by Ken Lussey
Bob looked up at the north side of the glen. ‘I keep thinking about what Archibald said about his ancestor. About him getting on in years and having been injured. The Callich Burn is a bit of a distance from here. It enters the loch well over a mile east of this point. That seems a long way to haul a significant weight of gold. If it were me, especially if I knew the redcoats were closing in, I’d have picked somewhere a little more readily to hand.’
‘You mean like the cottage, sir?’ asked Petty Officer MacDonald, who had joined them.
‘We don’t know if that existed in 1753,’ said Bob, ‘but yes, it’s a possibility. But if you assume he moved the gold from here to a valley on the hillside, then wouldn’t it make more sense to hide it in that valley immediately above us? It looks to be deeper and more heavily wooded than the Callich Burn, and simply looks a better bet all round.’
‘That’s shown on the map as the Allt Mhurlagain,’ said Dixon. ‘Are you suggesting that when the story got told, it simply got attached to the wrong valley?’
‘Well, this was in an age before maps were commonly available, and certainly not detailed maps,’ said Bob.
‘I suppose it has to be possible, sir,’ said Lieutenant Dixon. ‘Do you want us to go up and take a look?’
‘Again, no. Let’s go to the west end of the loch before deciding whether any of this needs to be looked at in more detail.’
‘Sir!’ Petty Officer MacDonald was standing beyond the bottom of the oval, close to the edge of the loch. ‘I think we can now agree that this used to be a graveyard.’ As Bob and Dixon walked down to him, he pointed at the ground close to his feet.
Bob saw a bleached piece of bone, possibly the top of a thigh bone. ‘It does look human rather than from a sheep, doesn’t it?’ he said.
MacDonald moved a rock aside to allow him to return the bone to the ground.
‘Right,’ said Bob. ‘Back to the boat, and we’ll continue the last couple of miles to the western end of the loch.’
Petty Officer MacDonald was untying the boat from the tree when he called out again. ‘Sir, look at the wall, about fifty yards to the east of here. It looks to me as if it’s been disturbed.’
Bob and Lieutenant Dixon climbed back out of the boat and walked in the direction MacDonald suggested. The petty officer was right. Some of the stones on the side of the ruined wall showed signs of having been moved recently. Several were scraped and moss had been torn in places.
‘Let’s take a closer look,’ said Bob. ‘Can you bring the pickaxe and crowbar?’
As a child, Bob had always wanted to be a pirate, and treasure hunting had always been a dream. He felt a surge of excitement now as Dixon and MacDonald hefted rocks that showed signs of disturbance out of the wall. ‘Is there anything there?’ he asked.
‘Just a hole behind the stones, sir,’ said Lieutenant Dixon. ‘It doesn’t take much imagination to think that something has been hidden here. But whatever it was has gone now.’
Bob looked into the gap now left in the wall. ‘I wonder what they did with the interior stones that had to be removed to create the void?’ Then he laughed. ‘It wouldn’t be much effort to have thrown them into the loch, leaving as little sign of disturbance as possible on the wall itself.’
‘I think you’re right, sir,’ said MacDonald. ‘This looks like it was carefully done.’
Bob said, ‘Am I jumping to conclusions if I suggest that while the graveyard over there might have been used in 1753 as a temporary home for the Loch Arkaig gold, before it was hidden somewhere else, the reverse process might have happened rather more recently, with the gold being brought here from wherever it was found, and hidden temporarily before being moved to a more permanent hiding place?’
‘That sounds plausible, sir,’ said Lieutenant Dixon. ‘Now we simply need to know where it was moved to from here.’
‘Hopefully Mallory and Quinlan can tell us when we catch them,’ said Bob. ‘In the meantime, let’s carry on to the western end of the loch.’
The pier at the west end of Loch Arkaig had seen much better days. The wooden structure looked in danger of collapse but was still usable with care. It had been built out on piles from a large rock on the loch’s north shore, close to the point where the conjoined Rivers Dessarry and Pean flowed into the loch.
