When Eight Bells Toll

TEN

"Let me sleep." I said. I kept my eyes shut. "I'm a dead man."

"Come on, come on." Another violent shake, a hand like a power shovel. "Up!"

"Oh, God!" I opened the corner of one eye. "What's the time?"

"Just after noon. I couldn't let you sleep any more."

"Noon! I asked to be shaken at five. Do you know — "

"Come here." He moved to the window, and I swung my legs stiffly out of bed and followed him. I'd been operated on during my sleep, no anaesthetic required in the condition I was in, and someone had removed the bones from my legs. I felt awful. Hutchinson nodded towards the window. "What do you think of that?"

I peered out into the grey opaque world. I said irritably: "What do you expect me to see in that damn fog?"

"The fog."

"I see," I said stupidly. "The fog."

"The two a.m. shipping forecast," Hutchinson said. He gave the impression of exercising a very great deal of patience. "It said the fog would clear away in the early morning. Well, the goddamned fog hasn't cleared away in the early morning."

The fog cleared away from my befuddled brain. I swore and jumped for my least sodden suit of clothing. It was damp and clammy and cold but I hardly noticed these things, except subconsciously, my conscious mind was frantically busy with something else. On Monday night they'd sunk the Nantesville at slack water but there wasn't a chance in a thousand that they would have been able to get something done that night or the Tuesday night, the weather had been bad enough in sheltered Torbay harbour, God alone knew what it would have been like in Beul nan Uamh. But they could have started last night, they had started last night for there had been no diving-boat in the Dubh Sgeir boathouse, and reports from the Nantesville's owners had indicated that the strong-room was a fairly antiquated one, not of hardened steel, that could be cut open in a couple of hours with the proper equipment, Lavorski and company would have the proper equipment. The rest of last night, even had they three divers and reliefs working all the time, they could have brought up a fair proportion of the bullion but I'd been damn sure they couldn't possibly bring up all eighteen tons of it Marine salvage had been my business before Uncle Arthur had taken me away. They would have required another night or at least a good part of the night, because they only dared work when the sun was down. When no one could see them. But no one could see them in dense fog like this. This was as good as another night thrown in for free.

"Give Uncle Arthur a shake. Tell him we're on our way. In the Firecrest"

"He'll want to come."

"He'll have to stay. He'll know damn well he'll have to stay. Beul nan Uamh, tell him."

"Not Dubh Sgeir? Not the boathouse?"

"You know damn well we can't move in against that until midnight."

"I'd forgotten," Hutchinson said slowly. "We can't move in against it until midnight."

The Beul nan Uamh wasn't living up to a fearsome reputation. At that time in the afternoon. It was dead slack water and there was only the gentlest of swells running up from the south-west. We crossed over from Ballara to the extreme north of the eastern shore of Dubh Sgeir and inched our way south-ward with bare steerage way on. We'd cut the by-pass valve into the underwater exhaust and, even in the wheelhouse, we could barely hear the throb of the diesel. Even with both wheelhouse doors wide open, we could just hear it and no more. But we hadn't the wheelhouse doors open for the purpose of hearing our own engine.

By this time we were almost half-way down the eastern patch of miraculously calm water that bordered the normal mill-race of Beul nan Uamh, the one that Williams and I had observed from the helicopter the previous afternoon. For the first time, Hutchinson was showing something approaching worry. He never spared a glance through the wheelhouse windows, and only a very occasional one for the compass: he was navigating almost entirely by chart and depth-sounder.

"Are you sure it'll be this fourteen-fathom ledge, Calvert?"

"It has to be. It damn well has to be. Out to the seven fathom mark there the sea-bottom is pretty flat, but there's not enough depth to hide superstructure and masts at low tide. From there to fourteen its practically a cliff. And beyond the fourteen fathom ledge it goes down to thirty-five fathom, steep enough to roll a ship down there. You can't operate at those depths without very special equipment indeed."

"It's a damn narrow ledge," he grumbled. "Less than a cable. How could they be sure the scuttled ship would fetch up where they wanted it to?"

"They could be sure. In dead slack water, you can always be sure."

Hutchinson put the engine in neutral and went outside. We drifted on quietly through the greyly opaque world. Visibility didn't extend beyond our bows. The muffled beat of the diesel served only to enhance the quality of ghostly silence. Hutchinson came back into the wheelhouse, his vast bulk moving as unhurriedly as always.

"I’m afraid you're right. I hear an engine."

I listened, then I could hear it too, the unmistakable thudding of an air compressor. I said: "What do you mean afraid?"

"You know damn well" He touched the throttle, gave the wheel a quarter turn to port and we began to move out gently into deeper water. "You're going to go down."

"Do you think I'm a nut case? Do you think I want to go down? I bloody well don't want to go down — and you bloody well know that I have to go down. And you know why. You want them to finish up here, load up in Dubh Sgeir and the whole lot to be hell and gone before midnight?"

"Half, Calvert. Take half of our share. God, man, we do nothing."

"I'll settle for a pint in the Columba Hotel in Torbay. You Just concentrate on putting this tub exactly where she ought to be. I don't want to spend the rest of my life swimming about the Atlantic when I come back up from the Nantesville."

He looked at me, the expression in his eyes saying "if," not "when," but kept quiet. He circled round to the south of the diving-boat — we could faintly hear the compressor all the way — then slightly to the west. He turned the Firecrest towards the source of the sound, manoeuvring with delicacy and precision. He said: "About a cable length."

"About that. Hard to judge in fog."

"North twenty-two east true. Let go the anchor."

I let go the anchor, not the normal heavy Admiralty type on the chain but a smaller CQR on the end of forty fathoms of rope. It disappeared silently over the side and the Terylene as silently slid down after it I let out all forty fathoms and made fast. I went back to the wheelhouse and strapped the cylinders on my back.

"You won't forget, now," Hutchinson said. "When you come up, just let yourself drift. The ebb's just setting in from the nor'-nor'-east and will carry you back here. I'll keep the diesel ticking, you'll be able to hear the underwater exhaust twenty yards away, I hope to hell the mist doesn't clear. You'll just have to swim for Dubh Sgeir."

"That will be ducky. What happens to you if it clears?"

"I'll cut the anchor rope and take oft."

"And if they come after you?"

"Come after me? Just like that? And leave two or three dead divers down inside the Nantesville?"

"I wish to God," I said irritably, "that you wouldn't talk about dead divers inside the Nantesville"

There were three divers aboard the Nantesville, not dead but all working furiously, or as furiously as one can work in the pressurised slow-motion world of the undersea.

