“I can see that.” The Count was looking at me in a thoughtful fashion. “All very well to opt out of responsibility, but what would you do?” He smiled. If I were to co-opt you again as a temporary unpaid director.”
“Easy,” I said, and the answer did come easily-as the result of the past thirty seconds thinking. I’d watch my back and get on with the ruddy film. ”
“So.” Otto nodded, and he, the Count, and Goin looked at one another in apparent satisfaction. “But now, this moment, what would you do?”
“When do we have supper?”
“Supper?” Otto blinked. “Oh, about eight, say.”
“And it’s now five. About to have three hours kip, that’s what I’m going to do. And I wouldn’t advise anyone to come near me, either for an aspirin or with a knife in their hand, for I’m feeling very nervous indeed.”
Smithy cleared his throat. “Would I get clobbered if I asked for an aspirin now? Or something a bit more powerful to make a man sleep? I feel as if my head has been on a butcher’s block.”
“I can have you asleep in ten minutes. Mind you, you’ll probably feel a damn sight worse when you wake up.”
“Impossible. Lead me to the knock-out drops.”
Inside my cubicle I gripped the handle of the small square double-plate glazed window and opened it with some difficulty. “Can you do that with yours?”
“You do have things on your mind. No mangers allocated for uninvited guests.”
“All the better. Bring a cot in here. You can borrow one from Judith Haynes’s room.”
“Of course,” he said. “There’s a spare one there.”
10
Five minutes later, wrapped to the eyes against the bitter cold, the driving snow and that wind that was now howling, not moaning, across the frozen face of the island, Smithy and I stood in the lee of the cabin, by my window which I’d wedged shut against a wad of paper: there was no handle on the outside to pull it open again but I had with me a multitooled Swiss army knife that could pry open just about anything. We looked at the vaguely seen bulk of the cabin, at the bright light-Coleman lamps have an intensely white flame-streaming from one of the windows in the central section and the pale glimmer of smaller lights from a few of the cubicles.
“No night for an honest citizen to be taking a constitutional,” Smithy said in my ear. “But how about bumping into one of the less honest ones.
“Too soon for him or them to be stirring abroad,” I said. “For the moment the flame of suspicion burns too high for anyone even to clear his throat at the wrong moment. Later, perhaps. But not now.”
We went directly to the provisions store, closed the door behind us and, since the hut was windowless, switched on both our torches. We searched through all the bags, crates, cartons, and packages of food and found nothing untoward.
“What are we supposed to be looking for?” Smithy asked.
“I’ve no idea. Anything, shall we say, that shouldn’t be here.”
“A gun? A big black ribbed bottle marked “Deadly Poison?’
“Something like that.” I lifted a bottle of Haig from a crate and stuck it in my parka pocket. “Medicinal use only,” I explained.
“Of course.” Smithy made a farewell sweep of his torch beam round the walls of the hut: the beam steadied on three small highly varnished boxes on an upper shelf.
“Must be very high grade food in those,” Smithy said. “Caviar for Otto, maybe?”
“Spare medical equipment for me. Mainly instruments. No poisons. Guaranteed.” I made for the door. “Come on.”
“Not checking?”
“No point. Be a bit difficult to hide a submachine gun in one of those.” The boxes were about ten inches by eight.
“OK to have a look, all the same.”
“All right.” I was a bit impatient. “Hurry it up, though.”
Smithy opened the lids of the first two boxes, glanced cursorily at the contents and closed them again. He opened the third box and said: “Broken into your reserves already, I see.”
“I have not.”
“Then somebody has.” He handed over the box and I saw the two vacant moulds in the blue felt.
“Somebody has indeed,” I said. “A hypodermic and a tube of needles.”
Smithy looked at me in silence, took the box, closed the lid and replaced it. He said: I don’t think I like this very much.”
“Twenty-two days could be a very long time,” I said. “Now, if we could only find the stuff that’s going to go inside this syringe.”
