An American Spy

by An American Spy (retail) (epub)

  Dundee stared down into the dark maw of the narrow chamber beside the main structure of the chimney, remembering. He grinned in the hot, steady light from the hurricane lantern; who’d have thought someone named Mary Poppins would come to his rescue? He turned and gave one last look down the length of the attic, muttered a brief curse directed at Charles Danby and tossed the hurricane lantern into the nearest pile of junk. The glass chimney smashed and the reservoir of kerosene rolled under a pile of carpets bundled in one corner, spilling dribbles of fuel as it went. There was a brief pause and then a huge sound like the breathless cough of some huge beast. A wall of fire leapt up to the beams and plaster overhead, instantly igniting the old, rotten hay. Within a few seconds the entire bone dry, dusty attic was engulfed in flames.

  A great howling sheet of fire came racing simultaneously along the floor and ceiling of the attic in Dundee’s direction, absorbing everything in its path. He ducked down the iron ladder and disappeared; a minute or so later, covered in soot and smelling of creosote the same way he had that long-ago day in Seattle, he tumbled out of the Jacob’s Ladder and into the cavernous basement of Dunstaffnage House. It took him another minute or so to locate the old coal chute, crawling across an ancient pile of old clinkers and bags of coal delivered by boat from the village.

  With the first muffled shouts of ‘fire’ coming from the floor above, Dundee crawled up the chute and ducked out of the basement, coal dust clotting his lungs and making him fight for breath in the cool night air. He stumbled away from the house and looked back. He could see gouts of smoke coming out of the upper-floor windows and flames shooting up out of gaping holes in the slate roof, tiles exploding like stony grenades as the flames ignited pockets of ancient air trapped in the slates. The fire had obviously reached down into the top floor as well; curtains had burst into flames and now the old mullioned windows were exploding as well, blasting shards of glass in all directions. Out of the corner of his eye Dundee could see the first people beginning to stumble out of the front door, followed by clouds and billows of smoke spilling out of the house and into the night air. He ran.

  Stumbling down the narrow path he suddenly realised he didn’t have the slightest idea where he was going; when he’d come in with Danby they came down a narrow flight of stairs from the landing strip, which had been carved out of the stone outcrop the house rested on. His senses told him that he was now moving away at right angles, the rocks visible like a black wall on his right, the loch on his left, its riffled waters a dozen yards away, separated from him by a steep, rocky beach. Directly ahead, vaguely seen in the distance through a scraggly patch of weather-beaten Scotch pine, he could see the lights of the village, Connel.

  He stumbled as the ground began to rise and nearly lost his footing on a scree of loose stone at the base of a huge old tree, long dead, its main trunk almost touching the ground, its broad upper limbs naked and skeletal in the moonlight. A figure loomed up, rising behind the tree. Whoever it was, he had a gun and it was pointed at Dundee’s midriff. Dundee groaned. He’d walked right into one of Danby’s guards, probably stealing a minute to relieve himself.

  ‘Bloody hell, Ian! You’ve stepped on my hand!’ A second figure rose from behind the tree, taller than the first and bigger all around. He certainly didn’t sound like any kind of guard but he, too, had a gun. ‘Bugger!’ he said. The hand without the gun was waving in the air.

  ‘Jesus!’ said the slighter of the two men, staring open-mouthed at Dundee. ‘Gangway foah de Lawd Jehovah!’ he said in broad Negro dialect with an overtone of English Public School. Definitely not a guard.

  ‘What are you going on about, Ian?’ said the second man.

  ‘Rex Ingram, you twit. Green Pastures.’

  ‘That was about Welsh choir boys or something,’ grumbled the second man. The first man stepped over the tree trunk and approached Dundee.

  ‘You really should go to the pictures more often Peter. That was How Green was My Valley. Five Academy Awards.’

  Earlier in the evening he’d found himself wondering about the sanity of the guests at dinner; now he was wondering about his own. It was like one of those farces that the BBC put on. The first man stopped in front of Dundee and shook his head, looking him up and down. ‘You are a sight.’ Dundee looked down at himself. Like his twelve-year-old self he was black with soot. Now he understood the reference to Green Pastures.

