TWELVE
Stuart sat comfortably in his train seat as the train pulled past Haymarket station and began to travel West towards Glasgow and his destination of Milngavie.
He was confused. How could life have done this to him? A few days ago, he was a lonely and unhappy man stuck in a rut with nowhere to go. Now he was on the run from the police. A man had been murdered and he had been thrown into a world of cloak and dagger. He was so scared. He had never felt as scared as this before. What was he to do? Turn himself in or run for the hills and hope it would all blow over.
For Stuart that was the ultimate questions. In his mind he wondered if would be safer to suffer whatever the courts and police threw at him or should he take on the police and the unknown cloak and dagger world that had been catapulted into his life just a few days before. The question for him was either going to lead to some form of resurrection or sudden and a never ending demise.
As he sat there in his seat, the weight of this decision consumed him. He pondered the ideas of running perhaps once he fled Scotland he would be free. Free. Yes free to escape this world he had been forced into. Moreover, with that freedom there would come a life. Life without heartache and the misery that he would have to endure if the police caught him. But Stuart knew that eventually he would be tracked down. So that freedom would never come. He would always be looking over his shoulder. It would be a life, but a life in while he would be dead. Could he carry this worry, sweating and grunting under the burden of a new life in which he could never settle down and would always be looking around checking to see if he was safe from capture. Then if he did manage to settle down who would he put in danger. Love ones, children friend’s even enemies. He knew deep down that this would be too much. But he could not turn to the police they would lock him up and they certainly would not believe his story either. In actual fact, Stuart was not too sure if he believed it either.
What to do eh?
He hoped he now had time to relax and take in his thoughts and plan his actions.
Within a few minutes, his train left the tenements’ and streets with their cosmopolitan hustle and bustle of life. His train passed under the motorway with the never ending streams of cars and vehicles that circumnavigated the city. Then it was all gone, the roads, the buildings and the chaos were replaced with the tranquillity and quietness of the mountains and hills of the West Lothian countryside.
The day was fine, and all around him was the yellow hawthorn flowering that consumed the railway edges and paths. Stuart began to ask himself why he had insisted on living in the city when all around him was the most beautiful countryside in the world.
Once he felt comfortable, Stuart got out Simon’s (aka John) little black pocketbook and began to study it. It was filled with jottings, and figures. Now and then, a name was scribbled down either circled or underlined. He noticed a series of numbers and letters and symbols.
Stuart was certain that Simon never did anything without a reason, and he was pretty sure that there was a cipher in all this. Conundrums and brainteaser was a subject that had always interested him. When he was young, he used to try to impress friends with his ability to crack puzzles quickly. Of course, it never really impressed them he just looked like a geek but it was an attempt anyway.
Stuart had always had a head for things like chess and brainteaser, and he always felt that if required he would be pretty good at deciphering ciphers. This one looked like the numerical kind where sets of figures matched to the letters of the alphabet, but anyone with a basic knowledge of metadata can find a clue to any problem after an hour or two's work. Stuart was sure that Simon would not have been content with anything so easy. Therefore, Stuart focused in on the printed words to break down the sequence of the letters.
During the whole train journey, he tried to break the cipher but none of the words answered.
The train arrived in Glasgow underground, remaining there, as people got off and on ready to go to the shops or work in the Glasgow area. A few minutes later, the train left Glasgow underground and just over half an hour later, he arrived at Milngavie.
Stuart got off the very long purple and while train with the letters SPT engraved in the side of the train. He opened the door to the train and was welcomed with a computerised voice asking him to remember his belongings. Stuart could not help but laugh inside because all his belongings would soon be lost once the police found the dead body in his flat.
People of various ages wondered off the train and began to walk with him down the platform towards a white bridge across which the whole of Milngavie seemed to pass over each day.
He noticed a sign. It said Attention 24hr CCTV in operation. Great he thought if this is switched on, they have my picture now. That meant the police would be hear soon. Howe soon though would they be here in a few minutes of several hours days later. Who knows he thought but he did realise he needed to be out of here soon.
Coming down from Milngavie Railway Station, he was met with a map of the town and a small green arrow that pointed towards the West Highland Way.
He walked under an underpass surrounded with murals of walkers and famous landmarks between Glasgow and Fort William. A few young men past him and one of them wolf whistled at a young girl with little more than a short skirt and a revealing top on. She reacted as he thought she would with a mouthful of venom to which the young men reacted by muttering to each other that she must be a lesbian.
