They pulled over and slept for an hour in the shoulder of a mountain called Ben Lomond that lay beside the loch of the same name. They woke, ate the last of their sandwiches and then drove on into the dawn, the new day bringing banks of fog that lay thick and heavy across the glens and moors.
With the first real light came trouble: entering a sleepy village huddled on the edge of a small loch, somewhere west of Tyndrum on the last long stretch of road down to the coast and the seaport town of Oban. The high street in the town was also the main road, with shops on one side and a few docks and small outbuildings and boathouses on the other. A constable wearing a rain cape stood beside a white globe and pillar box that marked the post office. The roadblock took the form of an oil drum set on the verge of the road with a large hand-painted sign in red letters that said: STOP.
‘Shit,’ said Jane. Her foot automatically slid over to the brake and they began to slow.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Angus. ‘Go, woman!’
Jane dropped her foot onto the accelerator just as the policeman made a clawing motion at the bonnet and then dropped away as they shot past and roared out of the town.
Craning his neck Angus turned and looked back down the road. ‘He’s done a prat but I think he’s all right.’ Angus turned in his seat again and looked out the windscreen. ‘We’ve got to get off the main roads,’ said the Scotsman. He pointed off to the right. A narrow gravel road led into a deep glen between two broad-shouldered hills. ‘There’s a chance we’ll wind up on somebody’s farm road or in a duck pond but it’s a risk we’ll have to take,’ he said. ‘They’ve obviously broadcast some sort of description; this bonny bit of transport is clearly a liability to us now.’ Jane nodded and swept the big car off the main road and onto the gravel byway. They continued on through the thickening fog, their lights almost completely useless now. Somewhere off to the left they could see occasional glimpses of a narrow, rushing river, thick stands of trees obscuring the view. The river ran out through a steep glen with hills all around, the road corkscrewing, forcing Jane to fight the heavy wheel. They slewed east, then west again, running between trees on both sides now, moving up the hill and away from the river. They reached the top of the hill and then moved down the other side, thumping across a main rail line then following beside it down a broad valley that held the fog in its grasp.
Soon they were in another deep-cut glen, wooded on either side. The woods ended, opening into a meadow. Directly ahead Jane saw a narrow bridge exactly like the one across Tweedsmuir’s trout stream. She was halfway across the bridge when she suddenly saw the back end of a small black car backing slowly out onto the road. She put her palm down on the horn and slammed on the brakes but she knew it was no use. The car was fully out onto the road now and had come to a full stop, its lights flashing.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Jane yelled. She dragged the wheel around and closed her eyes as the big Buick rocketed off the road and briefly took to the air before it blasted through a section of hedgerow as though it were tissue paper, then plunged downward with a sickening lurch. A limb from an old, brittle hawthorn rising beside the road clipped the front end of the car, crushing it. Bucking and pitching, the car dropped head first into the shallow stream below.
There was a long moment of silence: the only sounds were the hissing of the crumpled radiator and the harsh ticking of an engine cooling before its time. Jane and Angus struggled with the doors and finally managed to get out of the car and climb up the stream bank to the road. The owner of the small black car, an old, matchbox-shaped Morris, was waiting for them. He was small, like Tweedsmuir, but considerably younger. He was a little on the plump side, dressed in rough tweeds, a tartan cravat and a fat tweed cap to match his suit. He wore owlish looking round steel glasses and he had a small pair of binoculars around his neck. For a moment Jane froze, remembering the twinkling of lenses she’d seen from the Grasshopper. Then she relaxed; this man looked incapable of harming a ladybug. He looked like Mole from The Wind in the Willows.
‘I’m terribly sorry!’ said the round little man. ‘I’m tracking a particular family of young Mallards you see; they forage down by the loch and I thought if I got there early enough… Oh dear, pardon me; I suppose I really should introduce myself.’ The man in tweeds gave them a bright, eager smile and extended his hand, fog condensing on his glasses like dew. ‘Bond,’ he said. ‘James Bond.’
