“There are some things you are better not knowing, my dear, Why distress yourself unnecessarily? Just leave this to us.”
“You haven’t had a good look at me recently, have you, Sir Arthur?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t understand.”
“It may have escaped your attention but Fm not a child any more. I’m not even young any more. Please don’t treat
me as a juvenile. And if you want to get to that settee to-night »
“Very well. If you insist. The violence, I’m afraid, has not all been one-sided. Calvert, as I said, was about the Nantesville. He found my two operatives. Baker and Delmont.” Uncle Arthur had the impersonal emotionless voice of a man checking his laundry list. “Both men had been stabbed to death. This evening the pilot of Calvert’s helicopter was killed when the machine was shot down in the Sound of Torbay. An hour after that Hunslett was murdered. Calvert found him in the Firecrest’s engine-room with a broken neck.”
Uncle Arthur’s cheroot glowed and faded at least half a dozen times before Charlotte spoke. The shake was back in her voice. “They are fiends. Fiends.” A long pause, then: “How can you cope with people like that?”
Uncle Arthur puffed a bit more then said candidly: “I don’t intend to try. You don’t find generals slugging it out hand-to-hand in the trenches. Calvert will cope with them. Good night, my dear.”
He pushed off. I didn’t contradict him. But I knew that Calvert couldn’t cope with them. Not any more, he couldn’t. Calvert had to have help. With a crew consisting of a myopic boss and a girl who, every time I looked at her, listened to her or thought of her, starred the warning bells clanging away furiously in the back of my head, Calvert had to have a great deal of help. And he had to have it fast.
After Uncle Arthur had retired, Charlotte and I stood in silence in the darkened wheelhouse. But a companionable silence. You can always tell. The rain drummed on the wheel-house roof. It was as dark as it ever becomes at sea and the patches of white fog were increasing in density and number. Because of them I had cut down to half speed and with the loss of steerage way and that heavy westerly sea coining up dead astern I’d normally have been hard put to it to control the direction of the Firecrest: but I had the auto-pilot on and switched to “Fine”and we were doing famously. The auto-pilot was a much better helmsman than I was. And streets ahead of Uncle Arthur.
Charlotte said suddenly: “What is it you intend to do to-night?”
“You are a gourmand for information. Don’t you know that Uncle Arthur – sorry, Sir Arthur – and I are engaged upon a highly secret mission? Security is all.”
“And now you’re laughing at me – and forgetting I’m along on this secret mission too.”
“I’m glad you’re along and I’m not laughing at you, because I’ll be leaving this boat once or twice to-night and I have to have somebody I can trust to look after it when I’m away.”
“You have Sir Arthur.”
“I have, as you say. Sir Arthur, There’s no one alive for whose judgment and intelligence I have greater respect. But at the present moment I’d trade in all the judgment and intelligence in the world for a pair of sharp young eyes. Going by to-night’s performance, Sir Arthur shouldn’t be allowed out without a white stick. How are yours?”
“Well, they’re not so young any more, but I think they’re sharp enough.”
“So I can rely on you?”
“On me? I – well, I don’t know anything about handling boats.”
“You and Sir Arthur should make a great team, I saw you star once in a French film about——”
“We never left the studio. Even in the studio pool I had a stand-in.”
“Well, there be no stand-in to-night.” I glanced out through the streaming windows. “And no studio pool. This is the real stuff, the genuine Atlantic. A pair of eyes, Charlotte, that’s all I require. A pair of eyes. Just cruising up and down till I come back and seeing that you don’t go on the rocks. Can you do that?”
“Will I have any option?”
“Nary an option.”
“Then I’ll try. Where are you going ashore?”
“Eilean Oran and Craigmore. The two innermost islands in Loch Houron. If,” I said thoughtfully, “I can find them.”
“Eilean Oran and Craigmore.” I could have been wrong, but I thought the faint French accent a vast improvement on the original Gaelic pronunciation. “It seems so wrong. So very wrong. In the middle of all this hate and avarice and killing. These names – they breathe the very spirit of romance.”
“A highly deceptive form of respiration, my dear.” I’d have to watch myself, I was getting as bad as Uncle Arthur. “Those islands breathe the very spirit of bare, bleak and rocky desolation. But Eilean Oran and Craigmore hold the key to everything. Of that I’m very sure.”
She said nothing. I stared out -through the high-speed Kent clear-view screen and wondered if I’d see Dubh Sgeir before it saw me. After a couple of minutes I felt a hand on my upper arm and she was very close to me. The hand was trembling. Wherever she’d come by her perfume it hadn’t been bought in a supermarket or fallen out of a Christmas cracker. Momentarily and vaguely I wondered about the grievous impossibility of ever understanding the feminine mind: before fleeing for what she had thought to be her life and embarking upon a hazardous swim in the waters of Torbay harbour, she hadn’t forgotten to pack a sachet of perfume in her polythene kit-bag. For nothing was ever surer than that any perfume she’d been wearing had been well and truly removed before I’d fished her out of Torbay harbour.
“Philip?”
Well, this was better than the Mr. Calvert stuff. I was glad Uncle Arthur wasn’t there to have his aristocratic feelings scandalised, I said: “Uh-huh?”
“I’m sorry.” She said it as if she meant it and I supposed I should have tried to forget that she was once the best actress in Europe. “I’m truly sorry. About what I said -about what I thought — earlier on. For thinking you were a monster. The men you killed, I mean. I – well, I didn’t know about Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and the helicopter pilot. All your friends. I’m truly sorry, Philip. Truly.”
She was overdoing it. She was also too damn’ close. Too damn’ warm. You’d have required a pile-driver in top condition to get a cigarette card between us. And that perfume that hadn’t fallen out of a cracker – intoxicating, the ad-boys in the glossies would have called it. And all the time the warning bells were clanging away like a burglar alarm with the St. Virus’s dance. I made a manful effort to do something about it. I put my mind to higher things.
She said nothing. She just squeezed my arm a bit more and even the pile-driver would have gone on strike for piece-work rates. I could hear the big diesel exhaust thudding away behind us, a sound of desolate reassurance. The Firecrest swooned down the long overtaking combers then gently soared again. I was conscious for the first time of a curious meteorological freak in the Western Isles. A marked rise in temperature after midnight. And I’d have to speak to the Kent boys about their guarantee that their clearview screen wouldn’t mist up under any conditions, but maybe that wasn’t fair, maybe they’d never visualised conditions like this. I was just thinking of switching off the auto-pilot to give me something to do when she said: “I think I’ll go below soon. Would you like a cup of coffee first?”
“As long as you don’t have to put on a light to do it. And as long as you don’t trip over Uncle Arthur — I mean, Sir—–”
“Uncle Arthur will do just fine,” she said. “It suits him.” Another squeeze of the arm and she was gone.
The meteorological freak was of short duration. By and by the temperature dropped back to normal and the Kent guarantee became operative again. I took a chance, left the Firecrest to its own devices and nipped aft to the stern locker. I took out my scuba diving equipment, together with air-cylinders and mask, and brought them for’ard to the wheelhouse.
It took her twenty-five minutes to make the coffee. Calor gas has many times the calorific efficiency of standard domestic coal gas and, even allowing for the difficulties of operating in darkness, this was surely a world record for slowness in making coffee at sea. I heard the clatter of crockery as the coffee was brought through the saloon and smiled cynically to myself in the darkness. Then I thought of Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and Williams, and I wasn’t smiling any more.