When Eight Bells Toll

  ‘Old man Skouras draws a lot of water.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘He’s powerful. He has influence. If Skouras wanted action I’m damned sure he could get it. If the need arose and the mood struck him I’m sure he could be a very unpleasant character indeed.’

  ‘There’s not a better man or a kinder man ever sailed into Torbay,’ MacDonald said warmly. That hard brown face could conceal practically anything that MacDonald wanted it to conceal but this time he was hiding nothing. ‘Maybe his ways aren’t my ways. Maybe he’s a hard, aye, a ruthless businessman. Maybe, as the papers hint, his private life wouldn’t bear investigation. That’s none of my business. But if you were to look for a man in Torbay to say a word against him, you’ll have a busy time on your hands, Mr Petersen.’

  ‘You’ve taken me up wrongly. Sergeant,’ I said mildly. ‘I don’t even know the man.’

  ‘No. But we do. See that?’ He pointed through the side window of the police station to a large Swedish-style timber building beyond the pier. ‘Our new village hall. Town hall, they call it. Sir Anthony gave us that. Those six wee chalets up the hill there? For old folks. Sir Anthony again -every penny from his own pocket. Who takes all the schoolchildren to the Oban Games – Sir Anthony on the Shangri-la. Contributes to every charity going and now he has plans to build a boatyard to give employment to the young men of Torbay – there’s not much else going since the fishing-boats left.’

  ‘Well, good for old Skouras,’ I said. ‘He seems to have adopted the place. Lucky Torbay. I wish he’d buy me a new radio-transmitter.’

  ‘I’ll keep my eyes and ears open, Mr Petersen. I can’t do more. If anything turns up I’ll let you know at once.’

  I told him thanks, and left. I hadn’t particularly wanted to go there, but it would have looked damned odd if I hadn’t turned up to add my pennyworth to the chorus of bitter complaint.

  I was very glad that I had turned up.

  The midday reception from London was poor. This was due less to the fact that reception is always better after dark than to the fact that I couldn’t use our telescopic radio mast: but it was fair enough and Uncle’s voice was brisk and businesslike and clear.

  ‘Well, Caroline, we’ve found our missing friends,’ he said.

  ‘How many?’ I asked cautiously. Uncle Arthur’s ambiguous references weren’t always as clear as Uncle Arthur imagined them to be.

  ‘All twenty-five.’ That made it the former crew of the Nantesville. ‘Two of them are pretty badly hurt but they’ll be all right.’ That accounted for the blood I had found in the captain’s and one of the engineers’ cabins.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  He gave me a map reference. Just north of Wexford. The Nantesville had sailed from Bristol, she couldn’t have been more than a few hours on her way before she’d run into trouble.

  ‘Exactly the same procedure as on the previous occasions,’ Uncle Arthur was saying. ‘Held in a lonely farmhouse for a couple of nights. Plenty to eat and drink and blankets to keep the cold out. Then they woke up one morning and found their guards had gone.’

  ‘But a different procedure in stopping the – our friend?’ I’d almost said Nantesville and Uncle Arthur wouldn’t have liked that at all.

  ‘As always. We must concede them a certain ingenuity, Caroline. After having smuggled men aboard in port, then using the sinking fishing-boat routine, the police launch routine and the yacht with the appendicitis case aboard, I thought they would be starting to repeat themselves. But this time they came up with a new one – possibly because it’s the first time they’ve hi-jacked a ship during the hours of darkness. Carley rafts, this time, with about ten survivors aboard, dead ahead of the vessel. Oil all over the sea. A weak distress flare that couldn’t have been seen a mile away and probably was designed that way. You know the rest.’

  ‘Yes, Annabelle.’ I knew the rest. After that the routine was always the same. The rescued survivors, displaying a marked lack of gratitude, would whip out pistols, round up the crew, tie black muslin bags over their heads so that they couldn’t identify the vessel that would appear within the hour to take them off, march them on board the unknown vessel, land them on some lonely beach during the dark then march them again, often a very long way indeed, till they arrived at their prison. A deserted farmhouse. Always a deserted farmhouse. And always in Ireland, three times in the north and now twice in the south. Meantime the prize crew sailed the hi-jacked vessel to God alone knew where and the first the world knew of the disappearance of the pirated vessel was when the original crew, released after two or three days’ painless captivity, would turn up at some remote dwelling and start hollering for the nearest telephone.

