When Eight Bells Toll

Two quick flicks of the knife severed the lashings that secured the flare-box to the deck. One piece of rope, perhaps ten feet in all, I left secured to a handle of the box. I pulled a plastic bag from the pocket of my coat, tore off the coat and the yachtsman’s rubber trousers that I was wearing over my scuba suit, stuffed them inside and secured the bag to my waist. The coat and trousers had been essential. A figure in a dripping rubber diving suit walking across the decks of the Nantesville would hardly have been likely to escape comment whereas in the dusk and with the outer clothing I had on I could have passed for a crewman and, indeed, had done so twice at a distance: equally important, when I’d left the port of Torbay in my rubber dinghy it had been broad daylight and the sight of a scuba-clad figure putting to sea towards evening wouldn’t have escaped comment either, as the curiosity factor of the inhabitants of the smaller ports of the Western Highlands and Islands did not, I had discovered, lag noticeably behind that of their mainland brethren. Some would put it even more strongly than that.

Still crouching low, I moved out through the wheelhouse door on to the starboard wing of the bridge. I reached the outer end and stood up straight. I had to, I had to take the risk, it was now or never at all, I could hear the crew already beginning to move forward to start their search. I lifted the flare-box over the side eased it down the full length of the rope and started to swing it slowly, gently, from side to side, like a leadsman preparing to cast his lead.

The box weighed at least forty pounds, but I barely noticed the weight. The pendulum arc increased with every swing I made. It had reached an angle of about forty-five degrees on each swing now, pretty close to the maximum I could get and both time and my luck must be running out, I felt about as conspicuous as a trapeze artist under a dozen spotlights and just about as vulnerable too. As the box swung aft on its last arc I gave the rope a final thrust to achieve all the distance and momentum I could, opened my hands at the extremity of the arc and dropped down behind the canvas wind-dodger. It was as I dropped that I remembered I hadn’t holed the damned box, I had no idea whether it would float or sink but I did have a very clear idea of what would happen to me if it didn’t sink. One thing for sure, it was too late to worry about it now.

I heard a shout come from the main deck, some twenty or thirty feet aft of the bridge. I was certain I had been seen but I hadn’t. A second after the shout came a loud and very satisfactory splash and a voice I recognised as Jacques’s shouting: ‘He’s gone over the side. Starboard abaft the bridge. A torch quick!’ He must have been walking aft as ordered, seen this dark blur falling, heard the splash and come on the inevitable conclusion. A dangerous customer who thought fast, was Jacques. In three seconds he’d told his mates all they required to know: what had happened, where and what he wanted done as the necessary preliminary to shooting me full of holes.

The men who had been moving forward to start the sweep for me now came running aft, pounding along the deck directly beneath where I was crouching on the wing of the bridge.

‘Can you see him, Jacques?’ Captain Imrie’s voice, very quick, very calm.

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘He’ll be up soon.’ I wished he wouldn’t sound so damned confident. ‘A dive like that must have knocked most of the breath out of him. Kramer, two men and into the boat. Take lamps and circle around. Henry, the box of grenades. Carlo, the bridge, quick. Starboard searchlight.’

I’d never thought of the boat, that was bad enough, but the grenades! I felt chilled. I knew what an underwater explosion, even a small explosion, can do to the human body, it was twenty times as deadly as the same explosion on land. And I had to, I just had to, be in that water in minutes. But at least I could do something about that searchlight, it was only two feet above my head. I had the power cable in my left hand, the knife in my right and had just brought the two into contact when my mind stopped thinking about those damned grenades and started working again. Cutting that cable would be about as clever as leaning over the wind-dodger and yelling ‘Here I am, come and catch me’ – a dead giveaway that I was still on board. Clobbering Carlo from behind as he came up the ladder would have the same effect. And I couldn’t fool them twice. Not people like these. Hobbling as fast as I could I passed through the wheelhouse on to the port wing, slid down the ladder and ran towards the forepeak. The foredeck was deserted.

I heard a shout and the harsh chatter of some automatic weapon – Jacques and his machine-pistol, for a certainty. Had he imagined he’d seen something, had the box come to the surface, had he actually seen the box and mistaken it for me in the dark waters? It must have been the last of these – he wouldn’t have wasted ammunition on anything he’d definitely recognised as a box. Whatever the reason, it had all my blessing. If they thought I was floundering about down there, riddled like a Gruyère cheese, then they wouldn’t be looking for me up here.

They had the port anchor down. I swung over the side on a rope, got my feet in the hawse-pipe, reached down and grabbed the chain. The international athletics board should have had then-stop-watches on me that night, I must have set a new world record for shinning down anchor chains.

