last, the wire-mesh fence and main gates of the development site appeared ahead. The adverse weather conditions had kept most of the protesters away, but the diehards were still grimly hanging on. Ross gave a groan as he saw the small crowd huddled in their rain gear by the gates, ready to wave their sodden banners and scream abuse at any vehicles entering or leaving the fenced-off construction zone. Ross would have bet money that Geoffrey Watkins was among them. Come up all the way from England to stir up as much trouble as he could, Watkins was the most militant of the lot.
Ross personally didn’t have a lot of time for the environmental nutters in general, though he had to admit they might have a point on this occasion. It had certainly been one of the more contentious projects his firm had been involved in, and he’d often wished that his senior partner, Ewan, hadn’t agreed to take it on. The plans for Highland Manor, an eighteen-hole championship golf course and gated community estate with million-pound homes for wealthy retirees, had attracted no small amount of anger from locals. Two hundred acres of ancient pine forest had been earmarked for destruction under the scheme, sparking furious resistance and attempted legal action by one of the larger and more organised ecowarrior groups. The environmentalists had lost their legal case in court months ago, but in spite of the ruling against them were still gamely doing all they could to disrupt the development. Their methods had been creative enough to cause protracted and extremely expensive delays. The company who’d initially landed the contract had been brought to a virtual standstill by the legion of protesters who had invaded the site, chained themselves to trees, lain in the path of bulldozers, harangued the foresters and generally made it impossible to get the excavations underway. When the company had built a scale-proof fence worthy of a prison compound and brought in security personnel to eject the protesters, the ecowarriors had simply sharpened up their game by sabotaging construction vehicles, slashing tyres and setting an awful lot of valuable machinery ablaze, until in the end the company execs had been forced to cut their losses and give up.
Three more construction firms were now in competition to decide which lucky crew would take their place. All the while, persistent rumours abounded of a lot of dirty money changing hands and palms being greased for the project to be greenlit. If you believed the gossip, certain local officials were going to do well out of the deal – if and when it actually got completed. The situation was a mess.
Ross was driving his company van, a little white Peugeot Bipper with the chartered surveyor firm’s logo proudly emblazoned on its side, a magnet for trouble. Not much wanting his vehicle to be attacked and pelted with missiles, he slipped away from the main gates and detoured around the site’s western perimeter to a small side entrance the protesters had, mercifully, chosen to leave unguarded today. He parked the van and listened to the rain pounding the roof. The ground was turning to slush out there, appalling even by the normal standards of a Scottish winter. Beyond the fence stood the thick, dark forest, ancient and forbidding. Local folklore held spooky old tales of bogles and sluaghs and other evil spirits and hobgoblins that lurked in the woods, preying on the hapless. What a load of shite, Ross thought, but he still didn’t much fancy having to venture inside.
He changed into his wellies and tugged on his raincoat before getting out of the van, then took the plunge. Moments later, he’d undone the padlock holding the side gate and let himself through the fence, closing it behind him before setting off at a trudge towards the trees.
The forest was very dense and hard to walk through, and Ross was certainly no hardened outdoorsman. He tripped and stumbled his way for nearly quarter of a mile using a GPS navigation device to orient him towards the western boundary. Without the GPS he’d soon have been hopelessly lost, probably doomed to wander for ever. Overhead the tall trees swayed in the wind and their branches clacked and clashed like the antlers of fighting stags in the rutting season. Deep, deep in the forest he swore out loud – who the hell could hear him, anyway – as he had to clamber over a slippery, moss-covered fallen trunk that blocked his path with no other way around except through a mass of brambles that would have stopped a tank. He cursed even more vehemently a few metres further on, when he was forced to negotiate a steep downward slope where part of the ground had been washed away by floods of rain, exposing tree roots and a great deal of rotted and richly odorous vegetable matter.
Damn and blast. Why’d this have to happen to me? At least, if it was any consolation, the rain had stopped.
He was halfway down the slippery incline when he lost his footing. He windmilled his arms to try to regain his balance, to no avail. Next thing he was tumbling and slithering through the gloopy mud, desperately grasping at roots in an attempt to halt his descent but unable to stop himself until he’d rolled and somersaulted all the way to the claggy, squelchy bottom.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ he yelled as he managed to sit upright, caked from head to toe in wet, cloying, dripping, freezing cold filth that dripped from his fingers and matted his hair. ‘I don’t bloody believe it!’ Followed by a stream of much more profane invective.
But then his words abruptly died in his mouth as a very strange and unexpected sight caught his eye.
He reached out and raked in the dirt to uncover the rest of the shiny, glinting object whose corner was peeking up at him from the ground next to him. Something hard and small and thin and round, which he picked up and held up to look at more closely. As he wiped dirt off it, a stray beam of sunlight penetrated through the pine canopy above. It reflected off the object in his fingers, and it was as though someone had shone a golden light in his face. He gasped in astonishment.
Then, moments later, he was finding more gold coins in the mud. Dirty, but perfect and beautiful. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them. The torrential rain flood that had washed away part of the bank must have disturbed them from their hiding place. How long had they lain undiscovered in this remote and little-travelled neck of the woods?
Suddenly, Ross Campbell’s unlucky tumble and getting clarted up to his oxters in muck had become the best thing that had ever happened to him. As fast as he could stuff the coins into his coat and trouser pockets, more kept appearing all around. Within minutes he’d collected dozens of them. It was so incredible he was laughing and hooting to himself like a kid. When he’d loaded all he could carry into his pockets he struggled back up the slippery bank with his booty, vowing he’d return to dig up the hundreds more he was certain lay buried there.
The journey back to the van seemed to take him about half the time. He was so dazed and ecstatic that he barely noticed the brambles and treacherous terrain, and didn’t think for a single moment about his filthy, wet clothes or the fact that under them he was soaked to the bone. Reaching the van, he piled into the driver’s seat and dug some of the coins from his pocket to re-examine more closely. They were old, really old. He was no expert, but he was certain they must be worth a ton of money. A bloody fortune, lying there in the mud for hundreds of years, just waiting for him to come and find it.
Ross could hardly contain himself. The day’s task was almost completely forgotten. He’d just tell his business partner Ewan that the weather was too awful to get the job done, and promise to return as soon as possible. He had the exact location marked on his GPS device.
In the meantime, he needed to get home as fast as he could. A hot shower and a cup of tea, before he caught his death. Then he’d spend the rest of the afternoon, and probably the evening, cleaning up, counting and re-counting his glorious loot. What might the coins be worth? Hundreds of pounds each? Thousands? The numbers escalated in his head until it made him dizzy. Fantasies were already forming. He could picture himself quitting his job, for a start, then getting out of this godforsaken shithole and making a bee-line for somewhere with warm sandy beaches, palm trees and beautiful bikini-clad girls, maybe never to return. Fuck Katrina and her dentist! He’d show them.
He’d need to get the coins independently valued, of course. The internet would only tell him so much. But it would have to be discreet. And preferably done by an expert in another part of the UK, maybe in Edinburgh or London. Someone who’d never be told the precise location of the discovery. Nor would anyone else, certainly nobody local. As it seemed that he alone knew about this, he meant to keep it that way. The last thing Ross wanted was for others to come searching. And with the Loch Ardaich development project so conveniently