When Eight Bells Toll

NINE

We went down the stairs hand in hand. I may have been the last man in the world she would have elected to be alone with on a desert island, but she clung on pretty tightly all the same.

At the foot of the steps we turned right. I flicked on the torch every few yards but it wasn't really necessary, Susan knew every yard of the way. At the end of the hall we turned left along the eastern wing. Eight yards and we stopped at a door on the right-hand side.

"The pantry," she whispered. "The kitchen is beyond that."

I stooped and looked through the keyhole. Beyond was darkness. We passed through the doorway, then into an arch-way giving on to the kitchen. I flashed the tiny beam around the room. Empty.

There were three guards, Susan had said. The outside man, for whom I had accounted. The lad who patrolled the battlements. No, she didn't know what he did, but it was a good guess that he wasn't studying astronomy or guarding against parachutists. He'd have night glasses to his eyes and he'd be watching for fishing vessels, naval craft or fishery cruisers that might happen by and interrupt honest men at their work. He wouldn't see much on a night like this. And the third man, she said, guarded the back kitchen premises, the only entrance to the castle apart from the main gate — and the unfortunates in their cellars down below.

He wasn't in the kitchen premises, so he would be in the cellars down below.

A flight of steps led from the scullery beyond the kitchen down to a stone-flagged floor. To the right of this floor I could see the loom of light. Susan raised a finger to her lips and we made our way soundlessly down to the foot of the steps. I slid a cautious eye round the corner of this passageway.

It wasn't passageway, it was the damnedest flight of steps I'd ever come across. They were lit by two or three far-spaced and very weak electric bulbs, the walls coming to-gether towards the foot like a pair of railway lines disappearing into the distance. Maybe fifty feet — or seventy steps — down, where the first light was, another passageway branched off to the right. There was a stool at the corner of the small stone landing there, and sitting on the stool a man. Across his knees lay a rifle. They certainly went in for the heavy artillery.

I drew back. I murmured to Susan: "Where in hell's name do those steps lead to?"

"The boathouse, of course." A surprised whisper. "Where else?"

Where else, indeed. Brilliant work, Calvert, brilliant work. You'd skirted the south side of the Dubh Sgeir in the helicopter, you'd seen the castle, you'd seen the boathouse, you'd seen nary a handhold on the sheer cliff separating them, and you'd never raised an eyebrow at the glaring obviousness of the fact that ne'er the twain did meet.

"Those are the cellars in that passage going off to the right?" She nodded. "Why so far down? It's a long walk to collect the bubbly."

"They're not really wine-cellars. They used to be used as water reservoirs."

"No other way of getting down there?"

"No. Only this way."

"And if we take five steps down this way he shoots us full of holes with his Lee Enfield. Know who it is?"

"Harry. I don't know his other name. He's an Armenian, Daddy says. People can't pronounce his real name. He's young and smooth and greasy — and detestable."

"He had the effrontery to make a pass at the chieftain's daughter?"

"Yes. It was horrible." She touched her lips with the back of her hand. "He stank of garlic."

"I don't blame him. I'd do it myself if I didn't feel my pension creeping up on me. Call him up and make amends."

"What?"

"Tell him you're sorry. Tell him you misjudged his noble character. Tell him your father is away and this is the first chance you've had of speaking to him. Tell him anything."

"No!"

"Sue!"

"He'll never believe me," she said wildly.

"When he gets within two feet of you, he'll forget all about the reasoning why. He's a man, isn't he?"

"You're a man. And you're only six inches away." The eternal female illogic.

"I've told you how it is, it’s my pension coming between us. Quickly!"

She nodded reluctantly and I disappeared into the shadows of the nearest cellar, reversed gun in hand. She called and he came a running, his rifle at the ready. When he saw who it was, he forgot all about his rifle. Susan started to speak her lines but she might have saved her breath. Harry, if nothing else, was an impetuous young man. That wild Armenian blood. I stepped forwards, arm swinging, and lowered him to the ground. I tied him up and, as I'd run out of handkerchiefs, ripped away part of his shirt-front and used it as a gag. Susan giggled, a giggle with a note of hysteria.

"What's up?" Tasked.

"Harry. He's what they call a snappy dresser. That's a silk shirt. You're no respecter of persons, Mr. Calvert."

"Not persons like Harry. Congratulations. Wasn't so bad, was it?"

"It was still horrible," Again the hand to the mouth. "He's reeking of whisky."

"Youngsters have odd tastes," I said kindly. "You'll grow out of it. At least it must have been an improvement on the garlic."

