When Eight Bells Toll

‘We’re modernised now, sir. Portable photocopier. Standard on the job. Has to be dark. Won’t take five minutes. Can we begin in this laboratory of yours?’

A formality, he’d said. Well, he was right there, as a search it was the least informal thing I’d ever come across. Five minutes after he’d gone to the wheelhouse Durran came aft to join us and he and Thomas went through the Firecrest as if they were looking for the Koh-i-noor. To begin with, at least. Every piece of mechanical and electrical equipment in the after cabin had to be explained to them. They looked in every locker and cupboard. They rummaged through the ropes and fenders in the large stern locker aft of the laboratory and I thanked God I hadn’t followed my original idea of stowing the dinghy, motor and scuba gear in there. They even examined the after toilet. As if I’d be careless enough to drop the Koh-i-noor in there.

They spent most time of all in the engine-room. It was worth examining. Everything looked brand new, and gleamed. Two big 100 h.p. diesels, diesel generator, radio generator, hot and cold water pumps, central heating plant, big oil and water tanks and the two long rows of lead-acid batteries. Thomas seemed especially interested in the batteries.

‘You carry a lot of reserve there, Mr Petersen,’ he said. He’d learnt my name by now, even though it wasn’t the one I’d been christened with. ‘Why all the power?’

‘We haven’t even got enough. Care to start those two engines by hand? We have eight electric motors in the lab. – and the only time they’re used, in harbour, we can’t run either the engines or generators to supply juice. Too much interference. A constant drain.’ I was ticking off my fingers. ‘Then there’s the central heating, hot and cold water pumps, radar, radio, automatic steering, windlass, power winch for the dinghy, echo-sounder, navigation lights -’

‘You win, you win.’ He’d become quite friendly by this time. ‘Boats aren’t really in my line. Let’s move forward, shall we?’

The remainder of the inspection, curiously, didn’t take long. In the saloon I found that Hunslett had persuaded the Torbay police force to accept the hospitality of the Firecrest. Sergeant MacDonald hadn’t exactly become jovial, but he was much more human than when he’d come on board. Constable MacDonald, I noticed, didn’t seem so relaxed. He looked positively glum. Maybe he didn’t approve of his old man consorting with potential criminals.

If the examination of the saloon was cursory, that of the two forward cabins was positively perfunctory. Back in the saloon, I said:

‘Sorry I was a bit short, gentlemen. I like my sleep. A drink before you go?’

‘Well.’ Thomas smiled. ‘We don’t want to be rude either. Thank you.’

Five minutes and they were gone. Thomas didn’t even glance at the wheelhouse – Durran had been there, of course. He had a quick look at one of the deck lockers but didn’t bother about the others. We were in the clear. A civil good-bye on both sides and they were gone. Their boat, a big indeterminate shape in the darkness, seemed to have plenty of power.

‘Odd,’ I said.

‘What’s odd?’

‘That boat. Any idea what it was like?’

‘How could I?’ Hunslett was testy. He was as short of sleep as I was. ‘It was pitch dark.’

‘That’s just the point. A gentle glow in their wheelhouse – you couldn’t even see what that was like – and no more. No deck lights, no interior lights, no navigation lights even.’

‘Sergeant MacDonald has been looking out over this harbour for eight years. Do you need light to find your way about your own living-room after dark?’

‘I haven’t got twenty yachts and cruisers in my living-room swinging all over the place with wind and tide. And wind and tide doesn’t alter my own course when I’m crossing my living-room. There are only three boats in the harbour carrying anchor lights. He’ll have to use something to see where he’s going.’

And he did. From the direction of the receding sound of engines a light stabbed out into the darkness. A five-inch searchlight, I would have guessed. It picked up a small yacht riding at anchor less than a hundred yards ahead of it, altered to starboard, picked up another, altered to port, then swung back on course again.

‘“Odd” was the word you used,’ Hunslett murmured. ‘Quite a good word, too, in the circumstances. And what are we to think of the alleged Torbay police force?’

‘You talked to the sergeant longer than I did. When I was aft with Thomas and Durran.’

‘I’d like to think otherwise,’ Hunslett said inconsequentially. ‘It would make things easier, in a way. But I can’t. He’s a genuine old-fashioned cop and a good one, too. I’ve met too many. So have you.’

‘A good cop and an honest one,’ I agreed. ‘This is not his line of country and he was fooled. It is our line of country and we were fooled. Until now, that is.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘Thomas made one careless remark. An offbeat remark. You didn’t hear it – we were in the engine-room.’ I shivered, maybe it was the cold night wind. ‘It meant nothing – not until I saw that they didn’t want their boat recognised again. He said: ‘Boats aren’t really in my line.’ Probably thought he’d been asking too many questions and wanted to reassure me. Boats not in his line – a customs officer and boats not in his line. They only spend their lives aboard boats, examining boats, that’s all. They spend their lives looking and poking in so many odd corners and quarters that they know more about boats than the designers themselves. Another thing, did you notice how sharply dressed they were? A credit to Carnaby Street.’

