When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘And do you still think our pals are unpaid missionaries for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge?’ I sneered. ‘Do you know Jacques and Kramer?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I killed them both to-night. After they had killed a friend of mine. They broke his neck. Then they tried to kill my boss and myself. And I killed another. He came out of the dark to murder us. I think his name was Henry. Do you believe me now? Or do you still think we’re all dancing round the old maypole on the village green, singing ring-a-ring-o’-roses as we go?’

  The shock treatment worked almost too well. Her face wasn’t pale now, it was ashen. She said: ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘Later,’ I said coldly. What little self-regard I had was down among my shoe-laces, what I would have liked to do was to take her in my arms and say: ‘There, there, now, don’t you worry your pretty head, just you leave everything to your old Uncle Philip and all will be well at the end of the day’ In fact, it was damned hard not to do it. Instead, what I said, still in the same nasty voice, was: ‘We’ve no time for those little fol-de-rols. You want to get married, don’t you? Did your father say when he would be back?’

  She looked at the wash-basin in the corner of the room as if she were still making up her mind whether to be sick or not then pulled her eyes back to me and whispered: ‘You’re just as bad as they are. You’re a terrible man. You’re a killer.’

  I caught her shoulders and shook them. I said savagely: ‘Did he say when he would be back?’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes were sick with revulsion. It was a long time since any woman had looked at me like that. I dropped my hands.

  ‘Do you know what those men are doing here?’

  ‘No.’

  I believed her. Her old man would know, but he wouldn’t have told her. Lord Kirkside was too astute to believe that their uninvited guests would just up and leave them unharmed. Maybe he was just desperately gambling that if he told his daughter nothing and if he could swear she knew nothing then they would leave her be. If that was what he thought, he was in urgent need of an alienist. But that was being unjust, if I stood in his shoes – or, more accurately, was swimming in the murky waters he was in – I’d have grabbed at any straw.

  ‘It’s obvious that you know that your fiancé is still alive,’ I went on. ‘And your elder brother. And others. They’re being held here, aren’t they?’

  She nodded silently. I wished she wouldn’t look at me like that.

  ‘Do you know how many?’

  ‘A dozen. More than that. And I know there are children there. Three boys and a girl.’

  That would be right. Sergeant MacDonald’s two sons and the boy and the girl that had been aboard the converted lifeboat that had disappeared after setting off on the night cruise from Torbay. I didn’t believe a word that Lavorski had said to Susan about their reverence for human life. But I wasn’t surprised that the people in the boats who had accidentally stumbled across his illegal operations were still alive. There was a very good reason for this.

  ‘Do you know where they are kept? There should be any amount of handy dungeons in Dubh Sgeir castle.’

  ‘There are cellars deep underground. I’ve never been allowed to go near them in the past four months.’

  ‘This is your big chance come at last. Get your clothes on and take me there.’

  ‘Go down to the cellars?’ Aghast was the word for her expression. ‘Are you mad? Daddy tells me there are at least three men on guard duty all night long.’ There were only two men now but her opinion of me was low enough already so I kept quiet. ‘They’re armed. You must be mad. I’m not going!’

  ‘I didn’t think you would. You’ll let your boy friend die just because you’re a contemptible little coward.’ I could almost taste the self-loathing in my mouth. ‘Lord Kirkside and the Honourable Rollinson. What a lucky father. What a fortunate fiancé.’

  She hit me, and I knew I had won. I said without touching my face: ‘Don’t do that. You’ll waken up the guard. Get your clothes on.’

  I rose, sat on the footboard of the bed and contemplated the door and higher things while she changed. I was becoming tired of women telling me what a horrible character I was.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said.

  She was back in her uniform of pirate’s jersey and the denims she’d outgrown when she was about fifteen. Thirty seconds flat and nary a sound of a portable sewing machine. Baffling, that’s what it was.

  NINE

  Thursday: 4.30 a.m. – dawn

  We went down the stairs hand in hand. I may have been the last man in the world she would have elected to be alone with on a desert island, but she clung on pretty tightly all the same.

