When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Now wait a moment, Caroline.’ There was a cautious, almost placatory note to his voice. ‘No need to go off half-cocked.’ I was sure that no one had ever talked to Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason like that before but he didn’t seem particularly upset about it. He had the cunning of a fox, that infinitely agile and shrewd mind would be examining and discarding possibilities with the speed of a computer, he’d be wondering whether I was playing a game and if so how far he could play it with me without making it impossible for me to retreat from the edge of the precipice. Finally he said quietly: ‘You wouldn’t want to hang around there just to shed tears. You’re on to something.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’m on to something.’ I wondered what in the name of God I was on to.

  ‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours, Caroline.’

  ‘Forty-eight.’

  ‘Forty-eight. And then you return to London. I have your word?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘And Caroline?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I didn’t care for your way of talking there. I trust we never have a repetition of it.’

  ‘No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘Forty-eight hours. Report to me at noon and midnight.’ A click. Uncle Arthur was gone.

  The false dawn was in the sky when I went on deck. Cold heavy slanting driving rain was churning up the foam-flecked sea. The Firecrest, pulling heavily on her anchor chain, was swinging slowly through an arc of forty degrees, corkscrewing quite heavily now on the outer arc of the swing, pitching in the centre of them. She was snubbing very heavily on the anchor and I wondered uneasily how long the lengths of heaving line securing the dinghy, outboard and scuba gear to the chain could stand up to this sort of treatment.

  Hunslett was abaft the saloon, huddling in what little shelter it afforded. He looked up at my approach and said: ‘What do you make of that?’ He pointed to the palely gleaming shape of the Shangri-la, one moment on our quarter, the next dead astern as we swung on our anchor. Lights were burning brightly in the fore part of her superstructure, where the wheelhouse would be.

  ‘Someone with insomnia,’ I said. ‘Or checking to see if the anchor is dragging. What do you think it is – our recent guests laying about the Shangri-la radio installation with crow-bars? Maybe they leave lights on all night.’

  ‘Came on just ten minutes ago. And look, now – they’re out. Funny. How did you get on with Uncle?’

  ‘Badly. Fired me, then changed his mind. We have forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Forty-eight hours? What are you going to do in forty-eight hours?’

  ‘God knows. Have some sleep first. You too. Too much light in the sky for callers now.’

  Passing through the saloon, Hunslett said, apropos of nothing: ‘I’ve been wondering. What did you make of P.C. MacDonald? The young one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, glum, downcast. Heavy weight on his shoulders.’

  ‘Maybe he’s like me. Maybe he doesn’t like getting up in the middle of the night. Maybe he has girl trouble and if he has I can tell you that P.C. MacDonald’s love-life is the least of my concerns. Good night.’

  I should have listened to Hunslett more. For Hunslett’s sake.

  THREE

  Tuesday: 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.

  I need my sleep, just like anyone else. Ten hours, perhaps only eight, and I would have been my own man again. Maybe not exuding brightness, optimism and cheerfulness, the circumstances weren’t right for that, but at least a going concern, alert, perceptive, my mind operating on what Uncle Arthur would be by now regarding as its customary abysmal level but still the best it could achieve. But I wasn’t given that ten hours. Nor even the eight. Exactly three hours after dropping off I was wide awake again. Well, anyway, awake. I would have had to be stone deaf, drugged or dead to go on sleeping through the bawling and thumping that was currently assailing my left ear from what appeared to be a distance of not more than twelve inches.

  ‘Ahoy, there, Firecrest! Ahoy there!’ Thump, thump, thump on the boat’s side. ‘Can I come aboard? Ahoy, there! Ahoy, ahoy, ahoy!’

  I cursed this nautical idiot from the depths of my sleep-ridden being, swung a pair of unsteady legs to the deck and levered myself out of the bunk. I almost fell down, I seemed to have only one leg left, and my neck ached fiercely. A glance at the mirror gave quick external confirmation of my internal decrepitude. A haggard unshaven face, unnaturally pale, and bleary bloodshot eyes with dark circles under them. I looked away hurriedly, there were lots of things I could put up with first thing in the morning, but not sights like that.