  ‘Betty and Dorothy,’ I said. ‘Were they still in safe concealment when the crew were taken off?’

  ‘I imagine so. I don’t know. Details are still coming in and I understand the doctors won’t let anyone see the captain yet.’ Only the captain had known of the presence aboard of Baker and Delmont. ‘Forty-one hours now, Caroline. What have you done?’

  For a moment I wondered irritably what the devil he was talking about. Then I remembered. He’d given me forty-eight hours. Seven were gone.

  ‘I’ve had three hours’ sleep.’ He’d consider that an utter waste of time, his employees weren’t considered to need sleep. ‘I’ve talked to the constabulary ashore. And I’ve talked to a wealthy yachtsman, next boat to us here. We’re paying him a social call to-night.’

  There was a pause. ‘You’re doing what to-night, Caroline?’

  ‘Visiting. We’ve been invited. Harriet and I. For drinks.’

  This time the pause was markedly longer. Then he said: ‘You have forty-one hours, Caroline.’

  ‘Yes, Annabelle.’

  ‘We assume you haven’t taken leave of your senses.’

  ‘I don’t know how unanimous informed opinion might be about that. I don’t think I have.’

  ‘And you haven’t given up? No, not that. You’re too damn’ stiffnecked and – and –’

  ‘Stupid?’

  ‘Who’s the yachtsman?’

  I told him. It took me some time, partly because I had to spell out names with the aid of his damned code-book, partly because I gave him a very full account of everything Skouras had said to me and everything Sergeant MacDonald had said about Skouras. When his voice came again it was cagey and wary. As Uncle Arthur couldn’t see me I permitted myself a cynical grin. Even Cabinet Ministers found it difficult to make the grade as far as Skouras’s dinner-table, but the Permanent Under-Secretaries, the men with whom the real power of government lies, practically had their own initialled napkin rings. Under-Secretaries were the bane of Uncle Arthur’s life.

  ‘You’ll have to watch your step very carefully here, Caroline.’

  ‘Betty and Dorothy aren’t coming home any more, Annabelle. Someone has to ay. I want someone to pay. You want someone to pay. We all do.’

  ‘But it’s inconceivable that a man in his position, a man of his wealth –’

  ‘I’m sorry, Annabelle. I don’t understand.’

  ‘A man like that. Dammit all, I know him well, Caroline. We dine together. First-name terms. Know his present wife even better. Ex-actress. A philanthropist like that. A man who’s spent five consecutive seasons there. Would a man like that, a millionaire like that, spend all that time, all that money, just to build up a front –’

  ‘Skouras?’ I used the code name. Interrogatory, incredulous, as if it had just dawned upon me what Uncle Arthur was talking about. ‘I never said I suspected him, Annabelle. I have no reason to suspect him.’

  ‘Ah!’ It’s difficult to convey a sense of heartfelt gladness, profound satisfaction and brow-mopping relief in a single syllable, but Uncle Arthur managed it without any trouble. ‘Then why go?’ A casual eavesdropper might have thought he detected a note of pained jealousy in Uncle Arthur’s voice, and the casual eavesdropper would have been right. Uncle Arthur had only one weakness
in his makeup – he was a social snob of monumental proportions.

  ‘I want aboard. I want to see this smashed transmitter of his.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A hunch, let me call it, Annabelle. No more.’

  Uncle Arthur was going in for the long silences in a big way to-day. Then he said: ‘A hunch? A hunch? You told me this morning you were on to something.’

  ‘There’s something else. I want you to contact the Post Office Savings Bank, Head Office, in Scotland. After that, the Records files of some Scottish newspapers. I suggest The Glasgow Herald, the Scottish Daily Express and, most particularly, the West Highland weekly, the Oban Times.’

  ‘Ah!’ No relief this time, just satisfaction. ‘This is more like it, Caroline. What do you want and why?’

  So I told him what I wanted and why, lots more of the fancy code work, and when I’d finished he said: ‘I’ll have my staff on to this straight away. I’ll have all the information you want by midnight.’

