The Pretender's Gold

by Scott Mariani

  His employer shot him back an acid look. ‘I don’t need to be reminded, Hacker. I know what I said. I’m simply considering the advantages of temporarily delaying his elimination.’ He held up the phone, like a lawyer brandishing Exhibit A in the courtroom. ‘McCulloch might be old and sick, but he’s no fool. He’s obviously been on the same trail that we are. Hunting for the poacher, but for the opposite reason. I’m betting that this McGlashan is our star witness. If McCulloch has his phone, it means that he’s been in contact with him. Which in turn means he must know more about this whole affair than I’d so far given him credit for. And that being the case, I can’t help but speculate what other information McCulloch might be privy to. Things his nephew might easily have told him before he met with his little mishap. Such as the location of the spot where Ross Campbell found my lost property and took it for himself.’

  My lost property. Hacker could see no trace of doubt in his employer’s eyes. The guy really believed it. His delusion was the driving force behind all that had happened, and Hacker often wondered where it might end. He didn’t question the boss’s intelligence. He was probably the cleverest and wiliest person Hacker had ever met. But there was no doubt in Hacker’s mind that the man was insane.

  ‘Could be a long shot,’ Hacker said. ‘Hard to say for sure.’

  ‘Only one way to find out, isn’t there? And we won’t achieve that by killing him.’

  Hacker made no reply. The men didn’t look pleased. Hacker’s employer could see the looks passing between them, and he knew what they were thinking: that a job half done would be a job half paid for.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ his employer said. ‘I still want him dead, and you’ll still receive the agreed fee. Plus an additional bonus of five thousand each. If,’ he added, ‘you can find out what he knows, and on condition that it’s of value to me. Otherwise, not a penny more.’

  Hacker nodded. The rest of the men appeared reassured, with the exception of Macleod, who looked even more nervous now that kidnapping and possible torture were about to be added to the list of crimes to which he was an accomplice.

  ‘And I’m also commissioning you men to carry out another job for me,’ Hacker’s employer said. ‘Now we have reason to believe that this McGlashan is the witness, I want you to find him and get rid of him for me.’ He motioned at Macleod, without looking at him. ‘I’m sure that Macleod here will be able to supply you with his home address.’

  Hacker truly didn’t care whether McGlashan was the witness or not. ‘You want us to find out what he knows, too?’

  ‘No, just kill him. He’s caused us enough trouble already.’

  Just then, the unconscious body on the ground stirred and let out a pained groan. Banks said, ‘McCulloch’s coming round.’

  Hacker’s employer tossed Banks the bottle of pills. ‘Give him a couple of these, if that’s what he needs. Then get him loaded into the van and we’ll bring him to the estate.’

  The snatch had worked perfectly. The one good thing Angus Baird had done was to alert them to be on the lookout for Ewan McCulloch’s camper van. Macleod and Coull had spotted it in the police station car park the moment they’d arrived for work that morning, notifying Hacker’s employer just moments later. The plan had taken shape quickly and efficiently. Their preparations made, Hacker and the newly arrived crew had sped from the castle to the chosen ambush spot in their unmarked van, following their employer’s silver Rolls Royce Cullinan. Now they not only had McCulloch, but the name of the poacher, who would be dealt with soon enough.

  First it was McCulloch’s turn. By the time he recovered consciousness they were already en route back to base and he awoke to find himself bound and gagged in the back of the van. His captors removed the tape from his mouth long enough to dry-feed him two of his heart pills. Boonzie kicked and struggled as best he could, but he was still weak and soon gave up trying. By the time they arrived at their destination, he was asleep again, his breathing shallow. They bundled him out of the van and carried him to the secure, inescapable place beneath the castle in which they intended to keep him for the rest of his life.

  While the crew took care of their task, Hacker’s employer climbed the stairs to his study. He closed the door, hung up his coat and loosened his tie, then lit an Arturo Fuente cigar and settled in a plush leather armchair with a satisfied smile on his face. He had a great deal to be satisfied about, and not just because his current plans were moving along so nicely. Whenever he sat here in the luxurious splendour of his private domain overlooking all his stately acres and surrounded by the trappings of wealth, it was impossible not to be reminded of how very far he’d come from his comparatively humble roots.