  I opened the door across the passage. Hunslett was sound asleep and snoring. I returned to my own cabin and got busy with the dressing-gown and Paisley scarf again. The iron-lunged thumping character outside was still at it, if I didn’t hurry he would be roaring out ‘avast there’ any moment. I combed my hair into some sort of order and made my way to the upper deck.

  It was a cold, wet and windy world. A grey, dreary, unpleasant world, why the hell couldn’t they have let me sleep on. The rain was coming down in slanting sheets, bouncing inches high on the decks, doubling the milkiness of the spume-flecked sea. The lonely wind mourned through the rigging and the lower registers of sound and the steep-sided wind-truncated waves, maybe three feet from tip to trough, were high enough to make passage difficult if not dangerous for the average yacht tender.

  They didn’t make things in the slightest difficult or dangerous for the yacht tender that now lay alongside us. It maybe wasn’t as big – it looked it at first sight – as the Firecrest, but it was big enough to have a glassed-in cabin for’ard, a wheel-house that bristled and gleamed with controls and instrumentation that would have been no disgrace to a VC-10 and, abaft that, a sunken cockpit that could have sunbathed a football team without overcrowding. There were three crewmen dressed in black oilskins and fancy French navy hats with black ribbons down the back, two of them each with a boat-hook round one of the Firecrest’s guardrail stanchions. Half a dozen big inflated spherical rubber fenders kept the Firecrest from rubbing its plebeian paintwork against the whitely-varnished spotlessness of the tender alongside and it didn’t require the name on the bows or the crew’s hats to let me know that this was the tender that normally took up most of the after-deck space on the Shangri-la.

  Amidships a stocky figure, clad in a white vaguely naval brassbuttoned uniform and holding above his head a golf umbrella that would have had Joseph green with envy, stopped banging his gloved fist against the Firecrest’s planking and glared up at me.

  ‘Ha!’ I’ve never actually heard anyone snort out a word but this came pretty close to it. ‘There you are at last. Took your time about it, didn’t you? I’m soaked, man, soaked!’ A few spots of rain did show up quite clearly on the white seersucker. ‘May I come aboard?’ He didn’t wait for any permission, just leaped aboard with surprising nimbleness for a man of his build and years and nipped into the Firecrest’s wheelhouse ahead of me, which was pretty selfish of him as he still had his umbrella and all I had was my dressing-gown. I followed and closed the door behind me.

  He was a short, powerfully built character, fifty-five I would have guessed, with a heavily–tanned jowled face, close-cropped irongrey hair with tufted eyebrows to match, long straight nose and a mouth that looked as if it had been closed with a zip-fastener. A good-looking cove, if you liked that type of looks. The dark darting eyes looked me up and down and if he was impressed by what he saw he made a heroic effort to keep his admiration in check.

  ‘Sorry for the delay,’ I apologised. ‘Short of sleep. We had the customs aboard in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get off after that.’ Always tell everyone the truth if there’s an even chance of that truth coming out anyway, which in this case there was: gives one a reputation for forthright honesty.

  ‘The customs?’ He looked as if he intended to say ‘pshaw’ or ‘fiddlesticks’ or something of that order, then changed hi
s mind and looked up sharply. ‘An intolerable bunch of busybodies. And in the middle of the night. Shouldn’t have let them aboard. Sent them packing. Intolerable.

  What the deuce did they want?’ He gave the distinct impression of having himself had some trouble with the customs in the past.

  ‘They were looking for stolen chemicals. Stolen from some place in Ayrshire. Wrong boat.’

  ‘Idiots!’ He thrust out a stubby hand, he’d passed his final judgment on the unfortunate customs and the subject was now closed. ‘Skouras. Sir Anthony Skouras.’

  ‘Petersen.’ His grip made me wince, less from the sheer power of it than from the gouging effects of the large number of thickly encrusted rings that adorned his fingers. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some on his thumbs but he’d missed out on that. I looked at him with new interest. ‘Sir Anthony Skouras. I’ve heard of you of course.’