Chapter Twenty-five
The ruins of Dunstaffnage Castle lay some eight miles from the seaside town of Oban on the shores of Loch Linnhe and were virtually inaccessible except by water from the little village of Dunollie on the road to Connel, a mile or so to the east. There was a rough track that led to the castle from the village but it was only suitable for sportsmen wishing to test the waters or agile walkers willing to risk a turned ankle or even a broken leg on the upland crags leading to the ruins.
There were signs indicating that anybody chancing the path was doing so at their own risk, part of that risk being the likelihood of being summarily arrested since the entire southern side of the loch was private property.
The castle ruins themselves lay on a rocky promontory that extended out into the loch like the great, rough claw of some ancient dinosaur. The castle itself looked like a huge, ominous broken tooth jutting up out of some monstrous stony jaw. The main building was square and dated from the thirteenth century and at one time had a tower at each corner. The entrance to this was by a precarious ruined staircase that faced the loch. The walls were nine feet thick and on the foremost tower were two guns, which formed part of the armament of the Spanish Armada and had been raised from Tobermory Bay on the Island of Mull. Both guns were inscribed with the maker’s name: Auseurus Koster, Amsterdamm me fecit. Two hundred yards from the castle were the remains of a small chapel where some of the early Scottish kings were believed to be buried. In modern times it became the burial place of the Campbells of Dunstaffnage, the hereditary captains of the castle, whose mansion, a great, dark tomb of a place, lay another hundred yards distant, occupying the top of the stone outcropping, its back protected by a jutting cliff, its front door only reached by a long climb up a flight of stone steps leading from the landing place on the loch. The mansion was old, brick and stone covered in a grey, cracked stucco sometime in the past, its windows heavily mullioned and unattractive, the roof flat and sprouting chimneys like old warts on a haggard face. A house built for time and the weather.
Staring out of his third-floor bedroom window in the mansion, Lucas Dundee could see the castle ruins like a black shade obscuring the moonlit waters of the loch. Dundee had arrived by air, landing on a small, private strip above the house. On their way here Danby had informed him that Loch Linnhe was used by elements of the RAF to perfect night bombing over Holland and to not be disturbed by low- flying bombers occasionally making runs up the twenty-mile stretch of peat-coloured water. He also advised Dundee not to try to escape; there were guards on the footpath and the loch was close to seven miles wide; possible for an excellent swimmer like Dundee but not when the water was forty-five degrees. Even so, even an attempt to escape would result in extremely serious consequences. On the other hand, however, there were some kind of festivities taking place tonight and, if he was willing to dress for the occasion, he was welcome to attend. Danby had smiled then.
‘With a name like yours it seems appropriate, Ten Spot, don’t you think?’ He paused. ‘In fact, old friend, I insist on it.’
They’d flown in to the airstrip behind the house in the early hours of the morning and it had been too dark for Dundee to see much of anything at all. The mansion seemed empty with the exception of a few properly dressed servants, all male, and a few men in navy pullovers and jackets who had the faceless look of armed guards. Since then he hadn’t left the enormous room he’d been summarily taken to; there was an adjoining bathroom if he needed the facilities and so far he’d been brought three adequate meals.
The room he occupied was enormous, completely at od
ds with the claustrophobic garret at the Akergill Sanitarium. The ceiling, box-beamed and dark, was at least a dozen feet over his head. There was a massive fireplace on the far side of the room, the mantel arching up almost over his head, held up on either side by two life-size caryatid figures, suitably clothed in nothing but a few delicately placed stone leaves on the vines that entwined their bodies. Over the mantel, was a large gilt-framed oil painting of an unidentified, hard-faced man wearing a kilt and leaning on a broadsword that in real life would be almost impossible to lift. A scroll on the sword said simply 1603. On the ground at his feet, the point of the sword pierced the centre of a gold circlet ornamented with Maltese crosses and fleur-de-lys next to a large rectangular stone.
The rugs on the floor were thick and warm with some sort of worn heraldic theme; the floors themselves were waxed oak planks at least ten inches wide and so dark they were almost black. Dundee had no problem imagining the man over the mantel treading these same boards three hundred plus years ago.