The boathouse wasn't really a boathouse at all, it was a large vaulting cave formed in a cleft in a natural fault in the cliff strata. At the inner end of the cave longitudinal tunnels stretched away on either side paralleling the coastline, until they vanished beyond the reach of my torch. From the air, the boathouse in the small artificial harbour, a structure of about twenty feet by twenty, had seemed incapable of housing more than two or three fair-sized rowing boats. Inside it was big enough to berth a boat the size of the Firecrest, and then leave room to spare. Mooring bollards, four in number, lined the eastern side of the boathouse. There were signs of recent work where the inner end of the cave had been lengthened in the direction of the longitudinal tunnels to increase the berthing space and provide a bigger working platform, but otherwise it was as it must have been for hundreds of years. I picked up a boathook and tried to test the depth, but couldn't find bottom. Any vessel small enough to be accommodated inside could enter and leave at any state of the tide. The two big doors looked solid but not too solid. There was a small dry-land doorway on the eastern side.

The berth was empty, as I had expected to find it. Our friends were apprehensive and on piecework rates. It wasn't difficult to guess what they were working at, the working platform was liberally stacked with the tools of their trade: an oil engine-driven air compressor with a steel reservoir with outlet valves, a manually-operated, two-cylinder double-acting air pump with two outlets, two helmets with attached corselets, flexible, non-collapsible air tubes with metal couplings, weighted boots, diving dresses, life-cum-telephone lines, lead weights and scuba equipment such as I had myself, with a stack of compressed air cylinders at the ready.

I felt neither surprise nor elation, I'd known this must exist for the past forty-eight hours although I'd become certain of the location only that night. I was faintly surprised perhaps, to see all this equipment here, for this would surely be only the spares. But I shouldn't have been even vaguely surprised. Whatever this bunch lacked, it wasn't a genius for organisation.

I didn't see that night, nor did I ever see, the cellars where the prisoners were housed. After I'd huffed and puffed three-quarters of the way up that interminable flight of steps, I turned left along the passageway where we'd first seen Harry taking his ease. After a few yards the passageway broadened out into a low damp chamber containing a table made of beer-cases, some seats of -the same and, in one corner, some furniture that hadn't yet been drunk. A bottle of whisky, nearly full, stood on the table: Harry's remedy for garlic halitosis.

Beyond this chamber was a massive wooden door secured by an equally massive-looking lock with me key missing. All the celluloid in the world wouldn't open this lot but a beehive plastic explosive would do a very efficient job indeed. I made another of the many mental notes I'd made that night and went up the stairs to rejoin Susan.

Harry had come to. He was saying something in has throat which fortunately couldn't get past his silk-shirted gag to the delicate ears of the chieftain's young daughter, his eyes, to mint a phrase, spoke volumes and he was trying as best he could to do a Houdini with the ropes round his legs and arms, Susan Kirkside was pointing a rifle in his general direction and looking very apprehensive. She needn't have bothered, Harry was trussed like a turkey.

"These people down in the cellars," I said, "They've been there for weeks, some for months. They'll be blind as bats and weak as kittens by the time they get out."

She shook her head. "I think they'll be all right. They're taken out on the landing strip there for an hour and a half every morning under guard. They can't be seen from the sea. We're not allowed to watch. Or not supposed to. I've seen them often. Daddy insisted on it. And Sir Anthony."

"Well, good old Daddy." I stared at her. "Old man Skouras. He comes here?"

"Of course." She seemed surprised at my surprise. "He's one of them. Lavorski and this man Dollmann, the men that do all the arranging, they work for Sir Anthony. Didn't you know? Daddy and Sir Anthony are friends — were friends -before this, I've been in Sir Anthony's London home often."

"But they're not friends now?" I probed keenly.

"Sir Anthony has gone off his head since his wife died," Susan said confidently. I looked at her in wonder and tried to remember when I'd last been so authoritatively dogmatic on subjects I knew nothing about. I couldn't remember. "He married again, you know. Some French actress or other. That wouldn't have helped. She's no good. She caught him on the rebound."

"Susan," I said reverently, "you're really wonderful. I don't believe you'll ever understand what I mean by my pension coming between us. You know her well?"

"I've never met her."

"You didn't have to tell me. And poor old Sir Anthony -he doesn't know what he's doing, is that it?"

"He's all mixed up," she said defensively. "He's sweet, really he is. Or was."

"All mixed up with the deaths of four men, not to mention three of his own," I said. Sergeant MacDonald thought him a good man. Susan thought him sweet. I wondered what she would say if she saw Charlotte Skoura's back. "How do the prisoners do for food?"

"We have two cooks. They do it all. The food is brought down to than."

"What other staff?"

"No other staff. Daddy was made to sack them all four months ago."

That accounted for the state of the watchman's bathroom. I said: "My arrival in the helicopter here yesterday afternoon was duly reported by radio to the Shangri-la, A man with a badly scarred face. Where's the radio transmitter?"

"You know everything, don't you?"

"Know-all Calvert. Where is it?"

"Off the hall. In the room behind the stairs. It's locked."

"I have' keys that'll open the Bank of England. Wait a minute." I went down to the guard's room outside the prisoners' cellar, brought the whisky bottle back up to where Susan was standing and handed it to her. "Hang on to this."

She looked at me steadily. "Do you really need this?"

"Oh my God, sweet youth," I said nastily, "Sure I need it. I'm an alcoholic."

