When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘What else did they say? What else did they do?’ Hunslett spoke so quietly that I could hear the note of the engines of the customs’ boat fall away sharply as their searchlight lit up the low-water stone pier, half a mile away. ‘Take an undue interest in anything?’

  ‘They took an undue interest in everything. Wait a minute, though, wait a minute. Thomas seemed particularly intrigued by the batteries, by the large amount of reserve electrical power we had.’

  ‘Did he now? Did he indeed? And did you notice how lightly our two customs friends swung aboard their launch when leaving?’

  ‘They’ll have done it a thousand times.’

  ‘Both of them had their hands free. They weren’t carrying anything. They should have been carrying something.’

  ‘The photo-copier. I’m getting old.’

  ‘The photo-copier. Standard equipment my ruddy foot. So if our fair-haired pal wasn’t busy photo-copying he was busy doing something else.’

  We moved inside the wheelhouse. Hunslett selected the larger screw-driver from the tool-rack beside the echo-sounder and had the face-plate off our R.T.D./D.F. set inside sixty seconds. He looked at the interior for five seconds, looked at me for the same length of time, then started screwing the face-plate back into position. One thing was certain, we wouldn’t be using that transmitter for a long time to come.

  I turned away and stared out through the wheelhouse windows into the darkness. The wind was still rising, the black sea gleamed palely as the whitecaps came marching in from the south-west, the Firecrest snubbed sharply on her anchor chain and, with the wind and the tide at variance, she was beginning to corkscrew quite noticeably now. I felt desperately tired. But my eyes were still working. Hunslett offered me a cigarette. I didn’t want one, but I took one. Who knew, it might even help me to think. And then I had caught his wrist and was staring down at his palm.

  ‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘The cobbler should stick to his last.’ ‘He what?’

  ‘Wrong proverb. Can’t think of the right one. A good workman uses only his own tools. Our pal with the penchant for smashing valves and condensers should have remembered that. No wonder my neck was twitching when Durran was around. How did you cut yourself?’

  ‘I didn’t cut myself.’

  ‘I know. But there’s a smear of blood on your palm. He’s been taking lessons from Peter Sellers, I shouldn’t wonder. Standard southern English on the Nantesville, northern Irish on the Firecrest. I wonder how many other accents he has up his sleeve – behind his larynx, I should say. And I thought he was running to a little fat. He’s running to a great deal of muscle. You noticed he never took his gloves off, even when he had that drink?’

  ‘I’m the best noticer you ever saw. Beat me over the head with a club and I’ll notice anything.’ He sounded bitter. ‘Why didn’t they clobber us? You, anyway? The star witness?’

  ‘Maybe we have moved out of our class. Two reasons. They couldn’t do anything with the cops there, genuine cops as we’ve both agreed, not unless they attended to the cops too. Only a madman would deliberately kill a cop and whatever those boys may lack it isn’t sanity.’

  ‘But why cops in the first place?’

  ‘Aura of respectability. Cops are above suspicion. When a uniformed policeman shoves his uniformed cap above your gunwale in the dark watches of the night, you don’t whack him over the head with a marline-spike. You invite him aboard. All others you might whack, especially if we had the bad consciences we might have been supposed to have.’

  ‘Maybe. It’s arguable. And the second point?’

  ‘They took a big chance, a desperate chance, almost, with Durran. He was thrown to the wolves to see what the reaction would be, whether either of us recognised him.’

  ‘Why Durran?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you. I shone a torch in his face. The face didn’t register, just a white blur with screwed-up eyes half-hidden behind an upflung hand. I was really looking lower down, picking the right spot to kick him. But they weren’t to know that. They wanted to find out if we would recognise him. We didn’t. If we had done we’d either have started throwing the crockery at him or yelped for the cops to arrest them – if we’re against them then we’re with the cops. But we didn’t. Not a flicker of recognition. Nobody’s as good as that. I defy any man in the world to meet up again in the same night with a man who has murdered two other people and nearly murdered himself without at least twitching an eyebrow. So the immediate heat is off, the urgent necessity to do us in has become less urgent. It’s a safe bet that if we didn’t recognise Durran, then we recognised nobody on the Nantesville and so we won’t be burning up the lines to Interpol.’