Getting down there had been no trouble. I'd swum on the surface towards the diving-boat, the compressor giving me a clear bearing all the time, and dived when only three yards away. My bands touched cables, life-lines and finally an unmistakable wire hawser. The wire hawser was the one for me.

I stopped my descent on the wire when I saw the dim glow of light beneath me. I swam some distance to one side then down until my feet touched something solid. The deck of the Nantesville. I moved cautiously towards the source of the light.

There were two of them, standing in their weighted boots at the edge of an open hatchway. As I'd expected, they were wearing not my self-contained apparatus, but regular helmet and corselet diving gear, with air-lines and lifelines, the life-lines almost certainly with telephone wires imbedded inside them. Self-contained diving equipment wouldn't have been much use down here, it was too deep for oxygen and compressed-air stores too limited. With those suits they could stay down an hour and a half, at least, although they'd have to spend thirty to forty minutes on decompression stops on the way up. I wanted to be gone in less than that, I wanted to be gone that very moment, my heart was banging away against my chest wall like a demented pop drummer with the ague but it was only the pressure of the water, I told myself, it couldn't be fear, I was far too brave for that.

The wire rope I'd used to guide me down to the Nantesville, terminated in a metal ring from which splayed out four chains to the corners of a rectangular steel mesh basket. The two divers were loading this basket with wire- and wood-handled steel boxes that they were hauling up from the hold at the rate of, I guessed, about one every minute. The steel boxes were small but obviously heavy: each held four 28lb ingots of gold. Each box held a fortune. There were three hundred and sixty such fortunes aboard the Nantesville.

I tried to calculate the overall rate of unloading. The steel basket held sixteen boxes. Sixteen minutes to load. Another ten minutes to winch up to the diving-boat, unload and lower again. Say forty an hour. In a ninety-minute stretch, about sixty. But after ninety minutes they would have to change divers. Forty minutes, including two decompression stops of, say, twelve and twenty-four minutes, to get to the surface, then twenty minutes to change over and get other divers down. An hour at least. So, in effect, they were clearing sixty boxes every two and a half hours, or twenty-four an hour. The only remaining question was, how many boxes were left in the Nantesville's strong-room?

I had to find out and I had to find out at once. I'd had only the two compressed air-cylinders aboard the Firecrest and already their two hundred atmospheres were seriously depleted. The wire hawser jerked and the full basket started to rise, the divers guiding it clear of the superstructure with a trailing guide rope. I moved forward from the corner of the partially opened hatch remote from where they were standing and cautiously wriggled over and down. With excessive caution, I supposed: then- lamp cast only a small pool of light and they couldn't possibly have seen me from where I was standing.

I felt my hands — already puffed and numbed by the icy water — touch a life-line and air-line and quickly withdrew them. Below and to my right I could see another faint pool of light. A few cautious strokes and I could see the source of the light.

The light was moving. It was moving because it was attached to the helmet of a diver, angled so as to point down at an angle of forty-five degrees. The diver was inside the a strong-room.

They hadn't opened that strong-room with any Yale key. They'd opened it with underwater torches cutting out a roughly rectangular section in the strongroom's side, maybe six feet by four.

I moved up to this opening and pushed my head round the side. Beyond the now stooping diver was another light suspended from the deckhead. The bullion boxes were neatly stacked in racks round the side and it was a five-second job to estimate their number. Of the three hundred and sixty bullion boxes, there were about one hundred and twenty left. Something brushed my arm, pulled past my arm. I glanced down and saw that it was a rope, a nylon line, that the diver was pulling in to attach to the handle of one of the boxes. I moved my arm quickly out of the way.

His back was towards me. He was having difficulty in fastening the rope but finally secured it with two half hitches, straightened and pulled a knife from his waist sheath. I wondered what the knife was for.

I found out what the knife was for. The knife was for me. Stooped over as he had been, he could just possibly have caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye: or he might have felt the sudden pressure, then release of pressure, on the nylon rope: or his sixth sense was in better working condition than mine. I won't say he whirled round, for in a heavy diving suit at that depth the tempo of movement becomes slowed down to that of a slow-motion film.

But he moved too quickly for me. It wasn't my body that was slowing down as much as my mind. He was completely round and facing me, not four feet away, and I was still where I'd been when he'd first moved, still displaying all the lightning reactions and coordinated activity of a bag of cement. The six-inch-bladed knife was held in his lowered hand with thumb and forefinger towards me, which is the way that only nasty people with lethal matters on their minds hold knives, and I could see his face dearly. God knows what he wanted the knife for, it must have been a reflex action, he didn't require a knife to deal with me, he wouldn't have required a knife to deal with two of me.

It was Quinn.

I watched his face with a strangely paralysed intentness, I watched his face to see if the head would jerk -down to press the telephone call-up buzzer with his chin. But his head didn't move, Quinn had never required any help in his life and he didn't require any now. Instead his lips parted in a smile of almost beatific joy. My mask made it almost impossible for my face to be recognised but he knew whom he had, he knew whom he had without any doubt in the world. He had the face of a man in the moment of supreme religious ecstasy. He fell slowly forwards, his knees bending, till he was at an angle of almost forty-five degrees and launched himself forward his right arm already swinging far behind his back.

The moment of thrall ended. I thrust off backwards from the strong-room's outer wall with my left foot, saw the air-hose come looping down towards me as Quinn came through the jagged hole, caught it and jerked down with all ray strength to pull him off-balance, A sharp stinging pain burned its way upwards from my lower ribs to my right shoulders. I felt a sudden jerk in my right hand. I fell backwards on to the floor of the hold and then I couldn't see Quinn any more, not because the fall had dazed me nor because Quinn had moved, but because he had vanished in the heart of an opaque, boiling, mushrooming cloud of dense air-bubbles. A non-collapsible air-hose can, and often has to, stand up to some pretty savage treatment, but it can't stand up to the wickedly slicing power of a razor-sharp knife in the hands of the strongest man I'd ever known. Quinn had cut his own air-hose, had slashed it cleanly in two.

