husband, or, if someone else, then the arrangement was made through your husband. I never knew until recently that your husband was an old drinking pal of Lord Kirkside. I saw him yesterday, but he wouldn’t talk. Nor would his charming daughter.’

  ‘You do move around. I’ve never met the daughter.’

  ‘You should. She thinks you’re an old gold-digging hag. A nice kid really. But terrified, terrified for her life and those of others.’

  ‘Why on earth should she be?’

  ‘How do you think our triumvirate got Lord Kirkside to agree to their goings-on?’

  ‘Money. Bribery.’

  I shook my head. ‘Lord Kirkside is a Highlander and a gendeman. It’s a pretty fierce combination. Old Skouras could never lay hands on enough money to bribe Lord Kirkside to pass the uncollected fares box on a bus, if he hadn’t paid. A poor illustration, Lord Kirkside wouldn’t recognise a bus even if it ran over him, but what I mean is, the old boy is incorruptive. So your charming friends kidnapped old Kirkside’s elder son – the younger lives in Australia – and just to make sure that Susan Kirkside wouldn’t be tempted to do anything silly, they kidnapped her fiancé. A guess, but a damned good one. They’re supposed to be dead.’

  ‘No, no,’ she whispered. Her hand was to her mouth and her voice was shaking. ‘My God, no!’

  ‘My God, yes. It’s logical and tremendously effective. They also kidnapped Sergeant MacDonald’s sons and Donald MacEachern’s wife for the same reason. To buy silence and co-operation.’

  ‘But – but people just can’t disappear like that.’

  ‘We’re not dealing with street corner boys, we’re dealing with criminal master-minds. Disappearances are rigged to look like accidental death. A few other people have disappeared also, people who had the misfortune to be hanging around in small private boats while our friends were waiting for the tide to be exactly right before opening the sea-cocks on the hijacked ships.’

  ‘Didn’t it arouse police suspicion? Having so many small boats disappear in the same place.’

  ‘They sailed or towed two of those boats fifty or more miles away and ran them on the rocks. Another could have disappeared anywhere. The fourth did set sail from Torbay and disappeared, but the disappearance of one boat is not enough to arouse suspicion.’

  ‘It must be true, I know it must be true.’ She shook her head as if she didn’t believe it was true at all. ‘It all fits so well, it explains so many things and explains them perfectly. But – but what’s the good of knowing all this now? They’re on to you, they know you know that something is far wrong and that that something is in Loch Houron. They’ll leave –’

  ‘How do they know we suspect Loch Houron?’

  ‘Uncle Arthur told me in the wheelhouse last night.’ Surprise in her voice. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  I hadn’t remembered. I did now. I was half-dead from lack of sleep. A stupid remark. Perhaps even a give-away remark. I was glad Uncle Arthur hadn’t heard that one.

  ‘Calvert nears the sunset of his days,’ I said. ‘My mind’s going. Sure they’ll leave. But not for forty-eight hours yet. They will think they have plenty of time, it’s less than eight hours since we instructed Sergeant MacDonald to tell them that we were going to the mainland for help.’

  ‘I see,’ she said dully. ‘And what did you do on Dubh Sgeir tonight, Philip?’

  ‘Not much. But enough.’ Another little white lie. ‘Enough to confirm my every last suspicion. I swam ashore to the little harbour and picked the side door of the boathouse. It’s quite a boat-house. Not only is it three times as big on the inside as it is from the outside, but it’s stacked with diving equipment.’

  ‘Diving equipment?’

  ‘Heaven help us all, you’re almost as stupid as I am. How on earth do you think they recover the stuff from the sunken vessels? They use a diving-boat and the Dubh Sgeir boathouse is its home.’

  ‘Was – was that all you found out?’

  ‘There was nothing more to find out. I had intended taking a look round the castle – there’s a long flight of steps leading up to it from the boatyard inside the cliff itself – but there was some character sitting about three parts of the way up with a rifle in his hand. A guard of some sort. He was drinking out of some sort of bottle, but he was doing his job for all that. I wouldn’t have got within a hundred steps of him without being riddled. I left.’

  ‘Dear God,’ she murmured. ‘What a mess, what a terrible mess. And you’ve no radio, we’re cut off from help. What are we going to do? What are you going to do, Philip?’

  ‘I’m going there in the Firecrest this coming night, that’s what I’m going to do. I have a machine-gun under the settee of the saloon in the Firecrest and Uncle Arthur and Tim Hutchinson will have a gun apiece. We’ll reconnoitre. Their time is running short and they’ll want to be gone to-morrow at the latest. The boathouse doors are ill-fitting and if there’s no light showing that will mean they still haven’t finished their diving. So we wait till they have finished and come in. We’ll see the light two miles away when they open the door to let the diving-boat in to load up all the stuff they’ve cached from the four other sunken ships. The front doors of the boathouse will be closed, of course, while they load up. So we go in through the front doors. On the deck of the Firecrest. The doors don’t look all that strong to me. Surprise is everything. We’ll catch them napping. A sub-machine-gun in a small enclosed space is a deadly weapon.’