  At the foot of the steps we turned right. I flicked on the torch every few yards but it wasn’t really necessary, Susan knew every yard of the way. At the end of the hall we turned left along the eastern wing. Eight yards and we stopped at a door on the right-hand side.

  ‘The pantry,’ she whispered. ‘The kitchen is beyond that.’

  I stooped and looked through the keyhole. Beyond was darkness. We passed through the doorway, then into an archway giving on to the kitchen. I flashed the tiny beam around the room. Empty.

  There were three guards, Susan had said. The outside man, for whom I had accounted. The lad who patrolled the battlements. No, she didn’t know what he did, but it was a good guess that he wasn’t studying astronomy or guarding against parachutists. He’d have night glasses to his eyes and he’d be watching for fishing vessels, naval craft or fishery cruisers that might happen by and interrupt honest men at their work. He wouldn’t see much on a night like this. And the third man, she said, guarded the back kitchen premises, the only entrance to the castle apart from the main gate – and the unfortunates in their cellars down below.

  He wasn’t in the kitchen premises, so he would be in the cellars down below.

  A flight of steps led from the scullery beyond the kitchen down to a stone-flagged floor. To the right of this floor I could see the loom of light. Susan raised a finger to her lips and we made our way soundlessly down to the foot of the steps. I slid a cautious eye round the corner of this passageway.

  It wasn’t passageway, it was the damnedest flight of steps I’d ever come across. They were lit by two or three far-spaced and very weak electric bulbs, the walls coming together towards the foot like a pair of railway lines disappearing into the distance. Maybe fifty feet – or seventy steps – down, where the first light was, another passageway branched off to the right. There was a stool at the corner of the small stone landing there, and sitting on the stool a man. Across his knees lay a rifle. They certainly went in for the heavy artillery.

  I drew back. I murmured to Susan: ‘Where in hell’s name do those steps lead to?’

  ‘The boathouse, of course.’ A surprised whisper. ‘Where else?’

  Where else, indeed. Brilliant work, Calvert, brilliant work. You’d skirted the south side of the Dubh Sgeir in the helicopter, you’d seen the castle, you’d seen the boathouse, you’d seen nary a handhold on the sheer cliff separating them, and you’d never raised an eyebrow at the glaring obviousness of the fact that ne’er the twain did meet.

  ‘Those are the cellars in that passage going off to the right?’ She nodded. ‘Why so far down? It’s a long walk to collect the bubbly’

  ‘They’re not really wine-cellars. They used to be used as water reservoirs.’

  ‘No other way of getting down there?’

  ‘No. Only this way’

  ‘And if we take five steps down this way he shoots us full of holes with his Lee Enfield. Know who it is?’

  ‘Harry. I don’t know his other name. He’s an Armenian, Daddy says. People can’t pronounce his real name. He’s young and smooth and greasy – and detestable.’

  ‘He had the effrontery to make a pass at the chieftain’s daughter?’

  ‘Yes. It was horrible.’ She touched her lips with the back of h
er hand. ‘He stank of garlic’

  ‘I don’t blame him. I’d do it myself if I didn’t feel my pension creeping up on me. Call him up and make amends.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you misjudged his noble character. Tell him your father is away and this is the first chance you’ve had of speaking to him. Tell him anything.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Sue!’

  ‘He’ll never believe me,’ she said wildly.

  ‘When he gets within two feet of you, he’ll forget all about the reasoning why. He’s a man, isn’t he?’

  ‘You’re a man. And you’re only six inches away.’ The eternal female illogic.

  ‘I’ve told you how it is, it’s my pension coming between us. Quickly!’

  She nodded reluctantly and I disappeared into the shadows of the nearest cellar, reversed gun in hand. She called and he came a-running, his rifle at the ready. When he saw who it was, he forgot all about his rifle. Susan started to speak her lines but she might have saved her breath. Harry, if nothing else, was an impetuous young man. That wild Armenian blood. I stepped forwards, arm swinging, and lowered him to the ground. I tied him up and, as I’d run out of handkerchiefs, ripped away part of his shirt-front and used it as a gag. Susan giggled, a giggle with a note of hysteria.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘Harry. He’s what they call a snappy dresser. That’s a silk shirt. You’re no respecter of persons, Mr Calvert.’

