When Eight Bells Toll

machinery, the remains of some sharks and the most fearful smell I'd ever come across in my life. I left, hurriedly.

The first of the cottages yielded nothing. I flashed a torch through a broken window. The room was bare, it looked as if no one had set foot there for half a century, it was only too easy to believe Williams's statement that this tiny hamlet had been abandoned before the First World War. Curiously, the wall-paper looked as if it had been applied the previous day - a curious and largely unexplained phenomenon in the Western Isles. Your grandmother - in those days grandpa would have signed the pledge sooner than lift a finger inside the house - slapped up some wall-paper at ninepence a yard and fifty years later it was still there, as fresh as the day it had been put up.

The second cottage was as deserted as the first.

The third cottage, the one most remote from the flensing shed, was where the shark-fishers lived. A logical and very understandable choice, one would have thought, the farther away from that olfactory horror the better. Had I the option, I'd have been living in a tent on the other side of the island. But that was a purely personal reaction. The stench of that flensing shed was probably to the shark-fishers, as is the ammonia-laden, nostril-wrinkling, wholly awful mist — liquid manure - to the Swiss farmers: the very breath of being. The symbol of success. One can pay too high a price for success,

I eased open the well-oiled — shark-liver oil, no doubt — door and passed inside. The torch came on again. Grandma wouldn't have gone very much on this front parlour but grandpa would cheerfully have sat there watching his beard turn white through the changing seasons without ever wanting to go down to the sea again. One entire wall was given up to food supplies, a miserable couple of dozen crates of whisky and score upon scores of crates of beer. Australians, Williams had said. I could well believe it. The other three walls — there was hardly a scrap of wall-paper to be seen — wasdevoted to a form of art, in uninhibited detail and glorious Technicolor, of a type not usually to be found in the betterclass museums and art galleries. Not grandma's cup of tea at all.

I skirted the furniture which hadn't come out of Harrods and opened the interior door. A short corridor lay beyond. Two doors to the right, three to the left. Working on the theory that the boss of the outfit probably had the largest room to himself, I carefully opened the first door to the right.

The flash-light showed it to be a surprisingly comfortable room. A good carpet, heavy curtains, a couple of good armchairs, bedroom furniture in oak, a double bed and a bookcase. A shaded electric light hung above the bed. Those rugged Australians believed in their home comforts. There was a switch beside the door. I touched it and the overhead lamp came on.

There was only one person in the double bed but even at that he was cramped in it. It's hard to gauge a man's height when he's lying down but if this lad tried to stand up in a room with a ceiling height of less than six feet four inches, he'd finish up with concussion. His face was towards me but I couldn't see much of it, it was hidden by a head of thick black hair that had fallen over his brows and the most magnificently bushy black beard I'd ever clapped eyes on. He was sound asleep.

I crossed to the bed, prodded his ribs with the gun barrel and a pressure sufficient to wake a lad of his size and said: 'Wake up.'

He woke up. I moved a respectful distance away. He rubbed his eyes with one hairy forearm, got his hands under him and heaved himself to a sitting position. I wouldn't have been surprised to see him wearing a bearskin, but no, he was wearing a pair of pyjamas in excellent taste, I might have chosen the colour myself.

Law-abiding citizens woken in the dark watches of the night by a gun-pointing stranger react in all sorts of ways, varying from terror to apoplectically-purple outrage. The man in the beard didn't react in any of the standard ways at all. He just stared at me from under dark overhanging cliffs of eyebrows and the expression in the eyes was that of a Bengal tiger mentally tucking in his napkin before launching himself on the thirty-foot -leap that is going to culminate in lunch. I stepped  back   another  couple  of  paces  and  said:    'Don't try it.'

'Put that gun away, sonny boy,' he said. The deep rumbling voice seemed to come from the innermost recesses of the Carlsbad cavern. 'Put it away or I'll have to get up and clobber you and take it from you.'

'Don't be like that,' I complained, then added politely: 'If I put it away, will you clobber me?'

He considered this for a moment, then said: 'No.' He reached out for a big black cigar and lit it, his eyes on me all the time. The acrid fumes reached across the room and as it isn't polite for a guest in another's house to rush to open the nearest window without permission I didn't but it was a near thing. No wonder he'd never notice the stench from the flensing shed: compared to this, Uncle Arthur's cheroots came into the same category as Charlotte's perfume.

'My apologies for the intrusion. Are you Tim Hutchinson?'

'Yeah.  And you, sonny boy?'

'Philip Calvert. I want to use one of your boat's transmitters to contact London, I also need your help. How urgently you can't imagine. A good many lives and millions of pounds can be lost in the next twenty-four hours,'

He watched a particularly noxious cloud of this Vesuvian poison gas drift up to the cringing ceiling, then bent his eyes on me again. 'Ain't you the little kidder, now, sonny boy.'

'I'm not kidding, you big black ape. And, while we're at it, we'll dispense with the 'sonny boy' Timothy.'

He bent forward, the deep-set, coal-black eyes, not at all as friendly as I would have liked, then relaxed with a laugh. 'Touche, as my French governess used to say. Maybe you ain't kidding at that. What are you, Calvert?'

In for a penny, in for a pound. This man would grant his co-operation for nothing less than the truth. And he looked like a man whose co-operation would be very well worth having. So, for the second time that night and the second time in my life, I said: 'I'm an agent of the British Secret Service.' I was glad that Uncle Arthur was out there fighting for his life on the rolling deep, his blood pressure wasn't what it ought to have been and a thing like this, twice in one night, could have been enough to see him off.

He considered my reply for some time, then said: 'The Secret Service. I guess you have to be 'at that. Or a nut case. But you blokes never tell.'

'I had to. It would have been obvious anyway when I tell you what I have to tell you.'

'I'll get dressed. Join you in the front room in two minutes. Help yourself to a Scotch there.' The beard twitched and I deduced from this that he was grinning. 'You should find some, somewhere.'

I went out, found some somewhere and was conducting myself on the grand tour of the Craigmore art gallery