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Eskdale Shoot
Eskdale Shoot
Eskdale Shoot
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Eskdale Shoot

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Vigilante action is generally deplored, a symptom of the breakdown of law and order, or perhaps - equally serious - a loss of confidence in the integrity of the police. Is it ever justified? The decisive need for the police to retain the community's confidence may be the lesson from Eskdale.

Eskdale Shoot is the gripping tale of Peter Thorburn, the newly appointed manager of a forestry firm in the Scottish Borders, who is plunged suddenly into a mire of murder, tampered evidence and bullying interrogation. he wants to live a quiet life and marry, but someone is determined to frame him for a murder. Who? And why?

The tale reaches its violent climax in Eskdale. As Peter's belief in the integrity of the police is progressively destroyed, he is forced to resolve the extreme crisis solely with the help of close friends, the only people he believes he can trust, and some Gurkha soldiers from his brother-in-law's regiment.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 14, 2007
ISBN9781425198053
Eskdale Shoot
Author

William Mutch

Bill Mutch is a professional firester, educated in Edinburgh. He worked for several year in West Africa, before moving to the University of Oxford and then to the University of Edinburgh where he headed the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources. He has travelled widely and has worldwide experience as a consultant to foreign governments, as well as in the UK. He was the first president of the Institute of Chartered Foresters, a Commissioner of the Countryside Commission for Scotland and a board member of the Nature Conservancy Council, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Central Scotland Countryside Trust. He has published many books on trees and woodlands - most recently the 2006-revision of Tall Trees and Small Woods, a do-it-yourself guide to tree planting and woodland care. His first novel, Steal me a Duchess, a thrilling WW II story (inspired by an actual operation) was set in West Africa and published in 2001. This latest novel , is the first of a planned trilogy, each book set in a different part of the exciting Border country. Bill is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1985 was awarded the OBE for services to forestry. He is married and lives in Kinross-shire.

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    Book preview

    Eskdale Shoot - William Mutch

    © Copyright 2006 William Mutch

    Jacket design by Mark Blackadder

    The moral right of the author has been asserted

    All characters in this book, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

    Note for Librarians: A cataloguing record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada at www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html

    ISBN 978-1-4120-9190-9 (softcover)

    ISBN 978-1-4251-9805-3 (ebook)

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    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

    Contents

    ONE

    TWO

    THREE

    FOUR

    FIVE

    SIX

    SEVEN

    EIGHT

    NINE

    TEN

    ELEVEN

    TWELVE

    THIRTEEN

    FOURTEEN

    Image343.JPG

    ONE

    IT ALL BEGAN with a newspaper report.

    Students arrested on explosives charge

    Early yesterday Edinburgh police arrested William McClusky (18 years) and Robert Sinclair (22), both students at the University of Edinburgh, on charges of possessing an unlicensed firearm, ammunition and explosives. McClusky, from Dundee, is studying forestry at the university and Sinclair, who is from Kelso, is a final year medical student. It is understood the men were arrested at their lodgings in Causewayside, where a firearm and explosives were recovered by the police. Both men have been remanded in custody.

    Bill McClusky’s father and I had worked together in Africa. That is why the name grabbed my attention-and the coincidence the accused man was a forestry student at Edinburgh University, as I had been years before. That fact and the man’s name sprang off the page. The piece in The Scotsman suggested young McClusky was in deep trouble.

    This was a long time ago, in the middle of 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, but the real story could not be told then. The affair that developed had to be kept quiet as long as the key person was alive, even though he was living far away. He had to be protected, for I owed him a debt beyond all money. Now he is dead and I can set down what really happened those years ago in Eskdale. From time to time half-truths have been whispered in the Border country, although my friends have all kept silence. It is better that the tale should now be told properly.

    I had come home to Britain from West Africa a month or two earlier, in poor health. My friend and colleague in Nigeria, Alistair McClusky, had suggested I might meet his son Bill, since I was likely to be in Edinburgh where the boy was studying. Before I got around to contacting Bill, however, this had happened and I felt pretty guilty. Dengue fever followed by dysentery had left me weighing something under eight stone which, even for a man of my modest height, was not a pretty sight. I had to be shipped home and the specialist medics in Liverpool decided it would be unwise for me to continue living on the West Coast or elsewhere in the tropics. My resignation from the Colonial Service was inevitable and I had returned to Scotland, feeling low both about my ill health and, longer term, on losing my job.

