Gold

A Novel by

Michael Rolls

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Dedicated to the memory of my dear wife

Veronica Rolls

15th April 1943 to 23rd January 2018

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GOLD

Contents

Chapter One. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... ..2

Chapter Two – three weeks earlier. .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... . .. .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... ..8

Chapter Three – 14th November 1943.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... ........13

Chapter Four - 15th November 2013.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... ......14

Chapter Five – 16th November 2013..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ......21

Chapter Six... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .....26

Chapter Seven. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...31

Chapter Eight – May 2014... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... ............44

Chapter Nine – June 2014. .. .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... ..... ....57

Chapter Ten. .... .... .. .. .... .... ..... .... .. .. .... .... .... ..... ... .... .... .. .. .... .... ..... .... ... . .... .... ..... .... ... . .... .... .68

Chapter Eleven – July 2014. . .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .78

Chapter Twelve – Sco Nolan’s story. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...86

Chapter Thirteen. .. ..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ....97

Chapter Fourteen. .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....110

Epilogue..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...........113

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Chapter One

Compared to Everest, K2, Mont Blanc, even Ben Nevis, Beinn Bharrain on the Isle of Arran, at 2,312 feet is little more than a pimple on the face of the planet, not even a Scottish Munro, but on the evening of the eleventh of November, nineteen forty-three, it was just high enough to play a major part in a tragedy that was to reverberate for the next seventy years.

The Isle of Arran lay almost in the direct path of the many American aircraft that were being ferried from the USA to Great Britain as part of the build-up of the United States Army Air Force in the war effort against Nazi Germany. Almost, but not quite. The aircraft ferried from Gander in Newfoundland to Meeks Field on Iceland – later to become the Reykjavik International Airport, but in nineteen forty-three an essential part of America’s ability to send heavy bombers to Britain. From Meeks Field the aeroplanes flew some eight hundred miles to land at Prestwick Airport on Scotland’s west coast.

Just such an aircraft was a B-17, better known to the world at large as the ‘Flying Fortress’, the big four-engined bomber that was to gain undying fame for its part in the final defeat of the Third Reich. It had taken off from Meeks Field just before midday, expecting to arrive at Prestwick just before the short Scottish day gave way to the long Scottish night.

It never made it.

*******

Ingrid Arnesdottir looked up as the door to her father’s bakery opened and a man entered. Despite the fact that he was wearing a business suit, Ingrid was instantly aware that the man was no Icelander, but an American. At seventeen years of age, Ingrid was filled with the certainty of youth, and in her black and white view of the world, the Americans were not welcome. Like many Icelanders, she strongly resented the fact that her country had been invaded, first by the British, back in May of nineteen forty, then in August and September the British had left, but the Americans had arrived. Iceland, like her partner country Denmark, had declared her neutrality at the outbreak of war in September nineteen thirty-nine, but when Germany had violated Denmark’s neutrality in the April of the following year, the British had promptly followed suit the very next month by invading Iceland. There had been no resistance – at least not armed resistance; the Iceland parliament, the Althing, had recognised the reality of the situation. Had Germany followed up her invasion of Denmark by moving on to take Iceland as well, the presence of German naval and air forces on the island would have been a dagger aimed at the very heart of the Atlantic convoys, without which Britain could not hope to survive for long. When Britain, desperately in need of troops to reinforce her flagging forces in North Africa, had entered into an agreement with the Americans, reluctantly acquiesced to by the Althing, that the USA would take over the protection of Iceland, allowing the British soldiers to go where they were more needed, as far as many Icelanders, including Ingrid, were concerned, it was no improvement – it still meant that some thirty thousand strangers had taken over her country. The fact that many of those of her countrymen who had been bitterly opposed to the British and American invasions had become inured to the state of things, and even grateful that the British and Americans were much to be preferred to the Germans, once stories of German atrocities in the lands the Nazis had occupied began to surface, influenced Ingrid not one jot; she wanted her country to be free of all foreigners, no matter where they came from.

The man smiled at her.

“Good morning, miss,” he said, “may I have half a dozen of those cream cakes in the window?”

Ingrid was on the verge of refusing to serve him, to say that they were for display only, or that they were already ordered, or to pretend that she couldn’t speak English, when she had a better idea. An idea which would let her strike a tiny, tiny act of defiance against the invader. She treated the man to a dazzling smile, a smile which emphasised her attractive features and seemed to sparkle from blue eyes set in an alabaster complexion and framed by long silver blonde hair gathered into two thick plaits which hung down well past her shoulders.

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“Those are just on display, sir. Let me get you some from the cold store.”

She hurried from the shop into the store behind. On a shelf reposed two dozen cream cakes which her father had baked two days before, only to discover too late that the cream supplied by Nils Larrsen was quite definitely off. The cakes had been put to one side and would be the subject of her father demanding a refund plus some small compensation. Ingrid’s father, Lars Leifsen, was as dedicated a patriot as Ingrid herself; she was sure that he would not object to sacrificing six cakes to such a good cause.

She re-entered the shop and boxed up the cakes for the man who accepted them with a smile and proffered an American note in payment.

“I hope that US dollars are OK, miss?”

“They’re fine, sir,” she replied, when she would much rather have demanded Icelandic kroner in payment – but again a very small sacrifice. She watched in satisfaction as the man left the shop.

Ingrid wasn’t to know that her desire to inflict a minor stomach upset on the American was to have an effect that she could not begin to imagine – and which if she but had foreseen it, would have caused her to abandon her minor act of defiance at once.

*******

Harry Cobden hurried to the waiting Jeep and its Military Policeman driver.

“Thanks, corporal,” he said, “back to the base, please.”

As they drove the couple of miles to Meeks Field, Cobden reflected on his morning’s efforts.

Charged by his boss, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury George Norton, to deliver a sealed package to the American Ambassador’s office, the errand had taken him only twenty minutes or so, leaving him time for a quick stroll around part of Reykjavik, where he had been struck by how much better dressed and placid the civilians he had seen had been compared to their counterparts he had seen during his recent trip to London. The pinched, anxious look seen on the faces of so many Londoners was conspicuous by its absence, although he could not help wondering what effect having to survive the Blitz would have had on the placid Icelandic faces.

He had, however, noticed a certain degree of hostility on the faces of some of the pedestrians he had seen, his smile and ‘góðan daginn’ or ‘good morning’, the only words of Icelandic that he knew, being curtly ignored, all of which combined to make the beaming smile and gracious speech of the stunningly beautiful young girl in the baker’s shop all the more pleasant.

He got back to the base in plenty of time for the scheduled take off time of his aircraft, the same B-17 in which he had arrived from Newfoundland the previous day. He was met by the aircraft’s pilot, Captain Bill Abrahams, a twenty-six year old New Yorker, whose smooth handing of the big bomber had even managed to make Cobden, no fan of flying, feel reasonably relaxed. Despite, to Cobden from the viewpoint of a forty-five year old, Abrahams’ youth, he was a highly experienced pilot and was returning to Europe after having already completed one tour of operations, a tour which had seen him earn a Bronze Star for bravery and a Purple Heart indicating that he had been wounded in action. To Cobden the young man looked considerably older than his actual years, an impression increased by the scar which ran from a fraction of an inch away from the outside corner of his left eye to his jaw bone, just below the lobe of his ear. Cobden had no idea how Abrahams had come by the scar and felt that it would be impolitic to ask – the USAAF Captain had an air of reservation about him that seemed to preclude easy acquaintanceship.

“Bad news, I’m afraid, Mr. Cobden. We’re going to be taking off half an hour late – the crew chief found a fault in one of the magnetos and they are just finishing replacing it.”

“Is that serious, Captain?”

“Not now that it’s been replaced. Trouble is, it means a night landing at Prestwick, which isn’t the best of places after dark. Still, that’s it – nothing that we can do about it.”

“Couldn’t we delay until tomorrow morning?” Cobden asked nervously.

“I’m afraid not, sir. The Air Force needs every plane over there as quickly as they can be delivered, We’ll be OK though, nothing to worry about.”

As he finished speaking the other two members of the aircraft’s ferry crew joined them. Unlike Abrahams, they were both on their first operational mission and had never seen combat. Both were 5

second lieutenants, both young and eager to impress, and both clearly in awe of their captain.

Jimmy Coogan, born in Washington and twenty-four years old, was the second pilot. A fresh faced young man, his chubby features made him look even younger than his true age, with lank fair hair, pale blue eyes and a height of only five feet five or so, adding to the impression that he ought, by rights, to still be at school. On the other hand, Charles Meredith, the navigator, although a year younger, could easily have passed for ten years older. Tall and lean with a sallow complexion, dark brown eyes and virtually black hair, he had a permanently worried air about him. Adding to the impression of age beyond his years was the fact that his beard was, like his hair, virtually black and really needed a twice daily shave. Already, even at mid-morning, it looked in need of the attentions of a razor.

The four men made their way over to the operations centre to make a final check on their planned route; strictly speaking Cobden had no need to be there, but he was unwilling to simply wander off by himself, and the airmen, aware of his seniority within government service, were unwilling to object to his presence.

Route checking completed, they made their way to the equipment store to draw flying gear, sheepskin lined trousers and jackets to combat the cold of altitude, parachutes as an escape means of last resort, survival rations; then a message came through that the changed magneto was still being checked and that they had a further fifteen minutes to wait.

It was at that point that Cobden remembered the cream cakes. He had been carrying them in their box when Abrahams had first approached him and had left them on a shelf in the operations centre.

It was only a minute or so walk away, so he went back and fetched them. He offered them to his companions; nervousness over the coming flight had destroyed his appetite and he no longer fancied them himself. Abrahams declined, but Coogan and Meredith both took a cake each, although, having eaten them, both were uncomplimentary about Icelandic cooking, and the remaining cakes were consigned to a waste bin.

Finally the word came that all was ready and they took their places in a lorry waiting to ferry them to the dispersal area where their aircraft awaited them.

As they got out of the lorry and walked to the aircraft, Cobden marvelled once again that such a huge, ungainly looking beast, a veritable metal mammoth, could actually take to the air and once there fly for hundreds of miles, carrying tons of payload. Painted a dull olive green on top and sides, a light grey underneath, he could find no trace of beauty in it. It would be hard, he told himself, to imagine anything further removed from the grace and elegance of a bird on flight. It truly was a

‘Flying Fortress’ but a fortress all too frequently conquered according to the reports of their losses in operations over Europe.

As they arrived the military police corporal who had been guarding the aircraft saluted Abrahams and reported that nobody had been inside the plane whilst he had been on duty; none of the work to the faulty magneto had necessitated entry of the fuselage itself. Not for the first time, all three airmen wondered what it was in the quite small, but very heavy, packing case that had been lashed down to the floor of the aircraft in Newfoundland and had not been moved or touched since. When they had landed at Meeks Field the previous day the aircraft had been met by a jeep containing military policemen, one of whom had been posted as an armed guard before Cobden and the aircrew had even left the plane.

The four of them clambered aboard, Abrahams and Coogan respectively into the left and right hand pilots seats, Meredith into a cubbyhole where the radio sets and navigational equipment resided, leaving Cobden to settle himself into a fold down canvas seat behind the pilots, an uncomfortable perch to be occupied for hours on end, as he had already discovered on the flight from Newfoundland the previous day.

Coogan, under Abraham’s watchful gaze, pressed, to Cobden’s untutored eyes, a flurry of buttons which resulted in all four engines, one after another, bellowing into life, with the whole aircraft vibrating to their massive power. The engine notes rose to a crescendo then died back to be merely deafening as the pilots checked that all was well with them, then Coogan radioed the control tower.

“Meeks Tower, Four Seven Three requesting clearance for take-off.”

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Cobden realised that he had failed to don the earphones and microphone that dangled from the bulkhead beside him. He hurriedly put the combined set on, too late to hear the reply Coogan had received from the control tower, but presumably it had been in the affirmative, for the big machine started to trundle out of the dispersal bay towards the runway. It reached the end of the strip of concrete which was, Cobden had been told, ten thousand feet long, nearly two miles and able, he had been assured to offer a lightly laden ferry aircraft such as the one in which he now found himself, far more runway length than was actually needed.

Abrahams rested his right hand on the four throttle levers beside him and pushed them firmly forward and the B-17 started to accelerate, slowly at first, but with gradually increasing urgency, down the runway. Little more than half its length had been covered before Cobden realised that the thumping of the wheels on the concrete surface had died away and the aircraft was now airborne and climbing steadily away from Iceland and towards far distant Scotland.

An hour passed, then two, then three, with nothing to break the noisy monotony. Then, however, things did change.

Cobden became aware of a strange noise in his earphones; it sounded like somebody vomiting and moments later Meredith’s voice, sounding weak and disjointed, sounded in his ears.

“Skipper, I’m ill.”

There followed more sounds of vomiting, then Abrahams’ voice.

“Mr. Cobden, please check on Meredith.”

Cobden undid the lapstrap that secured him to his seat and made his way the few feet to the navigator’s cubbyhole. There he found Meredith doubled over his table, the table itself and the floor around the young man’s feet liberally splashed with vomit. Meredith was clearly in a state of near collapse, and Cobden hurried forward again to report to Abrahams.

“It looks like food poisoning or the like, captain – he’s been violently ill all over the place and is scarcely conscious.”

Abrahams frowned heavily at the unwelcome news and thought for a moment. Then he turned to Coogan.

“Jimmy, you’ll have to take over from Meredith. Get him out of his seat, lie him down somewhere, give him some water and Mr. Cobden, you stay with him and see what you can do for him.”

Coogan unbuckled his harness and made his way back to the stricken navigator, pushing past Cobden as he did so; Cobden noticed that the co-pilot was sweating heavily and seemed less than perfectly steady on his feet.

Had she but known it, Ingrid Arnesdottir’s act of defiance against the Americans who were in her country was having a far, far greater effect than she could ever have anticipated. Had she known of its likely effect, she would never have dreamt of doing what she had, but there was no way for her to know the tragedy she would cause and she never did.

Between them, Coogan and Cobden manoeuvred the semi-conscious Meredith out of his seat and laid him on the floor a few feet further aft. Coogan, after wiping the vomit away from the navigator’s table with his gloved hands, settled down and checked the chart that Meredith had been updating as they progressed across the grey Atlantic twenty thousand feet below them.

Cobden looked at the co-pilot anxiously.

“Are you alright, lieutenant?”

As both men had removed their headsets to enable them to move around, Coogan seemed not to hear at first, then shook his head slowly.

“I’m not too good, but I’ll be OK – let the skipper know.”

It than dawned on Coogan that all he had to do was don the navigator’s headset and he could talk to Abrahams direct. With hands that were shaking slightly, he slipped it over his head and spoke into the microphone.

“Skipper, I’m in position. Whatever got to Charley seems to have got to me as well, but I’m not too bad – I’ll cope OK.”

There was a long silence whilst Coogan assimilated his new duties, then he spoke again, his voice dull and leaden.

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“Skipper, the radios are dead and looking at the chart updates, Charley must have been out of it for an hour or more, and his last radio update is nearly ninety minutes old.”

Cobden listened in horror. It had been explained to him, when he had joined Abrahams and his colleagues back in Newfoundland, that ferry aircraft would only transmit in an emergency; although there was little danger of encountering German aircraft, there was a slight chance, as the Luftwaffe did have long range aircraft operating from Norway. Primarily their task was to report weather conditions to aid their meteorologists, but they were armed and a ferry aircraft using its radio to transmit ran the risk of having its position determined by German ground stations and a prowling Luftwaffe aircraft directed onto it. It was a small level of risk, but it had been known to happen, and the USAAF wisely ordered its aircrew to avoid such a risk except in an emergency. On the other hand, the radios were listened to avidly; every thirty minutes the latest weather conditions would be broadcast, an essential aid to long distance flight over the Atlantic with its fickle weather. With Meredith apparently out of action for over an hour and apparently having missed two or even three weather updates, there was no guarantee that the aircraft was now where its crew had thought it to be.

Abrahams was worried, very worried. Finding a successful landfall on the Scottish coast would have been simple in daylight – but it was rapidly growing gloomy as the short northern day approached its end in readiness to surrender pride of place to the long northern night. Had the radios still been working, a night approach would have been relatively simple. With neither daylight nor radio to assist him, he was reduced to dead reckoning which, given the length of time that had passed since the weather information had last been updated, really equated to guesswork. It was for situations such as this that the aircraft carried two separate radios – for both to fail was highly unusual, but that was of no comfort whatsoever in his present predicament.

What he didn’t know was that the weather updates that had been missed were crucial for the aircraft’s continuing safety. The atmospheric pressure had dropped considerably, with the result that the aircraft was actually nearly two thousand feet lower than the readout claimed. Additionally, the wind had strengthened and swung round a little to the west. As a result the B-17 was both lower and further north than he thought.

The normal approach to Prestwick was to come in south of Islay and the Kintyre peninsula, then turn north-east to take advantage of the run into Prestwick being over the sea with no danger from the high ground on the peninsula and, more particularly, on Arran.

Then the rain began; rain streaming from low cloud that went down far below the aircraft’s current altitude. Dead reckoning indicated that he was still over a hundred miles of Prestwick, which meant that he must still be over the sea, so he began a cautious descent to try and discover just how low was the cloud ceiling. Anxiously he scanned out of the cockpit window, then decided that two pairs of eyes would be better than one.

“Mr. Cobden, would you join me in the cockpit, please.”

A few moments later, the civilian was seated in the co-pilot’s seat gazing fixedly out to starboard, whilst Abrahams interspersed his own visual search of the dark grey blanket to port with quick inspections of his instruments.

The cloud base had still not been reached when, with the altimeter claiming that the aircraft was still some four thousand feet about sea level, the big bomber struck the very summit of the ridge of Beinn Bharrain at just two thousand, three hundred and twelve feet.

The aircraft came so near to actually clearing the ridge that the impact, which tore the underside of the fuselage away, caused the bomber to effectively bounce over the crest and then plummet down into the still, dark waters of Dubh Loch some thousand or so feet lower down the mountain side.

The waters closed over the stricken plane and within a minute or two had subsided to their normal impassive stillness as the rain quickly turned to snow which drifted gently down on the mountain side to conceal those pieces of debris left higher up by the first impact.

*************

Three miles away, in the tiny hamlet of Pirnmill, sixteen year old Douglas McFee continued to stare into the dark sky to the east. Moments earlier he had heard an aircraft pass low overhead, then he 8

was almost, but not quite, sure that he had heard some sort of crash. Had an aircraft flown into Beinn Bharrain? It was, he supposed, possible, so he decided to report the matter. That, however, was more easily said than done. The only telephone in the hamlet was in the post office and by now the post office would be closed. That meant that he would have to bang on the door of the postmistress, Sonia McDowell, an elderly lady renowned equally for her deafness and her short temper. He thought long and hard, then decided that if indeed an aeroplane had crashed on Beinn Bharrain there was nothing to be done before daylight at the earliest. He returned to his home and spent a lonely evening – his widower father was out on the trawler - listening to the radio before having an early night. He knew that Sonia McDowell was an early riser, and, sure enough, by half past six the next morning he had relayed his possible evidence to the police.

***********

Major Miles Land, USAAF, replaced the telephone handset and turned to his assistant, Sergeant Kenneth Cole.

“When was seven four three due in yesterday, sarge?”

“Seventeen forty-five, sir.”

“H’mm. Just had the police from Brodick on the line. An Arran islander reckons he may have heard an aircraft crash on high ground in the island at about that time.”

Land had already accepted that seven four three was lost, together with its crew, but was uncomfortably aware that there had been something out of the ordinary about the flight. It had been the subject of a ‘Secret’ message ordering the field’s commanding officer, Land’s boss, Colonel Hal Walters, to ensure that the ‘special cargo’ aboard the plane be placed under secure guard immediately the plane touched down and that a Mr. Harold Cobden, a senior official from the Department of the Treasury was to be afforded every assistance in anything that he might ask. All very mysterious, mused Land as he made his way to his superior’s office. He knocked and walked in. One look at his face warned Walters that there was bad news to come.

“What’s up, Miles – you look like you’ve got a burr up your ass!”

“That special flight, Hal. Just had a call from the police at Brodick, that’s on Arran. A local may have heard a crash on high ground about the right time for it to have been seven four three.”

“Oh, shit,” muttered the colonel, “that’s all we need. Christ knows what its special cargo was and now whatever it was may be lying around waiting to be picked by some bloody shepherd.”

He stopped, rose to his feet and looked out his office window.

“Well, the weather’s as bad as ever – no chance of having a look see for the moment, but as soon as it clears have a J-4 ready for us.”

In the event, it was the next day before the two men were able to take to the air in a J-4, the tiny high winged Piper Cub derivative that the American forces used as a virtual airborne taxi. A two seater, with a top speed of under a hundred miles an hour, it was an ideal vehicle for low speed, low altitude reconnaissance, and, with Walters at the controls and Land using binoculars from the rear seat, the little aeroplane cruised up and down the length of the Isle of Arran for nearly an hour. The two officers paid particular attention to the high ground, especially around Beinn Bharrain.

Conditions, for once, were perfect with a clear blue sky enabling the low but bright sun to throw everything into sharp relief below them, a relief enhanced by the blanket of snow that covered much of the island.

Walters shook his head in disgust.

“With this snow anything down there is going to stick out like a sore thumb – and I can’t see a bloody thing that looks anything like a crash site – you?”

“Nope. I reckon that Scottish peasant imagined things – probably too much Scotch whisky.”

“I reckon that’s about it, let’s go home”

What both men failed to appreciate was that the blanket of snow, which they had thought was giving them perfect viewing conditions, had in fact given them the diametric opposite. Even by Scottish standards, the fall had been exceptionally heavy. The rain which had caused such problems for Abrahams had turned to snow almost within minutes of the crash. It had been accompanied by a precipitous drop in temperature and in the forty hours which had passed since the crash, it had laid a 9

covering two feet deep over everything, even deeper in some places where the wind had caused drifting. To make things worse, the temperature had continued to drop alarmingly and the placid waters of Loch Dubh now lay under a thin sheet of ice, a sheet of ice covered in snow. The pieces of seven four three which had been torn off the aircraft when it had impacted the crest of the ridge of Beinn Bharrain were totally hidden from view, whilst the main body of the aircraft, together with the bodies of those who had been aboard her, were deep under the snow and ice capped black waters of Dubh Loch. Those few items which would normally have floated to the surface were trapped in or under that ice cap, the snow covering of which totally hid them from view. In fact they had twice passed within two or three hundred feet of the big bomber’s final resting place without ever knowing it.

They returned to their base and after discussing what they had seen – or rather hadn’t seen, Land was sent over to Arran to seek out the witness who had reported the possible crash. When he met Douglas McFee, he was not over-impressed, mistaking the young man’s natural reticence with strangers for simpleness of mind. McFee admitted that he wasn’t actually sure that he had heard a crash; the wind was up by then, making hearing anything at all difficult. Certainly he hadn’t seen anything, no fire, no explosion.

When he got back to Meeks Field Land had a report of what he had been told and what he and Walters had failed to find, typed out. The conclusion of the report, signed off by both officers was that the witness had been mistaken in his belief that an aircraft had crashed into Beinn Bharrain and that four seven three must have come down in the water, most probably, in view of the fact that the witness had claimed to hear an aircraft pass low overhead, into the waters of the Firth of Clyde between the Isle of Arran and the mainland.

And there the matter rested for more than half a century.

Chapter Two – three weeks earlier.

Graham Harris leant back in his chair, satisfied that his cigar, the best Havana product that money could buy, was drawing satisfactorily and surveyed the other people seated at the dinner table.

Directly opposite him was George Norton, his brother in law, the celebration of whose recent promotion was the reason for the meal. To his right sat his wife, Louise, the candle light reflecting in her hazel eyes and striking sparks from the diamond choker necklace she wore, her jet black hair setting of both the necklace and the deep red evening dress she wore. Opposite her, on Graham’s left, sat his sister Mary, George’s wife.

Harris’ smile encompassed the other three.

“Louise, Mary, thank you for providing so lovely a meal – and thank you, George, for giving us the excuse to enjoy it.”

He raised his glass, still containing a large spoonful or so of the Remy Martin cognac he favoured.

“Ladies, I give you a toast to George Norton, the newly minted Assistant Secretary at the Department of the treasury of these United States of America.”

The pun, as he knew it would, raised a small chuckle, but the echoing toast from his wife and sister was clearly sincerely meant.

He replaced his glass carefully on the table – wartime shortages meant that even he found Remy Martin hard to come by – before speaking again.

“Girls, I wonder if I might ask you to leave George and I together for a little while? There is a matter which concerns both our departments and it would be remiss of me not to raise it with him at the earliest opportunity – which I guess is now.”

The women smiled; both were used to their respective husbands mania over confidentiality in government affairs, and to be able to say to their friends and acquaintances that they had no idea what their spouses were up to in the nation’s interest, whilst saying it in such a way that conveyed that they actually knew damn well but that their lips were sealed, did their standing in their circle no harm at all.

10

George, on the other hand, looked momentarily perplexed, but resumed a poker face before the women could notice the fact.

Once Louise and Mary had left the room, Harris poured another small measure of Remy Martin for Norton and himself. The big dining room had a sort of window alcove in which were a couple of easy chairs and at Harris’ indication, the two men took their drinks over there and seated themselves. It was a little after eleven in the evening and full night in Washington, DC, so there was nothing to see other than their own reflections in the glass of the windows, but it wasn’t for the view that Harris had moved them both away from the dining table, but to ensure that anything that either of them said wouldn’t carry to the adjoining room where the two wives were.

Norton looked at his brother in law quizzically. Graham Harris, was, like himself, a very senior member of the American civil service, but whereas he was newly promoted and worked in the Department of the Treasury, Graham had held the same rank for some five or six years now and was in the State Department. Eight years older than himself, now fifty-one years of age, his host looked perhaps a few years older than his actual years. A very demanding job and recent personal tragedy had etched lines on his tanned face that aged him, whilst his shock of hair, once chestnut brown, was now pure white. He wondered what this matter of joint concern could be – certainly it was nothing of which he was already aware, and it was only some four hours since he had left his office for the night.

Harris, in his turn, was gazing at the younger man and wondering if what he was about to propose would fall on receptive ears. George was forty-five, about par for reaching Assistant Secretary rank, neither particularly fast not noticeably slow – but he knew that his brother in law was a highly intelligent man and highly thought of in his department. Slimly built with thinning brown hair and a long, narrow face giving him a permanently anxious expression, his grey eyes were seldom still, always darting back and forth, taking in, evaluating, and concluding upon everything that he saw, even in a domestic setting such as this. He waited to hear what Harris had to say, sure that it would be interesting.

Harris took a sip from his glass, then settled it down on the small table beside his hair.

“George,” he began, “what do you think of this war?”

The question was not at all what Norton had expected and he thought for a moment before replying.

“Well, it’s good for business. The demand for everything – coal, steel, wood, cloth, whatever –

means that provided that we handle things right, America is safely out of the Depression years and there’s no need to fear going back to them. Once the war in Europe is over it’s going to need rebuilding – quite literally in many areas. France, Britain and, once she is defeated, Germany will be on their knees financially. It will take them time to rebuild their industries and during that time, the USA will be the only major supplier available to them. Nowhere else in the world has the industrial capacity that we have; nobody else in the world has the money that we do. Russia – well, she’s been bled dry by the fighting, and she has a lot more bleeding to do before peace is achieved.

Whether a post war Russia and America will be happy bed-fellows is another matter. They are only fighting because that madman Hitler invaded them – he was too impatient and too sure of himself.”

Harris had been slowly nodding his head as Norton spoke.

“All very true, George. I’m sure that you are right about the economics of the matter. There is another aspect, though. Once the war is over the world is also going to be very different politically.

The Soviets aren’t going to want to see any chance of Germany ever becoming a threat to them again. Nineteen fourteen to eighteen was bad enough for Russia; this time has been far worse. Stalin is as bad a monster as Hitler – but he’s a sane monster, not a madman. I can see him extending his empire as far into Europe as he’s allowed to in order to create a big buffer between Germany and Russia. I can’t see any of the European powers being able to stop him, which is why it is essential that we launch an invasion of mainland Europe as soon as possible and drive our forces and, for what they are worth, our allies, as far east as possible. I’m worried that Roosevelt isn’t determined enough in that respect. I can appreciate the political advantage in letting the Soviets suffer as big a proportion of the casualties as possible – it’s a war of attrition in the East and the Russian casualties only result from the Germans also suffering casualties, and the fewer German soldiers there are left to face us when we have to go in there, the better.

11

“But there is something else. For a start, I’m tired of the USA letting itself get dragged into Britain’s wars. We should never have got involved in nineteen seventeen. Germany was being bled dry and revolution was in the air. Russia did have a revolution and became nothing more than a cypher for years. If we hadn’t got involved, the bloody Brits would have been on their knees as well, and America would have been left as by far the most powerful nation on earth. Instead, we effectively saved Britain’s bacon with American blood and gold – and they went on for another twenty years thinking themselves cock of the walk.”

He paused to take another sip of his drink and Norton reflected on what he had heard so far.

Graham had good reason to be bitter. In nineteen eighteen he had been a twenty-six year old captain in the infantry, fighting in the trenches in Flanders. He had lost a lot of friends and also his only brother, James, four years his junior, who had been killed by a German sniper. Disillusioned, he had left the Army at the end of the war and taken up his present career, but if Graham Harris had finished with war, war had not finished with Graham Harris. His younger son, William, just twenty-one years of age, had been an Ensign in the US Navy and had died on board the USS Arizona in the cowardly sneak attack by the Japs on Pearl Harbour on the seventh of December, nineteen forty-one, the day that President Roosevelt had branded as one that would live in infamy. Then, just eight months or so ago, his elder son, Graham junior, aged just twenty-four and a captain in the US

infantry as had been his father before him, had been killed in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in November nineteen forty-two, leaving Louise Grace, his daughter, who had married earlier in the year, as his sole surviving offspring. Yes, Graham had good cause to resent what wars had done to him and his family; but his brother in law still had more to say.

“Now, I’m not just having a rant to listen to the sound of my own voice. I have a plan which I think is good for the USA in the after war years, a plan that you can help me with if you will. I said about Britain still seeing herself as cock of the walk up to nineteen thirty-nine. Well any thought of that is long gone now. Her Empire is crumbling – the war has brought her Dominions in on her side – but they are getting more and more their own masters. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, come the end of this war they will be lands of opportunity for a shedload of immigrants, a lot of them from Britain itself. India can’t be held down much longer – it’ll be independent with a couple of years or so of the war’s end. Ireland will be a sore in Britain’s side for as long as a single Fenian draws breath. In the Far East, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong have all seen the Brits kicked out by the Japs. Once the Japs are sent packing, why should they welcome the Brits back again? In Egypt nationalism is rife – Cairo is a hotbed of discontent – and so it goes on. Now, the Brits aren’t fools, even if they do suffer from delusions of grandeur. If they were fools they could never have ruled over the biggest empire that the world has ever seen for such a long time. They can see all this just as clearly as we can. They can live with the ‘old’ Dominions growing up – they won’t be any form of threat to the ‘Mother Country’ – God, how I hate that patronising phrase – the commonalties between them and the UK will keep them friends for as long as anyone can imagine, even if they won’t always agree. However, one of the things that really worries the Brits is the Middle East. The boundaries there are largely artificial and bear little relationship to ethnicity or political reality. That wouldn’t matter too much – who would worry about where Libya’s boundaries began and ended other than the Libyans, for example? – but for one thing – oil.

“Now the Middle East is awash with oil and in the years to come oil is going to become ever more important a commodity. If you think that a lot of oil is used now, just imagine how much is going to be needed in the years to come. The world’s population is growing and growing at an ever faster rate. When I was born there were about eight or nine hundred million people on the planet – now it’s around two and a half billion – a threefold increase in just fifty years and much of that growth is occurring in the poorer parts of the world. As they become more and more used to the benefits of technology, better farming, all that sort of thing, they are going to skyrocket – and they won’t be happy to be living in grinding poverty – so demand for everything is going to keep on growing –

and for oil above all. Now, we have our own oil fields, but nobody in Europe has so much as a drop of home produced oil other than producing it from coal as the Germans are now being forced to do

– and that’s not a sustainable process. Europe will need oil and has none of its own – so it has to import. Up to now Britain has been able to control much of what went on in Middle East oil 12

production – but not anymore. Nationalism is rife throughout the region and religious differences can just about guarantee constant turmoil – especial if Palestine becomes an independent homeland for the Jews, which is virtually certain.

“”Knowing all this, before the war – and even now - the Brits have been carefully cultivating a raft of people in the Middle East, people who, if their particular area becomes independent, might move into positions of power, replacing the status quo. Obviously it would serve Britain’s interests if any such new brooms owed Britain a debt of gratitude – and the Brits have been building up such debts in the most direct way possible – bribery. Now, these are very, very careful people. If it was known to some of their so called friends that they were accepting bribes from the Brits, there would a queue of folk lining up to slit their throats. One of the things that they are careful about is the actual form of the bribes that they accept. For a couple of centuries or more the only universally accepted currency in that part of the world has been gold coins –and not just any old gold coins, but those of good repute, by far the most popular of which has been the British gold sovereign. Britain, in fact, is still minting them for that express reason – but Britain is running out of gold.

“Now, for the last few years I have had my people identifying the people in the Middle East who are taking Britain’s bribes and of late I have had agents gently sowing little seeds of discontent in the minds of those people, getting them to think that it won’t be long before Britain is broke and unable to keep sweetening the pot. Now, the big worry of Britain’s largesse drying up s that the Soviets will step in. They’ll need oil as much as anybody and pushing down into Persia, Iraq and the like will give them a twofold success – it’ll secure their own supplies and enable them to control what goes from the Middle East to the rest of the world.

“I think that the time is ripe to start talking seriously to these closet friends of the Brits and opening their eyes to what the world is going to be like once the war is over, and what talks best with them in gold.

“Now the Brits must have poured millions into this scheme over the years, and I’m not suggesting that we try to match them straight away. What I would like to achieve is to give them a little taste of American gold and a warning that the Brits won’t be able to keep paying them for ever, and to do so before the Soviets start trying anything of the some sort of thing.”

Norton frowned; he was impressed by what Harris had said and he could see the clear advantage to be gained for America in making sure that the oilfields of the Middle East didn’t come under Soviet control, but where did he come in? This was high level national policy that they were talking about, and policy within the ambit of the State Department – if it should come to pass Treasury might demand the right to express an opinion, but its main task would be to find the money.

“I see what you mean, Graham, but where do I come in? This is a matter for State, surely – how high has it been discussed?”

Harris gave him a wolfish grin.

“As far as I am aware, it hasn’t been. Cordell Hull, our esteemed Secretary of State, is a good, conscientious man, but to my mind, he has a serious weakness – he trusts the Brits. I don’t. I don’t trust them to contain the Middle east after the war, and if the area isn’t controlled, then the Soviets will come marching in.”

Norton began to feel uneasy. Where was this leading?

Graham smiled more benignly.

“I’ve been looking up the Treasury’s way of working. As an Assistant Secretary, you can sign off expenditure of up to two hundred thousand dollars, yes?”

Norton nodded his head.

“That’s right, but only within approved budgets, of course.”

Harris waved a dismissive hand.

“Of course, George, but let me make sure that I have this right. If you are satisfied that a request for funds is for two hundred thousand dollars or less and is within a budgetary heading already approved by Congress, the you can approve it without referring to anybody else – is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right – but Graham – I have to say that you are beginning to worry me – what is all this about?”

“Let me reassure you – there’s no need to worry. You know about the OSS, of course?”

13

“Colonel Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services? Yes, of course. I haven’t had any direct dealings with their budget, but it is one of the approved budget lines.”

“Yes, I know. Now, I’ve been talking to one of Donovan’s senior people – oh, and I understand Donovan himself is shortly to be promoted to Major General – a Lieutenant Colonel Hall. Now Hall was impressed with what I told him and is happy to go along with it, so all we need to do – all you need to do – is to authorise the release of two hundred thousand dollars in the form of ten thousand double eagle gold coins. Hall will arrange for them to be distributed to his agents in the Middle East and for them to pass them on to the people that the Brits have been bribing.”

Norton nodded his understanding; he could appreciate the use of the double eagle, a twenty dollar gold coin which had last been minted in nineteen thirty-three, but of which the Treasury still held substantial stocks of unissued coins.

“The thing is,” Harris continued, “we need to act quickly in getting those coins to Hall. It will take time for his people to gain the confidence of those they need to bribe. I’ve done some checking, and the best way to get the money over to where it is going to be needed is to send it on one of the USAAF aircraft that are being flown across the Atlantic to Britain. Once there, Hall’s man will collect it and arrange for its onward transmission.”

Norton nodded assent.

“Yes, that should be no problem. How long would it take to arrange a plane?”

“I’d have to talk to a contact in the air force, but it should be possible to get something set up in a couple of weeks or so.”

At that point they rejoined their wives; nothing more needed to be said about their unorthodox, but perfectly legal, plan.

Three days later, Norton had Harold Cobden called to his office. At forty-five years of age, Cobden was a middle ranking member of the Treasury and was unlikely to go any higher. Norton had selected him for the task he and Harris had determined upon because Cobden had a reputation as a steady sort of character, one who didn’t panic under pressure, although Norton realised that any pressure likely to appear during the transfer of gold across the Atlantic was unlikely to bear any resemblance to the type of pressure generated in an office environment.

Cobden took the offered chair uneasily. It was the first time that he had met the newly appointed Assistant Secretary and he could not imagine what it was that had required him to meet the man now.

“Mr. Cobden, I have a highly sensitive task that needs to done, and I have been advised that you are a man who can be relied upon to be discreet.”

Cobden nodded his head and waited.

“This department, Mr. Cobden, is playing a part in an intelligence operation in conjunction with the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services – you know about them, I take it?”

“Yes sir.”

“Right. The task involves the transfer from America to Britain of a substantial sum in gold – in gold double eagles in fact.”

Cobden’s eyes opened wide in astonishment.

“Now, I need somebody that I can trust implicitly to accompany that gold and to make sure that as few people as possible know about it and about its ultimate destination. Can I rely upon you for such a task?”

Cobden nodded once more.

“Yes, sir – you can rely upon me. What will I have to do?”

“The gold – it is in a packing case and although quite a small case, it weighs nearly half a ton – will be ready for you at the Federal Reserve Bank the day after tomorrow. It will be your responsibility to accompany it to La Guardia airport from where you will fly with it to Newfoundland. There you will join a USAAF aircraft being ferried to Britain, landing at the USAAF base at Prestwick in Scotland, where the OSS representative will take over the gold and from then on your responsibility is over. You’ll come back by USAAF aircraft a day or two later – can’t get final details on that until 14

you are actually over there, but you’ll be granted a fairly high priority, so it should only be a day or two before you are on your way back.”

Cobden listened to his superior, his mind in a whirl. Forty-five years of age, he had only once been out of the USA in his entire life, when he had been part if a Treasury team that had sailed across the Atlantic the previous year to act as a general assistant to the former holder of Norton’s post who had held discussions with his opposite number in the British Treasury regarding the minutiae of a Lease Lend agreement. That apart, the nearest he had come to foreign travel was when he had volunteered for Army service in nineteen seventeen; not required by the Army straightaway, it was well into the following year before he first donned uniform, only for hostilities to have ceased before he had completed his training. He had only flown in an aircraft once, when his brother, a wealthy individual, had paid for the two of them, plus their wives, to visit California for a vacation. They had gone by train, but Gordon, his brother, had insisted on flying back; Cobden had enjoyed the vacation, but not the flying. However, that scarcely seemed relevant at the moment. Norton was still speaking.

“Now, we need a cover story to explain your absence from your office. As far as your colleagues will be aware, you are one of a number of people I have had seconded from their normal duties to carry out unannounced audits for me at a variety of government establishments. As a story, it has the advantage of being mostly true – I really have seconded a few such people for just such a task.

The very nature of the job means that you can, in all honesty, tell anyone who asks that you are not allowed to say where you are going. You must tell your family members the same thing – and above all don’t tell them that you will be out of the country, just that you will be away for a few days.

“You must realise, Mr. Cobden, that I am placing a considerable degree of trust in your competence and your discretion. Succeed in this and it will not go unrecognised. I understand that your immediate superior is retiring in a few months’ time. Do this for me, make no mistakes, and you may rest assured that you will succeed to that post when it falls vacant.”

Cobden left Norton’s office in a whirl, to hurry home and pack some clothes to see him through a week away. To his wife he explained the cover story, assuring her that there was nothing to be worried about, and hinting about the possibility of promotion if he pleased the Assistant Secretary.

He mentioned Norton by name, something which, upon reflection, he felt might have been unwise, but too late to worry about it.

The next day he was on his way to New York and a further day later he met the crew of the aircraft that was to bear them to Britain.

But they never got there.

Chapter Three – 14th November 1943

The news of the fate of aircraft four seven three reached Norton early on the thirteenth of November. Horrified, he immediately put into effect measures to obscure the fact that in addition to the plane and its crew, the waves had also claimed a fifth of a million dollars in coin. He met up again with his brother in law the following evening and explained what he had needed to do and was irritated when Harris shrugged off the loss of the money.

“George, it’s a flea bite. Why, I understand that it wouldn’t even have paid for the aircraft that was carrying it.”

“Graham, of course it’s a flea bite compared to what the country spends every minute of the day, but ‘the civil servant who lost two hundred thousand dollars in gold’ is most emphatically something that I do not want to see appearing on my CV. What I have done is to gather together all the papers I can find that have any reference to the matter and put them under a seventy year embargo. I would have had them on a ‘never to be opened’ list, but that would raise questions – that list is reviewed by a committee every five years, whereas time limited embargoes are not normally reviewed at all – at least not at present.”

Harris shrugged his shoulders.

15

“Fair enough, George – I’m sure you know your own organisation best. Now, after this episode, I’m sure that you’ll agree that it would be foolish of us to run the same risk again – I don’t know many aircraft go down on that ferry run, but one is too many – and too much of a risk. I’ve had another word with Hall at the OSS and what we are going to do in future is to feed the funds to the various embassies in the diplomatic bags and once at an embassy the security chief will be responsible for feeding it to the OSS people in the field. It’ll take longer, but it should be safe.”

It is a matter of record that the USSR never did push down into the Middle East; how much the scheme dreamed up by Assistant Secretary Harris in the winter of nineteen forty-three contributed to that fact will never be known. Perhaps it helped a lot, perhaps it didn’t, but at the time it seemed well worth trying and there is no evidence that it ever made things worse, unlike some diplomatic initiatives.

Chapter Four - 15th November 2013

One thing you had to give the American civil service, Jane Cobden told herself – they are sticklers for precision. Over three years ago she had discovered that there were files which might finally cast a light on what had really happened to Harold Cobden, her great-grandfather, back in the November of nineteen forty-three, but she had also discovered that the files were embargoed until the fourteenth of November, two thousand and thirteen. That date had at last been reached yesterday.

Today, she would be able to access them in the Treasury building at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. She had already tracked down the responsible clerk who had agreed to make the papers available to her; now all she had to do was go there. That meant taking a couple of days’

vacation; fortunately, she was currently in the good books of her editor due to a story she had filed the previous month on a mid-ranking political figure and his over-extravagant life style. Said figure was now under investigation by the police and was understandably less than happy with the Washington Post and its junior political reporter. Admittedly, Watergate it wasn’t, but it was good enough for a short break away from her desk.

She was only a cab ride from her destination and accordingly, by ten o’clock that morning she was seated at a research desk facing a couple of box files. With some trepidation, she opened the first one. It contained a number of memoranda, clearly old and, when she started examining them, equally clearly referring to events in November, nineteen forty-three, events which without doubt had a bearing on the strange death of her great-grandfather. It had been impressed upon her that was not allowed to remove any of the documents, nor to photocopy them, but nobody had thought to tell her that she couldn’t photograph them, so, making sure that she was unobserved, she surreptitiously used the camera facility of her mobile phone until every scrap of paper was safely recorded. She made a great play of scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad whenever anyone came anywhere near –

and some of the notes she scribbled might well save her time later on when she tried to make sense of the whole story.

The contents of the second box file were a complete surprise. She had expected them to be simply more Treasury memoranda, but they weren’t. They came from a variety of sources, including the them United States Army Air Force, and the Office of Strategic Studies, the forerunner of the CIA.

Again she pressed her mobile phone’s camera into use, again she scribbled copious notes to herself on her pad.

Finished at last, she rang the bell which would summon a porter to take charge of the files now that her work was complete and a few minutes later watched as they were wheeled away on a document trolley by a grey haired black man who looked even older than the documents themselves. As she left the building she wondered if it would be another seventy years before those papers were examined again or if, indeed, they ever would be.

She took another cab back to her apartment in Queen Street, not far from the paper’s Fifteenth Street offices and as soon as she had closed the door behind her, she kicked off her shoes and threw herself down onto the divan, luxuriating, as ever, in the fact that small as it was (to attempt to swing a cat in it would undoubtedly result in the poor creature’s brains being dashed out against the walls) 16

it was hers, all hers, or at least it was as long as she could continue to afford paying the rent. It was expensive, but, she told herself, being so near to the office, at least she didn’t have to pay for the questionable pleasure of commuting into the city, and it was infinitely preferable to her previous living arrangements, when she had shared an apartment with three other girls – she had had much more space, but far less privacy, and Jane valued her privacy.

After she had relaxed for a few minutes, it was time for a shower to erase the grime of a typical Washington day, a grime which today shared pride of place with the dust of ancient paper documents. Her ablutions completed, she donned a silk housedress – an indulgence she had treated herself to on her twenty-ninth birthday as a protection against the big three-oh, poured herself a large glass of Chardonnay, then busied herself, in between sips from the wine glass, with transferring the pictures of the documents from her phone to her computer, and once they were safely on her hard disc she then proceeded to print off each and every document until, after a couple of hours she had a complete facsimile of the contents of the Treasury’s two box files.

Only then did she settle down to read through everything with determined concentration. She had read the papers in the Treasury building, but it had been a speed reading exercise as she was uncertain at that stage to determine what was vital, what was significant, and what was merely bureaucratic padding.

