Alistair MacLean: When Eight Bells Toll

I heard the click as Hunslett’s foot stepped on the deck-switch. "She's up and down."

"Put the pawl in for a moment. If that drum slips, I'll have no hands left." I pulled the bags right for'ard, leaned out under the pulpit raft and used lengths of heaving line to secure them to the anchor chain. When the lines were secure I lifted the bags over the side and let them dangle from the chain.

"I'll take the weight," I said. "Lift the chain off the drum — we'll lower it by hand."

Forty fathoms is 240 feet of chain and letting that lot down to the bottom didn't do my back or arms much good at all, and the rest of me was a long way below par before we started. I was pretty close to exhaustion from the night's work, my neck ached fiercely, my leg only badly and I was shivering violently. I know of various ways of achieving a warm rosy glow but wearing only a set of underclothes in the middle of a cold, wet and windy autumn night in the Western Isles is not one of them. But at last the job was done and we were able to go below. If anyone wanted to investigate what lay at the foot of our anchor chain he'd need a steel articulated diving suit.

Hunslett pulled the saloon door to behind us, moved around in the darkness adjusting the heavy velvet curtains then switched on a small table lamp. It didn't give much light but we knew from experience that it didn't show up through the velvet, and advertising the fact that we were up and around in the middle of die night was the last thing I wanted to do.

Hunslett had a dark narrow saturnine face, with a strong jaw, black bushy eyebrows and thick black hair — the kind of face which is so essentially an expression in itself that it rarely shows much else. It was expressionless now and very still.

"You'll have to buy another shirt," he said. "Your collar's too tight. Leaves marks."

I stopped towelling myself and looked in a mirror. Even in that dim light my neck looked a mess. It was badly swollen and discoloured, with four wicked-looking bruises where the thumbs and forefinger joints had sunk deep into the flesh. Blue and green and purple they were, and they looked as if they would be there for a long time to come.

"He got me from behind. He's wasting his time being a criminal, he'd sweep the board at the Olympic weight-lifting. I was lucky. He also wears heavy boots." I twisted around and looked down at my right calf. The bruise was bigger than my fist and if it missed out any of the colours of the rainbow I couldn't offhand think which one. There was a deep red gash across the middle of it and blood was ebbing slowly along its entire length. Hunslett gazed at it with interest.

"If you hadn't been wearing that tight scuba suit, you'd have most like bled to death. I better fix that for you."

"I don't need bandages. What I need is a Scotch. Stop wasting your time. Oh, hell, sorry, yes, you'd better fix it. We can't have our guests sloshing about ankle deep in blood."

"You're very sure we're going to have guests?"

"I half expected to have them waiting on the doorstep when I got back to the Firecrest. We're going to have guests, all right. Whatever our pals aboard the Nantesville may be, they're no fools. They'll have figured out by this time that I could have approached only by dinghy. They'll know damn well that it was no nosey-parker local prowling about the ship -local lads in search of a bit of fun don't go aboard anchored ships in the first place. In the second place the locals wouldn't go near Beul nan Uamh — the mouth of the grave — in daylight, far less at night time. Even the pilot says the place has an evil reputation. And in the third place no local lad would get aboard as I did, behave aboard as I did or leave as I did. The local lad would be dead."

"I shouldn't wonder. And?"

"So we're not locals. We're visitors. We -wouldn't be staying at any hotel or boarding-house — too restricted, couldn't move. Almost certainly we'll have a boat. Now, where would our boat be? Not to the north of Loch Houron for with a forecast promising a south-west Force 6 strengthening to Force 7, no boat is going to be daft enough to hang about a lee shore in that lot. The only holding ground and shallow enough sheltered anchorage in the other direction, down the Sound for forty miles, is in Torbay — and that's only four or five miles from where the Nantesville was lying at the mouth of Loch Houron, Where would you look for us?"

"I'd look for a boat anchored in Torbay. Which gun do you want?"

"I don't want any gun. You don't want any gun. People like us don't carry guns."

"Marine biologists don't carry guns," he nodded. "Employees of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries don't carry guns. Civil Servants are above reproach. So we play it clever. You're the boss."

"I don't feel clever any more. And I'll take long odds that I'm not your boss any more. Not after Uncle Arthur hears what I have to tell him."

"You haven't told me anything yet." He finished tying the bandage round my leg and straightened. "How's that feel?"

I tried it. "Better. Thanks. Better still when you've taken the cork from that bottle. Get into pyjamas or something. People found fully dressed in the middle of the night cause eyebrows to go up." I towelled my head as vigorously as my tired arms would let me. One wet hair on my head and eyebrows wouldn't just be lifting, they'd be disappearing into hairlines. "There isn't much to tell and all of it is bad."

He poured me a large drink, a smaller one for himself, and added water to both. It tasted the way Scotch always does after you've swum and rowed for hours and damn near got yourself killed in the process.

"I got there without trouble. I hid behind Carrara Point till it was dusk and then paddled out to the Bogha Nuadh. I left the dinghy there and swam underwater as far as the stern of the ship. It was the Nantesville all right. Name and flag were different, a mast was gone and the white superstructure was now stone — but it was her all right. Near as dammit didn't make it — it was close to the turn of the tide but it took me thirty minutes against that current. Must be wicked at the full flood or ebb."

"They say it's the worst on the West Coast — worse even than Coirebhreachan."

"I'd rather not be the one to find out. I had to hang on to the stern post for ten minutes before I'd got enough strength back to shin up that rope."

"You took a chance."

"It was near enough dark. Besides," I added bitterly, "there are some precautions intelligent people don't think to take about crazy ones. There were only two or three people in the after accommodation. Just a skeleton crew aboard, seven or eight, no more. All the original crew have vanished completely."

"No sign of them anywhere?"

"No sign. Dead or alive, no sign at all. I had a bit of bad luck. I was leaving the after accommodation to go to the bridge when I passed someone a few feet away. I gave a half wave and grunted something and he answered back, I don't know what. I followed him back to the quarters. He picked up a phone in the crew's mess and I heard him talking to someone, quick and urgent. Said that one of the original crew must have been hiding and was trying to get away. I couldn't stop him — he faced the door as he was talking and he had a gun in his hand. I had to move quickly. I walked to the bridge structure — "

"You what? When you knew they were on to you? Mr. Calvert, you want your bloody head examined."

"Uncle Arthur will put it less kindly. It was the only chance I'd ever have. Besides, if they thought it was only a terrified member of the original crew they wouldn't have been so worried: if this guy had seen me walking around dripping wet in a scuba suit he'd have turned me into a colander. He wasn't sure. On the way for'ard I passed another bloke without incident — he'd left the bridge super-structure before the alarm had been given, I suppose. I didn't stop at the bridge. I went right for'ard and hid behind the winchman's shelter. For about ten minutes there was a fair bit of commotion and a lot of flash-light work around the bridge island then I saw and heard them moving aft — must have thought I was still in the after accommodation.