I said: “Thank you, Susan. You have been a great help. Don’t take any more of those Nembutal tablets to-night. They’d think it damn’ funny if you were still asleep at midday to-morrow.”
“I wish it were midday the next day. I won’t let you down, Mr. Calvert. Everything is going to be all right, isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
There was a pause, then she said: “You could have pushed these two over the edge if you wanted to, couldn’t you. But you didn’t. You could have cut Harry’s arm, but you cut your own. I’m sorry for what I said, Mr. Calvert. About you being horrible and terrible. You do what you have to do.” Another pause. “I think you’re rather wonderful.”
“They all come round in the end,” I said, but I was talking to myself, she’d vanished into the mist. I wished drearily that I could have agreed with her sentiments, I didn’t feel wonderful at all, I just felt dead tired and worried stiff for with all the best planning in the world there were too many imponderables and I wouldn’t have bet a brass farthing on the next twenty-four hours. I got some of the worry and frustration out of my system by kicking the two prisoners to their feet.
We went slowly down that crumbling treacherous path in single file, myself last, torch in my left hand, rope tightly -but not too tightly – in my right hand. I wondered vaguely as we went why I hadn’t nicked Harry instead of myself. It would have been so much more fitting, Harry’s blood on Harry’s bayonet.
“You had a pleasant outing, I trust?” Hutchinson asked courteously.
“It wasn’t dull. You would have enjoyed it.” I watched Hutchinson as he pushed the Firecrest into the fog and the darkness, “Let me into a professional secret. How in the world did you find your way back into this pier to-night? The mist is twice as bad as when I left. You cruise up and down for hours, impossible to take any bearings, there’s the waves, tide, fog, currents — and yet there you are, right on the nose, to the minute. It can’t be done.”
“It was an extraordinary feat of navigation,” Hutchinson said solemnly. “There are such things as charts, Calvert, and if you look at that large-scale one for this area you’ll see an eight fathom bank, maybe a cable in length, lying a cable and a half out to the west of the old pier there. I just steamed out straight into wind and tide, waited till the depth-sounder showed I was over the bank and dropped the old hook. At the appointed hour the great navigator lifts his hook and lets wind and tide drift him ashore again. Not many men could have done it,”
“I’m bitterly disappointed,” I said. “I’ll never think the same of you again. I suppose you used the same technique on the way in?”
“More or less. Only I used a series of five banks and patches. My secrets are gone for ever. Where now?”
“Didn’t Uncle Arthur say?”
“You misjudge Uncle Arthur. He says he never interferes with you in – what was it? – the execution of a field operation. ‘ I plan,” he said. “I co-ordinate. Calvert finishes the job’.”
“He has his decent moments,” I admitted.
“He told me a few stories about you in the past hour. I guess it’s a privilege to be along.”
“Apart from the four hundred thousand quid or whatever?”
“Apart, as you say, from the green men. Where to, Calvert?”
“Home. If you can find it in this lot.”
“Craigmore? I can find it.” He puffed at his cigar and held the end close to his eyes. “I think I should put this out. It’s getting so I can’t even see the length of the wheelhouse windows, far less beyond them. Uncle Arthur’s taking his time, isn’t he?”
“Uncle Arthur is interrogating the prisoners.”
“I wouldn’t say he’d get much out of that lot.”
“Neither would I. They’re not too happy.”
“Well, it teas a nasty jump from the pier to the foredeck. Especially with the bows plunging up and down as they were. And more especially with their arms tied behind their backs.”
“One broken ankle and one broken forearm,” I said. “It could have been worse. They could have missed the fore-deck altogether.”
“You have a point,” Hutchinson agreed. He stuck his head out the side window and withdrew it again. “If s not the cigar,” he announced. “No need to quit smoking. Visibility is zero, and I mean zero. We’re flying blind on instruments. You may as well switch on the wheelhouse lights. Makes it all that easier to read the charts, depth-sounder and compass and doesn’t affect the radar worth a damn.” He stared at me as the light came on. “What the hell arc you doing in that flaming awful outfit?”
“This is a dressing-gown,” I explained. “I’ve three suits and all three are soaked and ruined. Any luck, sir?” Uncle Arthur had just come in to the wheelhouse.