I untied the rope round Harry's ankles and helped him to his feet. He repaid this Samaritan gesture by swinging at me with his right foot but fifteen minutes on the floor hadn't helped his circulation or reactions any and I forestalled him with the same manoeuvre. When I helped him up the second time there was no fight left in him.

"Did you — did you really have to do that?" The revulsion was back in her eyes.

"Did I — did you see what he tried to do to me?" I demanded.

"You men are all the same," she said.

"Oh, shut up!" I snarled. I was old and sick and tired and I'd run right out of the last of my witty ripostes.

The transceiver was a beauty, a big gleaming metallic RCA, the latest model as used in the naval vessels of a dozen nationalities. I didn't waste any time wondering where they had obtained it, that lot were fit for anything. I sat down and started tuning the set, then looked up at Susan. "Go and fetch me one of your father's razor blades."

"You don't want me to hear, is that it?"

"Think what you like. Just get it."

If she'd been wearing a skirt she'd have flounced out of the room. With what she was wearing flouncing was out of the question. The set covered every transmission frequency from the bottom of the long wave to the top of the V.H.F. It took only two minutes to raise SPFX. It was manned night and day the year round. It really was most considerate of the ungodly to provide me with such a magnificent instrument.

Sue Kirkside was back before I started speaking. I was ten minutes on the microphone altogether. Apart from code-names and map references I used plain English throughout. I had to, I'd no book, and time was too short anyway, I spoke slowly and clearly, giving precise instructions about the movements of men, the alignment of radio frequencies, the minutest details of the layout of Dubh Sgeir castle and asking all-important questions about recent happenings on the Riviera. I didn't repeat myself once, and I asked for nothing to be repeated to me, because every word was being recorded. Before I was half-way through, Susan's eyebrows had disappeared up under the blonde fringe and Harry was looking as if he had been sandbagged, I signed off, reset the tuning band to its original position and stood up.

"That's it," I said. "I'm off."

"You're what?" The grey-blue eyes were wide, the eye-brows still up under the fringe, but with alarm, this time, not astonishment, "You're leaving? You're leaving me here?"

"I'm leaving. If you think I'd stay a minute longer in this damned castle than I have to, you must be nuts. I've played my hand far enough already. Do you think I want to be around here when the guards change over or when the toilers on the deep get back here?"

"Toilers on the deep? What do you mean?"

"Skip it." I'd forgotten she knew nothing about what our friends were doing, "It's Calvert for home."

"You've got a gun," she said wildly, "You could — you could capture them, couldn't you?"

"Capture who?" The hell with the grammar.

"The guards. They're on the second floor. They'll be asleep."

"How many?"

"Eight or nine, I'm not sure."

"Eight or nine, she's not sure! Who do you think I am, Superman? Stand aside, do you want me to get killed? And, Susan, tell nothing to anybody. Not even Daddy. Not if you want to see Johnny-boy walk down that aisle. You understand?"

She put a hand on my arm and said quietly but with the fear still in her face: "You could take me with you."

"I could. I could take you with me and ruin everything. If I as much as fired a single shot at any of the sleeping warriors up top, I'd ruin everything. Everything depends on their never knowing that anybody was here to-night. If they suspected that, just had a hint of a suspicion of that, they'd pack their bags and take off into the night. Tonight. And I can't possibly do anything until to-morrow night. You understand, of course, that they wouldn't leave until after they had killed everyone in the cellar. And your father, of course. And they'd stop off at Torbay and make sure that Sergeant MacDonald would never give evidence against them. Do you want that, Susan? God knows I'd love to take you out of here, I'm not made of Portland cement, but if I take you the alarm bells will ring and then they'll pull the plug. Can't you see that? If they come back and find you gone, they'll have one thought and one thought only in their minds: our little Sue has left the island. With, of course, one thought in mind. You must not be missing."

"All right." She was calm now. "But you've overlooking something."

"I'm a great old overlooker. What?"

"Harry. He'll be missing. He'll have to be. You can't leave him to talk."

"He'll be missing. So will the keeper of the gate. I clobbered him on the way in." She started to get all wide-eyed again but I held up my hand, stripped off coat and wind-breaker, unwrapped the razor she'd brought me and nicked my forearm, not too deeply, the way I felt I needed all the blood I had, but enough to let me smear the bottom three inches of the bayonet on both sides. I handed her the tin of Elastoplast and without a word she stuck a strip across the incision. I dressed again and we left, Susan with the whisky bottle and torch, myself with the rifle, shepherding Harry in front of me. Once in the hall I relocked the door with the skeleton key I'd used to open it.

The rain had stopped and there was hardly any wind, but the mist was thicker than ever and the night had turned bitterly cold. The Highland Indian summer was in full swing. We made our way through the courtyard across to where I'd left the bayonet lying on the cliff edge, using the torch, now with the Elastoplast removed from its face, quite freely, but keeping our voices low. The lad maintaining his ceaseless vigil on the battlements couldn't have seen us five yards away with the finest night-glasses in the world, but sound in heavy mist has unpredictable qualities, it can be muffled, it can be distorted, or it can occasionally be heard with surprising clarity and it was now too late in the day to take chances.

