When Eight Bells Toll

There’s seldom any doubt about the exact time of a murder in an old English country house murder story. After a cursory examination and a lot of pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo, the good doctor drops the corpse’s wrist and says, ‘The decedent deceased at 11.57 last night’ or words to that effect, then, with a thin deprecatory smile magnanimously conceding that he’s a member of the fallible human race, adds, ‘Give or take a minute or two.’ The good doctor outside the pages of the detective novel finds it rather more difficult. Weight, build, ambient temperature and cause of death all bear so heavily and often unpredictably on the cooling of the body that the estimated time of death may well lie in a span of several hours.

I’m not a doctor, far less a good one, and all I could tell about the man behind the desk was that he had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in but not long enough for it to wear off. He was stiff as a man frozen to death in a Siberian winter. He’d been gone for hours. How many, I’d no idea.

He wore four gold bands on his sleeves, so that would seem to make him the captain. The captain in the radio cabin. Captains are seldom found in the radio cabin and never behind the desk. He was slumped back in his chair, his head to one side, the back of it resting against a jacket hanging from a hook on the bulkhead, the side of it against a wall cabinet. Rigor mortis kept him in that position but he should have slipped to the floor or at least slumped forward on to the table before rigor mortis had set in.

There were no outward signs of violence that I could see but on the assumption that it would be stretching the arm of coincidence a bit far to assume that he had succumbed from natural causes while preparing to defend his life with his Peacemaker I took a closer look. I tried to pull him upright but he wouldn’t budge. I tried harder, I heard the sound of cloth ripping, then suddenly he was upright, then fallen over to the left of the table, the right arm pivoting stiffly around and upwards, the Colt an accusing finger pointing at heaven.

I knew now how he had died and why he hadn’t fallen forward before. He’d been killed by a weapon that projected from his spinal column, between maybe the sixth and seventh vertebræ, I couldn’t be sure, and the handle of this weapon had caught in the pocket of the jacket on the bulkhead and held him there.

My job was one that had brought me into contact with a fair number of people who had died from a fair assortment of unnatural causes, but this was the first time I’d ever seen a man who had been killed by a chisel. A half-inch wood chisel, apparently quite ordinary in every respect except that its wooden handle had been sheathed by a bicycle’s rubber hand-grip, the kind that doesn’t show fingerprints. The blade was imbedded to a depth of at least four inches and even allowing for an edge honed to a razor sharpness it had taken a man as powerful as he was violent to strike that blow. I tried to jerk the chisel free, but it wouldn’t come. It often happens that way with a knife: bone or cartilage that has been pierced by a sharp instrument locks solid over the steel when an attempt is made to withdraw it. I didn’t try again. The chances were that the killer himself had tried to move it and failed. He wouldn’t have wanted to abandon a handy little sticker like that if he could help it. Maybe someone had interrupted him. Or maybe he had a large supply of half-inch wood chisels and could afford to leave the odd one lying around carelessly in someone’s back.

Anyway, I didn’t really want it. I had my own. Not a chisel but a knife. I eased it out of the plastic sheath that had been sewn into the inner lining of my coat, just behind the neck. It didn’t look so much, a four-inch handle and a little double-edged three-inch blade. But that little blade could slice through a two-inch manila with one gentle stroke and the point was the point of a lancet. I looked at it and looked at the inner door behind the radio table, the one that led to the radio-operator’s sleeping cabin, then I slid a little fountain-pen torch from my breast pocket, crossed to the outer door, switched off the overhead lamp, did the same for the table lamp and stood there waiting.

How long I stood there I couldn’t be sure. Maybe two minutes, maybe as long as five. Why I waited, I don’t know. I told myself I was waiting until my eyes became adjusted to the almost total darkness inside the cabin, but I knew it wasn’t that. Maybe I was waiting for some noise, the slightest imagined whisper of stealthy sound, maybe I was waiting for something, anything, to happen – or maybe I was just scared to go through that inner door. Scared for myself? Perhaps I was. I couldn’t be sure. Or perhaps I was scared of what I would find behind that door. I transferred the knife to my left hand – I’m right-handed but ambidextrous in some things – and slowly closed my fingers round the handle of the inner door.

It took me all of twenty seconds to open that door the twelve inches that was necessary for me to squeeze through the opening. In the very last half-inch the damned hinges creaked. It was a tiny sound, a sound you wouldn’t normally have heard two yards away. With my steel-taut nerves in the state they were in, a six-inch naval gun going off in my ear would have sounded muffled by contrast. I stood petrified as any graven image, the dead man by my side was no more immobile than I. I could hear the thump of my accelerating heartbeat and savagely wished the damned thing would keep quiet.

