When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  I eased open the well-oiled – shark-liver oil, no doubt – door and passed inside. The torch came on again. Grandma wouldn’t have gone very much on this front parlour but grandpa would cheerfully have sat there watching his beard turn white through the changing seasons without ever wanting to go down to the sea again. One entire wall was given up to food supplies, a miserable couple of dozen crates of whisky and score upon scores of crates of beer. Australians, Williams had said. I could well believe it. The other three walls – there was hardly a scrap of wall-paper to be seen – was devoted to a form of art, in uninhibited detail and glorious Technicolor, of a type not usually to be found in the better-class museums and art galleries. Not grandma’s cup of tea at all.

  I skirted the furniture which hadn’t come out of Harrods and opened the interior door. A short corridor lay beyond. Two doors to the right, three to the left. Working on the theory that the boss of the outfit probably had the largest room to himself, I carefully opened the first door to the right.

  The flash-light showed it to be a surprisingly comfortable room. A good carpet, heavy curtains, a couple of good armchairs, bedroom furniture in oak, a double bed and a bookcase. A shaded electric light hung above the bed. Those rugged Australians believed in their home comforts. There was a switch beside the door. I touched it and the overhead lamp came on.

  There was only one person in the double bed but even at that he was cramped in it. It’s hard to gauge a man’s height when he’s lying down but if this lad tried to stand up in a room with a ceiling height of less than six feet four inches, he’d finish up with concussion. His face was towards me but I couldn’t see much of it, it was hidden by a head of thick black hair that had fallen over his brows and the most magnificently bushy black beard I’d ever clapped eyes on. He was sound asleep.

  I crossed to the bed, prodded his ribs with the gun barrel and a pressure sufficient to wake a lad of his size and said: ‘Wake up.’

  He woke up. I moved a respectful distance away. He rubbed his eyes with one hairy forearm, got his hands under him and heaved himself to a sitting position. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him wearing a bearskin, but no, he was wearing a pair of pyjamas in excellent taste, I might have chosen the colour myself.

  Law-abiding citizens woken in the dark watches of the night by a gun-pointing stranger react in all sorts of ways, varying from terror to apoplectically-purple outrage. The man in the beard didn’t react in any of the standard ways at all. He just stared at me from under dark overhanging cliffs of eyebrows and the expression in the eyes was that of a Bengal tiger mentally tucking in his napkin before launching himself on the thirty-foot leap that is going to culminate in lunch. I stepped back another couple of paces and said: ‘Don’t try it.’

  ‘Put that gun away, sonny boy,’ he said. The deep rumbling voice seemed to come from the innermost recesses of the Carlsbad cavern. ‘Put it away or I’ll have to get up and clobber you and take it from you.’

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ I complained, then added politely: ‘If I put it away, will you clobber me?’

  He considered this for a moment, then said: ‘No.’ He reached out for a big black cigar and lit it, his eyes on me all the time. The acrid fumes reached across the room and as it isn’t polite for a guest in another’s house to rush to open the nearest window without permission I didn’t but it was a near thing. No wonder he’d never notice the stench from the flensing shed: compared to this, Uncle Arthur’s cheroots came into the same category as Charlotte’s perfume.

  ‘My apologies for the intrusion. Are you Tim Hutchinson?’

  ‘Yeah. And you, sonny boy?’

  ‘Philip Calvert. I want to use one of your boat’s transmitters to contact London. I also need your help. How urgently you can’t imagine. A good many lives and millions of pounds can be lost in the next twenty-four hours.’

  He watched a particularly noxious cloud of this Vesuvian poison gas drift up to the cringing ceiling, then bent his eyes on me again. ‘Ain’t you the little kidder, now, sonny boy.’

  ‘I’m not kidding, you big black ape. And, while we’re at it, we’ll dispense with the “sonny boy,” Timothy’

  He bent forward, the deep-set, coal-black eyes, not at all as friendly as I would have liked, then relaxed with a laugh. ‘Touché, as my French governess used to say. Maybe you ain’t kidding at that. What are you, Calvert?’