I located the bayonet and told Harry to lie face down in the grass; if I'd left him standing he just might have been tempted to kick me over the edge. I gouged the grass in assorted places with heel and toe, made a few more scores with the butt of a bayonet, stuck the blade of the gate-keeper's bayonet in the ground at a slight angle so that the rifle was just clear of the ground, kid Harry down so that the blood-stained bayonet tip was also just dear of the ground, so preventing the blood from running off among the wet grass, scattered most of the contents of the whisky bottle around and carefully placed the bottle, about a quarter full now, close to one of the bayonets. I said to Susan: "And what happened here do you think?"

"It's obvious. They had a drunken fight and both of them slipped on the wet grass over the edge of the cliff."

"And what did you hear?"

"Oh! I heard the sound of two men shouting in the hall. I went on to the landing and I heard them shouting at the tops of their voices. I heard the one tell Harry to get back to his post and Harry saying, no, by God, he was going to settle it now. I'll say both men were drunk, and I won't repeat the kind of language they were using. The last I heard they were crossing the courtyard together, still arguing."

"Good girl. That's exactly what you heard."

She came with us as far as the place where I'd left the gate-keeper. He was still breathing, I used most of what rope I'd left to tie them together at the waist, a few feet apart, and wrapped the end of it in my hand. With their arms lashed behind their backs they weren't going to have much balancing power and no holding power at all on the way down that steep and crumbling path to the landing stage. If either slipped or stumbled I might be able to pull them back to safety with a sharp tug. There was going to be none of this Alpine stuff with the rope around my waist also. If they were going to step out into the darkness they were going to do it without me.

I said: "Thank you, Susan. You have been a great help. Don't take any more of those Nembutal tablets to-night. They'd think it damn funny if you were still asleep at midday to-morrow."

"I wish it were midday the next day. I won't let you down, Mr. Calvert. Everything is going to be all right, isn't it?"

"Of course."

There was a pause, then she said: "You could have pushed these two over the edge if you wanted to, couldn't you. But you didn't. You could have cut Harry's arm, but you cut your own. I'm sorry for what I said, Mr. Calvert. About you being horrible and terrible. You do what you have to do." Another pause. "I think you're rather wonderful."

"They all come round in the end," I said, but I was talking to myself, she'd vanished into the mist. I wished drearily that I could have agreed with her sentiments, I didn't feel wonderful at all, I just felt dead tired and worried stiff for with all the best planning in the world there were too many imponderables and I wouldn't have bet a brass farthing on the next twenty-four hours. I got some of the worry and frustration out of my system by kicking the two prisoners to their feet.

We went slowly down that crumbling treacherous path in single file, myself last, torch in my left hand, rope tightly -but not too tightly — in my right hand. I wondered vaguely as we went why I hadn't nicked Harry instead of myself. It would have been so much more fitting, Harry's blood on Harry's bayonet.

"You had a pleasant outing, I trust?" Hutchinson asked courteously.

"It wasn't dull. You would have enjoyed it." I watched Hutchinson as he pushed the Firecrest into the fog and the darkness, "Let me into a professional secret. How in the world did you find your way back into this pier to-night? The mist is twice as bad as when I left. You cruise up and down for hours, impossible to take any bearings, there's the waves, tide, fog, currents — and yet there you are, right on the nose, to the minute. It can't be done."

"It was an extraordinary feat of navigation," Hutchinson said solemnly. "There are such things as charts, Calvert, and if you look at that large-scale one for this area you'll see an eight fathom bank, maybe a cable in length, lying a cable and a half out to the west of the old pier there. I just steamed out straight into wind and tide, waited till the depth-sounder showed I was over the bank and dropped the old hook. At the appointed hour the great navigator lifts his hook and lets wind and tide drift him ashore again. Not many men could have done it."

"I'm bitterly disappointed," I said. "I'll never think the same of you again. I suppose you used the same technique on the way in?"

"More or less. Only I used a series of five banks and patches. My secrets are gone for ever. Where now?"

"Didn't Uncle Arthur say?"

"You misjudge Uncle Arthur. He says he never interferes with you in — what was it? — The execution of a field operation. 'I plan,' he said. ' co-ordinate. Calvert finishes the job'."

"He has his decent moments," I admitted.

"He told me a few stories about you in the past hour. I guess it's a privilege to be along."

"Apart from the four hundred thousand quid or whatever?"

"Apart, as you say, from the green men. Where to, Calvert?"

"Home. If you can find it in this lot."

"Craigmore? I can find it." He puffed at his cigar and held the end close to his eyes. "I think I should put this out. It's getting so I can't even see the length of the wheelhouse windows, far less beyond them. Uncle Arthur's taking his time, isn't he?"

"Uncle Arthur is interrogating the prisoners."