No power on earth, could save Quinn now. With a pressure of forty pounds to the -square inch on that severed air-line, he would be drowning already, his suit filling up with water and weighting him down so that he could never rise again. Almost without realising what I was doing I advanced with the nylon rope still in my hands and coiled it any old way round the madly threshing legs, taking great care indeed to keep clear of those flailing arms, for Quinn could still have taken me with him, could have snapped my neck like a rotten stick. At the back of my mind I had the vague hope that when his comrades investigated, as they were bound to do immediately -those great clouds of bubbles must have already passed out through the hold on their way to the surface- they would think he'd become entangled and tried to cut himself free. I did not think it a callous action then nor do I now. I had no qualms about doing this to a dying man, and no compunction: he was doomed anyway, he was a psychopathic monster who killed for the love of it and, most of all. I had to think of the living who might die, the prisoners in the cellars of the Dubh Sgeir castle. I left him threshing there, dying there, and swam up and hid under the deck-head of the hold.

The two men who had been on deck were already on their way down, being slowly lowered on their life-lines. As soon as their helmets sunk below my level I came up through the hatchway, located the wire hawser and made my way up. I'd been down for just under ten minutes so when my wrist depth-gauge showed a depth of two fathoms I stopped for a three-minute decompression period. By now, Quinn would be dead.

I did as Hutchinson had told me, drifted my way back to the Firecrest — there was no hurry now — and located it without difficulty. Hutchinson was there to help me out of the water and I was glad of his help.

"Am I glad to see you, brother," he said. "Never thought the day would come when Tim Hutchinson would die a thousand deaths, but die a thousand deaths he did. How did it go?"

"All right. We've time. Five or six hours yet."

"I'll get the hook up." Three minutes later we were on our way and three minutes after that we were out near enough in the mid-channel of the Beul nan Uamh, heading north-north-east against the gathering ebb. I could hear the helm going on auto-pilot and then Hutchinson came through the door into the lit saloon, curtains tightly if, in that fog, unnecessarily drawn, where I was rendering some first aid to myself, just beginning to tape up a patch of gauze over the ugly gash that stretched all the way from lowest rib to shoulder. I couldn't see the expression behind the darkly-luxuriant foliage of that beard, but his sudden immobility was expression enough. He said, quietly: "What happened, Calvert?"

"Quinn. I met him in the strong-room of the Nantesville."

He moved forward and in silence helped me to tape up the gauze. When it was finished, and not until then, he said: "Quinn is dead." It wasn't a question.

"Quinn is dead. He cut his own air-hose." I told him what had happened and he said nothing. He didn't exchange a dozen words all the way back to Craigmore, I knew he didn't believe me. I knew be never would.

Neither did Uncle Arthur. He'd never believe me till the day he died. But his reaction was quite different, it was one of profound satisfaction. Uncle Arthur was, in his own, avuncular fashion, possessed of an absolute ruthlessness. Indeed, be seemed to take half the credit for the alleged execution. "It's not twenty-four hours," he'd announced at the tea-table, "since I told Calvert to seek out and destroy this man by whatever means that came to hand. I must confess that I never thought the means would consist of the blade of a sharp knife against an air-hose. A neat touch, my boy, a very neat touch indeed."

Charlotte Skouras believed me. I don't know why, but she believed me. While she was stripping off my makeshift bandage, cleaning the wound and re-bandaging it very efficiently, a process I suffered with unflinching fortitude because I didn't want to destroy her image of a secret service agent by bellowing out loud at the top of my voice, I told her what had happened and there was no doubt that she believed me without question. I thanked her, for bandage and belief, and she smiled.

Six hours later, twenty minutes before our eleven p.m. dead-line for taking off in the Firecrest, she was no longer smiling. She was looking at me the way women usually look at you when they have their minds set on something and can see that they are not going to get their own way: a rather less than affectionate look.

"I'm sorry, Charlotte," I said. "I'm genuinely sorry, but it's not on. You are not coming with us, and that's that." She was dressed in dark slacks and sweater, like one who had — or had had — every intention of coming with us on a midnight jaunt. "We're not going picnicking on the Thames. Remember what you said yourself this morning. There will be shooting. Do you think I want to see you killed?"

"I'll stay below," she pleaded. "I'll stay out of harm's way. Please, Philip, let me come."

"No."

"You said you'd do anything in the world for me. Remember?"

"That's unfair, and you know it. Anything to help you, I meant. Not anything to get you killed. Not you, of all people."

"Of all people? You think so much of me?"

I nodded.

"I mean so much to you?"

I nodded again. She looted at me for a long time, her eyes wide and questioning, her lips moving as if about to speak and yet not speaking, then took a step forward, latched her arms around my neck and tried to break it. At least, that was the way it felt, the dead Quinn's handiwork was still with me, but it wasn't that at all, she was clinging to me as she might cling to a person who she knew she would never see again. Maybe she was fey, maybe she had second sight, maybe she could see old Calvert floating, face down, in the murky waters of the Dubh Sgeir boathouse. When I thought about it I could see it myself, and it wasn't an attractive sight at all. I was beginning to have some difficulty with my breathing when she suddenly let me go, half-led, half-pushed me from the room and closed the door behind me. I heard the key turn in the lock.

"Our friends are at home," Tim Hutchinson said. We'd circled far to the south of Dubh Sgeir, close in to the southern shore of Loch Houron and were now drifting quickly on the flood tide, engines stopped, in an east by northerly direction past the little man-made harbour of Dubh Sgeir. "You were right, Calvert. They're getting all ready for their moonlit flitting."

"Calvert is usually right," Uncle Arthur said in his best trained-him-myself voice. "And now, my boy?"

The mist had thinned now, giving maybe a hundred yards' visibility. I looked at the T-shaped crack of light showing where the boathouse doors didn't quite meet each other in the middle and where the tops of the doors sagged away from the main structure.

"Now it is," I said. I turned to Hutchinson. "We've all of a fifteen foot beam. That entrance is not more than twenty wide. There's not a beacon or a mark on it. There's a four knot tide running. You really think it can be done — taking her through that entrance at four or five knots, fast enough to smash open those doors, without piling ourselves up an the rocks on the way in?"

"There's only one way to find out." He pressed the starter button and the warm diesel caught fire at once, its underpass exhaust barely audible. He swung her round to the south on minimum revs, continued on this course for two cables, westwards for the same distance, curved round to the north, pushed the throttle wide open and lit a cigar. Tim Hutchinson preparing for action. In the flare of the match the dark face was quiet and thoughtful, no more.

For just over a minute there was nothing to be seen, just the darkness and patches of grey mist swirling past our bows. Hutchinson was heading a few degrees west of north, making allowance for the set of the tide. All at once we could see it, slightly off the starboard bow as it had to be to correct for the tide, that big T-shaped light in the darkness, fairly jumping at us. I picked up the submachine-guns, opened and latched back the port wheelhouse door and stood there, gun in left hand, door-jamb in right, with one foot on the outside deck and the other still in the wheelhouse. Uncle Arthur, I knew, he was similarly positioned on the star-board side. We were as firmly braced as it was possible to be. When the Firecrest stopped, it would stop very suddenly indeed.