“If. You don’t think somebody may have borrowed it for his own private use? Somebody on the hard stuff who’s bent his own plunger? One of the Three Apostles, for instance? Right background, after all-pop world, film world, just kids.”
“No, I don’t think that.”
“I don’t think so either. I wish I did.”
We went from there to the fuel hut. Two minutes was sufficient to discover that the fuel hut had nothing to offer us. Neither had the equipment hut although it afforded me two items I wanted, a screwdriver from the toolbox Eddie had used when he was connecting up the generator and a packet of screws. Smithy said: “What do you want those for?”
“For the screwing up of windows,” I said. “A door is not the only way you can enter the cubicle of a sleeping man.”
“You don’t trust an awful lot of people, do you?”
“I weep for my lost innocence.”
There was no temptation to linger in the tractor shed, not with Stryker lying there, his face ghastly in the reflected wash from the torches, his glazed eyes staring unseeingly at the ceiling. We rummaged through toolboxes, examined metal panniers, even went to the length of probing fuel tanks, oil tanks, and radiators: we found nothing.
We made our way down to the jetty. From the main cabin it was a distance of just over twenty yards and it took us five minutes to find it. We did not dare use our torches and with that heavy and driving snow reducing visibility to virtually arm’s length, we were blind people moving in a blind world. We edged our way very gingerly out to the end of the jetty-the snow had covered up the gaps in the crumbling limestone and, heavily clad as we were, the chances of surviving a tumble into the freezing waters of the Sor-Hamna were not high–located the workboat in the sheltered northwest angle of the jetty and climbed down into it by means of a vertical iron ladder that was so ancient and rusty that the outboard ends of some of the rungs were scarcely more than a quarter of an inch in diameter.
On a dark night the glow from a torch can be seen from a considerable distance even through the most heavily falling snow but now that we were below the level of the jetty wall we switched our torches on again, though still careful to keep them hooded. A quick search of the workboat revealed nothing. We clambered into the fourteen-footer lying alongside and had the same lack of success. From here we transferred ourselves to the mock-up submarine-an iron ladder had been welded both to its side and the conning tower.
The conning tower had a platform welded across its circumference at a distance of about four feet from the top. A hatch in this led to a semicircular platform about eighteen inches below the flange to which the conning tower was secured: from here a short ladder led to the deck of the submarine. We went down and shone our torches around.
“Give me subs any time,” Smithy said. “At least they keep the snow out. That apart, I don’t think I’d care to settle down here.”
The narrow and cramped interior was indeed a bleak and cheerless place. The deck consisted of transverse spaced wooden planks held in position at either side by large butterfly nuts. Beneath the planks we could see, firmly held in position, rows of long narrow grey-painted bars-the four tons of cast-iron that served as ballast. Four square ballast tanks were arranged along either side of the shell-those could be filled to give negative buoyancy-and at one end of the shell stood a small diesel, its exhaust passing through the deckhead as far as the top of the conning tower, to which it was bolted: this engine was coupled to a compressor unit for emptying the ballast tanks. And that, structurally, was all that there was to it: I had been told that the entire mock-up had cost fifteen thousand pounds and could only conclude that Otto had been engaged in the producers’ favourite pastime of cooking the books.
There were several other disparate items of equipment. In a locker in what I took to be the after end of this central mock-up were four small mushroom anchors with chains, together with a small portable windlass: immediately above these was a hatch in the deckhead which gave access to the upper deck: the anchors could only be for mooring the model securely in any desired position. Opposite this locker, securely lashed against a bulkhead, was a lightweight plastic reconstruction of a periscope that appeared to be capable of operating in a sufficiently realistic fashion. Close by were three other plastic models, a dummy three-inch gun presumably for mounting on the deck and two model machine guns which would be fitted, I imagined, somewhere in the conning tower. In the foreword end of the craft were two more lockers: one held a number of cork life jackets, the other six cans of paint and some paint brushes. The cans were marked “Instant Grey.”