When Eight Bells Toll

‘There are no planes to this place, Annabelle. The mail-boat doesn’t call for another four days. The weather’s breaking down and I wouldn’t risk our boat to try to get to the mainland. I’m stuck here for the time being, I’m afraid.’

‘Do you take me for a nincompoop, sir?’ Now he was at it. ‘Go ashore this morning. An air-sea rescue helicopter will pick you up at noon. Nine p.m. at my office. Don’t keep me waiting.’

This, then, was it. But one last try. ‘Couldn’t you give me another twenty-four hours, Annabelle?’

‘Now you’re being ridiculous. And wasting my time. Good-bye.’

‘I beg of you, sir.’

‘I’d thought better of you than that. Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye. We may meet again sometime. It’s not likely. Good-bye.’

I switched the radio off, lit a cigarette and waited. The call-up came through in half a minute. I waited another half-minute and switched on. I was very calm. The die was cast and I didn’t give a damn.

‘Caroline? Is that you, Caroline?’ I could have sworn to a note of agitation in his voice. This was something for the record books.

‘Yes.’

‘What did you say? At the end there?’

‘Good-bye. You said good-bye. I said good-bye.’

‘Don’t quibble with me, sir! You said -’

‘If you want me aboard that helicopter,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to send a guard with the pilot. An armed guard. I hope they’re good. I’ve got a Luger, and you know I’m good. And if I have to kill anyone and go into court, then you’ll have to stand there beside me because there’s no single civil action or criminal charge that even you, with all your connections, can bring against me that would justify the sending of armed men to apprehend me, an innocent man. Further, I am no longer in your employment. The terms of my civil service contract state clearly that I can resign at any moment, provided that I am not actively engaged on an operation at that moment. You’ve pulled me off, you’ve recalled me to London. My resignation will be on your desk as soon as the mail can get through. Baker and Delmont weren’t your friends. They were my friends. They were my friends ever since I joined the service. You have the temerity to sit there and lay all the blame for their deaths on my shoulders when you know damn’ well that every operation must have your final approval, and now you have the final temerity to deny me a one last chance to square accounts. I’m sick of your damned soulless service. Good-bye.’

‘Now wait a moment, Caroline.’ There was a cautious, almost placatory note to his voice. ‘No need to go off half-cocked.’ I was sure that no one had ever talked to Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason like that before but he didn’t seem particularly upset about it. He had the cunning of a fox, that infinitely agile and shrewd mind would be examining and discarding possibilities with the speed of a computer, he’d be wondering whether I was playing a game and if so how far he could play it with me without making it impossible for me to retreat from the edge of the precipice. Finally he said quietly: ‘You wouldn’t want to hang around there just to shed tears. You’re on to something.’

‘Yes, sir, I’m on to something.’ I wondered what in the name of God I was on to.

‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours, Caroline.’

‘Forty-eight.’

‘Forty-eight. And then you return to London. I have your word?’

‘I promise.’

‘And Caroline?’

‘Sir?’

‘I didn’t care for your way of talking there. I trust we never have a repetition of it.’

‘No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Forty-eight hours. Report to me at noon and midnight.’ A click. Uncle Arthur was gone.

The false dawn was in the sky when I went on deck. Cold heavy slanting driving rain was churning up the foam-flecked sea. The Firecrest, pulling heavily on her anchor chain, was swinging slowly through an arc of forty degrees, corkscrewing quite heavily now on the outer arc of the swing, pitching in the centre of them. She was snubbing very heavily on the anchor and I wondered uneasily how long the lengths of heaving line securing the dinghy, outboard and scuba gear to the chain could stand up to this sort of treatment.

Hunslett was abaft the saloon, huddling in what little shelter it afforded. He looked up at my approach and said: ‘What do you make of that?’ He pointed to the palely gleaming shape of the Shangri-la, one moment on our quarter, the next dead astern as we swung on our anchor. Lights were burning brightly in the fore part of her superstructure, where the wheelhouse would be.

‘Someone with insomnia,’ I said. ‘Or checking to see if the anchor is dragging. What do you think it is – our recent guests laying about the Shangri-la radio installation with crow-bars? Maybe they leave lights on all night.’

‘Came on just ten minutes ago. And look, now – they’re out. Funny. How did you get on with Uncle?’

‘Badly. Fired me, then changed his mind. We have forty-eight hours.’

‘Forty-eight hours? What are you going to do in forty-eight hours?’

‘God knows. Have some sleep first. You too. Too much light in the sky for callers now.’

Passing through the saloon, Hunslett said, apropos of nothing: ‘I’ve been wondering. What did you make of P.C. MacDonald? The young one.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, glum, downcast. Heavy weight on his shoulders.’

‘Maybe he’s like me. Maybe he doesn’t like getting up in the middle of the night. Maybe he has girl trouble and if he has I can tell you that P.C. MacDonald’s love-life is the least of my concerns. Good night.’

