The Hill of the Red Fox

by Allan Campbell McLean

  Hector MacLeod was tiptoeing carefully out of the room, and at the sound of my voice he swung round. He looked at me for a long time before he spoke, and I felt my eyelids start to droop again.

  “Aye, she knows,” he said gravely, “but she is wise beyond her years, that one.”

  He swallowed, and I thought he was about to go on, but he turned on his heel and left the room abruptly.

  I rolled over on my side, and I believe I was asleep before he reached the kitchen.

  It was exactly two o’clock in the afternoon when I woke up. I lay on my back rubbing one foot against the other, drowsily content, letting wakefulness steal over me slowly like the wash of an incoming tide. It was the low murmur of voices in the kitchen that finally roused me. I leapt out of bed and threw on my clothes and dashed across the lobby to the kitchen.

  I stopped short in the doorway. All the men of Achmore were crowded into that little room. Hector MacLeod, Calum Stewart, Lachlan MacLeod, Donald Alec MacDonald, Roderick MacPherson; they were all there. Even Iain Ban MacDonald, with his arm in a sling.

  They all looked at me, but Hector MacLeod was the only one who spoke, and I noticed that his face still had a grey, drawn look.

  “What are you doing out of your bed?” he demanded.

  “But I feel fine,” I protested. “I’m … I’m just hungry, that’s all.”

  Mairi was sitting in a corner and she rose without a word and made me a big bowl of brose. I sat in to the table and took the brose, and ate several girdle scones and drank two cups of strong sweet tea.

  All the time I was eating, the men were strangely silent. They did not even speak to one another, and I thought at first that it was on account of Mairi having lost her father that they were so subdued.

  When I had finished my breakfast, I looked round the ring of silent faces and the first faint, gnawing doubt crept into my mind.

  “How is Duncan Mòr?” I asked.

  Nobody spoke.

  Hector MacLeod bit his lip. Calum Stewart looked down at his boots. Lachlan MacLeod, that dark, silent man, I didn’t expect to speak, but even his eyes refused to meet mine, as if afraid of what I would see there. Donald Alec MacDonald stared fixedly at the ceiling. Roderick MacPherson chewed at his nails. Iain Ban MacDonald fingered the bandage of his sling.

  The six men of Achmore were silent.

  “How is Duncan Mòr?” I repeated shakily, the bitter gall of fear gripping my stomach and rising up in my throat.

  Nobody spoke.

  I looked from one to the other of these men I knew so well. Some of them, like Calum Stewart and Donald Alec MacDonald, were big men. All of them were strong men. Like Duncan Mòr they worked with their hands, and like Duncan Mòr they feared no man. They would stand their ground and look prince or pauper in the eye, but not one of them would look at me. I know now that every one of them would willingly have faced the Devil himself rather than answer that question.

  It was left to Mairi to speak. She was standing at the other side of the table clearing away the dishes. She put down a cup and saucer with unsteady hands, and I saw her hands grip the edge of the table.

  “Duncan Mòr is dead, Alasdair,” she said, in a voice that was little more than a whisper.

  “No,” I cried. And again, “No.” And yet a third time, “No.” I blinked back the hot tears that flooded to my eyes. “He can’t be. He” — and my voice broke — “he just can’t be.”

  Hector MacLeod drew a long breath. “Aye, Duncan Mòr is gone,” he said solemnly, “and death comes to us all through time, but as long as any o’ the one of us is left, then the big fellow will live, too. Do you think I can ever be looking across to Mealt without seeing him there? Do you think I will ever make a ceilidh again without hearing that great roar o’ a laugh of his? No, no, Alasdair Beag, it is the ones who have nothing to leave but their money-bags who are dead and gone. Death can never finish the likes o’ Duncan Mòr, not in these parts.”

  “But if only he had waited,” I said miserably. “If only he had waited. Surely he must have known that you would all follow him to the Lodge?”

  “Duncan Mòr arranged it himself,” said Roderick MacPherson. “We were to wait by the main road while he went on alone. If he was not back in ten minutes we were to storm the Lodge.”