  His name was Charles Stuart, but it hadn’t always been. He had been born and raised Peter Charles Johnson and only much later, as an ambitious young man setting out to make his first million, adopted the surname that he believed reflected his true birthright and identity.

  The Johnsons hadn’t been a poor family, but hardly rolling in wealth either. Alan Johnson had practised as a gastroenterologist at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh and his wife Susan had taught history at a local comprehensive school. Susan Johnson had been an excellent teacher and an even better storyteller, and her only child had grown up listening to his mother’s spellbinding tales of their country’s rich and romantic past, from the coming of the Romans to the reign of Arthur; from Robert Bruce to Mary Queen of Scots; and the Scottish Wars of Independence from the time of the celebrated freedom fighter William Wallace through to the later bloody battles waged by the Scots Jacobites versus the English Redcoats and the adventures of the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, more popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. The man who’d tried, and failed so gloriously and somehow magnificently, to claim the British throne for a Scottish king to sit on. What a moment that would have been.

  Peter had been enthralled by those stories and soon began delving into the history books to learn more for himself. It would set him on a course that would change his life.

  Susan Johnson’s fascination with history, and especially the turbulent times of eighteenth-century Scotland, went beyond simple academic interest. Her maiden name prior to marrying Peter’s father had been Stuart, the French form of the ancient Scottish dynastic surname Stewart. The clan’s ancestral origins dated all the way back to a Breton knight who had come to Britain soon after the Norman invasion of 1066 and quickly established an Anglo-Norman noble house. Centuries later, Sir John Stewart of Bonkyll died fighting alongside William Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298.

  In the modern age there were more than seventy thousand people in Britain bearing the name Stuart or Stewart, all of them potentially eligible to claim descent from Scotland’s royal dynasty. But Susan Johnson, née Stuart, had been more tenacious than most in tracing back her genealogy through a centuries-long forest of family trees, and convinced herself beyond a shadow of a doubt that she, and hence her son also, belonged to the line of the noble Stuart clan.

  The connection, Susan maintained, came down the female line and led back to Charlotte Stuart, whose mother Clementina Walkinshaw had been Charles Edward Stuart’s mistress – the pair having first met during the rebellion of 1745 when he was unsuccessfully battling the English to regain the British throne for his father, James Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’. Charlotte had been the only one of the couple’s illegitimate children to survive infancy, herself eventually dying young at the age of thirty-six. Her relationship with her biological father had been a difficult one, but the Bonnie Prince eventually legitimised her in 1784 with the title of Duchess of Albany, whereupon she more or less abandoned her own three children and spent most of her remaining years caring for the elderly prince, by now a physically decrepit alcoholic and a far cry from the glamorous image of the heroic, albeit failed, defender of Scottish glory.

  Charlotte’s children had been raised in anonymity, their identities hidden behind aliases to protect them from scandal. T
he trail was obscure, but by a convoluted process of deduction Susan Johnson had come to the unwavering conclusion that she was personally descended from Charlotte’s elder daughter Marie-Victoire Adelaide, born 1779, who had found herself in Poland following the outbreak of the French Revolution and there married a Polish nobleman by the unwieldy name of Paul Anthony Bertrand de Nikorowicz, with whom she had a son; and on it went.

  In short, it was a complicated business. Young Peter hadn’t quite been able to keep track of it all, but never doubted his mother’s claim. And when a young boy grows up believing that royal blood runs in his veins, it can have a profound effect.

  In Peter’s case, it had been a mixed one. He’d worked extremely hard academically and, to his parents’ joy, at seventeen had gained a place at Cambridge to study economics. But it hadn’t been an easy path for him. At university he’d often felt inferior to the wealthier students, suspecting that they resented this comprehensive school kid from Edinburgh and didn’t consider him as one of their peer group. By the end of his first year, he’d become hardened to the class division he felt existed between them, and developed an aggressive chip on his shoulder. What had kept him going was the thought of the day when they’d all find out that he, Peter Johnson, was the descendant of a genuine true-blue prince. Let all those toffs eat shit for having snubbed him. One day, he was going to rub their snooty fucking noses in it.