  ‘You’ll be killed, you’ll be killed!’ She crossed to and sat on the bed-side, her eyes wide and scared. ‘Please, Philip! Please, please don’t. You’ll be killed, I tell you. I beg of you, don’t do it!’ She seemed very sure that I would be killed.

  ‘I have to, Charlotte. Time has run out. There’s no other way’

  ‘Please.’ The brown eyes were full of unshed tears. This I couldn’t believe: ‘Please, Philip. For my sake.’

  ‘No.’ A tear-drop fell at the corner of my mouth, it tasted as salt as the sea. ‘Anything else in the world. But not this.’

  She rose slowly to her feet and stood there, arms hanging limply by her side, tears trickling down her cheeks. She said dully: ‘It’s the maddest plan I’ve ever heard in my life,’ turned and left the room, switching off the light as she went.

  I lay there staring into the darkness. There was sense in what the lady said. It was, I thought, the maddest plan I’d ever heard in my life. I was damned glad I didn’t have to use it.

  TEN

  Thursday: noon – Friday: dawn

  ‘Let me sleep.’ I said. I kept my eyes shut. ‘I’m a dead man.’

  ‘Come on, come on.’ Another violent shake, a hand like a power shovel. ‘Up!’

  ‘Oh, God!’ I opened the corner of one eye. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Just after noon. I couldn’t let you sleep any more.’

  ‘Noon! I asked to be shaken at five. Do you know –’

  ‘Come here.’ He moved to the window, and I swung my legs stiffly out of bed and followed him. I’d been operated on during my sleep, no anæsthetic required in the condition I was in, and someone had removed the bones from my legs. I felt awful. Hutchinson nodded towards the window. ‘What do you think of that?’

  I peered out into the grey opaque world. I said irritably: ‘What do you expect me to see in that damn’ fog?’

  ‘The fog.’

  ‘I see,’ I said stupidly. ‘The fog.’

  ‘The two a.m. shipping forecast,’ Hutchinson said. He gave the impression of exercising a very great
deal of patience. ‘It said the fog would clear away in the early morning. Well, the goddamned fog hasn’t cleared away in the early morning.’

  The fog cleared away from my befuddled brain. I swore and jumped for my least sodden suit of clothing. It was damp and clammy and cold but I hardly noticed these things, except subconsciously, my conscious mind was frantically busy with something else. On Monday night they’d sunk the Nantesville at slack water but there wasn’t a chance in a thousand that they would have been able to get something done that night or the Tuesday night, the weather had been bad enough in sheltered Torbay harbour, God alone knew what it would have been like in Beul nan Uamh. But they could have started last night, they had started last night for there had been no diving-boat in the Dubh Sgeir boathouse, and reports from the Nantesville’s owners had indicated that the strongroom was a fairly antiquated one, not of hardened steel, that could be cut open in a couple of hours with the proper equipment. Lavorski and company would have the proper equipment. The rest of last night, even had they three divers and reliefs working all the time, they could have brought up a fair proportion of the bullion but I’d been damn’ sure they couldn’t possibly bring up all eighteen tons of it. Marine salvage had been my business before Uncle Arthur had taken me away. They would have required another night or at least a good part of the night, because they only dared work when the sun was down. When no one could see them. But no one could see them in dense fog like this. This was as good as another night thrown in for free.

  ‘Give Uncle Arthur a shake. Tell him we’re on our way. In the Firecrest.’

  ‘He’ll want to come.’

  ‘He’ll have to stay. He’ll know damn’ well he’ll have to stay. Beul nan Uamh, tell him.’

  ‘Not Dubh Sgeir? Not the boathouse?’

  ‘You know damn’ well we can’t move in against that until midnight.’

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ Hutchinson said slowly. ‘We can’t move in against it until midnight.’

  The Beul nan Uamh wasn’t living up to its fearsome reputation. At that time in the afternoon it was dead slack water and there was only the gentlest of swells running up from the southwest. We crossed over from Ballara to the extreme north of the eastern shore of Dubh Sgeir and inched our way southward with bare steerage way on. We’d cut the by-pass valve into the underwater exhaust and, even in the wheelhouse, we could barely hear the throb of the diesel. Even with both wheelhouse doors wide open, we could just hear it and no more. But we hadn’t the wheelhouse doors open for the purpose of hearing our own engine.