It was nearly two in the morning before she had finished perusing the papers.. She was sure that even now, she did not have the full picture, that somewhere there were other nuggets of information to be unearthed in her search to find out what had really happened all those years ago. There were, however, two specific papers amongst the dross that stood out and determined her that she was on the trail of something well worth pursuing. Most of the various memoranda referred to a ‘special cargo’ which was to be transported to the USAAF base at Prestwick in Scotland, without going into any detail as to what that special cargo might be. Just one crumpled, tatty sheet of paper that she had photographed gave the answer. It was an authorisation for a named official in the Federal Reserve building in New York to release ten thousand twenty dollar gold coins to Treasury official Harold Cobden. The second was a copy of a military report into the disappearance pf Boeing B-17

number 42-3473 on the night of the eleventh of November, nineteen forty-three. It was signed by two officers, a Major Land and a Lieutenant Colonel Walters. It included a note of a conversation that Land had had with an Arran resident, a young man called Douglas McFee, who had heard an aircraft pass low overhead at the appropriate time, and who thought that he had heard a crash seconds later. The area that McFee had indicated as the possible crash site had, however, already been surveyed from the air by Land and Walters and there was no trace whatsoever of any wreckage which must have been present had a crash actually occurred, so Land had concluded that McFee was mistaken. The reason for the treasury papers containing a military report was obvious –

although not stated in the Land/Walters document, that aircraft must have been the one carrying the

‘special cargo’ although the military had not stated so, nor had they named those who had been on board the aircraft.

Jane pushed back from the table and thought hard. Ten thousand twenty dollar gold coins – double eagles – a total of two hundred thousand dollars - what would that have represented back in nineteen forty-three? She checked on a useful website and soon came to the conclusion that two hundred thousand dollars back then would have had the same sort of purchasing power as about six million today – a very tidy sum indeed.

Then another thought struck her. Gold coins weren’t in normal circulation now and hadn’t been for many years, not even in nineteen forty-three. Those coins were presumably fresh from the mint, unissued. What did collectors pay for such coins today? More internet searching, and she looked in amazement at what she found. An individual double eagle, according to age and conditions, would fetch anywhere from fifteen hundred to two thousand five hundred dollars. Ten thousand of them would fetch something like twenty million dollars in hard cash. She did some more digging and discovered to her amazement that some coins were worth even more – far, far more. Apparently in nineteen thirty-three the mint had struck just over half a million double eagles – but they had never been officially issued. The depression had led the government to forbid the use and ownership of gold coins apart from those regarded as collectors’ pieces to prevent people hoarding gold for fear 17

of the dollar depreciating as the economy got worse, and all other gold coins had been called in and exchanged for paper dollars. The nineteen thirty-three coins had mostly been melted done into gold bars and stored – apart from a handful (estimates ranged from ten to twenty coins) which had apparently been stolen by a mint employee. Many years later one or two of them had surfaced and the Treasury had, after initial opposition, allowed them to pass into private ownership. One of then had been sold at auction for over seven millions dollars! She urgently needed to obtain proof that the B-17 which had disappeared en route to Scotland had indeed been carrying that ‘special cargo’

and that her great-grandfather had been aboard.

At last, wearied beyond measure, she finally laid the papers aside and retired to her bed, thinking as she did so that there was one element of the mystery that didn’t need any more documentation, an element she felt needed following up, but following up with caution.

*******

It was a week later. Jane had been unable to unearth any further documents relating to her search, so had decided to follow up what might perhaps be seen as a human interest side to the story – for she was convinced that a story was there for the telling and had already appraised her editor of the fact.

The end result was that she was now seated across the desk from one of the more powerful figures of the Washington political establishment, Graham George Hammond, the senior Senator for the state of Maryland. Maryland, although in area one of the smallest states in the Union, is, on an income per capita basis, the wealthiest, and the Senator’s office, and indeed the Senator himself, reflected that fact. The Senator’s office in the Senate building was panelled in some expensive looking hardwood, whilst the walls were adorned with pictures of the man himself along with the great and the good. There he was in picture with the Clintons, both father and son President Bush, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, even, as surely no more than a teenager, with John F. Kennedy – how on earth had he managed that? Those sort of photos were only to be expected in the office of a man who had been in one element or another of mainstream American politics for over forty years and a Senator for over thirty. Less common were the number of pictures of Hammond with foreign leaders; British Prime Ministers, German Chancellors, French and Italian Presidents, even one with Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh.

It was an impressive display, but no more impressive than the man himself. Sixty-nine years of age, his looks belied his age; he could easily have been taken for being ten years younger. His suit was a silver grey item in what looked like silk and probably cost more than Jane earned in a month – in fact, considerably more. A spotless white shirt was set off by a tie, again surely of silk, in a deep damson red and controlled by a tie pin than looked like a diamond; whatever, diamond or imitation

– and Jane doubted if anything about the senior Senator for Maryland was imitation – it was the size of her little fingernail, so if it really was a diamond? Jane could only imagine what the whole ensemble must have cost.

What the clothing was packaging, she had to admit to herself, wasn’t too bad, either. Hammond was well built, tall and broad shouldered but seemingly without an ounce of surplus fat on his frame.

Silver hair, still luxurious, was styled in a manner than looked casual, but was a tribute to whoever wielded the comb and scissors to the man’s locks, whilst deep set, piercingly blue eyes surveyed his visitor from a tanned, rugged face, the square jaw and heavy brows exuding strength. ‘If he was thirty years younger, I could really fancy him….’ Jane thought to herself.

Hammond smiled at her, a smile that must have been cultivated over the years to radiate charm and invite confidence in its wearer.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Senator,” Jane began and got no further.

“Ms. Cobden, I’m always only too happy to accommodate the Washington Post when it comes calling – now, how can I help you?”

Jane began again.

“Senator, I’m writing up a story on the disappearance of an airplane back in nineteen forty-three.

It’s a bit of a human interest story, a bit of a mystery story, and what makes it newsworthy is that the airplane – it was a Flying Fortress being ferried to the UK – was carrying a fortune in gold aboard.”

18

The heavy silver eyebrows raised a notch or so.

“That does indeed sound interesting – but why come to me about it? Old as I am, I wasn’t even born back then.”

The ‘old as I am’ line was accompanied by a self-deprecatory half smile, a gesture clearly aimed at assuring the recipient that the Senator wasn’t really old at all, but Jane ignored it.

“I’ve come to you, Senator, because the release of the coins was authorised by an Assistant Secretary at the Treasury, a George Norton, who was the brother in law of your grandfather, Graham Harris, who was an Assistant Secretary at the State Department at the time and who was somehow involved in the matter – I’ve seen a couple of memoranda between the two men which set up the release of the money and from the content it looks as though it was intended to achieve some sort of diplomatic result, although I’m afraid that at this stage I have no idea what that result might have been expected to be.”

This time the eyebrows formed a slight frown.

“I still don’t see how I can help you, Ms. Cobden.”

“I was wondering if your grandfather ever referred to the matter – it must have been something of considerable importance to be handled at Assistant Secretary level and to involve the military as well.”

The frown disappeared, to be followed by a slow shaking of the head.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Cobden, I really am, but I was still a teenager when my grandfather died and although we got on very well indeed together, he never mentioned anything about his work – State Department workings wouldn’t have interested me very much at the time, as I’m sure that you can well understand. He took me hunting and fishing as a boy when my father was too busy working, that sort of thing, but that was about it.”

Now that’s interesting, Jane thought to herself. Harris didn’t die until nineteen seventy, by which time Hammond himself was twenty-four or twenty-five and already working in the political office of his local Congressman. She decided not to follow up on that line with the Senator, however. He had lied to her and must have had a reason so to do, something that she needed to follow up in private. She didn’t realise that her reaction to being lied to had shown, even though only momentarily, on her face, and Hammond had picked it up. He decided to try and cover his tracks.

“No, hold on. I fear that I am misleading you there –my grandfather and I spent a fair amount of time together when I was a teenager – and younger – but when I started work we didn’t actually lose touch, but with him living in Washington and me in Maryland we didn’t see all that much of each other, certainly not enough to bore each other with work stories.”

Nice try, Senator, Jane thought to herself, but I don’t believe you – you’re wriggling – why?

And that was really that; the Senator continued to apologise for his inability to help and Jane apologised for wasting his time, to receive a charming rebuttal, that he had enjoyed meeting her.

Once she was safely out of his office, Hammond keyed his intercom.

“Morton, can you come in here for a moment, please?”

Seconds later, the door opened to admit Morton Lewis, Hammond’s Chief of Staff. The two men shared many common interests, but physically could scarcely have been less alike. Short and slender, with thinning dark hair brushed hopefully across a highly domed skull, Morton Lewis, although two years younger than his boss, looked at least ten years older. The two had been inseparable for over thirty years now, even since Hammond had first run for the Maryland senate seat; Lewis had been the mastermind behind the successful campaign of a mutual acquaintance for a State Senate seat, and impressed by Lewis’ obvious skills, Hammond had immediately poached him.

“What’s up, Graham?”

“You saw the girl leaving my office?”

“Yes, she was in the diary – Washington Post reporter, right?”

“You got it. She’s interested in what happened back in forty-three to an airplane that went missing on its way to Scotland, an airplane carrying a small fortune in gold coinage.”

Lewis frowned.

“So what’s that to us?”

19

“The man baby-sitting the gold was her great-grandfather, Harold Cobden.”

Lewis’ puzzlement increased.

“Sorry, still don’t understand.”

Hammond sighed.

“Better sit down Morton, this is a long story. Back in forty-three my grandfather, Graham Harris was an Assistant Secretary over at State and his brother in law, George Norton, was an Assistant Secretary in the Treasury. My grandfather was violently anti-British, couldn’t stand them, and he came up with an idea of taking over various leaders in waiting as it were, in the Middle East, people that were on the Brits’ payroll could be persuaded to move over to the American side. He reckoned that his idea had two advantages – big ones. Firstly, it would produce friends for the USA as British influence declined after the war – the Brits wouldn’t be able to keep up the sort of payments that their friends had gotten used to. Secondly, it would create a coterie of people opposed to any increase in Russian influence in the area.”

Lewis shrugged his shoulders.

“Sounds like a good idea to me – did it work?”

“Nobody really knows. The plane was carrying only what would have been a first instalment of payments to the people that had been earmarked for attention. When it went down, my grandfather decided it was too risky a way of carrying on and substituted an alternative system of feeding money a bit at a time to the various embassies to be dished out by the heads of security. There was a problem with that as well – it depended on the heads of security being reliable – and, although never proved, there were strong suspicions that at least a couple of them, perhaps more, dipped their fingers in the till. By the very nature of the way that the payments were being made there was no question of any proper accountability once the money was in the hands of the security chiefs.”

“I still don’t see a problem. Hell, all this is seventy years ago. Chances are every single person involved in it is long dead and buried.”

“What was it that Shakespeare had Mark Anthony say? Something about the evil that men do lives on after them? Well, my grandfather is one of the dead and buried – but I reckon that he was in on the racket somewhere. My father was always uneasy about how well off the old man always seemed to be. I don’t know how much money was poured into the Middle East to keep people sweet – and it wasn’t just during the war – the idea kept on long after the war had ended, because the USA was still worried about Middle East oil coming under Russian influence. There was a shed load of money going into a lot of different pockets, and my grandfather was in charge of the Middle East desk with an ideal opportunity to divert things his way if he had a mind to.”

Lewis nodded his head. “Now I see the problem – you were what, twenty-four when he died – who is going to accept that you knew nothing about it all if they feel like making capital out of it?”

“Exactly, guilt by association and there’s no way that I can prove that I didn’t know anything – and whilst I didn’t know anything, I certainly did have my suspicions.”

“So what do you want done?”

“I want you to find out just what that woman has discovered and also to find out if there is anything more to be found out, and if so make sure that she doesn’t find it.”

Lewis nodded and left the room, his mind already working on how to achieve what the Senator wanted.

Once returned to his own office, he made several telephone calls to people he felt might be in a position to point him in the right direction. By the end of the morning he knew where Jane had got her information and, with no nonsense about papers not being photocopied when it was a US

Senator who wanted the information, a complete facsimile of the contents of the Treasury’s two boxfiles had been couriered over to him. He studied them carefully and as a result arranged to meet that evening with a contact who had proved useful to him in the past.

Given that the remit of the CIA excludes it from carrying out operations with the continental United States, it could perhaps be claimed that the small unit headed by Henrietta Latour was, strictly speaking, illegal. However, provided her unit did not tread on too many toes, and above all not on too many important toes, that possible illegality tended to be winked at. Despite her name, she had 20

never been to France in her life; she owed her Francophile label to the nostalgia of her grandfather, born and bred in Louisiana and apparently one who, could he but have the opportunity by being alive a hundred or so years earlier, would have strongly objected to Napoleon selling Louisiana to the nascent American state.

Henrietta herself was born and bred in New York, moving to Washington on promotion to her current position some seven years earlier.

Morton Lewis rose to greet her as she entered the small bar a few blocks away from the Senate building, a bar far enough away from that august pile to be discreet, but not far enough to be out of easy walking distance, even on a cold November evening.

“Henrietta, thank you for coming at such short notice. Will you have a drink?”

“Thank you, Morton – I’ll have a glass of Chardonnay, please.”

Once they were both seated in a small booth, their drinks on the table between them, Henrietta tilted her head slightly to one side and gazed enquiringly at Lewis.

“So, Morton, with you there’s never something for nothing – what do you want me to do for you?”

“Henrietta, I’m trying to track down as much information as I can about a scheme which started in the war, where the USA paid a lot of money to people in the Middle East to keep them onside and make sure that the Soviets didn’t get a foot in the door with Middle East oil. The scheme ran for years – for all I know it may even still be running, although looking at the state that area is in today, if it is we’re wasting our money.”

Henrietta furrowed her brow.

“Why do you need me on this? Surely Treasury and State between them should have all the information that you would need – always provided that they haven’t lost it or shredded it, of course.”

“The reason that I’ve come to you is that when the scheme first started there was involvement of the OSS. The first attempt to implement the scheme was back in November nineteen forty-three. Two hundred thousand dollars in gold coin was transported by aircraft; the route was to end at Prestwick in Scotland where the money was to be handed over to an OSS operative. Unfortunately the aircraft was lost en route, believed to be down in the sea somewhere off the Scottish coast.

“Those who had dreamed up the scheme decided that large shipments by air were too dangerous to continue with, so they changed to fairly small lots going to the various Middle East embassies and being doled out from there by the relevant security chief. What I want to know is who the OSS

operative was in the case of the first consignment and what happened to him, proof positive that the gold really was on that plane, and whether there was OSS involvement in the later stages f the policy.”

The woman blinked slowly.

“OSS? That’s all ancient stuff, Morton. If the information that you are after ever found its way onto our database I’m sure that I can find it, but if it didn’t – well, needle in a haystack doesn’t even begin to come close, even if it still exists. But you said you want to be sure that the gold was actually on the airplane – do you have any reason to suppose that it wasn’t?”

Lewis shrugged his shoulders.

“Not really, but as you know me - I have a nasty suspicious mind and it does seem a bit convenient for a fortune in gold to just vanish like that into thin air – or if the reports are true, into the cold sea.”

“And assuming that I can find out all this – then what?”

“I don’t really know as yet – it will mostly depend on what you find.”

“OK, Morton, I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can – but if that stuff isn’t on the database, chances are it’s gone.”

And with that Lewis had to be satisfied.

As she left the bar, Henrietta Latour ran over the conversation of which she had just been part.

Knowing Morton Lewis as well as she did, she was sure that she had only been told the bare minimum and that there was something deeper going on. The fact that he wanted to dig into ancient history in such a manner raised alarm bells in her mind. His boss, Senator Hammond, was in line to succeed the present incumbent – who was about to step down through ill health – as chairman of the 21

prestigious Senate Finance Committee. He was sixty-nine years old and would also be facing an election in November two thousand and fourteen, just twelve months away, probably the last time he would run for office as at the end of his six year term – assuming that he won which was virtually certain – he would be seventy-six, surely too old to run again. As a result it seemed certain that he would be looking for one of two things. Either he wanted something that he could translate into political capital, or there was something in the past that needed to be hidden away to avoid political embarrassment. Given the fact that money seemed to be involved, her guess was that Lewis was out to perform some form of cover-up and the fact that it apparently included some aspect of OSS actions back in the war made her doubly suspicious. She decided that she would have to be very selective indeed as to what she passed on to the Senator’s Chief of Staff.

************

For his part, Lewis was sure that the Latour woman would only pass on what she deemed appropriate, but he wasn’t worried – it was no more than he would expect, no more than he would have done himself had their roles been reversed. There was, however, another immediate string to his bow, a string which had caused him to phone another of his contacts within minutes of leaving Hammond’s office. He was very anxious to know just how much Jane Cobden had unearthed.

Never one to over-indulge in subtlety when more direct means would be just as effective, his phone call resulted in a nasty shock for Jane when she arrived home that evening.

As she walked into the tiny apartment, she was immediately aware that something was different.

She paused at the threshold of the door, unhappily aware of Washington’s high crime rate, a crime rate which included a frighteningly high level of break-ins, many of which ended in rape or murder

– or both.

She fumbled in her bag for her pepper spray, took it out, and holding it in front of her, she cautiously stepped inside her domain.

There was nobody there, no trace of an intruder, yet something just wasn’t right. Then she realised what it was. She could smell something that shouldn’t have been there, something that smelt very much like a cheap aftershave.

She went through the apartment inch by inch and came to the inclusion that somebody had indeed been in it, someone, however, who had removed nothing. The only indication of his presence, apart from the odour in the air, was the slight misplacement of a number of items, the book she had left on the coffee table an inch or two to one side of where she had left it, the items in her underwear drawer again not quite how she had left them after dressing for work that morning.

At last, satisfied that nothing had been taken, she sat down to think things over. Heaven knows, she had little of value, but the TV, though small, was of high quality and the contents of her jewellery box, mostly bequeathed to her by her mother, would have at least fetched several hundred dollars, perhaps more.

So, the intruder hadn’t been after financial gain – so what had he been after? The only thing out of the ordinary that she possessed at the moment was the prints of the Treasury and military papers that she had obtained. She had already checked them and was happy that all were still there, so, what was the purpose of her unknown visitor?

A sudden thought struck her. Suppose that having searched her apartment and failed to find whatever it was that he wanted, he would return now that she was home and try and obtain whatever it was he wanted directly from herself?

She flew to the front door, checking that the two heavy duty locks were secure and that the security chain was in place. Not for the first time, she cursed the local firearms legislation which seemed to be designed to ensure that only criminals could obtain guns easily. The pepper spray was better than nothing, but not much, and no match for some hoodlum with a pistol. Citizens could only keep handguns in their homes, not carry them abroad – so if you came home to find your home broken into, your pistol was far more likely to be of use to the intruder than to yourself, so she had never bothered to apply for a permit to own a weapon.

22

Satisfied that the door was secure, she sat down and turned her mind to wondering as to who had broken in and why. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that those Treasury papers were the crux of the matter. Within hours of speaking to Senator Hammond and as a result alerting him to the possibility that, if there was a skeleton in his cupboard over the events of nineteen forty-three, it might now come to light, her aprtment had been broken into by an intruder who searched everything and everywhere, but stole nothing. If she had been a less tidy person, if the intruder hadn’t over indulged in cheap aftershave, she might never have known that anyone had broken in.

What to do? She could see no point in going to the police – with nothing stolen and only her own sense of smell and conviction that some items had been moved, what would they make of her complaint? There was a strong possibility that they would see her as an hysterical woman making a fuss over nothing – and if she should go to them at some time in the future, this would be seen as a false alarm and perhaps count against her being taken seriously again.

She was convinced that the entry had been made at the behest of the Senator; should she tackle him on the matter? He would undoubtedly deny any knowledge – and suppose whoever had carried it out for him was under the impression that he had left no trace of his presence? Raising the matter with Hammond would destroy that belief – might that not be dangerous? She wondered if there was anybody she should confide in, someone to share the burden, but immediately put it out of her mind. Had her father still been alive he would have been her automatic choice. George Cobden, a successful business man and perhaps the most competent person that she had ever known, was six years in his grave. He and her mother had been the innocent victims of a drunken driver on the freeway, snatched from her by a drunk’s irresponsibility. Her grandfather was still alive, but at seventy-eight years of age was in a nursing home, his once sharp intellect befuddled by cruel dementia. Her sister Lisa, two years older than herself, happily married and living in California could hardly be of help. Going to her colleagues at the paper would send out a signal that the little woman couldn’t cope on her own – a message that she had never given in the past and had absolutely no intention of giving now.

She went to bed in a troubled state of mind, with no clear plan of action before her.

Chapter Five – 16th November 2013

Henrietta Latour was at her desk by eight the next morning. Well aware of her habits, so were all her staff and it was one of those, Errol Clarke, for whom she called within minutes of arriving.

When she had spoken with Lewis the previous evening she had been a little economic with the truth. Whilst she had no doubt that any file contents from the nineteen forties would not be on the database, there was a more than even chance that the existence of the files would have been indexed during the drive for computerisation two decades earlier.

Clarke knocked on her office door and entered. He was the most junior of her operatives, twenty-eight years of age and a member of the CIA for just over four years. She explained what she wanted done and ten minutes later the young man started to trawl the dauntingly huge CIA index of the archives kept at the agency’s headquarters in Langley.

Clarke was intrigued by the task that he had been given. Something that had happened over forty years before he had been born – hell, something like twenty years before his boss had been born –

was suddenly important. He was young, but he was also very bright and this had all the aroma of ancient pigeons coming home to roost about it. He sent up a number of overlapping computer searches and awaited results as the mainframe churned through its algorithms. The initial results weren’t over encouraging due to the sheer mass of possibilities they threw up, but he was able to refine the search further and further as he made progress, until finally he was left with just over twenty files from the right time frame, any or all of which might have what he wanted.

He reported back to Latour who, inevitably, sent him on the next step – to physically check each and every one of those files.

As he drove the ten miles or so to Langley, he reflected on his boss. She was, he knew, over fifty, but with her jet black hair inevitably impeccably styled and a flawless complexion undoubtedly kept 23

that way by constant attention, she was a striking looking woman who could easily pass for a good few years younger – at least from ten feet or so. She had a very good reputation within the agency and her current posting reflected that. For a CIA unit to run operations within the USA demanded a truly delicate touch to on the one hand to achieve results, and on the other to avoid being hung out to dry for exceeding the agency’s terms of reference. In her four years in charge, Latour hadn’t put a foot wrong and scuttlebutt was that she was earmarked for a further promotion in the near future.

That being the case, it was important that nothing should endanger her success story and whilst he doubted that his present mission had any career threatening overtones about it, he resolved to be very cautious over it. Something that reflected badly on Latour was sure to reflect even more badly on anyone who let her down – she would see to that, no question.

Once in the archives he settled down to what promised to be a long, boring task, but in fact he found what he needed in just the third file he examined. Just to be sure, he quickly went through the remainder, but to his pleasant surprise he was able to get back to his office shortly after three and report to Latour on his findings.

She looked at him expectantly.

“It’s quite definite, ma’am. B-17 four seven three, the one that went missing did have the gold on board, no doubt about it. It also had four men on board, three USAAF officers, who were Captain William Abrahams, and Second Lieutenants David Coogan and Charles Meredith. The fourth man was a Treasury official, Harold Cobden. The OSS file has copies of the USAAF file originals – also in that file is a copy of a message, classified as ‘Secret’ – all the others were ‘Routine’ – requiring the CO at Prestwick, a Lieutenant Colonel Walters, to arrange for immediate security around the aircraft as soon as it landed, to give every assistance to Cobden in anything that he might request, and to expect the arrival of an OSS officer, a Captain Lowrie. In the event, of course, the airplane never arrived, so neither did Captain Lowrie.

“Moving on to what happened afterwards – Assistant Secretary Harris at State is named as the main man for the channelling of funds into the Middle East embassies, with Assistant Secretary Norton at the Treasury actually authorising the transfers of the funds. No individual transfer was anything like as big as the two hundred thousand the B-17 carried – the biggest was only twenty-five thousand, but the file, which covered the period from the very end of forty-three to the end of the war in forty-five, showed a total sum transferred of over ten million dollars – I did a quick check and that represents a purchasing power of around two hundred and fifty million dollars today.”

“What do we know about those two Assistant Secretaries?”

It hadn’t been in Clarke’s brief, but it was something that he had anticipated, a fact that pleased Latour and demonstrated that she had been right to give the task to the young man.

“Assistant Secretary Graham William Harris, born the eleventh of June, eighteen ninety-two and died third of January nineteen seventy. He retired at age sixty in nineteen fifty-two. Assistant Secretary George Henry Norton, born fourteenth of February nineteen hundred, died seventh of August nineteen seventy, also retired at sixty in nineteen sixty. The two men were brothers in law –

Norton married Harris’ sister, Mary born ninth of August nineteen ten and died third of January nineteen ninety-two. The Nortons had one son, Francis, born seventeenth of October, nineteen forty who died fifth of February two thousand and ten. He never married.

“On the other hand, Harris and his wife had three children. Two sons, both killed in the war; William was an Ensign in the Navy and died on board the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbour. He was the younger son; his elder brother, Graham junior, was killed in November nineteen forty-two in the North African landings – Operation Torch. The daughter, Louise, born eighth of August, nineteen twenty-two, married on the first of May nineteen forty-three to Henry Hammond, born second of February, nineteen seventeen. They died twenty-first of October nineteen ninety-eight and nineteenth of March nineteen eighty respectively. They had one son, born eighteenth of December nineteen forty-five. He is still alive, now aged sixty-nine – he is Graham Hammond, the senior Senator for Maryland.”

Clarke was watching his boss very closely as he said his last words, waiting to see what her reaction would be. There was none – which told him that she already knew that Senator Hammond was involved in all this in some way.

24

For her part, Latour realised too late that her lack of reaction had spoken volumes to her subordinate

– he really was quite bright, she told herself. To cover her error, she nodded thoughtfully.

“Well done, Errol – the Senator is a person of interest to me and this takes us a bit further along the line. Now, all this family history is fascinating stuff, but let’s get back to the money. How was it handled – in detail.”

“The State Department liaised with the various embassies to identify suitable recipients – men who might hold power or affect those who did hold power in the event of any regime changes.

Effectively, in this exercise, Harris was the State Department and once recipients had been identified, he agreed with the people on the ground the size of payments appropriate to each individual. That done, he liaised with Norton at the treasury and Norton authorised the release of funds to the embassies involved. Once the money reached an embassy the head of security handed it over to an operative –usually, but not exclusively, an OSS officer, who actually paid the money over.”

“What were the chances of money being syphoned off?”

“Pretty high. Don’t forget, the man actually being paid was in no position to let anybody know that he was effectively in the pay of the USA – in many cases had such knowledge got out it would have been a death sentence for him. There was certainly no official accounting of the money once it left the embassy. The fact that it was in gold – double eagles – was a potential danger to the recipient and it may well be that some of them demanded something less unique, less incriminating even. On the other hand, the Middle East was then, as it still is, a place where gold is highly valued and I am sure that those who received the coins would have had some means of either squirreling them away or turning them into something else.

“It would also have been easy for the US operative to skim off some of the money – again there would be the problem of having such easily identified coins in his possession, but that could be got round – perhaps by giving the contact the full amount but only in return for something more easily negotiable.”

“And what about at the Stateside end. Could Harris and/or Norton have been able to profit from what was going on?”

Clarke shook his head.

“I can’t see it. Neither of them ever came into physical contact with the money. The way it worked, once the policy was known at embassy level, was that an operative, usually, but not always OSS, would identify someone, let’s call him Abdullah, as being worth cultivating. He is approached and agrees to accept money in return for whatever –information, a promise to be on the side of the USA in the future – a raft of possibilities. Via the embassy, the operative gets the message back to Harris who agrees that ‘Abdullah’ goes on the payroll and advises Norton at Treasury to add the man to the grateful recipients of Uncle Sam’s gold. Norton signs an authorisation for the release of the funds which goes to the Federal Reserve where somebody parcels up the money and it then goes to State for inclusion in the diplomatic bag for the embassy concerned. Until it actually arrives at the embassy there is a complete accounting for it. Only after the embassy head of security doles it out to the operative is there a chance of fingers being dipped in the till. For Norton or Harris to be getting a cut of the action by having someone in the chain pay them would be incredibly risky –

there were dozens of these transactions every month and it would only take one suspicious or dissatisfied person in the chain and Harris, or Norton, or both, would be exposed.”

Latour mulled over what she had heard. It seemed that Morton Lewis would be getting good news over this – no sign of a skeleton in the Senator’s family cupboard. And yet, she mused, and yet –

there must have been a reason for Lewis to have approached her over all this. On the surface, Hammond’s ancestor was pure as the driven snow, so why the worry? It must surely have originated with the Senator himself, something had caused him to worry about the past. Harris had been the Senator’s grandfather. Harris had been a very senior official at State. Harris had been the originator of a scheme that saw millions of dollars fed to contacts in the Middle East. There was only one logical answer. For some reason the Senator was worried that his grandfather had been on the take and that someone would find out and use the fact against him. What could have sparked off such a worry, she wondered?

25

She decided to try another tack before reporting back to Lewis.

“Errol, the doings of US Senators are reasonably open to scrutiny. Try and find out if Senator Hammond had any unusual visitors over the last week.”

Clarke looked blankly at her. Ah, so young Mr. Clarke wasn’t as fully on the ball as he thought he was.

“Well, just phone his office and ask or something – use your imagination, but of course no mention that you are CIA.”

Clarke returned to his own office totally at a loss for any credible reason for asking such a question of the Senator’s office. Why should such a request be acceptable to the Senator’s staff? Then an alternative dawned on him. Security at the Senate building was tight. You didn’t just walk in and wander around. No, you reported to a reception desk, you stated your business, you went through a metal detector , you were issued with a visitor’s badge – the whole nine yards. The reception desk would have a record of every visitor to every Senator, all one hundred of them – so, how to unlock that information?

He mentally crossed his fingers and made his way to the office of a colleague who might be able to help.

Siobhan Chang, her names reflecting her parentage of fourth generation Irish and third generation Chinese, was the unit’s computer expert. Forty years of age, she was the very antithesis of the popular image of a ‘computer expert’. Nothing flamboyant about her at all, nor anything anti-establishment, she was the picture of the successful business woman with her severe hair style and no-nonsense black trouser suit, the jacket open to show a white silk blouse. Her oval features reflected her mixed heritage and her dark brown eyes sparkled with obvious intelligence as Clarke explained what he was trying to discover and why.

She sat in silent contemplation for a moment before responding.

“I’ve never needed to check, but I’m pretty sure that the visitor log over there is computerised. If I’m right, well, there’s no need for such a system to be high end security, so I should be able to get into it. All Senator Hammond’s visitors for the last week, right?”

Clarke nodded and less than twenty minutes later he had the answer that he was seeking; he bore the result in triumph back to Latour.

“Well, what have you got for me?”

“Hammond had a lot of visitors, mostly the sort of folk one would expect. Officials, campaign staff and party donors, and the like, but one person stands out. Ten o’clock yesterday morning the Senator had a visit from a reporter, a Miss Jane Cobden of the Washington Post.”

“Cobden? But that’s the same name as the man who went down with that B-17!”

Clarke nodded.

“Yes – and I’ve checked – she’s his great-granddaughter.”

Latour sat back as she thought things through. Did Hammond or Lewis realise the connection between the reporter who had called and the man, however inadvertently, sent to his death by the policy instigated by Hammond’s grandfather? Could there be a revenge motive in this?

She decided that the first thing that she would do would be to talk to Morton Lewis again, this time with the advantage of knowing more about the affair than he did. As a result the two met again that evening in the same small bar as on the previous night.

Lewis smiled at her.

“So, Henrietta, what do you have for me?”

“Some good news, I think. The gold that went done on B-17 four seven three definitely did go down on the airplane – no question. The OSS officer - he was a Captain Lowrie, by the way, died in nineteen eighty - who was to meet the B-17 never did so – he didn’t even arrive at Prestwick because, naturally enough, there was no message to tell him that the plane had arrived. The revised system that Assistant Secretaries Harris and Norton put in place was wide open to pilfering once money left the various embassies but we can find no evidence at all that either of them did anything untoward, so Senator Hammond can rest easy – no family skeleton to come rattling out of the cupboard. One thing else that you may not already know – the Washington Post reporter who met the Senator yesterday morning is the great-granddaughter of Harold Cobden, the Treasury official 26

who went down with the plane – and the gold. Now, I don’t know anything about her other than that fact, but it seems a bit odd that she is now sniffing around, wouldn’t you say? I wonder what has kicked her into action?”

Lewis knew full well what had sparked Jane Cobden off – the release of the Treasury papers on the expiration of the seventy year embargo, but he saw no point in sharing that knowledge. The fact that she had a family connection to the affair was, however, news to him and he was annoyed with himself for not having had the similarity of name checked out – still, now no need – it had been done for him.

“Henrietta, great job – I owe you one.”

“You surely do, Morton – and you can repay me by reminding the Senator that a little support at budget time wouldn’t go amiss.”

“I’ll do that, never doubt it.”

“Oh I won’t, Morton, I won’t.”

The words were delivered in a manner that left Lewis a little uneasy – was there something else Latour’s team had uncovered, something they were keeping in the bank just in case?

**********

Jane spent an uneasy evening in her apartment, the door double bolted, the pepper spray on the small table beside it where it could be snatched up in an instant if an unwelcome visitor should come calling. She was at a loss to know what her next step should be. She still didn’t know for certain what had happened to her great-grandfather, his travelling companions, the gold and the airplane. In idle curiosity, she went onto the Internet and entered ‘Arran’ ‘crash’ ‘USAAF’ and

‘WW2’ into her search engine. It was something that she had done many times in the past and had found several references to American machines coming down. Then she realised that whereas she normally entered ‘Scotland’ into the search engine, because the papers that she had been reading were uppermost in her mind, this time she had unthinkingly entered ‘Arran’. She was about to correct her mistake when she realised that the parameters that she had entered had already resulted in a number of hits, and one of them looked very interesting.

It was a reference to the website of a British author, one David Craig who apparently had written several books with an aviation theme. With one exception they were works of fiction; the exception was titled ‘Scotland’s Mystery Crashes; Myth and Mystery in the Clouds’. Ignoring the rather twee title, what interested her was that the website had a brief synopsis of the book which covered some twenty crashes which, on the face of it, should never have happened. Aircraft that had flown into mountains in perfect weather, aircraft that had crashed many miles from where they had reason to be, and aircraft that had simply disappeared without trace. In this category was included her great-grandfather’s plane. The synopsis only mentioned that the B-17 had disappeared without trace – but did the book itself have information that would be new to her? She checked the Amazon website and to her delight found that the book was available for electronic download. Five minutes later it was safely installed on her Kindle.

Avidly, she went to the section that dealt with flight four seven three. It was a disappointment; a bald recital of what she already knew and an assumed conclusion that the plane had ended up in the water between Arran and the Scottish mainland – but then, as a follow up there was a comment that sent her heart beating in excitement. In nineteen seventy a pair of walkers, husband and wife Alex and Katrina Gregory, Americans on holiday on the island, had approached the summit of Beinn Bharrain from the east, skirting Loch Dubh as they did so. In a small gully they had discovered a twisted piece of metal about five feet long and nearly three feet wide. They could make nothing of it

– it bore no resemblance to anything that might have been part of agricultural equipment or the like, and even if it had been, what farm equipment would have been brought up . They had no interest in it apart from the puzzle that it posed, but out of idle curiosity, Mr. Gregory took a photo of it, and also mentioned what they found to other guests at the hotel in Brodick at which they were staying.

Nobody had evinced much interest with one exception. The deputy manager of the hotel was a Mrs.

Alice McFee, a cousin of Douglas McFee who, as a sixteen year old back in nineteen forty-three 27

had heard a heavy aircraft pass low overhead and had thought that he had heard a crash shortly afterwards, although this had never been proved.

And there, maddeningly, the story stopped. No indication that anyone had ever followed up on what the Gregorys had found. The author posed the question as to whether it could have been part of the missing aircraft, but also made the point that two other heavy bombers had crashed on Arran’s high ground, so it might equally well have come from one or other of those two earlier crashes, one in August nineteen forty-one, the other in nineteen forty-three. Jane echoed the question in her own mind.

She checked the date that the book had been written – just three years ago, so if anything new had appeared in the forty three years since the Gregorys had found that odd bit of metal, surely it would have been included by the author?

She went back to Craig’s website – he had posted his E-mail address there, so she composed and sent a carefully worded E-mail, explaining that she was the great-granddaughter of one of the men who had disappeared along with B-17 four seven three and she was anxious to try and find out exactly what had happened to the bomber and its occupants. She did not mention that the aircraft had been carrying what was by now a fortune in gold.

Forgetting the time differential between Washington and the UK, she was pleasantly surprised to receive a reply within the hour. Craig said that there had been other sighting of bits of metal over the years, but there had been two known crashes on Arran of B-24 Liberators, an RAF aircraft in nineteen forty-one and a USAAF aircraft two years later and it had always been assumed that the further pieces of evidence – none of which had ever been gathered up in view of the difficult access to the area – had originated in one or other of those crashes, in which twelve and twenty-two personnel respectively had died, and not in a possible third crash.

She mulled over what Craig had sent her – and suddenly came to a decision.

Chapter Six

I was struggling; somehow I had to extract my hero from his unwelcome predicament in a way that would not leave any future readers ridiculing the solution. I wondered uneasily if I was on the verge of writer’s block. And it was therefore with relief that the telephone rang, interrupting my fruitless thought processes. I picked it up.

“David Craig.”

“David, it’s Alex McFee. I’ve got an animal in agony and the vet’s out on a call – can’t get to me for at least a couple of hours, probably more. Can you bring your rifle up, please?”

I sighed: I was happy enough to be interrupted, but I wished it had been with something more pleasant than putting some luckless animal out of its agony.

“OK, Alex, where are you?”

“I’m about half way between yourself and Loch Tanna.”

I did a quick calculation in my head.

“I can get the Land Rover up to you if I follow the burn – how far away from the burn are you?”

“Only a couple of hundred yards or so. You’ll be able to see me OK, but the beast has managed to fall into a wee gully and broken her back.”

As he spoke I was aware that I could vaguely hear a cow bellowing in pain in the background.

“I’ll be there as quick as I can Andrew.”

I went to the steel gun cabinet, after first retrieving the key from its hiding place, and took out the rifle. It was nothing special, just an ex-army rifle that had originally belonged to my grandfather, then to my father, and now to me. Although issued to some unknown British soldier during the first World War, it had actually been made in America, by the famous Winchester Arms company as at the time British factories were fully committed to making the standard British service rifle, the Short magazine Lee-Enfield, or SMLE, affectionately known to generations of soldiers as the

‘Smelly’. My rifle was also designed by the Enfield works but although originally intended to replace the ‘Smelly’ in army usage, it had been overtaken by events. Finalised as a design in 28

nineteen fourteen, it was just too late on the scene as Britain was plunged into war. Even so, over a million of the P14, as it was known, were produced and issued. At the war’s end many were declared surplus and sold on the civilian marker and in nineteen twenty my grandfather, then an assistant to a ghillie on a big Highland estate, had bought one for the princely sum of two pounds –

about the equivalent in purchasing power of sixty pounds or so in today’s terms. It was a simple, highly effective tool for a young man learning his trade, with the overwhelming advantage of having been cheap. My father had followed in grandfather’s footsteps and, on the old man’s death in nineteen sixty, had inherited the rifle. However, by then the Highland way of life was changing rapidly, and in nineteen seventy he and my mother, together with their three daughters, had moved to Aberdeen in search of better paid work.

He had found it, too, in what was then the fledgling North Sea oil industry. For five years he had worked hard and been paid well, then a fall which resulted in considerable damage – and which was attributed to employer negligence – had seen him retire, aged just thirty-five, in reasonable financial comfort, although in considerable physical pain. Neither of my parents, both born and brought up in the Highlands, had really enjoyed city life and they had moved, not back to the Highlands themselves, but to the Isle of Arran, where my father found once more the quiet that had eluded him in Aberdeen.

I was born two years later, something, I have always thought, of a surprise to the family. My sisters, Fiona, Sarah and Moira, were, respectively, already sixteen, fourteen and twelve years of age and were less than overjoyed to find that they had been replaced in the affection of their mother by this new arrival. As a result, my early years were marked with resentment from my siblings, resentment which faded as each in her turn married and moved away. Now, aged fifty-two, Fiona was married to Henry Logan, a GP in Edinburgh, with two daughters of her own, Ailsa, aged twenty-six, married in her turn to George Lucas, an accountant working in Perth.. They had a son, Kenneth, aged four and had just produced a sister for him, Louise, now six months. Ailsa’s sister, Catherine, was twenty-three and currently unmarried, although in a relationship with Kenneth Stringer; they both worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Sarah, now fifty years old, lived in London, where she had carved out a successful career for herself as a journalist, currently with the Daily Telegraph, and was on her second husband, Peter Shaw, also a journalist, but in his case with the BBC. Forty-six year old Moira now lived in California; she had met James Hall, an American studying European history at Edinburgh university and had married him as soon as she had graduated with a degree in economics and had left for the States at the earliest opportunity. Easily the brightest of the four of us, she had never truly forgiven me for taking away her status as the baby of the family, and whereas my two elder sisters and their families and I had a comfortable arms-length relationship, Moira and I had never got on.

My father had died of a heart attack in two thousand and ten, a month or two after his seventieth birthday and just two years after my mother had died of cancer. After our father’s death my sisters, basically urged on by Moira, had made a half-hearted attempt to have the family home sold and the proceeds divided, but father’s will was quite plain. The house and all it contained was mine; the money, of which there was a reasonable amount, was divided between the girls.

All this skittered briefly through my mind as I picked up the rifle and took it to the Land Rover, pausing to fetch some ammunition which, for security purposes I kept in a separate locked cabinet in the garage, firmly bolted down to the concrete floor. I took five cartridges – the full capacity of the rifle’s magazine - and slipped them into my pocket. I wouldn’t load the rifle until I had arrived where it was to be used – never, ever carry a loaded weapon in a vehicle was a rule my father had impressed on me from an early age. Far too many totally avoidable tragedies had occurred through people ignoring that simple rule. I didn’t expect to need more than one shot, but just in case something went wrong and I failed to achieve an instant kill, the poor suffering beast deserved a follow-up shot as quickly as possible.

I started the Land Rover and drove away from my house to where the burn reached the shore – I live right on the west shore of Arran, looking across the water to where the Kintyre peninsula juts out from mainland Scotland, separating Arran from the Inner Hebrides, to which it should really 29

belong, having far more in common with the geography of Isla and Jura than the low-lying land of the mainland to its immediate east and west.

The terrain immediately became impassable to anything other than a tractor or a vehicle with the old Land Rover’s off-road ability. Attempting the route in a normal car would have wrecked the suspension in no time. Even with the Land Rover one had to drive very carefully, so although I was only about a mile from where Alex was waiting, it was a good fifteen minutes or so before I reached him.

I saw him waving whilst I was still well short of his position but at last I was able to bring the Land Rover to a halt and get out to meet him. As I got out of the car there was no sign of the injured cow, but I could plainly hear her distressed lowing.

“Where is she, Alex?”

“Down here, David.”

He led me away from the small knot of rock upon which he had been standing to attract my attention; a hundred or so yards away we reached the lip of a small ravine, perhaps twenty feet deep, the same across and thirty or so yards long. There at the bottom was one of his Highland cows; she probably started off bellowing at full decibel count, but her lowing was now piteously weak. She was desperately trying to get to her feet, but her back legs were clearly useless – as Alex had said, her back was obviously broken.

Sadly, I loaded the rifle, lifted it to my shoulder and fired. The cow relaxed in death, now totally silent.

“Thank you, David – the poor beast’s noise was awful to hear.”

I unloaded the rifle again.

“Sorry that it was all I could do, Andrew – I’ve a tow rope in the Land Rover; want to drag her out?”

“Ay, we might as well get it done with.”

I fetched the rope, and not without considerable difficulty, we managed to drag the luckless beast’s carcase out of the little gully onto a piece of reasonably flat ground.

We looked at each other – obviously we could not just leave the cow there; she would have to be moved. Alex looked at the terrain, then at the cow, then back at the terrain.

“I’ll get the tractor with a bale lifter on it to move her – can you stay and help me, David?”

“Yes, of course – I’ll wait here for you.”

Alex had come up to the hillside on a quad bike – a ubiquitous tool for hill farmers – and he cautiously rode away on his mission, whilst I returned to the Land Rover to get out of the cold and the wind, which was now getting up.

I settled back to wait, and as I did so, my mind went to an E-mail that I had received a few days earlier from a woman in America. She was trying to establish just what had happened to an aircraft back in nineteen forty-three, an aircraft in which her great-grandfather had been flying. I was familiar with the case; indeed, I had referred to it in a book I had written some three years earlier which had focussed on a number of crashes in Scotland, all of them, on the face of it, crashes which should never have happened. In the book I had made brief mention of the aircraft in which she was so interested, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, which had been on a ferry flight from America to the UK to join a USAAF squadron in England, but which had never arrived. At about the right time for it to have been that particular aircraft a young boy, Douglas McFee, had heard an aircraft pass low overhead as he had made his way home to the house where he lived with his father in the small hamlet of Pirnmill. Douglas also thought that he might have heard a crash moments later but could not be sure and the USAAF had concluded that the B-17 had come down in the waters between Arran and the mainland. At that point the Firth of Clyde was roughly ten miles wide – plenty of space for the aircraft to come down in without leaving any trace of its fate. On the other hand, there was no doubt about the fate of two other aircraft which quite definitely had crashed on Arran’s high ground. Another USAAF aircraft, and another heavy bomber, but this time a B-24 Liberator which had been following the same route as the B-17 but a few months earlier, in August of 1943. It had crashed into high ground, killing all twelve USAF personnel on board. Two years earlier another Liberator, but this one an RAF aircraft, taking personnel to America, in other words the 30

reverse of the journey flown by the disappeared B-17. It had taken off from RAF Heathfield, near to what would become the USAAF base at Prestwick but had got no further than the unforgiving hills of Arran.

As a result, and given the very difficult terrain involved which had limited the war time efforts to the recovery of the bodies of those killed, and any dangerous items such as machine guns being carried on board, leaving the high ground liberally scattered which pieces of metal from the two crashes, one lot on the east facing slopes, the other on the western slopes.

As a result, the finding back in nineteen seventy by Mr and Mrs Gregory, of a fairly large piece of metal was by no means unusual, and nobody had followed it up at the time. However, it was, if the Gregory’s account was accurate, rather a long way from the two known crash sites. There was, of course, always the chance that in one of the many gales that would have lashed the island between nineteen forty-three and nineteen seventy, that a light piece of metal might have been blown across the landscape from an original location to where the Gregorys had discovered it, but it was a possible anomaly in the assumption that it had come from one or other of the two known crashes.

