Алистер Маклин: When Eight Bells Toll

‘Tell me this, Mr Calvert. If you radioed from Mr Hutchinson’s boat in Craigmore, why did you have to radio again from here later that night?’

‘If I didn’t, you’d be down among the dead men by this time. I spent the best part of fifteen minutes giving highly detailed descriptions, of Dubh Sgeir externally and of the castle and boat-house layout internally. Everything that Captain Rawley and his men have done had to be done in total darkness. You’ll keep an eye on our friends, Captain Rawley? A fishery cruiser will be off Dubh Sgeir shortly after dawn.’

The Marines herded them off into the left-hand cave, set three powerful lights shining into the prisoners’ faces and mounted a four man guard with machine-pistols at the ready. Our friends would undoubtedly keep until the fishery cruiser came in the morning.

Charlotte said slowly: ‘That was why Sir Arthur remained behind this afternoon when you and Mr Hutchinson went to the Nantesville? To see that I didn’t talk to the guards and find out the truth?’

‘Why else?’

She took her arm away and looked at me without affection. ‘So you put me through the hoop,’ she said quietly. ‘You let me suffer like this for thirty hours while you knew all the time.’

‘Fair’s fair. You were doing me down, I was doing you down.’

‘I’m very grateful to you,’ she said bitterly.

‘If you aren’t you damn’ well ought to be,’ Uncle Arthur said coldly. This was one for the books, Uncle Arthur talking to the aristocracy, even if only the aristocracy by marriage, in this waspish tone. ‘If Calvert won’t speak for himself, I will.

‘Point one: if you hadn’t kept on sending your little radio messages, Lavorski would have thought that there was something damned fishy going on and might well have left the last ton or two of gold in the Nantesville and taken off before we got here. People like Lavorski have a highly attuned sixth sense of danger. Point two: they wouldn’t have confessed to their crimes unless they thought we were finished. Point three: Calvert wanted to engineer a situation where all attention was on the Firecrest so that Captain Rawley and his men could move into position and so eliminate all fear of unnecessary bloodshed – maybe your blood, my dear Charlotte. Point four, and more important: if you hadn’t been in constant radio contact with them, advising them of our impending arrival right up to the moment we came through those doors – we’d even left the saloon door open so that you could clearly overhear us and know all we were doing – there would have been a pitched battle, guns firing as soon as those doors were breached, and who knows how many lives would have been lost. But they knew they were in control, they knew the trap was set, they knew you were aboard with that gun to spring the trap. Point five, and most important of all: Captain Rawley here was hidden almost a hundred yards away along the cross tunnel and the detachment up above were concealed in a store-room in the castle. How do you think they knew when to move in and move in simultaneously? Because, like all commandos, they had portable radio sets and were listening in to every word of your running commentary. Don’t forget your transmitter was stolen from the Firecrest. It was Calvert’s transmitter, my dear. He knew the transmitting frequency to the mainland last night. That was after he had – um – given you a little something to drink and checked your transmitter before using the one up in the castle last night.’

Charlotte said to me: ‘I think you are the most devious and detestable and untrustworthy man I’ve ever met.’ Her eyes were shining, whether from tears or whatever I didn’t know. I felt acutely embarrassed and uncomfortable. She put her hand on my arm and said in a low-voice: ‘You fool, oh, you fool! That gun might have gone off. I – I might have killed you, Philip!’

I patted her hand and said: ‘You don’t even begin to believe that yourself.’ In the circumstances, I thought it better not to say if that gun had gone off I’d never have trusted a three-cornered file again.

The grey mist was slowly clearing away and the dawn coming up on the quiet dark sea when Tim Hutchinson eased the Firecrest in towards Eilean Oran.

There were only four of us on the boat, Hutchinson, myself, Mrs MacEachern and Charlotte. I’d told Charlotte to find a bed in Dubh Sgeir castle for the night, but she’d simply ignored me, helped Mrs MacEachern on to the Firecrest and had made no move to go ashore again. Very self-willed, she was, and I could see that this was going to cause a lot of trouble in the years to come.

Uncle Arthur wasn’t with us, a team of wild horses couldn’t have dragged Uncle Arthur aboard the Firecrest that night. Uncle Arthur was having his foretaste of Paradise, sitting in front of a log fire in the Dubh Sgeir castle drawing-room, knocking back old Kirkside’s superlative whisky and retailing his exploits to a breathless and spellbound aristocracy. If I were lucky, maybe he’d mention my name a couple of times in the course of his recounting of the epic. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn’t.

Mrs MacEachern wasn’t having her foretaste of Paradise, she was there already, a calm dark old lady with a wrinkled brown face who smiled and smiled and smiled all the way to her home on Eilean Oran. I hoped to God old Donald MacEachern had remembered to change his shirt.