When eight bells toll (20 page)

Uncle Arthur puffed a bit more then said candidly: "I don't intend to try. You don't find generals slugging it out hand-to-hand in the trenches. Calvert will cope with them. Good night, my dear."

He pushed off. I didn't contradict him. But I knew that Calvert couldn't cope with them. Not any more, he couldn't. Calvert had to have help. With a crew consisting of a myopic boss and a girl who, every time I looked at her, listened to her or thought of her, starred the warning bells clanging away furiously in the back of my head, Calvert had to
have a great deal of help. And he had to have it fast.

After Uncle Arthur had retired, Charlotte and I stood in silence in the darkened wheelhouse. But a companionable silence. You can always tell. The rain drummed on the wheel-house roof. It was as dark as it ever becomes at sea and the patches of white fog were increasing in density and number. Because of them I had cut down to half speed and with the loss of steerage way and that heavy westerly sea coining up dead astern I'd normally have been hard put to it to control the direction of the
Firecrest:
but I had the auto-pilot on and switched to "Fine"and we were doing famously. The auto-pilot was a much better helmsman than I was. And streets ahead of Uncle Arthur.

Charlotte said suddenly: "What is it you intend to do to-night?"

"You
are
a
gourmand for information. Don't you know that Uncle Arthur - sorry, Sir Arthur - and I are engaged upon a highly secret mission? Security is all."

"And now you're laughing at me - and forgetting I'm along on this secret mission too."

"I'm glad you're along and I'm not laughing at you, because I'll be leaving this boat once or twice to-night and I have to have somebody I can trust to look after it when I'm away."

"You have Sir Arthur."

"I have, as you say. Sir Arthur, There's no one alive for whose judgment and intelligence I have greater respect. But at the present moment I'd trade in all the judgment and intelligence in the world for a pair of sharp young eyes. Going by to-night's performance, Sir Arthur shouldn't be allowed out without a white stick. How are yours?"

"Well, they're not so young any more, but I think they're sharp enough."

"So I can rely on you?"

"On me? I - well, I don't know anything about handling boats."

"You and Sir Arthur should make a great team, I saw you star once in a French film about------"

"We never left the studio. Even in the studio pool I had a stand-in."

"Well, there be no stand-in to-night."  I glanced out through the streaming windows. "And no studio pool. This is the real stuff, the genuine Atlantic. A pair of eyes, Charlotte, that's all I require. A pair of eyes. Just cruising up and down till I come back and seeing that you don't go on the rocks. Can you do that?"

"Will I have any option?"

"Nary an option."

"Then I'll try.  Where are you going ashore?"

"Eilean Oran and Craigmore. The two innermost islands in Loch Houron. If," I said thoughtfully, "I can find them."

"Eilean Oran and Craigmore."  I could have been wrong, but I thought the faint French accent a vast improvement on the original Gaelic pronunciation. "It seems so wrong. So very wrong. In the middle of all this hate and avarice and killing. These names - they breathe the very spirit of romance."

"A highly deceptive form of respiration, my dear." I'd have to watch myself, I was getting as bad as Uncle Arthur. "Those islands breathe the very spirit of bare, bleak and rocky desolation. But Eilean Oran and Craigmore hold the key to everything. Of that I'm very sure."

She said nothing. I stared out -through the high-speed Kent clear-view screen and wondered if I'd see Dubh Sgeir before it saw me. After a couple of minutes I felt a hand on my upper arm and she was very close to me. The hand was trembling. Wherever she'd come by her perfume it hadn't been bought in a supermarket or fallen out of a Christmas cracker. Momentarily and vaguely I wondered about the grievous impossibility of ever understanding the feminine mind: before fleeing for what she had thought to be her life and embarking upon a hazardous swim in the waters of Torbay harbour, she hadn't forgotten to pack a sachet of perfume in her polythene kit-bag. For nothing was ever surer than that any perfume she'd been wearing had been well and truly removed before I'd fished her out of Torbay harbour.

"Philip?"

Well, this was better than the Mr. Calvert stuff. I was glad Uncle Arthur wasn't there to have his aristocratic feelings scandalised, I said: "Uh-huh?"

