I still wasn’t smiling when I dragged myself on to the rocks of Eilean Oran, removed the scuba equipment and set the big, rectangular-based, swivel-headed torch between a couple of stones with its beam staring out to sea. I wasn’t smiling, but it wasn’t for the same reason that I hadn’t been smiling when Charlotte had brought the coffee to the wheelhouse just over half an hour ago, I wasn’t smiling because I was in a state of high apprehension and I was in a state of high apprehension because for ten minutes before leaving the Firecrest I’d tried to instruct Sir Arthur and Charlotte in the technique of keeping a boat in a constant position relative to a fixed mark on the shore.
“Keep her on a due west compass heading,” I’d said. “Keep her bows on to the sea and wind. With the engine at ‘ Slow’ that will give you enough steerage way to keep your head up. If you find yourselves creeping too far forwards, come round to the south “— if they’d come round to the north they’d have found themselves high and dry on the rock shores of Eilean Oran – “head due east at half speed, because if you go any slower you’ll broach to, come sharply round to the north then head west again at slow speed. You can see those breakers on the south shore there. Whatever you do, keep them at least two hundred yards away on the starboard hand when you’re going west and a bit more when you’re going east.”
They had solemnly assured me that they would do just that and seemed a bit chuffed because of what must have been my patent lack of faith in them both, but I’d reason for my lack of faith for neither had shown any marked ability to make a clear distinction between shore breakers and the north-south line of the foaming tops of the waves rolling eastwards towards the mainland. In desperation I’d said I’d place a fixed light on the shore and that that would serve as a permanent guide. I just trusted to God that Uncle Arthur wouldn’t emulate die part of an eighteenth-century French sloop’s skipper vis-a-vis the smugglers’ lamp on a rock-girt Cornish shore and run the damned boat aground under the impression that he was heading for a beacon of hope. He was a very clever man, was Uncle Arthur, but the sea was not his home.
The boatshed wasn’t quite empty, but it wasn’t far off it. I flashed my small torch around its interior and realised that MacEachern’s boatshed wasn’t the place I was after. There was nothing there but a weather-beaten, gunwale-splintered launch, with, amidships, an unboxed petrol engine that seemed to be a solid block of rust.
I came to the house. On its northern side, the side remote from the sea, a light shone through a small window. A light at half-past one in the morning. I crawled up to this and hitched a wary eye over the window-sill. A neat, clean, well-cared-for smaH room, with lime-washed walk, mat-covered stone floor and the embers of a drift-wood fire smouldering in an ingle-nook in the corner. Donald MacEachern was sitting in a cane-bottomed chair, still unshaven, still in his month-old shirt, his head bent, staring into the dull red bean of the fire. He had the look of a man who was staring into a dying fire because that was all that was left in the world for him to do. I moved round to the door, turned the handle and went inside.
He heard me and turned around, not quickly, just the way a man would turn who knows there is nothing left on earth that can hurt him. He looked at me, looked at the gun in my hand, looked at his own twelve-bore hanging on a couple of nails on the wall then sank back into his chair again.
He said tonelessly: “Who in the name of God are you?”
“Calvert’s my name. I was here yesterday.” I pulled off my rubber hood and be remembered all right. I nodded to the twelve-bore. “You won’t be needing that gun to-night, Mr. MacEachern. Anyway, you had the safety catch on.”
“You don’t miss much,” he said slowly. “There were no cartridges in the gun.”
“And no one standing behind you, was there?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said tiredly. “Who are you, man? What do you want?”
“I want to know why you gave me the welcome you did yesterday.” I put the gun away. “It was hardly friendly, Mr. MacEachern.”
“Who are you, sir?” He looked even older than he had done yesterday, old and broken and done.
“Calvert. They told you to discourage visitors, didn’t they, Mr. MacEachern?” No answer. “I asked some questions to-night of a friend of yours. Archie MacDonald. The Torbay police sergeant. He told me you were married. I don’t see Mrs. MacEachern.”
He half rose from his cane chair. The old bloodshot eyes had a gleam to them. He sank back again and the eyes dimmed.
“You were out in your boat one night, weren’t you, Mr. MacEachern? You were out in your boat and you saw too much. They caught you and they -took you back here and they took Mrs. MacEachern away and they told you that if you ever breathed a word to anyone alive you would never see your wife that way again. Alive, I mean. They told you to stay here in case any chance acquaintances or strangers should call by and wonder why you weren’t here and raise the alarm, and just to make sure that you wouldn’t be tempted to go the mainland for help – although heaven knows I would have thought there would be no chance in the world of you being as mad as that – they immobilised your engine. Salt-water impregnated sacks, I shouldn’t wonder, so that any chance caller would think it was due to neglect and disuse, not sabotage.”
“Aye, they did that.” He stared sightlessly into the fire, his voice the sunken whisper of a man who is just thinking aloud and hardly aware that he is speaking. “They took her away and they ruined my boat. And I had my life saving in the back room there and they took that too. I wish I’d had a million pounds to give them. If only they had left my Main. She’s five years older than myself.” He had no defences left.
“What in the name of God have you been living on?”
“Every other week they bring me tinned food, not much, and condensed milk. Tea I have, and I catch a fish now and then off the rocks.” He gazed into the fire, his forehead wrinkling as if he were suddenly realising that I brought a new dimension into his life. “Who are you, sir? Who are you? You’re not one of them. And you’re not a policeman, I know you’re not a policeman. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen policemen. But you are a very different kettle of fish.” There were the stirrings of life in him now, life in his face and in his eyes. He stared at me for a full minute, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable under the gaze of those faded eyes, when he said: “I know who you are. I know who you must be. You are a Government man. You are an agent of the British Secret Service.”
Well, by God, I took off my hat to the old boy. There I was, looking nondescript as anything and buttoned to the chin in a scuba suit, and he had me nailed right away. So much for the inscrutable faces of the guardians of our country’s secrets. I thought of what Uncle Arthur would have said to him, the automatic threats of dismissal .and imprisonment if the old man breathed a word. But Donald MacEachern didn’t have any job to be dismissed from and after a lifetime in Eilean Oran even a maximum security prison would have looked like a hostelry to which Egon Ronay would have lashed out six stars without a second thought, so as there didn’t seem to be much point in threatening him I said instead, for the first time in my life: “I am an agent of the Secret Service, Mr. MacEachern. I am going to bring your wife back to you.”
He nodded very slowly, then said: “You will be a very brave man, Mr. Calvert, but you do not know the terrible men who will wait for you.”
“If I ever earn a medal, Mr. MacEachern, it- will be a case of mistaken identification, but, for the rest, I know very well what I am up against. Just try to believe me, Mr. MacEachern. It will be all right. You were in the war, Mr. MacEachern.”
“You know. You were told?”