  I sat quite still in my chair, not seeing any of the faces around me, only the Major’s study and the gun pointing at my heart. Duncan Mòr’s voice came back to me. What if twenty odd men came bursting into the lodge? I saw the tightening of the Major’s lips and heard again his icy reply. If any attempt is made to take me the boy goes first.

  Somebody was speaking, and I jerked my head round. It was Iain Ban.

  “You may be sure Duncan Mòr knew what he was doing,” he said simply, “and I am thinking he is well pleased with his work.”

  “Aye,” assented Lachlan MacLeod, that man of few words. “The big fellow was never the man to leave a job unfinished.”

  Hector MacLeod rose to his feet. “The funeral is the day after tomorrow,” he said. “We will need to get the word round.”

  Little did I know, at that moment, what “the word” would bring.

  I don’t know how I would have got through the rest of that day had it not been for the constant coming and going of people. Mairi and the cailleach and I were never alone in the cottage for more than five minutes, and I had no time to think.

  Willie The Post came in to say that they had had a telegram at the post office to say that my mother would be arriving that night. When she came he was going to take the cailleach back home with him, for his mother was her first cousin, and he thought she would be happier staying with them.

  When I asked about Mairi, all he would say was, “Ach, your mother will be wanting to look after the lassie,” and I suspected there was more in the telegram than he had revealed.

  That afternoon the police came to see me. There was an inspector with a lot of silver braid on his cap, and a sergeant. The sergeant took notes while the inspector questioned me. It went on for a long time, dealing with everything that had happened from the day I arrived in Skye.

  When they had finished questioning me, the inspector cleared his throat importantly, and said, “Sir Reginald Gower, the Head of Military Intelligence, is coming to Portree tonight. He has expressed a wish to see you, so I shall send a car for you at ten tomorrow morning.” He fingered his collar, and added, “I don’t want you to discuss this with any of your crofter friends. Sir Reginald’s visit is to be kept strictly private. The instructions from London are that there is to be no publicity.”

  After that he seemed to thaw a little, and become less like a policeman. He shook hands with me and wished me luck, and smiling broadly told me not to forget the Police Force when I was old enough to leave school and be thinking of a career.

  It was a little after seven o’clock when my mother arrived with Willie The Post carrying her luggage. Willie only stayed for a few minutes, then he left with the cailleach, leaving my mother, Mairi and I, together in the kitchen.

  “How on earth did you get here so quickly?” I asked.

  “Well, you seem to have become awfully important since you came to Skye,” answered my mother, smiling at me. “I had a visit from Sir Reginald Gower, and he told me everything that had happened. I flew to Inverness with him and came on from there by car. Sir Reginald told me that he was looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. I’m … I’m awfully proud of you, Alasdair.”

  I had expected my mother to be worried and anxious, and I had been preparing myself to answer her flood of questions, but none came. She turned to Mairi and before long the two of them were chatting together as if they had known one another always. It all seemed so topsy-turvy, my mother behaving as if a sudden flight to Inverness and a dash by car to Skye were an everyday occurrence, but then everything had been topsy-turvy during the past few days.

  When I went to bed that night Mairi and my mother were still talking together. It had been ar
ranged that Mairi would stay with us in London, and we were to leave immediately after Duncan Mòr’s funeral.

  The police inspector was true to his word. Punctually at ten o’clock the next morning a police car arrived for me. I felt a little frightened as I sat alone in the back and was driven into Portree. The car stopped outside a hotel overlooking the bay, and the constable who was driving went in and spoke to the manager.

  The manager escorted me upstairs and knocked softly on a door at the end of a long corridor. When a voice called “Come in,” he stood aside to let me enter.

  As I stepped forward, I heard the door click quietly shut behind me, and I walked slowly across the room. A man was sitting in a deep armchair with his back to me. There was a coffee table in front of the chair and he pushed it aside and sprang to his feet. In two quick strides he had reached me and shaken me warmly by the hand. The first thing that occurred to me was that he looked more like a crofter than a peer of the realm. Perhaps it was his open, sun-tanned face, or it may have been due to the fact that most of the crofters I knew had the natural, easy dignity that one somehow associates with titles. At any rate, I liked him on sight.

