Читать книгу The Pretender’s Gold - Scott Mariani, Scott Mariani - Страница 10

The gold coin seemed to glitter between his fingers with a life of its own. Ewan had never seen anything like it before. He turned off the hoover and sat at the wheel of the van to examine the coin more closely. Its markings were ingrained with dirt, as though it had not long ago been dug up out of the ground. But they were still clear enough for Ewan to make out. One face bore the head of a regal-looking individual with long, flowing locks of hair and a noble, patrician profile. Inscribed around the circumference were the letters LVD.XV.D.G.FR. ET NAV. REX. The reverse of the coin was inscribed with a crown and more writing: CHRS.REGN.VINC.IMPER.1746.

None of which meant anything to Ewan except the obvious 1746 date mark. And the fact that it was most definitely not a piece of brass. But now the question was burning inside him: what on earth had Ross been doing with it?

On an impulse, he got out of the van, knelt down by the open driver’s door and reached an arm under the seat to see what else might be under there. To his even greater amazement his fingers closed on a second coin. As with the first, he stared at it for a long moment. It was virtually identical except for the date mark, which was a year older.

Where could Ross have possibly found these? Surely, not even an inveterate slob would leave valuable gold coins lying around for any length of time in their car. They couldn’t have been here long. Perhaps this explained where all the mud had come from. Was this what Ross had been doing on his trips into the countryside, rooting up old coins?

Scotland as a whole was incredibly rich with history, but nowhere more so than this region. Myths and legends of buried treasure had for years drawn legions of dreamers and speculators to the Loch Ardaich pine forest and surrounding glens looking to get rich in other ways, armed with metal detectors and shovels and divining rods and God knew what else. Nobody had ever found anything of significant historic interest, barring a few rusty old arrowheads and, on one exciting occasion, a medieval Scottish claymore sword so decomposed that it looked like a rotted stick. Gradually, the treasure hunters had dwindled to a bare few – while the sceptics and naysayers became both more numerous and vociferous. ‘There’s nothing there’ had become the received wisdom.

But it looked as though Ross might well have proved the naysayers wrong. Why hadn’t he shared the news of his discovery?

Reflecting, Ewan felt a pang of betrayal. He’d always considered Ross his friend. Friends didn’t hide things from one another. Ross’s deliberate act of secrecy smacked of mistrust and deviousness. What did he think, that Ewan would try to steal his precious coins? Claim his share, because they’d been discovered on company time?

But hold on a minute, Ewan thought. This wasn’t making any sense. What were the coins doing lying about in the van in the first place? Who wouldn’t have brought them inside and made sure they were safely hidden away? Which meant, or implied, that the reason Ross had left these two particular coins in the van was that he didn’t know they were there.

Which in turn also meant, or implied, that the reason he didn’t know they were there was that he’d accidentally dropped them, in his typically clumsy and negligent style, while his attention was taken up with something else. And what else could possibly have distracted him in such a way?

One logical answer sprang to mind.

More coins.

Ewan could picture it perfectly. Ross, delirious with greedy joy at his find, scrambling home in such a rush that the gold was literally slipping through his fingers. How many more coins could he have found? Enough, obviously, that he hadn’t bothered even counting them until he got back to his flat, or else he’d surely have missed these two. Dozens of them? Scores? Who could say?

But then Ewan had another thought that made his blood turn cold.

If these two coins represented only a minor fraction of Ross’s haul, as logic suggested, then where were the rest? What if Ross had had them on his person, keeping them close, when the alleged killers struck? What if the killers had taken them?

And worst of all, what if the gold was the reason they’d killed him?

Suddenly this whole dreadful thing made some kind of sense.

Ewan pocketed the pair of coins and pulled out his phone to call his uncle. No reply, and no messaging service on which to leave a voicemail. Ewan only had the Italian landline number to reach him on. He wasn’t even sure if Boonzie possessed a mobile. Knowing him, perhaps not. There was an email address for him and Mirella, but Ewan had given up sending messages to it long ago.

Ewan couldn’t stand passively waiting any longer. He had to do something. People must be told about this. Now there was not only a potential witness to the crime, but a likely and compelling motive to boot.

Kinlochardaich had a church, a pub, a garage, a small convenience store and its own tiny primary school with about twenty-five pupils, but it had no police station – something many residents regarded as a blessing. The only cop hereabouts was Grace Kirk, and so Ewan clambered into his van and drove hurriedly over to the rented cottage in which she lived alone, just beyond the outskirts of the village. He was a little nervous about going to see her. They hadn’t been alone together since they were both sixteen years old and sort of, kind of, on-and-off going out. Not that it had been much of a relationship. A bit of hand-holding, a few awkward kisses and some sweet talk, nothing more serious. But Ewan had secretly worshipped and pined for Grace for years afterwards, and in fact was willing to admit to himself that he’d never quite got over her. The news of her return to Kinlochardaich a few months back had got him rather worked up, though he’d never had the courage to speak to her, let alone ask her out again. The local gossip mill had it that she and Lewis Gourlay, a regular of the drinking fraternity at the Arms, were an item. Ewan stubbornly refused to believe the rumour.

In the event, he needn’t have felt nervous because Grace wasn’t at home. Ewan’s remaining option was now to drive the thirty miles south-east to Fort William, the nearest town of any real size, and talk to the police there. The journey took an hour, thanks to the narrow and winding roads.

The police station was a generic slab-sided office building located out of town near Loch Eil, with misty hills looming in the background. On arrival Ewan blurted out his story as best he could to a duty officer, who became thoroughly confused, asked him to calm down and showed him into an airless, windowless interview room with a plain table and four plastic chairs. Locked in the room and made to wait, Ewan felt strangely like he was under arrest. The beady eye of a video camera watched from one corner.

