The Pretender’s Gold

Chapter 11

While Boonzie was making his preparations, another phone conversation was going on between the same two individuals as before.

The underling reported, ‘There’s been another development, chief.’

His superior replied, quite irritably, ‘What kind of development?’

‘Someone else is on the scene. An old guy. A relative of McCulloch’s.’

‘I thought McCulloch didn’t have any family.’

‘Turns out he does. An uncle. His name’s McCulloch, too. Lives in Italy. Arrived here this morning.’

The superior heaved an impatient sigh. ‘Okay. Now tell me why I need to be concerned about some old guy who lives in Italy.’

‘Because he’s isn’t just any old old guy. He’s probably twice as fit as most men half his age. A right hard case.’

‘And why is this a problem?’

The underling said, ‘Firstly, he isn’t buying the accidental drowning theory about Campbell. He seems to think the cases are connected.’

‘I wonder where he got that idea. The poacher?’

‘His nephew told him the whole story.’

‘To be expected, I suppose. Go on.’

‘Uncle McCulloch’s got a bit of an attitude problem. Not a happy chappie. And he’s intent on pursuing his own investigation.’

‘I see. One of those.’

‘But here’s the worrying part, chief. The guy is ex-military. Retired British Army non-com. We tried to get into his MoD file and hit a brick wall. Classified shit. You know what that means.’

‘Why the hell should I know what that means?’

‘It means trouble,’ the underling replied. ‘Now, it so happens that I’ve got a brother-in-law who works for the Ministry. I was able to call in a favour and—’

‘I’m a busy man. Why don’t you just cut to the chase and tell me what you found out?’

‘Well, I’ve got McCulloch’s whole bio here in front of me. And like I thought, it turns out this bastard was no ordinary soldier. I really think you should listen to this.’

‘Let’s hear it, then.’

‘Born in Glasgow in 1953. Joined up at seventeen and was accepted into the Parachute Regiment two years later, in 1972. Did five years with them before he passed selection for 22 Special Air Service in February, 1977.’

‘You’re telling me that this moron Ewan McCulloch had an uncle in the SAS. Great. Just great.’

‘He served with them for twenty-six years. Counter-hijack and counter-terrorism specialist. A hell of a record, chief. I mean, you name it, he’s been there and done it. Operation Nimrod, 1980. The Iranian Embassy siege. Then the following year in Gambia, he was one of the special ops team who went in and rescued the President’s wife and kids from leftist rebels. Falklands War, 1982, he was with D Squadron for the famous assault on Pebble Island, when they destroyed half the Argentine air force in just thirty minutes.’

‘Oh, wonderful.’

‘In ’87 he was taking out IRA insurgents in Northern Ireland. Same year, his SAS unit got deployed to end the Peterhead Prison riot, here in Scotland. Blew their way in and stopped it before the rioters even knew what was happening. Four years after that, it was Operation Desert Storm, search-and-destroying SCUD missiles the Iraqis were trying to lob into Israel. Then in Bosnia in 1997 he was with the unit that shot dead a Serb war criminal called Simo Drljaca.’

‘This just keeps getting better.’

‘The following year they did a snatch mission in Serbia against another war criminal, Stevan Todorovic. Tracked the guy to a remote hideout in the mountains, kidnapped him in the dead of night and whisked him back into Bosnia to be arrested. After that, in 2001, yer man was sent to Afghanistan for Operation Trent, fighting against the Taliban—’

‘All right, all right, I get the picture.’

‘There’s probably more, all kinds of black-ops crap that nobody without a top-grade security clearance even knows about. He finally retired in 2003, rank of Colour Sergeant. Moved to Italy with his wife, been living there ever since.’

‘And now he’s honouring us with his company here in Scotland. Lucky us.’

‘It’s a worry. Someone with this bastard’s skills could be dangerous, if he starts sniffing around.’

‘I’d call that an understatement. All thanks to you, I might add.’

‘Chief, this guy would’ve turned up even if we’d killed McCulloch. In fact that would’ve probably made things worse.’

‘I’d say it’s bad enough as it is, don’t you? Where is he now?’

‘At his nephew’s house. Baird followed him there earlier and he’s watching the place. I spoke to him just before I called you. The old guy is still there. What should we do? You want him taken care of?’

‘If I said yes, what makes you think you’re up to the job, after last time?’

‘This will be different. No more screwups.’

‘He needs to disappear. Gone. Vanished. Not a trace. The sooner the better, before he starts talking to too many people and drawing attention.’