  In for a penny, in for a pound. This man would grant his cooperation for nothing less than the truth. And he looked like a man whose co-operation would be very well worth having. So, for the second time that night and the second time in my life, I said: ‘I’m an agent of the British Secret Service.’ I was glad that Uncle Arthur was out there fighting for his life on the rolling deep, his blood pressure wasn’t what it ought to have been and a thing like this, twice in one night, could have been enough to see him off.

  He considered my reply for some time, then said: ‘The Secret Service. I guess you have to be at that. Or a nut case. But you blokes never tell.’

  ‘I had to. It would have been obvious anyway when I tell you what I have to tell you.’

  ‘I’ll get dressed. Join you in the front room in two minutes. Help yourself to a Scotch there.’ The beard twitched and I deduced from this that he was grinning. ‘You should find some, somewhere.’

  I went out, found some somewhere and was conducting myself on the grand tour of the Craigmore art gallery when Tim Hutchinson came in. He was dressed all in black, trousers, sailor’s jersey, mackinaw and seaboots. Beds were deceptive, he’d probably passed the six foot four mark when he was about twelve and had just stopped growing. He glanced at the collection and grinned.

  ‘Who would have thought it?’ he said. ‘The Guggenheim and Craigmore. Hotheds of culture, both of them. Don’t you think the one with the ear-rings looks indecently overdressed?’

  ‘You must have scoured the great galleries of the world,’ I said reverently.

  ‘I’m no connoisseur. Renoir and Matisse are my cup of tea.’ It was so unlikely that it had to be true. ‘You look like a man in a hurry. Just leave out all the inessentials.’

  I left out the inessentials, but not one of the essentials. Unlike MacDonald and Charlotte, Hutchinson got not only the truth but the whole truth.

  ‘Well, if that isn’t the most goddamned story any man ever heard. And right under our bloody noses.’ It was hard to tell at times whether Hutchinson was Australian or American – I learnt later that he’d spent many years tuna-fishing in Florida. ‘So it was you in that chopper this afternoon. Brother, you’ve had a day and then some. I retract that “sonny boy” crack. One of my more ill-advised comments. What do you want, Calvert?’

  So I told him what I wanted, his own personal assistance that night, the loan of his boats and crews for the next twenty-four hours and the use of a radio transmitter immediately. He nodded.

  ‘Count on us. I’ll tell the boys. You can start using that transmitter right away’ ‘I’d rather go out with you to our boat right away,’ I said, ‘leave you there and come back in myself to transmit.’

  ‘You lack a mite confidence in your crew, hey?’

  ‘I’m expecting to see the bows of the Firecrest coming through that front door any minute.’

  ‘I can do better than that. I’ll roust out a couple of the boys, we’ll take the Charmaine – that’s the M.F.V. nearest the flensing shed – out to the Firecrest, I’ll go aboard, we’ll cruise around till you get your message off, then you come aboard the Firecrest while the boys take the Charmaine back again.’

  I thought of the maelstrom of white breakers outside the mouth of the alleged harbour. I said: ‘It won’t be too dangerous to take an M.F.V. out on a night like this?’

  ‘What’s wrong with a night like this? It’s a fine fresh night. You couldn’t ask for better. This is nothing, I’ve seen the boys take a boat out there, six o’clock in a black December evening, into a full gale.’

  ‘What kind of emergency wa
s that?’

  ‘A serious one, admittedly’ He grinned. ‘We’d run out of supplies and the boys wanted to get to Torbay before the pubs shut. Straight up, Calvert.’

  I said no more. It was obviously going to be a great comfort to have Hutchinson around with me for the rest of the night. He turned towards the corridor and hesitated: ‘Two of the boys are married. I wonder –’

  ‘There’ll be no danger for them. Besides, they’ll be well rewarded for their work.’

  ‘Don’t spoil it, Calvert.’ For a man with such a deep rumbling voice he could make it very soft at times. ‘We don’t take money for this kind of work.’

  ‘I’m not hiring you,’ I said tiredly. I’d quite enough people fighting me already without Tim Hutchinson joining their ranks. ‘There’s an insurance reward. I have been instructed to offer you half.’

  ‘Ah, now, that’s very different indeed. I’ll be delighted to relieve the insurance companies of their excess cash at any time. But not half, Calvert, not half. Not for a day’s work, not after all you’ve done. Twenty-five per cent to us, seventy-five per cent to you and your friends.’