  ‘We’re in the dear?’

  ‘I wish to God we were. They’re on to us.’

  ‘But you said ’

  ‘I don’t know how I know,’ I said irritably. ‘I know. They went through the after end of the Firecrest like a Treble Chance winner hunting for the coupon he’s afraid he’s forgotten to post. Then halfway through the engine-room search – click! – just like that and they weren’t interested any more. At least Thomas wasn’t. He’d found out something. You saw him afterwards in the saloon, the fore cabins and the upper deck. He couldn’t have cared less.’

  ‘The batteries?’

  ‘No. He was satisfied with my explanation. I could tell. I don’t know why, I only know I’m sure.’

  ‘So they’ll be back.’

  ‘They’ll be back.’

  ‘I get the guns out now?’

  ‘There’s no hurry. Our friends will be sure we can’t communicate with anyone. The mainland boat calls here only twice a week. It came to-day and won’t be back for four days. The lines to the mainland are down and if I thought for a moment they would stay down I should be back in kindergarten. Our transmitter is out. Assuming there are no carrier pigeons in Torbay, what’s the only remaining means of communication with the mainland?’

  ‘There’s the Shangri-la.’ The Shangri-la, the nearest craft to ours, was white, gleaming, a hundred and twenty feet long and wouldn’t have left her owner a handful of change from a quarter of a million pounds when he’d bought her. ‘She’ll have a couple of thousand quids’ worth of radio equipment aboard. Then there are two, maybe three yachts big enough to carry transmitters. The rest will carry only receivers, if that.’

  ‘And how many transmitters in Torbay harbour will still be in operating condition to-morrow?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘One. Our friends will attend to the rest. They’ll have to. We can’t warn anyone. We can’t give ourselves away.’

  ‘The insurance companies can stand it.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘This would be a nice time to wake up Uncle Arthur.’

  ‘I can’t put it off any longer.’ I wasn’t looking forward to talking to Uncle Arthur.

  Hunslett reached for a heavy coat, pulled it on, made for the door and stopped. ‘I thought I’d take a walk on the upper deck. While you’re talking. Just in case. A second thought – I’d better have that gun now. Thomas said they’d already checked three boats in the harbour. MacDonald didn’t contradict him, so it was probably true. Maybe there are no serviceable transmitters left in Torbay now. Maybe our friends just dumped the cops ashore and are coming straight back for us.’

  ‘Maybe. But those yachts are smaller than the Firecrest. Apart from us, there’s only one with a separate wheelhouse. The others will carry transmitters in the saloon cabin. Lots of them sleep in their saloon cabins. The owners would have to be banged on the head first before the radios could be attended to. They couldn’t do that with MacDonald around.’

  ‘You’d bet your pension on that? Maybe MacDonald didn’t always go aboard.’

  ‘I’ll never live to collect my pension. But maybe you’d better have that gun.’

  The Firecrest was just over three years old. The Southampton boatyard and marine-radio firm that had combined to build her had done so under conditions of sworn secrecy to a design p
rovided by Uncle Arthur. Uncle Arthur had not designed her himself although he had never said so to the few people who knew of the existence of the boat. He’d pinched the idea from a Japanese-designed Indonesianowned fishing craft that had been picked up with engine failure off the Malaysian coast. Only one engine had failed though two were installed, but still she had been not under command, an odd circumstance that had led the alert Engineer Lieutenant on the frigate that had picked her up to look pretty closely at her: the net result of his investigation, apart from giving this splendid inspiration to Uncle Arthur, was that the crew still languished in a Singapore prisoner of war camp.

  The Firecrest’s career had been chequered and inglorious. She had cruised around the Eastern Baltic for some time, without achieving anything, until the authorities in Memel and Leningrad, getting tired of the sight of her, had declared the Firecrest persona non grata and sent her back to England. Uncle Arthur had been furious, especially as he had to account to a parsimonious Under-Secretary for the considerable expense involved. The Waterguard had tried their hand with it at catching smugglers and returned it without thanks. No smugglers. Now for the first time ever it was going to justify its existence and in other circumstances Uncle Arthur would have been delighted. When he heard what I had to tell him he would have no difficulty in restraining his joy.