I looked out to the south where the ridge of Beinn Bharrain stood out stark against the grey November sky, and a thought started to formulate itself in my mind. Suppose, just suppose, young Douglas McFee really had heard an aircraft crash, even if he couldn’t be sure of the fact? Again, suppose, just suppose, the B-17 had in fact just clipped the extreme rim of the ridge and had suffered damage, but not impacted at that point? Much of the east facing slope of Beinn Bharrain was virtually sheer. It could have been that the aircraft had continued flying even though having suffered damage, damage which would, sooner or later, bring it down? If so, where was it? If it had crashed below the lip of Beinn Bharrain it would have been found at the time. If it had made it to the mainland, again it would have been found long ago. By process of elimination it must therefore surely be under water.

Douglas McFee, who had perhaps heard a crash back in nineteen forty-three was still alive. He was now a still sprightly eighty-six year old. Moreover, he was Alex’s father. I had spoken to him when I had been writing the book, but he had been able to tell me no more than he had told the USAAF

officer all those years before. He was quite certain a heavy aircraft had passed low overhead; he was not certain that he had heard a crash shortly afterwards. The wind had been getting up, he was about three miles away from Beinn Bharrain, so he refused to be adamant one way or the other.

I kept on theorising. When I had been writing the book the impossibility of saying anything definite about flight four seven three had disinclined me to any real follow-up on it. Now, however, the E-mail from the woman in America had made me think seriously about that aircraft for the first time since I had finished writing the book. There was, I realised, another stretch of water that might just possibly have swallowed up the Flying Fortress. Loch Dubh is pretty small as lochs go, just about two hundred yards long by seventy or eighty wide, but it was still easily large enough to have absorbed a crashing aircraft, even one with a wingspan of one hundred and three feet like the B-17.

It would be quite a coincidence, of course, but by no means impossible. The more plausible resting place would have been the far larger Loch Tanna, about a quarter of a mile or a little less beyond Dubh Loch from Beinn Bharrain but for two things. It wasn’t particularly deep and over the years had been visited by many tourists. Dubh Loch, on the other hand, was deep – very deep. Some of the local old wives’ tales claimed that it was bottomless – ridiculous of course, but the small loch was certainly deep enough to swallow any aircraft, even a modern Jumbo jet. The water was also bitterly cold, even in summer.

There was one big snag, of course. The Americans had flown over the area less than forty-eight hours after four seven three had been lost – surely some bits of detritus would have floated to the surface? I decided to talk once more with Douglas McFee. I had reached that stage in my deliberations when Alex returned on his tractor, the heavy rods of the bale lifter sticking out in front like a giant’s comb.

A fully grown Highland bull can weigh as much as a ton. The dead cow was probably no more than roughly half of that figure, but moving her was still no easy matter. The problem was to actually lift her dead weight enough to slide the prongs of the bale lifter under her, but at last we managed it, the 31

effort involved leaving us sweating and panting for breath, despite the cold November air. Time to broach the subject of talking to Douglas again.

“Alex, how’s your dad keeping?”

“Fit as a fiddler’s bitch still – I reckon he’ll outlive the lot of us. Still walks four to five miles a day

– and woe betide anyone suggesting he doesn’t cover the ground quite as fast as he did thirty year ago!”

“That’s good to hear – look, I want to talk to him again about that aircraft that he heard back in forty-three – do you reckon that would be OK?”

“Of course it would, David. He’ll be glad of the visit – he never says, but I know he misses ma dreadfully – something else the stubborn old bugger won’t admit to – so someone to talk to in the house will be great for him.”

I watched as Alex carefully drove away in the tractor, needing to be especially careful in his handling of the vehicle with the weight of the cow hanging on the front. As she had not been killed in an approved slaughterhouse, I supposed that theoretically her meat wouldn’t enter the human food chain, but she represented a valuable carcase and I was happy to leave that aspect to Andrew, his conscience, and whoever later became involved. It was important that whatever was done was done fairly quickly to avoid any chance of the meat spoiling – when stalking in the hills, deer that have been shot are normally gralloched – the opening of the carcase and the removal of the entrails

– on the spot, but it was a skill that I had never acquired, despite it being second nature to my father and, even more especially, my grandfather. A deer, even a large stag, is one thing, however –a half ton Highland cow is something else entirely, and Alex had shown no intention of performing the task; at least the weather, now turning really cold, would be a help in avoiding any chance of the meat spoiling quickly.

I was pleased to hear that Douglas, just about Pirnmill’s oldest habitant, was still holding up. He had lost his wife, Jessie, just over a year earlier and it must be lonely for him as locally virtually nobody of anywhere near his own generation was left. Jessie had been his junior by over ten years, so it had never occurred to either of them that she would go first, but that was what had happened.

Deciding that there was no time like the present, an hour or so later, after making myself a bit more presentable – moving the cow onto the bale lifter had left Alex and me not just sweating, but pretty filthy as well – I knocked on the door of Douglas’ small bungalow. Like my own, rather larger, bungalow, it looked out over the water to the Kintyre peninsula, today a vague mist enshrouded presence brooding on the skyline, but on a good day a heart achingly beautiful sight and one of the reasons I had come back to live in what had been my parents’ home when it was left to me in my father’s will. Douglas greeted me with obvious pleaser.

“Davey, boy – come you in. Andrew said that you might come calling – now – will ye take a dram with me to clear the chords and refresh the memory?”

I smiled – Douglas’ joie de vivre was infectious – always had been and always would be.

We settled ourselves in front of Douglas’ blazing log fire, each of us nursing a heavy cut glass tumbler containing a generous measure of the old man’s favourite Talisker. I sipped on the smooth, smoky malt whisky and outlined the thoughts that had come to my mind whilst waiting on the hill for Alex to return with the tractor.

He listened attentively and nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes, I can see what you mean, Davey – but is it likely? A big aeroplane sort of bounces off the lip of Beinn Bharrain, then plunges straight down into Loch Dubh? If it did manage it, I can understand why it’s never been found – the waters of the loch are main deep.”

“That was my thinking, Douglas, but one thing I can’t understand – if it did happen, there were sure to have been some things that would float to the surface, and if that had happened, why didn’t those two American officers see them when they flew over?”

He thought some more before replying.

“Davey, that was a bitter cold winter – bitter cold. As you know, we don’t usually get all that much snow on Arran except on the peaks of the hills, but that winter, and the next, was different. The night that I heard that aeroplane go over, and for all the next day, there was heavy snow – and I went up into the hills when it had stopped a couple of days later, to find that both Dubh Loch and 32

Loch Tanna were completely frozen over, and that there was a thick blanket of snow lying on the ice. If that had already happened when the Yanks flew over the area they wouldn’t have seen the lochs at all – just the snow on top of the ice covering them.”

That gave me a possible answer to one aspect of the puzzle – until I had heard Douglas say that, I couldn’t understand how two experienced pilots, flying low and slow over the area, could have missed seeing any detritus on the surface of the loch – if indeed there had been anything to see.

Now there was a possible explanation.

What now, I wondered? Did I have any reasonable grounds for raising the hopes of that woman in America that after all these years, there might be a chance of locating the resting place of her ancestor? After thinking it over - and accepting Douglas’ offer of a second glass of malt – I decided that it would be premature, and if I turned out to be wrong, downright cruel to raise her hopes only to dash them again. I resolved to do a bit more searching before saying anything to her.

The next day, suitably clothed for the weather which had turned dry but colder, I drove the Land Rover to the highest point of Beinn Bharrain I could reach on wheels, then started out on foot. I had only the vaguest idea as to where precisely the Gregorys had found their piece of metal, so it was no surprise to me that I failed to rediscover it. I did, however, find something.

It was nothing very earth shattering, just a piece of twisted metal about two feet long and perhaps eight or nine inches wide. What made it interesting was that I was sure that what I was looking at was a piece of aircraft alloy. One side was heavily corroded by the passage of time, despite which it was just possible to see that it had originally been painted a pale grey; the other side was less corroded and still bore some faint traces of a yellow-green paint. I knew that back in the nineteen forties American service aircraft had been painted on the inside with an anti-corrosive finish –

aluminium and its alloys don’t rust, of course –that is a characteristic of iron and its derivatives, but they do corrode when exposed to the elements over time and I felt sure that I was looking at a piece of metal that had been torn off an aircraft. The pale grey was also consistent with American aircraft of the time – a little later they had been left unpainted, the weight of paint saved offering a slight gain in performance or the ability to carry a bit more fuel or a slightly heavier bomb load.

But which aircraft? The more that I thought about it, the more sure I became that this piece, which had been wedged into the ground just a few yards from an outcrop of rock jutting out from the otherwise almost sheer face of the hill, looked for all the world as though it had been driven violently into its resting place, not blown there by a gale. If that was the case it couldn’t have come from either of the two known crashes – it must have come from a third aircraft, and what more likely than the missing Flying Fortress?

I spent well over an hour searching in the vicinity of my find but without finding anything else, not even the apparently considerably bigger piece of metal found by Mr and Mrs. Gregory back in nineteen seventy. It did, however strengthen my conviction that the B-17 could well have plunged down from where I had found the piece of metal straight into Loch Dubh, as the loch lay in a direct line from the highest part of the ridge of Beinn Bharrain and where I had found the metal. But had it really done so? The only way to be sure was to have a look beneath the waters, not something that I had any intention of doing myself – I have never done any diving in my life and am only a very mediocre swimmer. However, I did know somebody who might be able to help me out.

Chapter Seven

Morton Lewis sat at his desk, turning over in his mind the information that he had gleaned from Henrietta Latour. It looked as though there was no need to worry about the Senator’s grandfather becoming a ghost from the past to haunt Hammond’s expectations of succeeding to the chairmanship of the Finance Committee, nor to his Senate re-election prospects next year, and yet….

Hammond had made it very plain that he, and his father before him, had felt that Graham Harris had enjoyed a life style that could not be explained from his salary as a government employee, even a very senior one. Where had the extra money come from? He decided that, despite the clean bill of 33

health given to Harris by the CIA, a little more digging might be a wise precaution. Graham Harris had been dead for over forty-three years, but perhaps there still existed some record somewhere of his income and wealth. He pressed the intercom button to summon his secretary, and moments later Helen Carmody entered his office.

“Helen, I want to talk with that new guy who started last month – Fowler. Have him come in, would you, please?”

“Yes, sir.”

She left his office, wondering why the chief of staff would want to talk with a young man who was an intern on what was effectively a job experience post. To date he had been assigned to little more than reading duties, going through the vast amount of information that the media, in all its forms, churned out every day, looking for anything that might have the slightest bearing on the world of the senior Senator for Maryland.

Lewis looked up as, after a somewhat hesitant knock at his door, a young man entered.

“Ah, Mr. Fowler – please sit down I’ve got a job that needs doing and I think that it is one that, from what you’ve achieved for us so far, would seem to fit your talents.”

The young man took the seat indicated and looked at the man who was his ultimate boss; it was the first time that he had actually been in Lewis’ office and he wondered what task was about to be handed out to him, and hoped that it was something more interesting that all he had been doing to date.

Lewis looked at his subordinate thoughtfully. Harold Fowler was, he knew, twenty-four years old and had degrees in economics and politics. A period as an intern on the staff of a Senator would be a good entry on his CV, but Lewis had not the slightest idea what the young man’s ambitions were for the future. He was looking at a tall, skinny individual with lank fair hair combed across a highly domed skull. Pale blue eyes surveyed the world from behind heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. He looked, Lewis thought disparagingly, as though a puff of wind would blow him away, but he knew that Fowler, despite his unprepossessing appearance, was bright.

“As you know, the Senator is expected to become the Chairman of the Finance Committee when Senator Goldman steps down in a few weeks’ time. It all looks plain sailing, but there is always the chance that someone, one of his political opponents, may try to block his appointment. One of the most distasteful elements of American politics in recent years is the way in which people have seized on the slightest irregularity committed not just be someone seeking office, but by his family, friends, even, f they thought that it would make a denigrating his story, his family pet!

“Now, the Senator’s paternal grandfather was a senior official in the State Department during and immediately after, the war. Back then it is possible that policies and practices were in place which would be frowned upon today – spy networks operating in ways that would give the holier than thou brigade sleepless nights, bribery of foreign nationals on a grand scale, that sort of thing, all of it expedient at the time – there was, after all, the little matter of a war going on – but which would be met with severe disapproval today. I want you to look into the life and times of Assistant Secretary of State Graham Harris with the finest of tooth combs and see if there is anything, anything at all, which could be taken out of context by the Senator’s opponents. In particular, try and find out if he could be accused, however unjustly, of perhaps accepting money himself that might be construed as beyond what he could be expected to have earned in the normal way.”

To listen to Lewis speak, more in sorrow than anger, about the depths to which politics had sunk, it would have been hard to realise that the type of character assassination he was describing was a tactic he had employed in the past, both often and enthusiastically. He continued to brief Fowler as to what was wanted of him.

“I’d like you to have your report with me as soon as possible, but thoroughness is more important than speed – as an indication, let’s say at least an interim report for me a week today. Is that OK

with you?”

Fowler nodded his head vigorously.

“Yes, sir, I’ll get right on it.”

As the youngster left the room, Lewis once again fell to thinking about the cargo of gold which had been aboard the missing plane. It belonged, of course, to the US government- but it had been 34

missing for seventy years, so the government could hardly complain if it stayed missing. It was, he supposed, a pipe dream, but if that gold could be recovered in secret, there was enough there to let him to retire not just in comfort, but in positive sybaritic luxury. But how realistic a pipe dream could it be?

For a start, even if the gold could be found, there was the sheer weight involved. With each coin weighing an ounce, in total they represented over six hundred pounds to be moved – and that was just the weight of the coins themselves, ignoring whatever packing case they occupied. How big would the case have to be? He quickly jotted down some figures, then leant back in his chair in surprise. All that gold, all that wealth, could be contained in a something no bigger than a fairly small suitcase – although no normal suitcase could cope with the weight, of course. The weight of four smallish adult males packed into so small a space!

He shrugged his shoulders; the aircraft was lost without trace and dreaming about its cargo was a waste of time and effort. He turned to more pressing matters contained in the papers on his desk.

**********

Jane pulled her chair closer to the screen of her laptop and studied, for about the fifth or sixth time, the depiction of the Isle of Arran as represented by Google Earth. What a desolate looking dump, she thought to herself. About twenty miles long and half as wide, it was apparently home to about six thousand inhabitants, virtually all of whom lived in a string of small villages dotted around the island’s coastline as though clinging on for dear life to avoid being sucked down by the sea which constantly battered the shore. Hell, it was so empty. About six times as big as Manhattan and no more people on the whole island than you might find in a fair size city block. What a place to have to fly over, no trace of anywhere flat enough for even the most damaging of crash landings by something anywhere near to the size of a B-17. No, she sadly reflected, great-granddad and the others on board flight four seven three must have overflown the island and come down in the twenty mile wide stretch of water – the Firth of Clyde according to the map, between Arran and the mainland. Surely if anything else had happened, the remains of the huge aircraft would have stuck out like a sore thumb? Even if it had not been found at the time, in the seventy years which had elapsed since four seven three went missing, it would surely have been seen from the air? And yet, there was that strange piece of metal discovered by those holiday makers. Sure, there were two definite crash site of large aircraft on the island, but reading that guy Craig’s book, both crashes were a fair distance away from where the holiday makers – the Gregorys, that was their name – had seen it if the, admittedly vague, indication of where they had been hiking at the time was anything like correct.

Unwilling to accept that her ancestor was lost forever, that she would never truly know what had happened to him nor find his final resting place, she looked yet again at the map on her screen and began to hypothesise.

Suppose, just suppose, the aircraft had come down not on the land but into water, the water contained in one or other of the numerous lakes – what did the locals call them? Lochs – that was it.

She turned back to Craig’s book, reading yet again the chapter devoted to four seven three. A local, a youngster, had heard an aircraft pass low overhears and shortly afterwards might, or might not, have heard a crash. According to the book the youngster had lived in a tiny hamlet called Pirnmill.

She found it on the map and a quiet thrill overcame her. If you took a line from out west of the island, the direction from which four seven three must have come, and traced it over Pirnmill, right in its further path was a ridge of high ground, and just beyond the ridge two lakes – no, she corrected herself, two lochs. One was tiny and she dismissed it straightway, but the other was big.

According to the map it was called Loch Tanna. Could her great-grandfather’s plane have come down in that big stretch of water?

She came out of Google Earth, opened up her E-mail account and composed another E-mail to the Brit, David Craig, the author of the book. The crux of the E-mail was simple; was there any likelihood of four seven three being under the waters of Loch Tanna?

35

She reviewed the decision that she had come to a couple of days earlier. If there was the slightest chance of that aircraft being found, her next holiday was going to be on the Isle of Arran – she just hoped that the bleak hinterland of the place was offset by some decent accommodation somewhere.

*********

I had first met Hugh Jason when I had been doing research on my book about the Scottish mystery aircraft crashes. Like myself, he had served in the Royal Air Force, but well before my time. Born in nineteen forty-seven and joining the RAF as a twenty year old, he had retired as a Group Captain in two thousand and two. In the interim he had enjoyed a distinguished career including, as a newly promoted thirty-five year old Squadron Leader on secondment to the Royal Navy, flying a Sea Harrier in the Falklands war in nineteen eighty-two when, amongst other achievements, he had shot down two Argentinian A-4 Skyhawks attempting a bombing run on one of the Royal Navy’s fleet auxiliary troop ships. His action probably saved the lives of many soldiers, and was recognised with the award of the Distinguished Flying Cross, the DFC, one of Britain’s major awards for courage in the face of the enemy.

Since retirement, he lived in Edinburgh but, as a highly respected aviation archaeologist, travelled around quite a bit, but I was lucky; he answered the phone on its first ring.

“Jason.”

“It’s David Craig here, sir – I don’t know if you remember me?”

“Of course I do, David – and it’s Hugh, not ‘sir’ – we’re neither of us in the RAF now.”

“Thank you – I want to pick your brains about one of those crashes I wrote about in my book.”

“What brain I have left is all yours – how can I help?”

“It’s that B-17 that disappeared in nineteen forty-three, the one that was believed to flown low over Arran but never got to Prestwick.”

There was a brief pause at the other end before he replied.

“Yes, I remember now – there was an air search for wreckage but nothing found – is that the one?”

“Yes, that’s it. I’ve had a surprising E-mail from a woman in the States – she’s the great-granddaughter of one of the people on that plane – the civilian, some sort of American civil servant.

Apparently she has had access to some papers that have only just come into the public domain and wondered if the aircraft could have come down in a loch here on Arran rather than having reached the Firth of Clyde. The thing is, I’ve been wondering just that myself over the last few days. Do you have a map of Arran?”

“Yes, hold on a tick – I’ve got all the Ordnance Survey maps of the UK – just let me get the right one.”

After a minute or two he was back on the line.

“Right, David, I’ve got the map in front of me.”

“Right. On the west coast there is a small village called Pirnmill.”

“Yes, I’ve found it.”

“About three miles to the east of Pirnmill is one of the high points of the island, Beinn Bharrain. If you take a line through Pirnmill and the high point of the ridge of Beinn Bharrain and extend it, right in line is a small loch, Dubh Loch. I know the area and Dubh Loch is small, but big enough to swallow up an aircraft with no bother – and it’s deep, very deep according to the locals. The name –

Black Loch in the Gaelic – comes from the fact that even on a sunny day the water really does look black – it’s in the shade of the surrounding land. If that B-17 is down there, what would be the chances of recovering it?”

There was a pause; he was obviously studying the map.

“Well, anything’s possible, but being practical, in this case very slim. Assuming that the aircraft is in reasonable shape you’d need heavy lifting gear – how could you get it up there? To actually raise the aircraft you’d have to use flotation bags to get it to the surface and have a heavy duty winch to bring it within reach of your crane. Again, how would you get it there? And even if the aircraft was brought up, you’d then need to get it off site. You’re looking at millions of pounds for such an exercise – the first thing needed would be a road to the site so that your equipment could actually be got to where it was needed, and looking at the map you’re talking about a good few miles of road.

36

“Of course, if the aircraft is smashed up – which it might well be, of course, getting a few bits up, enough to confirm its identity would be easier and cheaper – but you’d still need gear up there which would be very difficult to get to the loch. There’s also another consideration to bear in mind

– the crew must still be on board, so the Procurator Fiscal would have to be advised and he would have the local Sheriff hold a Fatal Accident Inquiry. Oh, and as they are Americans, the Consul General in Edinburgh would need to be informed as well. Still, the first thing, obviously, is to find out whether she is actually down there. You’ll need a diver – do you know anyone who could do it?”

I shook my head – automatic reaction – then confirmed verbally.

“No, diving is something that I’ve never done myself and I’ve never had cause to come into contact with anybody in that sort of field.”

“Well, I have a contact who might be able to help – it’s a husband and wife team who run a diving school in Ayr, so they’re just across the water from you. They did some dives for me a couple of years ago when we were looking for a Hurricane that was believed to have come down in the Firth of Forth. Turned out to be duff gen, didn’t find a thing, but they clearly know their stuff. Mind you

– you’d have to pay for their services; it’s their bread and butter and they weren’t cheap. For a start, working around a wreck, or anything like that, divers always work in pairs – too dangerous to go solo. If you want to get in touch with them, here’s their number.”

He recited a telephone number to me and I jotted it down, but the comment ‘weren’t cheap’ was already putting me off. I had no money to spare for something like this and employing expert professionals wasn’t something that I could justify to myself on so flimsy a pretext. We finished our call and I replaced the telephone handset. I was reluctant to give up on my pursuit of flight four seven three, but it was beginning to look as though I had reached a dead end.

I composed a lengthy, and largely apologetic, E-mail to Jane Cobden over in the USA, explaining that Loch Tanna was too shallow and too well visited to have held a crashed B-17 for seventy years, and that whilst Dubh Loch just might possibly be the B-17’s final resting place, and therefore that of her great-grandfather as well, trying to do anything about finding it was out of my reach.

***********

Jane read Craig’s E-mail with initial disappointment, disappointment which gave way to determination. She sat down and composed a reply.

*********

I looked in amazement at the reply from Jane Cobden to my E-mail, an E-mail which I had assumed would be the last chapter in the sorry tale of flight four seven three.

‘Dear Mr. Craig,

Thank you for your E-mail. I’m sure that you will agree that the first thing to do is to establish whether or not the airplane is actually down there. I am due some vacation time, so I intend to come over to Arran in the next week or so. I am an experienced scuba diver – is there anywhere near to hand where I can hire the necessary gear? Ideally I should dive with a partner for safety’s sake –

perhaps a local would be happy to help for a fee? Also, how deep is the loch? I can dive to 40

metres, briefly to 50.

The dive will probably need a small boat to be used – looking at the terrain it would have to be transported by an off road vehicle - again can I hire a small inflatable and something like a Jeep Cherokee locally?

Sincerely,

Jane Cobden’

I thought long and hard about the missive. Obviously Jane Cobden was one very determined lady, for which I admired her. Nowadays I wrote fiction to supplement my RAF pension – I had been invalided out after my weapons officer and myself had been force to eject from our Tornado when it had suffered catastrophic damage from a bird strike on a low level exercise flight. Harry Menton, my weapons officer, had ejected without any problems, but I had been unlucky and the ejection seat’s vicious acceleration, needed to escape safely from a stricken aircraft, had damaged my spine.

37

After several weeks in traction and what had seemed an interminable period on first crutches and using a walking stick, I had recovered well enough for the damage not to interfere with normal life, apart from a tendency to suffer excruciating back ache from time to time. However, the medical experts were convinced that a second ejection would probably prove fatal as there was a high probability that me weakened spine would result in a broken spinal cord, so my days of flying fast jets were over. The RAF was in one of its periodic manpower reduction exercises as the politicians tried to scrape more money out of the budgets of the armed forces, so the offer was made to me to accept immediate retirement on an invalidity pension rather than transferring to non-flying duties. I had accepted, so at age thirty I was back in civilian life. I spent a couple of years working as a flying instructor at a flying school outside Perth, but hadn’t really enjoyed it. Then in rapid succession both my parents had died and so, in two thousand and eight I had returned to Arran where I had been born and brought up to live in what had been my parents’ house.

It was at that point that I had decided that I no longer wished to work for somebody else, at least for the time being, and I decided to try my hand at writing. Given my background, writing about aviation in some context or another was an obvious no-brainer and my first effort I published on Kindle, to avoid the embarrassment of rejection slips from publishing houses. To my pleasant surprise it sold very well – perhaps only pricing it at forty-nine pence helped. Writing fiction had supplemented my pension, but the book with which I was most pleased was my only work of non-fiction to date – the story of the mysterious crashes. This I had actually managed to get a publisher to accept and after a year of sales as a ‘proper’ book, I had then added it to my Kindle library.

My writing hadn’t earned me a fortune, and was never likely to – but it was a nice little addition to my income even after the taxman had taken his bite.

I decided that, given Jane Cobden’s determination, the least that I could do was to check if the sort of things she wanted could be obtained on Arran – except for the Jeep Cherokee. That big Yankee motor would be far less capable off road in our hills than my own Land Rover, so providing the wheels would be my contribution.

To my pleasant surprise I found that scuba gear would be no problem – there was a scuba set-up, aimed mostly at giving tourists an ‘experience’, on the far side of the island and talking to the owner, Hamish Logan, I found that not only could he provide what was needed, but as tourists wishing to submerge themselves in the winter waters of November and December were few and far between, he would be only too happy to act as the second diver to Miss Cobden, assuming that she was serious in her expressed intention to arrive in the near future.

Consequently, I sent the lady an answer to her E-mail, including in it the comment that my own Land Rover was the most capable off road vehicle, short of a tank, that she could wish to use and that I would be happy to drive it in the search for flight four seven three, and the news that for a reasonably small fee, Hamish would act as her second diver.

********

Morton Lewis was pleasantly surprised to receive a request for a meeting from Fowler on the Thursday – a day less than the week he had suggested as the timetable for an interim report. Helen Carmody ushered the young man into Lewis’ presence and he took the indicated chair, looking decidedly unhappy. Looking at him, Lewis began to have a sense of foreboding.

“What news do you have for me, Mr. Fowler?”

“It’s not very good, I’m afraid, sir.”

“Tell me the worst.”

“Mr. Harris wasn’t receiving any money that he shouldn’t have been – but his wife was.”

That was a shock which brought Lewis up in his chair in astonishment.

“His wife? How?”

“She had a bank account opened in the maiden name of her mother so the connection wasn’t immediately obvious. The way it worked was that the money which went out a couple of the Middle East embassies was involved. In both cases the head of security was a man who had formerly worked under Harris in the State Department. They colluded with Harris to identify fictitious contacts to be bribed. Harris and these two men needed each other – it was Harris, after all, who 38

approved the recommendations as to local people who should be in receipt of American funds.

Obviously the two men took their cut, but they also transferred funds to the bank account which Mrs. Harris had opened. On the face of it, Harris was squeaky clean, but in fact he and his wife received thousands of dollars between nineteen forty-three, when the scam started, and the end of the war. They didn’t keep it going after war’s end – I don’t know why, perhaps there end of hostilities saw some change in embassy organisation that made it more difficult.

“Oh and there is one other interesting thing – the money to pay the contacts was in gold – normally twenty dollar gold pieces, double eagles. Apparently in the Middle East gold was much, much more trusted than any paper money, even dollars. The money went out in small amounts at a time in the diplomatic bag; Harris and his Treasury contact, Assistant Secretary Norton, who was, by the way, Harris’ brother in law, had earlier tried to send a large consignment of gold all in one go. They sent it by airplane and the airplane was lost en route to the UK. After that – which must have been a major embarrassment for them both – it was a case of once bitten, twice shy and thereafter just small amounts at a time.”

“How did you discover all this?”

“I looked at the State Department records for the war years – they’re all in the public domain now –

and I was struck by the fact that the payments to a total of ten contacts, six at one embassy, four at the other, all stopped at the same time, whereas payments to other contacts of those two embassies continued to be made for varying periods of time after the war ended, as one would surely expect.

That gave me a starting point. The other end of the equation – because I started off with the assumption that there was something to find at Harris’ end – was really silly of Mrs. Harris. She never closed the account – and she didn’t die until nineteen ninety-eight, just a month or so after her ninety-ninth birthday. If she had closed it back in the forties I could never have found out about it, but just fifteen years ago, it wasn’t all that difficult. I’ve no idea why she kept the account open –

there were a few payments and withdrawals, usually two or three of each a year, up until the early seventies, then no movement at all up to the time she died.”

Lewis pondered on the words of his young subordinate. So, there was a skeleton in the cupboard.

The question was, would it stay there or would it come rattling out into the daylight to the Senator’s disadvantage? A thought struck him.

“How difficult was it to find out all this, Mr. Fowler?”

The man tried, and failed, to look modest.

“Pretty difficult, sir – I had to do a lot of digging.”

“How likely is it that somebody else might come across it?”

Fowler furrowed his brow in concentration.

“Pretty unlikely, I would have thought, sir. I had the advantage of assuming that there was something to look for, which gave me a starting point, but the really difficult bit was finding that Mrs. Harris had opened that bank account in the first place and that it still existed up to the time of her death. I found it because I was sure that there was something to find. I can’t see how anyone who didn’t have my starting point would come across it be chance. I mean, when she died the account hadn’t been used for many years and only contained just over a hundred dollars, so it wouldn’t immediately stick out if somebody was reviewing her estate.”

“Well that’s encouraging. Now, I am sure that you realise just how potentially serious all this is, so not a word to anyone, anyone at all.”

Fowler nodded vigorously.

“Of course not, sir.”

“Right, thank you very much for your efforts on this, Mr. Fowler – I won’t forget how well you have performed over this.”

Beaming with pride, Fowler left Lewis’ office with a noticeable spring in his step. Lewis watched him go, a deep frown on his face. Could the young man, so clearly pleased with himself, be relied upon to keep his mouth shut?

He got up from his desk and made his way to Hammond’s outer office, where the Senator’s secretary smiled in welcome. The smile was surface level only; like all of the Senator’s staff, 39

Kathleen Morrison was only too aware of how important it was to keep on the right side of the powerful chief of staff.

“There’s nobody with the Senator, sir,” she advised him, and Lewis walked in to the Senator’s sanctum sanctorum.

Hammond looked up as his long-time colleague entered the room.

“What news, Morton?”

“Not as good as I had hoped, Graham. Fowler discovered the way in which your father’s mother-in-law was acting as a conduit for funds syphoned off in the Middle East during the war – and if he could find out, there is always the danger that somebody else might.”

The senator frowned unhappily.

“I suppose that it was always a possibility that it would leak out one day. Tell me, this Fowler – can he be relied upon to keep his mouth shut?”

“Yes, I’m sure he can.”

“So, at the moment, it’s just you, I and Fowler who know about this?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, let’s try and keep it that way, at least until after the election.”

“You got it.”

Lewis left the Senator’s office wondering if, in fact, Fowler really could be relied upon.

*************

Jane read Craig’s E-mail with satisfaction. It really did look as though it was time to take that vacation and head for Scotland. She looked up possible flights and was initially disappointed to find there were no direct flights into Arran itself, then told herself she was being stupid – a place that sparsely inhabited, of course there’d be no commercial flights into it. It was, she saw, possible to charter a helicopter to the island, but when she checked the price she decided that she really couldn’t justify the cost from her own money and decided not to push her luck with her boss by suggesting that the paper should foot the bill. It was hardly as though she was following up on a fast breaking news story.

She composed a reply; she would fly to Scotland the next week, flying to Glasgow International and hiring a car there, driving to Ardrossan to catch the Brodick ferry and booking in to an hotel – could Craig recommend anywhere?

She had sent her E-mail in the late evening and the time differential meant that it was the following day before she received Craig’s reply. He suggested that, to save the cost of a hire car, which would in any case be of no use in reaching the Dubh Loch area, he would happily meet her at Glasgow and transport her to Arran. As to a hotel, he had no personal experience of any of them, but after asking around identified a couple that were locally well regarded.

She replied at once, gladly accepting the offer of transport and asking how she would know him.

The reply intrigued her. ‘I am six foot two, weigh fourteen stone – one hundred and ninety six pounds in your system, and will be wearing cord trousers and a Barbour jacket. The clincher, however, will be the fact that I will be holding up a card with your name on it.’ She smiled as she read it; clearly David Craig had a sense of humour.

She read further. Craig pointed out that all the hotels on the island were well away from the area of the Dubh Loch and as it was now the beginning of December, travelling from one of those hotels to the search area would eat into the precious few hours of daylight as the shortest day of the year came ever closer. Even though it was only a little over twenty miles, the road journey would take a good half hour or more and the off road driving would absorb another three-quarters of an hour or so. Craig had already spoken with Hamish Logan, who would be her support diver, and he was happy to move in with Craig for two or three days, bringing with him the necessary diving gear and a small inflatable boat. Craig’s bungalow was easily big enough to accommodate a third person, so why not stay there so that the maximum use could be made of the daylight hours?

It was something that she had not taken into consideration; a quick Google search demonstrated that she was heading for an area where at this time of year the day was a bit under seven hours long.

40

Craig’s suggestion was eminently sensible; it would also, she reflected, save on hotel bills. She looked at suitable flights – the most economic way was to fly from Washington to Newark, New Jersey from where an overnight flight with United Airlines went direct to Glasgow, arriving at seven thirty in the morning. She E-mailed Craig, gladly agreeing to his idea of accommodating her at his place and asking if a seven thirty in the morning arrival was OK for him to meet her at Glasgow airport.

She looked at the clock; just after three in the afternoon, so it would be just after eight in the evening with Craig, so hopefully an answer would be quick in coming. In fact, she only to wait some twenty minutes before receiving Craig’s response. Seven thirty in the morning would be fine

– he would combine meeting her with doing some shopping in Glasgow the previous day, stay overnight, and be ready to be at the airport in time to pick her up. From the airport they would drive to Ardrossan for the ferry and should be OK to catch the nine forty-five boat, reaching Brodick an hour later. Once landed, they would pick up Hamish Logan and the requisite equipment and get to Craig’s house around midday or a little later. Darkness would be falling not much after three, so serious work would have to wait until the next day, but they would be able to organise themselves so that they could start as soon as it would be light enough to drive off road.

She sent off an immediate reply accepting Craig’s suggested arrangements. Now it only remained to finalise a date.

**********

I scanned the arriving passengers as they came through the arrival hall. The United Airways Boeing 757 had landed on time some twenty minutes early and a stream of passengers, most of them looking weary after their overnight flight from America, trudged into view. As promised, I was holding up a card with ‘Jane Cobden’ written large upon it and one of the passengers promptly veered towards me.

“David Craig?” she enquired.

“That’s me, Ms. Cobden. Welcome to Scotland.”

“Thanks for meeting me – and please – it’s Jane.”

“Right you are – I’m David.”

I found myself looking at a young woman who looked a lot more alive than the majority of the passengers who had been subjected to the rigours of an overnight flight of nearly seven hours. Not very tall, perhaps five feet two or three, her blonde hair, cut to fall just below her ears, framed an attractive oval face which even at this hour looked animated and alert. Green eyes looked into mine appraisingly, giving an impression that Jane Cobden was much given to evaluating everything, and everyone, around her as a primary reaction to any situation in which she found herself. I knew that she was a reporter for the Washington Post, one of America’s foremost newspapers, and somehow her features ensured that she looked the part. She was dressed simply, clothing obviously chosen with the long flight in mind, loose fitting jogging bottoms and a similarly loose sweater, neither of which negated the shapely form within. Her sole luggage was a fair sized suitcase on wheels and a small carry-on bag slung over her shoulder. She was also carrying, slung over her free arm, a gabardine raincoat.

“You’d best put your coat on,” I told her, “it’s pretty cold out.”

She did as I advised and I escorted her from the airport to the car park; as we stepped out of the airport’s doors, despite the raincoat she shivered.

“I see what you mean about it being cold.”

Her voice was as attractive as the rest of her; quite deep and with less of an obvious American accent than I had expected, and no trace of the nasal intonation that is common from the big northern cities, although I supposed that Washington was perhaps not seen as truly northern in the States.

We reached my Land Rover, hurrying to keep warm, but when she saw it she stopped in surprise.

“That’s your car?” she queried uncertainly.

I was used to the reaction. The Land Rover is old – it had originally belonged to my father – and over thirty years of being used off road, often on terrain that was more rock than anything else, had 41

left its mark in scars and dents on the bodywork. What wasn’t immediately obvious, however, was the fact that it was still in first rate mechanical condition and boasted a degree of sheer ruggedness that its more modern successors could not even begin to match.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “ it’ll get us there – and when we are there you’ll see why it’s the best vehicle for we are going to do.”

I loaded her luggage into the rear of the car and we got in. One modification that I had made to the vehicle was to upgrade the original front seats to something a bit more comfortable, but other than that it was as unashamedly spartan inside as it was battered outside.

“I know it doesn’t look much,” I said, once again defending my aged set of wheels to somebody encountering it for the first time, “but believe me, it’ll keep going over terrain than would wreck most modern so-called off road vehicles in a couple of miles.”

She didn’t look totally convinced, but clearly decided to take my word for it. As we drove towards Ardrossan and the ferry to Arran I asked her about her background.

“Well, as I mentioned in my first E-mail to you, my great-grandfather disappeared in nineteen forty-three in the Flying Fortress that never made it to Scotland. It was always a bit of a mystery in the family, and when I started work for the Post I had the opportunity, and access to the resources, to try and find out what had actually happened to him. I met something of a brick wall – some State Department papers which clearly had a bearing were subjected to a seventy year embargo, but that was up in November, so at last I was able to piece together what had happened and why he was actually on that flight in the first place.”

“If we do find the aircraft – then what?”

“Well, great-grandfather and the crew must still be there in the airplane, so my family, and the families of the crew, will want to take them home for burial.”

She hesitated, then spoke again.

“Look, something that I haven’t told you before – it didn’t seem wise to include it in an E-mail. The reason that my great-grandfather was on board that airplane was because it was carrying a considerable amount of money in the form of gold coins which were destined for onward transmission to US embassies in the Middle East for paying local agents – at the time gold was far more acceptable to most people out there rather than any form of paper money.”

That certainly aroused my interest.

“So, what happens in that case? As I said in one of my E-mails, finding the aircraft, if indeed she is down there, is one thing. Recovering anything from the wreck will be quite another. The lay of the land is such that although I can get the Land Rover up to the loch without difficult, getting any heavy lifting equipment there would be another matter entirely. It would be very difficult, and very, very expensive.”

“I gathered that from your E-mail. If the airplane is down there, the next step will be inform the US

authorities who will obviously need to liaise with the Scottish folk to see what can be done.”

“Well, if she is down there, the first thing that will have to be done is to inform the police. There will need to be a fatal accident inquiry – a sort of coroner’s court – instigated by the Procurator Fiscal undertaken by the local sheriff, but obviously that will be a formality. Again, equally obviously, anything in the aircraft will belong to the appropriate US people.”

She smiled. “You have sheriffs here?”

“Oh yes, but they don’t ride horses not carry six-shooters. The office of Sheriff Principal in Scotland is an ancient one – it dates back at least to the eleventh century and the sheriff is effectively a judge. There are only six for all of Scotland and the post is so highly regarded that within the boundaries of his own sheriffdom, the sheriff ranks immediately after the Royal family –

something has been known to put the occasional politician’s nose well and truly out of joint.”

She chuckled, a pleasant sound that fitted well with her overall demeanour. However, when I had asked about her background, I had actually meant the more personal aspects of her life. I knew that she was a reporter for one of America’s most prestigious papers, and that was about all that I did know about her.

“What about yourself?” I asked, “are there any more members of your family wanting to know what happened to your great-grandfather?”

42

“Well, mom and dad were interested when they were alive, but my sister Lisa reckons it’s all a waste of time. She’s older than me by a couple of years, and she keeps saying that great-granddad died long before either of us were born, before our parents were born, even – so what’s the point?

She just doesn’t have the curiosity gene, I guess.”

She hesitated.

“Look, there is another reason as far as I am concerned. Harold Cobden was on that flight because his boss, George Norton, an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, sent him to look after the money.

That’s understandable – it was government money and only natural that somebody from the Treasury would ride shotgun on it. The way the money was to be used, however, was something the State Department had come up with – in particular an Assistant Secretary of State there, one Graham Harris, who was Norton’s brother-in-law. They are both long dead, of course, but Harris’

grandson, Graham Hammond, is the senior Senator for the State of Maryland and a very influential character in Washington. I’ve spoken with him – interviewed him back in November, and, I don’t know what, but I get the feeling that there is something not quite right about the Senator. Can’t put my finger on anything, but the way he answered my questions about his grandfather didn’t ring quite true. I think that there might just possibly be something to dig out there – and linked to a disappeared airplane carrying a fortune in gold, it might just make a story.”

I could see how the loss of the aircraft, the presence aboard it of her ancestor and a large amount of money, all added up to a potential story for Jane. I just hoped that we were on the right track and that flight four seven three really was within our reach and that we weren’t on a wild goose chase –

that she hadn’t staggered on to come down in the Firth of Clyde.

The ferry was docking and we were amongst the first to drive off. I headed for Hamish Logan’s place near the coast at Whiting Bay. I had met him briefly a few days earlier and he had agreed to get everything ready for us, so it didn’t take us long to load up the Land Rover with wetsuits, air tanks and various small items such as underwater timers and camera, lash the inflatable onto the Land Rover’s roof, and off we set towards my place, of necessity following the coast – and only decent – road, the A481, south and west to Pirnmill and my bungalow.

***********

During the journey from the ferry to Craig’s bungalow, Jane had studied her host carefully. He was, she judged, in his middle to late thirties, a slim six feet two or so, but despite the slimness there was a sense of latent strength about the man, and an air of competence as well, judging by the way he drove the aged vehicle with a minimum of effort. His face was, she decided, not handsome in the traditional manner – he would never be chosen to be the face of some advertising campaign for after-shave, but it was an interesting face for all of that. He was tanned, tanned to a degree that she hadn’t expected if all that she had heard about Scotland’s miserable climate was true, and his eyes, dark brown and deep-set, and accompanying a hooked, Romanesque nose, went well with the tanned skin. Also dark was his hair, cut severely short. She was impressed; she had also been impressed with just how flat and featureless was the landscape of the southern part of the island.

Fields with scarcely a tree to be seen, and those that were present stunted and bent over in the wind which must have free rein over the area. She had looked at a map of the island before setting off, so she wasn’t taken totally by surprise, but the reality was considerably bleaker than she had expected.

Also unexpected was Hamish Logan. The man was a giant, perhaps six feet eight or nine tall and something like two hundred and fifty pounds – what would they say here? About eighteen stone, that was it – and those two hundred and fifty pounds were pure muscle – there didn’t seem to be an ounce of fat on the man. His features might have been the original take on the term ‘aquiline’ with a hooked nose jutting proudly from a face that was all flat surfaces and harsh angles, as though hacked by an impatient sculptor from unyielding granite, with heavy brows that overhung eyes of a startling blue intensity that surveyed everything in their field of version as keenly as those of any eagle.

They drove through the small village of Blackwaterford, just about at the extreme south west corner of the island, and the road, still following the coast, turned north. Almost at once the distant hills 43

began to come into view and there were more trees in evidence, trees which temporarily hid the sea from her sight.

As they approached the small village of Pirnmill, where Craig lived, he waved out to their right, where a raw heap of granite dominated the skyline.

“That’s Beinn Bharrain,” he said, “Dubh Loch is just the other side of it, about three miles, or a bit under, from here.”

She turned her gaze in the direction that Craig had indicated. The mountain, a title it just about qualified for, she supposed, looked grim and threatening, an impression reinforced by a sudden rain squall which temporarily hid it from view, only for it to reappear moments later like some primeval beast surfacing.

As quickly as it had arrived, the rain squall passed over and as it did so Craig swung off the road onto a gravel drive leading to a large bungalow. Like all the houses of Pirnmill, it was built to the east of the road and looked out over the shoreline to the sea and the jutting peninsula of Kintyre beyond. With some sunshine, she thought to herself, it would be a stunning view, but today’s grey skies and constant threat of rain made it less than entrancing.

The three of them got out of the car and Craig, lifting Jane’s heavy bags from its rear as though they weighed nothing at all, led the way inside the house. Jane was pleasantly surprised to find herself in an entrance hall that promised a fair degree of comfort, even modest luxury. The wooden floor gleamed richly from the attentions of polish and elbow grease and one wall was dominated by a series of photographs, some clearly of family members, others showing her host in RAF uniform, sometimes alone, sometimes with other men. One picture jarred; it showed the twisted wreckage of an aircraft, the various elements so crushed and torn, and bearing the marks of fire, that it was impossible to the uninitiated to identify what it might originally have been.

She knew from the information ‘about the author’ that had been given in Craig’s book, that he had been in the air force and had been a pilot, but there had been no indication in the blurb as to when, nor why, he had left the service. Looking at the photo of the wreck she felt sure that she was looking at the reason, or at least part of it.

The rest of the bungalow lived up to the early impression. It large and comfortable, with central heating keeping the chill of a Scottish winter at bay with contemptuous ease. Craig showed her to a well-appointed bedroom, commenting that it had been occupied by two of his sisters when they had been children.

“This was your family home, then?” she queried.

“Yes – my parents moved to the island in nineteen seventy-five. My sisters are all older than me and came here with them, but I was born and brought up in this house. It passed on to me after my parents died and I’ve lived here since dad died nearly four years ago. I’d been away in the air force and then living in Perth for a while, but now that I’m back on the island I intend to stay here for good.”

She could understand that someone seeking a peaceful existence could do a lot worse than set down

– or in Craig’s case resume – roots in Pirnmill and Arran generally, but given the life that he had led in the forces, and the fact that he was still only about thirty-five or six, she wondered if Craig might not come to find the small island and its tiny population stultifying in the years ahead. Still, if it was a problem, it was his problem, not hers. Her problem would start on the morrow when, all being well, she and Logan went diving in the dark waters of Dubh Loch in search of an old airplane, four corpses, and a fortune in gold.

***********

Three thousand or so miles away in Washington, DC, it was the still early in the working day and Morton Lewis looked up as his secretary, Helen Carmody, came into his offices, the very brief period of time between the knock on the door and the door opening indicating that something important was about to be conveyed to him.

Mrs. Carmody, normally the very essence of unflappability, was clearly agitated.

“I’ve just had the police on the line, sir. Harold Fowler is dead – he was mugged last night and was found in an alley just before ten. It’s taken this long to identify him and as they haven’t been able to 44

contact any family – he only has his parents and they seem to be away from home, so the police have advised us.”

“This is dreadful – did they say what happened in any detail?”

“He’d been stabbed and his wallet, any cash that might have been on him, his watch and phone all taken. The police identified him because the killer hadn’t taken his Senate building identification card, but left it on the body.”