  The second, larger man eased himself over the tree trunk and crunched across the wet stone, one eye keeping a lookout over Dundee’s shoulder at the burning house. ‘I’m not the Americanophile, Ian. I don’t collect these little facts and I don’t particularly like American films.’ He joined his companion. In the moonlight Dundee could see that the men were both carrying large .45 automatics.

  ‘You’re Lucas Dundee, the American major, aren’t you?’ He paused. ‘Underneath the blackface, I mean.’

  ‘That’s right. Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry,’ said the man, extending his free hand. ‘Fleming, Ian Fleming.’ He nodded to the man beside him. ‘This is my brother Peter.’ He smiled pleasantly. ‘I’m a friend of Jane’s, by the way, in case you were wondering.’ He pointed towards the water. ‘We’ve got a boat down there; follow us and you can make your escape.’

  The boat turned out to be a tiny dinghy barely large enough for two, let alone three, powered by an equally tiny ‘Swift’ Electric outboard motor powered by a motor car battery. It was, however, almost completely silent and they puttered up the loch to the village of Connel without a sound, leaving the burning mansion behind them. Once in the village they found Fleming’s car, a massive, open touring, three litre, supercharged Bentley. Within half an hour of boosting himself into the attic of Dunstaffnage House, Lucas Dundee found himself in a room at an inn called The Sword and The Crown in the town of Oban, changing into a pair of Ian Fleming’s corduroy shooting trousers and pulling one of the slim man’s Navy-issue roll-neck sweaters over his head.

  Face and hands washed and wearing clean clothes, Dundee left Fleming’s room at the inn and went down to the ground floor. The inn was a plain, two-storey affair on Shore Street, across the road from a spread of a dozen or so railway tracks that abutted the railway station and Railway Quay, Oban’s main pier. Looming over everything close to the pier, including the inn, were three squat coastal steamers from Scottish Trader Lines, Hebrides Trader, Oban Trader and the largest of the three, Inveraray Trader. Mist was beginning to roll off the bay, wrapping the stout vessels in heavy grey shrouds. Somewhere a foghorn started to boom out its mournful call.

  Dundee crossed the small, low-ceilinged foyer and went into the public room off to the left. It was past eleven and, by rights, the bar and the kitchen should have been closed but somehow Fleming had managed to convince the innkeeper otherwise. The naval intelligence officer and his brother were seated in a narrow, high-backed booth beside a window that overlooked the railway tracks, working their way through a pint of Courage each and huge servings of warmed-up steak and kidney pie. Fleming waved his fork in the air and Dundee crossed the room to join them. They appeared to be the only people in the place with the exception of the innkeeper, swabbing out pint mugs with a rag and whistling tunelessly to himself. Dundee sat down, sliding into the booth beside the older Fleming. The innkeeper threw the rag across his shoulder, flipped open a pass-through in the bar and approached them. He asked what Dundee wanted. Dundee looked down at the Flemings’ heavily burdened plates, thought about the dinner he’d had earlier in the evening and settled for coffee. The innkeeper nodded silently and went away. He came back a moment later with something the colour of mud.

  ‘Last o’ the cream and there’s nae sugar,’ said the man then went away. Dundee sipped. It tasted like hot iron filings in a cup.

  ‘What exactly were you doing out there by the lake?’ asked Dundee.

  ‘Loch,’ said Fleming. ‘We were waiting to see what would happen. We knew you were in there; we just didn�
��t know what to do about it.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Peter Fleming. He looked to be seven or eight years older than his brother. From the lines and crow’s feet on his face he’d apparently led a harder life. ‘We’ve been on your trail since York.’

  Dundee stared. ‘You knew I’d been kidnapped?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Ian Fleming. His face clouded. ‘Unfortunately one of Danby’s people appeared to get wind of it. The woman we had following you went back on the train to inform Miss Todd and they killed her. Penny, that is, not Miss Todd.’

  ‘Penny?’ said Dundee.

  ‘She was one of our best,’ said Peter Fleming. ‘Her code name was Monet.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ said Dundee. ‘Who is we and why do you need code names?’