  ‘Nothing good. Columnists don’t like me because they know I despise them. A Cypriot who made his shipping millions through sheer ruthlessness, they say. True. Asked by the Greek Government to leave Athens. True. Became a naturalised British citizen and bought a knighthood. Absolutely true. Charitable works and public services. Money can buy anything. A baronetcy next but the market’s not right at the moment. Price is bound to fall. Can I use your radio transmitter? I see you have one.’

  ‘What’s that?’ The abrupt switch had me off-balance, no great achievement the way I was feeling.

  ‘Your radio transmitter, man! Don’t you listen to the news? All those major defence projects cancelled by the Pentagon. Price of steel tumbling. Must get through to my New York broker at once!’

  ‘Sorry. Certainly you may – but, but your own radio-telephone? Surely –’

  ‘It’s out of action.’ His mouth became more tight-lipped than ever and the inevitable happened: it disappeared. ‘It’s urgent, Mr Petersen.’

  ‘Immediately. You know how to operate this model?’

  He smiled thinly, which was probably the only way he was capable of smiling. Compared to the cinema-organ job he’d have aboard the Shangri-la, asking him if he could operate this was like asking the captain of a transatlantic jet if he could fly a Tiger Moth. ‘I think I can manage, Mr Petersen.’

  ‘Call me when you’re finished. I’ll be in the saloon.’ He’d be calling me before he’d finished, he’d be calling me before he’d even started. But I couldn’t tell him. Word gets around. I went down to the saloon, contemplated a shave and decided against it. It wouldn’t take that long.

  It didn’t. He appeared at the saloon door inside a minute, his face grim.

  ‘Your radio is out of order, Mr Petersen.’

  ‘They’re tricky to operate, some of those older jobs,’

  I said tactfully. ‘Maybe if I –’ ‘I say it’s out of order. I mean it’s out of order.’

  ‘Damned odd. It was working –’

  ‘Would you care to try it, please?’

  I tried it. Nothing. I twiddled everything I could lay hands on. Nothing.

  ‘A power failure, perhaps,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll check –’

  ‘Would you be so good as to remove the faceplate, please?’

  I stared at him in perplexity, switching the expression, after a suitable interval, to shrewd thoughtfulness. ‘What do you know, Sir Anthony, that I don’t?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  So I found out and went through all the proper motions of consternation, incredulity and tight-lipped indignation. Finally I said: ‘You knew. How did you know?’

  ‘Obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Your transmitter,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s more than just out order. You had the same midnight caller.’

  ‘And the Orion.’ The mouth vanished again. ‘The big blue ketch lying close in. Only other craft in the harbour apart from us with a radio transmitter. Smashed. Just come from there.’

  ‘Smashed? Theirs as well? But who in God’s name – it must be the work of a madman.’

  ‘Is it? Is it the work of a madman? I know something of those matters. My first wife -’ He broke off abruptly and gave an odd shake of the head, then went on slowly: ‘The mentally disturbed are irrational, haphazard, purposeless, aimless in their behaviour patterns. This seems an entirely irrational act, but an act with a method and a purpose to it. Not haphazard. It’s planned. There’s a reason. At first I thought the reason was to cut off my connection with the mainland. But it can’t be that. By rendering me temporarily incommunicado nobody stands to gain, I don’t stand to lose.’

  ‘But you said the New York Stock –’

  ‘A bagatelle,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Nobody likes to lose money.’ Not more than a few millions anyway. ‘No, Mr Petersen, I am not the target. We have here an A and a B. A regards it as vital that he remains in constant communication with the mainland. B regards it as vital that A doesn’t. So B takes steps. There’s something damned funny going on in Torbay. And something big. I have a nose for such things.’

  He was no fool but then not many morons have ended up as multimillionaires. I couldn’t have put it better myself. I said: ‘Reported this to the police yet?’

  ‘Going there now. After I’ve made a phone call or two.’ The eyes suddenly became bleak and cold. ‘Unless our friend has smashed up the two public call boxes in the main street.’

  ‘He’s done better than that. He’s brought down the lines to the mainland. Somewhere down the Sound. No one knows where.’

  He stared at me, wheeled to leave, then turned, his face empty of expression. ‘How did you know that?’ The tone matched the face.

  ‘Police told me. They were aboard with the customs last night.’

