Alistair MacLean - When Eight Bells Toll

"I radioed France. Riviera police dug up the grave in Beaulieu where she had been buried near the nursing home where she'd died. They found a coffin full of logs. You knew this, Tony."

Old Skouras nodded. He was a man in a dream.

"It took them half an hour to find out who had signed the death certificate and most of the rest of the day to find the doctor himself. They charged him with murder. This can be done in France on the basis of a missing body. The doctor wasted no time at all in taking them to his own private nursing home, where Mrs. Skouras was in a locked room. The doctor, matron and a few others are in custody now. Why in God's name didn't you come to us before?"

"They had Charlotte and they said they would kill my wife out of hand. What -what would you have done?"

"God knows," Uncle Arthur said frankly. "She's in fair health, Tony. Calvert got radio confirmation at five a.m." Uncle Arthur jerked a thumb upwards. "On Lavorski's big transceiver in the castle."

Both Skouras and Lord Kirkside had their mouths open, Lavorski, blood still Sowing from his mouth, and Dollmann looked as if they had been sandbagged. Charlotte's eyes were the widest wide I'd ever seen. She was looking at me in a very peculiar way.

"It's true," Susan Kirkside said. "I was with him. He told me to tell nobody," She crossed to take my arm and smiled up at me. "I'm sorry again for what I said last night. I think you're the most wonderful man I've ever known. Except Rolly, of course." She turned round at the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and promptly forgot all about the second most wonderful man she'd ever known.

"Rolly!" she cried. "Rolly!" I could see Rolly bracing himself.

They were all there, I counted them, Kirkside's son, the Hon. Rollinson, the policeman's sons, the missing members of the small boats and, behind them all, a small brown-faced old woman in a long dark dress with a black shawl over her head. I went forward and took her arm.

"Mrs. MacEachern," I said. "I’ll take you home soon. Your husband is waiting."

"Thank you, young man," she said calmly. "That will be very nice." She lifted her arm and held mine in a proprietorial fashion.

Charlotte Skouras came and held my other arm, not in quite so proprietorial a fashion, but there for everyone to see. I didn't mind. She said: "You were on to me? You were on to me all the time?"

"He was," Uncle Arthur said thoughtfully. "He just said he knew. You never quite got round to explaining that bit, Calvert."

"It wasn't difficult, sir — if you know all the facts, that is," I added hastily. "Sir Anthony put me on to you. That visit he paid me on the Firecrest to allay any suspicion we might have had about our smashed radio set only served, I'm afraid, to mate me suspicious. You wouldn't have normally come to me, you'd have gone ashore immediately to the police or to a phone, sir. Then, in order to get me talking about the cut telephone wires, you wondered if the radio-wrecker, to complete our isolation from the mainland, had smashed the two public call boxes. From a man of your intelligence, such a suggestion was fatuous, there must be scores of houses in Torbay with their private phone. But you thought it might sound suspicious if you suggested cut lines, so you didn't, Then Sergeant MacDonald gave me a glowing report about you, said you were the most respected man in Torbay and your public reputation contrasted so sharply with your private behaviour in the Shangri-la on Tuesday night — well, I just couldn't buy it."

"That nineteenth-century late Victorian melodrama act that you and Charlotte put on in the saloon that night had me fooled for all of five seconds. It was inconceivable that any man so devoted to his wife could be vicious towards another obviously nice woman-"

"Thank you kindly, sir," Charlotte murmured.

"It was inconceivable that he send her for his wife's photograph, unless he had been ordered to do so. And you had been ordered to do so, by Lavorski and Dollmann. And it was inconceivable that she would have gone — the Charlotte Meiner I knew would have clobbered you over the head with a marline spike. Ergo, if you weren't what you appeared to be, neither were you, Charlotte."

"The villains, they thought, were laying a foundation for an excellent reason for your flight from the wicked baron to the Firecrest, where you could become their eyes and ears and keep them informed of all our plans and moves, because they'd no idea how long their secret little transmitter in the engine-room would remain undetected. After they knew we'd found Hunslett — they'd removed the transmitter by that time — it was inevitable that they would try to get you aboard the Firecrest. So they laid a little more groundwork by giving you a bruised eye -the dye is nearly off already — and some wicked weals across your back and dumped you into the water with your little polythene kitbag with the micro-transmitter and gun inside it. Do this, they said, or Mrs. Skouras will get it."

She nodded. "They said that."

"I have twenty-twenty eyesight. Sir Arthur hasn't — his eyes were badly damaged in the war. I had a close look at those weak on your back. Genuine weals. Also genuine pin-pricks where the hypodermic with the anasthetic had been inserted before the lashes were inflicted. To that degree, at least, someone was humane."

"I could stand most things," Skouras said heavily. "I couldn't stand the thought of — the thought of — "

"I guessed you had insisted on the anaesthetic, sir. No, I knew. The same way that I knew that you had insisted that the crews of all those small yachts be kept alive or the hell with the consequences. Charlotte, I ran a finger-nail down one of those weals. You should have jumped through the saloon roof. You never batted an eyelid. After submersion in salt water. After that, I knew."

"I have devious reasons for the things I do. You told us that you had come to warn us of our deadly danger — as if we didn't know, I told you we were leaving Torbay within the hour, so off you trotted to your little cabin and told them we were going to leave within the hour. So Quinn, Jacques and Kramer came paddling across well in advance of the time you'd told us they would be corning, trusting we would have been lulled into a sense of false security. You must love Mrs. Skouras very much, Charlotte. A clear-cut choice, she or us, and you made your choice. But I was waiting for them, so Jacques and Kramer died. I told you we were going to Eilean Oran and Craigmore, so off you trotted down to your little cabin and told them we were going to Eilean Oran and Craigmore, which wouldn't have worried them at all. Later on I told you we were going to Dubh Sgeir. So off you trotted down to your little cabin again, but before you could tell them anything you passed out on your cabin deck, possibly as a result of a little night-cap I'd put in your coffee. I couldn't have you telling your friends here that I was going to Dubh Sgeir, could I now? They would have had a reception committee all nicely organised."

"You — you were in my cabin? You said I was on the floor?"

"Don Juan has nothing on me. I flit in and out of ladies' bedrooms like anything. Ask Susan Kirkside. You were on the floor. I put you to bed. I looked at your arms, incidentally, and the rope marks were gone. They'd used rubber bands, twisted pretty tightly, just before Hunslett and I had arrived?"

She nodded. She looked dazed.

"I also, of course, found the transmitter and gun. Then, back in Craigmore, you came and pumped back for some more information. And you did try to warn me, you were about torn in half by that time. I gave you that information. It wasn't the whole truth, I regret, but it was what I wanted you to tell Lavorski and company, which," I said approvingly, "like a good little girl you did. Off you trotted to your little white-washed bedroom — "