“Helen, I expect the police will track down his parents eventually, but see if we can do anything to help when they are found – and I’m sure that the Senator will want to attend the funeral.”

I’m sure that he will, Helen Carmody thought somewhat cynically to herself. A photo opportunity to show his caring side at the demise of an insignificant member of his staff – what could be more helpful? Pity that Fowler’s parents lived in Richmond, Virginia – had they lived in Maryland itself it would have been even better; the great man taking time out from his pressing duties of state to share in the grief of two humble constituents. As it was, Lewis would ensure that the media were fully appraised of the Senator’s concern for a lowly intern on his staff and his wish to provide what comfort that he could to the grieving family.

**********

It was still dark when we started to get ready to leave for Dubh Loch. I had prepared a substantial breakfast and both Hamish and Jane tucked in with gusto. Sausages, fried eggs and black pudding disappeared like magic and as soon as the first suspicion of dawn started to lighten the eastern sky we were on our way.

I drove us carefully up the hill, following the course of the burn at first, then even more cautiously striking off in a direct line towards Dubh Loch. I was able to get within a hundred yards or so of the loch itself before the precipitous going forced me to stop before risking the Land Rover sliding out of control on loose scree.

“Right, this is it, folks. On foot from here.”

We all got out of the car and Hamish and I lifted down the small inflatable that we had lashed to the roof rack the previous day. He and Jane had donned their wet suits at my bungalow; to have changed into them on the bare, wind-swept hillside would have been utter madness, but they wore over them an assortment of heavy clothing to combat the Arran winter. We made several scrambled descents to the water’s edge, but at last all was in place and Jane and Hamish shed their outer layers of clothing and the three of us got into the inflatable and carefully paddled it out from the shoreline.

Once we were just about in the middle of the loch, first Hamish, then Jane, carefully slipped over the side of the tiny vessel and disappeared beneath the dark water.

I waited anxiously in the little boat, despite my heavy clothing keenly aware of the wind whipping across the loch’s surface in gathering strength, gathering choppy little waves like growing messengers of its intent. In addition to my normal cold weather gear I was wearing an old-fashioned life jacket; it made my movements ungainly, but I had no wish to risk falling into that cold water without it. Heavily clad as I was, I would have sunk like a stone, never to rise again. Restricted movement was a small price to pay.

It seemed like an age, but could really have been no more than twenty minutes, if that, before the two of them broke surface. Hamish and I manhandled Jane into the inflatable, then Hamish hauled himself inboard.

“We found it!” Jane gasped in triumph, “Hamish has got pictures of it.”

One of Hamish’s items of equipment had been his underwater camera, which he now brandished like a trophy.

“Yes, it’s all on here, David.”

We hurriedly paddled back to the shore and scrambled back up to the Land Rover, where Hamish and Jane wrapped themselves in the blankets that I had packed to enable them to dry off before donning their outer clothing again, and gratefully accepted the Thermos flasks of hot soup which I had also included. Hamish seemed impervious to the cold, but Jane was by now shaking almost uncontrollably, like someone with an advance attack of ague, but after ten minutes in the Land 45

Rover’s warmth – for I had left its engine running to kept the inside temperature up – and the revivifying effects of the soup, she returned more or less to normal.

“God, that was cold,” she said, her teeth still chattering a bit, “I thought that I would never get warm again. That is definitely the last time I will ever go diving in one of your lochs.”

The previous evening we had learned from her that her previous diving experiences had all been on holiday, mostly in Florida, and although we – and particularly Hamish – had warned her that Scottish loch water in December – for we had now left November behind us – was an entirely different kettle of fish, she had clearly not appreciated just how different she was going to find things.

We drove back to my bungalow in a state of satisfaction over a mission accomplished far more easily than I for one had anticipated. Once in the house Hamish wasted no time in downloading the pictures from his camera onto my computer and for the first time in over seventy years the remains of flight four seven three were on view.

It made for a sorry sight. The aeroplane was smashed – there is no other word to describe it – but still immediately recognisable for what it had been. It looked for all the world as if giant hands had wrenched its various component pieces apart but left them vaguely in their correct relationship one with another.

The most poignant shot was of the flight deck area, where two sets of skeletal remains were vaguely discernable amidst the wreckage. The other two occupants were presumably somewhere within the wrecked fuselage which Hamish had reluctantly determined was too dangerous for them to attempt to penetrate.

Chapter Eight – May 2014

The recovery exercise was over at last. Back in December, after Jane and Hamish had found the wreck, the first thing that I had done was to notify the police. Jamie Henderson was a distant cousin of mine; we were of an age and had been at school together. We had lost touch whilst I had been in the Air Force, but had met up again a few times after I had returned to Arran. He had joined the police force almost straight from school and he was now the desk sergeant at Brodick police station so I had taken advantage of our relationship to report our find to him rather than make some anonymous contact. Jamie had immediately set the proper wheels in motion and the result had been authorisation for a combined team of Royal Navy and US Navy divers to investigate the wreck fully. They had cut their way into the wreckage and recovered the four skeletons that were all that remained of the crew and Harold Cobden.

For her part, Jane had contacted the American Consul General in Edinburgh; four seven three was, after all, an American aircraft, and those who had died within it had been American citizens.

The official enquiry by the Americans had confirmed Jane’s theory as to which aircraft the wreckage was and who, and what, had been aboard her when she had plunged into Dubh Loch –

and thereby hung a mystery. Try as they might, the divers had found no trace of the gold. Their efforts had been hampered by the fact that nobody knew just how the gold had been packed, nor where in the aircraft it might have been secured, but given its weight it must almost certainly been over the bomb bay area though obviously not in the bay itself – the thought of accidentally, or even deliberately, jettisoning such a cargo hardly bore thinking about. It was presumed that it was still down there but inaccessible for some reason, so the American government representatives had satisfied themselves with making it clear to one and all that should the gold ever come to light it belonged to Uncle Sam with no ifs, buts nor maybes.

The skeletons had been identified; whilst, in common with all American servicemen and women then and now, the three airmen had worn the regulation ‘dog tags’ round their necks, seventy years of water immersion had rotted away the cords on which the dog tags had hung and the small metal tags were now somewhere amongst the wreckage strewn on the loch floor. It had therefore been necessary to resort to DNA matching, from Jane in the case of Harold Cobden, and surviving family members on the cases of Lieutenants Meredith and Coogan had established the identity of three of 46

the skeletons. By process of elimination, the fourth skeleton was accepted to be that of Captain Abrahams, the aircraft commander. Sadly, William Abrahams had no living family to claim his remains. His remains had therefore been interred in the Arlington National Cemetery, the last resting place of so many of America’s fallen. James Coogan and Charles Meredith had been claimed by their families and buried in their home towns, as had been Harold Cobden, that interment organised by Jane and her sister.

Before the remains had been released there had had to have been a fatal accident inquiry, but that was a formality and the sheriff recorded verdicts of accidental death for all four of the deceased. I suppose that he could have added a rider finding pilot error, negligence, or whatever, but so long after the event such a rider would have been superfluous, and possibly even cruel.

As can be imagined, the acknowledgment of the presence of the gold, and the failure to find it, raised a lot of speculation, both locally and wider afield. One result was the decision by the North Ayrshire Council, that the wreck was not to be targeted by amateur – or for that matter professional

– treasure seekers, and notices appeared on the shore of Dubh Loch strictly forbidding any diving activity in its waters on pain of a very substantial fine.

I was as intrigued as anybody else by the failure of the Navy divers to recover the gold. The assumption that it was somewhere underneath some part of the wreck was an eminently sensible one, but was it the only valid assumption?

Early on in my thinking, I had sat down with paper and pencil to work out just how big a container the gold would have needed to be in, and the result amazed me. Each coin weighed an ounce, was an inch and a quarter in diameter and a little over an eight of an inch thick. If you piled a hundred of them one on top of another, the pile would still only be twelve inches or so high. Ten thousand coins represented a hundred such columns. Arrange them in ten rows of ten and all ten thousand coins could be contained in a space of roughly one cubic foot. I was so taken aback at how small a space the coins could be crammed into that I did the calculation three times – and came up with the same answer three times.

Until I did the maths, I had assumed that the coins would perhaps have needed to have been in something the size of a tea chest or the like, but realising how small a container they would have needed put a different complexion on things – no wonder the divers hadn’t found it; something that small could be anywhere underneath the aircraft on the floor of the loch. It might even – I stopped the thought in its tracks – it might even have torn free at that initial impact on the ridge of Beinn Bharrain and gone bouncing down the mountainside. It was, after all, extremely heavy for its size.

The impact had torn at least a couple of sizeable pieces of metal from the underside of the aircraft; something that small and heavy would have had a lot of inertia – it might well have torn free, but if it had, surely it would have been found in the ensuing seventy years?

It was surely ridiculous to think that the gold could have lain in the slopes of Beinn Bharrain all these years without discovery. No, it must be under the water, where it was likely to remain for all time. Officialdom wasn’t interested in mounting the sort of effort that would be needed to physically sift through every scrap of the fuselage of flight four seven three, and nothing short of a highly organised and well funded effort was likely to succeed. Even if an amateur treasure hunter were to ignore the warning notices, in the unlikely event of actually finding whatever container held the gold, then what? Ten thousand one ounce coins represented a weight of about six hundred and twenty-five pounds, more than a quarter of a ton, and that was ignoring the weight of any container. How would a diver move such a weight, let alone bring it to the surface?

I put thoughts of the gold to the back of my mind and returned my thinking to my current book which was nearing completion. I had promised myself that I would publish it on Kindle before the first of July and time was beginning to run out – only a bit over six weeks left and I still had a few anomalies in the story to sort out if the tale was to be credible. At least I wasn’t reliant upon it being a success – the income from my existing works had shown an encouraging upturn over and beyond the Christmas period, and even though I wouldn’t be able to enjoy much of a life style if I had to rely purely on the income from my writing, when added to my pension it was a welcome bit of jam on the bread and butter, so I was determined not to let up on it.

I was well on the way to solving one problem my hero was facing, when the phone rang.

47

“David Craig.”

“Davey boy, it’s Douglas. Look, I wonder if you’ve got a minute? I’ve only just remembered something that you might be interested in.”

“OK, Douglas, I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

From my bungalow to Douglas’ was only a couple of minutes’ walk, so, true to my word, I was soon seated in his comfortable living room, sipping on the inevitable glass of Talisker with which he seemed to welcome every visitor.

“Davey, you remember all the to-do about that crashed plane of course?”

I nodded – of course I did.

“Well, I was watching TV last night. It was one of those documentary programmes about the war and it concentrated on some divers exploring the wreckage of a warship in the English Channel.

Nothing to do with our aeroplane, but the man doing the talking about what was going on was a chap called Hammond – and that, together with the diving, brought back a memory. You know about that American couple that found the bit of metal from the crash? Well, a bit later another couple of Yanks came here about it – a man and his son, and Hammond was their name. They asked about where the bit of metal would have been found. They were staying at the same hotel where the Gregory couple had stayed and where my cousin Alice was the deputy manager back then, and she told them that I was probably the best person to ask.

“They came and saw me; the father told me that he had served in the American air force in the war and that he had come to Britain to visit his old haunts, including Prestwick where he had been based for a while, and whilst in the area had decided to visit Arran. Hearing about the crashes that had been on the island he had decided to visit the sites to pay his respects as it were. He realised that nobody knew what had happened to the third aircraft and that it was almost certainly in the Firth of Clyde, but perhaps the mysterious piece of metal was worth a visit anyway.

“I didn’t know exactly where it was, but I gave them directions to the general area and that was the last that I saw of them. However, my cousin Alice retired just over a year later, but just before she retired she mentioned to me that the same couple of Americans had come back to the hotel for a few days. As she retired just about then I don’t know whether they ever came back again, but don’t you think it all seems a bit odd?”

I agreed that it did indeed seem a bit odd – I could understand an ex-serviceman wanting to revisit his past, but to tramp though the inhospitable slope of Beinn Bharrain to look at lumps of twisted wreckage seemed a bit extreme and I wondered if those slopes had been their destination on their second visit as well?

I returned home with what I had learned from Douglas turning over in my mind. It was, of course, possible that the two Americans named Hammond were nothing to do with Senator Hammond, whose grandfather had been involved in arranging for the gold to be shipped to Scotland – but was it likely? I got onto the Internet and looked up Senator Hammond’s website. I found myself looking at the photograph of a middle-aged man still possessing the sort of film star looks that seem a prerequisite of a truly successful political career nowadays. He was, I noted, now some sixty-nine years of age, so either he had aged remarkably well or the picture was a little dated and a minor play for his vanity. I read through his biography carefully; he had been involved with the political scene from an early age – as a teenager he had been a member of the Kennedy peace corps – there was even a photo of a group of young men and women, of whom he had been one, clustered around the late President. The picture was dated October nineteen sixty-three; who in that group could have believed that their charismatic President would be dead within another month?

The website listed the Senator’s interests, and I was intrigued to see that they included sailing and that, when the pressures of office allowed, he liked nothing better than to get away for a while on his motor yacht. There was a picture of a sleek vessel, a good bit bigger than I had expected. The Lady Louise had apparently originally belonged to his father and was named for his father’s wife, the Senator’s mother, Louise Grace Hammond, born Louise Grace Harris, daughter of Graham Harris. I paid more attention to the motor yacht and after a bit of digging was able to find her registration details. Originally built in nineteen sixty-five, she had only had the two owners, the Senator and his father before him. Over a hundred and twenty feet long, with two powerful diesel 48

engines which gave her a top speed of over twenty knots, she was clearly capable of operating deep sea and could presumably have crossed the Atlantic had her owner wished to do so – the feat had, after all, been performed many times by vessels far smaller that Lady Louise.

I found something else of interest. Back in the late nineteen sixties, Hammond senior had been a highly successful business man, hence his ability to afford a vessel such as the Lady Louise, but in nineteen sixty-nine his company had suffered hard times. The Senator’s website eulogised at the hard work put in by the then young man and his father to pull the company round, and by the mid-seventies it was once more a success. Out of idle curiosity more than anything else, I looked up the company – Hammond Tools - and found that it was still operating, although the Senator had no connection with it, nor had he had since entering politics many years before. The big surprise was to find that the CEO was one Martin Gregory and in the blurb it said that he was the son of Alex Gregory, the man who, with Henry Hammond, the Senator’s father, had founded the firm back in nineteen forty-five. That sort of coincidence surely belonged only in works of fiction, if indeed we were seeing a case of genuine coincidence. In nineteen seventy Alex Gregory and his wife Kristina had phone a piece of twisted metal which I was now sure was a piece of flight four seven three. The next year Hammond, senior and junior, had arrived on the island asking about the location of the find. I had no idea how long they had stayed on Arran, but I did know that at the very least they had also returned the following year, nineteen seventy-two. Within a further two or three years Hammond Tools was no longer struggling but was financially secure. There was a tempting conclusion to be drawn from all that. It was tempting, but probably incapable of being proved.

I knew that Jane Cobden was still convinced that there was more of a story to be unearthed regarding the missing Flying Fortress, its luckless occupants, and the gold that it had been carrying and I sat down and composed a long E-mail to her, bringing her up to date on my thinking.

A couple of days later I had a reply. She had done a bit of digging and discovered that the cover story that Hammond senior had told Douglas McFee was a fabrication. No American airman named Henry Hammond had ever served at Prestwick during the time that it had been a USAAF base.

Clearly Hammond senior had felt the need to explain his presence – and in so doing had perhaps been unnecessarily verbose.

Jane had also done some digging into Hammond Tools; there she had been less successful. There was nothing to be found that suggested any peculiarities – but then if there had been they were over forty years in the past and unlike to be capable of being discovered at this late juncture. She had looked into the Senator’s declared interests in the Congressional records – again nothing that wasn’t totally above board. It was beginning to look as though nothing further would ever be known; had the Senator and his father found the gold all those years ago? If they hadn’t why had they come back? The area of Beinn Bharrain involved was large, but mostly open. However, I decided to have a look myself.

***********

Jane pushed her chair back from her desk and ran her fingers through her hair. Craig’s E-mail was haunting her. In her heart she was sure that Senator Hammond had a dark secret connected to what had happened on that Scottish hillside forty odd years ago when he and his father had tramped the slopes of Beinn Bharrain. She’d been there to those same slopes – the mountain had some looming grandeur to it, but it surely didn’t have sufficient physical attraction to bring two Americans across the Atlantic ocean for at least two successive years unless there was something other than just the scenery to beckon to them. She broke off her thoughts at that point. Yes, to get to Arran they would have had to cross the Atlantic – blindingly obvious. Craig hadn’t actually said so in the E-mail, but he seemed to have assumed that the two men would have come across in the Hammond motor yacht, the Lady Louise – but had they? The Lady Louise was based down river from Washington itself, but to sail from there to Scotland meant a journey of over three thousand miles. The Lady Louise was certainly capable of undertaking such a voyage, but would it have been practical? Two men on their own could scarcely have crewed the vessel, and Jane’s investigations had already ascertained that when the senator used the yacht nowadays it normally had a crew on board of at least four or five men to cope with the actual sailing of the vessel, cooking and the like, and if, as 49

was sometimes the case, he was entertaining friends aboard the crew might be as many as six or seven. Add to that the time element; if the vessel managed four hundred miles a day, it would surely still require well over a week each way, plus whatever time was spent at Arran.

Much as she would have liked to believe the worst of Senator Hammond, it was difficult to see how he and his father could have done anything on Arran connected with all that gold – but if that wasn’t the reason, why were they there for some time during at least two years? Was it possible in any way to check if the motor yacht had actually visited the Isle of Arran back in the early seventies?

She had no idea what sort of logbook the vessel might have, but assuming it actually had one and that it went that far back in time, she would dearly have liked to have had a look at it, but for the life of her could imagine no set of circumstances in which that could come about.

There was another problem. Even if Hammond, father and son, has somehow managed to spirit away the gold – then what? Double eagles were now very valuable and had already been worth far more than face value even back in the seventies, but to try and place ten thousand of them on the collectors’ market would surely have caused a stir and raised suspicions at the time? Remember, the government knew of the missing shipment and a sudden release of so many coins couldn’t possibly have gone unnoticed.

She pushed the papers she had been studying, papers which related to an upcoming problem the administration was going to have in getting a Medicare amendment past Congress and decided to seek help at least on the question of the gold.

Mervyn Roberts was a long time financial reporter on the paper and it was to him that Jane went for advice and suggestions. He looked up as she entered his cubbyhole of an office. The two of them knew each other slightly but had never worked together, so it was with some surprise that he welcomed her.

“Jane, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Mervyn, you remember the story of the missing B-17 and the gold on board it?”

“Yes, of course I do. The thought of all that lovey Yankee gold at the bottom of some Scottish lake just about broke my heart!”

“Mervyn, as you know the divers couldn’t find the gold – but then that’s hardly surprising given all the wreckage strewn around. Supposing, however, they couldn’t find it because it wasn’t there to be found?”

He suddenly became more focussed and Jane watched the transformation from mild interest to keen scrutiny. Roberts was nearly sixty, running a bit to fat, with an almost totally bald skull at variance with the heavy eyebrows and small moustache and beard, all of them still dark brown, that he favoured.

“What do you know, Jane?”

“I don’t know anything,” she said honestly, “I just wonder if somehow somebody might have got their hands on it. There is evidence that bits of the airplane were torn off it before it went into the loch; suppose, just suppose, the gold was part of whatever came adrift and was found, then what?”

“Jane, we’re talking about nearly a quarter of a ton of gold coins here. If they came adrift from the airplane there’s no way that they could have lain on a hillside for years..”

He stopped in mid-sentence.

“I see what you mean. If that had happened they would probably have been discovered pretty quickly. In that case – as you say, then what? Don’t forget, this was during the war. Obviously if it did happen, whoever found it didn’t tell the authorities or we would all know about it. That being the case, it would have effectively have been stolen. Now how in the name of all that’s wonderful would some kilted Rob Roy, coming across a fortune in foreign gold coins, do anything with them?

Suppose he squirreled them away, after popping backwards and forwards on that hillside with a rucksack or whatever filled with coins – perhaps thirty pounds in weight per journey? That would mean twenty or more trips – wouldn’t somebody notice?”

Jane shook her head.

50

“Not there, Mervyn, believe me; I’ve been there and it is one desolate spot and must have been even more so back then in wartime. If somebody did find the gold, provided they were careful, there would have been no problem in taking it away a bit at a time.”

Roberts chewed on his bottom lip for a moment.

“OK, so Rob Roy or whoever, now has thousands of American coins in his possession – but what can he do with them? From memory, just like here in the US, Brits weren’t allowed to hold gold in private possession back then, and anyway these were effectively stolen goods. His only really sensible course of action would have been to declare his find to the authorities and hope for a generous reward from grateful Uncle Sam. No, Jane, we know that didn’t happen, so for my money those coins are still under the water.”

This wasn’t going as Jane had hoped. Somehow she wanted to enter the idea that the coins had been found after the war, but couldn’t see a way clear to doing so without giving away more than she wanted to at this stage. She shrugged her shoulders.

“Yes, I see what you mean. I guess that you must be right. One thing, though – these are collectable coins. If someone now were to get their hands on them they could scarcely just try and sell them on E-bay – they’d be a glut on the market. How could somebody move that sort of hoard without suspicion?”

Roberts thought for a moment.

“A lot would depend on the sort of contacts our imaginary thief might have. If he’s just on his own, I suppose his best course of action would be to open a number of different E-bay accounts – perhaps five wouldn’t cause too much suspicion, although here I’m guessing, and sells a couple of coins a month on each. They’re going for a couple of grand a time on average – some for much more, of course, but let’s stick with that average – so he’d net twenty thousand a month, and he wouldn’t dare to declare it for tax, so it’s tax free. Nice going indeed for your average Joe, but I reckon that it wouldn’t be too long before his activities came to official notice – and even if they didn’t, he’s got ten thousand coins to get rid of so you’re looking at having to keep going for over eighty years to sell all of them – hardly practical.

“On the other hand, if he knows his way around, the best solution would be to sell them, at a pretty hefty discount, in India. India is awash with small and not so small dealers in gold, and selling the coins there could get him perhaps fifty per cent of their market value and no questions asked. The Indian market has been like that for decades now. Successive governments have tried to do something about it, but so far without much success – there are just too many dealers to track down more than a small proportion of the bent ones. But of course, unless he is really well connected and can get the buyers to come to him, our thief still has the problem of physically transporting the coins.”

Jane thanked Roberts for his information, promised that if anything ever did come to light about the missing gold he would be the first person, after herself, to know, and returned to her own desk.

Once there, she mulled over what she had been told. Given the existing wealth of the Hammond family back in the sixties before things turned difficult for them, they could probably have done just what Roberts had suggested – offloaded the coins at a discount in somewhere like India. But the logistics still baffled her.

Surely the Hammonds would not have wished to risk having other people involved, yet without additional assistance how could they have got the Lady Louise to Scotland? And if they hadn’t used the Lady Louise how could they have transported all that gold? Perhaps, after all, she really was barking up the wrong tree and the coins were still in Dubh Loch?

*********

Senator Graham Hammond chewed thoughtfully on the end of his fountain pen as he mulled over the unfortunate death of Harold Fowler, the young intern who had found out about the embezzlement of public funds that had been practised by his maternal grandparents. He was not long back from the young man’s funeral, where his comforting of the grieving parents had provided a useful photo opportunity. Morton Lewis had been confident that without the starting point that 51

young Fowler had been given, it was unlikely that anyone else would ever uncover the sins of Graham and Louise Harris all those years ago. Satisfied that the secret was almost certainly now confined to just Morton Lewis and himself, he returned his attention to the agenda papers for the upcoming meeting of the Finance Committee, the meeting which would confirm his succession to the chairmanship.

However, he found himself unable to concentrate. Instead, he found his mind wandering back in time to the days that he and his father had spent scouring a Scottish hillside all those years ago.

*********

I started from the western edge of Dubh Loch, near to where flight four seven three rested beneath its dark waters, and slowly worked my way up the hillside, zig-zagging back and forth so that I swept an area roughly eighty yards wide and stretching from the water’s edge to were the slope became too steep for walking, but would need climbing equipment. At the end of each leg of my search I placed a small, white painted stone to identify where I had already searched, and looking back down to the loch, it was depressing to realise just how small a portion of the hillside I had covered in an exercise that had taken most of the morning. The white stones delineated a mockingly narrow strip compared to the area still unsearched. I had told nobody what I was up to, not even Jane Cobden – no need to raise her hopes unnecessarily again – but I was determined that if anything existed on that bleak hillside which had any bearing on the mystery of the missing gold, I would find it.

My first strip search completed, I returned to the Land Rover where a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of beer awaited me, and as I slowly munched and sipped on my repast I once again went over in my mind everything I knew about the last flight of four seven three and the subsequent events connected to it. Somehow, I was convinced, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the gold was not still at the bottom of the loch. The presence of the Hammonds, father and son, for at least two years after the Gregorys had found that bit of metal needed explaining. I would not accept that they were simple tourists, a believe reinforced by the knowledge that Hammond senior had lied about being posted to Prestwick during the war. Why tell such a lie unless he wanted a credible excuse for being in the area?

I finished my meal and returned to my search; in May on Arran the daylight lasts a long time, so by the time I finally called it a day I had surveyed two more strips of hillside, and resolved to search at least at much the following day.

By the time I got home it was virtually time for bed, but before retiring for the night I composed an E-mail to Jane. A thought had struck me whilst I was sipping on a late night-cap. What had become of the Gregorys? After their discovery of that piece of metal in nineteen seventy they seemed to have vanished from the scene, although their son, who could only have been in his early twenties at the time, was now the CEO of the company his father, in conjunction with Senator Hammond’s father, had founded. In the E-mail I asked Jane if she knew what had become of the couple.

True to my intentions, the next day saw me early on the hillside and in the second tranche of the day I found what must have been the piece of metal the Gregory’s had discovered back in nineteen seventy. About five feet long and three feet wide, I was quite convinced that I was looking at another piece of the luckless flight four seven three. Like the smaller piece that I had myself discovered, it still bore traces of paint – light grey on one side, yellow-green on the other, the zinc-chromate anti-corrosion paint that the USAAF had used extensively. The metal was well away from the direct line between the ridge of Beinn Bharrain, the piece of metal that I had discovered, and Dubh Loch. Aircraft alloy is, of necessity, light in weight. This piece was large enough and light enough to have been a plaything of the many gales that had lashed Arran since nineteen forty-three, which explained why it was no longer anywhere near that direct line. At some time, however, one of those gales had blown it into a cleft in the rock, a miniature ravine, in which it was now firmly wedged probably for all time unless somebody disturbed it.

52

I did just that; I pulled it from its resting place for a closer examination, an examination which satisfied me that it was, indeed, a piece of aircraft alloy and given where it was it was almost certainly from four seven three. To have travelled, on the wings of the wind, from the line I had established from the peak of Beinn Bharrain to Dubh Loch was quite feasible; to have been blown from the other crash site on this side of the mountain was far less so. It would have had to be blown a mile or so instead of just a few hundred yards. So, I was looking at the piece of metal that the Gregorys had found forty-four years earlier, although I had no way of knowing if this was where the metal had been when they found it – it could well have been blown around numerous times in the interim before becoming wedged in this cleft.

I pushed it back into the cleft in the rock and continued my scouring of the hillside. The long twilight of evening had almost died away when I found my next discovery. It was another cleft, although a bit larger and heavily overhung by a loose rock, some hundred and fifty yards on from where I had found the Gregorys’ piece of metal. It was quite deep, perhaps seven or eight feet, but only three or four feet across and perhaps ten or so long; it was, in miniature, very like the ravine into which Alex McFee’s hapless Highland cow had fallen back in the previous November. Like that ravine, this cleft contained something that should not have there, in this case several pieced of twisted metal, none of them more than a couple of feet long. The thing was, I counted eight of them.

There was no way that even the most capricious of winds would have deposited all eight pieces in this one tiny cleft. One quite possibly. Two was very unlikely. Eight was totally impossible. Some human agency was responsible for them being here and the question was who and why?

I decided to pull them out for closer examination, but the light was now fast fading, so it would have to wait for the morrow. Reluctantly, I left my find and made my way back to the Land Rover and thence home.

When I got back there was an E-mail from Jane waiting for me. She had looked into the Gregorys and had found that they had both perished in a car smash in early nineteen seventy-three. Their car had left a minor road where it was cut into a hillside and had plunged down more than forty feet to a stream bed below. The road was infrequently used, so they had been done there for a good few hours before being discovered. As far as the accident investigators could ascertain, no other vehicle had been involved; it was a mystery why Alex Gregory had simply ploughed straight off the road.

No alcohol had been found in his blood, nor in that of his wife, and the unsatisfactory conclusion was that the crash was simply unexplained. It had happened in a scenic area well off any normal route the Gregorys might have been expected to take from their home to any logical destination, but there presence there was, again, unexplained. I went to bed wondering about a strange cache of pieces of torn metal on a Scottish hillside and a strange car crash on an American road.

**********

It was Saturday, and with no pressing stories on her plate, Jane decided to satisfy an element of idle curiosity and drive south to where the Lady Louise was berthed in a private marina a little upstream on the Potomac river from the bustling area of Newport News.

She parked her car a short distance from the marina itself and strolled along the quayside until she found herself within thirty yards or so of the first of the various moored vessels. There was no mistaking the Hammond vessel. It – no, she corrected herself, boats and ships were always ‘she’ –

she was the largest vessel there, perhaps nearly half as long again as the next biggest. She stood studying it for a while. Whilst bigger than she had expected, was it really big enough to have been sailed right across the Atlantic to Britain?

As she stood there, she was aware of somebody nearby and turning round she found herself facing a small, wizened man who could have been any age from fifty to ninety. Heavily tanned features, the face heavily lined, his head virtually bald, he had, she told herself, a head for all the world like an over-sized walnut. Wearing faded blue jeans, canvas deck shoes, and, despite the warmth of the day, a heavy dark blue sweater which had clearly seen better days and many of them, he looked the typical ancient mariner.

She smiled at him and was treated to a dazzling beam in return.

“Interested in the Lady Louise then, miss?”

53

His voice sounded of a piece with his appearance, low and aged.

“I was just wondering why she is so much bigger than anything else here.”

“Ah, that’s because she’s been berthed here since long before any of the others. Used to be that she was the only vessel here years ago – then the marina was built and she just stayed in the same area.

Been here since I was just a lad working with my dad.”

“She looks very expensive.”

“Oh, don’t know what she cost back then, but to buy one like her today you’d be looking at four or five million dollars. Still, she belongs to that Senator – Hammond his name is – and to his father before him, so I reckon that they’ve got their money’s worth over the years.”

“Do they use it a lot, then?”

“Oh, the Senator takes her out perhaps one weekend a month in the spring through to fall – but his father’s long gone, of course.”

“Could you go far in a boat like that?”

“She’s been across to Europe in her time.”

“Really? She’s big against the other boats here, but she looks a bit small to cross the Atlantic.”

“Oh, smaller boats than her have done it, many times. Mind, she hasn’t gone far out to sea for years

– nowadays the Senator just seems to use her for sailing around the coast with a few friends. Shame really – she’s better than that.”

“Have you ever been aboard her?”

“Oh yes, back in the old man’s day I crewed for him a few times, but only fairly local trips – didn’t want to be away from my wife and kids for too long, and as the young man – wasn’t a Senator back then, of course, became more and more the boss I didn’t want to be on the boat – he was a right pain in the ass even then and from I here he hasn’t improved with age. Hardly anyone local crewed for the Hammonds more than once or twice back then. Graham Hammond – that’s the Senator as is now - was too much of a pain to crew for. Never happy, never satisfied, or so I heard.”

“Seems a pity.”

“Well, nobody local had to put up with him, of course – there was plenty others wanting crews without having to put up with young Hammond. Things are different now, though – nothing like as much local work, whether on the boats or off them. Men are willing to work for Hammond no matter what, for at least he pays well. Mind you, that’s had a bit of a reputation as an unlucky boat with some folk – some I know wouldn’t take money to step aboard her, never mind crewing her.”

“Oh, why’s that?”

“Goes back to the early seventies. This was when the younger Hammond was still very much a young man and his old man was very much the boss. He sailed her to Europe in seventy-one and seventy-two. Each time he took three men to crew her along with himself and his son – for whatever else you say about either of the Hammonds, they were both good sailors, not just like some who sit back and leave it all to the crew. Anyway, the three who crewed were the same for both trips – and all three were dear within a twelve month of the second trip.”

“What happened?”

“Well, the three of them were two brothers – the Palin boys, Harry and Lou, Harry being the older at twenty-seven or eight or so, Lou two years younger, and their cousin, Billy Jarvis. After the first trip they were pretty flush – the Hammond’s had apparently paid well because of the length of time the trip would take – a bit over three weeks in all – so they were only too happy to sign on again the following year. Something must have happened on that trip because when they got back they were clearly upset about something, but wouldn’t talk about it, other than saying they’d never crew for the Hammonds again. Nor did they. Just a couple of months later, Billy – he was the youngest of the three, just twenty-three – was killed when he crashed his motor cycle. Happened on a deserted road, nobody else involved, nobody saw what happened, but it was odd – Billy was a good rider, and not a bit reckless, unlike so many young bikers. Then, would you believe, Harry and Lou were killed in another road accident just a couple of months later. This time they were in Harry’s auto and they were hit by a truck on one of the back roads. This time it was seen – the truck was going too fast around a bend, strayed over to the wrong side and went straight into them. The truck driver didn’t 54

stop – just drove off. The truck was found burnt out the next day – it had been stolen which explains why the driver kept on going.”

“But that’s awful – it’s almost as though the trips were fated. Isn’t it? You can understand some people not wanted to sail on her.”

The little man snorted derisively.

“That’s rubbish – ain’t no such thing as hauntings or the like. The boys were unlucky, like enough, but that’s all – nothing to do with the Lady Louise, or sailing on her. Lots of people get killed on the roads every year never heard of the board, the Hammonds, or nothing.”

He looked at his watch.

“Sorry – go to be of. The wife will have dinner going cold of I don’t hurry. Nice talking to you, miss.”

“And to you – and thanks for all that – it was really interesting. Oh, but I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s John, John Gates, but no relation of Bill, worse luck.”

Jane smiled.

“It would be nice, wouldn’t it – I’m Jane, Jane Cobden.”

She stretched out her hand and Gates shook it warmly, then made his way back along the quayside.

As she watched him leave, Jane’s mind was in a whirl. It came to her mind a phrase that the author Ian Fleming had a character utter in one of the James Bond books; ‘once can be happenstance, twice may be coincidence, but three times is enemy action.’

Well, there had been three happenings; three road traffic accidents which had left five people dead.

Nothing out of the ordinary there; thousands of Americans died on the roads every year, but these three had a strong connection with the Hammonds and therefore with flight four seven three and had all happened in the space of just a few months. That, surely, could not be happenstance, nor coincidence – it reeked of enemy action, and the only possible enemy to those people back in the seventies was surely the Hammonds, father and son.

So what had happened? It surely meant that somehow the Hammonds had found the gold and appropriated it. She was sure that it hadn’t been found by the Gregorys when they had visited Arran in nineteen seventy. If they had discovered it they would surely either have notified the authorities of their find at the time – which had not happened – or, if they felt it was a case of ‘finders, keepers’, they would never have mentioned finding that piece of airplane and thus draw attention to both themselves and the hillside and its secrets.

She thought it through further. Alex Gregory and Hammond senior were work colleagues and had known each other for years. There was no reason why Gregory should have known about flight four seven three, and even if he knew of the airplane’s disappearance, no reason for him to know of the gold that it had been carrying. Equally, there was no reason why he should have mentioned to Hammond what he and his wife had found on Arran.

On the other hand, there was every reason why Hammond would have known about the gold from his father-in-law, Graham Harris, who had been involved in the very fact of the gold being on the airplane in the first place. Every reason why, hearing what the Gregorys had found, for Hammond to wonder if it might be possible that the gold was somewhere on that Scottish hillside, and for the lure of so much gold to decide him to try and find it, and find it, Jane was now quite sure, he had.

But why had he gone to Arran twice, or, she corrected herself, at least twice? She didn’t know if the Hammonds had made further visits to the island after nineteen seventy-two and doubted if anyone else now living did, either. The only person left alive who would know was the Senator himself, and she could hardly ask him.

The whole affair was beginning to assume evil overtones. Her hypothesis was that the Hammonds had discovered the gold and, with the aid of their crew members, the luckless Harry and Lou Palin and Billy Jarvis, had taken it away on board the Lady Louise. But then what? And, again, why two trips with Jarvis and the Palins?

She cast her mind back to what she had learned from David Craig and Douglas McFee when she had been on Arran herself. The Hammonds had asked McFee where the metal found by the Gregorys might be. In the process, Hammond senior had lied, saying that he had been based at 55

Prestwick during the war years and was just visiting his old haunts out of nostalgia. There had been no mention of anyone other than the father and son being there with them, yet the three young American crew members must have been somewhere. Had they stayed on the boat? Had they, by then, already tried to find the piece of metal and failed? The Hammonds, she now remembered, had stayed at an hotel, not on board the boat itself.

She returned to her main theme. The gold had been found and taken away by the Hammonds and their crew. Once back in the States, by early nineteen seventy-three the Hammonds had decided to silence all those who could, either directly or indirectly, connect them to the theft –and had arranged those ‘accidents’ to ensure that silence.

So now what? She was on the cusp of a really, really big story – a US Senator involved in murder and the stealing of a fortune in gold, but how to prove it? Apart from Senator Hammond himself, anybody who knew about what had happened back then was safely dead.

She was still puzzling over what, if anything, it would be possible to do to progress the story when she got home.

*******

The next morning I returned to where I had found the pieces of twisted metal which had been, I was totally convinced, torn form the underside of flight four seven three by the cruel rim of Beinn Bharrain. Working slowly and carefully I brought each piece out of its resting place and laid them on the ground. Then I realised that there was something non-metallic still in the cleft.

I managed to reach down into the depths of the cleft and dragged out a piece of rotting canvas which looked as though it had once been a bag of some sort. It had been beneath the pieces of metal so had either been there before them, or had been the first item dumped in the cleft before the scraps of alloy. There was no indication of what it might once have been in it, and it started to fall apart in my hands; I had some clear plastic bags with me and I hurriedly thrust the remnants into one of them before the canvas completely turned to dust and blew away in the light breeze that was playing across the hill side. Underneath it I found a small, heavily corroded, brass padlock which might, or might not, have been some sort of closure for a canvas bag. Was I looking at the remnants of how some, at least, of the gold might have been packed all those years ago? I placed it in another of my clear plastic bags.

I put the bits of alloy back into the cleft in the rock – no point it leaving them out of it to be strewn around the hillside by the next gale to come along – and returned home to compose an E-mail to Jane informing her of my discovery.

It was three days before I received a reply from her, which was a bit of a surprise until I read the content of her message:-

‘I have been trying to discover how the coins might have been packed back in nineteen forty-three.

This long after the event nobody can be sure, but at last I managed to track down a guy who retired from the New York depository fifteen years ago, having started work there in nineteen fifty-four. At that time the most usual way of moving coinage – not that it happened very often other than for low denomination coins – was to make a paper encased roll of ten coins and load a hundred such rolls into a stout canvas bag which was closed by a small padlock. If that was what was done to ‘our’

coins then there would have been ten such bags and the bags themselves would then have gone into a container of some sort, but no idea what. Could have been a metal case, could have been a wooden packing case – who knows? I would, however, guess that it would have been something substantial, not another bag or the like, in view of the overall weight which would have needed to be moved by a fork-lift or the like, unless it was in a much larger case than actually needed so that several men could handle it together.’

She went on to say that she had learned some more about the mystery but that she was unwilling to commit what she had learned to an E-mail and that I should look out for the postman.

It took another couple of days for the promised letter to arrive and what I read in it made my blood run cold. I immediately felt that her analysis was correct; that back in the nineteen seventies Senator (as he now was) Hammond and his father had been responsible for five murders, presumably to keep their theft of the gold a secret from the rest of the world. So now what? As a reporter, she 56

obviously felt that she was on the brink of a real scoop, something that would almost rival Watergate as a coup for her paper – but how to prove any of it? This long after the event the Senator must see himself as fireproof – and that was my feeling as well. Only in the extremely unlikely occurrence of him actually confessing to what had happened could anything be proved over the murders, but was there a chance, no matter how remote, of tying him into the theft of the money?

Again, it seemed unlikely in the extreme. I went to bed that night with my mind in a state of turmoil.

**********

Jane looked through her contact list – an invaluable computer spreadsheet of hundreds of names of people that she had met over the years arranged so that it could be searched by any number of different parameters – name, age, profession, when and where met, and so on – until she found the details of the person that she wanted to contact.

Helen Forrester and Jane had been at university together and at the time they had been quite good friends. Over time, however, they had lost touch, and it was now several years since they had last met. That was about to change. She looked at her watch. Seven thirty; surely even a Detective Lieutenant in Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department would be home by now? She dialled the number. Her supposition was correct; the phone was answered almost at once.

“Hello?” A cautious answer, neutral in tone.

“Helen, it’s Jane Cobden.”

“Jane? How are you?”

“I’m fine thanks. Helen, I wonder if we could meet up soon? I’m after a story which might touch on a politician – no names at this stage – but I’d like to run what I know past you and hear if you think that I’m just wasting my time. Also, it’ll be a chance to catch up on things – must be over two years since we got together.”

“You don’t want a departmental source do you, Jane?”

“No, not at all – this doesn’t touch upon the MPD at all. Any crimes that may have been committed are well out of Washington. I just want your views on what I have.”

What Jane had just said was, strictly speaking, accurate. The Gregorys had just been over the border between Washington, DC, and Maryland when they had died in the auto crash; the three one-time crew members of the Lady Louise had died in Virginia, and the theft of the gold, of course, hadn’t even taken place in the USA.

“OK – look, I’m on a late shift tonight, in fact I was just about to leave when you phoned, but tomorrow evening should be OK. Do you remember Hammond’s Bar?”

There was a coincidence, thought Jane –her next step against Graham Hammond would, hopefully, start to take shape in a bar bearing his name although, as far as she was aware, it really was just a coincidence.

“Yes, of course – what time?”

“Eight OK with you?”

“That would be fine – see you then.”

“OK, Jane, now I really must rush.”

Just over twenty-four hours later the two girls were sat facing each other in a booth in Hammond’s bar. It was a place that they had met in from time to time a few years earlier until pressures of work for both of them had seen them drift apart. Jane looked at her friend; a policewoman for seven year or so now, newly promoted to Detective Lieutenant, although still attractive, Helen looked a bit older than her years and somehow there was a hard edge to her appearance that hadn’t been there when they had last met. Her eyes, always a bit deep-set, now had fine lines radiating from them, lines that looked as though they owed more to worry than to laughter. Her auburn hair was cut much shorter than Jane remembered and her the features of her oval face appraised the world warily. Given the visual changes in Helen, Jane wondered uneasily how she herself looked to her friend. Was the passage of time equally obvious?

57

They spent perhaps ten minutes, perhaps a little more playing catch-up on their respective lives, then Helen, always the less patient of the pair of them, demanded to know what it was that Jane really wanted to talk about. Jane took a deep breath and fixed her gaze on her friend’s face.

“It all began back in November nineteen forty-three when a USAAF bomber carrying a fortune in gold crashed in Scotland.”

As she recounted the full tale, and her suspicions of what had happened over the years, she watched Helen Forrester become more and more intent on what she was being told. She deliberately left the name of the Senator to the very end, a revelation which caused Helen to exhibit, for the first time, surprise.

“Senator Hammond from Maryland? The guy who is now chairman of the Finance Committee?”

“The very same.”

Helen shook her head slowly, but in wonderment, not negation.

“Hammond? Just a minute.”

She sat back in the booth’s upholstered bench seat, her brow furrowed in concentration.

“Got it. Back in December a member of his staff, an intern named Fowler, was mugged and murdered. I wasn’t involved in the case – it was another team that investigated it – but nothing was ever found and it was just another mugging as far as anyone could see.” Her voice tailed off and the two girls looked at each other. Jane was the first to speak.

“More coincidence?”

“Well, it’s over forty years since the deaths that your are trying to tie into Hammond and his father.

Surely it must just be a coincidence – but I don’t much care for coincidences, even old ones. But then, if it isn’t a coincidence – why?”

Jane shrugged her shoulders. She hadn’t heard of Fowler’s death at the time; sadly muggings that ended as murders were all too common on the streets of the nation’s capital.

“I suppose that it is just possible that he found out something?”

“After all this time? No, much as I hate to say it, it must surely be a coincidence. Anyway, what now? Your story hangs together, but there isn’t a shred of evidence to support it and apart from the Senator himself anyone who might know anything about it is long since dead and buried. I can’t see how you can run a story on what you’ve got, Jane, and if you tried to, the Senator’s lawyers would be down on you and the paper like a ton of bricks.”

Jane sadly agreed with Helen’s summation of the situation.

“It’s maddening to think that one of the most powerful figures in government is a thief and either a murderer or someone who arranged murders.”

“Better not say that anywhere in public, Jane. One thing I will do – I’ll have a quiet look at the file on the Fowler killing, although to be honest, I doubt that I’ll find anything useful. There is one other thing of course - ”

And that was where they left it.

********

Amos Keller reviewed the information that he had gathered on Jane Cobden. It was Keller who had broken into her apartment back in November and unwittingly left traces of his presence, traces which Jane had discovered. All he had taken away was photos of the papers she had obtained regarding flight four seven three; given the presence of an intruder, and lack of any theft, Jane had immediately assumed that whoever had broken in knew what information those papers contained.

Whilst Keller had not physically removed anything from Jane’s apartment, he had left something, something of which Jane was totally unaware.

Before the break-in Keller had used his smart phone to identify the Wi-Fi connections present in the apartment block and had identified the one belonging to Jane. He had then obtained a highly sophisticated, and very small, electronic ‘bug’ which had a dual purpose. It had broadcast the content of every telephone call that Jane had subsequently made to a base station that Keller had set up in a one room apartment nearby where the call had been automatically recorded for later study.

Additionally, every E-mail that Jane had made or received had similarly been transferred to an anonymous E-mail account Keller had set up. At the time he had toyed with the idea of planting via 58

the Internet, a virus on her computer so that he could, from his remote location, go through everything on her hard drive. In the end he had decided against it; anti-virus software was growing more sophisticated and more competent almost by the week and had the virus been discovered subsequently it would have raised suspicions in Jane’s mind and probably lead her to conclude that her electronic communications were compromised.