  ‘The police? That’s damned odd. What were the police doing here?’ He paused and looked at me with his cold measuring eyes. ‘A personal question, Mr Petersen. No impertinence intended. A question of elimination. What are you doing here? No offence.’

  ‘No offence. My friend and I are marine biologists. A working trip. Not our boat – the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.’ I smiled. ‘We have impeccable references, Sir Anthony.’

  ‘Marine biology, eh? Hobby of mine, you might say. Layman, of course. Must have a talk sometime.’ He was speaking absentmindedly, his thoughts elsewhere. ‘Could you describe the policeman, Mr Petersen?’

  I did and he nodded. ‘That’s him all right. Odd, very odd. Must have a word with Archie about this.’

  ‘Archie?’

  ‘Sergeant MacDonald. This is my fifth consecutive season’s cruising based on Torbay. The South of France and the ægean can’t hold a candle to these waters. Know quite a few of the locals pretty well by this time. He was alone?’

  ‘No. A young constable. His son, he said. Melancholy sort of lad.’

  ‘Peter MacDonald. He has reason for his melancholy, Mr Petersen. His two young brothers, sixteen years old, twins, died a few months back.

  At an Inverness school, lost in a late snow-storm in the Cairngorms. The father is tougher, doesn’t show it so much. A great tragedy. I knew them both. Fine boys.’

  I made some appropriate comment but he wasn’t listening.

  ‘I must be on my way, Mr Petersen. Put this damned strange affair in MacDonald’s hand. Don’t see that he can do much. Then off for a short cruise.’

  I looked through the wheelhouse windows at the dark skies, the white-capped seas, the driving rain. ‘You picked a day for it.’

  ‘The rougher the better. No bravado. I like a mill-pond as well as any man. Just had new stabilisers fitted in the Clyde – we got back up here only two days ago – and it seems like a good day to try them out.’ He smiled suddenly and put out his hand. ‘Sorry to have barged in. Taken up far too much of your time. Seemed rude, I suppose. Some say I am. You and your colleague care to come aboard for a drink to-night? We eat early at sea. Eight o’clock, say? I’ll send the tender.’ That meant we didn’t rate an invitation to dinner, which would have made a change from Hunslett and his damn
ed baked beans, but even an invitation like this would have given rise to envious tooth-gnashing in some of the stateliest homes in the land: it was no secret that the bluest blood in England, from Royalty downwards, regarded a holiday invitation to the island Skouras owned off the Albanian coast as the conferment of the social cachet of the year or any year. Skouras didn’t wait for an answer and didn’t seem to expect one. I didn’t blame him. It would have been many years since Skouras had discovered that it was an immutable law of human nature, human nature being what it is, that no one ever turned down one of his invitations.

  ‘You’ll be coming to tell me about your smashed transmitter and asking me what the devil I intend to do about it,’ Sergeant MacDonald said tiredly. ‘Well, Mr Petersen, I know all about it already. Sir Anthony Skouras was here half an hour ago Sir Anthony had a lot to say. And Mr Campbell, the owner of the Orion, has just left. He’d a lot to say, too.’

  ‘Not me, Sergeant. I’m a man of few words.’ I gave him what I hoped looked like a self-deprecatory smile. ‘Except, of course, when the police and customs drag me out of bed in the middle of the night. I take it our friends have left?’

  ‘Just as soon as they’d put us ashore. Customs are just a damn’ nuisance.’ Like myself, he looked as if he could do with some hours’ sleep. ‘Frankly, Mr Petersen, I don’t know what to do about the broken radio-transmitters. Why on earth – who on earth would want to do a daft vicious thing like that?’

  ‘That’s what I came to ask you.’

  ‘I can go aboard your boat,’ MacDonald said slowly. ‘I can take out my note-book, look around and see if I can’t find any clues. I wouldn’t know what to look for. Maybe if I knew something about fingerprinting and analysis and microscopy I might just find out something. But I don’t. I’m an island policeman, not a one-man Flying Squad. This is C.I.D. work and we’d have to call in Glasgow. I doubt if they’d send a couple of detectives to investigate a few smashed radio valves.’