Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

‘My dear Kirkside! My dear fellow!’ Uncle Arthur hurried forward and shook him by the hand, I’d quite forgotten that they knew one another. ‘Delighted to see you safe and sound, my dear chap. Absolutely delighted. It’s all over now.’

‘What in God’s name is happening?’ Lord Kirkside asked. ‘You – you’ve got them? You have them all? Where is my boy? Where is Rollinson? What–?’

An explosive crack, curiously muffled, came down the flight of steps. Uncle Arthur looked at Rawley, who nodded. ‘Plastic explosive, sir.’

‘Excellent, excellent,’ Uncle Arthur beamed. ‘You’ll see them any minute, Kirkside.’ He crossed over to where old Skouras was lined up against the wall, hands clasped behind his neck, reached up both his own, pulled Skouras’s arms down and shook his right hand as if he were attempting to tear it off.

‘You’re lined up with the wrong team, Tony, my boy.’ This was one of the great moments of Uncle Arthur’s life. He led him across to where Lord Kirkside was standing. ‘It’s been a frightful nightmare, my boy, a frightful nightmare. But it’s all over now’

‘Why did you do it?’ Skouras said dully. ‘Why did you do it? God, oh God, you don’t know what you’ve done.’

‘Mrs Skouras? The real Mrs Skouras?’ There is the ham actor in all of us, but more than most in Uncle Arthur. He pushed back his sleeve and studied his watch carefully. ‘She arrived in London by air from Nice just over three hours ago. She is in the London Clinic.’

‘What in God’s name do you mean? You don’t know what you are saying. My wife–’

‘Your wife is in London. Charlotte here is Charlotte Meiner and always was.’ I looked at Charlotte. A total incomprehension and the tentative beginnings of a dazed hope. ‘Earlier this year, blazing the trail for many kidnappings that were to follow, your friends Lavorski and Dollmann had your wife seized and hidden away to force you to act with them, to put your resources at their disposal. I think they felt aggrieved, Tony, that you should be a millionaire while they were executives: they had it all worked out, even to having the effrontery of intending to invest the proceeds in your empire. However. Your wife managed to escape, so they seized her cousin and best friend, Charlotte – a friend upon whom, shall we say, your wife was emotionally very dependent – and threatened to kill her unless they got Mrs Skouras back again. Mrs Skouras surrendered immediately. This gave them the bright idea of having two swords of Damocles hanging over your head, so, being men of honour, they decided to keep Charlotte as well as your imprisoned wife. Then, they knew, you would do exactly as they wanted, when and as they wanted. To have a good excuse to keep both you and Charlotte under their surveillance at the same time and to reinforce the idea that your wife was well and truly dead, they gave out that you had been secretly married.’ Uncle Arthur was a kind man: no mention of the fact that it was common knowledge that, at the time of her alleged death, brain injuries sustained by Mrs Skouras in a car crash two years previously had become steadily worse and it was known that she would never leave hospital again.

‘How on earth did you guess that?’ Lord Kirkside asked.

‘No guess. Must give my lieutenants their due,’ Uncle Arthur said in his best magnanimous taught–’em-all-I-know voice. ‘Hunslett radioed me at midnight on Tuesday. He gave me a list of names of people about whom Calvert wanted immediate and exhaustive inquiries made. That call was tapped by the Shangri-la but they didn’t know what Hunslett was talking about because in our radio transmissions all proper names are invariably coded. Calvert told me later that when he’d seen Sir Anthony on Tuesday night he thought Sir Anthony was putting on a bit of an act. He said it wasn’t all act. He said Sir Anthony was completely broken and desolated by the thought of his dead wife. He said he believed the original Mrs Skouras was still alive, that it was totally inconceivable that a man who so patently cherished the memory of his wife should have married again two or three months later, that he could only have pretended to marry again for the sake of the one person whom he ever and so obviously loved.

‘I radioed France. Riviera police dug up the grave in Beaulieu where she had been buried near the nursing home where she’d died. They found a coffin full of logs. You knew this, Tony.’

Old Skouras nodded. He was a man in a dream.

‘It took them half an hour to find out who had signed the death certificate and most of the rest of the day to find the doctor himself. They charged him with murder. This can be done in France on the basis of a missing body. The doctor wasted no time at all in taking them to his own private nursing home, where Mrs Skouras was in a locked room. The doctor, matron and a few others are in custody now. Why in God’s name didn’t you come to us before?’

‘They had Charlotte and they said they would kill my wife out of hand. What – what would you have done?’

‘God knows,’ Uncle Arthur said frankly. ‘She’s in fair health, Tony. Calvert got radio confirmation at five a.m.’ Uncle Arthur jerked a thumb upwards. ‘On Lavorski’s big transceiver in the castle.’

Both Skouras and Lord Kirkside had their mouths open. Lavorski, blood still flowing from his mouth, and Dollmann looked as if they had been sandbagged. Charlotte’s eyes were the widest wide I’d ever seen. She was looking at me in a very peculiar way.

‘It’s true,’ Susan Kirkside said. ‘I was with him. He told me to tell nobody.’ She crossed to take my arm and smiled up at me. ‘I’m sorry again for what I said last night. I think you’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever known. Except Roily, of course.’ She turned round at the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and promptly forgot all about the second most wonderful man she’d ever known.

‘Roily!’ she cried. ‘Roily!’ I could see Roily bracing himself.

They were all there, I counted them, Kirkside’s son, the Hon. Rollinson, the policeman’s sons, the missing members of the small boats and, behind them all, a small brown-faced old woman in a long dark dress with a black shawl over her head. I went forward and took her arm.

‘Mrs MacEachern,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you home soon. Your husband is waiting.’

‘Thank you, young man,’ she said calmly. ‘That will be very nice.’ She lifted her arm and held mine in a proprietorial fashion.

Charlotte Skouras came and held my other arm, not in quite so proprietorial a fashion, but there for everyone to see. I didn’t mind. She said: ‘You were on to me? You were on to me all the time?’

‘He was,’ Uncle Arthur said thoughtfully. ‘He just said he knew. You never quite got round to explaining that bit, Calvert.’

‘It wasn’t difficult, sir – if you know all the facts, that is,’ I added hastily. ‘Sir Anthony put me on to you. That visit he paid me on the Firecrest to allay any suspicion we might have had about our smashed radio set only served, I’m afraid, to make me suspicious. You wouldn’t have normally come to me, you’d have gone ashore immediately to the police or to a phone, sir. Then, in order to get me talking about the cut telephone wires, you wondered if the radio-wrecker, to complete our isolation from the mainland, had smashed the two public call boxes. From a man of your intelligence, such a suggestion was fatuous, there must be scores of houses in Torbay with their private phone. But you thought it might sound suspicious if you suggested cut lines, so you didn’t. Then Sergeant MacDonald gave me a glowing report about you, said you were the most respected man in Torbay and your public reputation contrasted so sharply with your private behaviour in the Shangri-la on Tuesday night – well, I just couldn’t buy it.