Keller did not regard Jane as a priority target. He therefore only reviewed her telephone and computer traffic once a week, so it was several days after Jane and Helen Forrester had met before he knew about their meeting. He had no idea what had been spoken about, but by using a search of

‘Helen Forrester’ in a number of databases to which he had no legal right of access, he had made the connection that Helen was a detective with Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department. That possibly put a new complexion upon matters. Was the reporter looking to get official help in investigating the fate of flight four seven three and its cargo? If so, would it be forthcoming? Was it significant that she had met the cop in a bar, not at the police station? Above all, was this something that he should pass on to his principal, or would it be better to keep it to himself for the time being and await developments, if any? On balance, he decided to pass the knowledge on, and did so the next day. True to his own principles of care over electronic communications, the report was typed on a computer which was not connected to the Internet and saved not to its hard drive but to a memory stick which then went under lock and key. Relying on the mailman was much slower than communicating electronically, but much more secure. The report itself was couched in terms that would be meaningless to anyone other than its intended recipient and above all did not identify Keller himself as its author. When he had accepted the assignment to keep tabs on Jane Cobden, he had established a simple code for his principal to use and also a method of replying which entailed using a post office box situated well away from Keller’s actual residence. Keller visited the box once a day to check for mail – Jane Cobden was not his only assignment - and the third day after sending in his report he received a response.

Chapter Nine – June 2014

It had been a long, hard day chasing up contacts regarding a possible corruption case involving a Congressman from Wyoming and a building contractor based right here in Washington, DC, and as she unlocked her door and walked into her apartment, Jane had nothing more on her mind than a long soak in the tub and a glass of cold Chardonnay.

It therefore took her a long, slow moment to realise that the apartment was already occupied. Two men were inside; one stood in front of her, the other emerged from behind the opened door and slammed it closed.

She opened her mouth to scream, but before she could utter a sound the man behind grabbed her round the waist with his left arm and clamped his right hand over her mouth, effectively gagging her.

The man in front her was tall, well over six feet, slimly built and dressed entirely in black. Black shoes, black trousers, black sweater, black leather gloves and a black woollen ski mask hiding all of his face except for his eyes, glittering eyes almost as dark as his clothing and which were staring fixedly at her. He extended his right arm, in the fist of which he held an unusual looking pistol, and as Jane stared at him in horror she clearly saw his finger tighten on the trigger and felt a blow, much like a heavy punch, immediately below her left breast. She looked down in puzzlement, to see a small dart protruding from her clothing; from the sharp pain which accompanied her next breath, the dart was obviously embedded in her flesh. She looked back up at her assailant, and as she did so she realised that his figure was becoming blurred and the room around them seemed to be swaying and pitching like a small boat on a rough sea. Her vision began to fade; her knees buckled, no longer able to support her weight, and had it not been for the man behind her retaining his firm hold of her, she would have slumped to the floor.

Jane had no idea how long had passed before she woke. She felt awful; nauseous and with a splitting headache. Trying to move ratcheted up the pain from the headache to an unbearable level 59

so she sank back into a state of semi-sleep. She woke again several times; each time the pain from the headache was a little less awful, but still bad enough to make her return to her state of near sleep.

At last, however, she woke with the headache no more than a dull throb behind the temples and with the nausea having disappeared. For the first time she was able to take in her surroundings. She was lying on a bed, on top of the covers, still dressed as she had been when she had been abducted.

There was a low power bedside lamp dimly illuminating the room, which was, to all intents and purposes, furnished as a very ordinary bedroom. There were two doors in the far wall and she carefully swung her legs over the side of the bed and attempted to stand. Not a good idea. The headache promptly took a remote second place to a renewed attack of nausea, which threatened to overwhelm her, and she sank back onto the bed.

More time passed; after several abortive attempts, each, however, a little less awful than the one before, she was at last able to get to her feet and stagger to the opposite wall. The first door she tried proved to be securely locked. The second, however, opened without difficulty and gave access to an en-suite bathroom. As she surveyed the facilities, she realised that she was in urgent need of using them, and once she had relieved herself she immediately felt far better.

In her improved state, she was able to take in her surroundings more fully. The room was, indeed, a very ordinary bedroom apart from two abnormalities – the locked door and the fact that when she pulled back the window drapes she had found that the window had been blocked out by having a sheet of plywood firmly screwed to its frame.

There was a small dressing table in one corner of the room with a small armless easy chair in front of it. She sat down on the chair and examined herself in the mirror. She had, she had to admit to herself, seen herself in far better reflections. The face that looked back at her was – there was no kinder word to describe it – positively gaunt. The dressing table was of the kneehole type with two small drawers either side. She opened all four drawers; all four were completely empty. She wondered how long it had been since she had been abducted, and as she did so, she realised that she was ravenously hungry, a hunger that up to now had been masked by her other problems.

It was almost as though her thoughts had been read. She heard a key turn in the lock of the locked door, and as she swung round on the chair, the door opened and two men entered. They were dressed as had been her abductors; black clothing from head to foot, including the facially obscuring ski masks. Neither of them was tall enough to have been the man who had fired the anaesthetic dart into her body, but that apart she had no visual clue as to their identity. In size and general build they were of a kind. Both perhaps five feet eight or nine, both in the one hundred and seventy or eighty pound range. The overwhelmingly good news was that one of them was carrying a small tray, on which reposed a plate of sandwiches and a plastic beaker of water.

Jane made it all the way to her feet as the pair advanced towards her.

“What’s going on?” she demanded, “why am I here?”

Neither of the men replied. Instead, the one carrying the tray placed it on the bed and they both turned round to leave.

“Answer me,” she demanded, “what’s going on?”

The nearer of the two men turned back, took two paces towards her and slapped her across the face.

It wasn’t a particularly hard blow, but the point had been made, and it was reinforced when he put his index finger to his lips and shook his head from side to side. No talking.

Jane took the plate of sandwiches and the beaker of water over to the dressing table, sat down and commenced eating and drinking whilst she reviewed her situation. It was not good. Nobody knew that she had been kidnapped; as she had no idea how long she had been unconscious she didn’t know if anyone at the paper had missed her yet. She had been taken on Friday evening and had been due to have the weekend off. Unless it was now sometime on Monday, nobody would have missed her at all yet.

She had no doubt that her abduction was connected to her investigation into Senator Hammond, no doubt at all. Presumably the idea was to stop her investigating the man, but in that case why was she still alive? Others who had posed a threat had, she was positive, been done away with and following her meeting with Helen Forrester she believed those done away with included the Senator’s young 60

intern, Harold Fowler – so why had she been spared? The fact that she had seen none of the faces of the men involved and had no way of identifying any of them was encouraging. It implied that she might survive all this.

Without a clock in the room, and without her watch which had been removed from her wrist, she had no idea how long had passed before the door opened once more. Perhaps an hour, perhaps more?

Once again a man dressed in black entered, followed by another. This time, however, she had no doubt that the first man was the man who had shot her with the tranquilising dart. He was the right height and the eyes were the same, dark and intense.

He pointed at the chair, from which she had risen as the door had been opened.

“Sit down, Jane.”

They were, she realised, the first words she had heard spoken since entering her apartment on Friday evening. The voice was low, but not gravelly, the accent unremarkable. He might not even be American from his intonation. She obeyed the command and as she did so the second man circled behind her and pulled her arms behind the back of the chair. She felt her wrists being secured by something narrow and hard, perhaps a cable tie or the like.

It was a fairly small room and when the tall man sat down on the bed and faced her, they were no more than four feet or so apart.

The man leant forward slightly, his hands on his knees.

“Now, Jane, let me tell you what is going to happen. I am going to ask you some questions and you are going to give me truthful answers. I already know some of the answers – those questions will be a test of your truthfulness. If I find that you have lied to me, even over something trivial, I will make you sorry.”

He sat back and, using his right hand, reached inside his left sleeve, from which he drew a knife, a knife which presumably had been kept in some sort of sheath under the sleeve of the sweater. She gazed at the knife in sick fascination. It had a plain dark wood handle; the blade was about seven inches long, tapering from about three quarters of an inch wide at the hilt to a needle like point.

“You see this, Jane?” the question was superfluous – she couldn’t take her eyes off it. “This is a stiletto, a genuine stiletto from the old country and it has been in my family for generations. My ancestors found it very useful as a means of persuasion or elimination, and I find it just as useful.

Now, if you lie to me, I will use the stiletto to scar you for life; if I get really annoyed with you I might even use it to blind you, so think very carefully before you answer my questions.”

Jane was terrified; her initial fear at her situation had been escalated to pure terror. She nodded her head dumbly, waiting to hear what her tormentor had to ask. The man was clearly satisfied that Jane appreciated her helplessness and tossed the knife onto the bed beside him and leant forward again.

“Now, Jane, I want you to tell me everything that you have discovered about your investigations into the affairs of Senator Hammond.”

Jane needed no second bidding; she told everything that she had discovered, although not everything that she suspected. She held back on the fact that she knew about the death of Harold Fowler. She had written nothing about the incident and had only known about it from talking to Helen.

When she finally finished, the man leant back and nodded his head slowly.

“Right, Jane, what you have said bears the ring of truth and corresponds to what I already know.

Now, your friend the detective – is she going to take any action over this?”

“I don’t think so – she said that we have no proof of anything and she couldn’t see any way of getting any.”

He nodded again.

“And this Brit – this David Craig – what about him?”

“Well, he was interested in the crash and finding the airplane. I wrote and told him of my suspicions, but I can’t see that he would be interested in doing anything about them – why would he want to?” She couldn’t deny having written to Craig; these people must have her computer and the letter was there on the hard drive for all to see.

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“Right, Jane. Now I am going to let you go. You will take no further interest in the Senator and if anyone already in the know asks why, you say you can’t prove anything and to proceed without proof would see you ending up being sued and ruined, both financially and professionally. Is that clear? Oh, and of course, you won’t tell anyone about your little stay with us – that needs to be clear as well.”

Jane swallowed nervously.

“I won’t say anything to anybody.”

“Very wise of you. And don’t forget, if you should try and go back on what we have just agreed, I will hear about it – and I won’t be anything like as forbearing when we next meet. Indeed, if we do have to meet again, I’m afraid that it will be a meeting which you will not survive.”

All this was delivered in so matter of fact a tone that it was far more frightening than had the man ranted and raved at her. Jane had absolutely no doubt that he meant every word that he had said.

He picked up the knife from the bed and replaced it in his sleeve, then got up and turned away from her, took a couple of paces towards the door, but then turned back again. The strange pistol was now in his grasp, and before Jane had a chance to react, he once more fired a dart into her body and she once again experienced the wavering sensations before unconsciousness overtook her.

The tall man turned to his companion.

“Right, undo her hands and put her back in her apartment.”

The secnd man removed his ski mask and frowned at Jane’s unconscious body.

“Why don’t we just finish her? Getting her back there is risky – suppose somebody sees us?”

The tall man had also removed his ski mask and stared down his shorter companion.

“It will be your job to make sure that you aren’t seen. I don’t care how you do it, just do it – and make sure that she is unharmed or you will find out just how well I can use my stiletto.”

His words had the desired effect; his companion’s half formed plan to dump Jane, safely dead, somewhere far from likely discovery, were still-born.

The tall man’s name was Ercole Bettini. Unlike many Americans with an Italian background his grandfather, also christened Ercole, had refused to Anglicize the family name. Bettini, the old man had insisted, had been a proud name in Sicily, one that demanded and received respect, and he saw no reason for things to be any different in America. The present Ercole, now forty-seven years old, admired the old man’s resolve and had no intention of betraying it. Like his companion – a man with whom he had never worked before – he was puzzled at the kid gloves being used in treating the Cobden woman, but Amos Keller’s instructions had been very specific. She was to be kept alive but scared to the extent that she would no longer be a problem. He felt confident that he had achieved that beyond question, but killing her would still have been his own preferred option. Still, he had been well paid and, having undertaken various profitable tasks for Keller in the past, he had no wish to dry up the likelihood of future income.

*********

Jane stirred uneasily and opened her eyes reluctantly to experience, once again, the headache and nausea she had suffered in the strange room. This time, when she at last felt well enough to take in her surroundings, she realised that she was back in her own apartment.

She finally rose on still wobbly legs and treated herself to a long soak in the bath as her system slowly returned to normal.

It was, she realised, the early hours of the morning, and a little more investigation revealed that it was Monday morning, so her entire abduction and its terrifying nature, had been accomplished within the weekend.

She didn’t feel like eating, but she had a raging thirst which took a couple of large glasses of water and then a couple of cups of coffee to satisfy. Whilst she was slaking her thirst she looked around the apartment. As far as she could make out, nothing had been removed permanently. Her computer was in its normal place, but she was sure that it would have been taken away when she was abducted – the information on it would have been very helpful to her inquisitor to determine not only what she knew, but also in enabling him to check on the truthfulness of some of her replies to his questions.

62

She viewed the machine suspiciously. There was no knowing what virus might have been implanted in it by her captors to perhaps enable them to identify anything new that she might use it for and she determined to replace it at the earliest opportunity.

As the time at which she would normally leave for work approached, she decided that she still felt too wobbly to go in; accordingly, she phoned up and cried off for the day, citing a violent upset caused, she assumed, by something that she had eaten the previous night.

She gave more thought to the possibility that her computer might now be compromised. How, she wondered, had her captors known that she had met with Helen Forrester? It had been arranged over the telephone; was it possible that her phone had been bugged? She went to her contact list and checked the number she wanted, but decided that the only safe way to make the call needed was to use a public phone; she had decided that until and unless proved to the contrary, both her land line and her mobile phone must be suspect.

Accordingly, an hour so so later she was having a mid-morning coffee and a Danish in a small diner about a mile from her apartment. Once she had finished her modest repast she used the diner’s pay phone to contact the man she needed to talk to. He was in and invited her round straight away.

Jamie Gooch was nobody’s idea of a typical computer geek. Six feet two and well built, his chiselled features, blue eyes and fair hair inevitably reminded Jane of the young Charlton Heston.

Why someone with Jamie’s looks spent over ninety percent of his time in his computer workshop when the world was full of impressionable young women was beyond her, but that was the way of it.

Without going into too much detail, she explained she was concerned that her apartment and her computer might be compromised. Jamie listened to her in silence, only an occasional blink of the eyelids betraying the fact that he was actually paying close attention.

When she finished he nodded once, got to his feet and simply said “Let’s go.”

Less than thirty minutes later they were in her apartment. On the way, Jamie had impressed upon her to say nothing once they were indoors as, if indeed her place was bugged, there was no telling what the bug might be picking up.

He had brought with him a medium sized suitcase which, when opened, revealed a bewildering area of electronic gadgetry, none of which meant anything at all to Jane, and she watched in silence as he went round the entire apartment, juts about inch by inch. At last he nodded to her and indicated the door. They left, took the elevator down to the lobby where there were a couple of bench seats and seated themselves.

“Right,” he said. “Yes, your place is bugged and it is a pretty sophisticated device at that. It’s located under your desk. It has what we call an induction loop round your telephone lead so that anything that comes through that lead is captured and retransmitted to a listening post. That means that any conversation on your landline is being overheard. It also means that any E-mail computer traffic is similarly being eavesdropped on. Finally, it is also picking up any mobile phone signals in the apartment. Everything it is picking up is being transmitted to somewhere. Given the bug’s small size, that somewhere can’t be very far away, probably no more than a couple of hundred yards.

Now, that means that whoever is bugging you has two choices. They can either be at the listening post all the time, with back-up recorders – which is how the police or the government would do it, using a team of people all round the clock – or, if it is someone outside officialdom it is much more likely that they will set up a recording facility and come to the listening post from time to time to review what has been captured.”

“So what do I do?”

“You have two choices. Either disable the bug – in which case whoever put it there will know that you have found it – or leave it in place and be very careful about what you say over the phones and commit to E-mail. Its range is limited – go a couple of flight up or down from your own apartment and you’ll be able to use your mobile without fear. E-mail is another matter – they can actually get into your E-mail account, so even if you use another computer they will still know what you are sending and receiving.”

“How long will all this go on for?”

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“One piece of good news – as I said, the device is tiny. It’s using a lithium battery and whoever planted it actually rigged up a charging circuit piggy-backing onto your computers charger. Left alone, that means the device would work indefinitely, but there is a way round that, but if you unplug the charger and rely only on your computer’s battery the bug’s battery will go flat in a couple of days. Once its battery is flat it’s useless.”

“But won’t that warn whoever planted it?”

“There’s a way round that. Unplug the charger, send an E-mail to someone, doesn’t matter who, and in it say that you’ll have to sign off because your computer’s charger seems to be playing up. Leave it for twenty-four hours or so and send a chatty E-mail to someone and halfway through make the same sort of comment. Then buy yourself a new charger for your computer and dump the old one in the trash.”

Had Jane but known it, events elsewhere would shortly make her precautions over the electronic bug entirely unnecessary.

*********

Amos Keller was a worried man. Ercole Bettini had carried out the abduction and terrifying of the Cobden women with his usual ruthless efficiency, but Bettini himself was becoming a possible threat. The man was the only link between Keller and several operations that he had commissioned at the behest of a number of important people, some of them who acted mostly legally, some who most decidedly did not.

No, Keller decided regretfully, Bettini had reached the end of his usefulness to him. He would have to be terminated – and the termination would have to be carried out by Keller himself. He couldn’t risk having a middleman involved, a middleman who would then have a potential hold over him.

He mentally reviewed ways and means for some time before deciding upon his plan of action.

********

Ercole Bettini was in the habit of eating out every Friday evening. ‘Il Siciliano’ was a small restaurant run by a distant cousin who, like Bettini himself, was a member of a family which had emigrated from Sicily to the United States shortly after World War Two. The two men were of an age and had a number of mutual friends and relatives, and quite often Bettini met someone he knew at the restaurant. As it happened, this particular Friday evening he dined alone, not that it made any difference.

Bettini chatted for a few minutes with Guido Castelgianni, the proprietor, paid his bill, and left. As he walked from the restaurant’s door towards his car, three pistol shots were fired from a parked car on the opposite of the road, a car which then immediately accelerated away. Castelgianni and several diners rushed out to the stricken man and an ambulance was immediately called, but it was all to no avail. Bettini was declared dead from gunshot wounds on arrival at the hospital.

*******

Bettini’s funeral was well attended by friends and many family members, both close relatives and distant kin. The police had, of course, investigated the shooting, but there were no witnesses, no forensic evidence, nothing to help them in their enquiries. Additionally, although he had no criminal record, Bettini had long been suspected of being an enforcer for hire, and the official assumption, although never publicly stated, was that one of his assignments was somehow the reason for his murder. Perhaps it was a revenge attack, perhaps it was to silence him over something that someone wanted to stay under wraps. Whatever, no police officer lost any sleep over the passing of Ercole Bettini.

The same was not true of his family. His wife, Maria, had a dilemma to resolve. Nearly a year before Ercole had entrusted to her a sealed envelope which, he had impressed upon her, was to be given to their eldest son, Luigi, should he himself die under suspicious circumstances or disappear.

She had always closed her eyes as to just how her late husband had been able to provide so well for herself and the children with no regular job of any sort. In her heart, she knew that he earned his money illegally, but she had no wish to know exactly how. Now Ercole had been murdered and she 64

was, she decided, honour bound to respect his wishes; she gave Luigi the envelope the day after the funeral.

Luigi Bettini bore no physical resemblance to his late father. Ercole had been tall and relatively slim and quite fair skinned. Twenty-five year old Luigi was short, just five feet eight, heavily built and with a swarthy complexion. The older family members said that was the very image of his great-grandfather, that other Ercole who had brought the family to America in nineteen forty-seven when a vendetta in their native Sicily was threatening to spiral out of control. Faced with superior forces, old Ercole had decided to carve out a new living in the New World for himself and his family.

Be that as it may, old habits ran deep in Luigi. His father had been murdered, gunned down without a chance to defend himself, and somebody had to pay. After reading his father’s last letter to him, Luigi knew exactly who it was who had to pay for his father’s death.

Amos Keller was a careful man. Given his chosen profession, carefulness to the point of paranoia was a wise precaution. He was therefore highly suspicious when he saw the same car parked opposite his house for three successive evenings when he arrived home. His office was in central Washington, and it was from that office that all his business transactions were conducted, but he actually lived in a house on Thirtieth Street North West, near the expensive Parrott’s Wood area. A strange car parked in the road stuck out like a sore thumb. He decided that the vehicle needed investigating, but not by him. Instead he phoned the local police station and quarter of an hour later a patrol car appeared. Two uniformed officers got out and cautiously approached the parked vehicle, only to find it empty, despite Keller’s claim that it had contained at least one, possible two, men acting suspiciously. The called in the licence plate number and were told that the car had been reported stolen three days earlier. Mildly irritated at the waste of their time, the two officers called on Keller and appraised him of the empty state of the car, and that it had been reported stolen, before making their way back to the station to fill in the inevitable report.

Keller relaxed. He had no idea why the stolen car should have appeared in his road on three successive days, but at least that was all it was, a stolen auto being parked somewhere the thief had presumably regarded as inconspicuous whilst he went about whatever business he had in mind.

From the interior of another parked vehicle, this time a small panel van bearing the logo of a pest control company, Luigi Bettini had watched the arrival and departure of the police officers. This was the third day that he had first parked the auto – it belonged to a cousin, loaned for the good of the cause and reported stolen to provide a smokescreen, left on foot, and returned shortly afterwards at around the time that Keller could be expected to return home, this time driving the van ostensibly on pest control duties. He had hoped that Keller might investigate the auto himself, but clearly his prey was too careful to take such a risk. So, it was time for Plan B. He climbed out of his van and openly approached Keller’s front door, rang the bell, and waited.

Keller had seen his approach – part of his paranoia was a CCTV system – and opened the door unsuspectingly. As the door opened, so Luigi charged in, forcing Keller back into the house, kicking the front door closed behind him.

Keller was no coward; although taken completely by surprise, his first reaction was to fight back and he reached for the pistol he automatically thrust into his belt, under his jacket, whenever answering the door. He was too slow; Luigi already had his own weapon out, a silenced point two-two automatic. Not very powerful, but powerful enough and, more importantly, quiet enough for it not to be heard from adjoining properties. The first, hurried, shot took Keller in the right shoulder, preventing any further attempt to draw his pistol. Now in total command of the situation, Luigi raised his own pistol and took careful aim.

“That shot was for me,” he said harshly. “This one is for my father.”

He shot Keller in the middle of the forehead, killing him instantly. Keller died without knowing why – there were several fathers who had suffered either directly or indirectly at his hands, any one of whom might have been the reason for a son seeking vengeance.

Luigi retrieved the two ejected cartridge cases from his pistol. He was about to leave by the front door when the significance of the small monitor in the hall struck him. He looked at it; it showed the approach to the house. Was it just a security camera or was there a chance that he was on a 65

CCTV disc or tape – as good as a signed confession if the police found it? He searched the house, soon finding the CCTV equipment in the den and wrecked it, taking away with him the disc which presumably held his image on it.

*********

Jane was in a quandary. The terrible ordeal that she had suffered was now several days behind her, and her natural determination to see a story through was beginning to reassert itself. Unaware that she no longer had anything to fear from Amos Keller or his contracted villains, she naturally assumed that she needed to be more cautious than at any previous time in her life. The quiet menace of the tall man with the knife had not left her thoughts; quite to the contrary. After a lot of thought, she had taken onboard Jamie Gooch’s suggestion for neutralising the electronic bug. A flurry of E-mails, all of them actually of little point, but sent to establish a reason for pretending that the computer’s charger was failing, had ended with one to her sister Lisa in which she had broken off halfway through, claiming that the battery was failing. A wait of twenty-four hours, during which she had purchased and put into use a new charger, and she E-mailed Lisa again, apologising for breaking off early in the previous message and explaining that she had needed a new charger. That, Jane told herself, ought to convince the unknown eavesdropper as to the reason for his evil little device dying on him. Two days later Jamie Gooch made another visit and confirmed that the bug was, indeed, no longer operational.

Jane felt as though a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders. The strain of having to remember how her every phone conversation or computer usage was being spied on had made the last ten or so days a total misery. Only when she had been out of the apartment had she felt free of the snooping, and even then every time she returned to it she was worried that she might once more confront intruders.

One of the cautious moves that she had implemented had been to buy a second computer and to set up a new E-mail account. She didn’t use the new computer in the apartment, nor did she access the new E-mail account on the old computer. Instead she went to a nearby café which offered free Wi-Fi access to its customers and conducted anything of a confidential nature from there.

As the days passed by with no further intrusions upon her life, she felt more and more determined not to be scared off from her pursuit of Senator Hammond and his crimes. The thing was, however, that somehow she had to accomplish it without once more coming to the attention of the tall man with the knife.

She wondered about telling Helen Forrester the whole story – but if she did so, wouldn’t Helen be duty bound to start an official investigation, an investigation that her abductors would stand a reasonable chance of hearing about? On balance, she decided to leave Helen out of things, at least for the present.

So, what were her alternatives? Once again she felt that she was facing a blank wall. Nobody who might have been able to give evidence was still alive, excepting, of course, Senator Hammond himself.

********

Senator Graham Hammond leant back in his leather desk chair and swivelled slowly round, surveying his luxurious office. It was the seat of his power, that combined with his chairmanship of the Finance Committee. He had just come from an informal meeting with the Secretary to the Treasury, where several unwritten understandings had been voiced and agreed upon. The result would, Hammond was confident, absolutely guarantee his re-election as Maryland’s senior senator come November. A Senate seat was contested every six years; by the time the next elections for the seat came round he would be seventy-five, time to step down gracefully and fully enjoy the benefits, both social and economic, of his long years in public service.

There was just one possible fly in the ointment, however – that interfering bitch of a reporter from the Washington Post snooping around. Morton Lewis had recently assured him that the woman had been scared off, but could he be sure that her interference was finished? Morton Lewis was a trusted aide, but it wasn’t his neck that would be on the block should things go wrong in any way.

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The Senator mulled over the possible problem that might be caused by Jane Cobden. Allowing her to know of his interest in her was, of course, totally out of the question – it would be sure to heighten her interest in him and in what had happened all those years ago. He had considered approaching her editor with a mild complaint about her activities, but had dismissed the idea after only the briefest of considerations. It would, once again, only result in increased interest; far from getting the woman warned off, it was far more likely to create the view in her superiors that she might well be onto something worth following up with greater rigour. He wondered idly if there was any way of really ensuring her silence. It was, after all, a problem that he and his father had faced and overcome in the past.

Morton Lewis, in the adjoining office, was a worried man. He had just finished reading the newspaper report on the murder of Amos Keller. Keller wasn’t anyone in the public eye, so his death had warranted only a small note on an inside page of the paper, but to Lewis it was an event of potentially monumental importance. Keller had carried out a number of commissions for the chief of staff over the years, none of them one hundred percent above board. Information to discredit political rivals of the Senator had been unearthed – and in some cases planted. People showing signs of being a nuisance had been warned off. Lewis had never questioned the methods that Keller might have used – far better not to know. What worried him now was the possibility that the police investigation into the man’s death might unearth records of their past dealings. Keller had always been very careful to protect his own identity in all the dealings that they had had, and had assured Lewis that that care worked both ways – but did it? Was there a risk of the police finding anything that could bring them to his door?

Lewis’ contacts were many and varied. They included people in the Washington Metropolitan Police Department at a variety of levels and he toyed with the idea of asking one of them to bring him up to speed on the investigation into Keller’s murder, but he could think of no credible reason for making such an approach that would not cause suspicion. There was, however, another way.

********

John Williams put down his phone thoughtfully. It was quite a while since he had last heard from Morton Lewis, so it was a surprise to be phoned out of the blue. He had listened carefully to what the man had to say, without really believing a word of it. The late Amos Keller, according to Lewis, had been attempting to blackmail one of the man’s senior staffers and Lewis, or so he said, was concerned lest anything in Amos’ possession might be useful to Senator Hammond’s political opponents in the run up to the November elections. Even though, according to Lewis, it couldn’t be anything with a direct bearing on the Senator himself, there might be something that could be used to back up a claim that he had shown poor judgement in appointing the woman in question .

A likely story! Far more likely was the possibility that there was something that might affect either Lewis himself or his boss. Still, that was no concern to Williams. Lewis had always paid well and this time would be no exception.

Forty-eight hours later it was done. The local paper reported a mysterious arson attack which had totally destroyed the empty house that had recently been the murder scene of a local resident, one Amos Keller. At the same time, but unknown outside the precinct house, the sparse physical evidence gathered from the scene of Keller’s murder had disappeared from the evidence store, had been delivered to Williams, and had gone up in smoke.

Williams reported back to Lewis on a job well done and celebrated the generous payment he received by treating himself to a new suit, an expensive evening out, and a further strengthening of his already comfortable bank balance.

********

I fired up my computer to find an E-mail from Jane Cobden waiting for me, a message from a different E-mail account to the one that she normally used. In the E-mail she advised me that her old E-mail account had been compromised and that in future she would be using this new one and if 67

I wished to contact her, would I please use the new account. I replied to her so that she knew that I had received her message, but had nothing new to add to the case of four seven three.

To be honest, the whole thing seemed to have run its course as far as I was concerned. Whether or not Jane managed to create her story and whether or not it had any effect on a man we both felt to be complicit in several murders, was something that would be played out, if at all, over in the United States. The involvement of the Isle of Arran in general, and of myself in particular, was surely at an end.

I returned to my latest novel, although compared to the real life story behind flight four seven three and its occupants and cargo, my writing seemed flat and lifeless, and after an hour or so I pushed my chair away from the desk, got to my feet, and determined to put my author’s problems to the back of my mind whilst I enjoyed a tramp over the lower slopes of Beinn Bharrain. The weather was fine, so I walked in jeans, shirt and a thin sweater, although ever mindful of the speed with which weather could change completely on Scotland’s west coast islands, I also had a small backpack containing light waterproofs in addition to sandwiches for a lunchtime break.

It was a wise precaution; by early afternoon, when I was perhaps three miles or a little more away from home, the clouds started to roll in from the Atlantic and soon afterwards the wind got up, driving stinging rain along with it. I hastily donned my waterproofs, but as the rain intensified, I looked for some form of shelter, a shallow cave, a rock overhang, anything that I could use for a bit of protection until the squall passed over.

I was considerably higher than Dubh Loch and well to the south and west of it, and the ground here was considerably more broken than lower down, so I was lucky enough to find a convenient rocky overhang where I was able to sit with my back propped against the face of the rock whilst the wind and rain eddied around me but without actually hitting me.

I could look out over the whole sweep on the glen and I struck me yet again how unlucky flight four seven three had been to come down in so desolate a spot and to contrive to end up in the only stretch of water capable of hiding it from human eyes for so many years.

The squall passed, and as is so often the case, it was followed by brilliant sunshine which showed the glen in an entirely different, and far more attractive, light. As I watched I saw a small herd of red deer cross the lower slopes; the stalking season for stags would open in a few weeks’ time on July the first and that for hinds would open on the first of October, and I wondered if any of those I could see would be chosen for the cull needed to prevent them from overwhelming their available food supplies and damage the environment for other species of wildlife.

The previous year I had been one of those invited to join a local cull of the hind population. It was always a problem for landowners. The stalkers who would pay considerable sums to stalk deer were always only interested in trophy stags, but at a time, such as now, when the deer population was threatening to grow out of control, it was the hinds that it was most necessary to cull. They provided a source of venison, but not the lure to the big spenders, so locals such as myself were often invited to undertake the necessary killing of the surplus hinds. As I watched, the small herd disappeared from view into a small cleft in the hillside, reminding me of the time that I had been called upon to shoot Alex McFee’s luckless cow which had fallen into a similar, but smaller and steeper cleft.

As they disappeared, my eye was attracted by a flash of something reflecting the sunlight. Whatever it was, where the reflection had come from was just bare rock, or seemed to be. Probably just rubbish left by some walker with no respect for our countryside, something that I could never understand; why come to somewhere wild and unspoilt and then do your best to spoil it?

Investigating the spot would only take me a few hundred yards off a direct line home and as more rain seemed highly likely – another bank of clouds was building up in the west – I decided to loop round to it straight away rather than continue to go further away from home. If it was just rubbish, at least I could remove it, provided that it wasn’t too big or cumbersome.

I was about half way to where I had seen the reflection when I realised that it was probably just the sun glinting on some water collected in a hollow after the heavy rain shower, but as it would have been further to retrace my steps than to carry on, carrying on is what I did.

I was both right and wrong. There was, indeed, a small depression in the rocky surface of the land and it had, indeed, filled with water from the rain, water which was already draining away, but there 68

was something else to see. The heavy rain had dislodged a large stone – it had clearly just happened, because it had rolled several yards down the slope, which was very gentle at this precise point, leaving a trail of earth and bits of heather to mark its passage. What was interesting was that until dislodged by the rain, the stone had concealed a narrow cleft into to rock, forming a sort of tiny cave no more than a couple of feet high and the same across, but which clearly penetrated more than that into the side of the hill.

When walking in our hills, even if I have no expectation of being out after dark, I always carry a torch with me, just in case, so I got it out and shone it into the little cave. What I saw caused me to get out my mobile and ring Jamie Henderson at Brodick police station. He listened to what I had to say in amazement.

“Davey, stay there will you, so that we can find the spot as quickly as possible.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t move.”

Half an hour later, Jamie, accompanied by a uniformed constable and a man in plain clothes whom I did not recognise, were with me beside the little cave. Jamie introduced his police companion as PC

Harris and the civilian as Doctor Graham, a police surgeon from Brodick. As I had done, their first action was to shine torches into it.

“You’re right, Mr. Craig,” said the doctor, “it’s a body all right, and it’s obviously been there a long time.”

He half-crawled into the rocky niche for a closer look, then backed out, still on hands and knees.

Rising to his feet and dusting his hands together, he turned to Jamie.

“Sergeant, I can’t see any need for rushing this, so I would suggest that you get your forensic people up here to have a good look at everything.”

Jamie nodded, and started to get things moving by using his radio to call back to his base.

“Right,” he said when he had finished his call, “nothing else to be done here for the time being, but now that the body’s hiding place has been revealed, we need to keep it secure. Sod’s law that some walker of a tourist will come across it if we leave it unguarded, so Harris, I’m leaving you here –

I’ll send a relief if the forensic team are going to delayed getting here, then we’ll take it from there.”

The constable nodded and the rest of us left him to his lonely vigil. As we did so, the threatened rain returned and we hurried as best we could over the uneven ground back to where Jamie had left the police Land Rover as near to the crime scene – for that was surely what it was – as he had been able to reach.

He dropped me off at my house, declining the offer of coming in for a quick drink of tea or the like, and he and the doctor took the road back to Brodick. The rain had intensified and I felt sorry for the luckless PC Harris stuck on that bleak hillside in the wet with only a long dead corpse to keep him company.

It took time, but over the next couple of days details slowly emerged. The police estimated that the body, which was that of a man who had been in his late thirties at the time of his death, had been in that hole in the hill for approximately forty years. It was murder, of that there was no doubt; cause of death had been two gunshots, either of which would have been fatal. Jamie, fascinated by the case, had kept me informed, although very unofficially. The man had been about five feet ten tall and in life would have weighted around twelve stone. His body was less decomposed than would normally have been the case; the little cave had been sealed by the large stone which had been wedged into place by a number of smaller ones which had, over time, been displaced by rain until the heavy shower that I had experienced had finally completed the task of opening the grave.

However, because the space was so small – the man had been literally wedged into place – it had become almost hermetically sealed and as a result the body was partially mummified. Even his clothing had not totally rotted away and the police had made a number of interesting discoveries in consequence. There was no form of identification on the man, no wallet, driving licence or the like,

– obviously anything that he had been carrying that would have said who he was must have been removed by his killer. However, some identification had been possible. Forensic examination of his teeth had led to the conclusion that he had received dental work abroad, almost certainly in the United States. Further confirmation of his probable nationality was the fact that he had money on 69

him – three twenty dollar bills in one of his shoes plus, something the killer must have missed when manhandling the body, two ten cent pieces – ‘dimes’ in American parlance, which must have fallen from a pocket and been hidden under the body itself when it had been pushed into place. The bullets which had killed him had stayed in his body. They were bullets from a thirty-eight calibre revolver

– a revolver rather than an automatic pistol because the bullets were plain lead, whereas pistols just about invariably used bullets jacketed in a harder material such as copper for more reliable feeding of the cartridge through the pistol’s action, which might be jammed by an easily damaged soft lead bullet in the magazine.

In view of the man’s probable nationality, the American Consul General in Edinburgh had been advised of the discovery. The Sheriff’s court had declared the man a victim of murder by person or persons unknown, and the man’s identity and the reason for his death might have remained forever a mystery – except for Jane Cobden. Once the news of the finding of the dead man was in the public domain, together with his probable American nationality, I had brought Jane up to date on what had been found. I felt that it was highly probable – indeed virtually certain – that a dead American on the slopes of Beinn Bharrain, and moreover a dead American who had been there for about forty years, must have some tie-in with the visits of the Hammonds to the Isle of Arran in search of gold.

Chapter Ten

Jane looked at Craig’s E-mail in astonishment. Another dead body which surely had a connection to the Hammonds! She wondered how to proceed. The usual problem immediately reared its head. The only person who would know what had happened was Senator Hammond, and he wouldn’t be saying anything soon, no way.

She pushed her chair back from the desk and thought hard. It was now over a month, nearly two, since the terrifying experience of her abduction, and she had come to terms of always exercising extreme caution in everything that she did. To the best of her knowledge, she had done nothing to bring herself back to the attention of the tall man with the knife, but she was taking no chances. Her apartment front door had been the first thing to receive attention. In the past it had only really been secure once she was safely inside – which was why her abductors had been able to gain entry and waylay her. Now things were very different. Although it looked much the same, in fact the door and its frame had been replaced with steel items disguised with wood cladding so that their greatly enhanced strength was not easily realised by any would be burglar or abductor. Nothing short of explosives could now open the door by brute force – and it would need to be a powerful enough explosion to blow out the entire door, its frame and a large chunk of the surrounding wall. One thing, however, was very obvious – the door no longer had a normal lock. Instead it boasted an electronic keypad which needed a nine figure entry code, which locked the door by means of substantial steel bolts into the steel frame. Jamie Gooch, the computer expert, had helped her on this aspect. He had explained that even a numeric entry code could be overcome with the use of very sophisticated electronic equipment, equipment very, very unlikely to be possessed by any casual criminal, but if someone knew of the existence of the keypad and was determined to gain entry, that was how they would do it, once they realised that the door itself was far too strong to simply smash down. The keypad was therefore something that Jamie himself had worked on. It had a detection circuit within it which would automatically freeze the locking mechanism in the closed position should any device with an electronic element be attached to it, so even if the would be intruder discovered the correct code it would no longer open the door. Short of living in Fort Knox, Jane felt that her home was as secure as it was humanly possible to make it. In this, she was helped by the fact that she lived on the fourth floor, with her windows set in a sheer wall. In the unlikely event of somebody attempting to abseil down from the roof, another four floors above, he would find that the window was now of toughened glass, again set in a steel frame and only openable from the inside via a heavy duty security lock. Good luck to anybody attempting the smash his way in through those windows whilst dangling sixty feet above the ground on the end of a rope.

That only left the danger of being snatched in the street, something that in the final analysis it was almost impossible to guard against, but Jane minimised the chance by varying her routine on a 70

random basis and was again helped by the apartment block having an underground car park with allocated spaces for residents, but only residents. Visitors had to find alternative facilities. It would be possible for an intruder on foot to penetrate the barrier but to do so he would have to pass the security booth, manned twenty-four hours a day, that controlled both vehicular access to the complex and pedestrian access to the main entrance area. Clearly the architect who had designed the building must have been almost as paranoid as Jane had now become.

Given the security measures that she had taken, Jane no longer felt that it was out of the question to pursue her investigation of Senator Hammond, but until the arrival of Craig’s E-mail had seen no way forward and, indeed, had made no further progress at all. Now, however, perhaps there was a new avenue to explore. What, she wondered, was the significance of the body? The fact that the unfortunate man had been killed on Beinn Bharrain only a few hundred yards or so from where flight four seven three had crashed, surely meant the Hammond was involved.

She cast her mind back to when she had looked at the Hammond motor yacht and the man to whom she had spoken – John Gates. She wondered if it would be worthwhile looking him up and talking to him again.

As a result, two days later she had tracked him down to his home and this time fully introduced herself as a reporter from the Washington Post. Gates was mildly impressed and as helpful as he could be.

“Tell me, John,” she urged, “did anybody going missing around seventy-two?”

“We’re mostly fisherman, girl – too many go missing over the years, you know.”

“Well, how about guys who crewed for the Hammonds – anyone of them still around – apart from yourself, of course?”

“Well, it was forty odd years ago. Lot of men that were here then have moved away or some will have died, but there are still a few I can call to mind.”

He was wearing a battered old yachting cap, which he pushed back on his head as he scratched thoughtfully at his grizzled hair. Finally he spoke again, and recited a list of eight names of men whom he thought were still in the area and who might well have crewed for the Hammonds at some time back in the seventies.

The next two days saw Jane tracking down the men on Gates’ list. He had been right in that all of them had crewed for the Hammonds at one time or another, but it was a suggestion by one of them that produced her next lead. It came from Samuel Goldberg, an elderly man but one who still regularly crewed for a number of owners, both power yachts and those using sail. A lifetime of such activity had seen his features sunburnt to a deep walnut colour and his hands were rough and calloused. His eyes, however, twinkled with life and good humour and he listened with interest as Jane outlined her quest. When she had finished, he gazed into the middle distance for a while, then spoke.

“One person you might try talking to is Martha Holsten. She and her husband broke up about that sort of time and Luke, her husband, vanished from hereabouts. He would have been the right age for this mystery man of yours, and although I don’t remember him having crewed for the Hammonds, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t. Luke was like me – crewed for a lot of different owners over the years. We were of an age – went to high school together and as kids were quite near neighbours. I never did understand him taking off – he loved the sea and sailing, it was his life. I could understand him and his wife breaking up, but not him leaving the area. I got the impression that the break-up wasn’t all that bad-tempered, certainly he still saw his boys.”

“He had sons?”

“Yes, twins, Nathan and Isaac. They both live around here, although neither of them sail. Nathan sell autos, Isaac works in a bank.”

He thought for a while.

“Come to think about it, I suppose both of them must be in their fifties now – haven’t seen them for a year or two, I suppose. Their mother lives alone, never remarried or anything.”

Fifteen minutes later, following the directions given to her by Goldberg, Jane stopped the car outside a small, neatly kept wooden walled bungalow. The white paintwork on the walls glistened in the sunlight and she walked up a short path, bordered by well-tended flower beds, before ringing 71

the bell on a door painted dark blue. The door was opened by a small, grey haired woman; Jane knew that Mrs. Holsten must be at least well into her seventies, but she could easily have passed for ten years younger.

Jane introduced herself and was invited into a small, comfortably furnished room with a view out onto a back garden which was a riot of colour – clearly Mrs. Holsten was a keen gardener. The little woman listened attentively as Jane recounted her story yet again and as she finished, she was surprised to see a tear trickle down the old lady’s cheek.

“Sorry, my dear,” Mrs. Holsten said, “but I think that you may have found my Luke. What you say about the age seems right and it was in nineteen seventy-two that he disappeared.”

“Can you tell me what happened, Mrs. Holsten?”

She nodded slowly.

“It really started the previous year, nineteen seventy-one. We had a poor year – work for Luke was hard to come by and I had my hands full with the twins, or more particularly, with Isaac. Although they looked as alike as two peas in a pod, they were very different characters. Nathan was a placid boy, easy going, nothing really got to him. Isaac, on the other hand, was always in trouble. He had a fiery temper on him and was always getting into fights and the like. We were both worried that he would go to the bad, especially as we had hardly any money and he could see some of his so-called friends were a lot better off than he was. They were fourteen – just getting to the difficult age, at least in Isaac’s case. Then Luke had the offer of a six month contract helping out in a logging operation in the Maryland hills. It was too far for him to drive back and forth every day in our old car, but there was accommodation – of a sort – with the job so he took it and only got back home every other weekend or so. At least there was money at last and things got easier with Isaac – I suppose you could say that we bribed him to keep him quiet, but whatever, it worked.

“Well, the six month contract came to an end, it was now nineteen seventy-two and money started to get tight again. Then one evening he came home – he’d been doing a bit of crewing for a boat taking out fishermen – really excited. He’d been offered a job, taking three, perhaps as much as four, weeks, for very good money indeed. Naturally, I asked what it was, and it really floored me when he said he didn’t really know yet, except that it was at sea. He’d find out more in a few days, he said. Then, that night he had a phone call and said that he had to go out to talk about the job –

and I never saw him again.”

Now, the tears were rolling unbidden down the old cheeks and Jane felt an instant reaction of extreme pity for this proud old lady who had suffered such an incomprehensible blow. Mrs. Holsten took a long, shuddering breath and composed herself.

“I’m sorry about that, my dear – silly of me. It was all so long ago now....” Her voice tailed off.

“I never did understand what had happened. There were those who assumed that Luke had up and left me, but I knew that wasn’t the case. I’ve always wanted to know what happened that night to make Luke just disappear into thin air like that. For years now, I’ve accepted that it is very unlikely that I will ever know the whole story, but now at least it looks as though I may find out what happened to him even if I don’t know why it happened.”

She sat more upright in her chair and looked Jane fully in the eyes.

“He was murdered, wasn’t he?”

“Well, Mrs, Holsten..”

“It’s Martha, everybody calls me Martha.”

Jane began anew.

“Well, Martha, the man that has been found in Scotland – he had been left in a very small cave which had been sealed with a big rock and then lots of stones and earth – was in his late thirties. We think that he was American because he had some American money on him, although his wallet and anything else that might have told us who he is has been taken away. He was shot with a pistol of some sort and he has been dead about forty years or so, give or take.”

Martha Holsten nodded in understanding.

“You say he had American money on him – tell me, did he have paper money tucked inside his shoe?”

Jane blinked in surprise; how could anyone know that? The old lady seized on her surprise.

72

“He did, didn’t he? Luke always carried some money like that – except when he was at sea, of course. He learned the trick from his father. Isaiah Holsten, Luke’s father, once worked for a while in Chicago and whilst he was there he was attacked one night by some thugs. They beat him up and took everything he had on him – and when he told people what had happened, a guy he worked with advised him to always carry some money tucked into his shoe so that , with any luck, he wouldn’t lose everything if he was ever attacked again, He never was, but all this had happened when Luke was only eleven or twelve years old and he took to the idea at once. Ever afterwards, except, as I said, when he was actually working on deck at sea, he always carried a bit of money that way.

Never a lot – we never had a lot – but at least ten dollars, often a bit more.”

