When Eight Bells Toll

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘My dear Kirkside! My dear fellow!’ Uncle Arthur hurried forward and shook him by the hand, I’d quite forgotten that they knew one another. ‘Delighted to see you safe and sound, my dear chap. Absolutely delighted. It’s all over now.’

  ‘What in God’s name is happening?’ Lord Kirkside asked.

  ‘You – you’ve got them? You have them all? Where is my boy? Where is Rollinson? What –?’

  An explosive crack, curiously muffled, came down the flight of steps. Uncle Arthur looked at Rawley, who nodded. ‘Plastic explosive, sir.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent,’ Uncle Arthur beamed. ‘You’ll see them any minute, Kirkside.’ He crossed over to where old Skouras was lined up against the wall, hands clasped behind his neck, reached up both his own, pulled Skouras’s arms down and shook his right hand as if he were attempting to tear it off.

  ‘You’re lined up with the wrong team, Tony, my boy.’ This was one of the great moments of Uncle Arthur’s life. He led him across to where Lord Kirkside was standing. ‘It’s been a frightful nightmare, my boy, a frightful nightmare. But it’s all over now’

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Skouras said dully. ‘Why did you do it? God, oh God, you don’t know what you’ve done.’

  ‘Mrs Skouras? The real Mrs Skouras?’ There is the ham actor in all of us, but more than most in Uncle Arthur. He pushed back his sleeve and studied his watch carefully. ‘She arrived in London by air from Nice just over three hours ago. She is in the London Clinic.’

  ‘What in God’s name do you mean? You don’t know what you are saying. My wife –’

  ‘Your wife is in London. Charlotte here is Charlotte Meiner and always was.’ I looked at Charlotte. A total incomprehension and the tentative beginnings of a dazed hope. ‘Earlier this year, blazing the trail for many kidnappings that were to follow, your friends Lavorski and Dollmann had your wife seized and hidden away to force you to act with them, to put your resources at their disposal. I think they felt aggrieved, Tony, that you should be a millionaire while they were executives: they had it all worked out, even to having the effrontery of intending to invest the proceeds in your empire. However. Your wife managed to escape, so they seized her cousin and best friend, Charlotte – a friend upon whom, shall we say, your wife was emotionally very dependent – and threatened to kill her unless they got Mrs Skouras back again. Mrs Skouras surrendered immediately. This gave them the bright idea of having two swords of Damocles hanging over your head, so, being men of honour, they decided to keep Charlotte as well as your imprisoned wife. Then, they knew, you would do exactly as they wanted, when and as they wanted. To have a good excuse to keep both you and Charlotte under their surveillance at the same time and to reinforce the idea that your wife was well and truly dead, they gave out that you had been secretly married.’ Uncle Arthur was a kind man: no mention of the fact that it was common knowledge that, at the time of her alleged death, brain injuries sustained by Mrs Skouras in a car crash two years previously had become steadily worse and it was known that she would never leave hospital again.

  ‘How on earth did you guess that?’ Lord Kirkside asked.

  ‘No guess. Must give my lieutenants their due,’ Uncle Arthur said in his best magnanimous taught-’em-all-I-know voice. ‘Hunslett radioed me at midnight on Tuesday. He gave me a list of names of people about whom Calvert wanted immediate and exhaustive inquiries made. That call was tapped by the Shangri-la but they didn’t know what Hunslett was talking about because in our radio transmissions all proper names are invariably coded. Calvert told me later that when he’d seen Sir Anthony on Tuesday night he thought Sir Anthony was putting on a bit of an act. He said it wasn’t all act. He said Sir Anthony was completely broken and desolated by the thought of his dead wife. He said he believed the original Mrs Skouras was still alive, that it was totally inconceivable that a man who so patently cherished the memory of his wife should have married again two or three months later, that he could only have pretended to marry again for the sake of the one person whom he ever and so obviously loved.

  ‘I radioed France. Riviera police dug up the grave in Beaulieu where she had been buried near the nursing home where she’d died. They found a coffin full of logs. You knew this, Tony.’

  Old Skouras nodded. He was a man in a dream.