If there was anyone inside waiting to flash a torch in my face and shoot me, knife me or do a little fancy carving up with a chisel, he was taking his time about it. I treated my lungs to a little oxygen, stepped soundlessly and sideways through the opening. I held the flash at the full outstretch extent of my right arm. If the ungodly are going to shoot at a person who is shining a torch at them they generally aim in the very close vicinity of the torch as the unwary habitually hold a torch in front of them. This, as I had learnt many years previously from a colleague who’d just had a bullet extracted from the lobe of his left lung because of this very unwariness, was a very unwise thing to do. So I held the torch as far from my body as possible, drew my left arm back with the knife ready to go, hoping fervently that the reactions of any person who might be in that cabin were slower than mine, and slid forward the switch of the torch.

There was someone there all right, but I didn’t have to worry about his reactions. Not any more.

He’d none left. He was lying face down on the bunk with that huddled shapeless look that belongs only to the dead. I made a quick traverse of the cabin with the pencil beam. The dead man was alone. As in the radio cabin, there was no sign of a struggle.

I didn’t even have to touch him to ascertain the cause of death. The amount of blood that had seeped from that half-inch incision in his spine wouldn’t have filled a teaspoon. I wouldn’t have expected to find more; when the spinal column has been neatly severed the heart doesn’t go on pumping long enough to matter a damn. There would have been a little more internal bleeding, but not much.

The curtains were drawn. I quartered every foot of the deck, bulkheads and furniture with my flash. I don’t know what I expected to find: what I found was nothing. I went out, closed the door behind me and searched the radio cabin with the same results. There was nothing more for me here, I had found all I wanted to find, all I had never wanted to find. And I never once looked at the faces of the two dead men. I didn’t have to, they were faces I knew as well as the face that looked back at me every morning out of my shaving mirror. Seven days previously they had dined with me and our chief in our favourite pub in London and they had been as cheerful and relaxed as men in their profession can ever be, their normal still watchfulness overlaid by the momentary savouring of the lighter side of life they knew could never really be for them. And I had no doubt they had gone on being as still and watchful as ever, but they hadn’t been watchful enough and now they were only still. What had happened to them was what inevitably happened to people in our trade, which would inevitably happen to myself when the time came. No matter how clever and strong and ruthless you were, sooner or later you would meet up with someone who was cleverer and stronger and more ruthless than yourself. And that someone would have a half-inch wood chisel in his hand and all your hardly won years of experience and knowledge and cunning counted for nothing for you never saw him coming and you never saw him coming because you had met your match at last and then you were dead.

And I had sent them to their deaths. Not willingly, not knowingly, but the ultimate responsibility had been mine. This had all been my idea, my brain-child and mine alone, and I’d overridden all objections and fast-talked our very doubtful and highly sceptical chief into giving if not his enthusiastic approval at least his grudging consent. I’d told the two men, Baker and Delmont, that if they played it my way no harm would come to them so they’d trusted me blindly and played it my way and now they lay dead beside me. No hesitation, gentlemen, put your faith in me, only see to it that you make your wills first of all.

There was nothing more to be done here now.

I’d sent two men to their deaths and that couldn’t be undone. It was time to be gone.

I opened that outer door the way you’d open the door to a cellar you knew to be full of cobras and black widow spiders. The way you would open the door, that is: were cobras and black widow spiders all I had to contend with aboard that ship, I’d have gone through that door without a second thought, they were harmless and almost lovable little creatures compared to some specimens of homo sapiens that were loose on the decks of the freighter Nantesville that night.

With the door opened at its fullest extent I just stood there. I stood there for a long time without moving a muscle of body or limbs, breathing shallowly and evenly, and when you stand like that even a minute seems half a lifetime. All my being was in my ears. I just stood there and listened. I could hear the slap of waves against the hull, the occasional low metallic rumble as the Nantesville worked against wind and tide on its moorings, the low moan of the strengthening night wind in the rigging and, once, the far-off lonely call of a curlew. Lonesome sounds, safe sounds, sounds of the night and nature. Not the sounds I was listening for. Gradually, these sounds too became part of the silence. Foreign sounds, sounds of stealth and menace and danger, there were none. No sound of breathing, no slightest scrape of feet on steel decks, no rustle of clothing, nothing. If there was anyone waiting out there he was possessed of a patience and immobility that was superhuman and I wasn’t worried about superhumans that night, just about humans, humans with knives and guns and chisels in their hands. Silently I stepped out over the storm sill.