Jane nodded her understanding.

“The man in the cave had sixty dollars tucked away like that – three twenty dollar bills.”

“That would have been quite a lot for us back then –as I said, times had become hard again.”

“Tell me, Martha, you must have reported Luke’s disappearance to the police?”

“Oh yes, but they never came up with anything at all – I told them that he had spoken about a job at sea and they talked to all the local boat owners, but nobody could help. I think that, to be truthful, they felt like some of the others around here, that Luke had had enough of us and just taken a powder.”

Graham bloody Hammond could have helped, I’m sure, Jane thought grimly to herself. A really, really nasty scenario was beginning to suggest itself to her, one in which Luke Holsten, an honest man, found himself caught up in something dishonest, had made his displeasure plain and been murdered for his pains. Then, because this must tie in somehow with the voyage of the Lady Louise, the three other members of the crew, the Palin boys, Harry and Lou, and their cousin, Billy Jarvis, having gone along with what had happened – surely the fact that they had been flush with cash on their return from Arran was the result of hush money? – had nevertheless been killed to shut their mouths not only over the theft of the gold but also about the killing of Luke Heston?

She posed the question that had sprung into her mind.

“Tell me, Martha, do you think that one of your sons would be willing to give a DNA sample? That way it could be proved for sure, one way or the other, if the man found in Scotland was your Luke.”

“Of course they would, Jane. They know how much it would mean to me.”

******

I read Jane’s latest E-mail with amazement. She had, by inspired digging and good investigative work, found a highly probable candidate for the ‘Mystery Man’ as he had been dubbed locally. I got in touch with Jamie Henderson again and he immediately set things in motion through the official channels.

Three days later it had been established beyond doubt. DNA analysis results had winged electronically back and forth across the Atlantic and had proved that the ‘Mystery Man’ was indeed Luke Holsten, born first of June nineteen thirty-four, died sometime in nineteen seventy-two. The next question was, of course, who had killed him and why? Officially there was no reason to link Senator Hammond with the killing. With the exception of the Senator himself, nobody still alive could prove that Luke Holsten had been on board the Lady Louise when she had visited Arran in nineteen seventy-two, and without such a link, there was nowhere for an investigation to go.

I learned from Jane, who in turn got it from a friend of hers in the police, that the Washington Metropolitan Police Department were beginning to wonder about Senator Hammond; the deaths of the three men who had crewed for him and his father back in nineteen seventy-two, the deaths of the Gregorys, husband and wife that very same year, and now this, all seemingly revolving around visits that he, in company with his father, had made to the Isle of Arran back then, smelt fishy in the opinion of experienced detectives, but a fishy smell was nothing like enough to start an investigation into one of the most powerful men in Washington.

There was also the fact that of the six deaths in ninety seventy-two, the five which had occurred in the United States had been seen at the time as unfortunate accidents. The only one of those deaths which was quite definitely the result of a crime was the shooting of Luke Holsten, and that had occurred in Scotland, where the American police had no jurisdiction. The Scottish pathologist, 73

when asked how long Luke Holsten might have been dead before being incarcerated in the cave gave a ‘best guess’ – and he emphasised that it was exactly that – of not more than forty-eight hours. That meant that it could not possibly have occurred in America – Holsten could not have been killed as or before the Lady Louise left American waters and transported as a corpse. The murder was, absolutely and definitely, a Scottish matter.

A couple of days later I met Detective Chief Inspector Iain Montgomery, the senior detective assigned to the case. A tired looking man, a few years older than myself, he carried with him an air of concerned weariness that belied what Jamie Henderson had told me when he had heard who had been assigned to the case – that the DCI was seen as a first class detective with an impressive success rate.

Montgomery was a slightly built individual, with thinning wispy hair, once red, now liberally laced with grey. His eyes, like his overall demeanour, exhibited apparent tiredness, but as we spoke I was aware that everything that I said was being mentally filed away in meticulous detail.

He had come to see me because it was I who had first stumbled upon the body of Luke Holsten, but he also listened patiently as I recounted everything that Jane Cobden and I had learnt and also I recounted all our suspicions. The only thing that I didn’t tell him about was Jane’s abduction – at the time Jane had kept that to herself, so it was through simple ignorance that I said nothing about it.

When I had finished, Montgomery leant back in the chair, steeple his fingers together and brought the tips up to touch his chin.

“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Craig. I feel that you and Ms. Cobden have the right of the matter –

this American Senator is in all of this up to his neck, but for the life of me, I can’t see how we can nail him for it. Assuming that the late Mr. Holsten arrived at Arran on board the Hammond vessel –

and we have no proof of that, although to my mind it is by far the most likely scenario – and was then murdered, we have five suspects, four of whom are already dead. Even if we can find something linking Holsten’s death to the Hammond’s, it would be very difficult to disprove any claim by him that he knew nothing about it, that he was told Holsten had decided to stay on and make his own way home later. That’s not being defeatist, it’s being realistic. One very, very slim piece of evidence that we do have – as I think that you know, we’ve recovered the bullets that killed Holsten from his body. They are in good condition and could be matched to the gun that fired them if it is still around and hasn’t been fired too much since. However, I’m sure you can appreciate just what sort of odds there are against us finding the gun – it was used seventy-two years ago and quite probably dumped soon afterwards – might even have been thrown into the loch, but with all the metal from that aircraft down there, trying to find it, even if it is there, would be pointless.”

I had to agree that Montgomery was being realistic, not defeatist, but it was a depressing litany.

After he left I composed an E-mail to Jane Cobden, bringing her up to date and expressing my own view that the trail seemed to have gone not just cold, but positively frozen.

*******

Jane read Craig’s E-mail with disappointment, but no surprise. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that Hammond or his father had been the murderer of Luke Holsten. Why should one of the crew have done it? She could visualise a scenario where one, or both, of the Hammonds had killed Luke Holsten and told the other three that the man had decided to stay on the island and had bribed them to keep their mouths shut on some pretext or other, perhaps saying that it could make trouble for the Hammonds themselves if it was known that they had, in effect, contributed to an illegal immigration. Other than that – would the three of them have kept quite if they had known that murder had been done?

She would dearly love to have been able to talk to one of those three young men – or young men as they had been back at the time – but they had been silenced for ever by the most effective means possible – killing them.

She had not thought about her own abduction, other than in a recurring dream, but she now began to wonder if it was possible to use it as a lever to get at Hammond as every other avenue seemed to 74

result in a dead end. She decided, reluctantly, to talk it over with Helen Forrester, and accordingly arranged to meet her friend, ostensibly for a quiet drink, the following evening.

*********

Morton Lewis was a worried man. He had contacts in the Washington MPD, contacts who had told him of the suspicions that were beginning to be floated regarding the activities of Graham Hammond and his father back in the nineteen seventies. He wondered uneasily if those suspicions might lead to action by the police. More to the point – he had done many things over the years for Graham Hammond, but he had no illusions about the man. Hammond was totally self-centred.

Should trouble arrive and he felt that he could lessen its impact upon himself, he wouldn’t hesitate for a second over doing his level best to shift the blame onto somebody else, and Lewis was only too aware that he would be the very first in the firing line.

He mentally reviewed the many ‘favours’ that he had arranged for the man, and whilst it had been normal for whatever was done to seek an advantage of whatever kind for the Senator to be at an element of distance, Lewis was uncomfortably aware that in the majority of instances Hammond could claim a fair degree of deniability, whereas his own imprint was too often only too obvious.

How much likelihood, he wondered, was there of the, hopefully vague, suspicions of the police sparking off an investigation? What worried him more than the possibility of the police starting to sniff around was the more likely possibility – perhaps strong possibility – of that wretched woman reporter continuing to dig into matters. And it wasn’t just her. Before his unfortunate demise Amos Keller had reported that the Cobden woman had shared much, possibility all, that she knew with Detective Lieutenant Forrester of the Washington MPD and some Brit in Scotland. He wondered at the feasibility of all three suffering unfortunate accidents; carefully arranged, there need be no suspicious link between the three to arouse the interest of the authorities. With the loss of Keller, he had nobody with the same level of contacts; the man really had been extremely valuable over the years and to lose him to some casual burglar with a gun was a major blow.

The prime target must surely be the reporter. Ever since Watergate, every politician in Washington had been wary of the Washington Post. Ever since Watergate, every reporter on that damned paper had been eager to demonstrate that Woodward and Bernstein weren’t the only reporters of note that the paper had produced.

How to arrange anything, though? With Keller gone, he really had nobody that he could trust with such a task. He even contemplated trying to achieve what he wanted by his own efforts – but not for long. The very thought of being caught in such an endeavour was enough to turn his stomach. There was, he mused, an alternative plan of action – one which just a few months ago would never even have crossed his mind, but which now perhaps promised a final closure to the problem.

******

Helen Forrester listened to her friend’s story in mounting anger.

“Why on earth didn’t you come to the police right away, Jane?” she demanded.

Jane shrugged her shoulders.

“I was frightened. That guy with the knife – he was totally, utterly convincing. His threat made me turn my apartment into something like a bank vault and for weeks I was scared, really, really scared, every time I went outdoors. However, nothing has happened since then, and I’m damned if I’m going to continue to live in fear because of that creep.”

Helen thought over what she had just been told.

“Well, going on what you’ve said, I don’t think that an official investigation is going to get very far

– after all this time, plus the work that you have had done to the apartment, there won’t be any forensic evidence to find. However, what I can do is to check our database on the modus operandi of the knifeman. Using tranquiliser darts to subdue a subject is pretty unusual, to say the least. I’ll have a look tomorrow and let you know what I come up with – let’s get together again tomorrow evening, and I’ll update you – OK?”

Delighted at the prospect of some progress, Jane agreed eagerly.

75

The next evening she could scarcely contain her impatience as, arriving early at the bar, she awaited Helen’s appearance. At last her friend appeared, apologising for being ten minutes or so late.

“Right,” she said, “I’ve run a thorough check on our database and I’ve come up with four previous instances of the use of tranquiliser darts in the way that they were used on you. There may have been unreported instances, of course, but no way of knowing if that has been so. Anyway, the four instances would appear to have been the work of two different men. Now, you referred to your guy as tall – how tall?”

Jane furrowed her brow in concentration.

“At least six two or three – perhaps even a little more.”

She cast her mind back to the search for the wreck of flight four seven three and the assistance that she had received from the Scottish diver Hamish Logan. He had been a huge man and she mentally compared her kidnapper to Hamish.

“Yes, six three or four tops. Perhaps only six two, but definitely no shorter.”

“Right, that gets rid of one of our possible – he’s only five seven or eight. The other guy, though –

he was described as six two, six three by witnesses, which fits your guy. Now, we actually have a possible identification for the man. One of the people attacked in the way that you were is a bank manager, He was subdued as you were, spirited away to somewhere, he knew not where, and there he was persuaded to arrange a payment for his own release, quite a substantial payment. This was just over a year ago, and at the time we literally had absolutely nothing to go on. However, the abductor made a mistake. Before entering the victim’s home he passed a CCTV camera that he obviously didn’t know about and we had him on film. There were problems. The definition wasn’t very good – a defence lawyer would have made a good case out of that alone – and the man had an alibi vouched for by a number of people, so we never even made an arrest, never mind got to court.

The suspect was one Ercole Bettini, and he had a record, so we have a mug shot of him. Here it is.”

She slid a photo across the table to Jane who looked at it closely.

“Those eyes – they were all that I could really see of him, but they were very dark, just like this man’s. He was slim – probably no more than a hundred seventy pounds.”

Helen nodded.

“That ties in. Bettini was one seventy three.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead, Jane. Not long after you were abducted, Bettini was gunned down in the street as he left a restaurant after dinner.”

“Well, if it was him – and he does seem to fit – I’m glad. He was a really creepy character, with all his talk about his stiletto.”

Helen’s head came up at the words.

“Stiletto? The man who abducted that banker had a knife which he used to threaten him, and which he referred to as a stiletto. Looks like we’ve identified him for sure.”

Jane leaned back in her seat.

“Do you think that I can stop worrying?”

“I think that it’s quite possible. Our sources tell us that Bettini often worked for a man called Amos Keller – again nothing we could go to court with – and Keller is also dead. Like Bettini, and only a week or two later, he was shot, In his case someone nailed him in his home and the easy story is that it was a burglary one wrong. In fact we think the two deaths are linked – that Keller was responsible for Bettini being shot and that he himself was the subject of a revenge killing. Bettini has a son, Luigi, who has a reputation – again nothing proved against him so far, but the whispers on the street make it look like Luigi popped Keller in revenge for his old man.”

Jane felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Perhaps the threat to her well-being was now over. There was another aspect, however.

“How does all this tie in with me being warned off Hammond?”

Helen shrugged.

“All nebulous, but the way I see it is that Hammond, or more likely his chief of staff, a creepy guy called Morton Lewis, didn’t like you nosing around and hired Keller to do something about it. That something was Bettini. Now, why Bettini was subsequently rubbed out, I just don’t know. I can’t 76

see that it has an obvious link to your abduction – more likely some other reason, but what that might be, probably only Keller ever knew – and obviously we can’t ask him – dead men don’t talk.”

Jane nodded her understanding.

“So,” Helen asked, “what next from your end?”

“Well, the story looks good – but I’ve no proof. If we were to publish with what I’ve got so far, Hammond would sue our asses off – and he’d win, no doubt about it.”

Helen made a moue of distaste.

“I really would like to get something on that guy – I’m sure that he and Morton Lewis are as unsavoury a pair as Washington politics have ever seen. I reckon that they are right up there with Richard Nixon and his mob.”

“Trouble is, what? I know that he and his father stole that gold – nothing else makes any sense at all

– but no way to prove it. No witnesses, no physical evidence, nothing!”

Helen was silent for a long drawn out moment before speaking again.

“Hammond has silenced anyone who might have been able to be a witness against him over here in the States – but I wonder if there is anyone in Scotland who knows anything?”

“Well, there’s that old guy, McFee, whom they spoke to in seventy-one, asking where the Gregorys had found that piece of metal, the finding that sparked everything off.”

Helen frowned.

“Not much to try and build a case on.”

Jane shook her head.

“Nothing at all....”

She stopped in mid-sentence.

“There might be others, though – I was concentrating first on finding the airplane, then on the men who had been on that yacht – and they were all Americans, of course, so I never really went deeper into any other aspect of this thing in Scotland. I suppose it’s just possible that somebody else over there might know something.”

“Would it be worth your going back to Scotland to see if you can find anything?”

Jane shook her head again.

“Not straight off, not just on the off chance – but the guy over there that I told you about – David Craig – might be able to help a bit. It’s a small place in terms of the number of people. Many of them seem to know each other – quite a lot of them actually seem to be related to one another for that matter. I reckon that it’s worth asking David if he can think of any way of asking around that might get results.”

*******

I read Jane’s E-mail with interest, but without much optimism that I could actually achieve anything for her. I understood her reasoning; in a small port like Brodick, the arrival of a biggish motor yacht flying the Stars and Stripes would scarcely have gone unnoticed at the time – but that was the rub.

‘The time’ was nineteen seventy-one and seventy-two, over forty years ago. Who would still be around, and of those that were, how much would they remember?

Certainly nobody at the time had seen anything like gold being smuggled away, nor murder committed – obviously such events would have come to light straight away. I did wonder if it would be possible to find evidence that Luke Holsten had actually arrived aboard the Lady Louise, although I doubted it. After all, the murder had been investigated – indeed, to all intents and purposes was still being investigated by the police, and DCI Montgomery had struck me as a careful, methodical sort of a man. If such evidence existed he would surely have found it, and as far as I was aware he had found nothing of the sort.

Still, it was worth at least making some sort of an effort. I had nothing better to do, as I had now finished my latest book and it was safely in the hands of my publisher. It would also appear in due course on Kindle for the electronic readers brigade; just how soon depended on how well the ink and paper version sold.

I decided to talk about my quest with Douglas McFee. He was, after all, an element of the whole story of flight four seven three and was also one of the oldest inhabitants of Arran that I knew 77

personally, so accordingly a couple of days later I was cosseted with him in his bungalow, nursing the inevitable glass of Talisker, whilst the old man searched his memory.

“Ach, there’s no many left that were around here then, Davey. Those that were young, many have left the island. Those that were old, they’re mostly dead and buried.”

He gazed into his tumbler, as though seeking for inspiration from the amber fluid within.

“That young policeman, Montgomery, he asked me the same, ye ken, but I couldn’t help him –

same reason. But now you’ve made me think over the thing again, there is one man that I’d forgot when talking with Mr. Montgomery. Do ye ken Alisdair MacClachan? Him as stays over in Kilmarnock now?”

I shook my head; I’d never heard of the man.

“He used to be the assistant harbour master at Brodick back in the day. Retired back about two thousand. Lost his wife, Jenny, the very same year and after a while his lassie, Morag, persuaded him to go and live with her and her man and bairns as Alisdair was getting right down over everything. Haven’t heard of him for a while, mind. For all I know, he might not still be with us, but if he is, he’s the only person I can call to mind who might be able to help you. If you do find him, tell him I was asking on him.”

I thanked Douglas, although to be honest, it seemed that he had really only underlined my assumption that there was nothing to be found that would help Jane in her quest for a story, Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so later that day I had tracked down a telephone number for the MacClachan’s daughter’s family, had ascertained that Alisdair MacClachan was indeed still alive, and had had my request to visit and talk to him accepted.

It was two days later that I crossed the mainland, taking the Brodick-Ardrossan ferry, and headed into Kilmarnock. Soon afterwards, I found myself stopping outside a large, well maintained bungalow just off the oddly names London Road, east of the town centre. Strange name for a road over four hundred miles away from London, and moreover one running east and west, rather than north and south as might be expected with such a name.

Although Kilmarnock is one of Scotland’s bigger burghs, I had never visited it before and found it a pleasant area. I could well understand old Alisdair MacClachan swopping the lonely existence of a widower on the wind-swept Isle of Arran for a family home in this pleasant location.

I rang the bell and the door was opened by a rather plump woman in her fifties, her dark hair cut short and dark brown eyes which, set in a pleasant face, eyed me in a friendly manner.

“Mrs. Ross?”

“Aye, you must be Mr. Craig, come to see my father, is that right?”

“It is indeed.”

“Well, come you in. Da’s in the conservatory.”

She lead me through a comfortably appointed and furnished house out to a high quality conservatory looking out onto an immaculate garden. Clearly Morag Ross and her husband were a house proud couple and had spent quite a bit on their bungalow over the years.

Alisdair MacClachan rose from a wicker work armchair to welcome me, his hand outstretched in greeting. I took it in my own and shook it, surprised at the strength of the grip of a man who must be at least eighty years old.

Alisdair MacClachan was a small, wiry man, no more than five feet six or so tall, but he exuded good health from a sturdy frame topped by a completely bald head tanned, like all the rest of his visible flesh to the colour of a walnut. Bright blue eyes regarded me with interest.

“Welcome, Mr. Craig. My old friend Douglas tells me that you hope I may be able to help you in a bit of a mystery – how’s that?”

Before I could answer he waved me to an armchair, the twin of his own, and we both sat.

“Well, sir, it goes back a long way, but it also affects a very recent police investigation. Have you heard of the discovery of a body on Arran?”

“Aye, Morag’s cousin, Fiona set us a copy of the paper with it in it – I understand that the body was found by yourself?”

78

“That’s right. I don’t know which paper you read – at first it wasn’t known who he was, but it was later established that it was a man called Luke Holsten, an American who disappeared in nineteen seventy-two.”

“Man, that’s a fair time ago – why do you think I can help you?”

“Well, nobody can prove it, but everyone believes that he came to the Isle of Arran as part of the crew of a fancy American motor yacht, the Lady Louise and that it was one of the other men on that boat who killed him – nothing else makes any sense. However, there is no proof that he was even on the boat. The harbour records from back then record the vessel’s arrival and the name of her home port, but no details of who was on board her. At the time Customs would have checked the crew’s passports, but that’s all they would have done, checked them. They wouldn’t have kept any records of passport numbers or the like, more’s the pity – if they had it would have proved how Holsten arrived on Arran.”

“Ah, I see your problem. Now I remember that yacht. As you can imagine a big, fancy American motor yacht arriving at Brodick didn’t happened every day. I remember she came twice, but the first time she came Jenny and I were away on our holidays, visiting her folk on Skye – they’d moved there a year or two before. The second time she came I did see her and she looked so grand that I took a picture of her. I kept a photo album of interesting vessels I saw and I’ve still got the album.

Haven’t looked at it in years, but the picture must still be in it. Bide yeself there and I’ll go get it.”

He rose to his feet and left the conservatory, returning after a few minutes with an old, and somewhat bettered, photo album in his grasp. He sat down again and turned the stiff pages of the book, finally stopping when he had found what he sought.

“Yes, there you are.”

He handed to open album to me and I found myself looking at a pin-sharp picture about seven by five inches in size of a large motor yacht, the Stars and Stripes fluttering bravely at her stern.

Clearly shown, but with only very small images were six men aboard the boat and by happy chance all six were facing the camera when the shot was taken. Disappointingly, however, the images of their faces were too small for them to be identified.

“I wonder,” I mused, “if it would be possible to somehow enlarge those faces? May I borrow this and show it to the police, Mr. MacClachan?”

“Of course you can, and the name’s Alisdair, you know – but before you take it away we may be able to do something with it ourselves – Morag’s grandson, her girl Aileen’s boy, is staying with us for a couple of days and like all these young-uns today he’s a wizard with a computer.”

He chuckled to himself.

“Let’s ask the expert!”

Once again he rose from his chair and this time returned with a tall slim lad in tow, a lad with a shock of red hair atop a thin, intelligent looking face.

“Hamish, this is Mr. Craig from Arran and we’re wondering if you can help us. You see this picture

– is there any way you can make those faces bigger so they could be recognised, do you think?”

Hamish took the proffered album and studied the photo.

“Reckon I can do something, granddad – I’ll have to scan it into my computer and then enlarge the faces – give me ten minutes.”

He left the room and his great-grandfather watched affectionately as he went.

“Oh, he’s a grand lad is young Hamish – brightest of all in this family, I’ll tell you. Wants to be a pilot when he’s old enough and I’m sure that he’ll make it.”

Hamish was absent for a little less than the ten minutes he had requested before he returned bearing both the original picture and three new prints, each showing a section of the original which contained one or more of the faces. As I looked at them, I realised that Hamish had done a good job.

The faces were now larger images, and retained enough definition for the individuals to be recognised. I knew none of them, of course, but I was sure that anyone who had known Luke Holsten would have no difficulty in recognising him – assuming, of course, that he was actually one of the six men in the picture.

I enthused over the result, bringing a furious blush to the youngster’s cheeks and he mumbled his thanks before escaping.

79

There was one final point ot be cleared up.

“Alisdair, can you prove when the picture was taken?”

“Oh, yes.”

He simply turned the original print over. There on the back, in faded but still clearly legible writing, was the legend ‘American Motor Yacht Lady Louise Brodick Harbour 14th June 1972’.

It was the clincher.

*******

The very next day I delivered the original photo, plus the enhanced images that young Hamish had made, to DCI Montgomery, who was delighted to receive them.

“Many thanks, Mr. Craig. I’ll send copies of these over to the States and see if the individuals can be identified.”

Without telling him, I had also sent copies over cyberspace myself, sending an E-mail with the pictures as attachments to Jane Cobden. Perhaps I should not have done so, as it might have been construed as interfering in a police investigation, but it seemed only fair after all that she had done so far in this mystery. But for her efforts little, if anything, that had happened on Arran all those years ago would ever have come to light. A a couple of days later I received a reply from her. All six men in the picture had been identified and, sure enough, Luke Holsten was one of them. That was as far as either of us could go in the affair now – the rest was up to the police of both countries.

*******

DCI Montgomery was closeted with his immediate Superior, Detective Superintendent Helen MacAvoy, in the latter’s office as they reviewed the case of the murder of Luke Holsten.

She ran her fingers though her short, blonde hair and leaned back in her chair.

“Bloody Hell, Iain, you’ve got a right sodding mess here, haven’t you? Murder of an American citizen, presumably by an American citizen, on Scottish soil over forty years back. And your chief suspect isn’t just any common or garden American, but one of their most powerful bloody politicians!”

Montgomery grinned ruefully.

“Sorry, boss, but that’s how it is. In all conscience, we really ought to talk to the man, although our chances of proving anything against him are slimmer than those of a snowball in hell as far as I can see.”

“I certainly agree with you there. Look, I’m going to have to take this thing upstairs – any request to interview this Hammond character is going to have to come from far above our pay grades.”

Chapter Eleven – July 2014

In the event it took nearly five weeks to arrange – and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who had insisted in being ‘kept in the picture’ had expressed amazement that things had moved that quickly, but at last Montgomery, accompanied for protocol’s sake by Assistant Chief Constable Hugo Blair, resplendent in uniform and medal ribbons, was seated opposite a table in a small but luxurious meeting room somewhere in the depths of the Senate Building. Also present, presumably to ensure that the rights of an American citizen weren’t infringed, was Assistant Chief of Police of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, George Lakis, like Blair resplendent in full uniform and with even more medal ribbons. In his plain, well used suit, Montgomery was already beginning to feel like a second-class citizen, a feeling strengthened by the final constituents of the group. Senator Graham Hammond looked as though his shirt and tie alone probably cost more than Montgomery’s entire wardrobe back home, and his lawyer, a hard faced middle-aged woman who had been introduced as Ms. Dolores Haigh looked similarly expensively clad and the possessor of a head of auburn hair that reeked of expensive salons . A less suitable forename it was difficult to image for the woman, Montgomery told himself, but it was Ms. Haigh who opened proceedings.

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She looked sternly at Montgomery and Blair, but particularly at Montgomery, clearly conveying the impression that she couldn’t really believe that this unprepossessing example of a Scottish policeman was truly in the same room as herself and her illustrious client.

“Gentlemen, I want it clearly understood from the outset that Senator Hammond is here of his own free will to offer what help he may be able to in the matter of the dead man found within your jurisdiction and who is alleged to be an American citizen.”

I’m not having that, Montgomery told himself grimly and interrupted the woman before she could continue.

“Actually, Ms. Haigh, there is no doubt about the dead man’s identity. DNA matching has proved him beyond any doubt to be Luke Holsten, date of birth the first of June nineteen thirty-four, the husband of Martha Holsten and the father of Nathan and Isaac Holsten, twins born on the fourteenth of May nineteen fifty-seven and who provided the DNA samples for matching purposes. Those DNA samples were tested both by our own Scottish laboratory and also by the Washington MPD

facility. Both came to the same conclusion.”

Before the woman could respond, Assistant Chief of Police Lakis cut in to support Montgomery.

“The detective is quite right, Ms. Haigh. There is no doubt that the body found by our Scottish colleagues is indeed that of Luke Holsten.”

Hatchet Face frowned at both of them, clearly irritated at being interrupted before she had her full say, but gave a grudging nod of acknowledgement.

“Very well then, you want the Senator’s help over the murder of Mr. Holsten. Perhaps we can now proceed?”

The question was accompanied by arched eyebrows as though everyone else was dragging their heels in the matter.

Montgomery refused to either rise to the bait or be intimidated. Instead, he gave the Senator, and his lawyer, his most winning smile.

“Thank you, ma’am –and you, sir. As I am sure you will be aware, we believe that Mr. Holsten travelled in the yacht Lady Louise to the Isle of Arran in June nineteen seventy-two. Indeed, we have a photograph of the vessel taken in Brodick Harbour on the fourteenth of that month and which clearly shows Mr. Holsten aboard her – his picture has been identified by his widow, Martha Holsten.” He turned slightly in his chair so that he was facing Hammond directly.

“Tell me, sir, was Mr. Holsten a member of your crew?”

The Senator nodded the silver-maned head.

“Yes he was, Inspector, but he stayed behind on the island. That was a bit of a nuisance, because it meant more work for the rest of us for the return journey, but we coped OK.”

“Do you know why he stayed behind?”

“I have no real idea, but some of the grumbles from the remaining three crew members over their extra workload led me to believe – rightly or wrongly, I must add – that Mr. Holsten was having marital problems and wanted to stay away from his family for a while. As I say, I have no idea whether that was true or not, but it did offer some sort of an explanation, I suppose.”

The Senator shrugged his expensively clad shoulders and sat back in his chair.

Montgomery had to acknowledge that Hammond had come up with a plausible explanation for Holsten’s presence on the island after the yacht had left, but it wasn’t the only question that needed answering.

“The thing that puzzles us, sir, is just why and by whom Mr. Holsten was killed. I mean, here is a man who comes to Arran effectively out of the blue. Nobody on the island knew him, nobody had even heard of him, or, with all due respect, even heard of your father or yourself. Why on earth should anybody on the island wish him dead?”

The Senator nodded that photogenic head again.

“I take your point, Inspector – but there must be an answer somewhere on the island, surely?

Perhaps he got into an argument with a local over something? Perhaps over a woman?”

“That’s a good point, sir, and I could understand that as a possibility if he had been beaten to death, killed by a blow from something heavy, something like that – the sort of thing that could occur in a fit of rage during an argument – but Mr. Holsten was shot. Shot twice with a point three eight 81

revolver. Now, currently, no normal UK citizen can legally possess such a weapon. Even back in nineteen seventy-two they were very strictly regulated. Now, Arran is a small island, sparsely populated. I’ve had the relevant records checked. Not a single person on the island was licenced to possess a thirty-eight calibre revolver, not one.”

Ms. Haigh cut in, doubtless anxious to justify whatever astronomic fee she was charging Hammond.

“So, detective, are you suggesting that the fact you cannot find evidence of a local owning such a weapon means that it must have come to the island on my client’s boat?”

“It does seem a strong possibility.”

She snorted her contempt for the answer.

“Really, detective, if that is all you have to go on, you are wasting everybody’s time here. We both know that the possession of handguns is forbidden to normal citizens of the UK, and a search of your system would reveal no such weapon licenced to a normal citizen – but handguns are in frequent use by your criminals. I had a check made, and only last month there were several crimes committed in which a handgun was used, two of them resulting in severe injury. Do you expect me to believe that not one single person on Arran is a law breaker? A law breaker who might have owned such a weapon? It defies believe.”

She sat back, smirking triumphantly.

Montgomery knew that she had made a convincing argument, one that was impossible to disprove, but he soldiered on.

“What is even harder to believe, Ms. Haigh, is that if – and it is a very, very big if - someone on Arran was in the illegal possession of a thirty-eight revolver, that that person would have some reason to kill Luke Holsten and squirrel his body away. Why? What could possibly be the motive for such an event?”

She shrugged her shoulders dismissively.

“That’s your job, detective – to find out who and why. I suggest that you go back to Scotland and get on with your job.”

To Montgomery’s surprise, Hammond interceded.

“Dolores, I appreciate the points that you have made, but I don’t want these gentlemen to feel that we are being obstructive over all this.”

He turned his attention to Montgomery.

“Are there any other questions that you would like to ask me, Inspector?”

Grateful for the change in tack, Montgomery nodded his thanks to the Senator and continued.

“What lead you to decide to visit the Isle of Arran, sir?”

“It wasn’t my decision – it was my father’s. He had served in the Army Air Force during the war and wanted to revisit some of the places he had seen then. We did a bit of a tour of Northern France in nineteen seventy – left the Lady Louise at Calais, hired a car and toured around. Then in seventy-one and two we visited the west coast of Scotland. We stopped only at Arran, mostly to replenish supplies and the like; the rest of the time – several days, we just cruised around the coastline, enjoying the scenery.”

“Why come to Arran twice?”

Hammond once again shrugged those expensively clad shoulders.

“I honestly don’t know. My father fancied a return trip, I liked sailing aboard the Lady Louise so was happy to come along with him. You must remember, Inspector, that back then the Lady Louise was my father’s boat, not mine, and he made all those sort of decisions. I was, quite literally, just along for the ride, but it was a ride I very much enjoyed, which is why I kept the boat after my father died.”

Montgomery changed tack again.

“How well do you remember the voyage, Senator? In particular, how well do you remember the crew members?”

“Not very well at all, to be honest. I had to refer to my father’s logbook before this meeting to refresh my memory. Had I not done so, I’m afraid that my memory would have been pretty hazy. It was, after all, over forty years ago. Until I looked at the log I could not have even called to mind the names of the crew members. It was reading about the trip that brought it all back to me.”

82

“Might we see the logbook, sir?”

“Yes, of course. I have it with me.”

He reached down into his briefcase and withdrew a leather bound book of roughly A4 size and a little over an inch thick, bound in leather or imitation leather and clearly fairly old and well used.

He slid it over the table to Montgomery.

“That’s the relevant book – it’s one of a number of volumes, of course. It covers the years nineteen seventy to nineteen seventy-four. I call it a logbook, but it is really a sort of diary. As a private vessel, the Lady Louise isn’t obligated to keep the sort of log that a commercial vessel must, but my father was always a meticulous man and kept that book in quite a bit of detail. I must admit that my own efforts on subsequent years haven’t been so detailed. Oh, you’ll see that I have left a bookmark in the pages that record our nineteen seventy-two trip.”

Montgomery opened the book at the tagged page. As Hammond had said, it was really a diary more than anything else, and he read the entries for June nineteen seventy-two with interest. They were disappointing. The names of the crew members were noted, as were the dates the vessel had spent in harbour at Brodick. Regarding Luke Holsten’s failure to return with the rest of them, the only comment was ‘Holsten not returning’. No mention was made of any possible reason.

He looked across at Hammond.

“Might I hold onto this for a while, please, sir? I’d like to see if I can glean anything from it.”

“By all means, Inspector, but you will return it when you have finished perusing it, won’t you? It does have some sentimental value to me, as well as the fact that the boat’s records would be incomplete without it.”

“Of course, sir.”

And that was about it. A few more pleasantries were exchanged but Montgomery was glumly aware that the chanced of shaking Hammond out of his comfort zone was just about non-existent. He and ACC Blair were booked into a nearby hotel, with their flight back to Glasgow, from Washington, via Newark, New Jersey and thence to Glasgow. It would take much of the day, but at least Blair had, thankfully, baulked at the idea of making tracks immediately after the interview with Hammond and taking the overnight flight. Montgomery was still suffering jet lag from the flight to the States; the thought of a double dose did not appeal at all.

In his hotel room, Montgomery leafed through Hammond’s logbook – or more correctly, Hammond Senior’s logbook. He found nothing of interest, but to be honest, he could hardly have expected the Senator to cough up the book if there had been anything incriminating in it. He could have claimed that no record of the time existed, and nobody could have gainsaid him.

So what now? As far as he could see the investigation into Luke Holsten’s murder was effectively over before it had scarcely begun, but given the time that had elapsed since the luckless man’s demise, what more could one expect?

He tossed the book onto the bed and ran through his thinking about the Senator. Everything that he knew about the man made him feel that there was something deep down within the man that was evil. He revisited his theory of what had happened forty plus years earlier.

It had started with the visit to Arran of the Gregorys. Why had they gone to Arran? Had it been a specific destination, or part of a wider itinerary? This long after the event, nobody knew. However, whatever the cause of their presence, they had discovered what had eventually turned out to be a piece of metal from flight four seven three. Had they know what her cargo had been? Alex Gregory had been the co-founder, with Hammond senior, of Hammond Tools. Surely what the one had known, so had the other? On the other hand, at the time the Gregorys had been quite open, and seemingly fairly disinterested in what they had found. Hammond must surely have known about the gold aboard flight four seven three, so, equally, so must have Alex Gregory. In that case, why mention what he and his wife had stumbled upon – the answer, surely, was that he did not realise just what the significance was of that piece of metal.

That discovery had set in motion the whole train of events. The Hammonds had visited Arran the next year, and again in nineteen seventy-two. Montgomery stopped at that point. Something that nobody had paid much attention to so far – why had the Hammonds visited Arran twice? Surely once would have been enough? OK, the gold was a fair weight – over six hundred pounds of it, but 83

with two of them – there had only been mention of the father and son visiting Douglas McFee, not any of the crew members – they could have carried away, say, thirty pounds each in rucksacks – so a total of five visits to wherever the gold had been lying. Why would they have needed to come back for a second visit?

Montgomery picked the logbook up again and flicked back through the pages to those relating to the nineteen seventy-one trip. As for the following year, there had been four hired hands. Three of the names were familiar – they were the Palin boys, Harry and Lou and their cousin, Billy Jarvis, the three young men who had died on the roads the year following the nineteen seventy-two visit in two separate traffic accidents. The fourth name, however, was one that had not appeared before –

Scott Nolan. Up until his perusal of Hammond’s logbook, nobody other than the Senator himself had known who had made the nineteen seventy-one trip. Now there was a name to be followed up, hopefully a name belonging to somebody still alive. He put the book down again and as he did so the room telephone rang. Mystified, he picked up the handset.

“Montgomery.”

“Blair here, Chief Inspector. Could you pop along to my room for a minute, please?”

A polite request from an Assistant Chief Constable to a lowly DCI was as good as a Royal Command.

“Right away, sir.”

Less than a minute later Montgomery was knocking on the ACC’s door.

“Come in.”

He entered and, to his surprise, found that his superior was not alone. With his was Assistant Chief of Police and a young woman whom he had not seen before. All three were seated round a small table in the room; scarcely large to start with, the room was now already positively crowded and Montgomery’s entrance made it more so.

“Come and sit, Chief Inspector,” Blair invited, and Montgomery took the fourth, and last, chair at the table.

“Sorry about the crush,” Blair continued, “but when Chief Lakis contacted me I thought that it was as well that we all got together as quickly as possible.”

“Thank you, Hugo,” the American responded. He turned to Montgomery. “Chief Inspector, this,” he indicated the young woman beside him, “is Detective Lieutenant Forrester. Lieutenant Forrester has already been looking at some aspects of events surrounding Senator Hammond, but I felt it best if we waited until after our meeting with him before adding her findings to the investigation, because I’ll tell you right away that something about the Senator doesn’t ring true with me. I’ve spent twenty-five year on the force, been a detective myself for much of them, and if that man is straight and true, I’ll just take my pension and ride into the sunset tomorrow.”

Montgomery blinked in surprise; perhaps the investigation in the Holsten murder wasn’t totally dead after all. Lakis turned back to the young woman.

“Lieutenant, fill our Scottish friends in with what you have found so far.”

Helen Forrester gazed at the two Scots, took a deep breath, and plunged into her story.

Montgomery listened with growing astonishment as the tale unfolded; at last she was finished and he and Blair looked at each other. Blair nodded slightly at him and Montgomery shook his head slowly.

“It almost beggars belief,” he started, “but it rings true, doesn’t it? Thing is that so far we’ve found nothing that gives us any proof against Senator Hammond, but there is one possible new lead.” He sensed the sudden air of expectation in the room. “Looking at that logbook I have borrowed from him, I looked at the nineteen seventy-one voyage the Lady Louise made. The three men who accompanied him in seventy-two, and who returned to the States with were there that time as well –

and there was a fourth man – a Scott Nolan. I had a quick search through the rest of the book and can’t find his name appearing anywhere else, so it might be worthwhile trying to find him and seeing if he can add anything to what we know.”

“We’ll get onto that, Chief Inspector,” the young woman replied. Looking at her, Montgomery was mildly surprised at her youth; she couldn’t be more than in her early thirties, and a Lieutenant in the Washington MPD was the equivalent of an Inspector in a British force. Anxious to avoid any 84

protocol gaffes, he had looked up the department’s rank structure before leaving Scotland. His own equivalent as a DCI would have been a Captain; an Inspector in the Washington force would be the equal of a British Superintendent. Clearly Lieutenant Forrester must be a high flyer in the force.

There was nothing else to cover and the meeting broke up, but at least there was now something that could be chased up.

*********

The next day, whilst Blair and Montgomery were winging their way back to Glasgow, Helen started a search for Scott Nolan, setting one of her junior detectives, Ken Dougan, onto the task. A little under two hours later he was back in her office.

“I’ve tracked down quite a few possibles, Lieutenant, and one in particular looks promising. There is a Scott Nolan living not more than five miles or so inland from where Senator Hammond’s boat is usually moored. Thing is – the man was born just a mile or two from where he now lives, but left the area in nineteen seventy-one, right after the date you gave me for the return of the Senator’s boat. Inland Revenue Service records show him having mover around in the south for a year or so, then coming back to the north-east after a couple of years, then finally working in Rhode Island for the last fifteen years before he retired just a couple of years ago and returned to his old habitat –

and from the names of his employers over the years, it looks as though just about every job he ever held had something to do with the sea. Could all be coincidence, of course, but he’s certainly the best fit I’ve found so far. What’s more, he lives just this side of the state line, so he’s in our jurisdiction.”

Helen reviewed what the young man had told her and quickly came to her decision.

“Sounds worth a visit – right, give the man a ring and tell him – politely – that we’d like to see him.

You’ve done the digging, so you come with me.”

As Dougan withdrew, Helen wondered if, at long last, it might be possible to pin something on the slippery Senior Senator for Maryland.

********

It had been a long, careful stalk, but now we were at its end. Over three hours earlier I had received a phone call from Jamie Henderson at the Brodick police station. A tourist’s car had been in collision with a large deer, which, apparently badly injured, had limped away whilst the shaken tourist and his wife and two children had phoned in the news to the police. It had happened only half a mile or so south of my place, so Jamie had asked me to find the beast and, if it was truly badly injured, to put it out of its misery. In turn, I had called up Alex McFee; assuming that I could find the deer and had to shoot it, we would need to transport the remains off the hillside and Alex’s tractor, the one we had used to move his dead cow all those months ago, was probably going to be needed. He agreed to accompany me on the stalk so that, in the event that the tractor was needed, he would know where to come.

The stalk had taken so long because we had needed to circle well away from where the accident had happened so that the fresh breeze was in our faces and therefore would not carry our scent to the animal.

In the event it was an anti-climax. We had found the stag and, examining him through binoculars, I saw that he was moving easily. Red deer are tough animals, especially big stags like this one, and it was by no means the first time that one hit by a car had proven to be little the worse for wear.

Certainly I could not justify shooting this animal and I apologised to Alex for wasting his time.

“Och, don’t worry, David, it’s been a grand day for not being indoors struggling with government form-filling!”

We had been lying on our stomachs, hidden from the stag by a tiny rise in the ground and as we got to our feet he realised our presence and was off in a flash, confirming my belief that there was nothing seriously wrong with him at all.

I slung my rifle over my shoulder and we turned away from the line we had been taking and started to walk downhill, chatting idly as we did so. From where we were to the road was nearly a mile and we took thing easy, enjoying the fresh air and mild sunshine.

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As we did so I phoned Jamie Henderson and told him that there was no need to worry about the stag

– it was OK and now roaming free again, apparently none the worse for its encounter with the tourist family and their car.

“Ah, that’s good to hear. Thanks, David. I’ll let the family know – apparently the children were virtually hysterical over it all, poor wee bairns.”

Glad to have been the bearer of good tidings for once, I parted from Alex as we neared the road and quarter of an hour later I was home and brewing a cup of tea when I realised that I hadn’t checked my E-mails since early that morning and it was now gone eight in the evening.

There were several, but only one of any interest. It was from Jane Cobden updating me on what was happening on her side of the Atlantic and how her friend, the policewoman Helen Forrester, was chasing up a possible lead in the mystery of the gold and how Helen had met the same Scottish DCI, Iain Montgomery, who had spoken with me about the murder of Luke Holsten. It all seemed a million miles away from stalking a stag on an Arran hillside and I doubted if I would ever be involved with the matter again.

******

Senator Hammond was enjoying a pre-dinner martini when his phone rang. He recognised the distinctive ring tone as the one he had set up on the instrument to identify a call coming from his chief of staff, Morton Lewis, on his mobile phone, so, making his apologies to his wife with a muttered ‘business call’, he went into his study to take it.

“Morton, what’s up? Why a call this evening?”

“Something has just come up. I didn’t want to wait to talk about it in the office tomorrow, and it’s not something to talk about over the phone.”

Hammond sighed inwardly; Lewis and his paranoia!

“Where are you?”

“I’m parked a hundred yards down the road from you. Come and meet me.”

“OK, Morton, but my wife isn’t going to be happy if the dinner is spoiled.”

A few minutes later he opened the passenger door of Lewis’ big BMW sedan and settled into the luxurious leather seat.

“So, what’s up that’s important enough to keep me from my dinner?”

“They’ve found Scott Nolan.”

The news was not welcome; Hammond felt as though he had been punched in the belly.

“I thought that the man had disappeared totally?”

“Well we couldn’t find him when you asked if he was still alive back when you decided to run for the Senate – but back then we didn’t have the resources we have now – and nothing like the resources that the police can bring to bear now.”

“So, what do we know?”

“Only that the police have tracked him down. My contact doesn’t have an address or anything for him, and by tomorrow I would imagine that the police will be talking to him. Now – you’ve never come clean over Nolan, not completely. How much does he know?”

Hammond hesitated before responding.

“Not everything – but enough to be a worry. He was with my father and me on the seventy-one trip and helped prepare the way for getting to the gold, but he didn’t actually know that it was gold that we were after, only that it was something valuable and something which didn’t belong to us – that in effect we intended to steal it. The other three – the two Palin brothers and Jarvis – had no qualms about what we intended to do, but I started to have doubts about Nolan on the trip back. The other three were full of what they expected to get as their share when we went back in seventy-two, but Nolan seemed too quiet for my liking. We weren’t able to do anything about him, though. As soon as we got home he disappeared. I tried to find him at the time – hired a private detective – but to no avail, and after a while my father said that we could forget the man – and until now it looked as though he was right, for we never heard another word about, nor from, Nolan from that day to this. I thought that he must have died or gone far away long ago.”

Lewis shook his head.

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“Obviously not. So, what now?”

“Damn it, Morton – that’s what I pay you to sort out.”

“And by sorting out – you mean what, precisely?”

“I don’t bloody know. Whatever it takes – but make sure that Nolan doesn’t talk to the police, or if he already has done that he isn’t around to testify if things should ever come to that.”

Lewis nodded his head slowly.

“OK, Graham, I’ll see what can be arranged. One thing, by the way, that I’ve never understood and you’ve never said. Why did you and your father go back in seventy-two? Why weren’t you able to sort it all out first time?”

Hammond laughed, but it was a laugh without a trace of humour to it.