  ‘It took them half an hour to find out who had signed the death certificate and most of the rest of the day to find the doctor himself. They charged him with murder. This can be done in France on the basis of a missing body. The doctor wasted no time at all in taking them to his own private nursing home, where Mrs Skouras was in a locked room. The doctor, matron and a few others are in custody now. Why in God’s name didn’t you come to us before?’

  ‘They had Charlotte and they said they would kill my wife out of hand. What – what would you have done?’

  ‘God knows,’ Uncle Arthur said frankly. ‘She’s in fair health, Tony. Calvert got radio confirmation at five a.m.’ Uncle Arthur jerked a thumb upwards. ‘On Lavorski’s big transceiver in the castle.’

  Both Skouras and Lord Kirkside had their mouths open. Lavorski, blood still flowing from his mouth, and Dollmann looked as if they had been sandbagged. Charlotte’s eyes were the widest wide I’d ever seen. She was looking at me in a very peculiar way.

  ‘It’s true,’ Susan Kirkside said. ‘I was with him. He told me to tell nobody.’ She crossed to take my arm and smiled up at me. ‘I’m sorry again for what I said last night. I think you’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever known. Except Roily, of course.’ She turned round at the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and promptly forgot all about the second most wonderful man she’d ever known.

  ‘Roily!’ she cried. ‘Roily!’ I could see Roily bracing himself.

  They were all there, I counted them, Kirkside’s son, the Hon. Rollinson, the policeman’s sons, the missing members of the small boats and, behind them all, a small brown-faced old woman in a long dark dress with a black shawl over her head. I went forward and took her arm.

  ‘Mrs MacEachern,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you home soon. Your husband is waiting.’

  ‘Thank you, young man,’ she said calmly. ‘That will be very nice.’ She lifted her arm and held mine in a proprietorial fashion.

  Charlotte Skouras came and held my other arm, not in quite so proprietorial a fashion, but there for everyone to see. I didn’t mind. She said: ‘You were on to me? You were on to me all the time?’

  ‘He was,’ Uncle Arthur said thoughtfully. ‘He just said he knew. You never quite got round to explaining that bit, Calvert.’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult, sir – if you know all the facts, that is,’ I added hastily. ‘Sir Anthony put me on to you. That visit he paid me on the Firecrest to allay any suspicion we might have had about our smashed radio set only served, I’m afraid, to make me suspicious. You wouldn’t have normally come to me, you’d have gone ashore immediately to the police or to a phone, sir. Then, in order to get me talking about the cut telephone wires, you wondered if the radio-wrecker, to complete our isolation from the mainland, had smashed the two public call boxes. From a man of your intelligence, such a suggestion was fatuous, there must be scores of houses in Torbay with their private phone. But you thought it might sound suspicious if you suggested cut lines, so you didn’t. Then Sergeant MacDonald gave me a glowing report about you, said you were the most respected man in Torbay and your public reputation contrasted so sharply with your private behaviour in the Shangri-la on Tuesday night – well, I just couldn’t buy it.

  ‘That nineteenth-century late Victorian melodrama act that you and Charlotte put on in the saloon that night had me fooled for all of five seconds. It was inconceivable that any man so devoted to his wife could be vicious towards another obviously nice woman –’

  ‘Thank you kindly, sir,’ Charlotte murmured.

  ‘It was inconceivable that he send her for his wife’s photograph, unless he had been ordered to do so. And you had been ordered to do so, by Lav
orski and Dollmann. And it was inconceivable that she would have gone – the Charlotte Meiner I knew would have clobbered you over the head with a marline spike. Ergo, if you weren’t what you appeared to be, neither were you, Charlotte.

  ‘The villains, they thought, were laying a foundation for an excellent reason for your flight from the wicked baron to the Firecrest, where you could become their eyes and ears and keep them informed of all our plans and moves, because they’d no idea how long their secret little transmitter in the engine-room would remain undetected. After they knew we’d found Hunslett – they’d removed the transmitter by that time – it was inevitable that they would try to get you aboard the Firecrest. So they laid a little more groundwork by giving you a bruised eye – the dye is nearly off already – and some wicked weals across your back and dumped you into the water with your little polythene kitbag with the micro-transmitter and gun inside it. Do this, they said, or Mrs Skouras will get it.’

  She nodded. ‘They said that.’

