Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

‘Am I glad to see you, brother,’ he said. ‘Never thought the day would come when Tim Hutchinson would die a thousand deaths, but die a thousand deaths he did. How did it go?’

‘All right. We’ve time. Five or six hours yet.’

‘I’ll get the hook up.’

Three minutes later we were on our way and three minutes after that we were out near enough in the midchannel of the Beul nan Uamh, heading north-north-east against the gathering ebb. I could hear the helm going on auto-pilot and then Hutchinson came through the door into the lit saloon, curtains tightly if, in that fog, unnecessarily drawn, where I was rendering some first aid to myself, just beginning to tape up a patch of gauze over the ugly gash that stretched all the way from lowest rib to shoulder. I couldn’t see the expression behind the darkly-luxuriant foliage of that beard, but his sudden immobility was expression enough. He said, quietly: ‘What happened, Calvert?’

‘Quinn. I met him in the strongroom of the Nantesville.’

He moved forward and in silence helped me to tape up the gauze. When it was finished, and not until then, he said: ‘Quinn is dead.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Quinn is dead. He cut his own air-hose.’ I told him what had happened and he said nothing. He didn’t exchange a dozen words all the way back to Craigmore. I knew he didn’t believe me. I knew he never would.

Neither did Uncle Arthur. He’d never believe me till the day he died. But his reaction was quite different, it was one of profound satisfaction. Uncle Arthur was, in his own avuncular fashion, possessed of an absolute ruthlessness. Indeed, he seemed to take half the credit for the alleged execution. ‘It’s not twenty-four hours,’ he’d announced at the tea-table, ‘since I told Calvert to seek out and destroy this man by whatever means that came to hand. I must confess that I never thought the means would consist of the blade of a sharp knife against an air-hose. A neat touch, my boy, a very neat touch indeed.’

Charlotte Skouras believed me. I don’t know why, but she believed me. While she was stripping off my makeshift bandage, cleaning the wound and re-bandaging it very efficiently, a process I suffered with unflinching fortitude because I didn’t want to destroy her image of a secret service agent by bellowing out loud at the top of my voice, I told her what had happened and there was no doubt that she believed me without question. I thanked her, for bandage and belief, and she smiled.

Six hours later, twenty minutes before our eleven p.m. deadline for taking off in the Firecrest , she was no longer smiling. She was looking at me the way women usually look at you when they have their minds set on something and can see that they are not going to get their own way: a rather less than affectionate look.

‘I’m sorry, Charlotte,’ I said. ‘I’m genuinely sorry, but it’s not on. You are not coming with us, and that’s that.’ She was dressed in dark slacks and sweater, like one who had – or had had – every intention of coming with us on a midnight jaunt. ‘We’re not going picnicking on the Thames. Remember what you said yourself this morning. There will be shooting. Do you think I want to see you killed?’

‘I’ll stay below,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll stay out of harm’s way. Please, Philip, let me come.’

‘No.’

‘You said you’d do anything in the world for me. Remember?’

‘That’s unfair, and you know it. Anything to help you, I meant. Not anything to get you killed. Not you, of all people.’

‘Of all people? You think so much of me?’

I nodded.

‘I mean so much to you?’

I nodded again. She looked at me for a long time, her eyes wide and questioning, her lips moving as if about to speak and yet not speaking, then took a step forward, latched her arms around my neck and tried to break it. At least, that was the way it felt, the dead Quinn’s handiwork was still with me, but it wasn’t that at all, she was clinging to me as she might cling to a person who she knew she would never see again. Maybe she was fey, maybe she had second sight, maybe she could see old Calvert floating, face down, in the murky waters of the Dubh Sgeir boathouse. When I thought about it I could see it myself, and it wasn’t an attractive sight at all. I was beginning to have some difficulty with my breathing when she suddenly let me go, half-led, half-pushed me from the room and closed the door behind me. I heard the key turn in the lock.

‘Our friends are at home,’ Tim Hutchinson said. We’d circled far to the south of Dubh Sgeir, close in to the southern shore of Loch Houron and were now drifting quickly on the flood tide, engines stopped, in an east by northerly direction past the little man-made harbour of Dubh Sgeir. ‘You were right, Calvert. They’re getting all ready for their moonlit flitting.’

‘Calvert is usually right,’ Uncle Arthur said in his best trained-him-myself voice. ‘And now, my boy?’

The mist had thinned now, giving maybe a hundred yards’ visibility. I looked at the T-shaped crack of light showing where the boathouse doors didn’t quite meet each other in the middle and where the tops of the doors sagged away from the main structure.

‘Now it is,’ I said. I turned to Hutchinson. ‘We’ve all of a fifteen foot beam. That entrance is not more than twenty wide. There’s not a beacon or a mark on it. There’s a four knot tide running. You really think it can be done – taking her through that entrance at four or five knots, fast enough to smash open those doors, without piling ourselves up on the rocks on the way in?’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’ He pressed the starter button and the warm diesel caught fire at once, its underpass exhaust barely audible. He swung her round to the south on minimum revs, continued on this course for two cables, westwards for the same distance, curved round to the north, pushed the throttle wide open and lit a cigar. Tim Hutchinson preparing for action. In the flare of the match the dark face was quiet and thoughtful, no more.

For just over a minute there was nothing to be seen, just the darkness and patches of grey mist swirling past our bows. Hutchinson was heading a few degrees west of north, making allowance for the set of the tide. All at once we could see it, slightly off the starboard bow as it had to be to correct for the tide, that big T-shaped light in the darkness, fairly jumping at us. I picked up the submachine-guns, opened and latched back the port wheelhouse door and stood there, gun in left hand, door-jamb in right, with one foot on the outside deck and the other still in the wheel-house. Uncle Arthur, I knew, was similarly positioned on the starboard side. We were as firmly braced as it was possible to be. When the Firecrest stopped, it would stop very suddenly indeed.

Forty yards away, Hutchinson eased the throttle and gave the wheel a touch to port. That bright T was even farther round on our starboard side now, but directly in line with us and the patch of dark water to the west of the almost phosphorescently foaming whiteness that marked the point where the flood tide ripped past the outer end of the eastern breakwater. Twenty yards away he pushed the throttle open again, we were heading straight for where the unseen west breakwater must be, we were far too far over to port, it was impossible now that we could avoid smashing bow first into it, then suddenly Hutchinson had the wheel spinning to starboard, the tide pushing him the same way, and we were through and not an inch of Uncle Arthur’s precious paint-work had been removed. Hutchinson had the engine in neutral. I wondered briefly whether, if I practised for the rest of my life, I could effect a manoeuvre like that: I knew damned well that I couldn’t.