‘Baird can handle it. Knife job, quick and dirty, no witnesses, while the old guy’s still at the house. He won’t even see him coming.’

‘No. Baird’s just a violent retard. From what you say, the old guy will chew him up and spit out the bones. I think you’d better pull Baird off McCulloch’s tail before he gets spotted or somehow manages to mess things up for us. I have other plans.’

‘Like what?’

‘It takes a pro to deal with a pro. I’m sending in Hacker.’

Chapter 12

The Normandy coast

Two days later

Ben Hope had always been a runner. In his mindset, if you weren’t constantly moving forwards, you were going backwards. That had never been an option for a person of his restless disposition, who needed to keep pushing hard from one challenging goal to the next. Somewhere deep in his mind he believed that, like a Great White shark, if he stopped moving, he’d sink to the bottom and die. He’d made himself physically fit from his mid-teens onwards, running and cycling and rock-climbing as though he was being chased by demons. That was before he’d joined the British Army and stern, shouty men in PT Instructor insignia took him to the next level and beyond. During his career he’d been able to achieve a degree of fitness, motivation and commitment that was off the charts. Now, all these years later, he still ran every day.

He liked to vary his routine. Sometimes he could be found pounding the woodland tracks and undulating wildflower meadows around the rural thirty-acre compound he co-owned here in France, a place called Le Val. Other times, he would drive out to this long, lonely stretch of beach just a few miles away on the coast. The beach was where he’d come today, to stretch his legs and put himself to the test during some downtime.

Winter was the season in which Ben liked running the most. A cold wind was blowing in off the sea, carrying pockets of squally rain that soaked him to the bone. This was his element, and the physical discomfort just made him push harder. The adverse weather on this chilly December day meant that the beach was totally deserted except for him and his German Shepherd, Storm, who loved nothing more than to tag along after his master on these punishing workouts with his tail wagging and his long pink tongue lolling out. Ben loved the emptiness. It allowed him to run at his peak and be alone with his thoughts.

A couple of times a week, as he was doing today, he liked to raise the endurance bar an extra notch by carrying a bergen weighed down with forty pounds of sand. Back in the day, he and his Special Forces comrades used to hump much greater loads than that for endless miles both in training and in combat. This was taking it easy by comparison. But it was enough to keep him in better shape than most of the much younger guys who came to be put through their paces at Le Val.

Ben co-ran the tactical training facility with his business partner and close friend Jeff Dekker. Jeff’s career had followed a parallel course to Ben’s, serving for years in the Navy’s Special Boat Service. Along with ex-soldier Tuesday Fletcher and the rest of their team they were kept busy by all the military, police and private close protection personnel who travelled to their quiet corner of rural Normandy from all over the world to hone their skills and learn from the best.

Ben finished his run and returned to where he’d parked his new car among the dunes on the approach to the beach. It was the latest in a line of BMW Alpina high-performance sedans, dark metallic blue. As much as he favoured the marque, he seemed to keep trashing them. The last one had been shot to pieces in a gun battle outside Alençon, a few months earlier. He blipped the locks open as he trudged up the loose sand. His body felt loose and pumped. Ten hard miles, and he was barely out of breath. Not too shabby. The dog was more tired than he was.

Ben dumped his bergen in the back of the Alpina, drank half a litre of bottled spring water, then changed out of his sandy running shoes. As he was getting ready to head back to Le Val he saw that he had a new voicemail message waiting for him on his phone.

It was from Jeff. He didn’t sound very happy, but that was no surprise since he’d fractured a bone in his wrist during a training exercise two weeks earlier, and was currently confined to desk duties with a cast and sling. Yet Ben could tell instantly from his tone that something else was wrong. Jeff sounded uncharacteristically worried. All he said was, ‘Call me back soon as.’

Ben did, right away. ‘Got your message. What’s up?’

‘Boonzie’s wife called the office number just now.’

‘Mirella?’

‘Yeah. Tuesday got the call and passed it on to me. There’s some kind of problem. She seemed pretty upset.’

‘Did she say what kind of problem?’

‘No, she wanted to speak to you about it. I think you’d better talk to her, mate. It sounds serious.’

It made sense to Ben that Mirella would rather talk to him, since Jeff didn’t know Ben’s old comrade Boonzie and his Italian wife as well as Ben did. But it didn’t make sense to Ben that it was Mirella, rather than Boonzie himself, who’d called. Something was obviously wrong.

