When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Will I have any option?’

  ‘Nary an option.’

  ‘Then I’ll try. Where are you going ashore?’

  ‘Eilean Oran and Craigmore. The two innermost islands in Loch Houron. If,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I can find them.’

  ‘Eilean Oran and Craigmore.’ I could have been wrong, but I thought the faint French accent a vast improvement on the original Gaelic pronunciation. ‘It seems so wrong. So very wrong. In the middle of all this hate and avarice and killing. These names – they breathe the very spirit of romance.’

  ‘A highly deceptive form of respiration, my dear.’ I’d have to watch myself, I was getting as bad as Uncle Arthur. ‘Those islands breathe the very spirit of bare, bleak and rocky desolation. But Eilean Oran and Craigmore hold the key to everything. Of that I’m very sure.’

  She said nothing. I stared out through the highspeed Kent clearview screen and wondered if I’d see Dubh Sgeir before it saw me. After a couple of minutes I felt a hand on my upper arm and she was very close to me. The hand was trembling. Wherever she’d come by her perfume it hadn’t been bought in a supermarket or fallen out of a Christmas cracker. Momentarily and vaguely I wondered about the grievous impossibility of ever understanding the feminine mind: before fleeing for what she had thought to be her life and embarking upon a hazardous swim in the waters of Torbay harbour, she hadn’t forgotten to pack a sachet of perfume in her polythene kit-bag. For nothing was ever surer than that any perfume she’d been wearing had been well and truly removed before I’d fished her out of Torbay harbour.

  ‘Philip?’

  Well, this was better than the Mr Calvert stuff. I was glad Uncle Arthur wasn’t there to have his aristocratic feelings scandalised. I said: ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She said it as if she meant it and I supposed I should have tried to forget that she was once the best actress in Europe. ‘I’m truly sorry. About what I said – about what I thought – earlier on. For thinking you were a monster. The men you killed, I mean. I – well, I didn’t know about Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and the helicopter pilot. All your friends. I’m truly sorry, Philip. Truly.’

  She was overdoing it. She was also too damn’ close. Too damn’ warm. You’d have required a pile-driver in top condition to get a cigarette card between us. And that perfume that hadn’t fallen out of a cracker – intoxicating, the ad-boys in the glossies would have called it. And all the time the warning bells were clanging away like a burglar alarm with the St Vitus’s dance. I made a manful effort to do something about it. I put my mind to higher things.

  She said nothing. She just squeezed my arm a bit more and even the pile-driver would have gone on strike for piece-work rates. I could hear the big diesel exhaust thudding away behind us, a sound of desolate reassurance. The Firecrest swooped down the long overtaking combers then gently soared again. I was conscious for the first time of a curious meteorological freak in the Western Isles. A marked rise in temperature after midnight. And I’d have to speak to the Kent boys about their guarantee that their clearview screen wouldn’t mist up under any conditions, but maybe that wasn’t fair, maybe they’d never visualised conditions like this. I was just thinking of switching off the auto-pilot to give me something to do when she said: ‘I think I’ll go below soon. Would you like a cup of coffee first?’

  ‘As long as you don’t have to put on a light to do it. And as long as you don’t trip over Uncle Arthur – I mean. Sir -’

  ‘Uncle Arthur will do just fine,’ she said. ‘It suits him.’ Another squeeze of the arm and she was gone.

  The meteorological freak was of short duration. By and by the temperature dropped back to normal and the Kent guarantee became operative again. I took a chance, left the Firecrest to its own devices and nipped aft to the stern locker. I took out my scuba diving equipment, together with air-cylinders and mask, and brought them for’ard to the wheelhouse.

  It took her twenty-five minutes to make the coffee. Calor gas has many times the calorific efficiency of standard domestic coal gas and, even allowing for the difficulties of operating in darkness, this was surely a world record for slowness in making coffee at sea. I heard the clatter of crockery as the coffee was brought through the saloon and smiled cynically to myself in the darkness. Then I thought of Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and Williams, and I wasn’t smiling any more.

