When eight bells toll (8 page)

"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 £78 143. 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 ajn. 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.
Holmivood
had vanished off the south coast of Ireland. The
Jeanme 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 rocksof 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.

"Let us not waste time by dwelling upon the obvious, Caroline," Uncle said coldly, which was pretty ungracious of him as the idea had never even entered his head until I had put it there four hours previously. "The point is - what is to be done? Islay to Skye is a pretty big area. Where does this get us?"

"How much weight can you bring to bear to secure the cooperation"of the television and radio networks?"

There was a pause, then: "What do you have in mind, Caroline?" Uncle at his most forbidding.

"An insertion of an item in their news bulletins."

"Well." An even longer pause. "It was done daily during the war, of course. I believe it's been done once or twice since. Can't compel them, of course - they're a stuffy lot, both the B.B.C. and the I.T.A." His tone left little doubt as to his opinion of those diehard reactionaries who brooked no interference, an odd reaction from one who was himself a past-master of brookmanship of this nature. "If they can be persuaded that it's completely apolitical and in the national interest there's a chance. What do you want?"

"An item that a distress signal has been received from a sinking yacht somewhere south of Skye, Exact position unknown. Signals ceased, the worst feared, an air-sea search to be mounted at first light to-morrow. That's all,"

"I may manage it. Your reason, Caroline?"

"I want to look around. I want an excuse to move around without raising eyebrows."

"You're going to volunteer the
Firecrest
for this search and then poke around where you shouldn't?"

"We have our faults, Annabelle, Harriet and I, but we're not crazy. I wouldn't take this tub across the Serpentine without a favourable weather forecast. It's blowing a Force 7 outside. And a boat search would take a lifetime too long in those parts. What I had in mind was this. At the very eastern rip of Torbay Island, about five miles from the villages there's a small deserted sandy cove, semicircular and well protected by steep bluffs and pine trees. Will you please arrange to have a long-range helicopter there exactly at dawn."

"And now it's your turn to think I am crazy," Uncle Arthur said coldly. That remark about the sea-keeping qualities of big own brain-child, the
Firecrest,
would have rankled badly. "I'm supposed to snap my fingers and hey presto I a helicopter will be there at dawn."

"That's fourteen hours from now, Annabelle. At five o'clock this morning you were prepared to snap your fingers and have a helicopter here by noon. Seven hours. Exactly half the time. But that was for something important like getting me down to London to give me the bawling out of a lifetime before firing me."

"Call me at midnight, Caroline. I hope to God you know what you are doing."

I said: "Yes, sir," and hung up. I didn't mean, Yes, sir, I knew what I was doing, I meant, Yes, sir, I hoped to God I knew what I was doing.

If the carpet in the
Shangri-la
saloon had cost a penny under five thousand pounds, then old Skouras must have picked it up second-hand somewhere. Twenty by thirty, bron2e and russet and gold, but mainly gold, it flowed across the deck like a field of ripe corn, an illusion heightened both by its depth and the impediment it offered to progress. You had to wade through the damn' thing. I'd never seen an item of furnishing like it in my life except for the curtains that covered two-thirds of the bulkhead space. The curtains made the carpet look rather shoddy. Persian or Afghanistan, with a heavy gleaming weave that gave a shimmering shot-silk effect with every little movement of the
Shangri-la,
they stretched all the way from deckhead to deck. What little of the bulkheads that could be seen were sheathed in a satiny tropical hardwood, the same wood as was used for the magnificent bar that tookup most of the after bulkhead of the saloon. The opulently upholstered settees and armchairs and bar-stools, dark green leather with gold piping, would have cost another fortune, even the trade-in value of the beaten copper tables scattered carelessly about the carpet would have fed a family of five for a year. At the Savoy Grill.

On the port bulkhead hung two Cézannes, on the starboard two Renoirs. The pictures were a mistake. In that room they didn't have a chance. They'd have felt more at home in the galley.

