Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘Thomas made one careless remark. An offbeat remark. You didn’t hear it – we were in the engine-room.’ I shivered, maybe it was the cold night wind. ‘It meant nothing – not until I saw that they didn’t want their boat recognised again. He said: ‘Boats aren’t really in my line.’ Probably thought he’d been asking too many questions and wanted to reassure me. Boats not in his line – a customs officer and boats not in his line. They only spend their lives aboard boats, examining boats, that’s all. They spend their lives looking and poking in so many odd corners and quarters that they know more about boats than the designers themselves. Another thing, did you notice how sharply dressed they were? A credit to Carnaby Street.’

‘Customs officers don’t usually go around in oil-stained overalls.’

‘They’ve been living in those clothes for twenty-four hours. This is the what – the thirteenth boat they’ve searched in that time. Would you still have knife-edged creases to your pants after that lot? Or would you say they’d only just taken them from the hangers and put them on?’

‘What else did they say? What else did they do?’ Hunslett spoke so quietly that I could hear the note of the engines of the customs’ boat fall away sharply as their searchlight lit up the low-water stone pier, half a mile away. ‘Take an undue interest in anything?’

‘They took an undue interest in everything. Wait a minute, though, wait a minute. Thomas seemed particularly intrigued by the batteries, by the large amount of reserve electrical power we had.’

‘Did he now? Did he indeed? And did you notice how lightly our two customs friends swung aboard their launch when leaving?’

‘They’ll have done it a thousand times.’

‘Both of them had their hands free. They weren’t carrying anything. They should have been carrying something.’

‘The photo-copier. I’m getting old.’

‘The photo-copier. Standard equipment my ruddy foot. So if our fair-haired pal wasn’t busy photo-copying he was busy doing something else.’

We moved inside the wheelhouse. Hunslett selected the larger screw-driver from the tool-rack beside the echo-sounder and had the face-plate off our R.T.D./D.F. set inside sixty seconds. He looked at the interior for five seconds, looked at me for the same length of time, then started screwing the face-plate back into position. One thing was certain, we wouldn’t be using that transmitter for a long time to come.

I turned away and stared out through the wheelhouse windows into the darkness. The wind was still rising, the black sea gleamed palely as the whitecaps came marching in from the south-west, the Firecrest snubbed sharply on her anchor chain and, with the wind and the tide at variance, she was beginning to corkscrew quite noticeably now. I felt desperately tired. But my eyes were still working. Hunslett offered me a cigarette. I didn’t want one, but I took one. Who knew, it might even help me to think. And then I had caught his wrist and was staring down at his palm.

‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘The cobbler should stick to his last.’

‘He what?’

‘Wrong proverb. Can’t think of the right one. A good workman uses only his own tools. Our pal with the penchant for smashing valves and condensers should have remembered that. No wonder my neck was twitching when Durran was around. How did you cut yourself?’

‘I didn’t cut myself.’

‘I know. But there’s a smear of blood on your palm. He’s been taking lessons from Peter Sellers, I shouldn’t wonder. Standard southern English on the Nantesville , northern Irish on the Firecrest. I wonder how many other accents he has up his sleeve – behind his larynx, I should say. And I thought he was running to a little fat. He’s running to a great deal of muscle. You noticed he never took his gloves off, even when he had that drink?’

‘I’m the best noticer you ever saw. Beat me over the head with a club and I’ll notice anything.’ He sounded bitter. ‘Why didn’t they clobber us? You, anyway? The star witness?’

‘Maybe we have moved out of our class. Two reasons. They couldn’t do anything with the cops there, genuine cops as we’ve both agreed, not unless they attended to the cops too. Only a madman would deliberately kill a cop and whatever those boys may lack it isn’t sanity.’

‘But why cops in the first place?’

‘Aura of respectability. Cops are above suspicion. When a uniformed policeman shoves his uniformed cap above your gunwale in the dark watches of the night, you don’t whack him over the head with a marline-spike. You invite him aboard. All others you might whack, especially if we had the bad consciences we might have been supposed to have.’

‘Maybe. It’s arguable. And the second point?’

‘They took a big chance, a desperate chance, almost, with Durran. He was thrown to the wolves to see what the reaction would be, whether either of us recognised him.’

‘Why Durran?’

‘I didn’t tell you. I shone a torch in his face. The face didn’t register, just a white blur with screwed-up eyes half-hidden behind an upflung hand. I was really looking lower down, picking the right spot to kick him. But they weren’t to know that. They wanted to find out if we would recognise him. We didn’t. If we had done we’d either have started throwing the crockery at him or yelped for the cops to arrest them – if we’re against them then we’re with the cops. But we didn’t. Not a flicker of recognition. Nobody’s as good as that. I defy any man in the world to meet up again in the same night with a man who has murdered two other people and nearly murdered himself without at least twitching an eyebrow. So the immediate heat is off, the urgent necessity to do us in has become less urgent. It’s a safe bet that if we didn’t recognise Durran, then we recognised nobody on the Nantesville and so we won’t be burning up the lines to Interpol.’

‘We’re in the dear?’

‘I wish to God we were. They’re on to us.’

‘But you said–’

‘I don’t know how I know,’ I said irritably. ‘I know. They went through the after end of the Firecrest like a Treble Chance winner hunting for the coupon he’s afraid he’s forgotten to post. Then halfway through the engine-room search – click! – just like that and they weren’t interested any more. At least Thomas wasn’t. He’d found out something. You saw him afterwards in the saloon, the fore cabins and the upper deck. He couldn’t have cared less.’

‘The batteries?’

‘No. He was satisfied with my explanation. I could tell. I don’t know why, I only know I’m sure.’

‘So they’ll be back.’

‘They’ll be back.’

‘I get the guns out now?’

‘There’s no hurry. Our friends will be sure we can’t communicate with anyone. The mainland boat calls here only twice a week. It came to-day and won’t be back for four days. The lines to the mainland are down and if I thought for a moment they would stay down I should be back in kindergarten. Our transmitter is out. Assuming there are no carrier pigeons in Torbay, what’s the only remaining means of communication with the mainland?’

‘There’s the Shangri-la.’ The Shangri-la , the nearest craft to ours, was white, gleaming, a hundred and twenty feet long and wouldn’t have left her owner a handful of change from a quarter of a million pounds when he’d bought her. ‘She’ll have a couple of thousand quids’ worth of radio equipment aboard. Then there are two, maybe three yachts big enough to carry transmitters. The rest will carry only receivers, if that.’

‘And how many transmitters in Torbay harbour will still be in operating condition to-morrow?’