  And so that was exactly what he’d done. Fired by a combination of his ancestral pride and his hatred of his peers, one of his first acts after graduating from Cambridge with his first-class degree was to change his name by deed poll from Peter Charles Johnson to Charles Stuart. His second action was to found the stock brokerage company that would, within just a few short years, make him super-wealthy.

  The newborn Charles Stuart was relentlessly ambitious and worked eighteen hours a day. He’d made his first million while still in his twenties. By the age of thirty-five he was the owner of one of Scotland’s best private art collections. By thirty-eight he’d bought his first aircraft, built a stable full of racehorses, purchased the villa in the Bahamas as a holiday residence and the chateau in Brittany – from where his beloved, now sadly deceased, mother had told him the Stuarts had originated. Then on his fortieth birthday he’d lavished a multi-million-pound fortune on buying the two-thousand-acre estate in Scotland and started building his dream castle.

  The castle was Charles Stuart’s pride and joy and was still, in many ways, a work in progress. He had designed the place to be as historically authentic as possible, albeit with all the trappings of modernity cleverly concealed behind its thick stone walls. One of his nods to authenticity was the underground chamber he’d had built deep inside his fortress’s foundations. He had passed it off to the architects as a wine cellar, but it contained no wine and was in fact a dungeon, modelled on real-life examples from the historic castles of Edinburgh, Loch Leven and, grimmest of them all, the bottle dungeon of St Andrews, a seven-metre-deep hole cut into solid rock and from which there could be no escape.

  Stuart had been morbidly fascinated by dungeons ever since reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe as a boy. In fourteenth-century France these dark and dreadful pits of incarceration had been called oubliettes: in translation, a place where the hapless prisoner would be left to rot and be forgotten. The delicious sadism of it still sent a shiver down Stuart’s back. He’d often fantasised about hurling his enemies into his very own dungeon and throwing away the key.

  And so, the dark, dank pit beneath the castle was where Boonzie McCulloch was to remain a prisoner until he told them what he knew, which would also be the day he died.

  Then, or so Charles Stuart hoped, he would be on track to reclaim the one thing he so badly wanted and money couldn’t buy.

  The lost treasure of his ancestor. The remainder of the legendary Jacobite gold that Stuart now knew for certain was buried somewhere beneath the ancient pine forest of Loch Ardaich.

  Chapter 30

  The primitive stone bothy had played an important role in Jamie McGlashan’s life. Once upon a time the remote, weather-battered shelter had served its traditional purpose as a means for roving hunters like Jamie and his father to take refuge from the elements and cook fish and rabbits over an open fire. Years later it had become Jamie’s regular hideout when he was on one of his intensive poaching sprees and sometimes wouldn’t return to his trailer home for weeks on end. And since Ross Campbell’s murder it had provided a very convenient hiding place for an eye-witness too terrified to go home.

  It was nearly four days since Jamie’s encounter with Ewan McCulloch’s uncle, the wild old nutcase who’d appeared out of nowhere dressed like a yeti and threatening him with a crossbow, and to whom Jamie had confessed his secret. Jamie hadn’t seen him again, and probably never would. Which pissed him off somewhat, because it meant he’d likely never see his mobile phone again either. But the old guy’s haunting final words of advice had kept replaying inside his head ever since.

  Get as far away frae this place as ye can. All hell’s aboot tae break loose.

  With no cash for travelling and nowhere else to run but the bothy, Jamie had spent these last days keeping his head down in even greater paranoia than before, shivering miserably through the freezing cold nights and dozing for most of the daytime in his sleeping bag, living off his diminishing catch and only sneaking outside to forage for firewood now and then.