Half an hour later, the door opened and in walked two middle-aged plainclothes men who introduced themselves as Detective Inspector Fergus Macleod and Detective Sergeant Jim Coull. Macleod was a large burly man with a neck like an Aberdeen Angus bull and a florid complexion, and Coull was a smaller sandy-haired guy with a brush moustache, lean and whippy in build, whose hands never stopped moving. They sat at the table and asked him to run through the account he’d told the duty officer.

Ewan patiently laid the whole thing out to them in detail. They listened gravely and Coull scratched occasional notes on a pad he kept close to his chest. When Ewan reached the part about the coins, the detectives asked if they could see them.

‘I only brought the one with me,’ he said, showing them the slightly newer one from 1746. It was a lie; the other was still in his pocket, but some mistrustful instinct made him keep it hidden. The detectives examined it with impassive faces, then Macleod asked if they could hang onto it as evidence. Ewan, who had seen this coming, reluctantly agreed. Coull put the coin in a little plastic bag and assured him it would be well looked after.

‘Don’t forget to drop the other one into the station when you get a chance,’ said Coull.

‘Of course,’ replied Ewan, thinking he’d do no such thing.

‘Now tell us again about this poacher who claims to have witnessed the alleged incident,’ Macleod said, leaning across the table with his chunky square hands laced in front of him. The term ‘alleged incident’ grated on Ewan somewhat, but he patiently and politely repeated what he’d already told them.

‘Like I said, that’s all I know about the man. I don’t know his name, or exactly who or what he saw, other than he witnessed four men pushing Ross into the loch and deliberately drowning him. He couldn’t swim, anyway.’

‘Couldnae swim, eh?’ Coull asked, glancing sideways at his colleague as though this were some suspicious detail critical to cracking the case. By now Ewan was starting to get peeved by their lacklustre response. He asked them what they intended to do about this, now they had the facts of the matter before them.

Macleod heaved his thick shoulders in a shrug. ‘To be honest, Mr McCulloch, I would hardly say we had the facts. What you’re reporting is essentially no more than hearsay. These are very serious allegations and require more than this kind of flimsy anecdotal evidence to support them.’

‘Well, if you wanted something more substantial to go on, you could try to identify the witness, for a start,’ Ewan said.

‘Alleged witness,’ Coull corrected him.

‘Okay, alleged witness,’ Ewan said with a flush of impatience.

‘And how do you propose we do that, Mr McCulloch?’

‘Given that he seems to be in the habit of poaching salmon on the loch, he might not be that hard to find. He told me he’d been caught before. So maybe he’s already on file somewhere. I mean, you must have a database of all the people who’ve been prosecuted for that sort of thing.’

‘You’d have to narrow it down to something a wee bit more specific,’ Coull said. ‘We don’t know when he was caught, or doing what exactly, or where. That’s an awfy lot of potential names to trawl through, each one of which would have to be processed individually. You’re talking an enormous expenditure of manpower.’

Ewan stared at him, thinking, Isn’t expending manpower what the police are meant to do when somebody gets murdered? ‘Okay, but it must be possible to identify him one way or another. Then maybe you could find out what he knows. Maybe in exchange for turning a blind eye to what he gets up to. Like a plea deal.’

‘That’s not what a plea deal is,’ Coull said, like a real smart-arse.

‘Whatever you call it, then.’

Macleod pursed his lips and breathed heavily. ‘I see. You’ve got this all worked out, haven’t you, Mr McCulloch? Maybe you should be doing our jobs for us.’

‘There’s a thought,’ Ewan snapped back and instantly regretted it.

The interview didn’t get any more productive from that point. Twenty minutes later, Ewan left the police station wishing he’d never gone there. On the long drive homewards he was wondering angrily why the hell he’d agreed to let them hold onto one of the gold coins as ‘evidence’, if they had little to no intention of taking the murder claim seriously.

Oh, what the hell. Boonzie would soon be here to help set things straight.

But there was no phone message waiting for him when he got home. Ewan’s heart sank in dismay.

He spent the rest of the day trying to alleviate his frustration with mundane tasks like fixing the broken wall tile in the bathroom. That evening he immersed himself in the internet, typing in search keywords like GOLD COINS LOCH ARDAICH PINE FOREST and noting down whatever he could find on a pad. There wasn’t much. Then he began checking out numismatical websites, a strange and obscure corner of the web devoted to the study of old currency.

Researching the coin’s inscriptions and 1745 date mark online he was able to determine that what he had in front of him was what was known as a Louis d’or, a gold Louis, the eighteenth-century precursor to the later French Franc. Its value, from what he could glean, was something in the region of five thousand pounds. Holy crap.

French coins buried in Scotland? Ewan investigated the history behind that, too, and made more notes. Lastly he spent a while hunting for information about illegal salmon fishing in the vicinity. Again, he discovered a few details, though nothing specifically useful to him, and scribbled them down on his pad.

He looked at his watch. Getting late, and still no word from Boonzie. Ewan didn’t want to pester his uncle by trying to call again, but maybe he could send an email. Thinking Boonzie ought to know about the coins, he used his phone to take a photo of it, then attached the image to a brief message that just said, ‘Ross found this. It gets weirder. Hope you get here soon.’

He watched the message go, and felt suddenly very alone and empty. In a sudden fit of hopeless rage he ripped the page out of the notepad, screwed it into a ball and flung it at the wastepaper basket. It missed, and rolled into the corner. He was too despondent to care.

He was beginning to worry that maybe his uncle wasn’t coming at all.