    The first essential was to recover my strength. Rest and plain food achieved that and I happily measured progress by the number of holes I could play, with diminishing scores, on some of the excellent golf courses that feature among Edinburgh’s attractions. I had business in the city too since, sadly, the family home had to be broken up after my mother’s death in the previous year. I was her only child, so that was a lonely and dispiriting business.

    With time on my hands-there was a limit to the amount of golf I could manage and I had few friends in the city-I read the daily papers pretty thoroughly. At the time, the EIIR controversy was the big story. Her Majesty the Queen was undoubtedly the second of her name in England but Good Queen Bess had reigned there before the merging of the kingdoms in 1603 and there had never been an Elizabeth Queen of Scots. On that score some people in Scotland objected vehemently to the title Elizabeth the Second.

    With the passage of half a century it is not easy to convey the intensity of the disagreement. It was so profound it appeared to threaten the break-up of the United Kingdom, which came as a shock and an affront to many people. Even in the House of Commons, when the Royal Titles Bill came up, there was a Division-quite unprecedented on such a measure-and forty Members of Parliament voted against the Queen’s title. In various parts of Scotland, shopkeepers who included EIIR symbols in their shop-window displays to celebrate the Queen’s accession and coronation were attacked. In a daring raid, a tiny group of young people stole the Stone of Destiny from the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, to return to Scotland what Edward the First had removed from Scone Palace in 1297. To the Establishment (at least in England) this was an appalling sacrilege that smacked of anarchy and deserved the severest punishment, if only a culprit could be found. There was press speculation that a Scottish Republican Army was forming, analogous to the IRA. The last straw came when the Post Office began erecting post-boxes carrying the EIIR insignia in the metal; they became targets for violence, culminating in the ‘posting’ of explosives.

    There were other big stories in the newspapers: trouble in Eastern Europe; Russian spying; the Cold War and Marshal Stalin’s death; national concern about nuclear energy and nuclear weapons-the British government had just offered a large amount of money as an incentive for the identification of new commercial sources of radioactive minerals in the UK-but all these national and international concerns paled when I read about Bill McClusky.

    In fact, the EIIR affair was the context of the case that followed the arrest of the two students, Sinclair the trainee doctor and McClusky the young forester. The influence of the Establishment, even of the Cabinet, reacting to the perceived threat of Scottish republicanism and the blowing up of post-boxes, was to bear strongly on the men’s fate. Since I am a forester and knew Bill’s father, I was especially interested in the report of the arrest and the case that followed. Nevertheless I did not appreciate how profoundly the affair subsequently would affect my own life.

    When I visited him in Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison, I found Bill McClusky a lanky, ginger-haired lad with a sallow complexion that often goes with that colouring and was not simply a product of prison life. He was bewildered at his confinement, unconvincingly belligerent, like a schoolboy caught in some prank, hopelessly naive about politics and pathetically anxious to talk about past life in Nigeria where he had visited his parents in school holidays. I provided a link to that secure world he had known before the present disaster. I came away depressed at his vulnerability, worn out with the effort of raising his spirits and providing support.

    Bill was a first year student, aged eighteen and ingenuous with it. It seemed his tolerance of alcohol was such that he became happy and talkative on anything more than a pint of draft beer, which may appear an advantage, as cost-effective, but it carries penalties. Be that as it may, McClusky went with Sinclair one evening to the Meadow Bar in central Edinburgh, close to the ‘digs’ they shared. The subsequent events were reported in the papers at the time of the trial and confirmed to me when I visited him in prison.

    Sitting with their beer in the noisy bar, the lads were part of the crowd in singing ‘Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled’ and voicing loud opinions on EIIR. They joyously raised their glasses to anti-English toasts that tasted well with the ale. During the hilarity, a stranger joined them, an older man who introduced himself as Carren and who hospitably provided more beer. Expressing fervent agreement with the anti-English sentiments, Carren said talk was all very well but were the students minded to help Scotland’s cause with stronger action? Bold with beer, they readily agreed. Had they somewhere safe to hide goods? Yes: there was a loose floorboard in the bedroom but what kind of goods?

    In short order, and to their considerable bewilderment, the students were supplied with a handgun and ammunition, slabs of explosive, detonators and a length of fuse. The targets, they were told, were the national grid pylons taking ‘good Scottish electricity to the bloody English’. When they pointed out defensively they had no transport for such a trip, they were assured a party member, a taxi-driver, would pick them up the following evening and take them to the chosen place.