Rather than let it wait until he got home, Ben punched Boonzie and Mirella’s landline number into his mobile. He sat in the car, watching the waves rolling in as the call connected and he heard the Italian dial tone. Storm had jumped into the back and was panting hot breath in Ben’s other ear and trying to lick his face. He gently pushed the dog away as Mirella’s voice came on the line, saying, ‘Pronto?’

Jeff had been right. She didn’t sound good at all.

Boonzie had learned Italian shortly after moving to Campobasso, and rather stubbornly insisted on speaking it with her all the time, so Mirella had never got to perfect her English. Which was fine, since Ben spoke Italian very well. ‘Mirella, it’s Ben.’

She sounded even more distraught, on the point of tears, as she thanked him for calling back so soon.

He asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Archibald.’ Mirella never called her husband by his nickname. Given that Boonzie would typically threaten dire violence against anyone else who dared to refer to him any other way, very few people did.

Ben steeled himself for the news that his dear old friend had fallen critically ill, or had received some terrible medical diagnosis, been given a week to live or was already dead. Not that Boonzie was particularly ancient. Even if he had been, the grizzled old warrior was one of those people you expect to live for ever, carved out of granite and as enduring and immutable as a mountain range.

But Mirella’s reply shocked him even more. ‘He’s missing.’

Ben stayed grimly silent as Mirella told him the story that had played out over the last few days. She explained how Boonzie had travelled to the Highlands of Scotland to visit his nephew Ewan, who’d been having some trouble. Ben hadn’t even known Boonzie had a nephew. He went on listening as she described the backstory of Ewan’s partner in the surveying business, recently drowned in an apparent accident that Ewan thought he had reason to suspect to be foul play.

The more Mirella talked, the faster the words came streaming out. Ben had to close his eyes and focus hard to keep up with the stream. He interrupted her flow with, ‘Hold on. Why did he think that?’

‘Because he received an anonymous phone call from a person claiming to be a witness to a crime,’ Mirella replied. ‘They said they saw some men murdering Ewan’s friend.’

As she went on explaining what she knew about the mystery witness, Ben listened hard and tried to make sense of it all. ‘So Boonzie – Archibald – went there to help Ewan do what? Track down this salmon fisherman guy?’

‘And find out what happened to Ross. But now Ewan is hurt, too. Archibald thought the same people who killed Ross had tried to kill him.’

‘Are the local police involved in this?’

‘He went to speak to them, but he wasn’t impressed. He decided to go his own way. You know him, how independent-minded he can be. And he doesn’t trust the police, at the best of times.’

Ben certainly did know him, and could also resonate with his reasons for going it alone. But it sounded like Boonzie had got himself into something bad, and that worried Ben. He asked, ‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘Two days ago. He doesn’t use a mobile phone. He called me from his nephew’s house. That was when he told me what happened to Ewan, how badly he was hurt, and how the police weren’t going to be of any help. Then I told him about the email that had come for him.’

‘What email?’

‘From his nephew.’ Mirella repeated to Ben what she’d already told her husband, reading out the short text of Ewan’s message verbatim. She described the image file that Ewan had attached with it. ‘It was a photo of a gold coin. The thing that Ross was supposed to have found. That’s all I know.’

Ben frowned at the mention of the coin. In his experience, gold and murder went together like strawberries and ice cream, and this made the suspicions of foul play seem more plausible. He said, ‘Can you send me the image file?’, and told her the email address to send it to.

Mirella was marginally more savvy with newfangled gadgetry than her technophobe husband. ‘I’m doing it now.’

Moments later, the email pinged into Ben’s inbox. He put the call on speaker while he opened up the file and scrutinised the picture. It was a good photo, focused sharp and up-close. No question that it was a gold coin. An old one, showing the date 1745. Probably valuable, though at this point Ben had no clear idea.

‘What the hell is this about, Mirella?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied helplessly. ‘Archibald didn’t say much when I told him about it. But he sounded as though it was no surprise. Like he already knew something.’

‘Did he say what he was going to do next? Where he was heading after Ewan’s house?’

‘If he had a plan, he didn’t tell me what it was. He just promised me he’d be home soon, and not to worry. But I am, Ben. I’m so desperately worried. He promised to keep in touch. Said he’d call twice a day to tell me where he was and what was happening. But it’s been two whole days and I haven’t heard anything from him at all! I keep imagining all kinds of terrible things. I’m going crazy here on my own. I had to talk to you.’