I’ve never paddled along the night-time Orinoco in a dug-out canoe and had a thirty-foot anaconda drop from a tree, wrap a coil around my neck and start constricting me to death and what’s more I don’t have to go there now to describe the experience for I know exactly what it feels like. The sheer animal power, the feral ferocity of the pair of huge hands that closed round my neck from behind was terrifying, something I’d never known of, never dreamed of. After the first moment of blind panic and shocked paralysis, there was only one thought in my mind: it comes to us all and now it has come to me, someone who is cleverer and stronger and more ruthless than I am.

I lashed back with all the power of my right foot but the man behind me knew every rule in the book. His own right foot, travelling with even more speed and power than mine, smashed into the back of my swinging leg. It wasn’t a man behind me, it was a centaur and he was shod with the biggest set of horseshoes I’d ever come across. My leg didn’t just feel as if it had been broken, it felt as if it had been cut in half. I felt his left toe behind my left foot and stamped on it with every vicious ounce of power left me but when my foot came down his toe wasn’t there any more. All I had on my feet was a pair of thin rubber swimming moccasins and the agonising jar from the steel deck plates shot clear to the top of my head. I reached up my hands to break his little fingers but he knew all about that too for his hands were clenched into iron-hard balls with the second knuckle grinding into the carotid artery. I wasn’t the first man he’d strangled and unless I did something pretty quickly I wasn’t going to be the last either. In my ears I could hear the hiss of compressed air escaping under high pressure and behind my eyes the shooting lines and flashes of colour were deepening and brightening by the moment.

What saved me in those first few seconds were the folded hood and thick rubberised canvas neck ruff of the scuba suit I was wearing under my coat. But it wasn’t going to save me many seconds longer, the life’s ambition of the character behind me seemed to be to make his knuckles meet in the middle of my neck. With the progress he was making that wouldn’t take him too long, he was half-way there already.

I bent forward in a convulsive jerk. Half of his weight came on my back, that throttling grip not easing a fraction, and at the same time he moved his feet as far backwards as possible – the instinctive reaction to my move, he would have thought that I was making a grab for one of his legs. When I had him momentarily off-balance I swung round in a short arc till both our backs were towards the sea. I thrust backwards with all my strength, one, two, three steps, accelerating all the way. The Nantesville didn’t boast of any fancy teak guard-rails, just small-section chain, and the small of the strangler’s back took our combined charging weights on the top chain.

If I’d taken that impact I’d have broken my back or slipped enough discs to keep an orthopædic surgeon in steady employment for months. But no shouts of agony from this lad. No gasps, even. Not a whisper of sound. Maybe he was a deaf mute – I’d heard of several deaf mutes possessed of this phenomenal strength, part of nature’s compensatory process, I suppose.

But he’d been forced to break his grip, to grab swiftly at the upper chain to save us both from toppling over the side into the cold dark waters of Loch Houron. I thrust myself away and spun round to face him, my back against the radio office bulkhead. I needed that bulkhead, too -any support while my swimming head cleared and a semblance of life came back into my numbed right leg.

I could see him now as he straightened up from the guardrail. Not clearly – it was too dark for that – but I could see the white blur of face and hands and the general outline of his body.

I’d expected some towering giant of a man, but he was no giant – unless my eyes weren’t focusing properly, which was likely enough. From what I could see in the gloom he seemed a compact and well enough made figure, but that was all. He wasn’t even as big as I was. Not that that meant a thing – George Hackenschmidt was a mere five foot nine and a paltry fourteen stone when he used to throw the Terrible Turk through the air like a football and prance around the training ring with eight hundred pounds of cement strapped to his back just to keep him in trim. I had no compunction or false pride about running from a smaller man and as far as this character was concerned the farther and faster the better. But not yet. My right leg wasn’t up to it. I reached my hand behind my neck and brought the knife down, holding it in front of me, the blade in the palm of my hand so that he couldn’t see the sheen of steel in the faint starlight.

He came at me calmly and purposefully, like a man who knew exactly what he intended to do and was in no doubt at all as to the outcome of his intended action. God knows I didn’t doubt he had reason enough for his confidence. He came at me sideways so that my foot couldn’t damage him, with his right hand extended at the full stretch of his arm. A one track mind. He was going for my throat again. I waited till his hand was inches from my face then jerked my own right hand violently upwards. Our hands smacked solidly together as the blade sliced cleanly through the centre of his palm.

He wasn’t a deaf mute after all. Three short unprintable words, an unjustified slur on my ancestry, and he stepped quickly backwards, rubbed the back and front of his hand against his clothes then licked it in a queer animal-like gesture. He peered closely at the blood, black as ink in the starlight, welling from both sides of his hand.

‘So the little man has a little knife, has he?’ he said softly. The voice was a shock. With this caveman-like strength I’d have expected a cavemanlike intelligence and voice to match, but the words came in the calm, pleasant, cultured almost accentless speech of the well-educated southern Englishman. ‘We shall have to take the little knife from him, shan’t we?’ He raised his voice. ‘Captain Imrie?’ At least, that’s what the name sounded like.