"I wouldn't say he'd get much out of that lot."

"Neither would I. They're not too happy."

"Well, it teas a nasty jump from the pier to the foredeck. Especially with the bows plunging up and down as they were. And more especially with their arms tied behind their backs."

"One broken ankle and one broken forearm," I said. "It could have been worse. They could have missed the fore-deck altogether."

"You have a point," Hutchinson agreed. He stuck his head out the side window and withdrew it again. "It’s not the cigar," he announced. "No need to quit smoking. Visibility is zero, and I mean zero. We're flying blind on instruments. You may as well switch on the wheelhouse lights. Makes it all that easier to read the charts, depth-sounder and compass and doesn't affect the radar worth a damn." He stared at me as the light came on. "What the hell are you doing in that flaming awful outfit?"

"This is a dressing-gown," I explained. "I've three suits and all three are soaked and ruined. Any luck, sir?" Uncle Arthur had just come in to the wheelhouse.

"One of them passed out." Uncle Arthur wasn't looking very pleased with himself. "The other kept moaning so loudly that I couldn't make myself heard. Well, Calvert, the story."

"The story, air? I was just going to bed. I've told you the story."

"Half a dozen quick sentences that I couldn't hear above their damned caterwauling," he said coldly. "The whole story, Calvert."

"I'm feeling weak, sir."

"I've rarely known a time when you weren't feeling weak, Calvert. You know where the whisky is."

Hutchinson coughed respectfully. "I wonder if the admiral would permit — "

"Certainty, certainly," Uncle Arthur said in a quite different tone. "Of course, my boy." The boy was a clear foot taller than Uncle Arthur. "And while you're at it, Calvert, you might bring one for me, too, a normal-sized one." He had his nasty side to him, had Uncle Arthur.

I said "good night" five minutes later. Uncle Arthur wasn't too pleased, I'd the feeling he thought I'd missed out on the suspense and fancy descriptions, but I was as tired as the old man with the scythe after Hiroshima. I looked in on Charlotte Skouras, she was sleeping like the dead. I wondered about that chemist back in Torbay, he'd been three parts asleep, myopic as a barn owl and crowding eighty. He could have made a mistake. He could have had only a minimal experience in the prescribing of steep-inducing drugs for those who lived in the land of the Hebridean prayer: "Would that the peats might cut themselves and the fish jump on the shore, that I upon my bed might lie, and sleep for ever more."

But I'd done the old boy an injustice. After what was, to me, our miraculous arrival in Craigmore's apology for a harbour it had taken me no more than a minute to shake Charlotte into something resembling wakefulness. I told her to get dressed — a cunning move this to make her think I didn't know she was still dressed — and come ashore. Fifteen minutes after that we were all inside Hutchinson's house and fifteen minutes still later, when Uncle Arthur and I had roughly splinted the prisoners' fractures and locked them in a room illuminated only by a skylight that would have taken Houdini all his time to wriggle through, I was in bed in another tiny box-room that was obviously the sleeping-quarters of the chairman of the Craigmore's an gallery selection committee, for he'd kept all the best exhibits to himself. I was just dropping off to sleep, thinking that if the universities ever got around to awarding Ph.D.s to house agents, the first degree would surely go to the first man who sold a Hebridean hut within sniffing distance of a flensing shed, when the door opened and the lights came on. I blinked open exhausted eyes and saw Charlotte Skouras softly closing the door behind her. "Go away," I said. "I'm sleeping."

"May I come in?" she asked. She gazed around the art gallery and her lips moved in what could have been the beginnings of a smile. "I would have thought you would have gone to sleep with the lights on to-night."

"You should see the ones behind the wardrobe doors," I boasted. I slowly opened my eyes as far as I could without mechanical aid. "Sorry, I'm tired. What can I do? I'm not at my best receiving lady callers in the middle of the night."

"Uncle Arthur's next door. You can always scream for help if you want to," She looked at a moth-eaten armchair. "May I sit down?"

She sat down. She still wore that uncrushable white dress and her hair was neatly combed, but that was about all you could say for her. Attempts at humour there might have been in her voice, but there was none in her face and none in her eyes. Those brown, wise, knowing eyes, eyes that knew all about living and loving and laughter, the eyes that had once made her the most sought-after actress of her time now held only sadness and despair. And fear. Now that she had escaped from her husband and his accomplices, there should have been no need for fear. But it was there, half-buried in the tired brown eyes, but there. Fear was an expression I knew. The lines round the eyes and mouth that looked so right, so inevitable, when she smiled or laughed — in the days when she had smiled and laughed — looked as if they had been etched by time and suffering and sorrow and despair into a face that had never known laughter and love. Charlotte Skouras's face, without the Charlotte Meiner of old behind it, no longer looked as if it belonged to her. A worn, a weary and an alien face. She must have been about thirty-five, I guessed, but she looked a deal older. And yet when she sat in that chair, almost huddled in that chair, the Craigmore art gallery no longer existed.