  ‘Then I don’t want it, Annabelle. Midnight’s too late for me. Midnight’s no use to me.’

  ‘Don’t ask the impossible, Caroline.’ He muttered something to himself, something I couldn’t catch, then: ‘I’ll pull every string, Caroline. Nine o’clock.’

  ‘Four o’clock, Annabelle.’

  ‘Four o’clock this afternoon?’ When it came to incredulity he had me whacked to the wide. ‘Four hours’ time? You have taken leave of your senses.’

  ‘You can have ten men on it in ten minutes. Twenty in twenty minutes. Where’s the door that isn’t open to you? Especially the door of the Assistant Commissioner. Professionals don’t kill for the hell of it. They kill because they must. They kill to gain time. Every additional hour is vital to them. And if it’s vital to them, how much more so is it to us? Or do you think we’re dealing with amateurs, Annabelle?’

  ‘Call me at four,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ll see what I have for you. What’s your next move, Caroline?’

  ‘Bed,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get some sleep.’

  ‘Of course. Time, as you said, is of the essence. You mustn’t waste it, must you, Caroline?’ He signed off. He sounded bitter. No doubt he was bitter. But then, insomnia apart, Uncle Arthur could rely on a full quota of sleep during the coming night. Which was more than I could. No certain foreknowledge, no second sight, just a hunch, but not a small one, the kind of hunch you couldn’t have hidden behind the Empire State Building. Just like the one I had about the Shangri-la.

  I only just managed to catch the last fading notes of the alarm as it went off at ten minutes to four. I felt worse than I had done when we’d lain down after a miserable lunch of corned beef and reconstituted powdered potatoes – if old Skouras had had a spark of human decency, he’d have made that invitation for dinner. I wasn’t only growing old, I felt old. I’d been working too long for Uncle Arthur. The pay was good but the hours and working conditions – I’d have wagered that Uncle Arthur hadn’t even set eyes on a tin of corned beef since the Second World War – were shocking. And all this constant worrying, chiefly about life expectancy, helped wear a man down.

  Hunslett came out of his cabin as I came out of mine. He looked just as old as I did. If they had to rely on a couple of ageing crocks like us, I thought morosely, the rising generation must be a pretty sorry lot.

  Passing through the saloon, I wondered bitterly about the identity of all those characters who wrote so glibly about the Western Isles in general and the Torbay area in particular as being a yachtsman’s paradise without equal in Europe. Obviously, they’d never been there. Fleet Street was their home and home was a place they never left, not if they could help it. An ignorant bunch of travel and advertising copy writers who regarded King’s Cross as the northern limits of civilisation. Well, maybe not all that ignorant, at least they were smart enough to stay south of King’s Cross.

  Four o’clock on an autumn afternoon, but already it was more night than day. The sun wasn’t down yet, not by a very long way, but it might as well have been for all the chance it had of penetrating the rolling masses of heavy dark cloud hurrying away to the eastwards to the inky blackness of the horizon beyond Torbay. The slanting sheeting rain that foamed whitely across the bay further reduced what little visibility there was to a limit of not more than four hundred yards. The village itself, half a mile distant and nestling in the dark shadow of the steeply-rising pine-covered hills behind, might never have existed. Off to the north-west I could see the navigation lights of a craft rounding the headland, Skouras returning from his stabiliser test run. Down in the Shangri-la’s gleaming galley a master chef would be preparing the sumptuous evening meal, the one to which we hadn’t been invited. I tried to put the thought of that meal out of my mind, but I couldn’t, so I just put it as far away as possible and followed Hunslett into the engine-room.

  Hunslett took the spare earphones and squatted beside me on the deck, note-book on his knee. Hunslett was as competent in shorthand as he was in everything else. I hoped that Uncle Arthur would have something to tell us, that Hunslett’s presence there would be necessary. It was.

  ‘Congratulations, Caroline,’ Uncle Arthur said without preamble. ‘You really are on to something.’ As far as it is possible for a dead flat monotone voice to assume an overtone of warmth, then Uncle Arthur’s did just that. He sounded positively friendly. More likely it was some freak of transmission or reception but at least he hadn’t started off by bawling me out.

