The Island Where Time Stands Still
THE ISLAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL
Dennis Wheatley
Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones
For
CHRISTINA FOYLE
Who has given over a million copies of my stories to her Book Club subscribers; and as a small tribute, in their 50th year of business, to
WILLIAM AND GILBERT FOYLE
who in half a century of hard work, inspiration and enterprise have built up the biggest bookshop in the world.
From their affectionate friend
DENNIS WHEATLEY
My dear Dennis,
I must admit that you have grounds for complaint; although, to me, it seems hardly credible that eight years should have slipped by since I last provided you with material for a book. I am all the more touched to hear that still, after all this time, a week seldom passes without some of your readers writing to ask what has happened to me.
In self-defence, I would point out that you could have satisfied their kind interest at least to the extent of relating my activities up to the end of World War II: but you chose to terminate your account of them in December 1941. Moreover, you left your readers under the impression that Erika’s husband had been liquidated by Grauber. Had Erika and I been less mentally exhausted after our nightmare crossing of Lake Constance, we should have realised that none of the Nazis in the boat was armed; and that, as we learned later, the shot we heard was fired from a Swiss patrol boat in an unsuccessful endeavour to prevent Grauber and his pals getting back to Germany.
I think it rather a pity that you have not yet described for your readers how von Osterberg really met his death, my final round with Grauber, and those unforgettable last hours with Hitler in the bunker. But perhaps you are right about the public being temporarily surfeited with tales of how we got the better of the Nazis, and that they would arouse much greater interest after a lapse of a few more years, which would give them almost an historical flavour.
As far as my activities since the war are concerned, it is true that I have been on a number of secret missions; but to give an account of any of them in detail would involve disclosing information which a foreign power would be very glad to have; so there can be no question of publishing these for the time being. However, although few people know it, I was recently written off as dead for the best part of a year. During that time I became involved in what might almost be termed a private enterprise of a ‘kill or be killed’ nature; and, rather than disappoint your readers altogether, I am sending you my notes about it.
The Pacific is a big place; the Chinese are a strange people: but love and greed don’t vary much the world over, do they? You know how my mind works well enough by now for me to be confident that you will give a fair picture of my reactions during these strange events which nearly cost me my reason and did cost a lot of other people their lives. More power to your elbow.
Yours ever,
P.S.
I still have a little of the Pol Roger ’28 you sent me in return for my last batch of notes, and it is now so good I’m keeping it for very special occasions. This time I rather favour Louis Roederer ’45, preferably in magnums, if you can find me some.
G.
P.P.S.
I am hoping to be back in England shortly, and that will definitely be an occasion for us to knock off a bottle or two of the ’28.
G.
Contents
Introduction
Prologue
1 The Cage
2 The Secret of the Island
3 The Price of Curiosity
4 The Vacant Throne
5 The Imperial Family
6 Lured by Love or Victim of Lust?
7 Death Without Warning
8 The Real Chinatown
9 The Big Decision
10 The Poisoned Cocktail
11 The Provocation
12 The Captive
13 Death in a Bed and Love in a Tree-top
14 The Merchant Prince’s Story
15 A Lady in Distress
16 The Midnight Rendezvous
17 On the Run
18 The Arm-pit of the Tortoise
19 ‘There is Many a Slip …’
20 The Great Man-hunt
21 A Try for a Throne
22 In the Hours of Darkness
23 The Diary of Lin Wân
24 The Three Wishes of Gregory Sallust
A Note on the Author
Introduction
Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.
As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.
There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.
There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.
He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ‘all his books’.
Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.
He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.
He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the
war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.
The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.
Dominic Wheatley, 2013
Prologue
‘In the Midst of Life’
‘This,’ thought Gregory Sallust, ‘is it!’
Another huge wave loomed above him like the side of a cliff, curled over, broke in a seething cascade of foam, and submerged him as though he was a rag doll drawn under the torrent of a mill-race.