Forty yards away, Hutchinson eased the throttle and gave the wheel a touch to port. That bright T was even farther round on our starboard side now, but directly in line with us and the patch of dark water to the west of the almost phosphorescently foaming whiteness that marked the point where the flood tide ripped past the outer end of the eastern breakwater. Twenty yards away he pushed the throttle open again, we were heading straight for where the unseen west breakwater must be, we were far too far over to port, it was impossible now that we could avoid smashing bow first into it, then suddenly Hutchinson had the wheel spinning to starboard, the tide pushing him the same way, and we were through and not an inch of Uncle Arthur's precious paint-work had been removed. Hutchinson had the engine in neutral. I wondered briefly whether, if I practised for the rest of my life, I could effect a manoeuvre like that: I knew damned well that I couldn't.

I'd told Hutchinson that the bollards were on the starboard side of the boathouse, so that the diving-boat would be tied up on that side. He angled the boat across the tiny harbour towards the right-hand crack of light, spun the wheel to port till we were angling in towards the central crack of light and put the engine full astern. It was no part of the plan to telescope the Firecrest's bows against the wall of the boathouse and send it — and us — to the bottom.

As an entrance it erred, if anything, on the spectacular side. The doors, instead of bursting open at their central hasps, broke off at the hinges and we carried the whole lot before us with a thunderous crash. This took a good knot off our speed. The aluminium foremast, with Uncle Arthur's fancy telescopic aerial inside, almost tore the tabernacle clear of the deck before it sheared off, just above wheelhouse level, with a most unpleasant metallic shrieking. That took another knot off. The screws biting deep in maximum revs astern, took off yet another knot, but we still had a fair way on when, amid a crackling, splintering of wood, partly of our planking but mainly of the doors, and the screeching of the rubber tyres on our well-tendered bows, we stopped short with a jarring shock, firmly wedged between the port quarter of the diving-boat and the port wall of the boathouse. Uncle Arthur's feelings must have been almost as bruised and lacerated as the planking of his beloved Firecrest. Hutchinson moved the throttle to slow ahead to keep us wedged in position and switched on the five-inch searchlight, less to illuminate the already sufficiently well-lit shed than to dazzle bystanders ashore. I stepped out on the deck with the machine-pistol in my hands.

We were confronted, as the travel books put it, with a scene of bustling activity, or, more precisely, what had been a scene of bustling activity before our entrance had apparently paralysed them all in whatever positions they had been at the time. On the extreme right three faces stared at us over the edge of the hold of the diving-boat, a typical forty-five-foot M.F.V. about the same size as the Charmaine, Two men on deck were frozen in the act of lifting a box across to the hold. Another two were standing upright, one with his hands stretched above his head, waiting for another box swinging gently from a rope suspended from a loading boom. That box was the only moving thing in the boathouse. The winchman himself, who bore an uncommon resemblance to Thomas, the bogus customs officer, one lever against his chest and another held in his outstretched right hand, looked as if the lavas of Vesuvius had washed over him twenty centuries ago and left him frozen for ever. The others, backs bent, were standing on the wall at the head of the boathouse, holding a rope attached to a very large box which two frogmen were helping to lift clear of the water. When it came to hiding specie, they had one-track minds. On the extreme left stood Captain Imrie, presumably there to supervise operations, and, beside him, his patrons, Lavorski and Dollmann. This was the big day, this was the culmination of all their dreams, and they weren't going to miss a moment of it.

Imrie, Lavorski and Dollmann were the ones for me. I moved forward until I could see the barrel of the machine-gun and until they could also see that it was pointing at them.

"Come close," I said. "Yes, you three. Captain Imrie, speak to your men. Tell them that if they move, if they try anything at all, I'll kill all three of you. I've killed four of you already. If I double the number, what then? Under the new laws you get only fifteen years. For murderous vermin, that is not enough. I'd rather you died here. Do you believe me, Captain Imrie?"

"I believe you." The guttural voice was deep and sombre. "You killed Quinn this afternoon."

"He deserved to die."

"He should have killed you that night on the Nantesville," Imrie said, "Then none of this would have happened."

"You will come aboard our boat one at a time," I said. "In this situation, Captain Imrie, you are without question the most dangerous man. After you, Lavorski, then — "

"Please keep very still. Terribly still." The voice behind me was totally lacking in inflection, hut the gun pressed hard against my spine carried its own message, one not easily misunderstood. "Good. Take a pace forward and take your right hand away from the gun."

I took a pace forward and removed my right hand. This left me holding the machine-pistol by the barrel.

"Lay the gun on the deck."

It obviously wasn't going to be much use to me as a club, so I laid it on the deck, I'd been caught like this before, once or twice, and just to show that I was a true professional I raised my hands high and turned slowly round.

"Why, Charlotte Skouras!" I said. Again I knew what to do, how to act, the correct tone for the circumvented agent, bantering but bitter. "Fancy meeting you here. Thank you very much my dear." She was still dressed in the dark sweater and slacks, only they weren't quite as spruce as the last time I'd seen them. They were soaking wet. Her face was dead white and without expression. The brown eyes were very still. "And how in God's name did you get here?"

"I escaped through the bedroom window and swam out. I hid in the after cabin."

"Did you indeed? Why don't you change out of those wet clothes?"

She ignored me. She said to Hutchinson: "Turn off that searchlight."

"Do as the lady says," I advised.

He did as the lady said. The light went out and we were all now in full view of the men ashore. Imrie said; "Throw that gun over the side, Admiral."

"Do as the gentleman says, "I advised.

Uncle Arthur threw the gun over the side. Captain Imrie and Lavorski came walking confidently towards us. They could afford to walk confidently, the three men in the hold, the two men who had suddenly appeared from behind the diving-boat's wheelhouse and the winch-driver — a nice round total of six — had suddenly sprouted guns. I looked over this show of armed strength and said slowly: "You were waiting for us."

"Certainly we were waiting for you," Lavorski said jovially. "Our dear Charlotte announced the exact time of your arrival. Haven't you guessed that yet, Calvert?"

"How do you know my name?"

"Charlotte, you fool. By heavens, I believe we have been grievously guilty of overestimating you."

"Mrs. Skouras was a plant," I said.