Bob realised that he was going to have to choose between leaving the boat unattended or leaving someone on their own to look after it. ‘Andrew, can you stay here with the boat, while Lieutenant Dixon and I visit the old settlement of Strathan about a mile west of here? The landscape here is wide open, so no-one will be able to approach without you seeing them. You keep the rifle, and if there’s any problem, fire off a shot and we’ll come running. We’ll leave the packs in the boat.’
‘No problem, sir. But we should keep an eye on the weather. It looks to me as if there could be a storm coming in. The wind has certainly increased over the past hour or so. We also need to leave enough time to get back before dark, and progress will be slower if the loch gets choppy, even with the wind behind us.’
Bob hadn’t considered the possibility that the fine weather of the morning and early afternoon might change, but as he followed the petty officer’s gaze west, he could see an approaching edge of cloud, with darker cloud beyond it. And Andrew was certainly right about the increasing strength of the wind. ‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ he said.
Bob and Lieutenant Dixon took the track that led a little way up the hill to the north before contouring to the west.
‘Good grief,’ said Lieutenant Dixon, ‘do commandos actually run in these boots? I’m not sure mine are even foot-shaped. Walking is quite a challenge.’
Bob had been wondering much the same thing but tried to concentrate on the surrounding landscape rather than on his feet.
‘Is this part of the village, sir?’ asked Dixon. They had walked about half a mile from the pier, and now stood looking at a stone gable end, immediately to the south of the track.
‘I suspect this must be the remains of the old barracks that Archibald Cameron talked about,’ said Bob. ‘I forget the Gaelic name, but he translated it as “the house of the soldiers”, which looks about right.’
‘It certainly commanded superb views along the loch and to the west and south,’ said Lieutenant Dixon.
From the barracks the track descended to a small cluster of stone structures. Bob looked around, ‘I don’t see anything that looks like a school, do you, Michael?’
‘No, sir, just a couple of run-down cottages and a stone shed with a corrugated iron roof.’
Bob and the lieutenant looked in each of the buildings but could find little evidence of the lives of the people who had lived here until only a few years previously. Each cottage comprised just two main rooms, each with a fireplace in the end wall. The last occupants seemed to have abandoned much of their furniture when they left. The remaining building was empty of furniture, but by a process of elimination Bob decided that it must have once been the school, still marked on the map.
Bob stood with Lieutenant Dixon in the more easterly of the two cottages. ‘Perhaps the people who lived here hoped they would be able to return after the war, sir,’ said Dixon.
‘It does look that way, Michael. Lieutenant Colonel White said that training exercises take place in the area west of Loch Arkaig. I’d imagine that these cottages and the school are used for shelter when trainees are in the area. It doesn’t look as if anyone has been here very recently, though.’
‘Were you expecting to find something useful, here, sir?’
Bob said, ‘I’d half wondered whether Mallory and Quinlan might have decided to make our lives easier by hiding the gold here, but on reflection that’s not a very sensible idea. They’d know the area is used by trainees and these buildings are the very last place you’d want to hide something valuable. Besides, where would you hide it
?’
‘Lift one of the paving stones forming the floor and dig a hole underneath, sir?’
‘It’s possible, but just seems too high risk. And what if the residents returned to live here before the two sergeants could return to retrieve the gold? No, I think we’re wasting our time, Michael. The dust on the surfaces and floor would be disturbed if anyone had been here in the past week, and we think that Mallory and Quinlan were relocating the gold as recently as Friday. The same is true in the other cottage and in the school.’
They left the cottage, taking care to shut the door properly against the increasingly strong wind. Lieutenant Dixon looked over his shoulder as they started back along the track. ‘Andrew was right about the weather, sir, it is beginning to look very threatening.’
Despite the need to get back to the boat, Bob wanted to look at the slight remains of the old barracks on the way back along the track.