So would I. So, I was pretty sure, would Hunslett. It wasn't merely that our sports coats and Paisley scarves clashed violently with the decor in general and the black ties and dinner jackets of our host and his other guests in particular. It wasn't even that the general run of conversation might have been specifically designed to reduce Hunslett and myself to our proper status of artisans and pretty inferior artisans at that. AH this talk about debentures and mergers and cross-options and takeovers and millions and millions of dollars has a pretty demoralising effect on the lower classes, but you didn't need to have the I.Q. of a genius to realise that this line of talk wasn't being aimed specifically at us; to the 'lads with the black ties, debentures and takeovers were the stuff and staff of life and so a principal staple of conversation. Besides, this wish to be somewhere else obviously didn't apply only to us: at least two others, a bald-headed, goatee-bearded merchant banker by the name of Henri Biscarte and a big bluff Scots lawyer by the name of MacCallum were just as uncomfortable as I felt, but showed it a great deal more.

A silent movie picture of the scene would have given no due as to what was wrong. Everything was so very comfortable, so very civilised. The deep armchairs invited complete relaxation. A blazing if superfluous log-fire burned in the hearth. Skouras was the smiling and genial host to the life. The glasses were never empty - the press of an unheard bell brought a white-jacketed steward who silently refilled glasses and as silently departed again. All so urbane, so wealthy, so pleasantly peaceful. Until you cut in the movie sound-track, that was. That was when you wished you were in the galley.

Skouras had his glass refilled for the fourth time in the forty-five minutes we had been there, smiled at his wife sitting in the armchair across the fire from him, lifted his glass in a toast.

"To you, my dear. To your patience with putting up with us all, so well. A most boring trip for you, most boring. I congratulate you."

I looked at Charlotte Skouras. Everybody looked at Charlotte Skouras. There was nothing unusual in that, millions of people-had looked at Charlotte Skouras when she had been the most sought-after actress in Europe. Even in those days she'd been neither particularly young nor beautiful, she didn't have to be because she'd been a great actress and not a beautiful but boneheaded movie star. Now she was even older and less good-looking and her figure was beginning to go. But men still looked at her. She was somewhere in her late thirties, but they would still be looking at her when she was in her bath-chair. She had that kind of face. A worn face, a used face, a face that had been used for living and laughing and thinking and feeling and suffering, a face with brown tired wise-knowing eyes a thousand years old, a face that had more quality and character in every little line and wrinkle - and heaven only knew there was no shortage of these — than in a whole battalion of the fringe-haired darlings of contemporary society, the ones in the glossy magazines, the ones who week after week stared out at you with their smooth and beautiful faces, with their beautiful and empty eyes. Put them in the same room as Charlotte Skouras and no one would ever have seen them. Mass-produced carbon copies of chocolate boxes are no kind of competition at all for a great painter's original in oils.

"You are very kind, Anthony." Charlotte Skouras had a deep slow slightly-foreign accented voice, and, just then, a tired strained smile that accorded well with the darkness under the brown eyes. "But I am never bored. Truly. You know that."

"With this lot as guests?" Skouras's smile was as broad as ever. "A Skouras board meeting in the Western Isles instead of your blue-blooded favourites on a cruise in the Levant? Take Dollmann here." He nodded to the man by his side, a tall thin bespectacled character with receding thin dark hair who looked as if he needed a shave but didn't. John Dollmann, the managing director of the Skouras shipping lines. "Eh, John? How do you rate yourself as a substitute for young Viscount Horley? The one with sawdust in his head and fifteen million in the bank?"

"Poorly, I'm afraid, Sir Anthony." Dollmann was as urbane as Skouras himself, as apparently unconscious of anything untoward in the atmosphere. "Very poorly. I've a great deal more brains, a great deal less money and I've no pretensions to being a gay and witty conversationalist."

"Young Horley
was
rather the life and soul of the party, wasn't he? Especially when I wasn't around," Skouras added thoughtfully. He looked at me. "You know him, Mr. Petersen?"

"I've heard of him. I don't move in those circles, Sir Anthony." Urbane as all hell, that was me.

"Um." Skouras looked quizzically at the two men sitting close by myself. One, rejoicing in the good Anglo-Saxon name of Hermann Lavorski, a big jovial twinkling-eyed man with a great booming laugh and an inexhaustible supply of risqué stories, was, I'd been told, his accountant and financial adviser. I'd never seen anyone less like an accountant and finance wizard, so that probably made him the best in the business. The other, a middle-aged, balding, Sphinx-faced character with a drooping handle-bar moustache of the type once sported by Wild Bin Hickock and a head that cried out for a bowler hat, was Lord Charnley, who, in spite of his title, found it necessary to work as a broker in the City to make ends meet. "And how would you rate our two good friends here, Charlotte?" This with another wide and friendly smile at his wife.