    ‘You’ll be striking a great blow for Scotland, boys.’

    Wickedness or plain foolishness? A host of influences conspired to commit them: the excitement of the moment, the beer, the weasel words of Carren, reluctance to be the one to chicken-out, genuine love of country, echoes of ‘Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled’. They took the ‘goods’ to put under the floorboard.

    When McClusky and Sinclair stood, shivering with cold and excitement, beside a steel super-grid pylon near the English border just over twenty-four hours later, the courage of the Meadow Bar beer had long gone. Problems were legion. How does one blow up a pylon? Should all the blocks of explosive be piled in a heap round one of the steel legs or divided among several? Or should the explosive be tied to the steel struts? But surely in that case much of the explosive force would be lost in the air instead of cutting the metal, wouldn’t it? Crucially, how long a fuse should be used?

    Uncertainties and unanswerable questions crowded in, bringing self-doubt and realisation they were ignorant of the rudiments of terrorism. Their education was commendably incomplete. They belonged to a pre-internet generation; subsequently twelve year-olds would know how to build a hydrogen bomb but these men were ignorant of the basics of even Guy Fawkes’ technology.

    Finally the students decided to abandon operations for that night and, returning all their material to the taxi, asked their fellow-conspirator to take them back to their Edinburgh lodgings.

    Only a few hours after their return, around six that morning, a loud knocking at the door heralded a police raid. The police, looking for a loose floorboard, were ‘acting on information received’. The students were arrested for possession of an unlicensed firearm and explosives. Carren, the man in the pub who had supplied the goods, was an agent provocateur, a policeman, as also was their friendly taxi-driver. Later, Carren would swear in court the students had approached him in the pub, asking for explosives and training in their use.

    From the press report, it seemed certain the students would be found guilty on these charges. I read that two men in Glasgow were found guilty of possessing unlicensed pistols and ammunition; each was fined five pounds and I took comfort this might set the scale of Bill’s penalty. That straightforward result, however, did not follow. To his credit, the Procurator-Fiscal in Edinburgh declined to press charges, on the grounds that the gun had been ‘deactivated’; the cartridges were dummies, as were the detonators; the slabs of explosive were harmless replicas. No damage had been done. No one had even been threatened with the dummy pistol. Things looked up.

    The Fiscal’s decision, however, was referred to London and the cumulative effect was seen of the theft of the Stone from Westminster Abbey, the post-box explosions, the intimidation in Glasgow and the rest. One could readily imagine the pressure placed on senior police officers to get a conviction to ‘teach these hooligans a lesson’ or some such phrase. At Cabinet level, it was decided the men should be indicted on charges of High Treason. The appalling significance of this charge was that, upon conviction, it would result in the death sentence: the judge would have no option-the sentence was mandatory. Several weeks later, the men were tried in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, fortunately on a charge that, by a sensible circumlocution devised by the Scots law officers, avoided the word ‘treason’. Instead, they were held to have been ‘conspiring to alter the constitution of the Realm by criminal means’. At the end of a trial full of conflicting evidence, the jury found them guilty. Perhaps the judge was influenced by the fact that the initiative, the transport and all the supposed explosives had been supplied by the agent provocateur Carren, because he sentenced the students to one year’s imprisonment, which appeared lenient against the threat of the treason penalty.

    In bitter cold that made me yearn for Africa, I was one of the small crowd in Parliament Square on the final day of the trial awaiting the verdict, drawn by the drama of the events and by the fact Bill McClusky was my friend’s son. People were held by the enormity of the charges and by disquiet at the way the evidence had been gathered. When the verdict was announced, there was a threat of mob violence against Carren but the man slipped away by some back door. People were shocked at the convictions but more at the lengths the police had gone to entrap the students. Carren was publicly reviled. The average Scot did not care for these slimy methods that did no favours for the public perception of the police.

    Strong though my own concern at the police behaviour was on the day of the trial, I had no conception how that disquiet was to recur, reinforced and sharpened ten-fold, in the months ahead.