  ‘Peter works for our Special Operations Executive, rather like your OSS. Monet was one of his people. She called herself Monet but the rest of the staff on Baker Street called her Money – uneducated clods. Her real name was Penny so that’s what I. called her – Moneypenny.’ His face darkened again. ‘Dying on a mission somewhere in a war zone is one thing – being murdered on a train in your own country is something else again.’

  ‘Back up,’ said Dundee. He took another sip of the ghastly coffee, then pushed it away. ‘Why were you tailing me and Jane?’

  ‘Because we were, and still are, in a rather tricky political situation,’ said Peter Fleming. ‘An American like Danby involved in an atrocious crime and our own Special Branch convinced that you were in league with him? Two bad apples.’

  ‘So you thought I’d lead you to Charlie, one way or the other?’

  ‘Something of the sort, yes. We already knew most of what we needed to know about the man, of course, we just rather wanted to roll up the whole business, your friend Charlie included. Bit of a rogue so to speak, gotten away from his own people as well from what we can gather. We almost had him when he flew in with you earlier but we were a little too late because he flew right out again. He’s been sighted on Mull.’

  ‘Mull?’

  ‘A rather large island eight miles across the sound. There’s an airstrip on the isthmus between Salen and Loch na Keal. The Loch of Cliffs,’ he added, translating.

  Dundee looked at him curiously. ‘Did you say Salen or Salem?’

  ‘Salen,’ said Ian Fleming. ‘Why? Do you know it?’

  Dundee didn’t answer. He looked beyond the younger Fleming to the old fireplace next to the bar. A poor copy of the painting over the fireplace in his room at Dunstaffnage House hung over the mantel, complete with the Crown and Sword from which the inn took its name. Dundee shook his head. It was all getting far too complex for him to take in. Ian Fleming finished his meal. He took an ornately enamelled cigarette tin out of his jacket pocket. There was a picture of a vaguely oriental woman staring out of a window on the top. Fleming popped off the lid and offered Dundee one of the slightly oval cigarettes inside, lighting it for him with a gold Dunhill.

  ’‘They’re Russian,’ said the younger Fleming airily. ‘Samokish of Moscow. My tobacconist in Burlington Arcade keeps them for me.’ He smiled. ‘God knows where he gets them these days.’ His brother threw him a withering look but Ian appeared not to notice.

  Dundee took a puff. It was awful. Coffee like iron filings and tobacco like camel shit. He took a deep drag anyway. ‘I’m not sure I really get it,’ he said. ‘I’m helping to track down the guy who’s stolen some of your crown jewels and that makes it a “tricky political situation”?’

  ‘Winston would seem to think so,’ said Peter Fleming.

  ‘Winston?’

  ‘Churchill. Prime Minister,’ the older brother said blandly.

  ‘We’re talking about crown jewels, not state secrets. And what in God’s name does it have to do with Bill Donovan?’ Dundee laughed.

  ‘I’m afraid this has never been about the crown jewels,’ said Peter Fleming, ‘and I’m afraid it has everything to do with Donovan and state secrets, ours and yours.’

  ‘Donovan? How do you figure that?’ scoffed Dundee.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ said Ian Fleming, obviously surprised. ‘Charles Danby worked for him.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Mull is an island of mountains and rough moorland, of forested glens and headland cliffs, of bare peninsulas and rocky coves measuring twenty-five miles by twenty between its farthest points, with a population of approximately fifteen hundred, most of them fishermen and sheep farmers, all of them cut from the same hardy Hebridean cloth that must clothe anyone intending to live in such a lonely and unappetising place. All of its sheltered ports lie on its east coast. To the north-east lie the Morvern Hills, a mile or so across the Sound of Mull. To the west there is only the open sea. Looming over everything in the centre of the island is the great black shape of Ben More, the island’s tallest point.

  The wooded village of Salen lies on the bay of the same name, facing the Morvern Hills and the Sound, situated on the isthmus of low, heavily forested land in birch and ash and oak that divides Mull’s northern head from its mountainous body. On the other side of the isthmus is Loch na Keal, the Loch of Cliffs, a deep indentation that comes in from the sea to the west, thousand-foot sheer cliffs coming off Ben More and knifing directly into the dark, deep and forbidding water.

