“You know everything, don’t you?”
“Know-all Calvert. Where is it?”
“Off the hall. In the room behind the stairs. It’s locked.”
“I have’ keys that’ll open the Bank of England. Wait a minute.” I went down to the guard’s room outside the prisoners’ cellar, brought the whisky bottle back up to where Susan was standing and handed it to her. “Hang on to this.”
She looked at me steadily. “Do you really need this?”
“Oh my God, sweet youth,” I said nastily, “Sure I need it. I’m an alcoholic.”
I untied the rope round Harry’s ankles and helped him to his feet. He repaid this Samaritan gesture by swinging at me with his right foot but fifteen minutes on the floor hadn’t helped his circulation or reactions any and I forestalled him with the same manoeuvre. When I helped him up the second time there was no fight left in him,
“Did you – did you really have to do that?” The revulsion was back in her eyes,
“Did I — did you see what he tried to do to me?” J demanded.
“You men are all the same,” she said.
“Oh, shut up!” I snarled. I was old and sick and tired and I’d run right out of the last of my witty ripostes.
The transceiver was a beauty, a big gleaming metallic RCA, the latest model as used in the naval vessels of a dozen nationalities. I didn’t waste any time wondering where they had obtained it, that lot were fit for anything. I sat down and started tuning the set, then looked up at Susan. “Go and fetch me one of your father’s razor blades.”
“You don’t want me to hear, is that it?”
“Think what you like. Just get it.”
If she’d been wearing a skirt she’d have flounced out of the room. With what she was wearing flouncing was out of the question. The set covered every transmission frequency from the bottom of the long wave to the top of the V.H.F. It took only two minutes to raise SPFX. It was manned night and day the year round. It really was most considerate of the ungodly to provide me with such a magnificent instrument.
Sue Kirkside was back before I started speaking. I was ten minutes on the microphone altogether. Apart from code-names and map references I used plain English throughout. I had to, I’d no book, and time was too short anyway, I spoke slowly and clearly, giving precise instructions about the movements of men, the alignment of radio frequencies, the minutest details of the layout of Dubh Sgeir castle and asking all-important questions about recent happenings on the Riviera. I didn’t repeat myself once, and I asked for nothing to be repeated to me, because every word was being recorded. Before I was half-way through, Susan’s eyebrows had disappeared up under the blonde fringe and Harry was looking as if he had been sandbagged, I signed off, reset the tuning band to its original position and stood up.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m off.”
“You’re what’?” The grey-blue eyes were wide, the eyebrows still up under the fringe, but with alarm, this time, not astonishment, “You’re leaving? You’re leaving me here?”
“I’m leaving. If you think I’d stay a minute longer in this damned castle than I have to, you must be nuts. I’ve played my hand far enough already.’ Do you think I want to be around here when the guards change over or when the toilers on the deep get back here?”
“Toilers on the deep? What do you mean?”
“Skip it.” I’d forgotten she knew nothing about what our friends were doing, “It’s Calvert for home.”
“You’ve got a gun,” she said wildly, “You could — you could capture them, couldn’t you?”
“Capture who?” The hell with the grammar.
“The guards. They’re on the second floor. They’ll be asleep.”
“How many?”
“Eight or nine, I’m not sure.”
“Eight or nine, she’s not sure! Who do you think I am, Superman? Stand aside, do you want me to get killed? And, Susan, tell nothing to anybody. Not even Daddy. Not if you want to see Johnny-boy walk down that aisle. You understand?”
She put a hand on my arm and said quietly but with the fear still in her face: “You could take me with you.”
“I could. I could take you with me and ruin everything. If I as much as fired a single shot at any of the sleeping warriors up top, I’d ruin everything. Everything depends on their never knowing that anybody was here to-night. If they suspected that, just had a hint of a suspicion of that, they’d pack their bags and take off into the night. Tonight. And I can’t possibly do anything until to-morrow night. You understand, of course, that they wouldn’t leave until after they had killed everyone in the cellar. And your father, of course. And they’d stop off at Torbay and make sure that Sergeant MacDonald would never give evidence against them. Do you want that, Susan? God knows I’d love to take you out of here, I’m not made of Portland cement, but if I take you the alarm bells will ring and then they’ll pull the plug. Can’t you see that? If they come back and find you gone, they’ll have one thought and one thought only in their minds: our little Sue has left the island. With, of course, one thought in mind. You must not be missing.”
“All right.” She was calm now. “But you’ve overlooking something.”
“I’m a great old overlooker. What?”
“Harry. He’ll be missing. He’ll have to be. You can’t leave him to talk.”
“He’ll be missing. So will the keeper of the gate. I clobbered him on the way in.” She started to get all wide-eyed again but I held up my hand, stripped off coat and wind-breaker, unwrapped the razor she’d brought me and nicked my forearm, not too deeply, the way I felt I needed all ‘the blood I had, but enough to let me smear the bottom three inches of the bayonet on both sides. I handed her the tin of Elastoplast and without a word she stuck a strip across the incision. I dressed again and we left, Susan with the whisky bottle and torch, myself with the rifle, shepherding Harry in front of me. Once in the hall I relocked the door with the skeleton key I’d used to open it.
The rain had stopped and there was hardly any wind, but the mist was thicker than ever and the night had turned bitterly cold. The Highland Indian summer was in full swing. We made our way through the courtyard across to where I’d left the bayonet lying on the cliff edge, using the torch, now with the Elastoplast removed from its face, quite freely, but keeping our voices low. The lad maintaining his ceaseless vigil on the battlements couldn’t have seen us five yards away with the finest night-glasses in the world, but sound in heavy mist has unpredictable qualities, it can be muffled, it can be distorted, or it can occasionally be heard with surprising clarity} and it was now too late in the day to take chances.
I located the bayonet and told Harry to lie face down in the grass; if I’d left him standing he just might have been tempted to kick me over the edge. I gouged the grass in assorted places with heel and toe, made a few more scores with the butt of a bayonet, stuck the blade of the gate-keeper’s bayonet in the ground at a slight angle so that the rifle was just clear of the ground, kid Harry down so that the blood-stained bayonet tip was also just dear of the ground, so preventing the blood from running off among the wet grass, scattered most of the contents of the whisky bottle around and carefully placed the bottle, about a quarter full now, close to one of the bayonets. I said to Susan: “And what happened here do you think?”
“It’s obvious. They had a drunken fight and both of them slipped on the wet grass over the edge of the cliff.”
“And what did you hear?”
“Oh! I heard the sound of two men shouting in the hall. I went on to the landing and I heard them shouting at the tops of their voices. I heard the one tell Harry to get back to his post and Harry saying, no, by God, he was going to settle it now. I’ll say both men were drunk, and I won’t repeat the kind of language they were using. The last I heard they were crossing the courtyard together, still arguing.”
“Good girl. That’s exactly what you heard.”
She came with us as far as the place where I’d left the gate-keeper. He was still breathing, I used most of what rope I’d left to tie them together at the waist, a few feet apart, and wrapped the end of it in my hand. With their arms lashed behind their backs they weren’t going to have much balancing power and no holding power at all on the way down that steep and crumbling path to the landing stage. If either slipped or stumbled I might be able to pull them back to safety with a sharp tug. There was going to be none of this Alpine stuff with the rope around my waist also. If they were going to step out into the darkness they were going to do it without me.