Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

Uncle Arthur nodded, but his mind was on something else. It was on the scuba suit I was pulling on.

"What the hell do you think you're going to do with that thing?" he demanded,

"Advance notification of intentions, sir. Won't be long. I'm taking a little trip to the Shangri-la. The Shangri-la's tender, rather. With a little homing device and a bag of sugar. With your permission, sir."

"Something else you forgot to tell me, hey, Calvert? Like that breaking off the Shangri-la's gangway light was no accident?"

"I'd like to get there before they replace it, sir."

"I can't believe it, I can't believe it." Uncle Arthur shook his head. For a moment I thought he was referring to the dispatch with which I had made the uneventful return trip to the Shangri-la's tender, but his next words showed that his mind was on higher and more important things. "That Tony Skouras should be up to his neck in this. There's something far wrong. I just can't believe it. Good God, do you know he was up for a peerage in the next List?"

"So soon? He told me he was waiting for the price to come down."

Uncle Arthur said nothing. Normally, he would have regarded such a statement as a mortal insult, as he himself automatically collected a life peerage on retirement. But nothing. He was as shaken as that.

"I'd like nothing better than to arrest the lot of them," I said. "But our hands are tied. We're helpless. But now that I know what we do know I wonder if you would do me a favour before we go ashore, sir. There are two things I want to know. One is whether Sir Anthony really was down at some Clyde shipyard a few days ago having stabilisers fitted -a big job few yards would tackle in a yacht that size. Should find out in a couple of hours. People tell silly and unnecessary lies. Also I'd like to find out if Lord Kirkside has taken the necessary steps to have his dead son's title — he was Viscount somebody or other — transferred to his younger son."

"You get the set ready and I'll ask them anything you like," Uncle Arthur said wearily. He wasn't really listening to me, he was still contemplating with stunned disbelief the possibility that his future fellow peer was up to the neck in skulduggery on a vast scale. "And pass me that bottle before you go below."

At the rate Uncle Arthur was going, I reflected, it was providential that the home of one of the most famous distilleries in the Highlands was less than half a mile from where we were anchored.

I lowered the false head of the starboard diesel to the engine-room deck as if it weighed a ton. I straightened and stood there for a full minute, without moving. Then I went to the engine-room door.

"Sir Arthur?"

"Coming, coming." A few seconds and he was at the door-way, the glass of whisky in his hand. "All connected up?"

"I've found Hunslett, sir."

Uncle Arthur moved slowly forward like a man in a dream.

The transmitter was gone. All our explosives and listening devices and little portable transmitters were gone. That had left plenty of room. They'd had to double him up to get him in, his head was resting on his forearms and his arms on his knees, but there was plenty of room. I couldn't see his face. I could see no marks of violence. Half-sitting; half-lying there he seemed curiously peaceful, a man drowsing away a summer afternoon by a sun-warmed wall, A long summer afternoon because for ever was a long time. That's what I'd told him last night, he'd all the time in the world for sleep.

I touched his face. It wasn't cold yet. He'd been dead two to three hours, no more. I turned his face to see if I could find how he had died. His head lolled to one side like that of a broken rag doll. I turned and looked at Sir Arthur. The dream-like expression had gone, his eyes were cold and bitter and cruel. I thought vaguely of the tales I'd heard, and largely discounted, of Uncle Arthur's total ruthlessness. I wasn't so ready to discount them now. Uncle Arthur wasn't where he was now because he'd answered an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, he'd have been hand-picked by two or three very clever men who would have scoured the country to find the one man with the extraordinary qualifications they required. And they had picked Uncle Arthur, the man with the extraordinary qualifications, and total ruthlessness must have been one of the prime requisites. I'd never really thought of it before.

He said: "Murdered, of course."

"Yes, sir."

"How?"

"His neck is broken, sir."

"His neck? A powerful man like Hunslett?"

"I know a man who could do it with one twist of his hands. Quinn. The man who killed Baker and Delmont. The man who almost killed me."

"I see." He paused, then went on, almost absently: "You will, of course, seek out and destroy this man. By whatever means you choose. You can reconstruct this, Calvert?"

"Yes, sir." When it came to reconstruction when it was too damn late, I stood alone. "Our friend or friends boarded the Firecrest very shortly after I had left this morning. That is, before daylight. They wouldn't have dared try it after it was light. They overpowered Hunslett and kept him prisoner. Confirmation that he was held prisoner all day comes from the fact that he failed to meet the noonday schedule. They still held him prisoner when you came aboard. There was no reason why you should suspect that there was anyone aboard — the boat that put them aboard before dawn would have gone away at once. They couldn't leave one of the Shangri-la's boats lying alongside the Firecrest all day."

"There's no necessity to dot i's and cross t's."

"No, sir. Maybe an hour or so after you departed the Shangri-la's tender with Captain Imrie, Quinn and company aboard turns up: they report that I'm dead. That was Hunslett's death warrant. With me dead they couldn't let him live. So Quinn killed him. Why he was killed this way I don't know. They may have thought shots could be heard, they may not have wanted to use knives or blunt instruments in case they left blood all over the deck. They were intending to abandon the boat till they came back at night, at midnight, to take it out to the Sound and scuttle it and someone might have come aboard in the interim. My own belief is that he was killed this way because Quinn is a psychopath and compulsive killer and liked doing it this way."

"I see. And then they said to themselves: 'Where can we hide Hunslett till we come back at midnight? Just in case someone does come aboard.' And then they said: 'Ha! We know. We'll hide him in the dummy diesel.' So they threw away the transmitter and all the rest of the stuff — or took it with them. It doesn't matter. And they put Hunslett inside."

Uncle Arthur had been speaking very quietly throughout and then suddenly, for the first time I'd ever known it, his voice became a shout, "How in the name of God did they know this was a dummy diesel, Calvert? How could they have known?" His voice dropped to what was a comparative whisper. "Someone talked, Calvert, or someone was criminally careless."

"No one talked, sir. Someone was criminally careless. I was. If I'd used my eyes Hunslett wouldn't be lying there now. The night the two bogus customs officers were aboard I knew that they had got on to something when we were in the engine-room here. Up to the time that they'd inspected the batteries they'd gone through the place with a tooth-comb. After that they didn't give a damn. Hunslett even suggested that it was something to do with the batteries but I was too clever to believe him." I walked to the work-bench, picked up a torch and handed it to Uncle Arthur. "Do you see anything about those batteries that would excite suspicion?"

He looked at me, that monocled eye still ice-cold and bitter, took the torch and examined the batteries carefully. He spent all of two minutes searching, then straightened.