He had been in many a tight corner before, and courage, quick wits, endurance, audacity, or some combination of them, had always saved him; but now, as hundreds of tons of water forced him fathoms deep into awful smothering blackness, he knew that even had he possessed the nine lives of a cat he would still be food for fishes long before morning. He was in the middle of the Pacific, a piece of human flotsam at the mercy of a raging tempest, and he had no chance whatever of being picked up.
At ten o’clock that night Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust’s yacht had struck a submerged coral-reef. It had ripped a great hole in her bottom, and within ten minutes they had known that nothing could save her. As, with flooded engine rooms, she wallowed in the trough of huge seas they had striven to get out the boats. The big launch had hardly touched the water when it was caught up and smashed like an egg-shell against the ship’s side. By then the yacht had been well down at the bows, so some of them had floated off on a cork raft from the fo’c’sle. Before they could distribute their weight evenly it had capsized and pinned several of them beneath it. Gregory was flung clear, caught on a wave crest and, in a matter of seconds, carried out of sight of his still-struggling companions. The moon was not yet up, only starlight lit the storm-tossed waters, as he struck out in a wild endeavour to rejoin them. His efforts proved unavailing. Above the booming of the hurricane he caught a single despairing cry, then his last contact with the two beings he loved best in the world was broken.
As he came gasping to the surface he thought for a second of the appalling swiftness with which calamity had overwhelmed them. When they had gone in to dinner at half-past eight the sea had been calm and the sky cloudless. Sir Pellinore’s eight guests might then justifiably have counted themselves among the luckiest people on earth. Between them they had an unusual degree of charm, intelligence, wit and beauty; all of them had a sufficiency of money, and the leisure to accept the elderly Baronet’s invitation to accompany him on a trip round the world. Despite his magnificent physique he had at last begun to feel his age, and his doctor had prescribed a year of sunshine. He was one of the few Englishmen left who could still afford to keep a two thousand ton yacht and delighted to entertain in it lavishly.
With a French chef in the galley, the cellar of a life-long connoisseur, and every comfort that money could provide, they had cruised in leisurely manner through the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Every few days they had stopped for a night or two in one port after another, to go ashore, to meet old friends and make new ones, to entertain or be entertained by diplomats and celebrities. From Singapore they had gone down to Java, then up to Borneo and round the Celebes through the countless islands of the South Seas to Tahiti. Thence, they had turned north for the two thousand odd mile run to Hawaii. It was on the third night out that the typhoon had caught them.
All unsuspecting they had assembled in the lounge, the men wearing dinner jackets, the women with light furs over shoulders left bare by their evening dresses. Even half way through dinner, when it had suddenly become obvious that they were in for a stormy night, only little Zenobia Walshingham and the lovely golden-haired Barbara Harland-Woolf had elected to retire to their cabins. The others had finished the meal and returned to the lounge for coffee and liqueurs. Arthur Walshingham had been setting up the backgammon board for his nightly game with Myra Blandish, when the ship struck. The shock sent every movable thing flying across the lounge, yet none of them had panicked. Who could, with Sir Pellinore calmly apologising to them for his yacht having behaved in such a ‘demned inconsiderate manner’? He had apologised to them again as she was going down, advising the women to wrap up warmly and the men to see that their flasks were full of brandy.
That had been half an hour—no, barely ten minutes—ago. And now, that grand old man, the pretty women and the battle-tested younger men he loved to have about him, his Captain, his faithful servants and his crew were all drowned or drowning.
Gregory closed his eyes, but not from fear of the next mountain of water that was rushing upon him. It was due to agony of spirit at the thought that somewhere not far off in the semi-darkness his beloved Erika must be choking out her life. His last glimpse of her had been as the raft turned over. She had been trying to calm the terrors of a young stewardess. Her arm had been round the girl’s shoulders. Both of them were fair, and as the last distress rocket sent up from the yacht burst a hundred feet up its glare had lit their mingled hair as it streamed out behind them, like a yellow pennant in the tearing wind.