"I'm sorry." She said it as if she meant it and I supposed I should have tried to forget that she was once the best actress in Europe. "I'm truly sorry. About what I said -about what I thought — earlier on. For thinking you were a monster. The men you killed, I mean. I - well, I didn't know about Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and the helicopter pilot. All your friends. I'm truly sorry, Philip. Truly."

She was overdoing it. She was also too damn' close. Too damn' warm. You'd have required a pile-driver in top condition to get a cigarette card between us. And that perfume that hadn't fallen out of a cracker - intoxicating, the ad-boys in the glossies would have called it. And all the time the warning bells were clanging away like a burglar alarm with the St. Virus's dance. I made a manful effort to do something about it. I put my mind to higher things.

She said nothing. She just squeezed my arm a bit more and even the pile-driver would have gone on strike for piece-work rates. I could hear the big diesel exhaust thudding away behind us, a sound of desolate reassurance. The
Firecrest
swooned down the long overtaking combers then gently soared again. I was conscious for the first time of a curious meteorological freak in the Western Isles. A marked rise in temperature after midnight. And I'd have to speak to the Kent boys about their guarantee that their clearview screen wouldn't mist up under any conditions, but maybe that wasn't fair, maybe they'd never visualised conditions like this. I was just thinking of switching off the auto-pilot to give me something to do when she said: "I think I'll go below soon. Would you like a cup of coffee first?"

"As long as you don't have to put on a light to do it. Andas long as you don't trip over Uncle Arthur — I mean, Sir-----"

"Uncle Arthur will do just fine," she said. "It suits him." Another squeeze of the arm and she was gone.

The meteorological freak was of short duration. By and by the temperature dropped back to normal and the Kent guarantee became operative again. I took a chance, left the
Firecrest
to its own devices and nipped aft to the stern locker. I took out my scuba diving equipment, together with air-cylinders and mask, and brought them for'ard to the wheelhouse.

It took her twenty-five minutes to make the coffee. Calor gas has many times the calorific efficiency of standard domestic coal gas and, even allowing for the difficulties of operating in darkness, this was surely a world record for slowness in making coffee at sea. I heard the clatter of crockery as the coffee was brought through the saloon and smiled cynically to myself in the darkness. Then I thought of Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and Williams, and I wasn't smiling any more.

I still wasn't smiling when I dragged myself on to the rocks of Eilean Oran, removed the scuba equipment and set the big, rectangular-based, swivel-headed torch between a couple of stones with its beam staring out to sea. I wasn't smiling, but it wasn't for the same reason that I hadn't been smiling when Charlotte had brought the coffee to the wheelhouse just over half an hour ago, I wasn't smiling because I was in a state of high apprehension and I was in a state of high apprehension because for ten minutes before leaving the
Firecrest
I'd tried to instruct Sir Arthur and Charlotte in the technique of keeping a boat in a constant position relative to a fixed mark on the shore.

"Keep her on a due west compass heading," I'd said.
"
Keep her bows on to the sea and wind. With the engine at ' Slow' that will give you enough steerage way to keep your head up. If you find yourselves creeping too far forwards, come round to the
south "—
if they'd come round to the north they'd have found themselves high and dry on the rock shores of Eilean Oran - "head due east at half speed, because if you go any slower you'll broach to, come sharply round to the north then head west again at slow speed. You can see those breakers on the south shore there. Whatever you do, keep them at least two hundred yards away on the starboard hand when you're going west and a bit more when you're going east."

They had solemnly assured me that they would do just that and seemed a bit chuffed because of what must have been my patent lack of faith in them both, but I'd reason for my lack of faith for neither had shown any marked ability to make a clear distinction between shore breakers and the north-south line of the foaming tops of the waves rolling eastwards towards the mainland. In desperation I'd said I'd place a fixed light on the shore and that that would serve as a permanent guide. I just trusted to God that Uncle Arthur wouldn't emulate die part of an eighteenth-century French sloop's skipper vis-a-vis the smugglers' lamp on a rock-girt Cornish shore and run the damned boat aground under the impression that he was heading for a beacon of hope. He was a very clever man, was Uncle Arthur, but the sea was not his home.

The boatshed wasn't quite empty, but it wasn't far off it. I flashed my small torch around its interior and realised that MacEachern's boatshed wasn't the place I was after. There was nothing there but a weather-beaten, gunwale-splintered launch, with, amidships, an unboxed petrol engine that seemed to be a solid block of rust.

