Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

"A reasonable request and a wise precaution," Uncle Arthur said mildly. He seemed pleased at my change of heart, at my proper deference to the wishes of the aristocracy.

"It won't be for long." I smiled at Charlotte Skouras. "We leave Torbay within the hour."

"What do I care what you charge him with?" I looked from Sergeant MacDonald to the broken-faced man with the wet blood-stained towel, then back to MacDonald again. "Breaking and entering. Assault and battery. Is legal possession of a dangerous weapon with intent to create a felony — murder. Anything you like."

"Well, now. It's just not quite as easy as that." Sergeant MacDonald spread his big brown hands across the counter of the tiny police station and looked at the prisoner and myself in turn. "He didn't break and enter, you know, Mr. Petersen. He boarded. No law against that. Assault and battery? It looks as if he has been the victim and not the perpetrator. And what kind of weapon was he carrying, Mr. Petersen?"

"I don't know. It must have been knocked overboard."

"I see. Knocked overboard, was it? So we have no real proof of any felonious intent."

I was becoming a little tired of Sergeant MacDonald. He was fast enough to cooperate with bogus customs officers but with me he was just being deliberately obstructive. I said: "You'll be telling me next that it's all a product of my fevered imagination. You'll be wiling me next that I just stepped ashore, grabbed the first passer-by I saw, hit him in the face with a four-by-two then dragged him up here inventing this tale as I went. Even you can't be so stupid as to believe that."

The brown face turned red and, on the counter, the brown knuckles turned ivory. He said softly: "You'll kindly not talk to me like that."

"If you insist on behaving like a fool I’ll treat you as such. Are you going to lock him up?"

"If s only your word against his."

"No. I had a witness. He's down at the old pier, now, if you want to see him. Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason. A very senior civil servant."

"You had a Mr. Hunslett with you last time I was aboard your boat."

"He's down there, too." I nodded at the prisoner. "Why don't you ask a few questions of our friend here?"

"I've sent for the doctor. He'll have to fix his face first. I can't understand a word he says."

"The state of his face doesn't help," I admitted. "But the main trouble is that he speaks Italian."

"Italian, is it? I'll soon fix that. The owner of the Western Isles cafe is an Italian."

"That helps. There are four little questions he might put to our pal here. Where is his passport, how he arrived in this country, who is his employer and where does he live."

The sergeant looked at me for a long moment then said slowly: "It's a mighty queer marine biologist that you are, Mr. Petersen."

"And it's a mighty queer police sergeant that you are, Mr. MacDonald. Good night."

I crossed the dimly-lit street to the sea-wall and waited in the shadow of a phone booth. After two minutes a man with a small bag came hurrying up the street and turned into the police station. He was out again in five minutes, which wasn't surprising: there was little a G.P. could do for what was plainly a hospital job.

The station door opened again and Sergeant MacDonald came hurrying out, long black mackintosh buttoned to the neck. He walked quickly along the sea wall, looking neither to left nor right, which made it very easy for me to follow him, and turned down the old stone pier. At the end of the pier he flashed a torch, went down a flight of steps and began to haul in a small boat. I leaned over the pier wall and switched on my own torch.

"Why don't they provide you with a telephone or radio for conveying urgent messages?" I asked. "You could catch your death of cold rowing out to the Shangri-la on a night like this."

He straightened slowly and let the rope fall from his hands. The boat drifted out into the darkness. He came up the steps with the slow heavy tread of an old man and said quietly: "What did you say about the Shangri-la?"

"Don't let me keep you, Sergeant," I said affably. "Duty before the idle social chit-chat. Your first duty is to your masters. Off you go, now, tell them that one of their hirelings has been severely clobbered and that Petersen has very grave suspicions about Sergeant MacDonald."

"I don't know what you are talking about," he said emptily. "The Shangri-la — I'm not going anywhere near the Shangri-la."

"Where are you going, then? Do tell. Fishing? Kind of forgotten your tackle, haven't you?"

"And how would you like to mind your own damn business?" MacDonald said heavily.

"That's what I'm doing. Come off it, Sergeant. Think I give a damn about our Italian pal? You can charge him with playing tiddley-winks in the High Street for all I care. I just threw him at you, together with a hint that you yourself were up to no good, to see what the reaction would be, to remove the last doubts in my mind. You reacted beautifully."

"I'm maybe not the cleverest, Mr, Petersen," he said with dignity. "Neither am I a complete idiot. I thought you were one of them or after the same thing as them." He paused. "You're not. You're a Government agent."

"I'm a civil servant." I nodded to where the Firecrest lay not twenty yards away. "You'd better come to meet my boss."

"I don't take orders from Civil Servants."

"Suit yourself," I said indifferently, turned away and looked out over the seawall. "About your two sons, Sergeant MacDonald. The sixteen-year-old twins who, I'm told, died in the Cairngorms some time back."

"What about my sons?" he said tonelessly.

"Just that I'm not looking forward to telling them that their own father wouldn't lift a finger to bring them back to life again."

He just stood there in the darkness, quite still, saying nothing. He offered no resistance when I took his arm and led him towards the Firecrest.

Uncle Arthur was at his most intimidating and Uncle Arthur in full intimidating cry was a sight to behold. He'd made no move to rise when I'd brought

MacDonald into the saloon and he hadn't ask him to sit. The blue basilisk stare, channelled and magnified by the glittering monocles transfixed the unfortunate sergeant like a laser beam.

"So your foot slipped, Sergeant," Uncle Arthur said without preamble. He was using his cold, Sat, quite urunflected voice, the one that curled your hair. "The fact that you stand here now indicates that. Mr. Calvert went ashore with a prisoner and enough rope for you to hang yourself and you seized it with both hands. Not very clever of you, Sergeant. You should not have tried to contact your friends."

"They are no friends of mine, sir," MacDonald said bitterly.

"I'm going to tell you as much as you need to know about Calvert — Petersen was a pseudonym — and myself and what we are doing." Uncle Arthur hadn't heard him. "If you ever repeat any part of what I say to anyone, it will cost you your job, your pension, any hope that you will ever again, in whatever capacity, get another job in Britain and several years in prison for contravention of the Official Secrets Act. I myself will personally formulate the charges." He paused then added in a masterpiece of superfluity: "Do I make myself clear?"

"You make yourself very clear," MacDonald said grimly.

So Uncle Arthur told him all he thought MacDonald needed to know, which wasn't much, and finished by saying: "I am sure we can now count on your hundred per cent co-operation, Sergeant."

"Calvert is just guessing at my part in this," he said dully.

"For God's sake!" I said. "You knew those customs officers were bogus. You knew they had no photo-copier with them. You knew their only object in coming aboard was to locate and smash that set — and locate any other we might have. You knew they couldn't have gone back to the mainland in that launch — it was too rough. The launch, was, in fact, the tender — which is why you left without lights — and no launch left the harbour after your departure. We'd have heard it. The only life we saw after that was when they switched on their lights in the Shangri-la's wheelhouse to smash up their own radio — one of their own radios, I should have said. And how did you know the telephone lines were down in the Sound? You knew they were down, but why did you say the Sound? Because you knew they had been cut there. Then, yesterday morning, when I asked you if there was any hope of the lines being repaired, you said no. Odd. One would have thought that you would have told the customs boys going back to the mainland to contact the G.P.O. at once. But you knew they weren't going hack there. And your two sons, Sergeant, the boys supposed to be dead, you forgot to close their accounts. Because you knew they weren't dead."