Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

"My dear Lady Skouras, my dear Lady Skouras!" Uncle Arthur was back among the aristocracy and showed it. He knelt by her side, ineffectually dabbing at her face with a hand-kerchief, "What in God's name has happened? Brandy, Calvert, brandy 1 Don't just stand there, man. Brandy!"

Uncle Arthur seemed to think he was in a pub but, as it happened, I did have some brandy left. I handed him the glass and said: "If you'll attend to Lady Skouras, sir, I'll finish getting the anchor up."

"No, no!" She took a gulp of the brandy, choked on it and I had to wait until she had finished coughing before she went on. "They're not coming for at least two hours yet. I know. I heard. There's something terrible going on, Sir Arthur. I had -to come, I had to come."

"Now, don't distress yourself, Lady Skouras, don't distress yourself," Uncle Arthur said, as if she weren't distressed enough already. "Just drink this down, Lady Skouras."

"No, not that!" I got all set to take a poor view of this, it was damned good brandy, then I realised she was talking of something else. "Not Lady Skouras. Never again! Char-lotte. Charlotte Meiner. Charlotte."

One thing about women, they always get their sense of prior-ities right. There they were on the Shangri-la, rigging up a home-made atom bomb to throw through our saloon windows and all she could think was to ask us to call her "Charlotte." I said: "Why did you have to come?"

"Calvert!" Uncle Arthur's voice was sharp. "Do you mind? Lady — I mean, Charlotte — has just suffered a severe shock. Let her take her time to — "

"No." She struggled to an upright sitting position and forced a warn smile, half-scared, half-mocking. "No, Mr. Petersen, Mr. Calvert, whatever your name, you're quite right. Actresses tend to over-indulge their emotions. I’m not an actress any longer." She took another sip of the brandy and a little colour came back to her face. "I've known for some time that something was very far wrong aboard the Shangri-la. Strange men have been aboard. Some of the old crew were changed for no reason. Several times I've been put ashore with the stewardess in hotels while the Shangri-la went off on mysterious journeys. My husband — Sir Anthony — would tell me nothing. He has changed terribly since our marriage — I think he takes drugs. I've seen guns. Whenever those strange men came aboard I was sent to my stateroom after dinner." She smiled mirthlessly. "It wasn't because of any jealousy on my husband's part, you may believe me. The last day or two I sensed that everything was coming to a climax. To-night, just after you were gone, I was sent to my stateroom. I left, but stayed out in the passage. Lavorski was talking. I heard him saying: 'If your admiral pal is a UNESCO delegate, Skouras, then I'm King Neptune. I know who he is. We all know who he is. It's too late in the day now and they know too much. It's them or us.' And then Captain Imrie — how I hate that man! — said: ' I'll send Quinn and Jacques and Kramer at midnight. At one o'clock they'll open the sea-cocks in the Sound'."

"Charming friends your husband has," I murmured.

She looked at me, half-uncertainly, half-speculatively and said: "Mr. Petersen or Mr. Calvert — and I heard Lavorski call you Johnson — "

"It is confusing," I admitted. "Calvert. Philip Calvert."

"Well, Philip," — she pronounced it the French way and very nice it sounded too -"you are one great bloody fool it you talk like that. You are in deadly danger."

"Mr. Calvert," Uncle Arthur said sourly — it wasn't her language he disapproved of, it was this Christian name familiar -it between the aristocracy and the peasants — "is quite aware of the danger. He has unfortunate mannerisms of speech, that's all. You are a very brave woman, Charlotte." Blue-bloods first-naming each other was a different thing altogether. "You took a great risk in eavesdropping. You might have been caught"

"I was caught, Sir Arthur." The smile showed up the lines on either side of her mouth but didn't touch her eyes. "That is another reason why I am here. Even without the knowledge of your danger, yes, I would have come. My husband caught me. He took me into my stateroom." She stood up shakily, turned her back to us and pulled up the sodden dark shirt. Right across her back ran three great blue-red weals. Uncle Arthur stood stock-still, a man incapable of movement. I crossed the saloon and peered at her back. The weals were almost an inch wide and running half-way round her body, Here and there were tiny blood-spotted punctures. Lightly I tried a finger on one of the weals. The flesh was raised and puffy, a fresh weal, as lividly-genuine a weal as ever I'd clapped eyes on. She didn't move. I stepped back and she turned to face us.

"It is not nice, is it? It does not feel very nice." She smiled and again that smile, "I could show you worse than that."

"No, no, no," Uncle Arthur said hastily. "That will not be necessary." He was silent for a moment, then burst out: "My dear Charlotte, what you must have suffered. It's fiendish, absolutely fiendish. He must be — he must be inhuman. A monster. A monster, perhaps under the influence of drugs. I would never have believed it!" His face was brick-red with outrage and his voice sounded as if Quinn had him by the throat. Strangled. "No one would ever have believed it!"

"Except the late Lady Skouras," she said quietly. "I understand now why she was in and out of mental homes several times before she died." She shrugged. "I have no wish to go the same way. I am made of tougher stuff than Madeleine Skouras. So I pick up my bag and run away." She nodded at the small polythene bag of clothes that had been tied to her waist. "Like Dick Whittington, is it not?"

"They'll be here long before midnight when they discover you're gone," I observed.

"It may be morning before they find out. Most nights I lock my cabin door. Tonight I locked it from the outside."

"That helps," I said. "Standing about in those sodden clothes doesn't. There's no point in running away only to die of pneumonia. You'll find towels in my cabin. Then we can get you a room in the Columba Hotel."

"I had hoped for better than that," The fractional slump of the shoulders was more imagined than seen, but the dull defeat in the eyes left nothing to the imagination. "You would put me in the first place they would look for me. There is no safe place for me in Torbay, They will catch me and bring me back and my husband will take me into that stateroom again. My only hope is to run away. Your only hope is to run away. Please. Can we not run away together?"

"No."

"A man not given to evasive answers, is that it?" There was a lonely dejection, a proud humiliation about her that did very little for my self-respect. She turned towards Uncle Arthur, took both his hands in hers and said in a low voice: "Sir Arthur, I appeal to you as an English gentleman." Thumbs down on Calvert, that foreign-born peasant. "May I stay? Please?"

Uncle Arthur looked at me, hesitated, looked at Charlotte Skouras, looked into those big brown eyes and was a lost man.

"Of course you may stay, my dear Charlotte." He gave a stiff old-fashioned bow which, I had to admit, went very well with the beard and the monocle. "Yours to command, my dear lady."

"Thank you, Sir Arthur." She smiled at me, not with triumph or satisfaction, just an anxious-to-be-friendly smile. "It would be nice, Philip, to have the consent -what do you say? — unanimous."

"If Sir Arthur wishes to expose you to a vastly greater degree of risk aboard this boat than you would experience in Torbay, that is Sir Arthur's business. As for the rest, my consent is not required. I'm a well-trained civil servant and I obey orders."

"You are gracious to a fault," Uncle Arthur said acidly.

"Sorry, sir," I'd suddenly seen the light and a pretty dazzling beam it was too. "I should not have called your judgment in question. The lady is very welcome. But I think she should remain below while we are alongside the pier, sir."