"A bait," Lavorski said cheerfully. I wasn't fooled by his cheerfulness, he'd have gone into hysterics of laughter when I came apart on the rack. "Swallowed hook, line, and sinker. A bait with a highly effective if tiny transmitter and a gun in a polythene bag. We found the transmitter in your starboard engine." He laughed again until he seemed in danger of going into convulsions. "We've known of every move you've made since you left Torbay. And how do you like that, Mr, Secret Agent Calvert?"

"I don't like it at all. What are you going to do with us?"

"Don't be childish. What are you going to do with us, asks he naively. I'm afraid you know all too well. How did you locate this place?"

"I don't talk to executioners."

"I think we'll shoot the admiral through the foot, to begin with," Lavorski beamed. "A minute afterwards through the aim, then the thigh — - "

"All right. We had a radio-transmitter aboard the Nantesville."

"We know that. How did you pin-point Dubh Sgeir?"

"The boat belonging to the Oxford geological expedition. It is moored fore and aft in a little natural harbour south of here. It's well clear of any rock yet it's badly holed. It's impossible that it would be holed naturally where it lay. It was holed unnaturally, shall we say. Any other boat you could have seen coming from a long way off, but that boat had only to move out to be in full sight of the boathouse — and the anchored diving-boat. It was very clumsy."

Lavorski looked at Imrie, who nodded. "He would notice that. I advised against it at the time. Was there more, Calvert?"

"Donald MacEachern on Eilean Oran. You should have taken him, not his wife. Susan Kirkside — you shouldn't have allowed her out and about, when did you. Last see a fit young twenty-one-year-old with blue shadows that size under her eyes? A fit young twenty-one-year-old with nothing in the world to worry about, that is? And you should have disguised that mark made by the tail fuselage of the Beechcraft belonging to Lord Kirkside's elder son when you ran it over the edge of the north cliff. I saw it from the helicopter."

"That's all?" Lavorski asked. I nodded, and he looked again at Imrie.

"I believe him," Imrie said. "No one talked. That's all we need to know. Calvert first, Mr. Lavorski?" They were certainly a brisk and business-like outfit.

I said quickly: "Two questions. The courtesy of two answers. I'm a professional. I'd like to know. I don't know if you understand."

"And two minutes," Lavorski smiled. "Make it quick. We have business on hand."

"Where is Sir Anthony Skouras? He should be here."

"He is. He's up in the castle with Lord Kirkside and Lord Charnley. The Shangri-la's tied up at the west landing stage."

"Is it true that you and Dollmann engineered the whole plan, that you bribed Charnley to betray insurance secrets, that you — or Dollmann, rather selected Captain Imrie to pick his crew of cut-throats, and that you were responsible for the capture and sinking of the ships and the subsequent salvaging of the cargoes. And, incidentally, the deaths, directly or indirectly, of our men?"

"It's late in the day to deny the obvious." Again Lavorski's booming laugh. "We think we did rather well, eh, John?"

"Very well indeed," Dollmann said coldly. "We're wasting time."

I turned to Charlotte Skouras. The gun was still pointing at me. I said: "I have to be killed, it seems. As you will be responsible for my death, you might as well finish the job." I reached down, caught the hand with the gun in it and placed it against my chest, letting my own hand fall away. "Please do it quickly."

There was no sound to be heard other than the soft throb of the Firecrest's diesel. Every pair of eyes in that boatshed was on us, my back was to them all, but I knew it beyond any question. I wanted every pair of eyes in that boatshed on us. Uncle Arthur took a step inside the starboard door and said urgently: "Are you mad, Calvert? She'll kill you! She's one of them."

The brown eyes were stricken, there was no other expression for it, the eyes of one who knows her world is coming to an end. The finger came off the trigger, the hand opened slowly and the gun fell to the deck with a clatter that seemed to echo through the boatshed and the tunnels leading off on either side. I took her left arm and said: "It seems Mrs. Skouras doesn't feel quite up to it. I'm afraid you'll have to find someone else to — "

Charlotte Skouras cried out in sharp pain as her legs caught the wheelhouse sill and maybe I did shove her through that doorway with unnecessary force, but it was too late in the day to take chances now. Hutchinson had been waiting and caught her as she fell, dropping to his knees at the same time, I went through that door after her like an international rugby three-quarter diving for the line with a dozen hands reaching out for him, but even so Uncle Arthur beat me to it. Uncle Arthur had a lively sense of self-preservation. Even as I fell, my hand reached out for the loudhailer that had been placed in position on the wheelhouse deck.

"Don't fire!" The amplified voice boomed cavernously against the rock-faces and the wooden walls of the boatshed. "If you shoot, you'll die! One shot, and you may all die. There's a machine-gun lined up on the back of every man in this boathouse. Just turn round, very very slowly, and see for yourselves."

I half rose to my feet, hoisted a wary eye over the lower edge of a wheelhouse window, got the rest of the way to my feet, went outside and picked up the machine-gun on the deck.

Picking up that machine-gun was the most superfluous and unnecessary action I had performed for many a long day. If there was one thing that boathouse was suffering from at the moment it was a plethora of machine-guns. There were twelve of them in all, shoulder-slung machine-pistols, in twelve of the most remarkably steady pairs of hands I'd ever seen. The twelve men were ranged in a rough semicircle round the inner end of the boathouse, big, quiet, purposeful-looking men dressed in woollen caps, grey-and-black camouflaged smocks and trousers and rubber boots. Their hands and faces were the colour of coal. Their eyes gleamed whitely, like performers in the Black and White Minstrel show, but with that every hint of light entertainment ended.

"Lower your hands to your sides and let your guns fall." The order came from a figure in the middle of the group, a man indistinguishable from the others. "Do please be very careful. Slowly down, drop the guns, utter stillness. My men are very highly trained commandos. They have been trained to shoot on suspicion. They know only how to kill. They have not been trained to wound or cripple."

They believed him. I believed him, They dropped their guns and stood very still indeed.

"Now clasp your hands behind your necks."

They did. All but one. Lavorski. He wasn't smiling any more and his language had little to recommend it.

That they were highly trained I could believe. No word or signal passed. The commando nearest Lavorski walked towards him on soundless soles, machine-pistol across his chest. The butt seemed to move no more than three inches. When Lavorski picked himself up the lower part of his face was covered in blood and I could see the hole where tome teeth had been. He clasped his hands behind his neck.

"Mr. Culvert?" the officer asked.

"Me," I said.

"Captain Rawley, sir. Royal Marine Commandos."

"The castle, Captain?"