Walking through the 1930’s designed town centre Stuart entered one of those large supermarkets and brought a small rucksack, a tent and a sleeping bag as well as some basic food and water and a Swiss army knife before he charged away towards the walk.
A few minutes later, he came to a great gushing river that he crossed before heading down a small path and onto a wood, where he was welcomed with a sign telling him it was the start of the West Highland way.
Before him was a wood as brown as a fox and littered with leaves and bracken that had fallen and became entombed into the ground during the previous season. A few hours later, he emerged out of the woods and was facing with a great expansive moor.
It was a gorgeous spring evening, with every hill showing as clear as a freshly cut amethyst. The air had the clean, with the smell of boglands around him. The air was as fresh as mid-ocean, and it had the strangest effect on his state of mind. Stuart actually free. He felt like a boy out for a spring holiday walk, instead of a man in his thirties who would soon be wanted by the police.
At that moment, Stuart realised that turning himself in would be useless and the vast and open space before him offered his best path to freedom and working out a way to solve this mystery.
Stuart walked along the empty track whistling away to ‘The barber of Seville’. There was no plan in his head, only just to go on and on in this desolate hill country. Every mile walked by Stuart made him feel better and more at ease with what had been going on.
He broke off a branch quickly turning it into a walking stick and he followed a roaring stream by the side of a glen.
Stuart reckoned he was now free from any pursuit by either the police or Simon’s murders. Night was quickly approaching. It had been some hours since he had eaten. So he suddenly felt very hungry. A mile or so up the path he came to a small campsite set in a nook beside a waterfall. A young woman with her attention focused on her IPod tapping away at some comment in face book or twitter told him it was £10 to stay the night and that the small shop served hot food up to nine. He quickly paid the fee and then set about pitching his small tent. Just before nine, he ordered some food and was greeted with a hearty meal of ham and eggs, chips, and a bottle of Iron brew.
Having eaten his food and drink, he walked off to his tent. As he climbed into his tent, he noticed a weather worn man coming down from the hills. To Stuart he looked like a giant, who in one step covered as much ground as three of his paces.
He made himself comfortable in his tent and climbed into his sleeping bag. A few minutes later Stuart was fast asleep.
The next morning Stuart awoke. By eight, he had eaten his breakfast from the shop and was striding north once again. Stuart’s notion was to make his way north to Fort William avoiding any contact with the police on the way.
Stuart thought he had still a good bit of a start, for it would take some hours to fix the blame on him and several hours more to identify the men who got on board the train at Waverley station.
Despite all that had gone on Stuart felt surprisingly happy. Indeed, he was in better spirits than he had been for months. He crossed over a long ridge of moorland skirting the side of a high hill. Nesting curlews and magpies were crying everywhere, and green pasture by streams were dotted with young lambs and the occasional fluttering rabbit. All the tension and trauma of the past months was slipping from his bones, and he stepped out like a four year old boy. He then continued to walk north coming to a gorge of moorland that dipped to the valley of a little river, and a mile away in the heather he saw the smoke of several mountain bikes rushing down a hill.
A few hours later Stuart came to a small village. There three men were chatting to each other in their cars. Stuart watched them carefully as he approached. One of them had a book, and looked like he was taking down notes.
All three men looked out across the moor where the white road departed. Stuart hoped they were not going follow him.
Stuart walked past the cars that the men sat in and soon realised that one of them was a police car. Avoiding attention, he turned a side street and walked down a garden path completely unobserved. He then crossed several gardens climbing their fences before he was parallel to where the men in their cars were. He then walked up a small track back towards the West Highland Way and his escape. It was at this point that a small black and white Jack Russell started to bark away at him. The dog thinking that Stuart was about to leave with its master's belongings, started to bark, and all but got Stuart by the trousers. This drew attention towards him. A few people stood looking out at their kitchen windows or front doors gawping at the dog and the man.
Stuart broke away from the dog and passed into a large thicket of tangled trees and bushes, he then reached down to the edge of the stream, and in cover of the bushes put a hundred yards or so behind him. Then from his shelter, he peered back, and saw the police officer and several people look out in his direction.
Happily, the dog that was attached to a rope broke free and was suddenly cascaded out of his den. Freeing himself the dog ran down the road where a car suddenly slammed his breaks on narrowly missing the dog. The horn of the car going off was enough to scare the dog off and turn everyone’s attention away from Stuart.