“One of them passed out.” Uncle Arthur wasn’t looking very pleased with himself. “The other kept moaning so loudly that I couldn’t make myself heard. Well, Calvert, the story.”
“The story, air? I was just going to bed. I’ve told you the story.”
“Half a dozen quick sentences that I couldn’t hear above their damned caterwauling,” he said coldly. “The whole story, Calvert.”
“I’m feeling weak, sir.”
“I’ve rarely known a time when you weren’t feeling weak, Calvert. You know where the whisky is.”
Hutchinson coughed respectfully. “I wonder if the admiral would permit—–”
“Certainty, certainly,” Uncle Arthur said in a quite different tone. “Of course, my boy.” The boy was a clear foot taller than Uncle Arthur. “And while you’re at it, Calvert, you might bring one for me, too, a normal-sized one.” He had his nasty side to him, had Uncle Arthur.
I said “good night”five minutes later. Uncle Arthur wasn’t too pleased, I’d the feeling he thought I’d missed out on the suspense and fancy descriptions, but I was as tired as the old man with the scythe after Hiroshima. I looked in on Charlotte Skouras, she was sleeping like the dead. I wondered about that chemist back in Torbay, he’d been three parts asleep, myopic as a barn owl and crowding eighty. He could have made a mistake. He could have had only a minimal experience in the prescribing of steep-inducing drugs for those who lived in the land of the Hebridean prayer: “Would that the peats might cut themselves and the fish jump on the shore, that I upon my bed might lie, and sleep for ever more.”
But I’d done the old boy an injustice. After what was, to me, our miraculous arrival in Craigmore’s apology for a harbour it had taken me no more than a minute to shake Charlotte into something resembling wakefulness. I told her to get dressed – a cunning move ‘this to make her think I didn’t know she was still dressed – and come ashore. Fifteen minutes after that we were alt inside Hutchinson’s house and fifteen minutes still later, when Uncle Arthur and I had roughly splinted the prisoners’ fractures and locked them in a room illuminated only by a sky-light that would have taken Houdini all his time to wriggle through, I was in bed in another tiny box-room that was obviously the sleeping-quarters of the chairman of the Craigmore’s an gallery selection committee, for he’d kept all the best exhibits to himself. I was just dropping off to sleep, thinking that if the universities ever got around to awarding Ph.D.s to house agents, the first degree would surely go to the first man who sold a Hebridean hut within sniffing distance of a flensing shed, when the door opened and the lights came on. I blinked open exhausted eyes and saw Charlotte Skouras softly closing the door behind her. “Go away,” I said. “I’m sleeping.”
“May I come in?” she asked. She gazed around the art gallery and her lips moved in what could have been the beginnings of a smile. “I would have thought you would have gone to sleep with the lights on to-night.”
“You should see the ones behind the wardrobe doors,” I boasted. I slowly opened my eyes as far as I could without mechanical aid. “Sorry, I’m tired. What can I do? I’m not at my best receiving lady callers in the middle of the night.”
“Uncle Arthur’s next door. You can always scream for help if you want to,” She looked at a moth-eaten armchair. “May I sit down?”
She sat down. She still wore that uncrushable white dress and her hair was neatly combed, but that was about all you could say for her. Attempts at humour there might have been in her voice, but there was none in her face and none in her eyes. Those brown, wise, knowing eyes, eyes that knew all about living and loving and laughter, the eyes that had once made her the most sought-after actress of her time now held only sadness and despair. And fear. Now that she had escaped from her husband and his accomplices, there should have been no need for fear. But it was there, half-buried in the tired brown eyes, but there. Fear was an expression I knew. The lines round the eyes and mouth that looked so right, so inevitable, when she smiled or laughed – in the days when she had smiled and laughed – looked as if they had been etched by time and suffering and sorrow and despair into a face that had never known laughter and love. .Charlotte Skouras’s face, without the Charlotte Meiner of old behind it, no longer looked as if it belonged to her. A worn, a weary and an alien face. She must have been about thirty-five, I guessed, but she looked a deal older. And yet when she sat in that chair, almost huddled in that chair, the Craigmore art gallery no longer existed.