Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

There was only one person in the double bed but even at that he was cramped in it. It's hard to gauge a man's height when he's lying down but if this lad tried to stand up in a room with a ceiling height of less than six feet four inches, he'd finish up with concussion. His face was towards me but I couldn't see much of it, it was hidden by a head of thick black hair that had fallen over his brows and the most magnificently bushy black beard I'd ever clapped eyes on. He was sound asleep.

I crossed to the bed, prodded his ribs with the gun barrel and a pressure sufficient to wake a lad of his size and said: "Wake up."

He woke up. I moved a respectful distance away. He rubbed his eyes with one hairy forearm, got his hands under him and heaved himself to a sitting position. I wouldn't have been surprised to see him wearing a bearskin, but no, he was wearing a pair of pyjamas in excellent taste, I might have chosen the colour myself.

Law-abiding citizens woken in the dark watches of the night by a gun-pointing stranger react in all sorts of ways, varying from terror to apoplectically-purple outrage. The man in the beard didn't react in any of the standard ways at all. He just stared at me from under dark overhanging cliffs of eyebrows and the expression in the eyes was that of a Bengal tiger mentally tucking in his napkin before launching himself on the thirty-foot -leap that is going to culminate in lunch. I stepped back another couple of paces and said: "Don't try it."

"Put that gun away, sonny boy," he said. The deep rumbling voice seemed to come from the innermost recesses of the Carlsbad cavern. "Put it away or I'll have to get up and clobber you and take it from you."

"Don't be like that," I complained, then added politely: "If I put it away, will you clobber me?"

He considered this for a moment, then said: "No." He reached out for a big black cigar and lit it, his eyes on me all the time. The acrid fumes reached across the room and as it isn't polite for a guest in another's house to rush to open the nearest window without permission I didn't but it was a near thing. No wonder he'd never notice the stench from the flensing shed: compared to this, Uncle Arthur's cheroots came into the same category as Charlotte's perfume.

"My apologies for the intrusion. Are you Tim Hutchinson?"

"Yeah. And you, sonny boy?"

"Philip Calvert. I want to use one of your boat's transmitters to contact London, I also need your help. How urgently you can't imagine. A good many lives and millions of pounds can be lost in the next twenty-four hours."

He watched a particularly noxious cloud of this Vesuvian poison gas drift up to the cringing ceiling, then bent his eyes on me again. "Ain't you the little kidder, now, sonny boy."

"I'm not kidding, you big black ape. And, while we're at it, we'll dispense with the 'sonny boy' Timothy."

He bent forward, the deep-set, coal-black eyes, not at all as friendly as I would have liked, then relaxed with a laugh. "Touché, as my French governess used to say. Maybe you ain't kidding at that. What are you, Calvert?"

In for a penny, in for a pound. This man would grant his co-operation for nothing less than the truth. And he looked like a man whose co-operation would be very well worth having. So, for the second time that night and the second time in my life, I said: "I'm an agent of the British Secret Service." I was glad that Uncle Arthur was out there fighting for his life on the rolling deep, his blood pressure wasn't what it ought to have been and a thing like this, twice in one night, could have been enough to see him off.

He considered my reply for some time, then said: "The Secret Service. I guess you have to be 'at that. Or a nut case. But you blokes never tell."

"I had to. It would have been obvious anyway when I tell you what I have to tell you."

"I'll get dressed. Join you in the front room in two minutes. Help yourself to a Scotch there." The beard twitched and I deduced from this that he was grinning. "You should find some, somewhere."

I went out, found some somewhere and was conducting myself on the grand tour of the Craigmore art gallery when Tim Hutchinson came in. He was dressed all in black, trousers, sailor's jersey, mackinaw and sea boots. Beds were deceptive, he'd probably passed the six foot four mark when he was about twelve and had just stopped growing. He glanced at the collection and grinned.

"Who would have thought it?" he said. "The Guggenheim and Craigmore. Hotbeds of culture, both of them. Don't you think the one with the earrings looks indecently overdressed?"

"You must have scoured the great galleries of the world," I said reverently.

"I'm no connoisseur. Renoir and Matisse are my cup of tea." It was so unlikely that it had to be true. "You look like a man in a hurry. Just leave out all the inessentials."

I left out the inessentials, but not one of the essentials. Unlike MacDonald and Charlotte, Hutchinson got not only the truth but the whole truth.

"Well, if that isn't the most goddamned story any man ever heard. And right under our bloody noses." It was hard to tell at times whether Hutchinson was Australian or American — I learnt later that he'd spent many years tuna-fishing in

Florida. "So it was you in that chopper this afternoon. Brother, you've had a day and then some. I retract that 'sonny boy' crack. One of my more ill-advised comments. What do you want, Calvert?"

So I told him what I wanted, his own personal assistance that night, the loan of his boats and crews for the next twenty-four hours and the use of a radio transmitter immediately. He nodded.

"Count on us. I'll tell the boys. You can start using that transmitter right away."

"I'd rather go out with you to our boat right away," I said, "leave you there and come back in myself to transmit."

"You lack a mite confidence in your crew, hey?"

"I'm expecting to see the bows of the Firecrest coming through that front door any minute."

"I can do better than that. I'll roust out a couple of the boys, we'll take the Charmaine — that's the M.F.V. nearest the flensing shed — out to the Firecrest, I'll go aboard, we'll cruise around till you get your message off, then you come aboard the Firecrest while the boys take the Charmaine back again."

I thought of the maelstrom of white breakers outside the mouth of the alleged harbour. I said: "It won't be too dangerous to take an M.F.V. out on a night like this?"

"What's wrong with a night like this? It's a fine fresh night. You couldn't ask for better. This is nothing, I've seen the boys take a boat out there, six o'clock in a black December evening, into a full gale."

"What kind of emergency was that?"

"A serious one, admittedly." He grinned. "We'd run out of supplies and the boys wanted to get to Torbay before the pubs shut. Straight up, Calvert."

I said no more. It was obviously going to be a great comfort to have Hutchinson around with me for the rest of the night. He turned towards the corridor and hesitated: "Two of the boys are married. I wonder — "

"There'll be no danger for them. Besides, they'll be well rewarded for their work."

"Don't spoil it, Calvert." For a man with such a deep rumbling voice he could make it very soft at times. "We don't take money for this kind of work."

"I'm not hiring you," I said tiredly. I'd quite enough people fighting me already without Tim Hutchinson joining their ranks, "There's an insurance reward. I have been instructed to offer you half."

"Ah, now, that's very different indeed. I'll be delighted to relieve the insurance companies of their excess cash at any time. But not half, Calvert, not half. Not for a day's work, not after all you've done. Twenty-five per cent to us, seventy-five per cent to you and your friends."

"Half is what you get. The other half will be used to pay compensation for those who have suffered hardship. There's an old couple on Eilean Oran, for instance, who are going to be wealthy beyond their dreams for the rest of their days."