The furniture suited the room: a giant old four-poster bed as dark as the floors, with dark green velvet curtains and a bedspread the same colour. The washstand, bureau and a pair of heavy chests were of even darker wood than the floors and looked faintly Spanish, deeply carved and obviously very old, perhaps liberated from the same ship of the Armada as the pair of cannon on the ruined castle walls.
The door into the room was lighter oak, spanned with a heavy pair of strap hinges and securely locked. When Dundee tried to open the window shutters he found behind the drapery, he discovered that they, too, were locked, and further covered with blackout curtains. He was as securely caged as he would have been in Shepton Mallet prison.
He went to the bed and sat down, staring across the room into the cold hearth of the giant fireplace. Danby had let him keep his Zippo and had given him a pack of Luckies: ‘The only free thing you’re going to get from this army, Ten Spot.’ Dundee lit one, took a deep drag and settled back against the large, green velvet bolster that stood against the headboard of the four-poster, thinking.
He went over the facts again carefully, trying to weave them together into a coherent whole. If Danby was in league with the Germans he supposed most of it now made some kind of sense but he still wasn’t sure he entirely bought the idea. Charlie Danby wasn’t anybody’s patriot and in all the time Dundee had known him he’d never done anything for anyone except himself. It was barely possible that somewhere along the line Danby might have become an ardent Nazi but somehow he doubted it. Power, cash and maybe his father’s real estate holdings but not strict discipline, jackboots and an oath of loyalty to a madman; that wasn’t Charlie’s way. Besides, back at the sanitarium he’d referred to Hitler as ‘just another tinpot dictator.’ That didn’t rate as loyalty in his book.
Then there was the question of his own kidnapping; he seriously doubted that Charlie had done it just to show off to his old schoolmate that he could; bully, liar, cheat and maybe a little bit crazy but always, above all else, Charlie was smart. There was a reason for everything he did and there was a reason for this. But what? How did kidnapping a lawyer and investigator from the Judge Advocate General’s office fit in with a plan to steal the Crown Jewels of England and sell them to the Germans?
Dundee stubbed out his cigarette into the ashtray that sat on the night table beside the bed.
Occleshaw.
The Special Branch cop had been on top of Charlie right from the start; had, in fact, known that Charlie had somehow managed to get inside Shepton Mallet and then out again and had known about the theft of the jewels. He’d appeared out of the blue and done everything he could to wave a flag and point a finger in Charlie’s direction. Why?
Bait.
The word stood in Dundee’s mind like a blinking sign. Bait, just like the dead body of a man from Garrard’s Jewellers with gold dust under his fingernails. Bait, like a matchbook cover from J. G. D. Satchell, Surveyor, Estate Agent & Auctioneer. A lease taken out in Charlie’s name and more gold dust at the place he rented. The idiotic matchbook that Jane had found at the tunnel entrance in the basement of the cottage. A trail of breadcrumbs that inevitably led to Shepton Mallet, the Akergill Sanitorium and finally to this place, by the shores of a loch in the Scottish Highlands that apparently had nothing to do with any of it. Inch by inch and clue by glaring clue Charlie had reeled him in like a trout on the end of one of Jane’s fly-fishing lines but to what end? Not to convince him of Charlie’s divine purpose in selling out the English crown and certainly not to convince him that crime actually paid in the end.
Bait. Occleshaw.
Bait for Occleshaw to nibble on perhaps.
But even if that were true it begged the question of ‘Why?’ Occleshaw was a cop and this wasn’t a game of Hare and Hounds, like a dime thriller. Why give Occleshaw any help along the way?
Frustrated, Dundee threw his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Once again he stared at the man in the painting, wondering who he was and what momentous occasion had resulted in him posing for a portrait in full clan regalia in 1603. Some battle fought and won no doubt, important then but long since forgotten by everyone, with the possible exception of the kilted man’s descendants.
Dundee glanced at his watch. Almost eight. He wasn’t finding any answers alone in this draughty room. He went to the immense cupboard beside the bed and opened the door. There was a light on a chain. He pulled it and the interior of the cupboard lit up. A suit of evening clothes was arrayed on several wooden hangers before him. On the floor there was a pair of expensive-looking soft leather quarter Wellingtons that looked about his size. Charlie didn’t miss a trick. Dundee took the clothes out of the cupboard and began to dress.
