When Eight Bells Toll. Alistair MacLean

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       TWO

       Tuesday: 3 a.m. – dawn

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

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

      ‘How did it go?’

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

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

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

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

      ‘We’re leaving?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      ‘I half expected to have them waiting on the doorstep when I got back to the Firecrest. We’re going to have guests, all right. Whatever our pals aboard the Nantesville may be, they’re no fools. They’ll have figured out by this time that I could have approached only by dinghy. They’ll know damn’ well that it was no nosey-parker local prowling about the ship – local lads in search of a bit of fun don’t go aboard anchored ships in the first place. In the second place the locals wouldn’t go near Beul nan Uamh – the mouth СКАЧАТЬ