  ‘We’ve traced those Post Office Savings books,’ he went on. He rattled off book numbers and details of times and amounts of deposits, things of no interest to me, then said: ‘Last deposits were on December 27th. Ten pounds in each case. Present balance is £78 14s. 6d. Exactly the same in both. And those accounts have not been closed.’

  He paused for a moment to let me congratulate him, which I did, then continued.

  ‘That’s nothing, Caroline. Listen. Your queries about any mysterious accidents, deaths, disappearances off the west coasts of Inverness-shire or Argyll, or anything happening to people from that area. We’ve struck oil, Caroline, we’ve really struck oil. My God, why did we never think of this before. Have your pencil handy?’

  ‘Harriet has.’

  ‘Here we go. This seems to have been the most disastrous sailing season for years in the west of Scotland. But first, one from last year. The Pinto, a well-found sea-worthy forty-five foot motor cruiser left Kyle of Lochalsh for Oban at eight a.m. September 4th. She should have arrived that afternoon. She never did. No trace of her has ever been found.’

  ‘What was the weather at the time, Annabelle?’

  ‘I thought you’d ask me that, Caroline.’ Uncle Arthur’s combination of modesty and quiet satisfaction could be very trying at times. ‘I checked with the Met. office. Force one, variable. Flat calm, cloudless sky. Then we come to this year. April 6th and April 26th. The Evening Star and the Jeannie Rose. Two East Coast fishing boats – one from Buckie, the other from Fraserburgh.’

  ‘But both based on the west coast?’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t try to steal my thunder,’ Uncle Arthur complained. ‘Both were based on Oban. Both were lobster boats. The Evening Star, the first one to go, was found stranded on the rocks off Islay. The Jeannie Rose vanished without trace. No member of either crew was ever found. Then again on the 17th of May. This time a well-known racing yacht, the Cap Gris Nez, an English built and owned craft, despite her name, highly experienced skipper, navigator and crew, all of them long-time and often successful competitors in R.O.R.C. races. That class. Left Londonderry for the north of Scotland in fine weather. Disappeared. She was found almost a month later – or what was left of her – washed up on the Isle of Skye.’

  ‘And the crew?’

  ‘Need you ask? Never found. Then the last case, a few weeks ago – August 8th. Husband, wife, two teenage children, son and daughter. Converted lifeboat, the Kingfisher. By all accounts a pretty competent sailor, been at it for years. But he’d
never done any night navigation, so he set out one calm evening to do a night cruise. Vanished. Boat and crew.’

  ‘Where did he set out from?’

  ‘Torbay.’

  That one word made his afternoon. It made mine, too. I said: ‘And do you still think the Nantesville is hell and gone to Iceland or some remote fjord in northern Norway?’

  ‘I never thought anything of the kind.’ Uncle’s human relationship barometer had suddenly swung back from friendly to normal, normal lying somewhere between cool and glacial. ‘The significance of the dates will not have escaped you?’

  ‘No, Annabelle, the significance has not escaped me.’ The Buckie fishing-boat, the Evening Star, had been found washed up on Islay three days after the S.S. Holmwood had vanished off the south coast of Ireland. The Jeannie Rose had vanished exactly three days after the M.V. Antara had as mysteriously disappeared in the St George’s Channel. The Cap Gris Nez, the R.O.R.C. racer that had finally landed up on the rocks of the island of Skye had vanished the same day as the M.V. Headley Pioneer had disappeared somewhere, it was thought, off Northern Ireland. And the converted lifeboat. Kingfisher, had disappeared, never to be seen again, just two days after the S.S. Hurricane Spray had left the Clyde, also never to be seen again. Coincidence was coincidence and I classed those who denied its existence with intellectual giants like the twentieth-century South African president who stoutly maintained that the world was flat and that an incautious step would take you over the edge with results as permanent as they would be disastrous: but this was plain ridiculous. The odds against such a perfect matching of dates could be calculated only in astronomical terms: while the complete disappearance of the crews of four small boats that had come to grief in so very limited an area was the final nail in the coffin of coincidence. I said as much to Uncle.