She said flatly: "You don't trust me, Philip."

"What on earth makes you say that? Why shouldn't I?"

"You tell me. You are evasive, you will not answer questions. No, that is wrong, you will and you do answer questions, but I know enough of men to know that the answers you give me are the ones you want to give me and not the ones I should hear. Why should this be, Philip? What have I done that you should not trust me?"

"So the truth is not in me? Well, I suppose I do stretch it a bit at times, I may even occasionally tell a lie. Strictly in the line of business, of course. I wouldn't lie to a person like you." I meant it and intended not to — unless I had to do it for her sake, which was different.

"Why should you not lie to a person like me?"

"I don't know how to say it. I could say I don't usually lie to lovely and attractive women for whom I have a high regard, and then you'd cynically say I was stretching the truth till it snapped, and you'd be wrong because it is the truth, if truth lies in the eye of the beholder. I don't know if that sounds like an insult, it's never meant to be. I could say it's because I hate to see you sitting there all washed up and with no place to go and no one to turn to at the one time in your life you need some place to go and someone to turn to, but I suppose again that might sound like an insult. I could say I don't lie to my friends, but that again would be an insult, the Charlotte Skourases of this world don't make friends with government hirelings who kill for their wages. It's no good. I don't know what to say, Charlotte, except that it doesn't matter whether you believe me or not as long as you believe that no harm will come to you from me and, as long as I’m near you, no harm will come to you from anyone else either. Maybe you don't believe that either, maybe your feminine intuition has stopped working."

"It is working — what you say? — overtime. Very hard indeed." The brown eyes were still and the face without expression. "I do think I could place my life in your hands."

"You might not get it back again."

"If s not worth all that much. I might not want it back."

She looked at me for a long moment when there was no fear in her eyes, then stated down at her folded hands. She gazed at them so long that I finally looked in the same direction myself, but there was nothing wrong with her hands that I could see. Finally she looked up with an almost timid half-smile that didn't belong to her at all.

"You are wondering why I came," she asked.

"No. You've told me. You want me to tell you a story. Especially the beginning and end of the story."

She nodded. "When I began as a stage actress, I played very small parts, but I knew what the play was all about. In this real-life play, I'm still playing a very small part. Only, I no longer know what the play is all about. I come on for three minutes in Act 2, but I have no idea what has gone before, I'm back for another minute in Act 4, but I've no idea in the world what's happened between Acts 2 and 4. And I cannot begin to imagine how it will all end." She half-lifted her arms, turning the palms upwards. "You cannot imagine how frustrating this can be for a woman."

"You really know nothing of what has gone before this?"

"I ask you to believe me."

I believed her. I believed her because I knew it to be true.

"Go to the front room and bring me, as they say in these parts, a refreshment," I said. "I grow weaker by the hour."

So she rose obediently and went to the front room and brought me the refreshment which gave me just enough strength to tell her what she wanted to know.

"They were a triumvirate," I said, which if not strictly accurate, was close enough to the truth for my explanation. "Sir Anthony, Lavorski, who, I gather, was not only his public and private accountant, but his overall financial director as well, and John Dollmann, the managing director of the shipping companies — they were split up for tax reasons -associated with your husband's oil companies. I thought that MacCallum, the Scots lawyer, and Jules Biscarte, the lad with the beard who owns one of the biggest merchant banks in Paris, was in with them too. But they weren't. At least not Biscarte. I think he was invited aboard ostensibly to discuss business but actually to provide our triumvirate with information that would have given them the basis for next coup, but he didn't like the way the wind was blowing and shied off, I know nothing about MacCallum."

"I know nothing about Biscarte," Charlotte said, "Neither he nor Mr. MacCallum stayed aboard the Shangri-la, they were at the Columba hotel for a few days and were invited out twice for dinner. They haven't been aboard since the night you were there."

"Among other things they didn't care for your husband's treatment of you."

"I didn't care for it myself, I know what Mr. MacCallum was doing aboard. My husband was planning to build a refinery in the Clyde estuary this coming winter and MacCallum was negotiating the lease for him. My husband said that, by the end of the year, he expected to have a large account of uncommitted capital for investment."

"I'll bet he did, that's as neat a phrase for the proceeds of grand larceny as ever I've come across, Lavorski, I think we'll find, was the instigator and guiding brain behind all this. Lavorski it would have been who discovered that the Skouras empire was badly in need of some new lifeblood in the way of hard cash and saw the way of putting matters right by using means they already had close to hand."

"But — but my husband was never short of money," Charlotte objected. "He had the best of everything, yachts, cars, houses — "

"He was never short in that sense. Neither were half the millionaires who jumped off the New York skyscrapers at the time of the stock market crash. Do be quiet, there's a good girl, you know nothing about high finance." Coming from a character who eked out a bare living from an inadequate salary, I reflected, that was very good indeed. "Lavorski struck upon the happy idea of piracy on a grand scale — vessels carrying not less than a million pounds' worth of specie at a time."