The water was cold but my exposure suit took care of that. It was choppy, with a heavy tide running, both of which suited me well. I swam down the port side of the Nantesville, underwater for ninety per cent of the time and I saw no one and no one saw me: all the activity was on the starboard side of the vessel.

My aqualung unit and weights and flippers were where I had left them, tied to the top of the rudder post – the Nantesville was not much more than half-way down to her marks and the top of the post not far under water. Fitting on an aqualung in choppy seas with a heavy tide running isn’t the easiest of tasks but the thought of Kramer and his grenades was a considerable help. Besides, I was in a hurry to be gone for I had a long way to go and many things to do when I arrived at my destination.

I could hear the engine note of the lifeboat rising and falling as it circled off the ship’s starboard side but at no time did it come within a hundred feet of me. No more shots were fired and Captain Imrie had obviously decided against using the grenades. I adjusted the weights round my waist, dropped down into the dark safety of the waters, checked my direction on my luminous wrist compass and started to swim. After five minutes I came to the surface and after another five felt my feet ground on the shore of the rocky islet where I’d cached my rubber dinghy.

I clambered up on the rocks and looked back. The Nantesville was ablaze with light. A searchlight was shining down into the sea and the lifeboat still circling around. I could hear the steady clanking of the anchor being weighed. I hauled the dinghy into the water, climbed in, unshipped the two stubby oars and paddled off to the southwest. I was still within effective range of the searchlight but its chances of picking up a black-clad figure in a low-silhouette black dinghy on those black waters were remote indeed.

After a mile I shipped the oars and started up the outboard. Or tried to start it up. Outboards always work perfectly for me, except when I’m cold, wet and exhausted. Whenever I really need them, they never work. So I took to the stubby oars again and rowed and rowed and rowed, but not for what seemed any longer than a month. I arrived back at the Firecrest at ten to three in the morning.

TWO (#ulink_0a6969b7-76cc-5faf-8bb8-b6e2878d197b)

Tuesday: 3 a.m. – dawn (#ulink_0a6969b7-76cc-5faf-8bb8-b6e2878d197b)

‘Calvert?’ Hunslett’s voice was a barely audible murmur in the darkness.

‘Yes.’ Standing there above me on the Firecrest’s deck, he was more imagined than seen against the blackness of the night sky. Heavy clouds had rolled in from the south-west and the last of the stars were gone. Big heavy drops of cold rain were beginning to spatter off the surface of the sea. ‘Give me a hand to get the dinghy aboard.’

‘How did it go?’

‘Later. This first.’ I climbed up the accommodation ladder, painter in hand. I had to lift my right leg over the gunwale. Stiff and numb and just beginning to ache again, it could barely take my weight. ‘And hurry. We can expect company soon.’

‘So that’s the way of it,’ Hunslett said thoughtfully, ‘Uncle Arthur will be pleased about this.’

I said nothing to that. Our employer, Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason, K.C.B. and most of the rest of the alphabet, wasn’t going to be pleased at all. We heaved the dripping dinghy inboard, unclamped the outboard and took them both on to the foredeck.

‘Get me a couple of waterproof bags,’ I said. ‘Then start getting the anchor chain in. Keep it quiet – leave the brake pawl off and use a tarpaulin.’

‘We’re leaving?’

‘We would if we had any sense. We’re staying. Just get the anchor up and down.’

By the time he’d returned with the bags I’d the dinghy deflated and in its canvas cover. I stripped off my aqualung and scuba suit and stuffed them into one of the bags along with the weights, my big-dialled waterproof watch and the combined wrist-compass and depth-gauge. I put the outboard in the other bag, restraining the impulse just to throw the damn’ thing overboard: an outboard motor was a harmless enough object to have aboard any boat, but we already had one attached to the wooden dinghy hanging from the davits over the stern.

Hunslett had the electric windlass going and the chain coming in steadily. An electric windlass is in itself a pretty noiseless machine: when weighing anchor all the racket comes from four sources – the chain passing through the hawse-pipe, the clacking of the brake pawl over the successive stops, the links passing over the drum itself and the clattering of the chain as it falls into the chain locker. About the first of these we could do nothing: but with the brake pawl off and a heavy tarpaulin smothering the sound from the drum and chain locker, the noise level was surprisingly low. Sound travels far over the surface of the sea, but the nearest anchored boats were almost two hundred yards away – we had no craving for the company of other boats in harbour. At two hundred yards, in Torbay, we felt ourselves uncomfortably close: but the sea-bed shelved fairly steeply away from the little town and our present depth of twenty fathoms was the safe maximum for the sixty fathoms of chain we carried.

I heard the click as Hunslett’s foot stepped on the deck-switch. ‘She’s up and down.’