I should have listened to Hunslett more. For Hunslett’s sake.

THREE (#ulink_7867f768-c667-5564-924f-7c00fadcaf7c)

Tuesday: 10 a.m. – 10 p.m. (#ulink_7867f768-c667-5564-924f-7c00fadcaf7c)

I need my sleep, just like anyone else. Ten hours, perhaps only eight, and I would have been my own man again. Maybe not exuding brightness, optimism and cheerfulness, the circumstances weren’t right for that, but at least a going concern, alert, perceptive, my mind operating on what Uncle Arthur would be by now regarding as its customary abysmal level but still the best it could achieve. But I wasn’t given that ten hours. Nor even the eight. Exactly three hours after dropping off I was wide awake again. Well, anyway, awake. I would have had to be stone deaf, drugged or dead to go on sleeping through the bawling and thumping that was currently assailing my left ear from what appeared to be a distance of not more than twelve inches.

‘Ahoy, there, Firecrest! Ahoy there!’ Thump, thump, thump on the boat’s side. ‘Can I come aboard? Ahoy, there! Ahoy, ahoy, ahoy!’

I cursed this nautical idiot from the depths of my sleep-ridden being, swung a pair of unsteady legs to the deck and levered myself out of the bunk. I almost fell down, I seemed to have only one leg left, and my neck ached fiercely. A glance at the mirror gave quick external confirmation of my internal decrepitude. A haggard unshaven face, unnaturally pale, and bleary bloodshot eyes with dark circles under them. I looked away hurriedly, there were lots of things I could put up with first thing in the morning, but not sights like that.

I opened the door across the passage. Hunslett was sound asleep and snoring. I returned to my own cabin and got busy with the dressing-gown and Paisley scarf again. The iron-lunged thumping character outside was still at it, if I didn’t hurry he would be roaring out ‘avast there’ any moment. I combed my hair into some sort of order and made my way to the upper deck.

It was a cold, wet and windy world. A grey, dreary, unpleasant world, why the hell couldn’t they have let me sleep on. The rain was coming down in slanting sheets, bouncing inches high on the decks, doubling the milkiness of the spume-flecked sea. The lonely wind mourned through the rigging and the lower registers of sound and the steep-sided wind-truncated waves, maybe three feet from tip to trough, were high enough to make passage difficult if not dangerous for the average yacht tender.

They didn’t make things in the slightest difficult or dangerous for the yacht tender that now lay alongside us. It maybe wasn’t as big – it looked it at first sight – as the Firecrest, but it was big enough to have a glassed-in cabin for’ard, a wheel-house that bristled and gleamed with controls and instrumentation that would have been no disgrace to a VC-10 and, abaft that, a sunken cockpit that could have sunbathed a football team without overcrowding. There were three crewmen dressed in black oilskins and fancy French navy hats with black ribbons down the back, two of them each with a boat-hook round one of the Firecrest’s guardrail stanchions. Half a dozen big inflated spherical rubber fenders kept the Firecrest from rubbing its plebeian paintwork against the whitely-varnished spotlessness of the tender alongside and it didn’t require the name on the bows or the crew’s hats to let me know that this was the tender that normally took up most of the after-deck space on the Shangri-la.

Amidships a stocky figure, clad in a white vaguely naval brass-buttoned uniform and holding above his head a golf umbrella that would have had Joseph green with envy, stopped banging his gloved fist against the Firecrest’s planking and glared up at me.

‘Ha!’ I’ve never actually heard anyone snort out a word but this came pretty close to it. ‘There you are at last. Took your time about it, didn’t you? I’m soaked, man, soaked!’ A few spots of rain did show up quite clearly on the white seersucker. ‘May I come aboard?’ He didn’t wait for any permission, just leaped aboard with surprising nimbleness for a man of his build and years and nipped into the Firecrest’s wheelhouse ahead of me, which was pretty selfish of him as he still had his umbrella and all I had was my dressing-gown. I followed and closed the door behind me.

He was a short, powerfully built character, fifty-five I would have guessed, with a heavily–tanned jowled face, close-cropped iron-grey hair with tufted eyebrows to match, long straight nose and a mouth that looked as if it had been closed with a zip-fastener. A good-looking cove, if you liked that type of looks. The dark darting eyes looked me up and down and if he was impressed by what he saw he made a heroic effort to keep his admiration in check.

‘Sorry for the delay,’ I apologised. ‘Short of sleep. We had the customs aboard in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get off after that.’ Always tell everyone the truth if there’s an even chance of that truth coming out anyway, which in this case there was: gives one a reputation for forthright honesty.

‘The customs?’ He looked as if he intended to say ‘pshaw’ or ‘fiddlesticks’ or something of that order, then changed his mind and looked up sharply. ‘An intolerable bunch of busybodies. And in the middle of the night. Shouldn’t have let them aboard. Sent them packing. Intolerable.