It was Pellinore who had been sending up the rockets. He had pretended that he was coming on the raft but at the last moment pushed it off; yelling that some of his ‘fellers’ were still trying to launch a boat on the port side. Had there been time for thought they might have known that the instinct of a man who for fifty years had worn a V.C. on all ceremonial occasions would never permit him to abandon his own ship while there was a living soul aboard her. Gregory loved the old boy like a father, and groaned again at the thought that for him too there could be no escape.
The rockets were no more likely to bring help in that vast waste than the lighting of a tallow dip; neither were the S.O.S.s frantically tapped out up to the last on the wireless. The only shipping route to the north of Tahiti ran northeast to San Francisco, and their course to Hawaii being north-west had already carried them hundreds of miles away from it. The nearest land was the widely-scattered Manihiki Islands, but they were little more than coral atolls; many were uninhabited and even the largest were places at which ancient trading vessels called only once or twice a year.
Again Gregory was sucked down, down, down, until he felt as if his lungs must burst, and it was only after moments of excruciating agony that his life-jacket brought him back to the surface. Thrusting himself up, he gazed desperately round for the masts of the sinking yacht, but they had disappeared. While under water he had been so whirled about that he had lost all sense of direction and with it, now that the yacht was gone any hope of fighting his way back to the place where he had last seen Erika.
Realising the futility of battling further against the wind-whipped waves, he ceased his struggles, and soon found that it was now easier to keep his head above water. For a while, like a bobbing cork, he was rushed at express speed up steep dark slopes, temporarily smothered in the white surf at their summits, then tobogganed down glassy inclines into further great water valleys. Now and then he let out a shout, but no answer came from the surrounding gloom, and the only sign of the wreck he sighted was a floating oar.
It was soon after he had seized upon it that he became aware that the storm was easing. The fact brought home to him how accursedly unfortunate they had been. The yacht, well found and capably handled as she was, could easily have ridden out the cyclone; or, had she struck the rock while the sea was calm, it should have been possible to keep her afloat until her radio brought help. It was the combination of the two menaces occurring simultaneously which had resulted in such swift and irretrievable disaster.
But the dying down of the wind brought him no comfort. He had lost the woman he loved, the old friend to whom he owed so much, and those other friends who had made such a gay and gallant company. He knew, too, that only the instinct of self-preservation had caused him to grab the oar. In those desolate waters the added support it gave him could only prolong the agony. It meant only the difference of an hour or so before he also must perish.
Although the wave crests were no longer breaking with their former fury, freshets of spray continued to dash themselves against his face, and he was still swallowing a lot of water. It made him feel sick and giddy. His eyes were sore, his body ached from the strain to which it had been put and he felt incredibly weary.
In an effort to keep his mind off Erika he tried to conjure up scenes from his life before he met her. Memories of other women drifted into his mental vision. Sabine, the beautiful Hungarian, as he had first seen her at the casino at Deauville; lovely, laughing Phyllis, with whom he had taken a stolen holiday up the Rhine; wicked little black-eyed Minnette, who had so nearly caused his death in China, during the first secret industrial investigation that he had carried out for Sir Pellinore. His thoughts turned to his closest men friends, then to other people—just faces, to many of which he could not put a name. Some were those of old enemies, others of girls with whom he had had only casual flirtations, a few of desperate idealistic loves which had tormented him in youth. One was sweet seventeen, with golden cork-screw curls, blue eyes and a big floppy hat bedecked with corn-flowers. He had adored her all one summer, living through the weeks only for Sundays to come again, when he would see her walking sedately with her parents after Church; but he had never even spoken to her. At that time he had been a Cadet in H.M.S. Worcester. The thought carried him back still further, to childhood days.
He was thinking of the wall-paper in his day-nursery when the oar slipped from his grasp. The effort needed to recover it brought him back with a jerk to the grim present. It occurred to him then that to recall episodes from one’s past life was said to be usual with people on the point of drowning—and that he was drowning.