‘It really was very small,’ said Lieutenant Dixon. ‘I can’t imagine that it was a popular posting among the redcoats of the day.’
Bob said, ‘The ground to the south seems to drop away quite steeply to the river.’ He walked beyond the traces of the building to the visible horizon, appreciating the way the views into the river valley below expanded as he did so.
Then he noticed something odd. He turned back towards the ruins of the barracks. ‘Michael, come and look at this.’
They say you never hear the shot that gets you, and Bob certainly didn’t. The bullet hit him on the left side of his chest. The impact threw him backwards and his limp body tumbled down the steep slope to the south.
The last of the light had drained away beyond the western horizon a quarter of an hour earlier and Bob was flying his Hawker Hurricane single seat fighter back towards Croydon Airport, some 70 miles to the west. He was tired. It was his second flight of the day. He’d shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter fifteen minutes after sunrise that morning, ten hours earlier. Today was Friday. He’d shot down another Bf 109 last Sunday, and another the day before that. On the Sunday before, he’d shot down two Bf 109s. And a little under two weeks before, on Monday the 7th of October 1940, Bob had shot down five Bf 109s in a single day.
Yes, he was tired. Bob worked hard to drum into his pilots the old maxim, that they should never fly straight and level for more than 30 seconds in a combat area. It was a rule that he applied instinctively himself. Especially, as now, when he was flying alone.
But somehow, he never saw the one that got him. There was a noise like nothing he’d ever heard before, and flashes as cannon shells impacted the structure of his Hurricane. Then there was a sharp pain in the side of his head and he could smell hot oil and coolant and his doomed aircraft began to spin vertically down towards the ground. Despite the huge gravitational forces created by the spin, Bob fought to open his aircraft’s canopy. He couldn’t see the ground in the dark, but he knew it was getting closer and closer.
His first sensation was of a deep, numbing cold. The second was of an icy trickle of water, flowing down the side of his neck as heavy rain fell on his face. Then he felt crashing waves of pain, first from his chest, and then from his left arm, until these were partly displaced by the pain from the back of his head. Slowly, he realised that the vivid recollection of being shot down was from far in the past, but he also realised he couldn’t remember anything between then and now.
What terrified Bob more than the pain, and more than not knowing where he was or how he had got there, was the knowledge that he was blind. He could feel his eyes were open, but he couldn’t see anything at all. He knew he’d lost the sight in his left eye as the result of a head injury when he’d been shot down. But his head had been injured again and now he couldn’t see anything out of either eye.
The memory of what had happened began to return. Bob took a deep breath to stem the rising tide of panic and then fought back the agonising pain in his left arm to slowly raise it in front of his face. The sense of relief he felt was perhaps the most intense feeling he could ever remember. The luminous face of his watch told him it was 8.20 p.m. He wasn’t blind. It was dark. Really dark.
Bob knew he must have been lying where he had fallen for well over four hours. He shivered and realised that he had to do something to fight off the cold. He didn’t know much about hypothermia, but he did know that it had been cold earlier in the day and it would be much colder now. He mentally thanked Lieutenant Colonel White for insisting they were issued with warm and water-resistant jackets.
He was lying on his back on a steep slope. He worked out that the old barracks and the track to Strathan lay at the top of the slope and that reaching the shelter of one of the cottages at Strathan was probably his only chance of surviving the night. He rolled over onto his front, groaning as the Sten gun, apparently still strapped to him, shifted, banging against his left side.
As Bob crawled painfully upwards it seemed to take forever until the gradient decreased, allowing him to stand upright on what he assumed was the flat ground south of the old barracks. He wondered if Michael had also been shot and realised he could trip over the lieutenant’s body without even seeing it. Then, above the background noise of the rain and fierce wind, he heard metal clinking against metal, coming from the direction of the track. He froze. Then he heard the sound again.
Bob had an agonising moment of indecision before realising that he only had one chance. As loudly as he could manage, he shouted, ‘Help!’ Then he shouted again.