She stared at me, her lips parted. I wished I had teeth like that, instead of having had half of them knocked out by Uncle Arthur's enemies over the years. Uncle Arthur, I mused bitterly, was twenty-five years older than I was and was frequently heard to boast that he'd still to lose his first tooth. She whispered: "You're making all this up."

"Lavorski made it all up. I'm just telling you, I wouldn't have the brains to think of something like that. Having thought up this splendid scheme for making money, they found themselves with three problems to solve: how to discover when and where large quantities of specie were being shipped, how to seize those ships and how to hide them while they opened the strong-room — a process which in ships fitted with the most modern strong-rooms can take anything up to a day — and removed said specie."

"Problem number one was easy. I have no doubt that they may have suborned high-ranking banking officials — the fact that they tried it on with Biscarte is proof of that — but I don't think it will ever be possible to bring those men to justice. But it will be possible to arrest and very successfully indict their ace informant, their trump card, our good friend the belted broker, Lord Charnley. To make a real good-going success of piracy you require the co-operation of Lloyd's. Well, that's an actionable statement, the co-operation of someone in Lloyd's. Someone like Lord Charnley. He is, by profession, marine underwriter at Lloyd's, Stop staring at me like that, you're putting me off."

"A large proportion of valuable marine cargoes are insured at Lloyd's. Charnley would know of at least a number of those. He would know the amount, the firm or bank of dispatch, and possibly the date of dispatch and vessel."

"But Lord Charnley is a wealthy man," she said.

"Lord Charnley gives the appearance of being a wealthy man," I corrected. "Granted, he had to prove that he was a man of substance to gain admission to the old club, but he may have backed the wrong insurance horses or played the Stock market. He either needed money or wanted money. He may have plenty but money is like alcohol, some people can take it and some can't, and with those who can't the more money they have the more they require."

"Dollmann solved problem two — the hi-jacking of the specie. I shouldn't imagine this strained his resources too far. Your husband ships his oil into some very odd and very tough places indeed and it goes without saying that he employs some very odd and very tough people to do it. Dollmann wouldn't have recruited the hi-jacking crew himself, he probably singled out our good friend Captain Imrie, who will prove to have a very interesting history, and gave him the authority to go through the Skouras fleets and hand-pick suitable men for the job. Once the hi-jacking crew was assembled and ready, Messrs. Skouras, Lavorski and Dollmann waited till the victim was on the high seas, dumped you and the stewardess in a hotel, embarked the lads on the Shangri-la, intercepted die specie-carrying vessel and by one of a series of ruses I'll tell you about later, succeeded in boarding it and taking over. Then the Shangri-la landed the captured crew under guard while the prize crew sailed the hi-jacked vessel to the appointed hiding-place."

"It can't be true, it can't be true," she murmured. It was a long time since I'd seen any woman wringing her hands but Charlotte Skouras was doing it then. Her face was quite drained of colour. She knew that what I was saying was true and she'd never heard of any of it before. "Hiding place, Philip? What hiding place?"

"Where would you hide a ship, Charlotte?"

"How should I know?" She shrugged tiredly. "My mind is not very clear to-night. Up in the Arctic perhaps, or in a lonely Norwegian fjord or some desert island. I can't think any more, Philip. There cannot be many places. A ship is a big thing."

"There are millions of places. You can hide a ship practically anywhere in the world. All you have to do is to open the bilge-valves and engine-room non-return valves to the bilges and detonate a couple of scuttling charges."

"You mean — you mean that "

"I mean just that. You send it to the bottom. The west side of the Sound to the east of Dubh Sgeir island, a cheery stretch of water rejoicing in the name of Beul nan Uamh — the mouth of the grave — must be the most densely packed marine graveyard in Europe to-day. At dead slack water the valves were opened at a very carefully selected spot in the Beul nan Uamh and down they went, all five of them, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. Tide tables show that, coincidentally, most of them were sunk at or near midnight. Cease upon the midnight, as the poet says, only in this case with a very great deal of pain, at least for the underwriters involved. Beul nan Uamh. Odd, I never thought of it before. A very apt name indeed. The mouth of the grave. Damn place is printed far too large in the chart, it doesn't have to be very obvious to be too obvious for Calvert."

She hadn't been listening to my meanderings. She said: "Dubh Sgeir? But — but that's the home of Lord Kirkside."

"It's not but, it's because. The hiding place was picked either by your husband, or, if someone else, then the arrangement was made through your husband. I never knew until recently that your husband was an old drinking pal of Lord Kirkside. I saw him yesterday, but he wouldn't talk. Nor would his charming daughter."

"You do move around. I've never met the daughter."

"You should. She thinks you're an old gold-digging hag. A nice kid really. But terrified, terrified for her life and those of others."

"Why on earth should she be?"

"How do you think our triumvirate got Lord Kirkside to agree to their goings-on?"

"Money. Bribery."