  I still wasn’t smiling when I dragged myself on to the rocks of Eilean Oran, removed the scuba equipment and set the big, rectangularbased, swivel-headed torch between a couple of stones with its beam staring out to sea. I wasn’t smiling, but it wasn’t for the same reason that I hadn’t been smiling when Charlotte had brought the coffee to the wheelhouse just over half an hour ago, I wasn’t smiling because I was in a state of high apprehension and I was in a state of high apprehension because for ten minutes before leaving the Firecrest I’d tried to instruct Sir Arthur and Charlotte in the technique of keeping a boat in a constant position relative to a fixed mark on the shore.

  ‘Keep her on a due west compass heading,’ I’d said. ‘Keep her bows on to the sea and wind. With the engine at “Slow” that will give you enough steerage way to keep your head up. If you find yourselves creeping too far forwards, come round to the south’ – if they’d come round to the north they’d have found themselves high and dry on the rock shores of Eilean Oran – ‘head due east at half speed, because if you go any slower you’ll broach to, come sharply round to the north then head west again at slow speed. You can see those breakers on the south shore there. Whatever you do, keep them at least two hundred yards away on the starboard hand when you’re going west and a bit more when you’re going east.’

  They had solemnly assured me that they would do just that and seemed a bit chuffed because of what must have been my patent lack of faith in them both, but I’d reason for my lack of faith for neither had shown any marked ability to make a clear distinction between shore breakers and the north-south line of the foaming tops of the waves rolling eastwards towards the mainland. In desperation I’d said I’d place a fixed light on the shore and that that would serve as a permanent guide. I just trusted to God that Uncle Arthur wouldn’t emulate the part of an eighteenth-century French sloop’s skipper vis-à-vis the smugglers’ lamp on a rock-girt Cornish shore and run the damned boat aground under the impression that he was heading for a beacon of hope. He was a very clever man, was Uncle Arthur, but the sea was not his home.

  The boatshed wasn’t quite empty, but it wasn’t far off it. I flashed my small torch around its interior and realised that MacEachern’s boatshed wasn’t the place I was after. There was nothing there but a weather-beaten, gunwale-splintered launch, with, amidships, an unboxed petrol engine that seemed to be a solid block of rust.

  I came to the house. On its northern side, the side remote from the sea, a light shone through a small window. A light at half-past one in the morning. I crawled up to this and hitched a wary eye over the window-sill. A neat, clean, well-cared-for small room, with lime-washed walls, mat-covered stone floor and the embers of a driftwood fire smouldering in an ingle-nook in the corner. Donald MacEachern was sitting in a cane-bottomed chair, still unshaven, still in his month-old shirt, his head bent, staring into the dull red heart of the fire. He had the look of a man who was staring into a dying fire because that was all that was left in the world for him to do. I moved round to the door, turned the handle and went inside.

  He heard me and turned around, not quickly, just the way a man would turn who knows there is nothing left on earth that can hurt him. He looked at me, looked at the gun in my hand, looked at his own twelve-bore hanging on a couple of nails on the wall then sank back into his chair again.

  He said tonelessly: ‘Who in the name of God are you?’

  ‘Calvert’s my name. I was here yesterday.’ I pulled off my rubber hood and he remembered all right. I nodded to the twelve-bore. ‘You won’t be needing that gun to-night, Mr MacEachern. Anyway, you had the safety catch on.�
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  ‘You don’t miss much,’ he said slowly. ‘There were no cartridges in the gun.’

  ‘And no one standing behind you, was there?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said tiredly.

  ‘Who are you, man? What do you want?’

  ‘I want to know why you gave me the welcome you did yesterday.’ I put the gun away. ‘It was hardly friendly, Mr MacEachern.’

  ‘Who are you, sir?’ He looked even older than he had done yesterday, old and broken and done.

  ‘Calvert. They told you to discourage visitors, didn’t they, Mr MacEachern?’ No answer. ‘I asked some questions to-night of a friend of yours. Archie MacDonald. The Torbay police sergeant. He told me you were married. I don’t see Mrs MacEachern.’