Nothing happened for a moment, and then he was dazzled by the glare of a torch shone straight at him.
Chapter Eighteen
‘It’s Group Captain Sutherland!’ Bob could see figures moving towards him in the periphery of the torch beam. Suddenly he felt very tired.
‘Sir, are you alright?’ He recognised Captain Sanderson’s voice.
‘If I’m honest, I’ve been better, Captain,’ Bob said. ‘I think I need to get out of the cold.’
‘We’ll take you down to Strathan, sir, and assess the situation there. Can you walk?’
Bob found he could. Sanderson assigned a commando to take each of Bob’s arms to steady him, but after a yelp of pain and another brief flash of the torch they settled on supporting his right arm only.
‘You need to find Lieutenant Dixon and Petty Officer MacDonald,’ said Bob.
‘All in good time, sir, let’s get you warm and dry first.’
It was downhill most of the way to the cottages. Bob remembered that it had only been a few minutes’ walk when travelling uphill in the opposite direction, but it seemed to cost him a huge amount of effort now. By the time he reached the nearest cottage, the commandos had already lit fires in the hearths in both rooms. Bob was amazed that they had been able to find anything combustible within miles in this rain.
With candles also lit, the interior of the cottage came to life, as perhaps a dozen men in khaki organised their kit and Captain Sanderson tried to make Bob comfortable on an ancient sofa.
The door banged open. ‘I was sure you were dead, sir!’ Lieutenant Dixon came into the cottage, followed by Petty Officer MacDonald. The lieutenant turned to Captain Sanderson. ‘Did he tell you he’d been shot, Captain?’
‘I was just about to look at him,’ said the captain. ‘He was close to going under with the cold out there, so I thought it best to get him here, then work out what else was wrong.’
Dixon looked at Bob with concern. ‘Sir, you were shot by Sergeant Quinlan. You were standing on the edge of the slope beyond the ruined barracks and the shot knocked you off your feet and down the slope. The sergeant shot you with a Lee-Enfield rifle, and said he’d hit you in the chest. He said you were dead, and given his reputation as an outstanding shot, I didn’t think to question that.’
‘Are you alright?’ said Bob.
‘A badly wounded pride, sir, but otherwise fine. Mallory and Quinlan took me prisoner and threate
ned to kill me if Andrew didn’t surrender too. Andrew had heard the shot and was on his way to help. After that they stove in the bottom of the boat to sink it, brought us here and tied us up in the shed, or school, or whatever it is. We’ve been in there ever since. Come on, let’s look at you, sir. There’s a nasty bump and a cut on the back of your head. It’s not bled much, but you can feel there’s a swelling there. I suppose you picked that up falling down the slope.’
Sanderson turned to Dixon. ‘You are quite sure that Mallory and Quinlan were here this afternoon, lieutenant?’
‘Yes, definitely.’
‘Did you get any idea of what they were doing here, and where they went when they left?’
‘No. After they left Andrew and I trussed up in the other cottage we didn’t see or hear anything more of them. Frankly, I’m not sure why they didn’t kill us. Look, can’t this wait? We need to check on the Group Captain.’
‘Can you look after him for a short while?’ asked Sanderson. ‘I need to let Lieutenant Colonel White know what’s happening. We’ve got a field radio with us, but it will be touch and go whether we’re within voice range. I’m going to take the radio operator back up to the high ground where we found the group captain. That should give a better line of sight. Otherwise we’re stuck with Morse code.’
A commando corporal who said he was a first-aider helped Lieutenant Dixon lift Bob’s camouflage smock as a precursor to pulling it off over his head. Bob’s loud groan caused a change of plan, and in the end the smock was cut from him.
‘Your uniform jacket’s not in much better shape, sir,’ said the lieutenant. ‘You’re bleeding from an arm wound, and there’s a hole in your jacket over your chest, but no bleeding there that I can see.’