"In our hands."

"The

"In our hands."

"The prisoners?"

"Two men are on their way up, after."

I said to Imrie: "How many guards?"

He spat and said nothing. The commando who had dealt with Lavorski moved forward, machine-pistol high. Imrie said: "Two."

I said to Rawley: "Two men enough?"

"I hope, sir, that the guards will not be so foolish as to offer resistance."

Even as he finished speaking the flat rapid-fire chatter of a sub-machine-gun came echoing down the long flight of stone steps. Rawley shrugged.

"They'll never learn to be wise now. Robinson?" This to a man with a waterproof bag over his shoulder. "Go up and open the cellar door. Sergeant Evans, line them up in two rows against the wall there, one standing, one sitting."

Sergeant Evans did. Now that there was no danger of being caught in cross-fire we landed and I introduced Uncle Arthur, full military honours and all, to Captain Rawley. Captain Rawley's salute was something to see. Uncle Arthur beamed. Uncle Arthur took over.

"Capitally done, my boy!" he said to Rawley. "Capitally. There'll be a little something for you in this New Year's List Ah! Here come some friends."

They weren't all exactly friends, this group that appeared at the bottom of the steps. There were four tough but dispirited looking characters whom I’m never seen before, but unquestionably tunic's men, closely followed by Sir Anthony Skouras and Lord Charnley. They, in their turn, were closely followed by four commandos with the very steady hands that were a hallmark of Rawley's men. Behind them came Lord Kirkside and his daughter. It was impossible to tell what the black-faced commandos were thinking, but the other eight had the same expression on their faces, dazed and utter bewilderment.

"My dear Kirkside! My dear fellow!" Uncle Arthur hurried forward and shook him by the hand, I'd quite forgotten that they knew one another. "Delighted to see you safe and sound, my dear chap. Absolutely delighted. It's all over now."

"What in God's name is happening?" Lord Kirkside asked. "You — you've got them? You have them all? Where is my boy? Where is Rollinson? What -?"

An explosive crack, curiously muffled, came down the Sight of steps. Uncle Arthur looked at Rawley, who nodded. "Plastic explosive, sir."

"Excellent, excellent," Uncle Arthur beamed. "You'll see them any minute, Kirkside." He crossed over to where old Skouras was lined up against the wall, hands clasped behind his neck, reached up both his own, pulled Skouras's arms down and shook his right hand as if he were attempting to tear it off.

"You're lined up with the wrong team, Tony, my boy." This was one of the great moments of Uncle Arthur's life. He led him across to where Lord Kirkside was standing. "It's been a frightful nightmare, my boy, a frightful nightmare, But it's all over now."

"Why did you do it?" Skouras said dully. "Why did you do it? God, oh God, you don't know what you've done."

"Mrs. Skouras? The real Mrs. Skouras?" There is the ham actor in all of us, but more than most in Uncle Arthur, He pushed back his sleeve and studied his watch carefully. "She arrived in London by air from Nice just over three hours ago. She is in the London Clinic."

"What in God's name do you mean? You don't know what you are saying. My wife — - "

"Your wife is in London. Charlotte here is Charlotte Meiner and always was." I looked at Charlotte. A total incomprehension and the tentative beginnings of a dazed hope. "Earlier this year, blazing the trail for many kidnappings that were to follow, your friends Lavorski and Dollmann had your wife seized and hidden away to force you to act with them, to put your resources at their disposal. I think they felt aggrieved, Tony, that you should be a millionaire while they were executives: they had it all worked out, even to having the effrontery of intending to invest the proceeds in your empire. However. Your wife managed to escape, so they seized her cousin and best friend, Charlotte — a friend upon whom, shall we say, your wife was emotionally very dependent — and threatened to kill her unless they got Mrs. Skouras back again. Mrs. Skouras surrendered immediately. This gave them the bright idea of having two swords of Damocles hanging over your head, so, being men of honour, they decided to keep Charlotte as well as your imprisoned wife. Then, they knew, you would do exactly as they wanted, when and as they wanted. To have a good excuse to keep both you and Charlotte under their surveillance at the same time, and to reinforce the idea that your wife was well and truly dead, they gave out that you had been secretly married." Uncle Arthur was a kind man: no mention of the fact that h was common knowledge that, at the time of her alleged death, brain injuries sustained by Mrs. Skouras in a car crash two years previously had become steadily worse and it was known that she would never leave hospital again.

"How on earth did you guess that?" Lord Kirkside asked.

"No guess. Must give my lieutenants their due," Uncle Arthur said in his best magnanimous taught- 'em-all-I-know voice. "Hunslett radioed me at midnight on Tuesday. He gave me a list of names of people about whom Calvert wanted immediate and exhaustive inquiries made. That call was tapped by the Shangri-la but they didn't know what Hunslett was talking about because in our radio transmissions all proper names are invariably coded. Calvert told me later that when he'd seen Sir Anthony on Tuesday night he thought Sir Anthony was putting on a bit of an act. He said it wasn't all act. He said Sir Anthony was completely broken and desolated by the thought of his dead wife. He said he believed the original Mrs. Skouras was still alive, that it was totally inconceivable that a man who so patently cherished the memory of his wife should have marked again two or three months later, that he could only have pretended to marry again for the sake of the one person whom he ever and so obviously loved.

"I radioed France. Riviera police dug up the grave in Beaulieu where she had been buried near the nursing home where she'd died. They found a coffin full of logs. You knew this, Tony."

Old Skouras nodded. He was a man in a dream.

"It took them half an hour to find out who had signed the death certificate and most of the rest of the day to find the doctor himself. They charged him with murder. This can be done in France on the basis of a missing body. The doctor wasted no time at all in taking them to his own private nursing home, where Mrs. Skouras was in a locked room. The doctor, matron and a few others are in custody now. Why in God's name didn't you come to us before?"

"They had Charlotte and they said they would kill my wife out of hand. What -what would you have done?"

"God knows," Uncle Arthur said frankly. "She's in fair health, Tony. Calvert got radio confirmation at five a.m." Uncle Arthur jerked a thumb upwards. "On Lavorski's big transceiver in the castle."

Both Skouras and Lord Kirkside had their mouths open, Lavorski, blood still Sowing from his mouth, and Dollmann looked as if they had been sandbagged. Charlotte's eyes were the widest wide I'd ever seen. She was looking at me in a very peculiar way.