‘Put the pawl in for a moment. If that drum slips, I’ll have no hands left.’ I pulled the bags right for’ard, leaned out under the pulpit rail and used lengths of heaving line to secure them to the anchor chain. When the lines were secure I lifted the bags over the side and let them dangle from the chain.

‘I’ll take the weight,’ I said. ‘Lift the chain off the drum – we’ll lower it by hand.’

Forty fathoms is 240 feet of chain and letting that lot down to the bottom didn’t do my back or arms much good at all, and the rest of me was a long way below par before we started. I was pretty close to exhaustion from the night’s work, my neck ached fiercely, my leg only badly and I was shivering violently. I know of various ways of achieving a warm rosy glow but wearing only a set of underclothes in the middle of a cold, wet and windy autumn night in the Western Isles is not one of them. But at last the job was done and we were able to go below. If anyone wanted to investigate what lay at the foot of our anchor chain he’d need a steel articulated diving suit.

Hunslett pulled the saloon door to behind us, moved around in the darkness adjusting the heavy velvet curtains then switched on a small table lamp. It didn’t give much light but we knew from experience that it didn’t show up through the velvet, and advertising the fact that we were up and around in the middle of the night was the last thing I wanted to do.

Hunslett had a dark narrow saturnine face, with a strong jaw, black bushy eyebrows and thick black hair – the kind of face which is so essentially an expression in itself that it rarely shows much else. It was expressionless now and very still.

‘You’ll have to buy another shirt,’ he said. ‘Your collar’s too tight. Leaves marks.’

I stopped towelling myself and looked in a mirror. Even in that dim light my neck looked a mess. It was badly swollen and discoloured, with four wicked-looking bruises where the thumbs and forefinger joints had sunk deep into the flesh. Blue and green and purple they were, and they looked as if they would be there for a long time to come.

‘He got me from behind. He’s wasting his time being a criminal, he’d sweep the board at the Olympic weight-lifting. I was lucky. He also wears heavy boots.’ I twisted around and looked down at my right calf. The bruise was bigger than my fist and if it missed out any of the colours of the rainbow I couldn’t offhand think which one. There was a deep red gash across the middle of it and blood was ebbing slowly along its entire length. Hunslett gazed at it with interest.

‘If you hadn’t been wearing that tight scuba suit, you’d have most like bled to death. I better fix that for you.’

‘I don’t need bandages. What I need is a Scotch. Stop wasting your time. Oh, hell, sorry, yes, you’d better fix it, we can’t have our guests sloshing about ankle deep in blood.’

‘You’re very sure we’re going to have guests?’

‘I half expected to have them waiting on the doorstep when I got back to the Firecrest. We’re going to have guests, all right. Whatever our pals aboard the Nantesville may be, they’re no fools. They’ll have figured out by this time that I could have approached only by dinghy. They’ll know damn’ well that it was no nosey-parker local prowling about the ship – local lads in search of a bit of fun don’t go aboard anchored ships in the first place. In the second place the locals wouldn’t go near Beul nan Uamh – the mouth of the grave – in daylight, far less at night time. Even the Pilot says the place has an evil reputation. And in the third place no local lad would get aboard as I did, behave aboard as I did or leave as I did. The local lad would be dead.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder. And?’

‘So we’re not locals. We’re visitors. We wouldn’t be staying at any hotel or boarding-house – too restricted, couldn’t move. Almost certainly we’ll have a boat. Now, where would our boat be? Not to the north of Loch Houron for with a forecast promising a south-west Force 6 strengthening to Force 7, no boat is going to be daft enough to hang about a lee shore in that lot. The only holding ground and shallow enough sheltered anchorage in the other direction, down the Sound for forty miles, is in Torbay – and that’s only four or five miles from where the Nantesville was lying at the mouth of Loch Houron. Where would you look for us?’

‘I’d look for a boat anchored in Torbay. Which gun do you want?’

‘I don’t want any gun. You don’t want any gun. People like us don’t carry guns.’

‘Marine biologists don’t carry guns,’ he nodded. ‘Employees of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries don’t carry guns. Civil Servants are above reproach. So we play it clever. You’re the boss.’

‘I don’t feel clever any more. And I’ll take long odds that I’m not your boss any more. Not after Uncle Arthur hears what I have to tell him.’

‘You haven’t told me anything yet.’ He finished tying the bandage round my leg and straightened. ‘How’s that feel?’

I tried it. ‘Better. Thanks. Better still when you’ve taken the cork from that bottle. Get into pyjamas or something. People found fully dressed in the middle of the night cause eyebrows to go up.’ I towelled my head as vigorously as my tired arms would let me. One wet hair on my head and eyebrows wouldn’t just be lifting, they’d be disappearing into hairlines. ‘There isn’t much to tell and all of it is bad.’