He knocked on the door when he was done and one of the beefy-looking guards opened it for him. The man looked him up and down, then turned to the left and pointed to a staircase at the end of a wide, panelled hall.
‘That way… sir.’ They’d obviously been told to be polite but they left no confusion about who was in charge. Feeling slightly ridiculous in the evening clothes, Dundee adjusted his black tie and nodded. He noticed that the guard’s place in the hall was directly across from his door. There was no table and no book this time; the guard didn’t look like the literary type anyway.
Dundee went down the stairs. The second floor seemed to be more rooms off a narrow main hall. Peeking around the banister, he couldn’t see any guards so he walked quickly down the hall and tried the first door he came to. It was locked and so were the next three he tried. Either he was the only guest at the moment or Charlie was being extremely careful. Dundee abandoned his search and went back to the stairs. He went down to the ground floor.
The old house was substantial, although much less ornate than Akergill Hall had been. The main entrance was small, lit by several pale electric lights in sconces set around the low stone walls. The stone floors were covered with a scattering of dark Axminster rugs of no particular pedigree. If anything the foyer of the house was a little cramped and not half as grand as Dundee’s own room, with the exception of a massive suit of armour clutching some kind of hooked lance in its gauntlet that had been placed at the foot of the stairs against the wall. The ceilings were low; the box beams dark, oppressive oak.
Underneath the front door, manned by another guard, Dundee could hear the soft moaning of the wind blowing up from the loch. Akergill Hall had been built partly as an expression of wealth; this place had been built to guard against the elements. The guard at the door nodded to the right and Dundee could hear voices and laughter from behind a closed pair of pocket doors.
Following the guard’s nod, he went and slid open the doors. The room was large, well lit and panelled in wood, with a fire glowing in a good-sized hearth. A pair of crossed broadswords over a blank shield graced the area over the mantel. Dirks, halberds and axes were displayed on one wall while swords and lances were arranged on the other. It was a room given over to instruments and appliances of violence
, all of them gleaming and glittering in the firelight. There wasn’t a woman to be seen.
There were a scattering of carpets on an old oak floor like the one in his room and a number of comfortable upholstered chairs. Against one wall there was a well-stocked bar from which a number of people were serving themselves. A slightly portly man rose from one of the chairs, a glass of brandy in his hand, the flames in the hearth catching the light and turning the amber fluid to fire in his glass.
‘Ah, Major Dundee.’ It was Sir John Gadsby; Dundee wasn’t surprised. There were a dozen more people in the room, most wearing evening clothes like Dundee himself and a few in formal kilts. There was no sign of Danby anywhere.
‘Where’s Charlie?’
‘Not here, I’m afraid,’ said Gadsby. ‘Pressing business elsewhere. He sends his regrets.’
‘I see you’re not keeping up your little charade any more,’ said Dundee.
‘Charade?’ asked Gadsby. Then he smiled, taking a sip from his glass and nodding. ‘You mean the names.’
‘David Portal, I think it was. I was supposed to be a Canadian merchant seaman.’
‘You have a good memory… Mr Portal.’ Gadsby smiled again. ‘Can I fetch you a drink?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Dundee.
‘Prefer to keep your wits about you, young man?’ A scarecrow-thin man wearing a kilt and a ribboned and tartan-edged Glengarry bonnet suddenly appeared beside him. He had a pencil-thin moustache and thin, almost invisible lips. He smelled of Scotch but didn’t seem to be feeling its effects the way Gadsby was feeling his brandy. The man had the deep, rolling Scots accent of a born Glaswegian.
‘Something like that.’
‘Mr William Wier Gilmour,’ said Gadsby, introducing the skinny man. ‘The man who founded the Scottish Fascist Party.’
‘Oh,’ said Dundee.
‘The man standing by the fireplace is William Chambers-Hunter. He was a planter in Ceylon before he returned to join the cause.’ Dundee turned to look. The man in question was wearing an expensively tailored Savile Row suit with the left arm pinned up. The one-armed man in the ‘fancy suit’ from the cottage in Shepton Mallet. He tried not to act surprised.
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