"It's true," Susan Kirkside said. "I was with him. He told me to tell nobody," She crossed to take my arm and smiled up at me. "I'm sorry again for what I said last night. I think you're the most wonderful man I've ever known. Except Rolly, of course." She turned round at the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and promptly forgot all about the second most wonderful man she'd ever known.

"Rolly!" she cried. "Rolly!" I could see Rolly bracing himself.

They were all there, I counted them, Kirkside's son, the Hon. Rollinson, the policeman's sons, the missing members of the small boats and, behind them all, a small brown-faced old woman in a long dark dress with a black shawl over her head. I went forward and took her arm.

"Mrs. MacEachern," I said. "I’ll take you home soon. Your husband is waiting."

"Thank you, young man," she said calmly. "That will be very nice." She lifted her arm and held mine in a proprietorial fashion.

Charlotte Skouras came and held my other arm, not in quite so proprietorial a fashion, but there for everyone to see. I didn't mind. She said: "You were on to me? You were on to me all the time?"

"He was," Uncle Arthur said thoughtfully. "He just said he knew. You never quite got round to explaining that bit, Calvert."

"It wasn't difficult, sir — if you know all the facts, that is," I added hastily. "Sir Anthony put me on to you. That visit he paid me on the Firecrest to allay any suspicion we might have had about our smashed radio set only served, I'm afraid, to mate me suspicious. You wouldn't have normally come to me, you'd have gone ashore immediately to the police or to a phone, sir. Then, in order to get me talking about the cut telephone wires, you wondered if the radio-wrecker, to complete our isolation from the mainland, had smashed the two public call boxes. From a man of your intelligence, such a suggestion was fatuous, there must be scores of houses in Torbay with their private phone. But you thought it might sound suspicious if you suggested cut lines, so you didn't, Then Sergeant MacDonald gave me a glowing report about you, said you were the most respected man in Torbay and your public reputation contrasted so sharply with your private behaviour in the Shangri-la on Tuesday night — well, I just couldn't buy it."

"That nineteenth-century late Victorian melodrama act that you and Charlotte put on in the saloon that night had me fooled for all of five seconds. It was inconceivable that any man so devoted to his wife could be vicious towards another obviously nice woman-"

"Thank you kindly, sir," Charlotte murmured.

"It was inconceivable that he send her for his wife's photograph, unless he had been ordered to do so. And you had been ordered to do so, by Lavorski and Dollmann. And it was inconceivable that she would have gone — the Charlotte Meiner I knew would have clobbered you over the head with a marline spike. Ergo, if you weren't what you appeared to be, neither were you, Charlotte."

"The villains, they thought, were laying a foundation for an excellent reason for your flight from the wicked baron to the Firecrest, where you could become their eyes and ears and keep them informed of all our plans and moves, because they'd no idea how long their secret little transmitter in the engine-room would remain undetected. After they knew we'd found Hunslett — they'd removed the transmitter by that time — it was inevitable that they would try to get you aboard the Firecrest. So they laid a little more groundwork by giving you a bruised eye -the dye is nearly off already — and some wicked weals across your back and dumped you into the water with your little polythene kitbag with the micro-transmitter and gun inside it. Do this, they said, or Mrs. Skouras will get it."

She nodded. "They said that."

"I have twenty-twenty eyesight. Sir Arthur hasn't — his eyes were badly damaged in the war. I had a close look at those weak on your back. Genuine weals. Also genuine pin-pricks where the hypodermic with the anasthetic had been inserted before the lashes were inflicted. To that degree, at least, someone was humane."

"I could stand most things," Skouras said heavily. "I couldn't stand the thought of — the thought of — "

"I guessed you had insisted on the anaesthetic, sir. No, I knew. The same way that I knew that you had insisted that the crews of all those small yachts be kept alive or the hell with the consequences. Charlotte, I ran a finger-nail down one of those weals. You should have jumped through the saloon roof. You never batted an eyelid. After submersion in salt water. After that, I knew."

"I have devious reasons for the things I do. You told us that you had come to warn us of our deadly danger — as if we didn't know, I told you we were leaving Torbay within the hour, so off you trotted to your little cabin and told them we were going to leave within the hour. So Quinn, Jacques and Kramer came paddling across well in advance of the time you'd told us they would be corning, trusting we would have been lulled into a sense of false security. You must love Mrs. Skouras very much, Charlotte. A clear-cut choice, she or us, and you made your choice. But I was waiting for them, so Jacques and Kramer died. I told you we were going to Eilean Oran and Craigmore, so off you trotted down to your little cabin and told them we were going to Eilean Oran and Craigmore, which wouldn't have worried them at all. Later on I told you we were going to Dubh Sgeir. So off you trotted down to your little cabin again, but before you could tell them anything you passed out on your cabin deck, possibly as a result of a little night-cap I'd put in your coffee. I couldn't have you telling your friends here that I was going to Dubh Sgeir, could I now? They would have had a reception committee all nicely organised."

"You — you were in my cabin? You said I was on the floor?"

"Don Juan has nothing on me. I flit in and out of ladies' bedrooms like anything. Ask Susan Kirkside. You were on the floor. I put you to bed. I looked at your arms, incidentally, and the rope marks were gone. They'd used rubber bands, twisted pretty tightly, just before Hunslett and I had arrived?"

She nodded. She looked dazed.

"I also, of course, found the transmitter and gun. Then, back in Craigmore, you came and pumped back for some more information. And you did try to warn me, you were about torn in half by that time. I gave you that information. It wasn't the whole truth, I regret, but it was what I wanted you to tell Lavorski and company, which," I said approvingly, "like a good little girl you did. Off you trotted to your little white-washed bedroom — "

"Philip Calvert," she said slowly, "you are the nastiest, sneakingest, most low-down double-crossing — "

"There are some of Lavorski's men aboard the Shangri-la," old Skouras interrupted excitedly. He had rejoined the human race. "They'll get away — "

"They'll get life," I said, "They're in irons, or whatever Captain Rawley's men here are in the habit of using."

"But how did you — how did you know where the Shangri-la was? In the darkness, in the mist, it's impossible — "

"How's the Shangri-la's tender working?" I asked.

"The what? The Shangri-la — what the devil -?" He calmed down. "It's not working. Engines out of order."

"Demerara sugar has that effect upon them," I explained. "Any sugar has, in fact, when dumped in the petrol tanks, but Demerara was all I could lay hands on that Wednesday night after Sir Arthur and I had left you but before we took the Firecrest in to the pier. I went aboard the tender with a couple of pounds of the stuff. I'm afraid you'll find the valves are ruined. I also took with me a homing signal transmitter, a transistorised battery-powered job, which I attached to the inner after bulkhead of the anchor locker, a place that's not looked at once a year. So, when you hauled the incapacitated tender aboard the Shangri-la — well, we knew where the Shangri-la was."