‘Customs officers don’t usually go around in oil-stained overalls.’

‘They’ve been living in those clothes for twenty-four hours. This is the what – the thirteenth boat they’ve searched in that time. Would you still have knife-edged creases to your pants after that lot? Or would you say they’d only just taken them from the hangers and put them on?’

‘What else did they say? What else did they do?’ Hunslett spoke so quietly that I could hear the note of the engines of the customs’ boat fall away sharply as their searchlight lit up the low-water stone pier, half a mile away. ‘Take an undue interest in anything?’

‘They took an undue interest in everything. Wait a minute, though, wait a minute. Thomas seemed particularly intrigued by the batteries, by the large amount of reserve electrical power we had.’

‘Did he now? Did he indeed? And did you notice how lightly our two customs friends swung aboard their launch when leaving?’

‘They’ll have done it a thousand times.’

‘Both of them had their hands free. They weren’t carrying anything. They should have been carrying something.’

‘The photo-copier. I’m getting old.’

‘The photo-copier. Standard equipment my ruddy foot. So if our fair-haired pal wasn’t busy photo-copying he was busy doing something else.’

We moved inside the wheelhouse. Hunslett selected the larger screw-driver from the tool-rack beside the echo-sounder and had the face-plate off our R.T.D./D.F. set inside sixty seconds. He looked at the interior for five seconds, looked at me for the same length of time, then started screwing the face-plate back into position. One thing was certain, we wouldn’t be using that transmitter for a long time to come.

I turned away and stared out through the wheelhouse windows into the darkness. The wind was still rising, the black sea gleamed palely as the whitecaps came marching in from the south-west, the Firecrest snubbed sharply on her anchor chain and, with the wind and the tide at variance, she was beginning to corkscrew quite noticeably now. I felt desperately tired. But my eyes were still working. Hunslett offered me a cigarette. I didn’t want one, but I took one. Who knew, it might even help me to think. And then I had caught his wrist and was staring down at his palm.

‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘The cobbler should stick to his last.’ ‘He what?’

‘Wrong proverb. Can’t think of the right one. A good workman uses only his own tools. Our pal with the penchant for smashing valves and condensers should have remembered that. No wonder my neck was twitching when Durran was around. How did you cut yourself?’

‘I didn’t cut myself.’

‘I know. But there’s a smear of blood on your palm. He’s been taking lessons from Peter Sellers, I shouldn’t wonder. Standard southern English on the Nantesville, northern Irish on the Firecrest. I wonder how many other accents he has up his sleeve – behind his larynx, I should say. And I thought he was running to a little fat. He’s running to a great deal of muscle. You noticed he never took his gloves off, even when he had that drink?’

‘I’m the best noticer you ever saw. Beat me over the head with a club and I’ll notice anything.’ He sounded bitter. ‘Why didn’t they clobber us? You, anyway? The star witness?’

‘Maybe we have moved out of our class. Two reasons. They couldn’t do anything with the cops there, genuine cops as we’ve both agreed, not unless they attended to the cops too. Only a madman would deliberately kill a cop and whatever those boys may lack it isn’t sanity.’

‘But why cops in the first place?’

‘Aura of respectability. Cops are above suspicion. When a uniformed policeman shoves his uniformed cap above your gunwale in the dark watches of the night, you don’t whack him over the head with a marline-spike. You invite him aboard. All others you might whack, especially if we had the bad consciences we might have been supposed to have.’

‘Maybe. It’s arguable. And the second point?’

‘They took a big chance, a desperate chance, almost, with Durran. He was thrown to the wolves to see what the reaction would be, whether either of us recognised him.’

‘Why Durran?’

‘I didn’t tell you. I shone a torch in his face. The face didn’t register, just a white blur with screwed-up eyes half-hidden behind an upflung hand. I was really looking lower down, picking the right spot to kick him. But they weren’t to know that. They wanted to find out if we would recognise him. We didn’t. If we had done we’d either have started throwing the crockery at him or yelped for the cops to arrest them – if we’re against them then we’re with the cops. But we didn’t. Not a flicker of recognition. Nobody’s as good as that. I defy any man in the world to meet up again in the same night with a man who has murdered two other people and nearly murdered himself without at least twitching an eyebrow. So the immediate heat is off, the urgent necessity to do us in has become less urgent. It’s a safe bet that if we didn’t recognise Durran, then we recognised nobody on the Nantesville and so we won’t be burning up the lines to Interpol.’

‘We’re in the dear?’

‘I wish to God we were. They’re on to us.’