Four o’clock on an autumn afternoon, but already it was more night than day. The sun wasn’t down yet, not by a very long way, but it might as well have been for all the chance it had of penetrating the rolling masses of heavy dark cloud hurrying away to the eastwards to the inky blackness of the horizon beyond Torbay. The slanting sheeting rain that foamed whitely across the bay further reduced what little visibility there was to a limit of not more than four hundred yards. The village itself, half a mile distant and .nestling in the dark shadow of the steeply-rising pine-covered hills behind, might never have existed. Off to the north-west I could sec the navigation lights of a craft rounding the headland, Skouras returning from his stabiliser test run. Down in the Shangri-la’s gleaming galley a master chef would be preparing the sumptuous evening meal, the one to which we hadn’t been invited. I tried to put the thought of that meal out of my mind, but I couldn’t, so I just put it as far away as possible and followed Hunslett into the engine-room.
Hunslett took the spare earphones and squatted beside me on the deck, note-book on his knee. Hunslett was as competent in shorthand as he was in everything else. I hoped that Uncle Arthur would have something to tell us, that Hunslett’s presence there would be necessary. It was.
“Congratulations, Caroline,” Uncle Arthur said without preamble. “You really are on to something.” As far as it is possible for a dead flat monotone voice to assume an overtone of warmth, then Uncle Arthur’s did just that. He sounded positively friendly. More likely it was some freak of transmission or reception but at least he hadn’t started off by bawling me out,
“We’ve traced those Post Office Savings books,” he went on. He rattled off book numbers and details of times and amounts of deposits, things of no interest to me, then said: “Last deposits were on December 27th. Ten pounds in each case. Present balance is £78 143. 6d. Exactly the same in both. And those accounts have not been closed.”
He paused for a moment to let me congratulate him, which I did, then continued.
“That’s nothing, Caroline. Listen. Your queries about any mysterious accidents, deaths, disappearances off the west coasts of Inverness-shire or Argyll, or anything happening to people from that area. We’ve struck oil, Caroline, we’ve really struck oil. My God, why did we never think of this before. Have your pencil handy?” “Harriet has.”
“Here we go. This seems to have been the most disastrous sailing season for years in the west of Scotland. But first, one from last year. The Pinto, a well-found sea-worthy forty-five foot motor cruiser left Kyle of Lochalsh for Oban at eight ajn. September 4th. She should have arrived that afternoon. She never did. No trace of her has ever been found.”
“What was the weather at the time, Annabelle?”
“I thought you’d ask me that, Caroline.” Uncle Arthur’s combination of modesty and quiet satisfaction could be very trying at times. “I checked with the Met. office. Force one, variable. Flat calm, cloudless sky. Then we come to this year. April 6th and April 26th. The Evening Star and the Jeannie Rose. Two East Coast fishing boats – one from Buckie, the other from Fraserburgh,”
“But both based on the west coast?”
“I wish you wouldn’t try to steal my thunder,” Uncle Arthur complained. “Both were based on Oban. Both were lobster boats. The Evening Star, the first one to go, was found stranded on the rocks off Islay. The Jeannie Rose vanished without trace. No member of either crew was ever found. Then again on the 17th of May. This time a well-known racing yacht, the Cap Gris Nez, an English built and owned craft, despite her name, highly experienced skipper, navigator and crew, all of them long-time and often successful competitors in R.O.R.C. races. That class. Left Londonderry for the north of Scotland in fine weather. Disappeared. She was found almost a month later – or what was left of her — washed up on the Isle of Skye.”
“And the crew?”
“Need you ask? Never found. Then the last case, a few weeks ago – August 8th. Husband, wife, two teenage children, son and daughter. Converted lifeboat, the Kingfisher. By all accounts a pretty competent sailor, been at it for years. But he’d never done any night navigation, so he set out one calm evening to do a night cruise. Vanished. Boat and crew.”
“Where did he set out from?”
“Torbay.”
That one word made his afternoon. It made mine, too. I said: “And do you still think the Nantesville is hell and gone to Iceland or some remote fjord in northern Norway?”
“I never thought anything of the kind.” Uncle’s human relationship barometer had suddenly swung back from friendly to normal, normal lying somewhere between cool and glacial. “The significance of the dates will not have escaped you?”
“No, Annabelle, the significance has not escaped me.” The Buckie fishing-boat, the Evening Star, had been found washed up on Islay three days after the S.S. Holmivood had vanished off the south coast of Ireland. The Jeanme Rose had vanished exactly three days after the M.V. Antara had as mysteriously disappeared in the St. George’s Channel. The Cap Gris Nez, the R.O.R.C. racer that had finally landed up on the rocks of the island of Skye had vanished the same day as the M.V. Headley Pioneer had disappeared somewhere, it was thought, off Northern Ireland. And the converted lifeboat, Kingfisher, had disappeared, never to be seen again, just two days after the S.S. Hurricane Spray had left the Clyde, also never to be seen again. Coincidence was coincidence and I classed those who denied its existence with intellectual giants like the twentieth-century South African president who stoutly maintained that the world was flat and that an incautious step would take you over the edge with results as permanent as they would be disastrous: but this was plain ridiculous. The odds against such a perfect matching of dates could be calculated only in astronomical terms: while the complete disappearance of the crews of four small boats that had come to grief in so very limited an area was the final nail in the coffin of coincidence. I said as much to Uncle.
“Let us not waste time by dwelling upon the obvious, Caroline,” Uncle said coldly, which was pretty ungracious of him as the idea had never even entered his head until I had put it there four hours previously. “The point is – what is to be done? Islay to Skye is a pretty big area. Where does this get us?”
“How much weight can you bring to bear to secure the cooperation”of the television and radio networks?”
There was a pause, then: “What do you have in mind, Caroline?” Uncle at his most forbidding.
“An insertion of an item in their news bulletins.”
“Well.” An even longer pause. “It was done daily during the war, of course. I believe it’s been done once or twice since. Can’t compel them, of course – they’re a stuffy lot, both the B.B.C. and the I.T.A.” His tone left little doubt as to his opinion of those diehard reactionaries who brooked no interference, an odd reaction from one who was himself a past-master of brookmanship of this nature. “If they can be persuaded that it’s completely apolitical and in the national interest there’s a chance. What do you want?”
“An item that a distress signal has been received from a sinking yacht somewhere south of Skye, Exact position unknown. Signals ceased, the worst feared, an air-sea search to be mounted at first light to-morrow. That’s all,”
“I may manage it. Your reason, Caroline?”
“I want to look around. I want an excuse to move around without raising eyebrows.”
“You’re going to volunteer the Firecrest for this search and then poke around where you shouldn’t?”
“We have our faults, Annabelle, Harriet and I, but we’re not crazy. I wouldn’t take this tub across the Serpentine without a favourable weather forecast. It’s blowing a Force 7 outside. And a boat search would take a lifetime too long in those parts. What I had in mind was this. At the very eastern rip of Torbay Island, about five miles from the villages there’s a small deserted sandy cove, semicircular and well protected by steep bluffs and pine trees. Will you please arrange to have a long-range helicopter there exactly at dawn.”
“And now it’s your turn to think I am crazy,” Uncle Arthur said coldly. That remark about the sea-keeping qualities of big own brain-child, the Firecrest, would have rankled badly. “I’m supposed to snap my fingers and hey presto I a helicopter will be there at dawn.”
“That’s fourteen hours from now, Annabelle. At five o’clock this morning you were prepared to snap your fingers and have a helicopter here by noon. Seven hours. Exactly half the time. But that was for something important like getting me down to London to give me the bawling out of a lifetime before firing me.”