Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

‘And the crew?’

‘Need you ask? Never found. Then the last case, a few weeks ago – August 8th. Husband, wife, two teenage children, son and daughter. Converted lifeboat, the Kingfisher. By all accounts a pretty competent sailor, been at it for years. But he’d never done any night navigation, so he set out one calm evening to do a night cruise. Vanished. Boat and crew.’

‘Where did he set out from?’

‘Torbay.’

That one word made his afternoon. It made mine, too. I said: ‘And do you still think the Nantesville is hell and gone to Iceland or some remote fjord in northern Norway?’

‘I never thought anything of the kind.’ Uncle’s human relationship barometer had suddenly swung back from friendly to normal, normal lying somewhere between cool and glacial. ‘The significance of the dates will not have escaped you?’

‘No, Annabelle, the significance has not escaped me.’ The Buckie fishing-boat, the Evening Star , had been found washed up on Islay three days after the S.S. Holmwood had vanished off the south coast of Ireland. The Jeannie Rose had vanished exactly three days after the M.V. Antara had as mysteriously disappeared in the St George’s Channel. The Cap Gris Nez , the R.O.R.C. racer that had finally landed up on the rocks of the island of Skye had vanished the same day as the M.V. Headley Pioneer had disappeared somewhere, it was thought, off Northern Ireland. And the converted lifeboat. Kingfisher , had disappeared, never to be seen again, just two days after the S.S. Hurricane Spray had left the Clyde, also never to be seen again. Coincidence was coincidence and I classed those who denied its existence with intellectual giants like the twentieth-century South African president who stoutly maintained that the world was flat and that an incautious step would take you over the edge with results as permanent as they would be disastrous: but this was plain ridiculous. The odds against such a perfect matching of dates could be calculated only in astronomical terms: while the complete disappearance of the crews of four small boats that had come to grief in so very limited an area was the final nail in the coffin of coincidence. I said as much to Uncle.

‘Let us not waste time by dwelling upon the obvious, Caroline,’ Uncle said coldly, which was pretty ungracious of him as the idea had never even entered his head until I had put it there four hours previously. ‘The point is – what is to be done? Islay to Skye is a pretty big area. Where does this get us?’

‘How much weight can you bring to bear to secure the co-operation of the television and radio networks?’

There was a pause, then: ‘What do you have in mind, Caroline?’ Uncle at his most forbidding.

‘An insertion of an item in their news bulletins.’

‘Well.’ An even longer pause. ‘It was done daily during the war, of course. I believe it’s been done once or twice since. Can’t compel them, of course – they’re a stuffy lot, both the B.B.C. and the I.T.A.’ His tone left little doubt as to his opinion of those diehard reactionaries who brooked no interference, an odd reaction from one who was himself a past-master of brookmanship of this nature. ‘If they can be persuaded that it’s completely apolitical and in the national interest there’s a chance. What do you want?’

‘An item that a distress signal has been received from a sinking yacht somewhere south of Skye. Exact position unknown. Signals ceased, the worst feared, an air-sea search to be mounted at first light to-morrow. That’s all.’

‘I may manage it. Your reason, Caroline?’

‘I want to look around. I want an excuse to move around without raising eyebrows.’

‘You’re going to volunteer the Firecrest for this search and then poke around where you shouldn’t?’

‘We have our faults, Annabelle, Harriet and I, but we’re not crazy. I wouldn’t take this tub across the Serpentine without a favourable weather forecast. It’s blowing a Force 7 outside. And a boat search would take a lifetime too long in those parts. What I had in mind was this. At the very eastern tip of Torbay Island, about five miles from the village, there’s a small deserted sandy cove, semicircular and well protected by steep bluffs and pine trees. Will you please arrange to have a long-range helicopter there exactly at dawn.’

‘And now it’s your turn to think I am crazy,’ Uncle Arthur said coldly. That remark about the sea-keeping qualities of his own brainchild, the Firecrest , would have rankled badly. ‘I’m supposed to snap my fingers and hey presto! a helicopter will be there at dawn.’

‘That’s fourteen hours from now, Annabelle. At five o’clock this morning you were prepared to snap your fingers and have a helicopter here by noon. Seven hours. Exactly half the time. But that was for something important, like getting me down to London to give me the bawling out of a lifetime before firing me.’

‘Call me at midnight, Caroline. I hope to God you know what you are doing.’

I said: ‘Yes, sir,’ and hung up. I didn’t mean, Yes, sir, I knew what I was doing, I meant, Yes, sir, I hoped to God I knew what I was doing.

If the carpet in the Shangri-la ’s saloon had cost a penny under five thousand pounds, then old Skouras must have picked it up secondhand somewhere. Twenty by thirty, bronze and russet and gold, but mainly gold, it flowed across the deck like a field of ripe corn, an illusion heightened both by its depth and the impediment it offered to progress. You had to wade through the damn’ thing. I’d never seen an item of furnishing like it in my life except for the curtains that covered two-thirds of the bulkhead space. The curtains made the carpet look rather shoddy. Persian or Afghanistan, with a heavy gleaming weave that gave a shimmering shot-silk effect with every little movement of the Shangri-la , they stretched all the way from deckhead to deck. What little of the bulkheads that could be seen were sheathed in a satiny tropical hardwood, the same wood as was used for the magnificent bar that took up most of the after bulkhead of the saloon. The opulently upholstered settees and armchairs and bar-stools, dark green leather with gold piping, would have cost another fortune, even the trade-in value of the beaten copper tables scattered carelessly about the carpet would have fed a family of five for a year. At the Savoy Grill.

On the port bulkhead hung two Cézannes, on the starboard two Renoirs. The pictures were a mistake. In that room they didn’t have a chance. They’d have felt more at home in the galley.

So would I. So, I was pretty sure, would Hunslett. It wasn’t merely that our sports coats and Paisley scarves clashed violently with the decor in general and the black ties and dinner jackets of our host and his other guests in particular. It wasn’t even that the general run of conversation might have been specifically designed to reduce Hunslett and myself to our proper status of artisans and pretty inferior artisans at that. All this talk about debentures and mergers and cross-options and takeovers and millions and millions of dollars has a pretty demoralising effect on the lower classes, but you didn’t need to have the I.Q. of a genius to realise that this line of talk wasn’t being aimed specifically at us; to the lads with the black ties, debentures and takeovers were the stuff and staff of life and so a principal staple of conversation. Besides, this wish to be somewhere else obviously didn’t apply only to us: at least two others, a bald-headed, goatee-bearded merchant banker by the name of Henri Biscarte and a big bluff Scots lawyer by the name of MacCallum were just as uncomfortable as I felt, but showed it a great deal more.