The Pretender’s Gold. Scott Mariani
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.
Early next morning, with the surveyors’ office still closed and having heard nothing from his uncle, Ewan decided to drive over to the golf course development site and take a look around. He avoided the ubiquitous crowd of demonstrators who never seemed to tire of camping by the main entrance, and sneaked around to the same discreet spot on the perimeter fence where Ross’s van had been found. He quietly let himself in through the locked side gate and spent a while wandering among the woods. The chances of finding where Ross had made his fateful discovery were pretty slim, and he knew it; he didn’t really know why he’d come here except for something to occupy his mind.
From the southern edge of the forest’s tree line he made his zigzagging way down the steep, heathery slopes to the lochside. The sky was pale and the air was chilly, making his breath billow in clouds. The craggy hilltops that surrounded the loch like the defences of prehistoric fortresses were wreathed in mist, now and then a shard of sunlight breaking through the cloud and casting a golden streak across the rugged landscape. All his life Ewan had marvelled at the magnificent scenery, but it was now forever