"I'm afraid I don't follow, Calvert."

"Look at Messrs. Dollmann, Lavorski and Imrie. They follow all right. I know the exact frequency that transmitter sends on — after all, it was my transmitter. One of Mr. Hutchinson's skippers was given this frequency and tuned in to it like all M.F.Vs it has a loop aerial for direction finding, he just had to keep turning the loop till the signal was at full strength. He couldn't miss. He didn't miss."

"Mr. Hutchinson's skippers?" Skouras said carefully. "M.F.Vs you said?"

It was as well, I reflected, that I wasn't overly troubled with self-consciousness, what with Mrs. MacEachern on one hand, Charlotte on the other, and every eye, a large proportion of them hostile to a degree, bent upon me, it could have been embarrassing to a degree, "Mr. Hutchinson has two shark-fishing boats. Before I came to Dubh Sgeir last night I radioed from one of his boats asking for help — the gentlemen you see here. They said they couldn't send boats or helicopters in this weather, in almost zero visibility. I told them the last thing I wanted was their damned noisy helicopters, secrecy was everything, and not to worry about the sea transport, I knew some men for whom the phrase 'zero visibility' was only a joke. Mr. Hutchinson's skippers. They went to the mainland and brought Captain Rawley and his men back here. I didn't think they'd arrive until late at night, that's why Sir Arthur and I were afraid to move before midnight. What time did you get here, Captain Rawley?"

"Nine-thirty."

"So early? I must admit it was a bit awkward without a radio. Then ashore in your little rubber boats, through the side door, waited until the diving-boat came back — and waited and waited."

"We were getting pretty stiff, sir."

Lord Kirkside cleared his throat. Maybe he was thinking of my nocturnal assignation with his daughter.

"Tell me this, Mr. Calvert. If you radioed from Mr. Hutchinson's boat in Craigmore, why did you have to radio again from here later that night?"

"If I didn't, you'd be down among the dead men by this time. I spent the best part of fifteen minutes giving highly detailed descriptions, of Dubh Sgeir externally and of the castle and boathouse layout internally. Everything that Captain Rawley and his men have done had to be done in total darkness. You'll keep an eye on our friends, Captain Rawley? A fishery cruiser will be off Dubh Sgeir shortly after dawn."

The Marines herded them off into the left-hand cave, set three powerful lights shining into the prisoners' faces and mounted a four-man guard with machine- pistols at the ready, Our friends would undoubtedly keep until the fishery cruiser came in the morning.

Charlotte said slowly: "That was why Sir Arthur remained behind this afternoon when you and Mr. Hutchinson went to the Nantesville? To see that I didn't talk to the guards and find out the truth?"

"Why else?"

She took her arm away and looked at me without affection. "So you put me through the hoop," she said quietly. "You let me suffer like this for thirty hours while you knew all the time."

"Fair's fair. You were doing me down, I was doing you down."

"I'm very grateful to you," she said bitterly.

"If you aren't you damn' well ought to be," Uncle Arthur said coldly. This was one for the books, Uncle Arthur talking to the aristocracy, even if only the aristocracy by marriage, in this waspish tone. "If Calvert won't speak for himself, I will."

"Point one: if you hadn't kept on sending your little radio messages, Lavorski would have thought that there was something damned fishy going on and might well have left the last ton or two of gold in the Nantesville and taken off before we got here. People like Lavorski have a highly attuned sixth sense of danger. Point two: they wouldn't have confessed to their crimes unless they thought we were finished. Point three: Calvert wanted to engineer a situation where all attention was on the Firecrest so that Captain Rawley and his men could move into position and so eliminate all fear of unnecessary bloodshed — maybe your blood, my dear Charlotte. Point four, and more important: if you hadn't been in constant radio contact with them, advising them of our impending arrival right up to the moment we came through those doors — we'd even left the saloon door open so that you could clearly overhear us and know all we were doing -there would have been a pitched battle, guns firing as soon as those doors were breached, and who knows how many lives would have been lost. But they knew they were in control, they knew the trap was set, they knew you were aboard with that gun to spring the trap. Point five, and most important of all: Captain

Rawley here was hidden almost a hundred yards away along the cross tunnel and the detachment up above were concealed in a store-room in the castle. How do you think they knew when to move in and move in simultaneously? Because, like all commandos, they had portable radio sets and were listening in to every word of your running commentary. Don't forget your transmitter was stolen from the Firecrest. It was Calvert's transmitter, my dear. He knew the transmitting frequency to the mainland last night. That was after he had — urn -given you a little something to drink and checked your transmitter before using the one up in the castle last night." Charlotte said to me: "I think you are the most devious and detestable and untrustworthy man I've ever met." Her eyes were shining, whether from tears or whatever I didn't know. I felt acutely embarrassed and uncomfortable. She put her hand on my arm and said in a low voice: "You fool, oh, you fool! That gun might have gone off, I — I might have killed you, Philip!"

I patted her hand and said: "You don't even begin to believe that yourself." In the circumstances, I thought it better not to say if that gun had gone off I'd never have trusted a three-cornered file again.

The grey mist was slowly clearing away and the dawn coming up on the quiet dark sea when Tim Hutchinson eased the Firecrest in towards Eilean Oran.

There were only four of us on the boat, Hutchinson, myself, Mrs. MacEachern and Charlotte. I'd told Charlotte to find a bed in Dubh Sgeir castle for the night, but she'd simply ignored me, helped Mrs. MacEachern on to the Firecrest and had made no move to go ashore again. Very self-willed, she was, and I could see that this was going to cause a lot of trouble in the years to come.

Uncle Arthur wasn't with us, a team of wild horses couldn't have dragged Uncle Arthur aboard the Firecrest that night. Uncle Arthur was having his foretaste of Paradise, sitting in front of a log fire in the Dubh Sgeir castle drawing-room, knocking back old Kirkside's superlative whisky and retailing his exploits to a breathless and spell-bound aristocracy. If I were lucky, maybe he'd mention my name a couple of times in the course of his recounting of the epic. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn't.

Mrs. MacEachern wasn't having her foretaste of Paradise, she was there already, a calm dark old lady with a wrinkled brown face who smiled and smiled and smiled all the way to her home on Eilean Oran, I -hoped to God old Donald MacEachern had remembered to change his shirt.