  ‘I have twenty-twenty eyesight. Sir Arthur hasn’t – his eyes were badly damaged in the war. I had a close look at those weals on your back. Genuine weals. Also genuine pinpricks where the hypodermic with the anesthetic had been inserted before the lashes were inflicted. To that degree, at least, someone was humane.’

  ‘I could stand most things,’ Skouras said heavily. ‘I couldn’t stand the thought of – the thought of –’

  ‘I guessed you had insisted on the anesthetic, sir. No, I knew. The same way that I knew that you had insisted that the crews of all those small yachts be kept alive or the hell with the consequences. Charlotte, I ran a finger-nail down one of those weals. You should have jumped through the saloon roof. You never batted an eyelid. After submersion in salt water. After that, I knew.

  ‘I have devious reasons for the things I do. You told us that you had come to warn us of our deadly danger – as if we didn’t know. I told you we were leaving Torbay within the hour, so off you trotted to your little cabin and told them we were going to leave within the hour. So Quinn, Jacques and Kramer came paddling across well in advance of the time you’d told us they would be coming, trusting we would have been lulled into a sense of false security. You must love Mrs Skouras very much, Charlotte. A clear-cut choice, she or us, and you made your choice. But I was waiting for them, so Jacques and Kramer died. I told you we were going to Eilean Oran and Craigmore, so off you trotted down to your little cabin and told them we were going to Eilean Oran and Craigmore, which wouldn’t have worried them at all. Later on I told you we were going to Dubh Sgeir. So off you trotted down to your little cabin again, but before you could tell them anything you passed out on your cabin deck, possibly as a result of a little night-cap I’d put in your coffee. I couldn’t have you telling your friends here that I was going to Dubh Sgeir, could I now? They would have had a reception committee all nicely organised.’

  ‘You – you were in my cabin? You said I was on the floor?’

  ‘Don Juan has nothing on me. I flit in and out of ladies’ bedrooms like anything. Ask Susan Kirkside. You were on the floor. I put you to bed. I looked at your arms, incidentally, and the rope marks were gone. They’d used rubber bands, twisted pretty tightly, just before Hunslett and I had arrived?’

  She nodded. She looked dazed.

  ‘I also, of course, found the transmitter and gun. Then, back in Craigmore, you came and pumped me for some more information. And you did try to warn me, you were about torn in half by that time. I gave you that information. It wasn’t the whole truth, I regret, but it was what I wanted you to tell Lavorski and company, which,’ I said approvingly, ‘like a good little girl you did. Off you trotted to your little whitewashed bedroom –’

  ‘Philip Calvert,’ she said slowly, ‘you are the nastiest, sneakingest, most low-down double-crossing ’

  ‘There are some of Lavorski’s men aboard the Shangri-la,’ old Skouras interrupted excitedly. He had rejoined the human race. ‘They’ll get away –’

  They’ll get life,’ I said. ‘They’re in irons, or whatever Captain Rawley’s men here are in the habit of using.’

  ‘But how did you – how did you know where the Shangri-la was? In the darkness, in the mist, it’s impossible –’

  ‘How’s the Shangri-la’s tender working?’ I asked.

  ‘The what? The Shangri-la’s – what the devil –?’ He calmed down. ‘It’s not working. Engines out of order.’

  ‘Demerara sugar has that effect upon them,’ I explained. ‘Any sugar has, in fact, when dumped in the petrol tanks, but demerara was all I could lay hands on that Wednesday night after Sir Arthur and I had left you but before we took the Firecrest in to the pier. I went aboard the tender with a couple of pounds of the stuff. I’m afraid you’ll find the valves are ruined. I also took with me a homing signal transmitter, a transistorised battery-powered job, which I attached to the inner after bulkhead of the anchor locker, a place that’s not looked at once a year. So, when you hauled the incapacitated tender aboard the Shangri-la – well, we knew where the Shangri-la was.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow, Calvert.’

  ‘Look at Messrs. Dollmann, Lavorski and Imrie. They follow all right. I know the exact frequency that transmitter sends on – after all, it was my transmitter. One of Mr Hutchinson’s skippers was given this frequency and tuned in to it. Like all M.F.V.s it has a loop aerial for direction finding, he just had to keep turning the loop till the signal was at full strength. He couldn’t miss. He didn’t miss.’

  ‘Mr Hutchinson’s skippers?’ Skouras said carefully. ‘M.F.V.s you said?’

