Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

A flight of steps led from the scullery beyond the kitchen down to a stone-flagged floor. To the right of this floor I could see the loom of light. Susan raised a finger to her lips and we made our way soundlessly down to the foot of the steps. I slid a cautious eye round the corner of this passageway.

It wasn’t passageway, it was the damnedest flight of steps I’d ever come across. They were lit by two or three far-spaced and very weak electric bulbs, the walls coming together towards the foot like a pair of railway lines disappearing into the distance. Maybe fifty feet – or seventy steps – down, where the first light was, another passageway branched off to the right. There was a stool at the corner of the small stone landing there, and sitting on the stool a man. Across his knees lay a rifle. They certainly went in for the heavy artillery.

I drew back. I murmured to Susan: ‘Where in hell’s name do those steps lead to?’

‘The boathouse, of course.’ A surprised whisper. ‘Where else?’

Where else, indeed. Brilliant work, Calvert, brilliant work. You’d skirted the south side of the Dubh Sgeir in the helicopter, you’d seen the castle, you’d seen the boathouse, you’d seen nary a handhold on the sheer cliff separating them, and you’d never raised an eyebrow at the glaring obviousness of the fact that ne’er the twain did meet.

‘Those are the cellars in that passage going off to the right?’ She nodded. ‘Why so far down? It’s a long walk to collect the bubbly’

‘They’re not really wine-cellars. They used to be used as water reservoirs.’

‘No other way of getting down there?’

‘No. Only this way’

‘And if we take five steps down this way he shoots us full of holes with his Lee Enfield. Know who it is?’

‘Harry. I don’t know his other name. He’s an Armenian, Daddy says. People can’t pronounce his real name. He’s young and smooth and greasy – and detestable.’

‘He had the effrontery to make a pass at the chieftain’s daughter?’

‘Yes. It was horrible.’ She touched her lips with the back of her hand. ‘He stank of garlic’

‘I don’t blame him. I’d do it myself if I didn’t feel my pension creeping up on me. Call him up and make amends.’

‘What?’

‘Tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you misjudged his noble character. Tell him your father is away and this is the first chance you’ve had of speaking to him. Tell him anything.’

‘No!’

‘Sue!’

‘He’ll never believe me,’ she said wildly.

‘When he gets within two feet of you, he’ll forget all about the reasoning why. He’s a man, isn’t he?’

‘You’re a man. And you’re only six inches away.’ The eternal female illogic.

‘I’ve told you how it is, it’s my pension coming between us. Quickly!’

She nodded reluctantly and I disappeared into the shadows of the nearest cellar, reversed gun in hand. She called and he came a-running, his rifle at the ready. When he saw who it was, he forgot all about his rifle. Susan started to speak her lines but she might have saved her breath. Harry, if nothing else, was an impetuous young man. That wild Armenian blood. I stepped forwards, arm swinging, and lowered him to the ground. I tied him up and, as I’d run out of handkerchiefs, ripped away part of his shirt-front and used it as a gag. Susan giggled, a giggle with a note of hysteria.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘Harry. He’s what they call a snappy dresser. That’s a silk shirt. You’re no respecter of persons, Mr Calvert.’

‘Not persons like Harry. Congratulations. Wasn’t so bad, was it?’

‘It was still horrible.’ Again the hand to the mouth. ‘He’s reeking of whisky.’

‘Youngsters have odd tastes,’ I said kindly. ‘You’ll grow out of it. At least it must have been an improvement on the garlic.’

The boathouse wasn’t really a boathouse at all, it was a large vaulting cave formed in a cleft in a natural fault in the cliff strata. At the inner end of the cave longitudinal tunnels stretched away on either side paralleling the coastline, until they vanished beyond the reach of my torch. From the air, the boathouse in the small artificial harbour, a structure of about twenty feet by twenty, had seemed incapable of housing more than two or three fair-sized rowing boats. Inside it was big enough to berth a boat the size of the Firecrest , and then leave room to spare. Mooring bollards, four in number, lined the eastern side of the boat-house. There were signs of recent work where the inner end of the cave had been lengthened in the direction of the longitudinal tunnels to increase the berthing space and provide a bigger working platform, but otherwise it was as it must have been for hundreds of years. I picked up a boat-hook and tried to test the depth, but couldn’t find bottom. Any vessel small enough to be accommodated inside could enter and leave at any state of the tide. The two big doors looked solid but not too solid. There was a small dry-land doorway on the eastern side.

The berth was empty, as I had expected to find it. Our friends were apprehensive and on piecework rates. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they were working at, the working platform was liberally stacked with the tools of their trade: an oil engine-driven air compressor with a steel reservoir with outlet valves, a manually operated, two-cylinder double-acting air pump with two outlets, two helmets with attached corselets, flexible, non-collapsible air tubes with metal couplings, weighted boots, diving dresses, life-cum-telephone lines, lead weights and scuba equipment such as I had myself, with a stack of compressed air cylinders at the ready.

I felt neither surprise nor elation, I’d known this must exist for the past forty-eight hours although I’d become certain of the location only that night. I was faintly surprised perhaps, to see all this equipment here, for this would surely be only the spares. But I shouldn’t have been even vaguely surprised. Whatever this bunch lacked, it wasn’t a genius for organisation.

I didn’t see that night, nor did I ever see, the cellars where the prisoners were housed. After I’d huffed and puffed three-quarters of the way up that interminable flight of steps, I turned left along the passageway where we’d first seen Harry taking his ease. After a few yards the passageway broadened out into a low damp chamber containing a table made of beer-cases, some seats of the same and, in one corner, some furniture that hadn’t yet been drunk. A bottle of whisky, nearly full, stood on the table: Harry’s remedy for garlic halitosis.

Beyond this chamber was a massive wooden door secured by an equally massive-looking lock with the key missing. All the celluloid in the world wouldn’t open this lot but a beehive plastic explosive would do a very efficient job indeed. I made another of the many mental notes I’d made that night and went up the stairs to rejoin Susan.

Harry had come to. He was saying something in his throat which fortunately couldn’t get past his silk-shirted gag to the delicate ears of the chieftain’s young daughter, his eyes, to mint a phrase, spoke volumes and he was trying as best he could to do a Houdini with the ropes round his legs and arms. Susan Kirkside was pointing a rifle in his general direction and looking very apprehensive. She needn’t have bothered, Harry was trussed like a turkey.

‘These people down in the cellars,’ I said. ‘They’ve been there for weeks, some for months. They’ll be blind as bats and weak as kittens by the time they get out.’

She shook her head. ‘I think they’ll be all right. They’re taken out on the landing strip there for an hour and a half every morning under guard. They can’t be seen from the sea. We’re not allowed to watch. Or not supposed to. I’ve seen them often. Daddy insisted on it. And Sir Anthony.’