Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

I’d told Hutchinson that the bollards were on the starboard side of the boathouse, so that the diving-boat would be tied up on that side. He angled the boat across the tiny harbour towards the righthand crack of light, spun the wheel to port till we were angling in towards the central crack of light and put the engine full astern. It was no part of the plan to telescope the Firecrest’s bows against the wall of the boathouse and send it – and us – to the bottom.

As an entrance it erred, if anything, on the spectacular side. The doors, instead of bursting open at their central hasps, broke off at the hinges and we carried the whole lot before us with a thunderous crash. This took a good knot off our speed. The aluminium foremast, with Uncle Arthur’s fancy telescopic aerial inside, almost tore the tabernacle clear of the deck before it sheared off, just above wheelhouse level, with a most unpleasant metallic shrieking. That took another knot off. The screw, biting deep in maximum revs astern, took off yet another knot, but we still had a fair way on when, amid a crackling, splintering of wood, partly of our planking but mainly of the doors, and the screeching of the rubber tyres on our well-fendered bows, we stopped short with a jarring shock, firmly wedged between the port quarter of the diving-boat and the port wall of the boathouse. Uncle Arthur’s feelings must have been almost as bruised and lacerated as the planking of his beloved Firecrest. Hutchinson moved the throttle to slow ahead to keep us wedged in position and switched on the five-inch searchlight, less to illuminate the already sufficiently welllit shed than to dazzle bystanders ashore. I stepped out on the deck with the machine-pistol in my hands.

We were confronted, as the travel books put it, with a scene of bustling activity, or, more precisely, what had been a scene of bustling activity before our entrance had apparently paralysed them all in whatever positions they had been at the time. On the extreme right three faces stared at us over the edge of the hold of the diving-boat, a typical forty-five-foot M.F.V. about the same size as the Charmaine. Two men on deck were frozen in the act of lifting a box across to the hold. Another two were standing upright, one with his hands stretched above his head, waiting for another box swinging gently from a rope suspended from a loading boom. That box was the only moving thing in the boathouse. The winchman himself, who bore an uncommon resemblance to Thomas, the bogus customs officer, one lever against his chest and another held in his outstretched right hand, looked as if the lavas of Vesuvius had washed over him twenty centuries ago and left him frozen for ever. The others, backs bent, were standing on the wall at the head of the boathouse, holding a rope attached to a very large box which two frogmen were helping to lift clear of the water. When it came to hiding specie, they had one-track minds. On the extreme left stood Captain Imrie, presumably there to supervise operations, and, beside him, his patrons, Lavorski and Dollmann. This was the big day, this was the culmination of all their dreams, and they weren’t going to miss a moment of it.

Imrie, Lavorski and Dollmann were the ones for me. I moved forward until I could see the barrel of the machine-gun and until they could also see that it was pointing at them.

‘Come close,’ I said. ‘Yes, you three. Captain Imrie, speak to your men. Tell them that if they move, if they try anything at all, I’ll kill all three of you. I’ve killed four of you already. If I double the number, what then? Under the new laws you get only fifteen years. For murderous vermin, that is not enough. I’d rather you died here. Do you believe me. Captain Imrie?’

‘I believe you.’ The guttural voice was deep and sombre. ‘You killed Quinn this afternoon.’

‘He deserved to die.’

‘He should have killed you that night on the Nantesville,’ Imrie said. ‘Then none of this would have happened.’

‘You will come aboard our boat one at a time,’ I said. ‘In this situation, Captain Imrie, you are without question the most dangerous man. After you, Lavorski, then–’

‘Please keep very still. Terribly still.’ The voice behind me was totally lacking in inflection, but the gun pressed hard against my spine carried its own message, one not easily misunderstood. ‘Good. Take a pace forward and take your right hand away from the gun.’

I took a pace forward and removed my right hand. This left me holding the machine-pistol by the barrel.

‘Lay the gun on the deck.’

It obviously wasn’t going to be much use to me as a club, so I laid it on the deck. I’d been caught like this before, once or twice, and just to show that I was a true professional I raised my hands high and turned slowly round.

‘Why, Charlotte Skouras!’ I said. Again I knew what to do, how to act, the correct tone for the circumvented agent, bantering but bitter. ‘Fancy meeting you here. Thank you very much my dear.’ She was still dressed in the dark sweater and slacks, only they weren’t quite as spruce as the last time I’d seen them. They were soaking wet. Her face was dead white and without expression. The brown eyes were very still. ‘And how in God’s name did you get here?’

‘I escaped through the bedroom window and swam out. I hid in the after cabin.’

‘Did you indeed? Why don’t you change out of those wet clothes?’ She ignored me. She said to Hutchinson: ‘Turn off that searchlight.’

‘Do as the lady says,’ I advised.

He did as the lady said. The light went out and we were all now in full view of the men ashore. Imrie said: ‘Throw that gun over the side, Admiral.’

‘Do as the gentleman says,’ I advised.

Uncle Arthur threw the gun over the side. Captain Imrie and Lavorski came walking confidently towards us. They could afford to walk confidently, the three men in the hold, the two men who had suddenly appeared from behind the diving-boat’s wheelhouse and the winch-driver – a nice round total of six – had suddenly sprouted guns. I looked over this show of armed strength and said slowly: ‘You were waiting for us.’

‘Certainly we were waiting for you,’ Lavorski said jovially. ‘Our dear Charlotte announced the exact time of your arrival. Haven’t you guessed that yet, Calvert?’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Charlotte, you fool. By heavens, I believe we have been grievously guilty of over-estimating you.’

‘Mrs Skouras was a plant,’ I said.

‘A bait,’ Lavorski said cheerfully. I wasn’t fooled by his cheerfulness, he’d have gone into hysterics of laughter when I came apart on the rack. ‘Swallowed hook, line, and sinker. A bait with a highly effective if tiny transmitter and a gun in a polythene bag. We found the transmitter in your starboard engine.’ He laughed again until he seemed in danger of going into convulsions. ‘We’ve known of every move you’ve made since you left Torbay. And how do you like that, Mr Secret Agent Calvert?’

‘I don’t like it at all. What are you going to do with us?’

‘Don’t be childish. What are you going to do with us, asks he naïvely. I’m afraid you know all too well. How did you locate this place?’

‘I don’t talk to executioners.’

‘I think we’ll shoot the admiral through the foot, to begin with,’ Lavorski beamed. ‘A minute afterwards through the arm, then the thigh–’

‘All right. We had a radio-transmitter aboard the Nantesville.’

‘We know that. How did you pin-point Dubh Sgeir?’

‘The boat belonging to the Oxford geological expedition. It is moored fore and aft in a little natural harbour south of here. It’s well clear of any rock yet it’s badly holed. It’s impossible that it would be holed naturally where it lay. It was holed unnaturally shall we say. Any other boat you could have seen coming from a long way off, but that boat had only to move out to be in full sight of the boathouse – and the anchored diving-boat. It was very clumsy.’