    Soon afterwards I was appointed to a new job, as Scottish manager of Firtree Forest Management and, in the challenge of that move, Carren and the events of the High Court passed from my mind, at least for a time. Firtree’s chief executive in London, Piers Millinghurst, aimed to open a new office at Melrose in the Scottish Borders as a convenient centre for the firm’s expanding activities. It was an exciting prospect, my health had been restored and I was a keen applicant. The interview was at the firm’s office in London and the following day, having been given the news the position was mine, I was invited to lunch at the Millinghursts’ house near Ascot. I looked forward to meeting my new colleague at home with his wife; such informal contact among senior staff was a feature of the service I had recently left and I hoped the Firtree appointment would be more than a straight business arrangement. In the event, the meeting was quite different from my expectation.

    Piers was not a professional forester; his background was financial. He had worked in South Africa and, after the war, in the City of London where he had spotted the potential that British tax laws offered those who invested in afforestation. On the strength of that, he had taken over the embryo Firtree business, just at a time some people were beginning to make big money and were looking for tax-effective ways of placing it. He appeared to have backed a winner and his talk made me enthusiastic. He was tall, distinguished in appearance and self-confident, at least away from his wife.

    Beatrice Millinghurst was South African, obviously of Dutch extraction for she had a pronounced accent. She may have been a year or two older than her husband; opinionated and domineering, she was markedly plain with iron-grey hair drawn back to a knot on the nape of her neck. When Piers introduced me, she seized on the fact I had been working in West Africa to launch a tirade on the inadequacies of British administration there. In her view ‘the blecks’ had to be ruled hard.

    ‘You British are too soft by half. I know. If you treat a Kaffir soft, he gets the idea he is the equal of a white man and then you will never get a day’s work out of him.’ And so on.

    It seemed unpromising that my hostess should open this controversy with her husband’s newly appointed partner at our first meeting. Although disagreeing comprehensively with her thesis-and, whatever her experience in South Africa, she was quite ignorant of conditions elsewhere on the continent-I did not want to begin my engagement in the Firtree firm by having a stand-up fight with Beatrice. The saving grace was that I should be working three hundred miles from Ascot and, with luck, we should meet infrequently: the more seldom the better. On the other hand Piers was a charming host and I could envisage a good working relationship between us. I still wanted the job.

    The upshot of the interview and the lunch party was that Piers offered me a salaried partnership in the company, conditional on my putting capital into it. Since I had just received a lump sum as part of the pension settlement from my former employers, this presented no problem and I asked that the company’s lawyer send the terms of the partnership directly to my solicitor in Edinburgh. This stance was out of my usual character but the direct result of Beatrice’s belligerence. The Millinghursts appeared surprised at the formality of my request and to a degree I surprised myself. On reflection I realised it was an instinctive distrust generated by Beatrice’s verbal assault. In fact, when she was out of the room, Piers apologised for her attack, stressing it derived from an unhappy time in South Africa. I said I understood and bore no scars.

    Nevertheless it intrigued me that Piers’ wife was party to the terms of my appointment. She had no formal position in the company but it was evident she exercised considerable influence and ‘wore the breeks’. Although Piers gave no impression of being hen-pecked, there was no doubt he was the follower, perhaps simply to avoid the hassle of taking a different line. Their house revealed affluence and much attachment to material goods and life-style. If the man married for money, he had to accept the rough with the smooth but in my judgment it was a poor bargain and I found myself sympathising with Piers for his burden.

    I had my partnership but I was glad I should be working far distant from London. I travelled north next morning to begin my duties immediately.

    From his own good experience when he was working in Scotland, Piers recommended excellent lodgings in the village of Darnick, a mile or so west of Melrose, as a base until I found a permanent home. Helen Dalgliesh was a charming widow who believed it was her duty to spoil me and fatten me up. She had returned to Darnick, where she had lived as a girl, after her husband’s death a few years back. She let rooms in her home ‘really for the company’, she said, which may have been true for I never saw evidence she was short of money. I was comfortable in the two rooms she gave me, although she proved to be a considerable martinet as regards cleaning; I soon learned to be careful with my forest boots and wet overcoat after I had been out in the field. Comfortable though I was, I sensed I was something of a disappointment to my landlady, for she was wont to refer in warm terms to the times ‘when Mr Millinghurst stayed here’. Her relative coolness for me may have stemmed from my becoming engaged to be married: she may have disliked competition.

