I heard the click as the wheelhouse door opened, the louder click as it was shut by a firm hand. A pool of light from a flashlamp preceded the visitor down the four steps from the wheelhouse to the saloon. He paused at the foot of the steps and the light moved away as he made to locate the light-switch. I stepped round the door and did three things at once – I hooked an arm around his neck, brought up a far from gentle knee into the small of his back and ground the muzzle of the Luger into his right ear. Violent stuff, but not unnecessarily violent stuff, it might have been my old friend Quinn. The gasp of pain was enough to show that it wasn’t.
“This isn’t a hearing aid you feel, friend. It’s a Luger pistol. You’re one pound pressure from a better world. Don’t make me nervous.”
The better world seemed to have no appeal for him. He didn’t make me nervous. He made an odd gurgling noise in his throat, he was trying either to speak or breathe, but he stood motionless, head and back arched. I eased the pressure a little.
“Put that light switch on with your left hand. Slowly. Carefully.”
He was very slow, very careful. The saloon flooded with light.
“Raise your hands above your head. As high as you can reach.”
He was a model prisoner, this one, he did exactly 33 he was told. I turned him round, propelled him into the centre of the room and told him to face me.
He was of medium height, nattily dressed in an astrakhan coat and a fur Cossack hat. He had a beautifully trimmed white beard and moustache, with a perfectly symmetrical black streak in the centre of the beard, the only one of its kind I had ever seen. The tanned face was red, either from anger or near-suffocation. From both, I decided. He lowered his hands without permission, sat on the settee, pulled out a monocle, screwed it into his right eye and stared at me with cold fury. I gave him look for look, stare for stare, pocketed the Luger, poured a whisky and handed it to Uncle Arthur. Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason, K.C.B. and all the rest of the alphabet.
“You should have knocked, sir,” I said reproachfully,
“I should have knocked.” His voice sounded half-strangled, maybe I had exerted more pressure than had been necessary. “Do you always greet your guests this way?”
“I don’t have guests, sir. I don’t have friends, either. Not fn the Western Isles. All I have is enemies. Anyone who comes through that door is an enemy. I didn’t expect to see you here, sir.”
“I hope not. In view of that performance, I hope not.” He rubbed his throat, drank some whisky and coughed. “Didn’t expect to be here myself. Do you know how much bullion was aboard the Nantesville?”
“Close on a million, I understand.”
“That’s what I understood. Eight millions! Think of it, eight million pounds’ worth. All this gold that’s being shovelled back from Europe into the vaults at Fort Knox usually goes in small lots, 108 lb. ingots at a time. For safety. For security. In case anything goes wrong. But the Bank knew that nothing could go wrong this time, they knew our agents were aboard, ‘they were behind with their payments, so they cleverly loaded fourteen hundred and forty ingots without telling anyone. Eight million. The Bank is hopping mad. And everyone is taking it out on me.”
And he’d come up here to take it out on me. I said: “You should have let me know. That you were coming.”
“I tried to. You failed to keep your noon-day schedule. The most elementary of crimes, Calvert, and the most serious. You failed to keep a schedule. You or Hunslett. Then I knew things were going from bad to worse. I knew I had to take over myself. So I came by plane and R.A.F. rescue launch.” That would have been the high-speed Jaunch I’d seen taking a bad battering in the Sound as we had headed down towards the cove. “Where’s Hunslett?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know?” He was using his quiet unemphatic tone, the one I didn’t care for very much, “You’re out of your depth in this one, Calvert, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I’m afraid he’s been removed by force. I’m not sure how. What have you been doing in the past two hours, sir?”
“Explain yourself.” I wished he’d stop screwing that damned monocle into his eye. It was no affectation, that monocle, he was nearly blind on that side, but h was an irritating mannerism. At that moment, anything would have irritated me.
“That R.A.F. launch that dropped you off here just now. It should have been here at least two hours ago. Why didn’t you come aboard then?”
“I did. We almost ran the Firecrest down in the darkness as we came round the headland. No one here. So I went and had some dinner. Nothing but baked beans aboard this damned boat as far as I could see.”
“The Columbia hotel wouldn’t offer you much more. Toast below the beans, if you were lucky.” The Columbia was Torbay’s only hotel.
“I had smoked trout, filet mignon and an excellent bottle of hock. I dined aboard the Shangri-la.” This with the slight him of a smite. Uncle Arthur’s Achilles’ heel was showing again: Uncle Arthur loved a lord like nobody’s business, and a knight with a seven-figure income was as good as a lord any day.
“The Shangri-la?” I stared at him, then remembered. “Of course. You told me. You know Lady Skouras well. No, you said you knew her very well and her husband well. How is my old Sir Anthony?”
“Very well,” he said coldly. Uncle Arthur had as much humour as the next man, but discussing titled millionaires in tones of levity was not humorous.
“And Lady Skouras?”
He hesitated. “Well—-”
“Not so well. Pale, drawn, unhappy, with dark smudges under her eyes. Not unlike myself. Her husband mistreats her and mistreats her badly. Mentally and physically. He humiliated her in front of a group of men last night. And she had rope burns on her arms. Why would she have rope burns on her arms, Sir Arthur?”
“Impossible. Quite fantastic. I knew the former Lady Skouras, the one who died this year in hospital. She——”
“She was undergoing treatment in a mental hospital. Skouras as good as told me.”
“No matter. She adored him. He adored her. A man can’t change like that. Sir Anthony – Sir Anthony’s a gentleman.”
“Is he? Tell me how he made his last millions. You saw Lady Skouras, didn’t you?”
“I saw her,” he said slowly. “She was late. She arrived with the filet mignon.” He didn’t seem to find anything funny in that, “She didn’t look very well and she’s a bruise on her right temple. She’d fallen climbing aboard from the tender and hit her head against a guardrail.”
“Hit her head against her husband’s fist, more like. To get back to the first time you boarded the Firecrest this evening. Did you search it?”
“I searched it. All except the after cabin. It was locked, I assumed there was something in there you didn’t want chance callers to see.”
“There was something in there that callers, not chance, didn’t want you to see,” I said slowly. “Hunslett. Hunslett under guard. They were wafting for word of my death, then they’d have lulled Hunslett or kept him prisoner. If word came through that I hadn’t been killed, then they’d have waited until my return and taken me prisoner too. Or killed us both. For by then they would have known that I knew too much to be allowed to live. It takes time, a long time, to open up a strong-room and get all those tons of gold out and they know their time is running out. They’re desperate now. But they still think of everything.”
“They were waiting for word of your death,” Uncle Arthur said mechanically. “I don’t understand.”
“That helicopter you laid on for me, sir. We were shot down to-night after sunset. The pilot’s dead and the machine is at the bottom of the sea. They believe me to be dead also.”
“I see. You go from strength to strength, Calvert.” The absence of reaction was almost total, maybe he was getting punch-drunk by this time, more likely he was considering .the precise phraseology that would return me to the ranks of the unemployed with economy and dispatch. He lit a long, thin and very black cheroot and puffed meditatively. “When we get back to London remind me to show you my confidential report on you.”
“Yes, sir.” So this was how it was coming.
“I was having dinner with the Under-Secretary just forty-eight hours ago. One of .the things he asked me was which country had the best agents in Europe. Told him I’d no idea. But I told him who I thought, on the balance of probabilities, was the best agent in Europe. Philip Calvert.”