  It was as well, I reflected, that I wasn’t overly troubled with selfconsciousness, what with Mrs MacEachern on one hand, Charlotte on the other, and every eye, a large proportion of them hostile to a degree, bent upon me, it could have been embarrassing to a degree. ‘Mr Hutchinson has two shark-fishing boats. Before I came to Dubh Sgeir last night I radioed from one of his boats asking for help – the gentlemen you see here. They said they couldn’t send boats or helicopters in this weather, in almost zero visibility. I told them the last thing I wanted was their damned noisy helicopters, secrecy was everything, and not to worry about the sea transport, I knew some men for whom the phrase “zero visibility” was only a joke. Mr Hutchinson’s skippers. They went to the mainland and brought Captain Rawley and his men back here. I didn’t think they’d arrive until late at night, that’s why Sir Arthur and I were afraid to move before midnight. What time did you get here, Captain Rawley?’

  ‘Nine-thirty.’

  ‘So early? I must admit it was a bit awkward without a radio. Then ashore in your little rubber boats, through the side door, waited until the diving-boat came back – and waited and waited.’

  ‘We were getting pretty stiff, sir.’

  Lord Kirkside cleared his throat. Maybe he was thinking of my nocturnal assignation with his daughter.

  ‘Tell me this, Mr Calvert. If you radioed from Mr Hutchinson’s boat in Craigmore, why did you have to radio again from here later that night?’

  ‘If I didn’t, you’d be down among the dead men by this time. I spent the best part of fifteen minutes giving highly detailed descriptions, of Dubh Sgeir externally and of the castle and boat-house layout internally. Everything that Captain Rawley and his men have done had to be done in total darkness. You’ll keep an eye on our friends, Captain Rawley? A fishery cruiser will be off Dubh Sgeir shortly after dawn.’

  The Marines herded them off into the left-hand cave, set three powerful lights shining into the prisoners’ faces and mounted a fourman guard with machine-pistols at the ready. Our friends would undoubtedly keep until the fishery cruiser came in the morning.

  Charlotte said slowly: ‘That was why Sir Arthur remained behind this afternoon when you and Mr Hutchinson went to the Nantesville? To see that I didn’t talk to the guards and find out the truth?’

  ‘Why else?’

  She took her arm away and looked at me without a
ffection. ‘So you put me through the hoop,’ she said quietly. ‘You let me suffer like this for thirty hours while you knew all the time.’

  ‘Fair’s fair. You were doing me down, I was doing you down.’

  ‘I’m very grateful to you,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘If you aren’t you damn’ well ought to be,’ Uncle Arthur said coldly. This was one for the books, Uncle Arthur talking to the aristocracy, even if only the aristocracy by marriage, in this waspish tone. ‘If Calvert won’t speak for himself, I will.

  ‘Point one: if you hadn’t kept on sending your little radio messages, Lavorski would have thought that there was something damned fishy going on and might well have left the last ton or two of gold in the Nantesville and taken off before we got here. People like Lavorski have a highly attuned sixth sense of danger. Point two: they wouldn’t have confessed to their crimes unless they thought we were finished. Point three: Calvert wanted to engineer a situation where all attention was on the Firecrest so that Captain Rawley and his men could move into position and so eliminate all fear of unnecessary bloodshed – maybe your blood, my dear Charlotte. Point four, and more important: if you hadn’t been in constant radio contact with them, advising them of our impending arrival right up to the moment we came through those doors – we’d even left the saloon door open so that you could clearly overhear us and know all we were doing – there would have been a pitched battle, guns firing as soon as those doors were breached, and who knows how many lives would have been lost. But they knew they were in control, they knew the trap was set, they knew you were aboard with that gun to spring the trap. Point five, and most important of all: Captain Rawley here was hidden almost a hundred yards away along the cross tunnel and the detachment up above were concealed in a store-room in the castle. How do you think they knew when to move in and move in simultaneously? Because, like all commandos, they had portable radio sets and were listening in to every word of your running commentary. Don’t forget your transmitter was stolen from the Firecrest. It was Calvert’s transmitter, my dear. He knew the transmitting frequency to the mainland last night. That was after he had – um – given you a little something to drink and checked your transmitter before using the one up in the castle last night.’