Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

I checked that the Luger and the little Lilliput — I'd put them both back in their waterproof covering after leaving Dubh Sgeir — were still in working order. They were. In the saloon I poured myself a stiff three fingers of whisky. It went down my throat like a ferret down a burrow after a rabbit, one moment there, the next vanished in the depths. The weary old red corpuscles hoisted themselves to their feet and started trudging around again. It seemed a reasonable assumption that if I encouraged them with some more of the same treatment they might even break into a slow gallop and I had just closed my hand around the bottle when I heard the sound of an approaching engine. I put the bottle back in the rack, switched out the saloon lights — although they would have been invisible from outside through the velvet curtains — and took up position behind the open saloon door.

I was pretty sure the precautions were unnecessary, ten to one this was Hunslett coming back from shore, but why hadn't he taken the dinghy, still slung on the davits aft? Probably someone, for what Hunslett had regarded as an excellent reason, had persuaded him to go ashore and was now bringing him back.

The motor-boat's engine slowed, went into neutral, astern, then neutral again. A slight bump, the murmur of voices, the sound of someone clambering aboard and then the engine opening up again.

The footfalls passed over my head as the visitor — there was only one set of footfalls — made his way towards the wheelhouse door. The springy confident step of a man who knew what he was about. There was only one thing wrong with that springy confident step. It didn't belong to Hunslett. I flattened myself against the bulkhead, took out the Luger, slid off the safety catch and prepared to receive my visitor in what I had now come to regard as the best traditions of the Highlands.

I heard the click as the wheelhouse door opened, the louder click as it was shut by a firm hand. A pool of light from a flash-lamp preceded the visitor down the four steps from the wheelhouse to the saloon. He paused at the foot of the steps and the light moved away as he made to locate the light-switch. I stepped round the door and did three things at once — I hooked an arm around his neck, brought up a far from gentle knee into the small of his back and ground the muzzle of the Luger into his right ear. Violent stuff, but not unnecessarily violent stuff, it might have been my old friend Quinn. The gasp of pain was enough to show that it wasn't.

"This isn't a hearing aid you feel, friend. It's a Luger pistol. You're one pound pressure from a better world. Don't make me nervous."

The better world seemed to have no appeal for him. He didn't make me nervous. He made an odd gurgling noise in his throat, he was trying either to speak or breathe, but he stood motionless, head and back arched. I eased the pressure a little.

"Put that light switch on with your left hand. Slowly. Carefully."

He was very slow, very careful. The saloon flooded with light.

"Raise your hands above your head. As high as you can reach."

He was a model prisoner, this one, he did exactly as he was told. I turned him round, propelled him into the centre of the room and told him to face me.

He was of medium height, nattily dressed in an astrakhan coat and a fur Cossack hat. He had a beautifully trimmed white beard and moustache, with a perfectly symmetrical black streak in the centre of the beard, the only one of its kind I had ever seen. The tanned face was red, either from anger or near-suffocation. From both, I decided. He lowered his hands without permission, sat on the settee, pulled out a monocle, screwed it into his right eye and stared at me with cold fury. I gave him look for look, stare for stare, pocketed the Luger, poured a whisky and handed it to Uncle Arthur. Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason, K.C.B. and all the rest of the alphabet.

"You should have knocked, sir," I said reproachfully,

"I should have knocked." His voice sounded half-strangled, maybe I had exerted more pressure than had been necessary. "Do you always greet your guests this way?"

"I don't have guests, sir. I don't have friends, either. Not in the Western Isles. All I have is enemies. Anyone who comes through that door is an enemy. I didn't expect to see you here, sir."

"I hope not. In view of that performance, I hope not." He rubbed his throat, drank some whisky and coughed. "Didn't expect to be here myself. Do you know how much bullion was aboard the Nantesville?"

"Close on a million, I understand."

"That's what I understood. Eight millions! Think of it, eight million pounds' worth. All this gold that's being shovelled back from Europe into the vaults at Fort Knox usually goes in small lots, 108lb. ingots at a time. For safety. For security. In case anything goes wrong. But the Bank knew that nothing could go wrong this time, they knew our agents were aboard, they were behind with their payments, so they cleverly loaded fourteen hundred and forty ingots without telling anyone. Eight million. The Bank is hopping mad. And everyone is taking it out on me."

And he'd come up here to take it out on me. I said: "You should have let me know. That you were coming."

"I tried to. You failed to keep your noon-day schedule. The most elementary of crimes, Calvert, and the most serious. You failed to keep a schedule. You or Hunslett. Then I knew things were going from bad to worse. I knew I had to take over myself. So I came by plane and R.A.F. rescue launch." That would have been the high-speed launch I'd seen taking a bad battering in the Sound as we had headed down towards the cove. "Where's Hunslett?"

"I don't know, sir."

"You don't know?" He was using his quiet unemphatic tone, the one I didn't care for very much, "You're out of your depth in this one, Calvert, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir. I'm afraid he's been removed by force. I'm not sure how. What have you been doing in the past two hours, sir?"

"Explain yourself." I wished he'd stop screwing that damned monocle into his eye. It was no affectation, that monocle, he was nearly blind on that side, but he was an irritating mannerism. At that moment, anything would have irritated me.

"That R.A.F. launch that dropped you off here just now. It should have been here at least two hours ago. Why didn't you come aboard then?"

"I did. We almost ran the Firecrest down in the darkness as we came round the headland. No one here. So I went and had some dinner. Nothing but baked beans aboard this damned boat as far as I could see."

"The Columbia hotel wouldn't offer you much more. Toast below the beans, if you were lucky." The Columbia was Torbay's only hotel.

"I had smoked trout, filet mignon and an excellent bottle of hock. I dined aboard the Shangri-la." This with the slight him of a smile. Uncle Arthur's Achilles' heel was showing again: Uncle Arthur loved a lord like nobody's business, and a knight with a seven-figure income was as good as a lord any day.

"The Shangri-la?" I stared at him, then remembered. "Of course. You told me. You know Lady Skouras well. No, you said you knew her very well and her husband well. How is my old Sir Anthony?"

"Very well," he said coldly. Uncle Arthur had as much humour as the next man, but discussing titled millionaires in tones of levity was not humorous.

"And Lady Skouras?"

He hesitated. "Well — "

"Not so well. Pale, drawn, unhappy, with dark smudges under her eyes. Not unlike myself. Her husband mistreats her and mistreats her badly. Mentally and physically. He humiliated her in front of a group of men last night. And she had rope burns on her arms. Why would she have rope burns on her arms, Sir Arthur?"

"Impossible. Quite fantastic. I knew the former Lady Skouras, the one who died this year in hospital. She — "