I came to the house. On its northern side, the side remote from the sea, a light shone through a small window. A light at half-past one in the morning. I crawled up to this and hitched a wary eye over the window-sill. A neat, clean, well-cared-for smaH room, with lime-washed walk, mat-covered stone floor and the embers of a drift-wood fire smouldering in an ingle-nook in the corner. Donald MacEachern was sitting in a cane-bottomed chair, still unshaven, still in his month-old shirt, his head bent, staring into the dull red bean of the fire. He had the look of a man who was staring into a dying fire because that was all that was left in the world for him to do. I moved round to the door, turned the handle and went inside.

He heard me and turned around, not quickly, just the way a man would turn who knows there is nothing left on earth that can hurt him. He looked at me, looked at the gun in my hand, looked at his own twelve-bore hanging on a couple of nails on the wall then sank back into his chair again.

He said tonelessly:   "Who in the name of God are you?"

"Calvert's
my
name. I was here yesterday." I pulled off my rubber hood and be remembered all right. I nodded to thetwelve-bore. "You won't be needing that gun to-night, Mr. MacEachern. Anyway, you had the safety catch on."

"You don't miss much," he said slowly. "There were no cartridges in the gun."

"And no one standing behind you, was there?"

"I don't know what you mean," he said tiredly. "Who are you, man? What do you want?"

"I want to know why you gave me the welcome you did yesterday." I put the gun away. "It was hardly friendly, Mr. MacEachern."

"Who are you, sir?" He looked even older than he had done yesterday, old and broken and done.

"Calvert. They told you to discourage visitors, didn't they, Mr. MacEachern?" No answer. "I asked some questions to-night of a friend of yours. Archie MacDonald. The Torbay police sergeant. He told me you were married. I don't see Mrs. MacEachern."

He half rose from his cane chair. The old bloodshot eyes had a gleam to them. He sank back again and the eyes dimmed.

"You were out in your boat one night, weren't you, Mr. MacEachern? You were out in your boat and you saw too much. They caught you and they -took you back here and they took Mrs. MacEachern away and they told you that if you ever breathed a word to anyone alive you would never see your wife that way again. Alive, I mean. They told you to stay here in case any chance acquaintances or strangers should call by and wonder why you weren't here and raise the alarm, and just to make sure that you wouldn't be tempted
to
go the mainland for help - although heaven knows I would have thought there would be no chance in the world of you being as mad as that - they immobilised your engine. Salt-water impregnated sacks, I shouldn't wonder, so that any chance caller would think it was due to neglect and disuse, not sabotage."

"Aye, they did that." He stared sightlessly into the fire, his voice the sunken whisper of a man who is just thinking aloud and hardly aware that he is speaking. "They took her away and they ruined my boat. And I had my life saving in the back room there and they took that too. I wish I'd had a million pounds to give them. If only they had left my Main. She's five years older than myself." He had no defences left.

"What in the name of God have you been living  on?"

"Every other week they bring me tinned food, not much, and condensed milk. Tea I have, and I catch a fish now and then off the rocks." He gazed into the fire, his forehead wrinkling as if he were suddenly realising that I brought a new dimension into his life. "Who are you, sir? Who are you? You're not one of them. And you're not a policeman, I know you're not a policeman. I've seen them. I've seen policemen. But you are a very different kettle of fish." There were the stirrings of life in him now, life in his face and in his eyes. He stared at me for a full minute, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable under the gaze of those faded eyes, when he said: "I know who you are. I know who you must be. You are a Government man. You are an agent of the British Secret Service."

Well, by God, I took off my hat to the old boy. There I was, looking nondescript as anything and buttoned to the chin in a scuba suit, and he had me nailed right away. So much for the inscrutable faces of the guardians of our country's secrets. I thought of what Uncle Arthur would have said to him, the automatic threats of dismissal .and imprisonment if the old man breathed a word. But Donald MacEachern didn't have any job to be dismissed from and after a lifetime in Eilean Oran even a maximum security prison would have looked like a hostelry to which Egon Ronay would have lashed out six stars without a second thought, so as there didn't seem to be much point in threatening him I said instead, for the first time in my life: "I am an agent of the Secret Service, Mr. MacEachern. I am going to bring your wife back to you."