    When I arrived at Darnick to begin work with Firtree, Alex Wylie met me. He was the firm’s foreman, an imposing figure, over six feet in height, and not averse to ‘blowing his own trumpet’. During the war he had been in the Service Corps in Africa and Italy, and had a fund of colourful stories about his time driving supply trucks in those theatres of war. Much more important to me, a survey of recent work convinced me he knew his job. He was also familiar with the district, detailed knowledge of which I lacked at the start.

    In my early days at Melrose, Alex tried hard to keep power in his own hands, presumably on the assumption I might be a ‘soft-mark’.

    ‘Just leave it to me, Mr Thorburn. I know someone who’ll be just the ticket’, he said when I announced my intention of engaging a secretary.

    I told him in no uncertain terms I would select not only my secretary but other people as well and he resigned himself to the reality I was not content to be a mere figurehead. Like Mrs Dalgliesh, Alex was a strong fan of Piers Millinghurst who had recruited him when Piers had been in Scotland. ‘When Mr Millinghurst was here’ was often a preface to a suggestion about what action might be taken, until I had to be quite blunt.

    ‘Piers Millinghurst is in London, Alex, and I am in charge of the operations in Scotland, so we shall do it my way. Right?’

    ‘Oh, aye. That’s right, Mr Thorburn. What you say goes.’

    The redeeming feature was that he knew the job technically and ran the squad well. I was able to recruit a good bunch of men for the fieldwork. It was only when I had been in Darnick for a couple of weeks I came to appreciate Alex was aiming to become Helen’s second husband; in the local phrase, ‘he was hanging up his hat’. Some evenings I was aware Alex was a visitor in the kitchen and I reckoned Alex bid well to move in with Helen when I found a permanent home. It was an innocent entertainment for me to observe the progress of the romance and I wished them well.

    Alice, my new secretary, had no problem of divided loyalty.

    Firtree operated by taking advantage of the tax laws which, at that time, made a forestry investment extremely attractive to high income tax payers. It would buy land, fence and drain it, build roads and prepare it to sell on to a wealthy investor for forest planting, another Firtree contract. The government backed the afforestation programme with substantial cash grants, in addition to the tax breaks.

    ‘Don’t neglect communications, Peter. Building new roads early on is good investment,’ Millinghurst emphasised. ‘Decent access reduces our planting costs and maintenance and cuts both the fire risk and insurance. Just as important, it’s a real plus for investors because they can drive into their property and see what they have bought. They can walk around, go shooting if they want to, feel they are part of the County. It makes them feel good, which is good for Firtree. Incidentally, for the road building we need stone and gravel, so it’s our policy to acquire the mineral rights wherever we can when we buy land. Sporting rights too. I know you are a shooting man, so you should like that.’

    This was a style of forest work entirely different from my experience in Africa. There I had managed superb mature forest in government ownership, with huge hardwoods. Here the land was bare, to be planted with only one or two species of conifers. In one measure it was tame stuff, but it was my new job and I was set to make a success of Firtree’s move to create a forest from scratch. I threw myself into it, moved into Mrs Dalgliesh’s house at Darnick and forgot Africa.

    The change meant there were new people to meet, staff to be recruited, new skills to be mastered, fresh challenges to be faced each day. Added to that, I fell in love and planned to marry. The plight of the students McClusky and Sinclair and how they had been snared by the police lost some of its former urgency in my thoughts. Nevertheless, soon after I took up the appointment in Firtree, I noticed a short paragraph in The Scotsman.

    Police Witness Emigrates

    It is reported that Mr James Carren, who was a prominent witness at the recent trial of the students McClusky and Sinclair in the Edinburgh High Court, has emigrated with his family to one of the dominions. Mr Carren, revealed at the trial as a former member of the Police Special Branch, was active in supplying the imitation weapons that featured prominently in the conviction of the men. McClusky (18) and Sinclair (22) were each sentenced by Lord Whitmore to one year’s imprisonment which they are now serving in Saughton Prison. It is understood that, since the trial, Mr Carren, who is married and has a young family, has received anonymous mail with threats of violence and has emigrated under another name. No member of the policeforce in Edinburgh was available to confirm or comment on this report.

    I read it with some satisfaction and a feeling that a chapter was being closed. I had a new career and a whole new life to make. Nevertheless what had happened to Bill McClusky kept turning up like a bad penny, affecting my values and judgment for a year and more ahead. Subconsciously, I suppose, it began to undermine my faith in the

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