  As much as part of him enjoyed the total reclusion, he couldn’t stop his imagination from running riot. What the hell had the old guy been planning on doing? Jamie lay there for hours visualising scenes of mayhem and bloodshed, Ewan’s crazy ninja killer uncle stalking the streets like Rambo hellbent on revenge. The look in his eye had been so terrifyingly sincere that Jamie had no problem believing he would carry out his threat to put his enemies six feet under the ground. For all Jamie knew, the nutter had already wiped out everyone connected with his nephew’s beating and had either been shot to death in a massive gun battle with the police or was now locked up in jail. Which, with the bad guys dead, would mean it was now safe for Jamie to leave his hiding place. Not knowing what was happening out there was eating him alive.

  So was his worry about another problem. Every two weeks, Jamie was obliged to jump in his Subaru and make the tedious drive to Fort William to sign on for his benefits. Poaching wasn’t quite a lucrative enough profession for him to give up his dependency on those Jobseeker’s Allowance cheques, not to mention his housing benefit payments. And today was signing day. If he didn’t show up at the Job Centre to make his mark and verify that he was actively seeking work, etc., etc., then the Nazis in the dole office would give him grief and threaten to stop his benefits.

  As Jamie ruminated over his problem, it suddenly occurred to him that his signing-on book, that all-important document required to demonstrate his feeble and mostly spurious attempts to find work, was sitting on his bedside cabinet in the trailer.

  Jamie stamped about the bothy in a rage yelling ‘Ahh, fuck! Fuck!’ But stamp and yell all he wanted, he knew he had little choice but to venture back home for the first time in days, grab his signing-on book and hustle over to Fort William to keep the Nazis happy and the dole cheques rolling in. His duty done, he could decide afterwards whether or not to return to his hideout.

  He packed up his stuff, tossed everything in the back of the Subaru, dusted the snow off the windscreen and managed to get the engine started. With a lot of sliding and skidding around, he negotiated the mile-long track to the main road, and set out towards Kinlochardaich.

  He rented the trailer from the farmer who owned the neglected field half a mile from the edge of the village. At some point in the far-distant past the farmer had planned on turning the whole field into a caravan park but run out of interest after the first mobile home was installed, and for the last several years had been content to let Jamie live there as his sole tenant for £30 a week. Home sweet home was a solitary, lichen-streaked 25x10ft prefabricated box
with a leaky roof and cracked windows, surrounded by a wasteland of junk and resembling a landfill on the inside.

  Jamie ploughed the Subaru across the rutted, frozen field, parked up and tramped through the falling snow and up the slippery metal steps to his front door. He never locked the trailer, since the lock was broken and there was nothing worth stealing in there anyway.

  The flimsy door creaked open and Jamie stepped inside without bothering first to kick the snow from his boots. Wasting no time, he headed for the bedroom. The trailer was filled with the familiar old smell of stale cooking oil, unwashed clothes and rising damp. His bed was a mildewed single mattress on the floor and his bedside cabinet was a scabby kitchen unit he’d rescued from a skip. There among the clutter of mouldy mugs and crumpled magazines lay his damn signing-in book, just where he’d remembered it.

  ‘Ya basturt,’ he muttered. He looked at his watch. It was nearly two-thirty p.m., giving him plenty of time to get to Fort William. He scooped the book up and thrust it in his pocket and turned towards the door.

  And was unable to react, flinch or utter anything but a gasp of horror and surprise as the two figures blocked the doorway and one of them punched a long, slim knife blade deep inside Jamie’s stomach.

  Jamie staggered back a step, too stunned to compute what was happening to him. As fast as it penetrated his vitals the knife withdrew and then came at him again, stabbing at his chest. This time Jamie instinctively raised a hand to protect himself, and the razor-sharp blade slashed across his palm and severed his little finger. Then the second figure stepped forward, clutching another knife, and Jamie felt an unimaginable shock of agony as the cold steel plunged into the soft flesh of his neck. His mouth opened to scream, but what came out was an unearthly, inhuman shriek, like the sound of an animal being slaughtered.

  And it was only then, in a strangely detached moment of comprehension as though he were observing it happening from the outside, that Jamie McGlashan realised that he was being brutally murdered.