I shook my head. "Lord Kirkside is a Highlander and a gentleman. It's a pretty fierce combination. Old Skouras could never lay hands on enough money to bribe Lord Kirkside to pass the uncollected fares box on a bus, if he hadn't paid. A poor illustration, Lord Kirkside wouldn't recognise a bus even if it ran over him, but what I mean is, the old boy is incorruptive. So your charming friends kidnapped old Kirkside's elder son — the younger lives in Australia — and just to make sure that Susan Kirkside wouldn't be tempted to do anything silly, they kidnapped her fiancé. A guess, but a damned good one. They're supposed to be dead."

"No, no," she whispered. Her hand was to her mouth and her voice was shaking. "My God, no!"

"My God, yes. It's logical and tremendously effective. They also kidnapped Sergeant MacDonald's sons and Donald MacEachern's wife for the same reason. To buy silence and co-operation."

"But — but people just can't disappear like that"

"We're not dealing with street comer boys, we're dealing with criminal masterminds. Disappearances are rigged to look like accidental death. A few other people have disappeared also, people who had the misfortune to be hanging around in small private boats while our friends were waiting for the tide to be exactly right before opening the sea-cocks on the hi-jacked ships."

"Didn't it arouse police suspicion? Having so many small boats disappear in the same place."

"They sailed or towed two of those boats fifty or more miles away and ran them on the rocks. Another could have disappeared anywhere. The fourth did set sail from Torbay and disappeared, but the disappearance of one boat is not enough to arouse suspicion."

"It must be true, I know it must be true." She shook her head as if she didn't believe it was true at all. "It all fits so well, it explains so many things and explains them perfectly. But — but what's the good of knowing all this now? They're on to you, they know you know that something is far wrong and that that something is in Loch Houron. They'll leave-"

"How do they know we suspect Loch Houron?"

"Uncle Arthur told me in the wheelhouse last night." Surprise in her voice. "Don't you remember?"

I hadn't remembered. I did now. I was half-dead from lack of sleep. A stupid remark. Perhaps even a give-away remark. I was glad Uncle Arthur hadn't heard that one.

"Calvert nears the sunset of his days," I said. "My mind's going. Sure they'll leave. But not for forty-eight hours yet. They will think they have plenty of time, it's less than eight hours since we instructed Sergeant MacDonald to tell them that we were going to the mainland for help."

"I see," she said dully. "And what did you do on Dubh Sgeir to-night, Philip?"

"Not much. But enough." Another little white lie. "Enough to confirm my every last suspicion. I swam ashore to the link harbour and picked the side door of the boathouse. It's quite a boathouse. Not only is it three times as big on the inside as it is from the outside, but it's stacked with diving equipment."

"Diving equipment?"

"Heaven help us all, you're almost as stupid as I am. How on earth do you think they recover the stuff from the sunken vessels? They use a diving-boat and the Dubh Sgeir boathouse is its home."

"Was — was that all you found out?"

"There was nothing more to find out. I had intended taking a look round the castle — there's a long flight of steps leading up to it from the boatyard inside the cliff itself — but there was some character sitting about three parts of the way up with a rifle in his hand. A guard of some sort. He was drinking out of some son of bottle, but he was doing his job for all that. I wouldn't have got within a hundred steps of him without being riddled. I left"

"Dear God," she murmured. "What a mess, what a terrible mess. And you've no radio, we're cut off from help. What are we going to do? What are you going to do, Philip?"

"I'm going there in the Firecrest this coming night, that's what I'm going to do. I have a machine-gun under the settee of the saloon in the Firecrest and Uncle Arthur and Tim Hutchinson will have a gun apiece. We'll reconnoitre. Their time is running short and they'll want to be gone to-morrow at the latest. The boathouse doors are ill-fitting and if there's no light showing that will mean they still haven't finished their diving. So we wait till they have finished and come in. We'll see the light two miles away when they open the door to let the diving-boat in to load up all the stuff they've cached from the four other sunken ships. The front doors of the boathouse will be closed, of course, while they load up. So we go in through the front doors. On the deck of the Firecrest. The doors don't look all that strong to me. Surprise is everything. Well catch them napping. A sub-machine-gun in a small enclosed space is a deadly weapon."

"You'll be killed, you'll be killed!" She crossed to and sat on the bed-side, her eyes wide and scared, "Please, Philip! Please, please don't. You'll be killed, I tell you, I beg of you, don't do it!" She seemed very sure that I would be killed.

"I have to, Charlotte. Time has run out. There's no other way."

"Please." The brown eyes were full of unshed tears. This I couldn't believe. "Please, Philip. For my sake."

"No," A tear-drop fell at the corner of my mouth, it tasted as salt as the sea. "Anything else in the world. But not this."

She rose slowly to her feet and stood there, arms hanging limply by her side, tears trickling down her cheeks. She said dully: "It's the maddest plan I've ever heard in my life," turned and left the room, switching off the light as she went.

I lay there staring into the darkness. There was sense in what the lady said. It was, I thought, the maddest plan I’ve ever heard in my life. I was damned glad I didn't have to use it.