  What made the Firecrest unique was that while she had two screws and two propeller shafts, she had only one engine. Two engine casings, but only one engine, even although that one engine was a special job fitted with an underwater bypass exhaust valve. A simple matter of disengaging the fuel pump coupling and unscrewing four bolts on top – the rest were dummies – enabled the entire head of the diesel starboard engine to be lifted clear away, together with the fuel lines and injectors. With the assistance of the seventy foot telescopic radio mast housed inside our aluminium foremast, the huge gleaming transmitter that took up eighty per cent of the space inside the starboard engine casing could have sent a signal to the moon, if need be: as Thomas had observed, we had power and to spare. As it happened I didn’t want to send a signal to the moon, just to Uncle Arthur’s combinex office and home in Knightsbridge.

  The other twenty per cent of space was taken up with a motley collection of material that even the Assistant Commissioner in New Scotland Yard wouldn’t have regarded without a thoughtful expression on his face. There were some packages of pre-fabricated explosives with amatol, primer and chemical detonator combined in one neat unit with a miniature timing device that ranged from five seconds to five minutes, complete with sucker clamps. There was a fine range of burglar’s house-breaking tools, bunches of skeleton keys, several highly sophisticated listening devices, including one that could be shot from a Very-type pistol, several tubes of various harmless-looking tablets which were alleged, when dropped in some unsuspecting character’s drink, to induce unconsciousness for varying periods, four pistols and a box of ammunition. Anyone who was going to use that lot in one operation was in for a busy time indeed. Two of the pistols were Lugers, two were 4.25 German Lilliputs, the smallest really effective automatic pistol on the market. The Lilliput had the great advantage that it could be concealed practically anywhere on your person, even upside down in a spring-loaded clip in your lower left sleeve – if, that was, you didn’t get your suits cut in Carnaby Street.

  Hunslett lifted one of the Lugers from its clamp, checked the loading indicator and left at once. It wasn’t that he was imagining that he could already hear stealthy footsteps on the upper deck, he just didn’t want to be around when Uncle Arthur came on the air. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t really want to be around then either.

  I pulled out the two insulated rubber cables, fitted the powerfully spring-loaded saw-toothed metal clamps on to the battery terminals, hung on a pair of earphones, turned on the set, pulled another switch that actuated the call-up and waited. I didn’t have to tune in, the transmitter was permanently pre-set, and pre-set on a V.H.F. frequency that would have cost the licence of any ham operator who dared wander anywhere near it for transmission purposes.

  The red receiver warning light came on. I reached down and adjusted the magic eye control until the green fans met in the middle.

  ‘This is station SPFX,’ a voice came. ‘Station SPFX.’

  ‘Good morning. This is Caroline. May I speak to the manager, please?’

  ‘Will you wait, please?’ This meant that Uncle Arthur was in bed. Uncle Arthur was never at his best on rising. Three minutes passed and the earphones came to life again.

  ‘Good morning, Caroline. This is Annabelle.’

  ‘Good morning. Location 481, 281.’ You wouldn’t find those references in any Ordnance Survey Map, there weren’t a dozen maps in existence with them. But Uncle Arthur had one. And so had I.

  There was a pause, then: ‘I have you, Caroline. Proceed.’

  ‘I located the missing vessel this afternoon. Four or five miles north-west of here. I went on board to-night.’

  ‘You did what, Caroline?’

  ‘Went on board. The old crew has gone home. There’s a new crew aboard. A smaller crew.’

  ‘You located Betty and Dorothy?’ Despite the fact that we both had scramblers fitted to our radio phones, making intelligible eavesdropping impossible, Uncle Arthur always insisted that we spoke in a roundabout riddle fashion and used code names for his employees and himself. Girls’ names for our surnames, initials to match. An irritating foible, but one that we had to observe. He was Annabelle, I was Caroline, Baker was Betty, Delmont, Dorothy and Hunslett, Harriet. It sounded like a series of Caribbean hurricane warnings.