  He half rose from his cane chair. The old bloodshot eyes had a gleam to them. He sank back again and the eyes dimmed.

  ‘You were out in your boat one night, weren’t you, Mr MacEachern? You were out in your boat and you saw too much. They caught you and they took you back here and they took Mrs MacEachern away and they told you that if you ever breathed a word to anyone alive you would never see your wife that way again. Alive, I mean. They told you to stay here in case any chance acquaintances or strangers should call by and wonder why you weren’t here and raise the alarm, and just to make sure that you wouldn’t be tempted to go the mainland for help – although heaven knows I would have thought there would be no chance in the world of you being as mad as that – they immobilised your engine. Saltwater impregnated sacks, I shouldn’t wonder, so that any chance caller would think it was due to neglect and disuse, not sabotage.’

  ‘Aye, they did that.’ He stared sightlessly into the fire, his voice the sunken whisper of a man who is just thinking aloud and hardly aware that he is speaking. ‘They took her away and they ruined my boat. And I had my life saving in the back room there and they took that too. I wish I’d had a million pounds to give them. If only they had left my Mairi. She’s five years older than myself.’ He had no defences left.

  ‘What in the name of God have you been living on?’

  ‘Every other week they bring me tinned food, not much, and condensed milk. Tea I have, and I catch a fish now and then off the rocks.’ He gazed into the fire, his forehead wrinkling as if he were suddenly realising that I brought a new dimension into his life. ‘Who are you, sir? Who are you? You’re not one of them. And you’re not a policeman, I know you’re not a policeman. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen policemen. But you are a very different kettle of fish.’ There were the stirrings of life in him now, life in his face and in his eyes. He stared at me for a full minute, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable under the gaze of those faded eyes, when he said: ‘I know who you are. I know who you must be. You are a Government man. You are an agent of the British Secret Service.’

  Well, by God, I took off my hat to the old boy. There I was, looking nondescript as anything and buttoned to the chin in a scuba suit, and he had me nailed right away. So much for the inscrutable faces of the guardians of our country’s secrets. I thought of what Uncle Arthur would have said to him, the automatic threats of dismissal and imprisonment if the old man breathed a word. But Donald MacEachern didn’t have any job to be dismissed from and after a lifetime in Eilean Oran even a maximum security prison would have looked like a hostelry to which Egon Ronay would have lashed out six stars without a second thought, so as there didn’t seem to be much point in threatening him I said instead, for the first time in my life: ‘I am an agent of the Secret Service, Mr MacEachern. I am going to bring your wife back to you.’

  He nodded very slowly, then said: ‘You will be a very brave man, Mr Calvert, but you do not know the terrible men who will wait for you.’

  ‘If I ever earn a medal, Mr MacEachern, it will be a case of mistaken identification, but, for the rest, I know very well what I am up against. Just try to believe me, Mr MacEachern. It will be all right. You were in the war, Mr MacEachern.’

  ‘You know. You were told?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nobody had to tell me.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The back was suddenly very straight. ‘I was a soldier for twenty-two years. I was a sergeant in the 51st Highland Division.’

  ‘You were a sergeant in the 51st Highland Division,’ I repeated. ‘There are many people, Mr MacEachern, and not all of them Scots, who maintain that there was no better in the world.’

  ‘And it is not Donald MacEachern who would be disagreeing with you, sir.’ For the first time the shadow of a smile touched the faded eyes. ‘There were maybe one or two worse. You make your point, Mr Calvert. We were not namely for running away, for losing hope, for giving up too easily.’ He rose abruptly to his feet. ‘In the name of God, what am I talking about? I am coming with you, Mr Calvert.’

  I rose to my feet and touched my hands to his shoulders. ‘Thank you, Mr MacEachern, but no. You’ve done enough. Your fighting days are over. Leave this to me.’

  He looked at me in silence, then nodded. Again the suggestion of a smile. ‘Aye, maybe you’re right. I would be getting in the way of a man like yourself. I can see that.’ He sat down wearily in his chair.

  I moved to the door. ‘Good night, Mr MacEachern. She will soon be safe.’