  He was not a big man; in fact, he was rather small and sparely built, but the power of his personality was such that it seemed to magnify his physical stature. He had deep-set grey eyes and a broad, humorous mouth, and an eager, bird-like way of holding his head a little on one side. He was wearing an old tweed suit with leather inserts patched on the elbows, and leather cuffs, and a soft shirt and plain woollen tie. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that he was a sort of super policeman, except for his unmistakable air of authority and those keen grey eyes. I had an uneasy feeling that he could see through to my backbone.

  “Well, young Cameron, sit down,” he said. His voice was surprisingly deep for so small a man and free from any exaggerated accent.

  When I sat down I noticed that the coffee table was littered with dozens of fish hooks and flies.

  Sir Reginald saw my eyes on them and said, smiling a little, “You and your friends seem to have done all my work for me, so I might as well do a spot of fishing while I’m in Skye.”

  I mumbled something, and he said, “D’you like fishing?”

  I told him that Duncan Mòr had taught me how to fish.

  “Duncan MacDonald, eh?” was all he said.

  I nodded, feeling a lump rising in my throat at the mention of his name.

  “I would have liked to have had the honour of meeting your friend MacDonald,” he said slowly. He paused and lit a cigarette, leaning back in the chair and blowing smoke rings, his eyes on the ceiling. “You know he was shot at very close range,” he went on, his eyes still on the ceiling. “The doctors tell me that any normal man would have been dead within seconds, but Duncan MacDonald stayed on his feet long enough to put paid to Cassell. That was a man for you, young Cameron. He must have had the heart of a lion.”

  “Duncan Mòr wasn’t afraid of anything,” I said, keeping my eyes down, afraid of making a fool of myself.

  “Tell me about him,” said Sir Reginald simply. “How you came to meet him. How you got involved in this affair. Everything.”

  I started off in a halting fashion, and then, as my confidence grew, I became absorbed in the telling of the tale and almost forgot that the man I was speaking to was the chief of MI5. I told him my story from the very beginning, exactly as I have set it down here, and he listened without a word, but his alert grey eyes never left my face.

  When I had finished, he said reflectively, “It makes a good story. Major Cassell — or Colonel Zaborin of the Russian Military Intelligence, to give him his real name — was a very clever man. He succeeded in fooling us for a long time, but it never occurred to him that he could be out-witted by a boy and a bunch of crofters. It’s the old story of the professional despising the amateur. We were always a nation of amateurs, young Cameron, and I hope to God we always will be. I shouldn’t be saying this, but it has always been the amateurs who have pulled us through.

  “Of course, we weren’t asleep. After Ransome disappeared without trace, we had Hunt and Reuter watched day and night. Our agent succeeded in sticking to Hunt and tracked him as far as Lochailort. Unfortunately, it was a case of the watcher being watched, and you know what happened to him. He didn’t live to tell his story.”

  “There’s just one thing I’ve never understood, sir,” I said hesitantly. “Why didn’t your agent let me know that Hunt was at Achmore Lodge, instead of writing Hunt at the Hill of the Red Fox?”

  “The answer to that one is simple,” replied Sir Reginald. “Our agent wasn’t even aware of the existence of Achmore Lodge. You must remember we were working in the dark. Our information was of the sketchiest. We knew that Ransome and a member of the Foreign Office were working in Russia for the Soviet Government, and that Russian agents had succeeded in smuggling them out of the country. The one real scrap of information that we succeeded in picking up was that the leader of the Soviet espionage group went under the code name of Red Fox.

  “Well then, to go back to our agent who was trailing Hunt. He knew that the train was bound for Mallaig. It was logical to assume that Hunt was making for a rendezvous, prior to leaving the country, and what better place for that rendezvous than the Island of Skye? If it were Skye, then Hunt must be making his getaway by sea. For Skye, mark you, although it is only fifty miles long, has a coastline that stretches for hundreds of miles. A long, lonely coastline.