  ‘Half is what you get. The other half will be used to pay compensation for those who have suffered hardship. There’s an old couple on Eilean Oran, for instance, who are going to be wealthy beyond their dreams for the rest of their days.’

  ‘You get nothing?’

  ‘I get my salary, the size of which I’d rather not discuss, as it’s a sore point. Civil Servants are not permitted to accept gratuities.’

  ‘You mean to say you get beaten up, shot down, half-drowned and suffered another couple of murder attempts just for a lousy pay cheque? What makes you tick, Calvert? Why the hell do you do it?’

  ‘That’s not an original question. I ask myself the same question about twenty times a day, rather more often recently. It’s time we were gone.’

  ‘I’ll get the boys up. They’ll be tickled pink by those gold watches or whatever the insurance boys will be handing over. Engraved, of course. We insist on that.’

  ‘The reward will be in cash, not kind. Depends how much of the stolen goods are recovered. We’re pretty sure to recover all the Nantesville’s cargo. Chances are that we’ll recover the lot. The award is ten per cent. Yours will be five. The minimum you and your boys will pick up will be four hundred thousand pounds: the maximum will be eight hundred and fifty. Thousand pounds, I mean.’

  ‘Say that in English.’ He looked as if the London Post Office Tower had fallen on top of him. So I said it again, and after a time he looked as if only a telegraph pole had fallen on him and said carefully: ‘At rates like that, a man might expect a fair bit of cooperation. Say no more. Put right out of your head any thoughts you had of advertising in the Telegraph. Tim Hutchinson is your man.’

  And Tim Hutchinson was undoubtedly my man. On a night like that, dark as doomsday, rain sluicing down and a thickening mist making it impossible – for me, at least – to tell the difference between a naturally breaking sea and a wave foaming over a reef, Tim Hutchinson was my man. Cheap at half a million.

  He was one of that rare breed, that very rare breed, of naturals to whom the sea is truly home. Twenty years’ daily polishing and refining in every conceivable condition a rarely-bestowed gift with which you must be born in the first place and anyone can be like this. Just as the great Grand Prix drivers, the Carraciolas and Nuvolaris and Clarks, operate on a level incomprehensible to highly competent drivers of very fast cars, so Hutchinson operated on a level incomprehensible to the finest of amateur yachtsmen. Search your ocean racing clubs and Olympic yachting teams the world over and you will not find men like this. They are to be found, and even then so very seldom, only in the ranks of the professional deep-sea fishermen.

  Those huge hands on throttle and wheel had the delicacy of a moth. He had the night-sight of a barn owl and an ear which could infallibly distinguish between waves breaking in the open sea, on reefs or on shores: he could invariably tell the size and direction of seas coming at him out of the darkness and mist and touch wheel or throttle as need be: he had an inbuilt computer which provided instant correlation of wind, tide, current and our own speed and always let him know exactly where he was. And I’ll swear he could smell land, even on a lee shore and with the rest of us suffering olfactory paralysis from the fumes of the big black cigars which seemed to be an inseparable part of the man. It required only ten minutes beside him to realise that one’s ignorance of the sea and ships was almost total. A chastening discovery.

  He took the Charmaine out through the Scylla and Charybdis of that evil alleged harbour entrance under full throttle. Foaming white-fanged reefs reached out at us, bare feet away, on either side. He didn’t seem to notice them. He certainly didn’t look at them. The two ‘boys’ he’d brought with him, a couple of stunted lads of about six foot two or thereabouts, yawned prodigiously. Hutchinson located the Firecrest a hundred yards before I could even begin to imagine I could see any shape at all and brought the Charmaine alongside as neatly as I could park my car by the kerb in broad daylight – on one of my better days, that was. I went aboard the Firecrest to the vast alarm of Uncle Arthur and Charlotte who’d heard no whisper of our arrival, explained the situation, introduced Hutchinson and went back aboard the Charmaine. Fifteen minutes later, the radio call over, I was back aboard the Firecrest.

  Uncle Arthur and Tim Hutchinson were already thick as thieves. The bearded Australian giant was extremely courteous and respectful, calling Uncle Arthur ‘Admiral’ every other sentence while Uncle Arthur was plainly delighted and vastly relieved to have him on board. If I felt this was a slight on my own seaman-like qualities, I was undoubtedly correct.