  Small steamers call at Salen on their regular runs but mostly it is a fishing village, a recent addition to the island, having been developed in the early 1800s by Lachlan MacQuarrie, the so-called Father of Australia, who bought an estate there on retiring. The village has a single road that also serves as High Street, a post office and a small hotel of ten rooms, the oddly named Tangle of the Islands. Just beyond the village a single-lane dirt track leads through the woods and across the isthmus to the abandoned hamlet of Killiechronan, its half-dozen tumbledown huts and cottages sitting just above a span of pebbled beach that leads down to the waters of Loch na Keal. To the left of the settlement are the towering cliffs of Gribun and above the heavily wooded slopes of Ben More.

  Jane Todd sat in the small, overheated dining room of the Tangle as the locals called it, smoking another cigarette, wondering what to do next. With the funny little ornithologist’s help they had apparently slipped through Occleshaw’s net and eventually made their way here. It was incredible luck more than anything else. Bond, the ornithologist, was on his way to Mull, intent on completing his latest field guide, Birds of the Western Highlands, and he was more than happy to take them there. He seemed very enthusiastic about a new edition of his Birds of the West Indies, particularly Jamaica, which he intended to complete as soon as the present political situation allowed.

  His intention was to make his way around Mull in a boat he’d hired for the purpose, something he called a Thorneycroft, which seemed to surprise Angus because of its size. Apparently the boat in question was a forty-two-foot motor cruiser whose design had been used to produce the Royal Navy’s MTB or Motor Torpedo Boat. Somehow he’d managed to get the fuel coupons for it or knew who to bribe to get them.

  The owl-eyed birdwatcher quickly allayed any of Angus’s fears by telling him he had much the same kind of boat at his home on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire and that he had, in fact, taken part in the rescue at Dunkirk. He would circumnavigate the island taking pictures and making his sketches and if Angus and Jane were still there when he returned he’d be glad to take them back to the mainland. In the meantime they were welcome to use his motor car, considering all the trouble he’d caused them on the road to Oban. Bond had left from Tobermory early the previous morning, waving from the cabin of his boat, Lady Beryl II, as he slipped out of the harbour and headed into the Sound. Taking his car they’d driven down the ten-mile stretch of country road to Salen.

  She finished her third cup of weak, milky-sweet tea and her fourth cigarette since finishing breakfast then checked her watch. It was past nine and Angus was still using the large claw-foot tub in his room. They’d been in the ho
tel for less than a day and he’d already had at least three baths. She lit another cigarette and stared out the window overlooking Salen Bay. In the distance, on the far point of the bay, she could see the ruins of an old castle, stark against the steel grey, overcast sky. They were almost out of time and she was running out of ideas.

  ‘I’m not goddamn Nancy Drew,’ she muttered to herself, sipping cold tea then inhaling deeply on her cigarette.

  ‘It’s not right,’ said a voice in a broad, rolling brogue. She looked up, startled. It was Tommy, the innkeeper’s nephew, a young boy from Edinburgh. He was twelve or thirteen, big for his age, with heavily muscled wrists and a broad chest. The wrists came from his previous job of milkman’s assistant and the chest was apparently the result of a mail-order bodybuilding course. He had a very adult-looking and expensive tattoo of a leaping tiger on his right forearm and, according to his uncle, he preferred to be called ‘Shane’ after the Jack Schaeffer novel, which the boy was rarely seen without. His handsome young face, with intense hazel eyes and dark, bushy eyebrows, was set in a perpetual scowl, either as a result of his age or the fact that he’d been shipped off to his uncle’s hotel in Salen for the duration of the war or perhaps both.

  ‘What’s not right… Shane?’ she said, remembering the nickname.

  ‘I heard you asking my uncle about the tides and he didn’t know. So I found out.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s not right, like I said… Jane.’ His eyes got that smouldering look she’d seen before and she was startled to realise that this big, muscle-bound boy was actually flirting with her. Well, good for him, she thought. And good luck. Not that he’d need it with his looks but he certainly wasn’t going to find many targets for Cupid’s bow on the Isle of Mull.