  “I think our agent must have borrowed a map from somebody on the train. A good proportion of the passengers would be going to Skye, and a fair number of them would be climbers and hikers — people who always carry maps with them. His next step, unless I am greatly mistaken, would be to study the map — particularly the coastline — to look for a likely place for getting a man away unobserved. It is my opinion that he saw the hill marked on the map as the Hill of the Red Fox. A hill that was only a few miles from a bay in an isolated part of the island. I think he took a chance on its name. It might have been a coincidence. On the other hand — and as events proved — it might not.

  “Put yourself in our agent’s shoes, young Cameron, when he discovered that he, too, had a man on his tail. He had to shake him off, or his life wasn’t worth tuppence, and at the same time he had to try to get a message through, in case the worst happened. For all he knew, Hunt was guarded by several men. He could trust nobody. So he passed a message to you — a schoolboy. Who would suspect a schoolboy of carrying a message on behalf of MI5? Nobody. Unfortunately” — and here his eyes twinkled — “or perhaps I should say ‘fortunately,’ instead of handing the message over, you acted in a rather unorthodox fashion.”

  I had had a question on my lips all the time he was speaking, and when he paused to light a cigarette, I presented it.

  “But how did Dr Reuter get to Skye without being traced, sir? You said he was being watched day and night.”

  Sir Reginald grimaced. “We were fooled by a very simple ruse,” he said wryly. “Reuter hired a car from Marwell to London. He paid it off near Euston Station and went into a café. Our agent followed him to the café and took a corner table that commanded a view of the entire room. Reuter had coffee and biscuits, then he went to the lavatory. As you know, Reuter was an easy man to keep an eye on; he had a very distinctive limp and he was carrying a shiny new briefcase. Well, a limping man came out of the toilet carrying the same briefcase, paid his bill and took a cab to Victoria Station. From Victoria he went by train to Dover with our man hanging grimly on to his tail.

  “Of course, you have probably guessed by now that the man on the Dover train wasn’t Dr Reuter at all. He was a double, made up to look like Reuter, wearing identical clothes and simulating Reuter’s limp. The switchover took place in the café’s toilet. Doubtless, once the coast was clear, Reuter made for Euston Station and followed the same process as Ransome and Hunt. Believe me, Colonel Zaborin was a most thorough organizer. I’ve been thro
ugh all the documents we found in Achmore Lodge, and the whole operation was planned with military precision.”

  “Did you get all the proof you wanted, sir?” I asked.

  Sir Reginald nodded. “In addition to the documents we found, Reuter has made a full statement, admitting everything. It seems that the Russians were holding his wife as a hostage, although if he is to be believed, she was a fanatical Communist and had been urging him to join her. Of course, we didn’t know that his wife was living; he had told us she had died in a Nazi concentration camp.

  “One of the three men who were holding out in the bothy has since died of his wounds, but the other two have made complete confessions. They were British-born Communists, and will pay the full penalty.

  “The only local man involved was Murdo Beaton. He was paid handsomely for taking them out by coble to the submarine. The Sound of Raasay is a dangerous stretch of water and a local man was needed to handle the boat. Not only that, if they had been seen, the presence of a local man would have disarmed suspicion. Needless to say, when Zaborin’s mission was completed, Beaton would have been disposed of.”

  “Has he … has he been found yet?” It was difficult to put such a question into words when it concerned somebody you had known and lived with.

  “No, he has not, nor is he likely to be,” said Sir Reginald firmly. “There is no doubt that he was killed in the explosion on the bridge. No man could have survived that. His body was swept out to sea, and I am told that the off-shore currents are such that it is unlikely to be recovered.”

  I could not repress a shiver, thinking how close I had come to sharing the same fate.

  Sir Reginald went on to give me some more information; information that I am not at liberty to repeat here. When he had sworn me to secrecy, he rose to his feet and stood looking down at me.

  “You have lost a good friend, young Cameron,” he said slowly, “and unless I am much mistaken you will be lucky if you ever meet his equal again. I cannot speak on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, but I can tell you that when I return to London I shall be making my report directly to the Home Secretary. I shall make the strongest possible recommendation that the George Cross be awarded posthumously to Duncan MacDonald.”