  ‘Where are we off to now?’ Charlotte Skouras asked. I was disappointed to see that she was just as relieved as Uncle Arthur.

  ‘Dubh Sgeir,’ I said. ‘To pay a call on Lord Kirkside and his charming daughter.’

  ‘Dubh Sgeir!’ She seemed taken aback. ‘I thought you said the answer lay in Eilean Oran and Craigmore?’

  ‘So I did. The answers to some essential preliminary questions. But the end of the road lies in Dubh Sgeir. And the foot of the rainbow.’

  ‘You talk in riddles,’ she said impatiently.

  ‘Not to me, he doesn’t,’ Hutchinson said jovially. ‘The foot of the rainbow, ma’am. That’s where the pot of gold lies.’

  ‘Here and now I’d settle for a pot of coffee,’ I said. ‘Coffee for four and I’ll make it with my own fair hands.’

  ‘I think I would rather go to bed,’ Charlotte said. ‘I am very tired.’

  ‘You made me drink your coffee,’ I said threateningly. ‘Now you drink mine. Fair’s fair.’

  ‘If you are quick, then.’

  I was quick. I’d four cups on a little tin tray in nothing flat, a powerful mixture of instant coffee, milk and sugar in all of them and a little something extra in one of them. There were no complaints about the coffee. Hutchinson drained his cup and said: ‘Can’t see why you three shouldn’t get your heads down for a little. Unless you think I need help?’

  No one thought he needed help. Charlotte Skouras was the first to go, saying she felt very sleepy, which I didn’t doubt. She sounded it. Uncle Arthur and I left a moment later, Tim Hutchinson promising to call me when we neared the landing stage on the west side of Dubh Sgeir. Uncle Arthur wrapped himself in a rug on the saloon settee. I went to my own cabin and lay down.

  I lay for three minutes then rose, picked up a three-cornered file, softly opened my cabin door and as softly knocked on Charlotte’s door. There was no reply, so I opened the door, passed in, silently closed it and switched on the lights.

  She was asleep all right, she was a million miles away. She hadn’t even managed to make it to bed, she was lying on the carpet, still fully clothed. I put her on the bunk and pulled a couple of blankets over her. I pushed up a sleeve and examined the mark left by the rope burn.

  It wasn’t a very big cabin and it
took me only a minute to find what I was looking for.

  It made a pleasant change and a very refreshing one to transfer myself from the Firecrest to land without that damned clammy scuba suit impeding every stroke or step of the way.

  How Tim Hutchinson located that old stone pier in the rain, the fog and the darkness was something that would have been for ever beyond me – if he hadn’t told me later that night. He sent me to the bows with a torch in my hand and damned if the thing didn’t loom out of the darkness as if he’d gone in on a radio bearing. He went into reverse, brought the bows, plunging heavily in the deep troughs, to within two feet of the pier, waited till I picked my moment to jump off then went full astern and disappeared into the fog and darkness. I tried to imagine Uncle Arthur executing that lot, but my imagination wasn’t up to it. It boggled. Uncle Arthur, thank heaven, slept the sleep of the just. Drake was in his hammock and a thousand miles away, dreaming all the time of W.C.I.

  The path from the landing stage to the plateau above was steep and crumbling and someone had carelessly forgotten to equip it with a handrail on the seaward side. I was in no way heavily burdened. All I was carrying apart from the weight of my own years was a torch, gun and coil of rope – I’d neither the intention nor the expectation of doing a Douglas Fairbanks on the outer battlements of the Dubh Sgeir castle, but experience had taught me that a rope was the most essential piece of equipment to carry along on a jaunt on a precipitously walled island – but even so I was breathing pretty heavily by the time I reached the top.

  I turned not towards the castle but north along the grass strip that led to the cliff at the northern end of the island. The strip that Lord Kirkside’s elder son had taken off from in his Beechcraft on the day when he and his brother-in-law to be had died, the strip that Williams and I had flown along less than twelve hours previously after our talk with Lord Kirkside and his daughter, the strip at the abrupt northern end of which I’d imagined I’d seen what I’d wanted to see, but couldn’t be sure. Now I was going to make sure.