Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

"Betty and Dorothy aren't coming home any more, Annabelle. Someone has to pay. I want someone to pay. You want someone to pay. We all do."

"But it's inconceivable that a man in his position, a man of his wealth — "

"I'm sorry, Annabelle. I don't understand."

"A man like that. Dammit all, I know him well, Caroline. We dine together. First-name terms. Know his present wife even better. Ex-actress. A philanthropist like that. A man who's spent five consecutive seasons there. Would a man like that, a millionaire like that, spend all that time, all that money, just to build up a front — "

"Skouras?" I used the code name. Interrogatory, incredulous, as if it had just dawned upon me what Uncle Arthur was talking about. "I never said I suspected him, Annabelle. I have no reason to suspect him."

"Ah!" It's difficult to convey a sense of heartfelt gladness, profound satisfaction and brow-mopping relief in a single syllable, but Uncle Arthur managed it without any trouble. "Then why go?" A casual eavesdropper might have thought he detected a note of pained jealousy in Uncle Arthur's voice, and the casual eavesdropper would have been right. Uncle Arthur had only one weakness in his make-up — he was a social snob of monumental proportions.

"I want aboard. I want to see this smashed transmitter of his."

"Why?"

"A hunch, let me call it, Annabelle. No more."

Uncle Arthur was going in for the long silences in a big way to-day. Then he said: "A hunch? A hunch? You told me this morning you were on to something,"

"There's something else. I want you to contact the Post Office Savings Bank, Head Office, in Scotland. After that, the Records files of some Scottish newspapers. I suggest The Glasgow Herald, the Scottish Dotty Express and, most particularly, the West Highland weekly, the Oban Times."

"Ah!" No relief this time, just satisfaction. "This is more like it, Caroline. What do you want and why?"

So I told him what I wanted and why, Jots more of the fancy code work, and when I'd finished he said; "I'll have my staff on to this straight away, I'll have all the information you want by midnight."

"Then I don't want it, Annabelle. Midnight's too late for me. Midnight's no use to me."

"Don't ask the impossible, Caroline." He muttered something to himself, something I couldn't catch, then: "I'll pull every strings Caroline. Nine o'clock."

"Four o'clock, Annabelle."

"Four o'clock this afternoon?" When it came to incredulity he had me whacked to the wide. "Four hours' time? You have taken leave of your senses."

"You can have ten men on it in ten minutes. Twenty in twenty minutes. Where's the door that isn't open to you? Especially the door of the Assistant Commissioner. Professionals don't kill for the hell of it. They kill because they must. They kill to gain time. Every additional hour is vital to them. And if it's vital to them, how much more so is it to us? Or do you think we're dealing with amateurs, Annabelle?"

"Call me at four," he said heavily. "I'll see what I have for you. What's your next move, Caroline?"

"Bed," I said. "I'm going to get some sleep."

"Of course. Time, as you said, is of the essence. You mustn't waste it, must you, Caroline?" He signed off. He sounded bitter. No doubt he was bitter. But then, insomnia apart, Uncle Arthur could rely on a full quota of sleep during the coming night. Which was more than I could. No certain foreknowledge, no second sight, just a hunch, but not a small one, the kind of hunch you couldn't have hidden behind the Empire State Building. Just like the one I had about the Shangri-la.

I only just managed to catch the last fading notes of the alarm as it went off at ten minutes to four. I felt worse than I had done when we'd lain down after a miserable lunch of corned beef and reconstituted powdered potatoes — if old Skouras had had a spark of human decency, he'd have made that invitation for dinner. I wasn't only growing old, I felt old. I'd been working too long for Uncle Arthur. The pay was good but the hours and working conditions — I'd have wagered that Uncle Arthur hadn't even set eyes on a tin of corned beef since World War II — were shocking. And all this constant worrying, chiefly about life expectancy, helped wear a man down.

Hunslett came out of his cabin as I came out of mine. He looked just as old as I did. If they had to rely on a couple of ageing crocks like us, I thought morosely, the rising generation must be a pretty sorry lot.

Passing through the saloon, I wondered bitterly about the identity of all those characters who wrote so glibly about the Western Isles in general and the Torbay area in particular as being a yachtsman's paradise without equal in Europe, Obviously, they'd never been there. Fleet Street was their home and home was a place they never left, not if they could help it. An ignorant bunch of travel and advertising copy writers who regarded King's Cross as the northern limits of civilisation. Well, maybe not all that ignorant, at least they were smart enough to stay south of King's Cross.

Four o'clock on an autumn afternoon, but already it was more night than day. The sun wasn't down yet, not by a very long way, but it might as well have been for all the chance it had of penetrating the rolling masses of heavy dark cloud hurrying away to the eastwards to the inky blackness of the horizon beyond Torbay. The slanting sheeting rain that foamed whitely across the bay further reduced what little visibility there was to a limit of not more than four hundred yards. The village itself, half a mile distant and nestling in the dark shadow of the steeply-rising pine-covered hills behind, might never have existed. Off to the north-west I could see the navigation lights of a craft rounding the headland, Skouras returning from his stabiliser test run. Down in the Shangri-la's gleaming galley a master chef would be preparing the sumptuous evening meal, the one to which we hadn't been invited. I tried to put the thought of that meal out of my mind, but I couldn't, so I just put it as far away as possible and followed Hunslett into the engine-room.

Hunslett took the spare earphones and squatted beside me on the deck, notebook on his knee. Hunslett was as competent in shorthand as he was in everything else. I hoped that Uncle Arthur would have something to tell us, that Hunslett's presence there would be necessary. It was.

"Congratulations, Caroline," Uncle Arthur said without preamble. "You really are on to something." As far as it is possible for a dead flat monotone voice to assume an over-tone of warmth, then Uncle Arthur's did just that. He sounded positively friendly. More likely it was some freak of transmission or reception but at least he hadn't started off by bawling me out.

"We've traced those Post Office Savings books," he went on. He rattled off book numbers and details of times and amounts of deposits, things of no interest to me, then said: "Last deposits were on December 27th. Ten pounds in each case. Present balance is pound 78,143.60. Exactly the same in both. And those accounts have not been closed."

He paused for a moment to let me congratulate him, which I did, then continued.

"That's nothing, Caroline. Listen. Your queries about any mysterious accidents, deaths, disappearances off the west coasts of Inverness-shire or Argyll, or anything happening to people from that area. We've struck oil, Caroline, we've really struck oil. My God, why did we never think of this before. Have your pencil handy?"

"Harriet has."

"Here we go. This seems to have been the most disastrous sailing season for years in the west of Scotland. But first, one from last year. The Pinto, a well-found sea-worthy forty-five foot motor cruiser left Kyle of Lochalsh for Oban at 8 a.m. September 4th. She should have arrived that afternoon. She never did. No trace of her has ever been found."