Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing. The end of a dream. Deirdre would never have talked like that. Where’s your old man?’

‘My old man?’ The one eye I could see had the power turned up to its maximum shrivelling voltage. ‘You mean my father?’

‘Sorry. Lord Kirkside.’ It was no feat to guess that she was Lord Kirkside’s daughter, hired help are too ignorant to have the execrable manners of their aristocratic betters.

‘I’m Lord Kirkside.’ I turned round to see the owner of the deep voice behind me, a tall rugged-looking character in his fifties, hawk nose, jutting grey eyebrows and moustache, grey tweeds, grey deerstalker, hawthorn stick in hand. ‘What’s the trouble, Sue?’

Sue. I might have known. Exit the last vestige of the Hebridean dream. I said: ‘My name is Johnson. Air-Sea Rescue. There was a boat, the Moray Rose , in bad trouble somewhere south of Skye. If she’d been not under command but still afloat she might have come drifting this way. We wondered–’

‘And Sue was going to fling you over the cliff before you had a chance to open your mouth?’ He smiled down affectionately at his daughter. ‘That’s my Sue. I’m afraid she doesn’t like newspapermen.’

‘Some do and some don’t. But why pick on me?’

‘When you were twenty-one could you, as the saying goes, tell a newspaperman from a human being? I couldn’t. But I can now, a mile away. I can also tell a genuine Air-Sea Rescue helicopter when I see one. And so should you too, young lady. I’m sorry, Mr Johnson, we can’t help you. My men and I spent several hours last night patrolling the cliff-tops to see if we could see anything. Lights, flares, anything. Nothing, I’m afraid.’

‘Thank you, sir. I wish we had more voluntary co-operation of this kind.’ From where I stood I could see, due south, the gently rocking masts of the Oxford field expedition’s boat in Little Horseshoe Bay. The boat itself and the tents beyond were hidden behind the rocky eastern arm of the bay. I said to Lord Kirkside: ‘But why newspapermen, sir? Dubh Sgeir isn’t quite as accessible as Westminster.’

‘Indeed, Mr Johnson.’ He smiled, not with his eyes. ‘You may have heard of – well, of our family tragedy. My elder boy, Jonathon, and John Rollinson – Sue’s fiancé.’

I knew what was coming. And after all those months she had those smudges under her eyes. She must have loved him a lot. I could hardly believe it.

‘I’m no newspaperman, sir. Prying isn’t my business.’ It wasn’t my business, it was my life, the raison d’être for my existence. But now wasn’t the time to tell him.

‘The air accident. Jonathan had his own private Beechcraft.’ He waved towards the stretch of green turf running to the Northern cliffs. ‘He took off from here that morning. They – the reporters – wanted on-the-spot reporting. They came by helicopter and boat – there’s a landing stage to the west.’ Again the mirthless smile. ‘They weren’t well received. Care for a drink? You and your pilot?’ Lord Kirkside, for all the reputation Williams had given him, seemed to be cast in a different mould from his daughter and Mr Donald MacEachern: on the other hand, as the Archbishop of Canterbury knew to his cost, Lord Kirkside was a very much tougher citizen than either his daughter or Mr MacEachern.

‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. But we haven’t many hours of daylight left.’

‘Of course, of course. How thoughtless of me. But you can’t have much hope left by this time.’

‘Frankly, none. But, well, you know how it is, sir.’

‘We’ll cross our fingers for that one chance in a million. Good luck, Mr Johnson.’ He shook my hand and turned away. His daughter hesitated then held out her hand and smiled. A fluke of the wind had blown the hair off her face, and when she smiled like that, sooty eyes or not, the end of Deirdre and the Hebridean dream didn’t seem to be of so much account after all. I went back to the helicopter.

‘We’re getting low on both fuel and time,’ Williams said. ‘Another hour or so and we’ll have the dark with us. Where now, Mr Calvert?’

‘North. Follow this patch of grass – seems it used to be used as a light aircraft runway – out over the edge of the cliff. Take your time.’

So he did, taking his time as I’d asked him, then continued on a northward course for another ten minutes. After we were out of sight of watchers on any of the islands we came round in a great half circle to west and south and east and headed back for home.

The sun was down and the world below was more night than day as we came in to land on the sandy cove on the eastern side of the Isle of Torbay. I could just vaguely distinguish the blackness of the tree-clad island, the faint silvery gleam of the sand and the semicircular whiteness where the jagged reef of rocks fringed the seaward approach to the cove. It looked a very dicey approach indeed to me but Williams was as unworried as a mother at a baby-show who has already slipped the judge a five-pound note. Well, if he wasn’t going to worry, neither was I: I knew nothing about helicopters but I knew enough about men to recognise a superb pilot when I sat beside one. All I had to worry about was that damned walk back through those Stygian woods. One thing, I didn’t have to run this time.

Williams reached up his hand to flick on the landing lights but the light came on a fraction of a second before his fingers touched the switch. Not from the helicopter but from the ground. A bright light, a dazzling light, at least a five-inch searchlight located between the high-water line of the cove and the tree-line beyond. For a moment the light wavered, then steadied on the cockpit of the helicopter, making the interior bright as the light from the noon-day sun. I twisted my head to one side to avoid the glare. I saw Williams throw up a hand to protect his eyes, then slump forward wearily, dead in his seat, as the white linen of his shirt turned to red and the centre of his chest disintegrated. I flung myself forwards and downwards to try to gain what illusory shelter I could from the cannonading submachine shells shattering the windscreen. The helicopter was out of control, dipping sharply forwards and spinning slowly on its axis. I reached out to grab the controls from the dead man’s hands but even as I did the trajectory of the bullets changed, either because the man with the machine-gun had altered his aim or because he’d been caught off-balance by the sudden dipping of the helicopter. An abruptly mad cacophony of sound, the iron clangour of steel-nosed bullets smashing into the engine casing mingled with the banshee ricochet of spent and mangled shells. The engine stopped, stopped as suddenly as if the ignition had been switched off. The helicopter was completely out of control, lifeless in the sky. It wasn’t going to be in the sky much longer but there was nothing I could do about it. I braced myself for the jarring moment of impact when we struck the water, and when the impact came it was not just jarring, it was shattering to a degree I would never have anticipated. We’d landed not in the water but on the encircling reef of rocks.

I tried to get at the door but couldn’t make it, we’d landed nose down and facing seawards on the outside of the reefs and from the position where I’d been hurled under the instrument panel the door was above and beyond my reach. I was too dazed, too weak, to make any real effort to get at it. Icy water poured in through the smashed windscreen and the fractured floor of the fuselage. For a moment everything was as silent as the grave, the hiss of the flooding waters seemed only to emphasise the silence then the machine-gun started again. The shells smashed through the lower after part of the fuselage behind me and went out through the top of the windscreen above me. Twice I felt angry tugs on the right shoulder of my coat and I tried to bury my head even more deeply into the freezing waters. Then, due probably to a combination of an accumulation of water in the nose and the effect of the fusillade of bullets aft, the helicopter lurched forwards, stopped momentarily, then slid off the face of the reef and fell like a stone, nose first, to the bottom of the sea.