‘Be quiet, you fool!’ The urgent irate voice came from the direction of the crew accommodation aft. ‘Do you want to -’

‘Don’t worry, Captain.’ The eyes didn’t leave me. ‘I have him. Here by the wireless office. He’s armed. A knife. I’m just going to take it away from him.’

‘You have him? You have him? Good, good, good!’ It was the kind of a voice a man uses when he’s smacking his lips and rubbing his hands together: it was also the kind of voice that a German or Austrian uses when he speaks English. The short guttural ‘gut’ was unmistakable. ‘Be careful. This one I want alive. Jacques! Henry! Kramer! All of you. Quickly! The bridge. Wireless office.’

‘Alive,’ the man opposite me said pleasantly, ‘can also mean not quite dead.’ He sucked some more blood from the palm of his hand. ‘Or will you hand over the knife quietly and peaceably? I would suggest -’

I didn’t wait for more. This was an old technique. You talked to an opponent who courteously waited to hear you out, not appreciating that half-way through some well-turned phrase you were going to shoot him through the middle when, lulled into a sense of temporary false security, he least expected it. Not quite cricket, but effective, and I wasn’t going to wait until it took effect on me. I didn’t know how he was coming at me but I guessed it would be a dive, either head or feet first and that if he got me down on the deck I wouldn’t be getting up again. Not without assistance. I took a quick step forward, flashed my torch a foot from his face, saw the dazzled eyes screw shut for the only fraction of time I’d ever have and kicked him.

It wasn’t as hard as it might have been, owing to the fact that my right leg still felt as if it were broken, nor as accurate, because of the darkness, but it was a pretty creditable effort in the circumstances and it should have left him rolling and writhing about the deck, whooping in agony. Instead he just stood there, unable to move, bent forward and clutching himself with his hands. He was more than human, all right. I could see the sheen of his eyes, but I couldn’t see the expression in them, which was just as well as I don’t think I would have cared for it very much.

I left. I remembered a gorilla I’d once seen in Basle Zoo, a big black monster who used to twist heavy truck tyres into figures of eight for light exercise. I’d as soon have stepped inside that cage as stay around that deck when this lad became more like his old self again. I hobbled forward round the corner of the radio office, climbed up a liferaft and stretched myself flat on the deck.

The nearest running figures, some with torches, were already at the foot of the companionway leading up to the bridge. I had to get right aft to the rope with the rubber-covered hook I’d swung up to swarm aboard. But I couldn’t do it until the midship decks were clear. And then, suddenly, I couldn’t do it all: now that the need for secrecy and stealth was over someone had switched on the cargo loading lights and the midships and foredecks were bathed in a brilliant dazzle of white. One of the foredeck arc lamps was on a jumbo mast, just for’ard of and well above where I was lying. I felt as exposed as a fly pinned to a white ceiling. I flattened myself on that deck as if I were trying to push myself through it.

They were up the companion way and by the radio office now. I heard the sudden exclamations and curses and knew they’d found the hurt man:

I didn’t hear his voice so I assumed he wasn’t able to speak yet.

The curt, authoritative German-accented voice took command.

‘You cackle like a flock of hens. Be silent. Jacques, you have your machine-pistol?’

‘I have my pistol, Captain.’ Jacques had the quiet competent sort of voice that I would have found reassuring in certain circumstances but didn’t very much care for in the present ones.

‘Go aft. Stand at the entrance to the saloon and face for’ard. Cover the midships decks. We will go to the fo’c’sle and then come aft in line abreast and drive him to you. If he doesn’t surrender to you, shoot him through the legs. I want him alive.’

God, this was worse than the Peacemaker Colt. At least that fired only one shot at a time. I’d no idea what kind of machine-pistol Jacques had, probably it fired bursts of a dozen or more. I could feel my right thigh muscle begin to stiffen again, it was becoming almost a reflex action now.

‘And if he jumps over the side, sir?’

‘Do I have to tell you, Jacques?’

‘No, sir.’

I was just as clever as Jacques was. He didn’t have to tell me either. That nasty dry taste was back in my throat and mouth again. I’d a minute left, no more, and then it would be too late. I slid silently to the side of the radio office roof, the starboard side, the side remote from the spot where Captain Imrie was issuing curt instructions to his men, lowered myself soundlessly to the deck and made my way to the wheelhouse.

I didn’t need my torch in there, the backwash of light from the big arc-lamps gave me all the illumination I wanted. Crouching down, to keep below window level, I looked around and saw what I wanted right away – a metal box of distress flares.