“It was too bloody silly for words. In seventy-one we sailed into Brodick on the twenty-seventh of June. We had a good idea where we would find the gold from what Gregory had told my father the previous year, and sure enough, three days later, on the thirtieth, we found it. It was just my father and myself doing the searching for the first two days– he didn’t trust the crew members enough to have them in on the search initially, or we’d have found it more quickly and everything would have been sorted out that year, but it wasn’t to be. On the third day, with so much of the hillside still to search, he decided to bring the crew members along as well to speed things up, and it’s just as well that he did. When Alex Gregory and his wife had found that chunk of metal the previous year, Alex recognised it for what it was straight away. He knew about flight four seven three from my father and it was idle curiosity about that flight that led him to include a few days on Arran in their holiday that year. He actually found the gold – but there was nothing that he could do about moving it by himself, and he didn’t trust his wife to keep her mouth shut. It fact it was his wife who nearly blew it for us by talking about what they had found – the piece of airplane metal that is, not the gold, for Alex had found that by himself and very wisely didn’t tell her about it.”

“How come he found the gold but couldn’t do anything about it?”

“It was in a metal container, a container that had broken clear of the airplane when it hit the ridge and had gone crashing down the hillside until it ended up in a cleft in the rocks. Remember, this was forty-three. There was a war on. The USAAF search hadn’t found any evidence of flight four seven three having come down on land, so it was assumed that it had overflown the island and ended up in the sea between Arran and the mainland. As a result, nobody searched the area –

nobody had any reason to – and vegetation grew over the case, which was quite small but very heavy. Alex, however, had a reason to go looking – and he struck lucky.

“Ideally, he would have come with us in seventy-one, but he was laid up with a broken leg, the result of a traffic accident, so couldn’t come, so my father had to rely on Alex’s description of where he had found the gold. What we didn’t realise was that he and Martha had disturbed that piece of metal when they found it, and the gales the following winter had moved it well away from where it had been.

“That’s why we had to ask around before we rediscovered it, and even then, of course, it was nowhere near the cleft containing the gold. As I said, we didn’t find it until the thirtieth. The next day we were all set to go back for it – but it was the first of July, and on the first of July the culling season for red deer stags opens – and that year there was to be a particularly heavy cull of the beasts. As a result, the hill was crawling with locals and was likely to be for several days at least.

There was no way we could open up that case and take away the gold without a very good chance of some nosy bastard wondering what we were up to, so we went home, after making sure that the case was even more securely hidden than it had been originally. In seventy-two we took good care to arrive well before the culling season started and were able to break open the case – it wasn’t a safe or anything, just an ordinary metal box – and move the gold to the Lady Louise. With six of us to carry it away in rucksacks, we did it in just two days. Then, to make it look good, we stayed around for a couple of more days before sailing away.”

“What happened to Holsten?”

The Senator’s face became a mask of non-communication, his eyes staring blankly at his chief of staff.

“I have no idea,” he said in a neutral tone that matched his blank expression.

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“And the others, the Gregorys themselves, the Palin brothers, Jarvis?”

If possible, Hammond’s expression became even stonier.

“Are you implying anything, Morton?”

Lewis looked his employer straight in the eye.

“No, I’m not – but depending on what Nolan tells the police, others might well do so.”

Hammond shrugged dismissively.

“Let them. Nobody can prove who killed Holsten, the others died in tragic road accidents. End of story.”

I certainly hope so, Lewis thought to himself, but ventured no spoken comment. Instead, he reverted to the question of Scott Nolan.

“So, I’ll see what can be done about Nolan.”

“Right – better get on with it.”

As he climbed out of his chief of staff’s car, Hammond started to wonder uneasily about Lewis.

They had been together for a long time and Hammond had relied strongly upon the man, but he was now beginning to wonder just how long their relationship could last if Nolan proved to be a problem. He would have been more worried still had he known that every word of their conversation had been recorded by a device that Lewis had installed in his car for that express purpose.

Chapter Twelve – Scott Nolan’s story

Ken Dougan eased the unmarked police car to a halt outside a small, well maintained bungalow that was the current address of Scott Nolan, and he and Helen Forrester walked up the short drive where he rang the front door bell.

The summons was answered by a sturdily built man who, although no more than five feet six or seven tall, exuded an air of strength and confidence.

Helen smiled at him.

“Mr. Nolan?”

He regarded her for a moment before replying.

“That’s me.”

“Good morning, sir. I’m Detective Lieutenant Helen Forrester and this is my colleague Detective Dougan who spoke to you on the pone yesterday. May we come in and talk with you?”

The stern face broke into a welcoming smile as Nolan stepped back from the door.

“Yes, of course. Come in.”

He ushered them into a lounge that ran the entire depth of the house, with windows at each end looking out, respectively, to the street in which they had parked, and a small area of lawn at the back. He gestured to them to be seated on a black leather settee which faced the rear window and placed himself in a matching arm chair to one side so that all three of them could look at each other without straining.

“So, how can I help you, Lieutenant?”

Before replying, Helen took a better look at their host now that he was seated in the full light from the window. He was, she knew, sixty-eight years old, but obvious good health and a lack of surplus fat meant that he looked a good bit younger. His head was completely bald and was sun-tanned to the colour of mahogany. Heavy brows overhung deep-set blue eyes surrounded by a multitude of small wrinkles caused, no doubt, by squinting into the far horizons at sea, for his employment record held by the IRS showed a preponderance of maritime employment in his history. His hands, resting on the arms of his chair, were calloused, scarred and powerful looking, again bearing evidence to his former profession, whilst his short sleeved shirt revealed muscular arms that would not have looked out of place on a professional boxer or weight lifter. Altogether, Scott Nolan looked a man, despite his age, who was not to be trifled with. She began her tale.

“Mr. Nolan, we are looking into the events surrounding a couple of trips made by the motor yacht Lady Louise back in nineteen seventy-one, when I believe that you were a member of the crew, and 88

nineteen seventy-two when I understand that you weren’t. What can you tell us about that first journey?”

Nolan regarded her steadily.

“That’s a long time ago, Lieutenant, so I suppose it must be something important to get the police involved so long after the event.”

She nodded her head.

“Yes, Mr. Nolan, we do see it as important.”

“Right. Well, back in seventy-one I was twenty-five years old. I’d done a fair amount of crewing by then, both motor vessels and sailing ones, and I like to think that local owners saw me as competent and trustworthy. I hadn’t crewed for the Hammonds before, but when they apparently suddenly found themselves in urgent need of an extra crewman because someone they had been expecting to crew had to pull out at the last moment, I wasn’t surprised – and quite gratified – that they offered me the berth. The money was good – the Hammonds were well known in the area as being wealthy

– and a voyage of about three weeks offered a good sum compared to a few days here and a few days there which was all that I, and lots like me, were getting at the time.

“The voyage to Scotland was straightforward enough. At the time I thought that it was just a pleasure cruise, if a bit of an unusual one. I’d known about the Lady Louise just about all my adult life – she’d been around since the mid-sixties – and she’d never been away from her moorings for more than a week or so before, so this was a long trip by the Hammonds’ standards. However, that was up to them, and I welcomed the chance of the longer trip and the extra money – who wouldn’t?

Once we got to Scotland they explained the purpose of the voyage. Apparently there was a lot of money at stake – a case containing gold coins which had been lost during the war as the result of an airplane crash and which they wanted to recover for the reward – or so they said. Personally, I didn’t believe that for one moment. The was had been finished for nearly forty years. If something had been lost that long ago anyone setting out to find it would most probably be looking to keep it, but I didn’t say anything. After nearly a week’s sailing with the Hammonds, I had decided that father and son were men that I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of – there was just something about them that made you uneasy in their presence.

“We berthed at a small port called Brodick, which wasn’t on the mainland at all, but on a small off shore island called Arran. The Hammonds booked into a local small hotel. Leaving the four of us –

that’s the Palin brothers, Harry and Lou, Billy Jarvis and myself, to sleep on board. It gave the four of us a bit more room, but I was a bit surprised that the Hammonds should have berthed ashore when their accommodation on the yacht was pretty good, still –it was their money.

“The next day we started to look for the case; according to the Hammonds its location had been marked by a piece of metal from the crash. They were wrong. It took us nearly all day to find what seemed to be the right piece of metal, but it was just lying on the hillside nowhere near what the Hammonds were expecting – a cleft in the rock covered up by small rocks and stones. The Hammonds left us to make our own way back to the boat whilst they sought out one of the locals who they thought might help.

“As a result we resumed the search the next day, but although it looked small enough on the map, the hill side was quite big and absolutely riddled with small clefts, hollows and the like – hundreds of them.

“It took us four days to find what we were looking for, and even then it wasn’t until late in the evening when even that far north with its late sunset, the light was going. Henry Hammond – that was the father of course, and the guy in charge, decided it was too late to try and do anything that evening, but that the next day we’d come back, break the case open, and transport its contents back to the yacht. But it didn’t happen. What we hadn’t realised was that the next day, the first of July, was the start of culling stags on the island, so, by local standards, it was alive with men with rifles.

We weren’t worried about the rifles – these were men who undertook the cull every year, not a host of clueless amateurs as we see here at the start of the deer hunting season and who are a greater threat to themselves and other hunters than they are to the deer, but it was the number of men around – it only wanted some busybody to wonder what we, half a dozen Yanks, were up to, to wreck everything.

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“Understandably, the Hammonds, and especially the old man, were furious, but there was nothing that they could do. Henry Hammond did some checking and found out that it could be a couple of weeks or even more before the cull was over, so he decided that the only thing to be done was to make sure that the site was as secure as possible and return the following year.

“On the voyage home I began to have grave doubts about the Hammonds. It wasn’t anything that they did, or even what they said, but I just had this feeling that there was a lot of money involved in this exercise and I couldn’t see the two of them wanting to share it. They were rich and well connected, whereas I was sure that we four were little better than drifters in their eyes. They had talked about returning in seventy-two and I gave the best impression that I could of someone keen to return with them, but in fact I had already made up my mind that I was going to get as far away from them as I could as soon as we docked back in the States.

“Sure enough, once we had docked and been paid, I took the next bus out of town. I’d been renting a room in a small boarding house, and I gave the woman who ran it to understand that I was headed for Chicago. In fact, I went to Florida, where I had a cousin who lived in Orlando. He and his wife put me up for a couple of months and then I moved on again. Can’t say I took to the climate down there, so after a couple of stops, each for a month or two, I came back to the north-east, but well away from Washington. Finally I settled in Rhode Island, first working for a guy who ran a small tourist fishing service, just the one boat, then taking over when Ray – that’s Ray Eastmond –

decided it was time for him to retire – that was about ten years ago. Finally, I retired myself. The business did pretty well over the years, so I decided to come back to my old area. After all, it was forty years and more since I’d had anything to do with the Hammonds, and I’d learnt that the old man had died and that the son was now a US Senator, so I decided I had nothing to worry about.”

You don’t know the half of it, Helen thought to herself.

“So you never kept in touch with anyone here until you returned?”

He nodded.

“That’s right, Lieutenant.”

“Well, I have some news for you. Back in seventy-two, there were seven people who had been associated with the efforts of the Hammonds to recover that gold. That’s Mr. and Mrs. Gregory –

Mr. Gregory was the business partner of Hammond senior, and it was he who had actually discovered the gold in seventy and was supposed to be on the Lady Louise in seventy-one but had to cry off at the last moment due to getting injured in an accident. There were the Palin brothers and Billy Jarvis, Luke Holsten who took your berth for the second trip, and, of course, yourself. By the middle of nineteen seventy-three, you were the only one left alive. The Gregorys were killed in a road accident, as were the Palin boys and Billy Jarvis. Luke Holsten simply disappeared until his body was discovered earlier this year on the Isle of Arran. The other deaths may have been genuine accidents, although I personally doubt it – they were just too convenient for the Hammonds – but Holsten was definitely murdered – he was shot.”

Nolan looked at her in astonishment.

“Are you saying that the Hammonds were responsible?”

“No, I can’t say that – nothing to link them to the road accident deaths, and only the fact that Holsten had been a crew member on their boat to tie them to him – but the whole thing stinks.

Stinks to high heaven.”

Helen reflected that she shouldn’t really be saying such things to a member of the public, but the whole thing was so frustrating that she couldn’t help herself. Sadly, nothing that Nolan had told her helped in any way to build a case against Hammond. There was, however, something else to consider. Now that Nolan had been found, was there any chance of him being at risk? He was, after all, the only surviving link to the events on Arran back in the seventies. Might the Senator want to silence him to ensure that anything that he might know could never come to a courtroom? She decided to broach the subject with the man.

“Mr. Nolan, there is one thing that I think that you should bear in mind. In view of what happened to those others, it might be a wise precaution to keep on the lookout for any strangers around – just in case.”

He frowned.

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“Do you think I may be in danger?”

“I honestly don’t know. It seems unlikely after all this time, but it always pays to be careful, doesn’t it?”

Nolan frowned again.

“Yes, I suppose that it does. But on the other hand, you found me, but you’re the police. Hammond doesn’t have your sort of resources, so I can’t see that he can know about me.”

Helen didn’t disillusion the man, but she was uncomfortably aware that someone like the Senator –

or more probably one of his staff – would almost certainly have one or more contacts in the police department, contacts who would ensure that he learnt of anything that might affect his interests. She had one more question to ask of Nolan.

“Mr. Nolan, did you ever see any sign of anybody on board the Lady Louise having a gun?”

“Don’t know about the others, but Graham Hammond certainly had a pistol – a Colt thirty-eight, one of their short barrelled revolvers. He was cleaning it in the main cabin one evening and I asked him if he was happy with it as I was thinking of getting a pistol myself – I lived in a fairly rough area at the time, and this was before the gun laws around here became so restrictive. He said he’d never had to fire it other than for a bit of practice to make sure he knew how to use it, but that he was satisfied with it.”

“You’re sure that it was a Colt?”

“Oh yes – you know that Colt pistols have this little sort of medallion of a prancing horse on the grips? I saw that plain as day.”

That at least was a bit of help. Helen knew from the information that they had received from the Scottish police that the two bullets recovered from Luke Holsten’s body showed that they could well have been fired from a Colt weapon – the rifling marks on the bullets indicated a gun which had been rifled anti-clockwise. Colt weren’t the only manufacturers producing pistols in which the bullet was spinning in an anti-clockwise direction as it left the barrel, but at least it eliminated all those manufacturers, such as Smith and Wesson, the other big American gun manufacturer, in which the bullet was spun in the opposite direction – and Graham Hammond had owned a Colt revolver at the appropriate time. It wasn’t remotely enough to build a case on, but it was a small piece of helpful evidence in a case woefully lacking in such.

The two detectives took their leave of Nolan and he watched from his window as they drove away.

Their news had shaken him more than he had liked to admit, especially in front of a woman, even if that woman was a senior police detective, and he wondered uneasily what he should do. As he had said to them, there had been something about the Hammonds that had worried him at the time – no, he thought angrily, be honest with yourself – there had been something about them that had actually scared him. That was especially true of the son, Graham, who had an air of menace about him all the time. It was little things – a disproportionate anger over anything, no matter how insignificant, that didn’t go exactly as he wanted. It had shown when he had asked Graham about the pistol. The man’s actual words had been that he hadn’t needed to use it in earnest yet, but the way in which he had said those words had left Nolan with the uneasy impression that Graham Hammond would have no hesitation in using that weapon if he thought it necessary. He had no difficulty in imaging Hammond using that gun on Luke Holsten if the man, whom Nolan had met once or twice back then but had never really known well, had somehow seriously crossed him.

*********

Morton Lewis sat in his office. It was late; he was the only one left in the suite of offices allocated to the senior Senator for Maryland, and he felt the need for solitude as he yet again went over in his mind his plans for the near future. By far the most essential element of them was to ensure that he managed to emerge from this potential mess with nobody able to point the finger of accusation at him. It was for this reason that he had finally decided, with the greatest reluctance, that he would have to take the necessary actions himself. With the death of Amos Keller he had lost a trusted contact. There were, he was fully aware, many men with the ability to take Keller’s place, but they were men that he had not used in the past and who, in consequence, he was unwilling to trust at this stage of the proceedings, a stage which, if not handled correctly, could lead to his ruin.

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After over an hour spent in mentally reviewing every aspect of his plans he was at last satisfied that he would be leaving nothing to chance and that they were as fool proof as it was humanly possible to make them. They were, he admitted to himself, drastic, but so was the situation.

**********

Since the visit from the two detectives, Scott Nolan had mulled over what he had been told. The events that linked him to Graham Hammond, now a US Senator, but then a young man of uncertain temper and one apparently totally self-centred, were over forty years in the past, but could they be ignored?

His immediate reaction had been that he had nothing, or virtually nothing, to worry about. Now he was less certain. Forty plus years might have led to Graham Hammond’s character mellowing – but then again they might not have. It was for that reason that he had hunted through the old trunk in which reposed a variety of items from his past and which he had so far not felt the need to unpack in the two years plus that he had lived at his present home. Right at the bottom of the trunk, beneath a couple of heavy sweaters too decrepit to be worn for anything other than working on the boat which had been his livelihood, was a bundled up shape in a slightly oily rag.

He lifted it out from its resting place and unwound the rag. There in his hand was now the pistol that he had bought all those years ago. It weighed heavily in his grasp. It was a revolver, similar to that which he had seen Hammond junior cleaning aboard the Lady Louise back in nineteen seventy-one, a Colt ‘Detective Special’, just under seven inches in length and some twenty-one ounces in weight, but at close range a deadly weapon despite its small size. He had bought it in nineteen seventy-one; second hand and already well used, it had cost him just a few dollars and, apart from a couple of shots before parting with his money to make sure that it actually worked, he had never had occasion to fire it. It was unloaded and he rummaged further into the trunk before finding a half full box of ammunition. Bought at the same time as the pistol, he wondered if it would still work.

There was only one way to find out. Uneasily aware that current legislation, passed long after he had bought the Colt, forbad normal citizens of Washington, DC, from carrying a handgun around, he nevertheless wrapped the pistol up again and, together with the box of ammunition, carried it out to his car and secreted both items under the front passenger seat.

His journey to an area of deserted sand dunes on the coast of the Potomac River that he knew was taken with exemplary care, observing every traffic sign to the letter, but at last he reached his destination without incident. He loaded the gun with three rounds taken at random from the box of cartridges, and, stuffing the weapon into his pocket, he walked away from his car and over the nearest dune. It was an unseasonably cold, windy day, with a hint of rain in the air, and he was not surprised to find the area totally empty of life, apart from a few seagulls wheeling overhead.

After one last anxious look around to ensure that he really was unobserved, he pointed the little pistol out across the grey waters of the Potomac and pulled the trigger. The ammunition still worked; the gun kicked in his hand and the noise, considerably louder than he imagined that he remembered, caused the gulls to shriek in unavailing protest. He fired twice more; all three rounds worked perfectly, a tribute to the company that had made them all those years ago.

Satisfied that, if necessary, he now had the means to defend himself, he made, if possible, an even more cautious drive home, where he loaded the pistol once more and put it in the drawer of a small unit next to the front door where it would be easily to hand in the event of an unwelcome visitor. At night, he decided, it would be in the drawer of the bedside cabinet where, again, it would be within easy reach should it be needed.

*******

Jane returned to her apartment, kicked off her shoes at the door, and padded into the kitchen. The fridge contained a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay and she poured herself a large glass of the crisp white wine before turning on the news channel on the TV. Only half aware of what was being broadcast, she took a large gulp of the wine before retreating to the bedroom, stripping off and making her way to the shower to wash away the weariness of a day spent tramping around the 92

corridors of the Capitol building interviewing various members of the Finance Committee, most of whom wished to have nothing to do with her and her story of possible inconsistencies in a procurement programme for the Pentagon.

As the lukewarm water cascaded over her and she rinsed her hair under the spray, she wondered if this was yet another story that would never see the light of day. Like so much that occurred in the nation’s capital, it was of real interest to practically nobody, even though, if her suspicions were correct, it meant that the American tax payer was, yet again, paying through the nose for a programme of dubious merit.

“Does anybody really care?” she wondered to herself.

Her ablutions completed, she dried herself and donned a silk dressing gown and returned to the lounge, the TV, and her wine.

Her mind went back to the affair of flight four seven three. It was nearly a year now since she had first studied the documents that had sent on the trail of a missing airplane and its missing cargo of gold, a trail that had included one certain murder and possibly five more. Like her current story, it looked as though it would never reach a true conclusion. After initial enthusiasm, her editor was now disinterested; the unlikelihood of the story ever being completed had led him to insist that others possible stories must take precedence and Jane had reluctantly complied.

The ringing of her mobile phone interrupted her train of thought; muting the TV, she picked up the phone from the coffee table where she had placed it before she had gone for her shower.

“Jane Cobden.”

She didn’t know it, but she was about to receive news that would reawaken interest in the affair of flight four seven three.

**********

It was three o’clock in the morning, and Graham Hammond, the senior Senator for Maryland, could not sleep. He lay on his back staring at the ceiling, whilst his wife, oblivious of the torment besieging his mind, slept peacefully at his side.

It had all started when that bloody woman reporter had come to see him. Up until that moment he had thought that the events of the nineteen forties, when his maternal grandfather had enriched himself by skimming off funds intended for diplomatic bribes in the Middle East, and the events of the seventies, when he and his father had enriched themselves still further by what many would see as grave robbing and all would see as defrauding the US government.

Of the two sets of circumstance, by far the more serious was that of the gold that he and his father had appropriated. It wasn’t just the theft itself, but the actions that he had been driven to take to keep that theft secret.

Those actions had returned to haunt his dreams at an increasing rate, until now scarcely a night went by that did not result in him waking in the small hours, totally unable to get back to sleep, whilst the dead marched through his mind’s eye.

It had all started to go wrong in nineteen seventy-one, although that fact took time to become apparent. Alex Gregory had, the previous year, stumbled upon the case containing the gold lost when flight four seven three had crashed on that Scottish hillside, only to then disappear under the surface of some insignificant patch of water. Alex had reported what he had found to Hammond’s father, Henry Hammond and suggested that they return to the island and lift the gold for themselves.

Henry hadn’t hesitated for a moment. The company that he and Gregory had founded was beginning to experience financial difficulties and unless drastic action was taken would soon no longer be in a position to continue to fund the life style that the Hammonds and Gregorys had become accustomed to.

It should have been so simple. The Hammonds, plus Alex Gregory would sail to Arran and take the gold away. There were, however, practical problems. The three of them were too few to crew the big yacht for a journey across the Atlantic; crew would have to be hired, and it was essential that those crew members would keep quiet about what went on. Three suitable young men had been found, two brothers, Harry and Lou Palin and their cousin Billy Jarvis. All three were experienced 93

crewmen, all three were hard up, all three seemed reliable, above all, all three seemed less than morally scrupulous. Alex Gregory, Henry Hammond, and Graham himself had worked out a way of retrieving the gold which would minimise the amount seen by the crew members, leaving them regarding the payments they received as generous and not an insignificant reward tempting them to press for more.

It would have worked, but for Gregory somehow managing to involve himself in a minor traffic accident which had left him with a broken leg and unable to travel for at least three months or so.

To delay that long would have meant crossing the Atlantic in the autumn, with the increased chances of bad weather, so Henry Hammond had found a fourth crew man at short notice. That man, Scott Nolan, had seemed suitable, but had proved to be less malleable than the other three.

Even that probably wouldn’t have been a problem but for the fact that, without Gregory in the team, it had taken longer to find the cached gold than would otherwise have been the case. Then the idiotic timing; the very day after the location of the gold had been discovered, the stag stalking season had started and there was too great a risk of being discovered in their activities, so the Lady Louise had sailed away with those aboard empty handed.

Once they returned home, Nolan had promptly disappeared, clearly wishing to have no further part in what he presumably feared would be a crime.

A year had gone by, a year in which Gregory had developed cold feet and made it clear that he wanted no further part in securing the gold. The Hammonds had persuaded him to keep his mouth shut about its existence, something to which he had agreed with clear reluctance.

Then there had been the following year, nineteen seventy-two. Gregory was still unwilling to participate, Nolan was off the scene – not that the Hammonds would have trusted him anyway – so an additional man was needed. They thought that they had the ideal replacement; Harry Cowell was forty years old with a lot of experience crewing both motor and sailing vessels and was known to, and vouched for by, the Palin brothers and Russell – but the idiot had got into a fight in a bar two nights before they due to sail and suffered a broken arm in the process. That had resulted in the hiring of Luke Holsten – the worst possible decision that they could have made. Holsten had proven too honest for his own good. When he had realised exactly the type of undertaking that he had joined, he made no secret of the fact that if the Hammonds didn’t report the discovery of the gold to the US authorities, then he would. As a result, he had to go. Hammond could still see the disbelief on the other man’s face as the first of the bullets hit him. The two of them had been alone on the hillside, and Holsten’s disappearance had been explained to the other three as a result of him not wishing to return to his family because of matrimonial problems. Whether or not the tale was believed, the Hammonds couldn’t be sure – so those three had to go as well.

Chronologically, however, it was the Gregorys who posed the first problem once the Lady Louise was back at her berth. Despite having chickened out of helping, Gregory had demanded a substantial cut of the profits. Neither Hammond saw any reason to accommodate him and the result had been an ambush on an isolated road, where Graham Hammond had followed the Gregorys’ auto and rammed it off the road down a steep, rocky incline.

Once that step had been taken, father and son hardened their hearts. Billy Jarvis was a biker and it was child’s play to find a deserted road and force him off it to his death.

The Palin brothers were more difficult, but at last an opportunity presented itself and they too, plunged down a hillside to their dooms.

Now the Hammonds had nobody left to worry about and for forty years that was the case. But now?

He wondered; that intern had known too much – but in arranging for his demise at Hammond’s unstated but implicit need, Lewis was now in a position, should he so wish, to bring down the Senator at any moment.

He wondered if he should be looking to do anything about Lewis. If it was needed, could he still do it? It was more than forty years since he had last had the need to get his own hands dirty, but some skills, he tried to reassure himself, are with you forever.

At last accepting that sleep was beyond him, he rose from the bed, careful not to disturb his peacefully sleeping wife and, slipping on a robe, padded downstairs to the kitchen where he fixed 94

himself a cup of coffee. He took it into his study and sat down at the desk and fired up his computer.

As he had been making the coffee a thought had come to him. What if Lewis had stashed away some sort of incriminating evidence against him in recognition that no partnership, no matter how mutually beneficial, can be guaranteed to last forever? Perhaps moving against Lewis would be a very big mistake. Plagued by indecision, he idly flicked through his E-mails, finding nothing requiring immediate attention, before bringing up a news website. The usual, he thought dispiritedly, a reflection of a world in which the news was usually bad, often very bad. Then an item of local news caught his attention.

*********

Jane stirred uneasily in the bed, unsure of where she was. Something told her that she wasn’t at home, but where was she? She tried to move and realised that movement was hampered by something attached to her arm and that there was some sort of mask over her face., but not one which covered her eyes, so her sight wasn’t impaired, although she realised that she couldn’t focus properly. She was lying on her back and there was a white ceiling above her and, just in her blurred peripheral vision, some sort of stand, from which a tube led down to her left arm; it was the tube which was hampering her movement.

She contemplated attempting to sit up but realised that she was too weak to attempt it.

What had happened to her?

There was a rustle of clothing as somebody moved close to her and bent over her. Her blurred vision couldn’t make out the features, so she had no idea who it might be, but whoever the person was she, for Jane somehow sensed that it was a woman, was wearing what seemed to be a uniform of some sort.

“Jane, can you hear me?” The voice was disembodied but understandable and confirmed Jane’s assumption that the person was female. She made a muttered response, the words difficult to articulate as she tried to answer in the affirmative.

“Jane, I’m Nurse Howard. You mustn’t try to move or you’ll hurt yourself. Tell me, are you in any pain?”

Jane thought about the question. Was she in pain? She decided on her response.

“No.” She managed to say, half croak, half whisper. There was something else that she had to say to this person and she slowly formed the words.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in the George Washington Hospital.”

Her mind was slowly clearing, and her words were beginning to be formed more easily.

“Hospital? Why, what happened?”

“You were hit by an auto whilst you were crossing a road. You’ve had a lucky escape, but you’ll be alright.”

As the words were spoken a sudden bolt of agonising pain shot through Jane’s body, causing her to moan aloud. The nurse straightened up and did something to the stand beside the bed.

“Don’t worry, Jane, the pain will soon go.”

She was right; Jane felt the pain slowly start to drain away, but as it did so she drifted into a state of unconsciousness.

She was unaware, when she next came round, of how long she had been unconscious, but the room was in near darkness and she was alone. She remembered what the nurse had told her and lay still, frightened to move in case it cause a repetition of the searing pain that had been just about her last sensation before drifting off. She dozed, this time a natural sleep rather than one induced by the analgesia from the drip to her arm.

She woke again, aware that the room was now brighter, that it had a window and that it was clearly daylight outside. Her eyesight was just about back to normal and she was able to take in her surroundings properly for the first time. She was in a small private room, hooked up to drip into her 95

arm from a stand, but also to some sort of monitor on a second stand, a monitor showing, she assumed, her vital signs on its small black screen with its green lines slowly scrolling across it. As she stirred the door opened and a woman, dressed in a nurse’s uniform, entered and smiled at her.

“Hello, Jane, how are you feeling?”

Jane thought carefully before replying.

“Very tired and very weak – and very thirsty.”

“Well, I can do something about the thirst. No, don’t try to move – I’ll help you.”

The woman cautiously lifted Jane’s head and shoulders and brought a glass of water, from which a drinking straw protruded, to her lips. Jane took a careful sip; her throat was sore, but the water went down easily enough and tasted wonderful.

“What happened to me?”

“Don’t you remember anything?”

“No, I was at work and…”

Her voice trailed away as she realised that she could remember nothing after getting up from her desk to go home. Had she got there?

“You were knocked down in the street just a block away from your office. We think that you were crossing the road to a coffee bar just opposite when you were hit by the auto, which didn’t stop.

You were lucky; somehow you escaped with just broken ribs and some fairly minor internal injuries, but the big worry was that you hit your head very hard on the ground.”

For the first time Jane realised that her head was encircled with a bandage.

“I’m afraid that we had to shave most of your hair off – you had a serious fracture to your skull, but surgery has put that right.”

Jane pondered over what she had just been told.

“How long have I been here?”

“Since Wednesday.”

“And today is?”

“Why, Monday, of course.”

Jane looked at the nurse in puzzlement.

“Five days? I’ve been here for five days?”

“That’s right. Of course, most of that time you’ve been out of it. You were unconscious when you were brought in and were kept in an induced coma after your surgery.”

Jane tried to shake her head; a mistake as a bolt of pain suddenly shot through her head. The pain must have registered on her face, because the nurse immediately did something to the drip again and after a few minutes Jane drifted once more into unconsciousness.

She woke again, once more unaware of what the time, or even what the day, was. This time there was nobody else in the room, and she tried to make sense of what had happened to her. Her conversation with the nurse – what was her name? – Nurse Howard, that was it – had established that she had been in hospital since Wednesday, but now that she applied herself to it, she realised that she was remembering leaving the office not on the Wednesday, but on the Tuesday. Slowly a fuzzy memory started to form. She had received a telephone call at home after work on Tuesday, a call which had suggested that she meet somebody the next day, the next day which would have been the Wednesday, and a meeting after work.

She let herself drift again, pleased that she was beginning to piece some facts together.

The next time that she woke, it was to find a tall, extremely good looking black man, dressed in the inevitable white coat, with the equally inevitable stethoscope hanging round his neck, to mark him out as a doctor of some sort. He was accompanied by a nurse, but a different one. The doctor smiled at her, revealing a row of dazzlingly white teeth.

“Good morning, Jane. I’m Doctor Kelly, and this is Nurse Moore. I’m the surgeon who operated on you last week and I’m pleased to see you looking so much better.”

Jane smiled weakly at him, vaguely aware that he perhaps looked like a younger version of Denzel Washington, for a long time one of her favourite screen actors.

“Hello, doctor. Can you tell me why I’m here?”

96

“You suffered a quite serious head injury when that auto hit you – in fact, it could be said that you were lucky to survive, but I’m glad to be able to tell you that you’ll make a complete recovery, although you are going to have to stay here for a few more days yet.”

Jane was on the verge of telling the man about her returning memories of being invited to a meeting in the coffee shop opposite her office when she decided to keep that information to herself for a while. Then she realised that Doctor Kelly was talking again.

“Now that you are fully conscious, the police would like to talk to you when you feel up to it. What happened was serious; you could very easily have been killed and the driver simply drove off and left you lying in the road.”

She shuddered at what she was being told. Somebody hadn’t cared if she lived or died, but at the back of her mind was the uneasy suspicion that the driver, whoever he had been, had actually wanted her dead.

The doctor was talking again.

“Jane, I want you to clearly understand how your recovery will proceed. It’s going to be quite a long job, I’m afraid, but rest assured, you will make a full recovery in time. First things first. As you know, you have now been in here just on a week and for most of that time you have been in a coma, at first purely the result of the blow to your head when you went down, then after twenty-four ours we put you into a sedation-induced coma to allow the first stage of your recovery to take place and the neurological damage you suffered started to repair itself. Now we’ve stopped the heavy sedation and allowed you to come round at your own pace, but there is a downside, I’m afraid. You are going to suffer very severe headaches from time to time, headaches which will badly affect your vision and be very painful. They won’t last long, just a few minutes at a time, but when they hit they will be totally incapacitating. They will lessen in severity and become less and less frequent as time goes by, but you must be prepared for them. Now, we could prescribe powerful analgesia to combat them, but what we would have to use would have to be very strong and very addictive. It would be a classic case of the cure being worse than the problem. Until the headaches have disappeared totally, you mustn’t even think of driving anywhere – to have such an attack on the freeway could have results that don’t even bear thinking about.”

“How long will that take, doctor?”

“You must look to being unable to drive for at least six months, and I would strongly advise you not to work at all for at least three. If you suffer an attack when you are out and about, you must immediately find somewhere to sit, or better still, lie down until it passes, or you will almost certainly collapse. I have had quite a few patients suffer this sort of injury, with its resultant damage to the brain caused by internal bleeding, and although the numbers aren’t great enough to be statistically significant, as they say, there have been enough cases for me to form a reasonably educated guess as to the prognosis. All of my patients have been totally clear of these attacks in under a year. One young man was actually clear inside four months, but he was exceptional and his injuries weren’t quite as severe as yours.

“Now, you have been off sedation for nearly twenty-four hours and I’m afraid that you can expect to start getting the headaches any time now. We could keep you in for another day or two so that you can come to terms with what they are like in a safe environment, and this is very much what I would like to happen, but obviously it is up to you – what do you say?”

Jane’s mind was in a whirl. The thought of being off work for three months, and unable to drive for six, appalled her, but she could see the sense in what the man was saying.

“I’ll take your advice, doctor, and stay here for a couple of days.”

“Good. I’m sure that you have made the right decision. I will talk to you again tomorrow when we will have an idea as to how things are going with you.”

With that he left the room, leaving Jane alone with Nurse Moore, a cheerful looking woman of about fifty, plump and matronly in appearance, and bustling by nature. She looked at Jane, head tilted to one side.

“I think that we ought to get you up into a chair, Jane. You’ve been in that bed for a week now and your legs are going to be very wobbly indeed for a while, so the sooner we get you moving about a bit, the better.”

97

With Nurse Moore’s gentle assistance, Jane made it to an upright, upholstered chair the other side of the room. As the nurse had predicted, her legs were, indeed, very wobbly, scarcely able to bear her weight for the few paces across the floor.

Once she was seated, Nurse Moore disappeared after promising to send in some magazines and a cup of coffee, and with strict instructions to call for help if she wanted to leave the comfort of the chair for any reason.

True to her word, a few minutes later a young nursing assistant appeared, bearing the promised reading material and cup of coffee, both of which Jane welcomed.

It was just over an hour before the first headache struck. Despite Doctor Kelly’s warning, Jane was totally unprepared for its severity. Suddenly there had been a shaft of, quite literally, blinding pain that wrung an agonised gasp from her lips. Her vision was badly affected – she couldn’t focus her eyes on anything and blinding flashes of bright light, purple, green, blue, danced in front of her gaze.

It only lasted a minute of two before receding, to be replaced by a mild throbbing ache at her temples, but she now fully realised what she wouldn’t be able to drive, and why an early return to work looked out of the question as well. At last, even the mild throbbing disappeared and she remained seated, shaken and sweating, but otherwise unharmed.

Over the next twenty-four hours Jane experienced five more attacks. There was no pattern as to when they hit, but each seemed every bit as severe as the one before.

It was the following day, the day she due to be discharged from hospital, that she received a visit from Helen Forrester. Jane was surprised; she had been told that the police would want to talk to her about the hit and run, but she had expected a uniformed officer, not a detective Lieutenant, even if they were friends. However, it soon became evident that this was more than just a routine visit, or even just a friendly visit. At Helen’s behest, Jane went through all that she could remember of the incident, including the phone call the previous evening.

“Tell me about the phone call, Jane.”

“Well. I’d not long got home when I got the call. It was a man, a man who introduced himself as Scott Nolan and said that he had been a crew man for the Hammonds on the nineteen seventy-one trip to Arran. He said that I might find his memories of the trip of interest.”

Helen bit her lip fretfully. She had learned of the existence of Nolan thanks to the British detective, Montgomery, who had perused the Hammond’s logbook of the journey. She had not mentioned the man to Jane, nor had she mentioned Jane to Nolan when she had interviewed him.

“Jane, did he give any indication as to how he knew that you were interested in the Hammonds’

trips to Arran?”

Jane’s brow furrowed in concentration.

“No, he didn’t.”

“So how did he know about you? How did he know to contact you?”

Jane shrugged helplessly.

“I don’t know – and it didn’t even cross my mind at the time. I’d had a lousy day and all I really wanted to do was put my feet up and chill out.”

“And this was the Tuesday evening, right?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Well,” Helen said grimly, “whoever was on the other end of that call, it wasn’t Scott Nolan. He was shot down in a drive-by shooting outside his house on the Monday evening. He’s dead, Jane.”

Jane was shocked by the news. Until she had received that telephone call on the Tuesday evening, Scott Nolan had simply been one of numerous names of possible Hammond crew members that she had gleaned in her interviews of John Gates and Samuel Goldberg; he hadn’t been mentioned in any specific context, just a name and one she had not thought needing to follow up. The phone call had demonstrated that she had been wrong on that count and she had looked forward to correcting her mistake.

For her part, Helen hadn’t told Jane about Nolan. She and Jane were friends, but she had wanted to speak with Nolan before, not after, he had spoken with a reporter, even if that reporter had been 98

Jane. She now wondered just who had made the phone call to Jane – the prime suspect had to be the Senator or, more likely, someone acting on his behalf.

It was at that moment that Jane was seized with one of her violent headaches; Helen looked on in horror at the agony her friend was clearly suffering. At last the attack, after what had seemed an age but was in reality no more than two minutes or so, passed and Jane slumped back in her chair.

“Sorry about that,” she wheezed, “they don’t last for very long, but by Christ they hurt!”

Helen was shaken by what she had seen, and well understood why Jane had been told that she must not drive and should stay off work for the present.

“Jane, what are you going to do whilst these attacks keep coming?”

Jane, her eyes still filled with tears of pain, looked at her friend.

“I don’t really know – and hearing about Nolan has really worried me. I’m sure that the auto hitting me was deliberate,” Helen nodded her agreement – any other conclusion was ridiculous, “and I’m a bit of a sitting duck at the moment. I can stay in the apartment – it’s pretty secure now – but for how long? It looks as though there will never be any evidence against Hammond and he can just carry on as he likes.”

Helen had no option but to agree. Despite digging into anything and everything that she could think of, not one shred of evidence had come to light that would be of any use in a courtroom. Hammond, to all intents and purposes, was fireproof. That left the vital question of how to protect Jane, for she had no doubt that the fact that she had survived, by the narrowest of margins, this attempt on her life didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be more.

Jane’s mind was working on the same lines.

“You know,” she began hesitantly, “I hate to say this, but I think that I need to get away somewhere, somewhere where Hammond can’t find me.”

Helen nodded in agreement.

“I’m sure that you’re right, Jane. You can’t stay a virtual prisoner in your apartment, wondering when he will try next, and what he will try next.”

The vestige of a plan was beginning to formulate itself in Jane’s thinking. Somewhere well away from Washington, DC, where anyone of the teeming population might be willing to do Hammond’s bidding and attack her, and this time successfully.

“I’ve got an idea,” she began, but Helen interrupted her.

“If it’s somewhere to go to, somewhere safe, don’t tell anyone, not even me. Keep in touch, but do it by E-mail – not even by phone. Only if you are totally off the radar can we be sure that you will be safe.”

“You’re right,” Jane agreed, “I have thought of somewhere, somewhere that I’m sure that nobody will think of looking for me.”

Chapter Thirteen

I looked at the E-mail in surprise – and horror. It was from Jane Cobden and made very disturbing reading. An attempt had been made on her life and had very nearly succeeded, and a man I had never heard of, Scott Nolan, who had possibly known things to the Hammonds’ detriment, had been murdered. In the E-mail Jane advised me that she was going to come back to Arran as she felt that nobody would think of looking for her on the island. She was E-mailing me just to let me know –

she intended staying in a hotel in Brodick.

I composed and sent an immediate reply. Quite apart from the cost, the hotels would be the first port of call for anybody looking for her, should they think of Arran as a possible refuge. My spare room, I told her, was at her disposal for as long as she needed it.

I received a prompt reply, thanking me and gratefully accepting my offer. She would arrive at Glasgow in two days’ time; could I possibly be kind enough to meet her?

The answer was, of course ‘Yes’ and two days later I duly presented myself at the arrival hall to meet her.

I was shocked at her appearance. She had never been overweight, but now she was almost skeletal and had a gaunt, positively haggard, expression. The most noticeable thing about her was that she 99

was wearing a woollen hat pulled well down over her ears so that no vestige of her blonde hair, normally so prominent a feature of her appearance, could be seen.

I went to meet her and, to my surprise, she threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly. I realised that she was crying.

“David, I’m so glad to see you. Thank you for meeting me.”

She suddenly released me and stepped back.

“Sorry,” she said, looking embarrassed, “I don’t know what came over me. It’s just that seeing a friendly face…” her voice tailed away.

“No need to apologise,” I assured her, “I’m only too pleased to see you again and to be able to help.”

I gathered up her bags and escorted her to the car park and into the Land Rover.

“Still got old faithful, I see.”

“Oh yes, no point in changing when it’s still a going concern.”

I drove us to the ferry and a couple of hours later we reached my bungalow. As I ensured that she was settled in comfortably, she turned to me, her face a picture of concern.

“David, you have no idea just how grateful I am to you for taking me in like this, but I do want you to realise that if Hammond, or whoever he has working for him, does find out where I am it could be dangerous for you as well.”

“Don’t worry about that. The tourist season is coming to an end. Any strangers around this neck of the woods will stick out like a sore thumb. That’s one of the reasons that I suggested that you come here. Brodick isn’t remotely like Washington, of course, but even there someone new could be anonymous – and dangerous.”

I realised that she was still wearing the woollen hat; seeing me look at it, she shrugged her shoulders and swept it off. Her hair was gone; it had obviously been shaved off and was only now starting to grow back, given her the appearance of having had a recent crew cut.

“They had to shave nearly all of it off when they operated on my head,” she explained, “ and when I looked at myself in a mirror afterwards I looked so utterly ridiculous that I had the rest shaved off as well so that now it can all grow back naturally at the same rate. I know that it doesn’t suit me, but it will get better!”

I was going to say that it looked fine but stopped myself in time. It would have been a lie and Jane would have known that it was a lie. Instead, I busied myself making us both a cup of tea and sat her down and listened to the full story of what had happened to her since we had last met. It made fascinating listening – and worrying listening as well. Clearly Hammond was an extremely dangerous man, all the more so because he was obviously working through intermediaries and to date had left no evidence for anyone to find. He really did seem able to flout the law with impunity.

“Do you think that there is any chance of the law catching up with Hammond?” I asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders dismissively.

“I don’t see how – so far he hasn’t left so much as the vestige of a clue that is even involved in any of this. My friend, Helen Forrester, she’s a Detective Lieutenant – that’s the same as a Detective Inspector over here – in the Washington police and she’s been involved in the case and she admits that they’re getting nowhere over it.”

On that sombre note we changed the subject and I suggested a brief walk before we ate. It was now late August and already the days were shortening, a reminder that the long days of the Scottish summer were behind us and the long nights of autumn and winter would soon be upon us.

She readily agreed and mere minutes later we were tramping away from the bungalow into the hillside behind. We had only been walking for ten minutes or so when Jane suddenly gave a gasp and stumbled. Had I not been close by and able to catch her, she would have fallen and as I held her upright I could see that she was clearly in a lot of pain. A couple of minutes passed whilst she hung in my arms like a rag doll, then she slowly recovered.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said shakily, “that was one of my headache attacks that I told you about.

The doctors have promised me that they will get less severe and less frequent, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

I was very contrite and apologised for suggesting the walk.

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“No, David, it’s alright – I can’t just sit around all day waiting for the attacks. They come without any warning, which is why I’m off work for the time being. This one would undoubtedly have come even if we had just been sitting by the fire.”

Despite her assurance, I insisted that we make our way back and we did so, with me watching her like a hawk for the slightest indication of another attack.

I need not have worried; we got back without any problem and Jane settled herself into an armchair whilst I prepared food.

*********

Lewis Morton was a worried man. How much longer, he wondered, could he continue to evade the law in his efforts to protect Hammond, and by inference himself, from retribution over the past? As Jane Cobden went up into the air and then down head first from the impact of the auto’s front fender, he had thought that the final nail had been placed in the coffin of any attempt to bring Hammond to justice, but somehow the little bitch had survived the impact and worse, she had now totally disappeared. Her apartment was deserted, her work colleagues professed to be unaware of her whereabouts – where was she?

At least Nolan, who had been the greater danger, had been eliminated, so there was no need for concern there. He had been surprised at how easy it had all been, and how much of a thrill it had been to commit murder himself, rather than hiring a mercenary for the task. Nolan literally had never known what had hit him as Lewis, after waiting half a block away, had at last seen the man emerge from his front door and start to walk out from his bungalow’s front door to his auto. An essential element of Lewis’ planning had been the fact that Nolan’s small bungalow lacked a garage, with his vehicle parked in the road in front of the house. For those vital few yards Nolan was out in the open, and Lewis had simply driven past and shot him. He had then driven away and abandoned his hired auto, hired with false identification and credit card details, a mile or so away.

It had been a risky process, but one he had, in his own mind, carried off to perfection.

However, the murder and the attempted murder weren’t why he was worried. His worry centred upon Hammond himself. He had known Hammond for many years now, and had always seen him as having a truly unflappable personality, but the veneer was beginning to crack. More and more Hammond was asking for reassurances over every little detail on Lewis’ attempts to kept the Senator fireproof. More and more the man was fretting over the future and the chance of being found out. Lewis hadn’t been present when Hammond had been interviewed by the police, including the two officers from Scotland, but he felt sure that were the interview to be repeated today, there was a good chance that Hammond would simply fall apart, a scenario that Lewis feared above all else.