  ‘I found them.’ I took a deep breath. ‘They won’t be coming home again, Annabelle.’

  ‘They won’t be coming home again,’ he repeated mechanically. He was silent for so long that I began to think that he had gone off the air. Then he came again, his voice empty, remote. ‘I warned you of this, Caroline.’

  ‘Yes, Annabelle, you warned me of this.’

  ‘And the vessel?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just gone. North, I suppose.’

  ‘North, you suppose.’ Uncle Arthur never raised his voice, when he went on it was as calm and impersonal as ever, but the sudden disregard of his own rules about circumlocution betrayed the savage anger in his mind. ‘North where? Iceland? A Norwegian fjord? To effect a trans-shipment of cargo anywhere in a million square miles between the mid-Atlantic and the Barents Sea? And you lost her. After all the time, the trouble, the planning, the expense, you’ve lost her!’ He might have spared me that bit about the planning, it had been mine all the way. ‘And Betty and Dorothy.’ The last words showed he’d taken control of himself again.

  ‘Yes, Annabelle, I’ve lost her.’ I could feel the slow anger in myself. ‘And there’s worse than that, if you want to listen to it.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  I told him the rest and at the end of it he said: ‘I see. You’ve lost the vessel. You’ve lost Betty and Dorothy. And now our friends know about you, the one vital element of secrecy is gone for ever and every usefulness and effectiveness you might ever have had is completely negated.’ A pause. ‘I shall expect you in my office at nine p.m. to-night. Instruct Harriet to take the boat back to base.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The hell with his Annabelle. ‘I had expected that. I’ve failed. I’ve let you down. I’m being pulled off.’

  ‘Nine o’clock to-night, Caroline. I’ll be waiting.’

  ‘You’ll have a long wait, Annabelle.’

  ‘And what might you mean by that?’ If Uncle Arthur had had a low silky menacing voice then he’d have spoken those words in a low silky menacing voice. But he hadn’t, he’d only this flat level monotone and it carried infinitely more weight and authority than any carefully modulated theatrical voice that had ever graced a stage.

  ‘There are no planes to this place, Annabelle. The mail-boat doesn’t call for another four
days. The weather’s breaking down and I wouldn’t risk our boat to try to get to the mainland. I’m stuck here for the time being, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Do you take me for a nincompoop, sir?’ Now he was at it. ‘Go ashore this morning. An air-sea rescue helicopter will pick you up at noon. Nine p.m. at my office. Don’t keep me waiting.’

  This, then, was it. But one last try. ‘Couldn’t you give me another twenty-four hours, Annabelle?’

  ‘Now you’re being ridiculous. And wasting my time. Good-bye.’

  ‘I beg of you, sir.’

  ‘I’d thought better of you than that. Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye. We may meet again sometime. It’s not likely. Good-bye.’

  I switched the radio off, lit a cigarette and waited. The call-up came through in half a minute. I waited another half-minute and switched on. I was very calm. The die was cast and I didn’t give a damn.

  ‘Caroline? Is that you, Caroline?’ I could have sworn to a note of agitation in his voice. This was something for the record books.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you say? At the end there?’

  ‘Good-bye. You said good-bye. I said good-bye.’

  ‘Don’t quibble with me, sir! You said –’

  ‘If you want me aboard that helicopter,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to send a guard with the pilot. An armed guard. I hope they’re good. I’ve got a Luger, and you know I’m good. And if I have to kill anyone and go into court, then you’ll have to stand there beside me because there’s no single civil action or criminal charge that even you, with all your connections, can bring against me that would justify the sending of armed men to apprehend me, an innocent man. Further, I am no longer in your employment. The terms of my civil service contract state clearly that I can resign at any moment, provided that I am not actively engaged on an operation at that moment. You’ve pulled me off, you’ve recalled me to London. My resignation will be on your desk as soon as the mail can get through. Baker and Delmont weren’t your friends. They were my friends. They were my friends ever since I joined the service. You have the temerity to sit there and lay all the blame for their deaths on my shoulders when you know damn’ well that every operation must have your final approval, and now you have the final temerity to deny me a one last chance to square accounts. I’m sick of your damned soulless service. Good-bye.’