  ‘Not persons like Harry. Congratulations. Wasn’t so bad, was it?’

  ‘It was still horrible.’ Again the hand to the mouth. ‘He’s reeking of whisky’

  ‘Youngsters have odd tastes,’ I said kindly. ‘You’ll grow out of it. At least it must have been an improvement on the garlic.’

  The boathouse wasn’t really a boathouse at all, it was a large vaulting cave formed in a cleft in a natural fault in the cliff strata. At the inner end of the cave longitudinal tunnels stretched away on either side paralleling the coastline, until they vanished beyond the reach of my torch. From the air, the boathouse in the small artificial harbour, a structure of about twenty feet by twenty, had seemed incapable of housing more than two or three fair-sized rowing boats. Inside it was big enough to berth a boat the size of the Firecrest, and then leave room to spare. Mooring bollards, four in number, lined the eastern side of the boat-house. There were signs of recent work where the inner end of the cave had been lengthened in the direction of the longitudinal tunnels to increase the berthing space and provide a bigger working platform, but otherwise it was as it must have been for hundreds of years. I picked up a boat-hook and tried to test the depth, but couldn’t find bottom. Any vessel small enough to be accommodated inside could enter and leave at any state of the tide. The two big doors looked solid but not too solid. There was a small dry-land doorway on the eastern side.

  The berth was empty, as I had expected to find it. Our friends were apprehensive and on piecework rates. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they were working at, the working platform was liberally stacked with the tools of their trade: an oil engine-driven air compressor with a steel reservoir with outlet valves, a manuallyoperated, two-cylinder double-acting air pump with two outlets, two helmets with attached corselets, flexible, non-collapsible air tubes with metal couplings, weighted boots, diving dresses, life-cum-telephone lines, lead weights and scuba equipment such as I had myself, with a stack of compressed air cylinders at the ready.

  I felt neither surprise nor elation, I’d known this must exist for the past forty-eight hours although I’d become certain of the location only that night. I was faintly surprised perhaps, to see all this equipment here, for this would surely be only the spares. But I shouldn’t have been even vaguely surprised. Whatever this bunch lacked, it wasn’t a genius for organisation.

  I didn’t see that night, nor did I ever see, the cellars where the prisoners were housed. After I’d huffed and puffed three-quarters of the way up that interminable flight of steps, I turned left along the passageway where we’d first seen Harry taking his ease. After a few yards the passageway broadened out into a low damp chamber containing a table made of beer-cases, some seats of the same and, in one corner, some furniture that hadn’t yet been drunk. A bottle of whisky, nearly full, stood on the table: Harry’s remedy for garlic halitosis.

  Beyond this chamber was a massive wooden door secured by an equally massive-looking lock with the key missing. All the celluloid in the world wouldn’t open this lot but a beehive plastic explosive would do a very efficient job indeed. I made another of the many mental notes I’d made that night and went up the stairs to rejoin Susan.

  Harry had come to. He was saying something in his throat which fortunately couldn’t get past his silk-shirted gag to the delicate ears of the chieftain’s young daughter, his eyes, to mint a phrase, spoke volumes and he was trying as best he could to do a Houdini with the ropes round his legs and arms. Susan Kirkside was pointing a rifle in his general direction and looking very apprehensive. She needn’t have bothered, Harry was trussed like a turkey.

  ‘These people down in the cellars,’ I said. ‘They’ve been there for weeks, some for months. They’ll be blind as bats and weak as kittens by the time they get out.’

  She shook her head. ‘I think they’ll be all right. They’re taken out on the landing strip there for an hour and a half every morning under guard. They can’t be seen from the sea. We’re not allowed to watch. Or not supposed to. I’ve seen them often. Daddy insisted on it. And Sir Anthony.’

  ‘Well, good old Daddy.’ I stared at her. ‘Old man Skouras. He comes here?’

  ‘Of course.’ She seemed surprised at my surprise. ‘He’s one of them. Lavorski and this man Dollmann, the men that do all the arranging, they work for Sir Anthony. Didn’t you know? Daddy and Sir Anthony are friends – were friends – before this. I’ve been in Sir Anthony’s London home often.’