His concern, however, was not simply about Hammond. He was also concerned for himself. Over the years he had arranged many things to ensure the continued success of the Senator, but it wasn’t through simple loyalty. Running for office as a United States Senator is not cheap. It requires considerable funds, funds to pay for advertising, for campaign premises and staff, for time on local TV. Those funds, except for candidates rich enough to meet them out of their own pockets, have to be found; found by eliciting donations from individuals and organisations. Over the years, masterminding the acquisition of campaign funds had been one of Lewis’ most important tasks, and one which he had performed, to the casual observer, flawlessly. The appearances, however, were deceptive. Over the years he had carefully syphoned off part of the proceeds for himself, a total of just over two million dollars. He was under no illusions; any competent accountant, once set the task of examining the Senator’s campaign funding, would find the money that Lewis had kept back.

Were that to happen Lewis would be facing charges of embezzlement and a jail sentence. And he was determined that he would never go to jail. He would do whatever it took to prevent that from happing – whatever.

He was, he reluctantly admitted to himself, moving towards a course of action that even a few short months ago would have been totally unthinkable.

*********

101

Jane had now been staying with me for two weeks. The first week had seen her suffer no less than fourteen of the savage headaches, each one leaving her shaken and prey to an ongoing dull ache for hours afterwards. She had begun to despair that she would ever be free of them, but the second week had seen just six such attacks and she pronounced them as slowly declining in severity. After the attack that had occurred when we had been out walking, we had been very careful indeed. She never left the house without me, and I took good care to always be within arms’ length when she was on her feet. It was now some four months since the hit and run and she was beginning to fret over how soon she could resume a normal life, but appreciated that she really had to be clear of the attacks before she could even begin to hope for a return to normality. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the attacks gave any warning, but they didn’t. One moment she would be fine, the next effectively physically crippled.

It was the Tuesday, the second day of the third week, when things started to change. She had been sitting at her computer when another attack hit her and she slumped back in her chair, a chair which had arms to prevent her from falling off sideways. The attack, however, lasted little more than a minute, compared to the earlier ones which had invariably lasted at least two and usually rather longer.

I looked anxiously at her as she showed the usual signs of the attack leaving her.

“How are you, Jane?”

“Not too bad – that one was a lot less painful than usual, and it didn’t seem to last as long as usual, either.”

“It didn’t. I was watching you and it was scarcely more than a minute.”

“Please God they are beginning to go away. I really don’t want to go through the rest of my life like this.”

“I’m sure you won’t – after all, your surgeon said that every similar case he treated did see the attacks vanish in time.”

She nodded, wincing as she did so – the follow-on dull headache was clearly still in evidence.

“Yes, I guess that it’s just a case of one day at a time.” She hesitated before speaking again.

“You know, David, I can’t begin to thank you enough for taking me in like this. I can’t think of anybody else who would have been able to help me like this.”

“Don’t be silly – I enjoy having you here, and keeping you safe is a privilege, not a burden.”

“It’s kind of you to say so – and even kinder to look after me the way that you have.”

It seems strange now, unreal even, but somehow a moment later she was in my arms and we were kissing avidly. After a moment she pulled back and looked into my eyes, her own shimmering with unshed tears.

“Thank you, David,” she said softly.

We took things slowly, but there was a growing intimacy between us that we consummated soon after. I now had an even stronger reason for keeping her safe.

Thankfully the attacks continued to reduce both in severity and frequency. The months ticked by; Jane had phoned her surgeon back in Washington and had confirmed that if she went without an attack for a month she could probably see herself as clear, and if two months were attack free, then she could definitely see herself as fine.

We were now at the beginning of October; the most recent attack had been in early September and we both waited anxiously to see if there was to be another.

There wasn’t; by the end of the month we were confident that the crippling attacks were a thing of the past and now Jane had to think what she was going to do with the rest of her life. I desperately wanted her to stay with me, but I had to accept that she had a promising career, currently a career that had been on hold for over three months, to go back to. I, on the other hand, was self-employed and could really continue my writing anywhere – but the thought of living in America, and moreover in a big city, appealed not at all. The openness of Arran, even at its most barren and windswept, was what I loved about the place and my life on it. Nothing could truly replace the feeling of freedom that flying a fast jet had given me, but that was now lost to me and Arran was the next best thing that I could hope for. The thought of living cheek by jowl with untold thousands of other human beings simply appalled me.

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There was also the question of Jane’s safety. There was no way of knowing whether the failed attempt on her life was the end of danger for her, or whether whoever had failed would try again once she was back in the anonymity of Washington, that very anonymity offering any would-be assassin perfect cover.

For several days we skirted round the question of the future, but I was only too aware that it would have to be faced sooner or later.

However, things were about to change.

*********

Jane was on her computer checking, as she did on a regular basis, the news coming out of America and, in particular, out of Washington.

“Bloody Hell!” I heard her exclaim.

“What’s up?”

She was silent for a moment, staring at the computer screen as though transfixed. When they came, the words of her answer were dragged out as though what she was saying she could not really believe.

“David, it’s Hammond – he’s dead!”

“Dead! Bloody Hell indeed – what happened?

“According to this, he was driving himself on some out of state back roads and simply went off the road. It’s rubbish – total rubbish. Hammond never drove himself – he had an official driver when he was on business and when he was off duty, as it were, he had a man who worked for him who did the driving. I found all that out when I did my research on him last year. He could drive, of course, but he really disliked having to. Oh, I suppose he might have driven if the family were away on vacation or something like that – but this happened in the middle of a working week. Something very, very odd is going on.”

She pushed her chair back from the computer desk and we looked at each other in bewilderment.

All along, Hammond had been our bête noire, pulling the strings that had led to seven deaths and the attempt on Jane’s life. Had we been wrong? Was there somebody else pulling the strings? I went along with Jane’s assumption at once – I knew that she had dug into the Senator’s – no, now the late Senator’s – life in minute detail, the mark of a truly dedicated investigative reporter. If she said Hammond didn’t drive himself, then Hammond just didn’t drive himself.

We had, of course, talked incessantly over the last few months about the situation in Washington.

Hammond was the man in the limelight as far as we were concerned. We were sure that, back in nineteen seventy-two, he had murdered Luke Holsten. We were equally sure that the subsequent deaths, all of them, could be laid at Hammond’s door. But now? Could it be that we were wrong?

Surely not – only Hammond and his father had survived for any length of time after the murder of Luke Holsten. Only Hammond – until the last day or two – had been still alive to be worried about anything about the gold, the death of Luke Holsten, or indeed anything else from that time.

It was Jane who came up with the most probable answer.

“You know, David, there’s one thing that has concerned me about Hammond all the way through all of this. The man is known. OK, he’s not the President, but I’ll bet you that his face is better known that those of most of the Cabinet, probable better even that the Vice-President. OK, when he carried out those killings in the seventies – or arranged for the ones on the States to be carried out – who knows? – he wasn’t a well-known figure, but he most certainly has been for the last twenty years or more. He would have been taking an awful risk in contacting intermediaries himself, and I’ve long wondered if in fact he had some sort of cut-out man to distance himself from what was done. Now he’s dead himself, I’m sure of it – and I’m sure that the cut-out man was responsible for killing him, again either directly or through a third party – and my guess is that the cut-out man had to act himself. Just look at what an opportunity for blackmail the killing of a US Senator on behalf of somebody would be!”

“Any ideas as to who such a person might be?”

She thought for a moment, but only a moment, before replying.

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“My money would be on his chief of staff, Morton Lewis. I looked into him as well as Hammond when I was doing my research. They’ve been together for a long time – well over thirty years, ever since Hammond first became a State Senator in Maryland back in nineteen seventy-six – and when you concentrate on possible problems to the Senator’s career, it is surprising – or perhaps not – how often you find that for reasons that never seem clear, problems had a habit of disappearing. For instance, back in eighty-five, with the Senator facing the need for re-election the following year, there were mutterings about an affair with a woman staffer. Probably wouldn’t have been the end of the world for Hammond – even though he only become a US Senator in seventy-eight, he was already pretty well entrenched in Maryland by that time, but not the best of stories to have floating around about a man always tub-thumping about good old American virtues, including family life.

The mutterings never came to anything and the woman vanished from the Washington scene. At the time one of the Post reporters – this was long before my time with the paper of course – tracked her down to find her living in Chicago in pretty miserable circumstances and totally unwilling to talk to him. He reckoned that she had been well and truly scared off – but there wasn’t a trace of proof.”

“He certainly sounds a prime suspect, doesn’t he. And if his affairs are so closely linked to those of Hammond, perhaps he decided that the time had come to close down any danger to himself from Hammond talking. So, now what?”

Jane’s brow furrowed in concentration.

“I don’t know, David. I reckon that I am safe here, but if I were to go back to Washington, would I still be at risk? Getting hit by that auto was what they call a ‘life changing moment’. My surgeon says that I was lucky to survive – if I hadn’t been in emergency surgery so quickly after being hit he had no doubt that I would not have survived.”

The future was still unresolved when we went to bed that night, but the morning saw a change, a change that was momentous for both of us and which was to trigger events far beyond our expectations.

It was over breakfast that Jane hesitantly broached the subject.

“David, would you be unhappy if I didn’t return to Washington, but stayed here?”

I was taken totally aback. All along, much as I wanted Jane to stay with me, I had expected that her job and her style of living in America would eventually drag her back there.

“Don’t be silly – unhappy? There’s absolutely nothing that would make me happier!”

She gave a big sigh of relief.

“David, that’s wonderful. I don’t know what I’ll do for money, mind you – I’ll need to get a job of some sort. I don’t want you to think that you have to keep me!”

“I want to keep you, silly, preferably all to myself!”

She laughed and during the course of the next few days she arranged to cancel her lease on her Washington apartment, get her belongings transported to Scotland, resign from her job at the Post and let her sister know of her changed circumstances.

When they arrived, her belongings were surprisingly few in number – apparently all her adult life she had lived in furnished accommodation of one sort or another, so had not accumulated much in the way of a baggage train.

********

Morton Lewis had many contacts. Amongst them was a secretary in the personnel department of the Washington Post. Ever since Jane had disappeared after her discharge from hospital the woman had known that Lewis wanted to find out Jane’s new location, but the paper had been as much in the dark as had Lewis himself.

That had now changed. Jane’s resignation letter had given her new address and within the day Lewis knew that his target was now living on the very Scottish island which had seen the start of the late Senator Hammond’s wealth and success, and eventual premature death, all those years ago.

It was, he reflected, ironic to say the very least.

He thought things over. With Hammond now dead, the Cobden woman might take advantage of the fact that the dead can’t sue for libel, and go into print with her story, a story that would have every chance of leading back to himself.

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In his thinking, Lewis was unaware of the fact that Jane actually knew considerably less than he credited to her. His own guilty conscience was creating a considerably greater level of danger to himself than was actually the case. He assumed that she had somehow tracked down the link between Keller and himself and the tie-in to Hammond. It was a misapprehension that would eventually cost him very dear.

He remembered that there had been a Brit living on Arran who had featured in the discovery the wreck of flight four seven three, and then also in the discovery of Holsten’s body. Was it possible that the Cobden woman and the man – what was his name? Yes, Craig, that was it – were collaborating over all of this? Now he put his mind to it, he remembered that Craig was a writer with a string of successful works of fiction to his name, but also one non-fiction work, the book about crashed aircraft in Scotland that had largely been responsible for sparking off this entire bloody mess. If they were working together – and if not, why had Cobden gone to some God forsaken dump of a Scottish island? – then they were probably both equally dangerous.

He pondered on what he should do about the couple. Ideally, they should both be silenced, - but how? The thought of travelling to the Isle of Arran hardly seemed very practical, but was there any other way to achieve it?

As an afterthought, he trawled through an address finder to look up where Craig lived. When the answer came up he looked at it twice before the realisation sank in. It was the same address that Cobden had given to her employers – she and Craig were living together. Did that make them easier targets? With any luck, surely the answer must be yes.

The more he thought about it, the more he felt that, like it or not, he would have to travel to the Isle of Arran and take care of those two interfering busybodies once and for all. But how to do it?

Taking a firearm on a trans-Atlantic flight was obviously out of the question, and the likelihood of obtaining one on the island itself was equally improbable. It would have to be something else.

Could he succeed with an arson attack whilst they slept? Not knowing the layout of Craig’s house, even though he had been able to view the exterior of what looked to be the right property on Google Maps, there were obvious difficulties to such a plan, but what else was possible? Running them off the road, as had been so successful with the late Graham Hammond, was fraught with difficulty –

he would have to hire a vehicle, which was likely to sustain damage in the attack, damage which would raise immediate questions when a fatal accident had recently occurred. If he hired an auto he wouldn’t be able to return it, so then what? He had two false identities available to him – one of which which he had already used to hire the auto he had used for shooting Nolan and the hit and run on the Cobden woman, then the other for a hire auto to take out Hammond. In both cases he had simply abandoned the vehicle after using it for its deadly purpose, confident that the hire companies would never be able to trace their missing autos back to him, but would come up against the brick wall of his fake personas. Could he make such a plan work on Arran? The problem was that in population terms the place was so small – any stranger was likely to be noticed and remembered.

He cast his mind back to Hammond’s tale of how the nineteen seventy-one attempt to recover the gold had had to be abandoned because it had run foul of the stag culling season – so obviously there would be rifles on the island – but what were the chances of him laying his hands on one? Again, surely very slim to non-existent.

He went to bed that night still with no coherent plan to end the danger of Cobden and her associate Brit.

*********

It was probably the best time of my life. I introduced Jane to every facet of the island that I could think of, plus all my friends who, without exception, took to her instantly. Somehow she had the ability to make friends in just moments. A particular favourite, and an admiration which was reciprocated, was Douglas McFee. She had met him briefly when we had been looking for the wreck of flight four seven three, but hadn’t really had an opportunity to get to know him properly, a lack which was now remedied. We updated Douglas on the full story of the crashed plane, the mysterious deaths associated with it and the theft of the gold, and Douglas was fascinated.

“You know, Davey, you should make one of your books about it all.”

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“Oh, I couldn’t do that – if anyone were to write it all up it should be Jane – she’s the one who did all the work over it.”

But Jane shook her head.

“No, I’ve had enough of flight four seven three and everything about it. It’s a black story and one I don’t want to tell. With Hammond dead there is nobody left to bring to justice over it – the gold was lost forever back in the seventies and no good will come out of stirring it all up now.”

“There’s still the death of that Hammond man,” Douglas objected.

“True, but that’s up to the cops back in Washington. If they can solve it – because I’m sure that it wasn’t a simple accident – all well and good. If they can’t,” she shrugged her shoulders expressively, “well, to my mind one bad guy took out another bad guy. In my book that’s not something anyone should lose too much sleep over.”

I had to agree with Jane’s sentiments on the matter. There was no chance of bringing anyone to justice over the gold, the murder – as we assumed it to be – of Hammond was a matter for the Washington police, and with the man dead there was no point in Jane pursuing any story about him, even had she wanted to. Again, with Hammond dead, there was nobody left to be implicated in the murder of Luke Holsten all those years ago. No, we were well out of it all.

But unfortunately we were to discover that we weren’t ‘well out of it’ at all.

*******

Morton Lewis drove his hire car carefully off the Ardrossan- Brodick ferry, only too aware of the concentration necessary to drive on what was, for an American, the ‘wrong’ side of the road. So far, his trip had been without a hitch. He had felt it necessary to use his own name for the flight to Glasgow; there was always the danger that one or other – or both – of the hire firms still wondering what had happened to the autos hired out to ‘Alex Carmichael’ and ‘Michael Philips’ respectively, might have somehow got a stop put on the credit cards that he had in those names. Once at Glasgow, however, he had felt it safe to use the Carmichael identity and so it had proved. He had deliberately chosen one of the smaller hire companies and was now driving an eighteen month old Ford Mondeo automatic - driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road was bad enough, but he hadn’t driven a vehicle with manual transmission before in his life and had no intention of trying to ‘learn on the job’.

Again using his Carmichael persona, he had booked into the Douglas Hotel, a comfortable, well established looking kind of a place and was pleased with the accommodation and also by the price, a good deal less than he would have had to pay for a similar standard of accommodation in Washington, DC.

Once he had booked in and deposited his bags, he returned to the Mondeo and made a slow circuit of the island. The main road, the A841, ran all the way around the island, mostly hugging the shoreline, and he paid particular attention as it passed through the tiny hamlet of Pirnmill, the location of Jane Cobden and her British accomplice. Infuriatingly, the various houses, nearly all of them bungalows, and all in the inland side of the road with an unobstructed view of the waters across to the Kintyre peninsula, lacked numbers or names readable from the road. Reconnaissance on foot would be needed – and that carried a danger. Jane Cobden would recognise him if they were to come face to face, a risk that he dare not take.

He returned to his hotel and tried another tack. The story of flight four seven three and the recovery of the human remains from Dubh Loch must have been the biggest event in this backwater in decades, so he trawled the Internet for the sites of local newspapers and finally found something helpful. It was a picture of David Craig taken at the time that the official recovery team were in action. It had been taken outside Craig’s house and showed not just the man himself but also a portion of his home and the bonnet of a vehicle.

Lewis studied the picture avidly. The bungalow had a dark blue front door with inset glass panels in it, and the vehicle was a battered looking 4x4 of some sort. Further delving in cyberspace came up with the information that the vehicle was a British Land Rover, and an old one, so old that there couldn’t be many such on the island.

106

He also studied closely the depiction of the man himself. Craig was described as being thirty-six years of age and a former pilot in the Royal Air Force. He looked fit, with a deep tan, with eyes that were dark brown and deep-set, in a face dominated by a hooked, Romanesque nose, and dark hair cut severely short. All in all, he looked a tough customer to have to deal with.

Lewis mentally reviewed his journey through Pirnmill; he could remember a similar looking vehicle to Craig’s Land Rover parked in the drive of one of the bungalows; he had surely found the house that he was looking for. Now all he had to do was to come up with a method of silencing its occupants once and for all.

Darkness comes early on Arran in winter, a fact that both helped and hindered Lewis as he reconnoitred what he had now established to be Craig’s bungalow. He had left the Mondeo just off the road, about half a mile away and had walked cautiously to a narrow lane leading off the road. It turned out to be an access way to two adjoining houses, but also led away from them, and from the road, for a hundred yards or a little more before petering out at the beginning of the slope of the hillside. He was, he was confident, invisible to anyone looking out of a lighted room in any of the houses, but the darkness meant that he had to be extremely wary of his footing. He was helped, but not very much, by the three-quarter moon, without which it would have been foolhardy in the extreme to walk the hillside without a torch, a source of light which would betray him at once.

At last he was directly behind the Craig dwelling. It was clearly occupied, but all the windows were curtained, making it impossible to tell who was inside, nor where they were within the building.

The back yard - ‘back garden’ they would call it here – was bounded by a low fence, no more than three feet or so high, and he was able to close right up to it without any problems. He was now only fifty feet or so from the back wall of the bungalow and the light spilling from the curtained windows, and similar light escaping from the house on either side, made it a little easier, and safer, to walk on the uneven ground.

But now what? When he had seen the aged Land Rover that was Craig’s mode of transport, he had thought about sabotaging it, but it was parked in full view of the road and of the house windows.

The more he thought through his alternatives, the more he decided that there were no alternatives, just one possible course of action – fire. He would have to attack the rear of the house – the front would suffer the same risks as trying to sabotage the Land Rover – in clear sight of the road. In the small hours there would be very little, if any, traffic, but he had no intention of running any unnecessary risk, no matter how small.

He made his way back to the track between the houses and returned to his hotel to plan in detail what he would need to do. When he had hired the car in Glasgow one of the first things that he had done was to purchase, and fill, two five litre petrol cans, in case an arson attack proved to be the best choice. Now, he was doubly glad of his forethought – such a purchase here on the island by a foreigner might well be remembered.

*********

We had just finished breakfast when the phone rang. It was Douglas McFee on the other end of the line.

“Davey, could you and Jane spare me a few minutes? I have something that I would like to show you.”

“Sure, we’ll be right round.”

We had breakfasted in our night attire, so it was a little longer than ‘right away’, but ten minutes or so later we were seated in Douglas’ lounge, for once without a glass of Talisker. Even for Douglas, quarter to ten in the morning was a bit early.

He had his laptop computer on the coffee table between us, switched on but with nothing currently on the screen.

“Last night,” he began, “I was upstairs with the lights out, hoping for anything interesting to photograph.”

I nodded; unlike my own house, Douglas’ bungalow was of the chalet style. With two upstairs bedrooms, both of which looked out over the rear of the house towards the hills. Douglas was an avid photographer, and one of the aspects that fascinated him was photographing scenes in low 107

natural light, something made possible by the advent of highly sophisticated digital camera able to capture images in light levels far lower than used to be possible on film. He continued.

“It was about nine o’clock and nothing worthwhile had I seen, when I saw a man walking behind the houses.”

“In the pitch dark?” Jane queried, “He must have been mad!”

“Well, it wasn’t quite pitch night, Jane. There was quite a good moon up and so close to the houses there was also a bit of illumination from people’s rear windows. What puzzled me, apart from the fact that anyone would be walking there at night at all, was the fact that he spent several minutes standing at your fence, looking at your house. I was so intrigued that I took a couple of photos of him, and one of the, as he turns to walk away gets him full face – and here it is.”

So saying, he pressed the computer touchpad and a picture of a man, full face, came up on the screen.

Jane gave a gasp of surprise.

“But that’s Morton Lewis, Hammond’s chief of staff as was. What’s he doing on the island?”

We looked at each other in bewilderment, before Jane voiced the thought that had already formed in my mind.

“He’s after me. I’m sure he was responsible for the hit and run that nearly killed me – now he wants to have another go. Why else spend so long examining our house? Why else be on the island at all?”

I was sure that she was right. We already suspected him of killing Hammond, and Jane had told me that there were many mutterings, none of them provable, within the Washington political establishment, to the effect that Lewis had a number of questionable contacts, contacts that he had no hesitation in using to further the career and prospects of his employer and, for that matter, himself.

The thing that puzzled us was why, now that Hammond was dead, should he be after Jane?

Everything that she had was connected to Hammond and his assumed crimes, not Lewis. However, whatever the reason, it seemed certain that it was Jane’s presence on Arran that had brought him here.

I thought long and hard. I accepted as a given fact that, for whatever reason, Lewis wanted Jane dead and was on the island to accomplish her murder. But how? Surely he would not have been able to bring a gun with him, not with airport security so high, and so effective, nowadays? He presumably would have flown in to Glasgow or Edinburgh. Might he have somehow acquired a weapon whilst in either of the big cities? Even if he had, how would he use it? Surely he couldn’t expect to simply knock on our door and gun her, and possibly myself, down when we answered? He was on an island. There were only three means of escape available to him - the ferry, which would easily be checked for an escaping criminal, possibly hiring a local fisherman to take him over to the mainland, or stealing a small boat and making the journey by himself. And why the intense study of the back of the house?

Suppose, I thought uneasily, he had somehow obtained a rifle? Mentally I reviewed the area behind the house; the undulating character of the early slopes meant that there were many possible locations for a would be sniper to overlook our back garden – but was that really a likely scenario? I had no idea how accomplished a shot Lewis might be, but anyone who was going to this sort of trouble must surely have confidence in his ability to accomplish his plan.

But again, that didn’t explain why he had spent so long behind the house, a length of time which would have enabled him to virtually count all the bricks. Another thought came to me. If I had been Lewis, how would I have attempted to silence Jane – and possibly myself? Walking up to the front door with a pistol? Ludicrous; neighbours would be alerted by the gun fire and the police would be aware of the problem in next to no time, leaving Lewis to try and make his escape – scarcely easy.

A rifle from the hillside? Same problems over escaping for the killer, plus how long might he have to wait for us to appear at the back to offer ourselves as targets?

The more that I thought about it, the more I inclined to a different approach altogether. Fire was surely the obvious approach. At first instance it would be the fire service that would be called, not the police. Lewis could make his way back to his hotel – I assumed that he must be staying in an 108

hotel on the island – and seem totally divorced from the unfortunate conflagration of a bungalow in Pirnmill.

If I wanted to incinerate Jane and I in our beds, how would I go about it? Surely at night, when everybody was safely in bed and asleep – no witnesses and helpless victims. I did have smoke alarms in the bungalow and whilst Lewis wouldn’t know that, he would surely have to take the possibility into account in his plans. So, some means of wedging the doors to prevent them being used as escape routes. No, that wouldn’t work – both the front and back doors opened inwards, so simple wedges were no use. I continued to ponder how Lewis could most effectively attack the house and came to the conclusion that his best method would be to simply throw a burning device through the bedroom window. As with Douglas’ home, I had two bedrooms, one of them the main bedroom in which Jane and I slept, at the back of the house, but unlike Douglas’ chalet bungalow, they were, of course, at ground floor level and therefore much more vulnerable.

To my mind. Lewis’ obvious solution was to use one, or more Molotov cocktails – glass bottles filled with petrol, the neck stuffed with rag to act as a wick. Light the wick, hurl the bottle, and you had a deadly incendiary device. My windows were double glazed to resist the effects of Scottish winters, but I had no doubt that something like a filled glass milk or beer bottle would shatter them if thrown hard enough. They would then burst into flames inside the room, leaving any occupants very little chance of surviving.

********

That same morning, building on his night time reconnaissance, Lewis was once again on the hill behind Craig’s bungalow, but this time nearly half a mile away to avoid any chance of detection. He was dressed appropriately for someone simply walking in the hills should he encounter any of the locals, his apparel reinforced by a small backpack. He had with him a spotting telescope and, lying behind an outcrop of rock, the telescope supported on his backpack for steadiness, he was able to make a thorough examination of the rear of the house. As he had hoped, the window of what was clearly the main bedroom was one of those at the back. He now knew where his targets would be at night, and satisfied with what he had found, he tramped back to where he had left his car and returned to his hotel.

His next step was to work out his escape route. Trying to make rapid progress over the hill in the dark was out of the question; the chances of a sprained ankle or the like were simply too great. He would have to make his way along the rear of the houses to the path that he used previously. That posed a bit of a risk that someone in one of the other houses – he would have to pass the rear of four properties – might be alerted by the arson attack and look out of their own rear windows, but on balance he felt that the risk was very slight.

Speed would be of the essence, however. He had to set the bedroom on fire and make his escape in no more than a few minutes. How was he to ensure that the bedroom became an inferno as quickly as possible? He remembered something from some film or other seen many years ago – of irregular partisans attacking enemy trucks filled with soldiers by hurling home-made petrol bombs at the vehicles. Those bombs had been simple glass bottles filled with petrol and ignited by cloth wicks stuffed into the necks, cloths which the partisans had simply lit before throwing them. Would such an item actually work, or was it just a Hollywood invention? Time to do some Internet browsing.

Ten minutes later he had what he needed; confirmation that the half remembered film had shown a method of attack which was perfectly feasible. There was even a common name for the device – a Molotov cocktail, presumably a name concocted in World War Two.

He left the hotel and from the nearest shop selling alcohol purchased a six pack of bottled beer with screw caps and a couple of cheap disposable cigarette lighters, buying two in case one might fail him. Once back in his room three of the bottles were opened and emptied down the toilet – they would be the basis of his weapons.

He considered preparing them there and then, but decided it was too risky to have bottles of petrol either in the room or later in his car. Having the stuff spill out would not be good,; additionally, if he tried to carry out the work in his room it would end up stinking of petrol, a sure source of puzzlement to the hotel staff. No, he would have to prepare them once he had parked up near to his 109

targets. Then a practical problem struck him. It would be dark; how was he to fill the bottles with petrol without using a light and betraying his presence? Reluctantly, he decided that the bottles would have to be prepared sometime in advance, somewhere where he would be able to see what he was doing, but to do so without any risk of being seen.

The most obvious solution was also the most practical. With the empty beer bottles in his pockets, he left his room, got into his hire car and simply drove round the main road until he found a pull off that was out of sight of the road itself. Once there, it was the work of only a few minutes to fill the bottles from his can of petrol and tightly stopper them with their screw caps. When the time came it would be easy, just working by feel, to unscrew the stoppers and replace them with the cloth wicks.

Securing the bottles in the boot of the car, wedging them in so that they ran no risk of rolling around and breaking, he returned to his hotel and settled down to wait for the night.

*********

I explained my conclusions to Jane and Douglas who, after their initial reluctance to believe that anyone would mount such an attack, agreed with my logic.

“Now,” I said, “the next question is what do we do about Lewis? What we have is all supposition –

I can’t see the police being able to take action on it – after all he hasn’t committed any crime on the island, leastways, not as far as we know. I could talk to Jamie Henderson, but what could he really do? He’s a sergeant, not really in a position to deploy officers on the basis of my say so. No, I think that we need to know more about Lewis – and we also need to be ready to protect ourselves against him. For a start, where is he staying?”

“I’m sure that I can find that out,” Douglas replied, “it’ll probably only take a few phone calls.”

Douglas was one of Arran’s older inhabitants. He had lived on the island all his life and his circle of relations, friends and acquaintances was enormous. True to his word, we had the answer less than twenty minutes later.

“There’s only three Americans staying at any of the island hotels at the moment, an elderly couple at the Ormidale, and one man on his own, although his name isn’t Lewis – it’s Alex Carmichael and he’s staying at the Douglas.”

“Well,” Jane replied, “if there’s only one single man – I’m sure the elderly couple aren’t anything to do with all this – he must be using a false identity. That has to be Lewis.”

I nodded my head.

“I’m sure you’re right – but now what?”

“How about going and seeing him and letting him know that you are on to him?” Douglas suggested. “Surely that should scare him off?”

I thought about it for a while, but then shook my head.

“I’m sure that it would stop him for the moment – but for how long? If we just do that, what’s to stop him trying again later?”

Douglas considered my response and reluctantly acquiesced.

“Yes, I see what you mean, Davey – so what’s to do?”

“I can’t see any alternative to waiting him out and catching him in the act, can you?”

Jane and Douglas both looked decidedly unhappy at my suggestion, but could come up with no better option.

*********

It was cold. It was very cold, even though I was well muffled up and under cover. My plan to take Lewis in the act was helped by the fact that our next door neighbours, Archie and Fiona McKay, were away on a long visit to their daughter and her family in New Zealand. During their absence I was looking after their house and had a full set of their keys, including the key to the garden shed in their back garden, a shed which had a window giving me an excellent view of the rear of my own house.

Jane was safe with Douglas. I had used several time switches to give the impression of normal activity in our bungalow, with lights going on and off, the TV playing, and the like. Now it was two 110

in the morning and so far nothing had happened. I wasn’t altogether surprised; if he was coming tonight Lewis would surely want to be satisfied that everybody was safely tucked up in bed and that there would be no chance sighting of him by anybody.

Then I heard it – a slight sound of footsteps carrying through the small, half-open window to the shed. Cautiously, I peered out, to be rewarded with the sight of a figure close to my rear fence, although still on the far side of it.

The door of the shed was hidden from the view of the man - who was surely Lewis – who was now carefully clambering over the fence, not a difficult task as it was only three feet or so high. I slipped outside and made my way round the farther side of the shed from the intruder. There just enough light from the combination of the moon and the dim porch light which the McKays always had on whether they were at home or not.

I eased my way close to the fence between the two properties and waited. Unaware of my presence, the figure was fiddling with something on the ground; the flare of a match or lighter briefly lit up his features, then went out and I heard a muffled curse. It was time to act. I was holding my shotgun; I had debated whether to use it or the rifle, finally deciding that the rifle was just too powerful to fire in close proximity to the houses should things go wrong. I was carrying it broken open, but with both barrels already loaded, and I closed it with a metallic snap that sounded very loud in the stillness of the night.

“I’ve a shotgun on you, Lewis. Don’t move or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

The man stiffened; then he did something that caught me totally unprepared. Instead of obeying, he whirled round and hurled something – I later discovered that it was an uncapped beer bottle full of petrol – at me. Whether he was exceptionally gifted in reacting to emergency situations, or just extremely lucky, I will never know, but the bottle passed within inches of my head, its contents spraying out in a fan of liquid which splashed into my face and eyes, momentarily blinding me.

By the time that I had recovered my sight and senses, he had hurdled the fence and was running parallel to the rear fences of the adjoining properties, heedless of the dangers posed by the uneven ground.

I raised the shotgun – and hesitated. Then I lowered it and instead of firing, and in all probability ending up in court on a manslaughter charge – even, perhaps, accused of murder - I tossed it down and started to follow the fleeing would be arsonist on foot.

It wasn’t easy; the ground was uneven and I stumbled frequently, but I was aware that my pursuit was making my quarry equally at risk of a heavy fall. Even so, I was gaining slightly on him as he reached the track leading to the road – which was were our second line of defence came into play.

We had the advantage over Lewis in that we knew that he would have to come by vehicle and that he would need to leave the vehicle reasonably close at hand. There were a few places along the road where it was possible to pull off and park and, sure enough, one of them was occupied by a Ford Mondeo which didn’t belong to any of the locals. We knew this because Andrew McFee was also in our ‘team’, waiting half a mile down the road in the opposite direction from that from which Lewis would come travelling from Brodick. Once Andrew had been alerted by a mobile phone call from his father the moment Douglas had seen the intruder making his way along the back of the houses towards my bungalow, he had cruised quietly down the road to where Lewis had parked his car. It had been the work of only a moment for Andrew to immobilise the Mondeo – a heavy bladed gralloching knife driven into one of the tyres had achieved that. Then Andrew had simply parked beside the Mondeo and waited.

Lewis, now less than twenty yards in front of me, staggered onto the road and started to run towards his car. Then he saw the Land Rover stopped beside it. In the dark of the night it was impossible to see the Land Rover clearly, especially as Andrew had his headlights on, shining towards, and partially dazzling, the running man. All that Lewis would have been able to see clearly was that a vehicle was stopped beside his Mondeo and that the vehicle had a rotating blue light on its roof.

Strictly illegal, of course, for a civilian to masquerade as a police officer in an official vehicle, but Lewis wasn’t to know that he was being fooled by a twelve volt battery operating a light originally intended for outdoor disco use. In his eyes all he could see was a police car parked next to his own 111

vehicle. Continuing to make his way to his car was out of the question - and I was coming up fast behind him.

Then fate took a hand. I was no more than ten yards behind Lewis when my foot went into a deep rut and I fell heavily, knocking the wind out of myself. Lewis took his opportunity, spinning on his heel and racing past me as I struggled to rise. By the time I was on my feet he had disappeared in the darkness, heading back the way he had come down the track, but continuing to its end and onto the hillside beyond.

By the time that I had made it to my feet and regained my breath and at least some of my composure, Andrew had switched off the imitation police light, left the Land Rover, and was by my side.

“What happened, David?”

“Caught my foot and fell – and the bugger simply ran past me onto the hill.”

“Well, good luck to him on the hill in the dark – he’ll be lucky not to break his bloody neck!”

It was a fair point. There still wanted a good six hours before dawn and stumbling around in the dark on the slopes of Beinn Bharrain was a recipe for disaster from falling into one of the many crevasses that scarred its face.

There was also the cold. The temperature was a little above freezing – but only a little. From what I had seen of Lewis in the low light available, he had looked to be wearing nothing more weather proof than what had looked like a light casual jacket; indeed, his light clothing had helped him in his attempt to escape me, for I was heavily bundled up in cold weather clothing which had made my vigil bearable whilst I waited for him to appear, but which was a distinct handicap in a foot race.

Lewis had escaped us – but now he had to survive the elements without adequate clothing on a windswept hillside.

Then it began to rain, not torrentially, but heavy enough. I began to wonder if Lewis could, indeed, survive such a night. What were his options? He was under the impression that the police were waiting for him by his car, so any attempt to return to it must seem out of the question. He could tramp across the face of the hill until he was well clear of our immediate vicinity and then strike back for the road and start walking – but walking where to? By road he was about twenty miles from his hotel in Brodick. Striking across Beinn Bharrain the distance was little more than half that, but the terrain made it the equivalent of a far longer journey. Surely he wasn’t stupid enough to try and hike over Beinn Bharrain in the dark?

What would I do in his position? Inadequately clothed for the weather, without supplies – for he had been carrying nothing other than his improvised firebombs when he tried his attack – shelter would be the uppermost priority, surely. But there was none of much value to a man caught out in such conditions. The face of the hill provided a few shallow caves which would protect him, to a degree, from the rain, provided that he could find one facing away from the wind which would otherwise blow the rain in on him. But they wouldn’t protect him from the cold and anyway, the chances of finding such a one in the dark were slight to non-existent.

No, the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that once he felt himself safe from pursuit he would have to come back down towards the road, hoping that there would be a shed or an outhouse where he could hide up to survive what was now giving every indication of becoming a storm. To stay out on the hill would be madness; to try and hike across it, madness magnified several fold. Andrew and I made hurried track for Douglas’ bungalow, where he and Jane awaited us with hot drinks and a warming fire in the lounge.

Once I had warmed up a little I told the others of my thinking and we gave thought to what to do next. The obvious answer was that it was time to involve the police. We had the evidence of the arson attempt, but the thought of starting the wheels rolling at what was now getting on for three in the morning did not appeal. Instead, we all departed to our various beds.

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Chapter Fourteen

At eight in the morning I got in touch with the police. I had hoped to speak to Jamie Henderson, but he was off duty. Instead, I got his boss, Inspector Graham, who whilst initially irritated at the delay it reporting what had happened in the small hours, accepted my excuse that there was nothing that anybody could have done to track down Lewis in the dark. Indeed, it was still dark, and would be for more than another hour, but the Inspector started organising things and a couple of hours later instigated a house to house search for several miles of the A841, the road which encircles Arran, in both directions from where Lewis’ Mondeo was still parked. The fact that the car had a flat tyre was presumably noticed, but never commented upon.

No sign of Lewis was found. Various sheds and outbuildings in which a fugitive might have sought shelter were examined but no trace of the man was discovered. The obvious inference was that he was somewhere on the hillside, and given the weather of the last several hours – and it was still raining, still bitterly cold – either suffering seriously from exposure or quite probably already dead from it. Graham simply didn’t have the manpower to mount a really thorough sweep of the hillside, and after a few hours of seeing his men struggle to make any sort of an organised search in the immediate face behind Pirnmill, called it off. I didn’t blame him in the slightest. Risking the health of his small body of men in such conditions to look for an attempted murderer who posed no further threat to anybody was a poor balance of priorities. Instead, he called in a search and rescue helicopter to overfly the area and see if any trace of Lewis could be found. For the rest of the day the machine clattered back and forth over both faces of Beinn Bharrain , but without success.

***********

The next morning I decided to walk the hillside for a combination of healthy exercise and curiosity as to whether I might succeed in locating Lewis’ body – for I was sure that he could never have survived for what was now some thirty hours in the open. To this day, I don’t know why I took the rifle, but take it I did. Perhaps it was some form of premonition; certainly it wasn’t with any intention of stalking deer, even though it was still the culling season. Had that been my intention I would have needed at least one companion to help bring a carcase down from the hillside – but I walked alone.

It was gone midday; I had been walking for some three hours when I crested a small false summit of the hill and there before me was something that I had forgotten. It was a small, tumbledown bothy, constructed many years ago from a combination of stones and turf. Forty years earlier there had still been some sheep on this part of the island, and the bothy offered shelter to the shepherd if caught by inclement weather. The lie of the land made it invisible from just about any point more than a hundred yards or so away, as whoever had made it had, naturally enough, looked for a location that offered as much natural protection as possible, so the bothy sat in a shallow depression about fifty yards across. So tumbledown was it that unless one actually knew of its existence, or came very close to it, it looked more like a jumble of rocks that anything manmade. What made me stop and stare was that there seemed to be a faint wisp of smoke trickling out of it. Suddenly, I remembered that Lewis had been carrying arson materials – could it possibly be that he had somehow stumbled across this shelter and managed to light a fire to keep himself alive? Mentally I reviewed the possibility; because of the nature of the terrain I had been taking a very circuitous route. Somebody who had struck away from the road, firstly along the track between the houses, then onto the hillside itself in a straight line, would only have had to travel a bit under a mile to reach the bothy. Given the conditions at the time, if Lewis really had achieved that, I took my hat off to him. Obviously he had found it – if indeed it was him – by pure chance, but it looked as though he had made the most of that chance.

An innate sense of caution made me unsling the rifle from my shoulder and ease off the safety catch as I made a cautious approach to the bothy. If Lewis was in there I was determined that he would not escape again.

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I should have been even more cautious; I was about twenty yards away from the bothy when Lewis burst out from behind it, a rock clutched in his hand and raced at me. I acted on pure reflex, swinging the rifle round and firing as I did so. The impact of the bullet caused Lewis to stagger forward and go down face first on the rocky soil, where he lay without moving.

I stood there appalled. When I had started to approach the bothy my intention had been to capture Lewis, secure in the expectation that the threat of the rifle would be enough to make him acquiescent; killing him had not been in my mind, much as permanently removing him from the face of the earth would have been to the peace of mind of Jane and myself.

Now what? Would anyone in authority really believe that my killing of an unarmed man was justified? I could visualise the courtroom scene with the prosecutor mocking my claim that, armed with a powerful rifle, shooting down a man in cold blood was clearly murder.

It was then that I heard the footsteps as somebody ascended the little rise that I had so recently breasted with such a dreadful result. Hurriedly I laid down the rifle. I had no wish to appear to be threatening whomsoever it was approaching – I already had more than enough problems as it was.

To my surprise it was Douglas McFee who appeared over the little ridge.

“I was out for a little walk and heard the shot, Davey, and thought that I had better come and see what had happened.”

Numbly, I indicated the body of Lewis.

“Ah, I see – well, serves the bastard right – what happened?”

“Just chance. I had no idea that he was here, saw a bit of smoke coming out of that old bothy and thought it might be him. He must have seen me coming, because he came charging round the back of the bothy with a rock in his hand. I just reacted – so now what can I do? It’s the last thing I wanted, but it’s done now. Nothing I can do except get the police involved now.”

Douglas shook his head slowly.

“Davey, lad, you should know by now that the island looks after its own.”

He reached into his pocket, drew out his mobile phone and speed-dialled.

“Andrew, it’s your da. I need you up by the old bothy right away. Come by tractor and tow a quad bike with you – come as far as you can by tractor, then the quad bike – and bring a tarpaulin with you.”

It took Andrew half an hour to reach us, thirty minutes of anxiety during which we dragged Lewis’

body into the bothy so that it was out of sight should anyone chance by. At last Andrew puttered into sight on the quad bike.

“Ah, there you are,” said Douglas, “we have a bit of a disposal task on our hands.”

He pointed to the bothy and between the three of us we dragged Lewis out again, with Andrew showing no surprise, as if transporting corpses was all in a day’s work. We rolled him into the tarpaulin and tied him to the back of the quad bike, which Andrew cautiously manoeuvred down to the tractor, which was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards down the hillside. Once there, we transferred Lewis to the bale lifter, lashing him securely in place and once more covering him with the tarpaulin.

The we looked at each other.

“Now what?” I asked uncertainly. Douglas looked at me for a moment before speaking.

“Well, Davey, we can’t just leave him anywhere on the hillside – sooner or later he would be found.

Just think of that poor chap you found. No, we need to put him in water, and what better place than Dubh Loch? All those notices forbidding diving and everything will help – and the water is deep quite close in to the shore.”

“Be better if we could get him out towards the middle,” offered Andrew.

“Yes, but how to do it?”

“I’ve an idea,” his son replied, “we wrap him in the tarp with some rocks for company, then we sink him close to the shore. Then tomorrow, for it’ll be dark soon, we come back with an inflatable and take him out to the middle in it.”

“And where is the inflatable coming from?”

“When all the divers were here searching the wreck of that aircraft they punctured one of their small inflatables on some sharp rocks and they had so much gear with them that I persuaded one of the 114

divers to let me have it for a song. It wasn’t actually badly damaged and I patched it up quite easily

– thought it might come in handy for a bit of fishing on one of the lochs sometime.”

And that is exactly what we did. It seemed hopelessly fraught with risk, but it went off a smoothly as you could possibly have wished for

Epilogue

I never told Jane exactly what had transpired at the bothy, just told her that Lewis was no longer a problem. She’s no fool; she realised that I had somehow done away with the man, but didn’t ask to be told any more. The part that Douglas and Andrew had played in the drama I never even hinted at.

His disappearance was never really investigated, and certainly never explained. The Glasgow car hire company eventually got their Mondeo back, thanks to the police identifying them as the owners from the papers left in the glove compartment, but the police were at a loss, as were the company themselves, to understand why a car hired out to an Alex Carmichael in Glasgow should have been found abandoned on Arran, when the man himself had checked out of his hotel ostensibly to visit a sick friend, a friend who might have been anywhere on the face of the planet. No trace of Alex Carmichael was found on the island, but that was seen to be explained as his open ended ferry ticket had been used for a return journey to the mainland just two days after he had booked out of his hotel

– that had actually been me using the ticket which we had found in Lewis’ wallet, for we had stripped him of all forms of identification before sinking him in Dubh Loch, and to use the ticket seemed an ideal means of muddying the water as to where the man was. I had simply gone ashore at Ardrossan, hung around for a few hours, and then bought a one way ticket back to Arran, paying with cash so that I left no paper trail to raise any interest in anybody’s mind should my movements ever come under scrutiny. I had also been relieved to see, upon examining the body, that the high powered round had passed completely through him; no spent bullet to be checked by forensic experts should the occasion ever arise, so my immediate thought of getting rid of my grandfather’s rifle was unnecessary – and it would have seemed wrong anyway, seeing that it had quite probably saved my life, as Lewis had taken me by surprise with his mad dash from hiding.

I will be eternally grateful to Douglas and Andrew McFee, two men who regarded justice as coming before legal niceties. Did I regret killing Morton Lewis? I sometimes ask myself that question and, so far, the answer has always been ‘no’. He was, Jane and I were convinced, a murderer back in the States, whilst on the normally peaceful Isle of Arran he had attempted to commit murder once again. It was no fault of his that Jane and I still live.

As for where we had put him, it seemed highly appropriate that he was under the surface of the waters of Dubh Loch, completing a saga which had began more than seventy years earlier, although it must go without saying that those who had plunged to their deaths in nineteen forty-three were far worthier human beings than this last man to lie beneath the surface of those black waters, and I was glad that they were no longer there to share their resting place with a truly loathsome human being.

THE END

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Table of Contents

Chapter Four - 15th November 2013

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Ten

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue