Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

I had exchanged Eilean Oran for the island of Craigmore and I still wasn’t smiling. I wasn’t smiling for all sorts of reasons. I wasn’t smiling because Uncle Arthur and Charlotte Skouras together made a nautical combination that terrified the life out of me, because the northern tip of Craigmore was much more exposed and reefhaunted than the south shore of Eilean Oran had been, because the fog was thickening, because I was breathless and bruised from big combers hurling me on to unseen reefs on my swim ashore, because I was wondering whether I had any chance in the world of carrying out my rash promise to Donald MacEachern. If I thought a bit more I’d no doubt I could come up with all sorts of other and equally valid reasons why I wasn’t smiling, but I hadn’t the time to think any more about it, the night was wearing on and I’d much to do before the dawn.

The nearest of the two fishing boats in the little natural harbour was rolling quite heavily in the waves that curled round the reef forming the natural breakwater to the west so I didn’t have to worry too much about any splashing sound I might make as I hauled myself up on deck. What I did have to worry about was that damned bright light in its sealed inverted glass by the flensing shed, it was powerful enough to enable me to be seen from the other houses on shore. . . . But my worry about it was a little thing compared to my gratitude for its existence. Out in the wild blue yonder Uncle Arthur could do with every beacon of hope he could find.

It was a typical M.F.V., about forty-five feet long and with the general look of a boat that could laugh at a hurricane. I went through it in two minutes. All in immaculate condition, not a thing aboard that shouldn’t have been there. Just a genuine fishing boat. My hopes began to rise. There was no other direction they could go. The second M.F.V. was the mirror image of the first, down to the last innocuous inch. It wouldn’t be true to say that my hopes were now soaring, but at least they were getting up off the ground where they’d been for a long time.

I swam ashore, parked my scuba equipment above the highwater mark and made my way to the flensing shed, keeping its bulk between the light and myself as I went. The shed contained winches, steel tubs and barrels, a variety of ferocious weapons doubtless used for flensing, rolling cranes, some unidentifiable but obviously harmless machinery, the remains of some sharks and the most fearful smell I’d ever come across in my life. I left, hurriedly.

The first of the cottages yielded nothing. I flashed a torch through a broken window. The room was bare, it looked as if no one had set foot there for half a century, it was only too easy to believe Williams’s statement that this tiny hamlet had been abandoned before the First World War. Curiously, the wall-paper looked as if it had been applied the previous day – a curious and largely unexplained phenomenon in the Western Isles. Your grandmother – in those days grandpa would have signed the pledge sooner than lift a finger inside the house – slapped up some wall-paper at ninepence a yard and fifty years later it was still there, as fresh as the day it had been put up.

The second cottage was as deserted as the first.

The third cottage, the one most remote from the flensing shed, was where the shark-fishers lived. A logical and very understandable choice, one would have thought, the farther away from that olfactory horror the better. Had I the option, I’d have been living in a tent on the other side of the island. But that was a purely personal reaction. The stench of that flensing shed was probably to the sharkfishers, as is the ammonia-laden, nostril-wrinkling, wholly awful mist – liquid manure – to the Swiss farmers: the very breath of being. The symbol of success. One can pay too high a price for success.

I eased open the well-oiled – shark-liver oil, no doubt – door and passed inside. The torch came on again. Grandma wouldn’t have gone very much on this front parlour but grandpa would cheerfully have sat there watching his beard turn white through the changing seasons without ever wanting to go down to the sea again. One entire wall was given up to food supplies, a miserable couple of dozen crates of whisky and score upon scores of crates of beer. Australians, Williams had said. I could well believe it. The other three walls – there was hardly a scrap of wall-paper to be seen – was devoted to a form of art, in uninhibited detail and glorious Technicolor, of a type not usually to be found in the better-class museums and art galleries. Not grandma’s cup of tea at all.

I skirted the furniture which hadn’t come out of Harrods and opened the interior door. A short corridor lay beyond. Two doors to the right, three to the left. Working on the theory that the boss of the outfit probably had the largest room to himself, I carefully opened the first door to the right.

The flash-light showed it to be a surprisingly comfortable room. A good carpet, heavy curtains, a couple of good armchairs, bedroom furniture in oak, a double bed and a bookcase. A shaded electric light hung above the bed. Those rugged Australians believed in their home comforts. There was a switch beside the door. I touched it and the overhead lamp came on.

There was only one person in the double bed but even at that he was cramped in it. It’s hard to gauge a man’s height when he’s lying down but if this lad tried to stand up in a room with a ceiling height of less than six feet four inches, he’d finish up with concussion. His face was towards me but I couldn’t see much of it, it was hidden by a head of thick black hair that had fallen over his brows and the most magnificently bushy black beard I’d ever clapped eyes on. He was sound asleep.

I crossed to the bed, prodded his ribs with the gun barrel and a pressure sufficient to wake a lad of his size and said: ‘Wake up.’

He woke up. I moved a respectful distance away. He rubbed his eyes with one hairy forearm, got his hands under him and heaved himself to a sitting position. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him wearing a bearskin, but no, he was wearing a pair of pyjamas in excellent taste, I might have chosen the colour myself.

Law-abiding citizens woken in the dark watches of the night by a gun-pointing stranger react in all sorts of ways, varying from terror to apoplectically-purple outrage. The man in the beard didn’t react in any of the standard ways at all. He just stared at me from under dark overhanging cliffs of eyebrows and the expression in the eyes was that of a Bengal tiger mentally tucking in his napkin before launching himself on the thirty-foot leap that is going to culminate in lunch. I stepped back another couple of paces and said: ‘Don’t try it.’

‘Put that gun away, sonny boy,’ he said. The deep rumbling voice seemed to come from the innermost recesses of the Carlsbad cavern. ‘Put it away or I’ll have to get up and clobber you and take it from you.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ I complained, then added politely: ‘If I put it away, will you clobber me?’

He considered this for a moment, then said: ‘No.’ He reached out for a big black cigar and lit it, his eyes on me all the time. The acrid fumes reached across the room and as it isn’t polite for a guest in another’s house to rush to open the nearest window without permission I didn’t but it was a near thing. No wonder he’d never notice the stench from the flensing shed: compared to this, Uncle Arthur’s cheroots came into the same category as Charlotte’s perfume.

‘My apologies for the intrusion. Are you Tim Hutchinson?’

‘Yeah. And you, sonny boy?’

‘Philip Calvert. I want to use one of your boat’s transmitters to contact London. I also need your help. How urgently you can’t imagine. A good many lives and millions of pounds can be lost in the next twenty-four hours.’