“Dollmann solved problem two – the hi-jacking of the specie. I shouldn’t imagine this strained his resources too far. Your husband ships his oil into some very odd and very tough places indeed and it goes without saying that he employs some very odd and very tough people to do it. Dollmann wouldn’t have recruited the hi-jacking crew himself, he probably singled out our good friend Captain Imrie, who will prove to have a very interesting history, and gave him the authority to go through the Skouras fleets and hand-pick suitable men for the job. Once the hi-jacking crew was assembled and ready, Messrs. Skouras, Lavorski and Dollmann waited till the victim was on the high seas, dumped you and the stewardess in a hotel, embarked the lads on the Shangri-la, intercepted die specie-carrying vessel and by one of a series of ruses I’ll tell you about later, succeeded in boarding it and taking over. Then the Shangri-la landed the captured crew under guard while the prize crew sailed the hi-jacked vessel to the appointed hiding-place.”
“It can’t be true, it can’t be true,” she murmured. It was a long time since I’d seen any woman wringing her hands but Charlotte Skouras was doing it then. Her face was quite drained of colour. She knew that what I was saying was true and she’d never heard of any of it before. “Hiding place, Philip? What hiding place?”
“Where would you hide a ship, Charlotte?”
“How should I know?” She shrugged tiredly. “My mind is not very clear to-night. Up in the Arctic perhaps, or in a lonely Norwegian fjord or some desert island. I can’t think any more, Philip. There cannot be many places. A ship is a big thing.”
“There are millions of places. You can hide a ship practically anywhere in the world. All you have to do is to open the bilge-valves and engine-room non-return valves to the bilges and detonate a couple of scuttling charges.”
“You mean — you mean that ”
“I mean just that. You send it to the bottom. The west side of the Sound to the east of Dubh Sgeir island, a cheery stretch of water rejoicing in the name of Beul nan Uamh — the mouth of the grave – must be the most densely packed marine graveyard in Europe to-day. At dead slack water the valves were opened at a very carefully selected spot in the Beul nan Uamh and down they went, all five of them, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. Tide tables show that, coincidentally, most of them were sunk at or near midnight. Cease upon the midnight, as the poet says, only in this case with a very great deal of pain, at least for the underwriters involved. Beul nan Uamh. Odd, I never thought of it before. A very apt name indeed. The mouth of the grave. Damn’ place is printed far too large in the chart, it doesn’t have to be very obvious to be too obvious for Calvert.”
She hadn’t been listening to my meanderings. She said: “Dubh Sgeir? But – but that’s the home of Lord Kirkside.”
“It’s not but, it’s because. The hiding place was picked either by your husband, or, if someone else, then the arrangement was made through your husband. I never knew until recently that your husband was an old drinking pal of Lord Kirkside. I saw him yesterday, but he wouldn’t talk. Nor would his charming daughter.”
“You do move around. I’ve never met the daughter.”
“You should. She thinks you’re an old gold-digging hag. A nice kid really. But terrified, terrified for her life aod those of others.”
“Why on earth should she be?”
“How do you think our triumvirate got Lord Kirkside to agree to their goings-on?”
“Money. Bribery.”
I shook my head. “Lord Kirkside is a Highlander and a gentleman. It’s a pretty fierce combination. Old Skouras could never lay hands on enough money to bribe Lord Kirkside to pass the uncollected fares box on a bus, if he hadn’t paid. A poor illustration, Lord Kirkside wouldn’t recognise a bus even if it ran over him, but what I mean is, the old boy is incorruptive. So your charming friends kidnapped old Kirk-side’s elder son – the younger lives in Australia – and just to make sure that Susan Kirkside wouldn’t be tempted to do anything silly, they kidnapped her fiancé. A guess, but a damned good one. They’re supposed to be dead,”
“No, no,” she whispered. Her hand was to her mouth and her voice was shaking. “My God, no!”
“My God, yes. It’s logical and tremendously effective. They also kidnapped Sergeant MacDonald’s sons and Donald MacEachern’s wife for the same reason. To buy silence and cooperation.”
“But – but people just can’t disappear like that”
“We’re not dealing with street comer boys, we’re dealing with criminal master-minds. Disappearances are rigged to look like accidental death. A few other people have disappeared also, people who had the misfortune to be hanging around in small private boats while our friends were waiting for the tide to be exactly right before opening the sea-cocks on the hijacked ships.”
“Didn’t it arouse police suspicion? Having so many small boats disappear in the same place.”
“They sailed or towed two of those boats fifty or more miles away and ran them on the rocks. Another could have disappeared anywhere. The fourth did set sail from Torbay and disappeared, but the disappearance of one boat is not enough to arouse suspicion.”
“It must be true, I know it must be true.” She shook her head as if she didn’t believe it was true at all. “It all fits so well, it explains so many things and explains them perfectly. But – but what’s the good of knowing all this now? They’re on to you, they know you know that something is far wrong and that that something is in Loch Houron. They’ll leave—”
“How do they know we suspect Loch Houron?”
“Uncle Arthur told me in the wheelhouse last night.” Surprise in her voice. “Don’t you remember?”
I hadn’t remembered. I did now. I was half-dead from lack of sleep. A stupid remark. Perhaps even a give-away remark. I was glad Uncle Arthur hadn’t heard that one.
“Calvert nears the sunset of his days,” I said. “My mind’s going. Sure they’ll leave. But not for forty-eight hours yet. They will think they have plenty of time, it’s less than eight hours since we instructed Sergeant MacDonald to tell them ‘hat we were going to the mainland for help.”
“I see,” she said dully. “And what did you do on Dubh Sgeir to-night, Philip?”
“Not much. But enough.” Another little white lie. “Enough to confirm my every last suspicion. I swam ashore to the link harbour and picked the side door of the boathouse. It’s quite a boathouse. Not only is it three times as big on the inside as it is from the outside, but it’s stacked with diving equipment.”
“Diving equipment?”
“Heaven help us all, you’re almost as stupid as I am. How on earth do you think they recover the stuff from the sunken vessels? They use a diving-boat and the Dubh Sgeir boathouse is its home.”
“Was – was that all you found out?”
“There was nothing more to find out. I had intended taking a look round the castle – there’s a long flight of steps leading up to it from the boatyard inside the cuff itself – but there was some character sitting about three parts of the way up with a rifle in his hand. A guard of some sort. He was drinking out of some son of bottle, but he was doing his job for all that. I wouldn’t have got within a hundred steps of him without being riddled. I left”
“Dear God,” she murmured. “What a mess, what a terrible mess. And you’ve no radio, we’re cut off from help. What are we going to do? What are you going to do, Philip?”
“I’m going there in the Firecrest this coming night, that’s what I’m going to do. I have a machine-gun under the settee of the saloon in the Firecrest and Uncle Arthur and Tim Hutchinson will have a gun apiece. We’ll reconnoiter. Their time is running short and they’ll want to be gone to-morrow at the latest. The boathouse doors are ill-fitting and if there’s no light showing that will mean they still haven’t finished their diving. So we wait till they have finished and come in. We’ll see the light two miles away when they open the door to let the diving-boat in to load up all the stuff they’ve cached from .the four other sunken ships. The front doors of the boathouse will be closed, of course, while they load up. So we go in through the front doors. On the deck of the Firecrest. The doors don’t look all that strong to me. Surprise is everything. Well catch them napping. A sub-machine-gun in a small enclosed space is a deadly weapon.”