Ben said nothing for a few moments, thinking about his friend. Boonzie McCulloch was one of the toughest old war dogs Ben had ever known, and he’d known a few. The kind of guy you’d thank God was on your side, and not the enemy’s. Boonzie was also famously reticent when it came to talking about his past exploits. Ben was certain that even Mirella knew only a fraction of what her husband had been through, and survived, in his time.

‘He’s pretty resilient, Mirella. The fact that you haven’t heard from him might not mean he’s in trouble. It’s possible that he’s gone to ground for a while, and can’t call you. Maybe he will, any time now. And then everything will be okay again.’

‘There’s something else,’ she said, in a voice that sounded hollow, drained of energy. ‘Something he’d never have wanted me to tell anyone. He made me swear to keep quiet about it. Like if it was never talked about, it wouldn’t be real any more and it would just go away. But it is real. And it isn’t going away so easily.’

‘I don’t understand. What are you talking about?’

And then she told him about Boonzie’s illness.

Chapter 13

Mirella said, ‘I could tell he was having a problem. He seemed tired a lot more often than usual, and sometimes he looked pale. Something was obviously bothering him, but he kept insisting that he was fine and would get irritable if I pestered him about it. Then about six months ago, he finally confessed that he’d been getting increasingly severe chest pains and was becoming worried about them.’

Ben asked, ‘How serious is it?’

‘I persuaded him to see a private specialist in Campobasso. The doctor ran some tests and soon diagnosed heart disease. Said there was a risk of cardiac arrest if the condition was left untreated. Archibald just brushed it off, didn’t want to accept the diagnosis. When we got home, he wouldn’t even talk about it. I was so angry and upset. That man is as stubborn as a mule.’

Tell me about it, Ben thought. He waited anxiously to hear more.

‘Anyway, of course, the pains got worse. Eventually he agreed that something had to be done. Two months ago, he went into hospital to be fitted with a pacemaker.’

This was news, even though Ben and Boonzie kept in touch regularly. ‘I spoke with him just six weeks or so ago. I thought he sounded a little tired, but he never mentioned a single word to me about operations and pacemakers.’

‘And he’d have hated anyone knowing. Even more than he hates having it. He’s not as strong as he used to be, and he has to take all these pills every day. Of course, he works twice as hard to prove himself. But he’s struggling, Ben, I can tell. He’s been getting fainting attacks. I read that some of these defibrillation implants can malfunction sometimes, or that all kinds of complications can happen, even a year after the operation. When he told me he needed to go to Scotland I begged him to stay, but he wouldn’t listen. What if something happened to him there? Why else wouldn’t he have called me again in two whole days?’

‘We don’t know that, Mirella,’ Ben said, lowering his voice to sound more reassuring.

‘I already called the hospital, in case he might have been taken there. It’s in a town called Fort William. The only patient there with the surname McCulloch was his nephew Ewan. But that doesn’t mean nothing has happened. The town is miles from where Ewan lives. It’s a remote place, deep in the hills. Archibald could be out there somewhere, with nobody to help if he got into trouble. He could have fainted again, or had a bad attack, and nobody might even know about it until—’ Mirella’s voice had reached a peak of anxiety and now broke apart into a sob.

Ben was quiet for a long time. Then he said, ‘Tell me the name of the place.’

She read it out for him, struggling with the strange foreign spelling. Ben noted it down and was instantly putting together his plan.

‘Here’s what we’re going to do, Mirella. I’ll get there as quickly as I can. You need to stay by the phone and call me immediately if you hear from him. Okay?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I need as much information from you as possible to help me find him,’ Ben said. ‘For example, did he rent a car at the airport?’ Knowing what kind of vehicle Boonzie was using would be a useful asset. The registration number, even better. There were ways of bluffing that kind of knowledge out of rental companies.

‘He went by train.’

Ben considered the kind of remote local stations the area would have, not a car rental outlet for miles around. ‘Then how’s he travelling?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t worry about it. What about other contacts there? Does he know anyone else in the village, did he mention any names to you? A friend of Ewan’s, perhaps? Or maybe he booked a place to stay, like a hotel or guesthouse?’

‘He never mentioned anything about that to me.’

Ben said nothing. He’d have little to go on when he got there. But that wasn’t anything new to him.

Mirella said, ‘I don’t know how to thank you for this, Ben. I didn’t know who else to turn to. I couldn’t go to Scotland alone. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Ben told her. ‘That’s what you have me for. Finding people is what I do best, and I will find him. That’s a promise.’