  ‘She will soon be safe,’ he repeated. He looked up at me, his eyes moist, and when he spoke his voice held the same faint surprise as his face. ‘You know, I believe she will.’

  ‘She will. I’m going to bring her back here personally and that will give me more pleasure than anything I’ve ever done in my life. Friday morning, Mr MacEachern.’

  ‘Friday morning? So soon? So soon?’ He was looking at a spot about a billion light years away and seemed unaware that I was standing by the open door. He smiled, a genuine smile of delight, and the old eyes shone. ‘I’ll not sleep a wink tonight, Mr Calvert. Nor a wink to-morrow night either.’

  ‘You’ll sleep on Friday,’ I promised. He couldn’t see me any longer, the tears were running down his grey unshaven cheeks, so I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him alone with his dreams.

  EIGHT

  Thursday: 2 a.m. – 4.30 a.m.

  I had exchanged Eilean Oran for the island of Craigmore and I still wasn’t smiling. I wasn’t smiling for all sorts of reasons. I wasn’t smiling because Uncle Arthur and Charlotte Skouras together made a nautical combination that terrified the life out of me, because the northern tip of Craigmore was much more exposed and reefhaunted than the south shore of Eilean Oran had been, because the fog was thickening, because I was breathless and bruised from big combers hurling me on to unseen reefs on my swim ashore, because I was wondering whether I had any chance in the world of carrying out my rash promise to Donald MacEachern. If I thought a bit more I’d no doubt I could come up with all sorts of other and equally valid reasons why I wasn’t smiling, but I hadn’t the time to think any more about it, the night was wearing on and I’d much to do before the dawn.

  The nearest of the two fishing boats in the little natural harbour was rolling quite heavily in the waves that curled round the reef forming the natural breakwater to the west so I didn’t have to worry too much about any splashing sound I might make as I hauled myself up on deck. What I did have to worry about was that damned bright light in its sealed inverted glass by the flensing shed, it was powerful enough to enable me to be seen from the other houses on shore. . . . But my worry about it was a little thing compared to my gratitude for its existence. Out in the wild blue yonder Uncle Arthur could do with every beacon of hope he could find.

  It was a typical M.F.V., about forty-five feet long and with the general look of a boat that could laugh at a hurricane. I went through it in two minutes. All in immaculate condition, not a thing aboard that shouldn’t have been there. Just a genuine fishing boat. My hopes began to rise. There was no other direction they could go. The second M.F.V. was the mirror image of the first, down to the last innocuous inch. It wouldn’t be true to say that my hopes were
now soaring, but at least they were getting up off the ground where they’d been for a long time.

  I swam ashore, parked my scuba equipment above the highwater mark and made my way to the flensing shed, keeping its bulk between the light and myself as I went. The shed contained winches, steel tubs and barrels, a variety of ferocious weapons doubtless used for flensing, rolling cranes, some unidentifiable but obviously harmless machinery, the remains of some sharks and the most fearful smell I’d ever come across in my life. I left, hurriedly.

  The first of the cottages yielded nothing. I flashed a torch through a broken window. The room was bare, it looked as if no one had set foot there for half a century, it was only too easy to believe Williams’s statement that this tiny hamlet had been abandoned before the First World War. Curiously, the wall-paper looked as if it had been applied the previous day – a curious and largely unexplained phenomenon in the Western Isles. Your grandmother – in those days grandpa would have signed the pledge sooner than lift a finger inside the house – slapped up some wall-paper at ninepence a yard and fifty years later it was still there, as fresh as the day it had been put up.

  The second cottage was as deserted as the first.

  The third cottage, the one most remote from the flensing shed, was where the shark-fishers lived. A logical and very understandable choice, one would have thought, the farther away from that olfactory horror the better. Had I the option, I’d have been living in a tent on the other side of the island. But that was a purely personal reaction. The stench of that flensing shed was probably to the sharkfishers, as is the ammonia-laden, nostril-wrinkling, wholly awful mist – liquid manure – to the Swiss farmers: the very breath of being. The symbol of success. One can pay too high a price for success.