  ‘But they’re not friends now?’ I probed keenly.

  ‘Sir Anthony has gone off his head since his wife died,’ Susan said confidently. I looked at her in wonder and tried to remember when I’d last been so authoritatively dogmatic on subjects I knew nothing about. I couldn’t remember. ‘He married again, you know. Some French actress or other. That wouldn’t have helped. She’s no good. She caught him on the rebound.’

  ‘Susan,’ I said reverently, ‘you’re really wonderful. I don’t believe you’ll ever understand what I mean by my pension coming between us. You know her well?’

  ‘I’ve never met her.’

  ‘You didn’t have to tell me. And poor old Sir Anthony – he doesn’t know what he’s doing, is that it?’

  ‘He’s all mixed up,’ she said defensively. ‘He’s sweet, really he is. Or was.’

  ‘All mixed up with the deaths of four men, not to mention three of his own,’ I said. Sergeant MacDonald thought him a good man. Susan thought him sweet. I wondered what she would say if she saw Charlotte Skouras’s back. ‘How do the prisoners do for food?’

  ‘We have two cooks. They do it all. The food is brought down to them.’

  ‘What other staff?’

  ‘No other staff. Daddy was made to sack them all four months ago.’

  That accounted for the state of the watchman’s bathroom. I said: ‘My arrival in the helicopter here yesterday afternoon was duly reported by radio to the Shangri-la. A man with a badly scarred face. Where’s the radio transmitter?’

  ‘You know everything, don’t you?’

  ‘Know-all Calvert. Where is it?’

  ‘Off the hall. In the room behind the stairs. It’s locked.’

  ‘I have keys that’ll open the Bank of England. Wait a minute.’ I went down to the guard’s room outside the prisoners’ cellar, brought the whisky bottle back up to where Susan was standing and handed it to her. ‘Hang on to this.’

  She looked at me steadily. ‘Do you really need this?’

  ‘Oh my God, sweet youth,’ I s
aid nastily. ‘Sure I need it. I’m an alcoholic’

  I untied the rope round Harry’s ankles and helped him to his feet. He repaid this Samaritan gesture by swinging at me with his right foot but fifteen minutes on the floor hadn’t helped his circulation or reactions any and I forestalled him with the same manoeuvre. When I helped him up the second time there was no fight left in him.

  ‘Did you – did you really have to do that?’ The revulsion was back in her eyes.

  ‘Did I – did you see what he tried to do to me?’ I demanded.

  ‘You men are all the same,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ I snarled. I was old and sick and tired and I’d run right out of the last of my witty ripostes.

  The transceiver was a beauty, a big gleaming-metallic RCA, the latest model as used in the naval vessels of a dozen nationalities. I didn’t waste any time wondering where they had obtained it, that lot were fit for anything. I sat down and started tuning the set, then looked up at Susan. ‘Go and fetch me one of your father’s razor blades.’

  ‘You don’t want me to hear, is that it?’

  ‘Think what you like. Just get it.’

  If she’d been wearing a skirt she’d have flounced out of the room. With what she was wearing flouncing was out of the question. The set covered every transmission frequency from the bottom of the long wave to the top of the V.H.F. It took only two minutes to raise SPFX. It was manned night and day the year round. It really was most considerate of the ungodly to provide me with such a magnificent instrument.

  Sue Kirkside was back before I started speaking. I was ten minutes on the microphone altogether. Apart from code-names and map references I used plain English throughout. I had to, I’d no book, and time was too short anyway. I spoke slowly and clearly, giving precise instructions about the movements of men, the alignment of radio frequencies, the minutes details of the layout of Dubh Sgeir castle and asking all-important questions about recent happenings on the Riviera. I didn’t repeat myself once, and I asked for nothing to be repeated to me, because every word was being recorded. Before I was half-way through, Susan’s eyebrows had disappeared up under the blonde fringe and Harry was looking as if he had been sandbagged. I signed off, reset the tuning band to its original position and stood up.