Stuart carried on walking for a quarter of a mile before we looked back. By then the police car was gone and everything in the village looked like it was back to normal.
Stuart was now in a wide semicircle of moorland, with a brown peaty river running down towards a massive lake as radius, and the high hills forming the northern circumference. There was not a sign or sound of a human being, only the splashing water and the interminable crying of birds and the endless shrieks from sheep and horses. Yet, oddly enough, for the first time Stuart felt the terror of the hunt on him. It was not the police that he thought of, but the unknown folk, who knew that he knew Simon’s secret and dared not let him live. He was certain that they would pursue him and hunt him down like a dog until he was found him. They were certain to want to silence him forever. Once their grip closed on him he knew he would find no mercy.
Well he was certain now that he was going to spoil their plans. He just needed to work out how he was going to do that.
He looked back, but there was nothing in the landscape. The sun glinted on the metals of the farm gates and the wet boulders in the stream, and you could not have found a more peaceful sight in the world. Nevertheless, Stuart started to run. Crouching low in the runnels of the bog, he ran until the sweat blinded his eyes. The mood did not leave him until he had reached the edge of mountain and flung himself panting on a ridge high above the waters of the brown river. He then turned around and could see the whole moor right away to the village and the small road that ran through it to the south of it where green fields took the place of heather.
Stuart who had the eyes of a hawk could see nothing moving in the countryside. Then he looked beyond the ridge and saw a new kind of landscape a shallow green valley with plentiful fir plantations and the faint lines of dust that rose from people enjoying themselves along the banks of Loch Lomond.
Last of all Stuart looked into the blue sky, and there he saw that which set his pulse racing. Low down in the south a military aircraft was climbing into the heavens. For an hour or two, he watched it from a pit of heather. It flew low along the hill-tops, and then in narrow circle over the valley up along the path that Stuart had come. Then it seemed to suddenly alter its course and rose to a great height, and flew away back to the south.
Stuart was not happy. He never expected this level of sophistication, and he began to think less well of the countryside he had chosen for a refuge. The heather hills were no sort of cover if his enemies were in the sky. Therefore, he decided to find a different kind of sanctuary. He looked to the Northern banks of Loch Lomond. Beyond the ridge was the odd occasional house and hotel.
It was about five in the evening and Stuart was now coming out of the moorland towards a white stretch of road that wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream. As he followed it, fields started to appear and soon the mountains and glens became a plateau, and presently Stuart had reached a kind of pass half way up the East bank of Loch Lomond where a solitary plume smoked in the twilight. A path swung over a small bridge, and leaning on the walls was a young man.
He was smoking a cigarette and was studying the water with his eyes. In his left hand, was a small book with a finger marking the place?
'Good evening to you,' Stuart said sombrely.
'It's really beautiful here isn’t it'
The smell of peat smoke and of the smell of sausages and burgers cooking away floated to him from a camp fire.
'Is this a camp site?' Stuart asked.
'No, just an empty field' he said politely.
‘Are you planning to camp the night. I hope so, because to tell you the truth I have had no company for a few days.'
Stuart pulled himself up on the wall of the bridge and began to detect an ally.
'You're a bit young for camping' he said.
'My father before he died a year ago used to come up here camping with me, so I sort of like camping here as it makes me feel a bit closer to him. I seem to spend most of my time here.’
‘Sadly the only people that come here now are cars full of fat kids and fatter parents who stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two’.
‘Ok I’ll camp here too. It’s getting late and I too could do with the company’
Soon Stuart’s tent was pitched and they both shared the food as well as a can or two of larger.
A few minutes later as Stuart entered his tent, he heard from far off the beat of an aircraft engine.
There silhouetted against the dusky West was the military Raptor unmanned aircraft hovering over the path. When the Raptor passed and left to the north Stuart came out and finished off his food and drink. Both men chatted about walking, climbing, and some of the many walks and Bens they had climbed across Scotland.
The next day the young man was gone. The weather was great and all was calm. This gave Stuart the time to sit down and go through Simon’s book.
Stuart spent some time trying to break Simon’s code. It looked like one of those one time pads which he had read sometime in the past that the Russians had used for their communications. He remembered that the one-time pad had been created by an American officer during the First World War and had been widely adopted by the Allies. When he was at school, he and his friends had used a similar system to e-mail messages to each other. It involved using a sheet of random numbers taken from a sheet on the one time pad. The result was a sheet of text that consisted simply of groups of five numbers one after another. Those that received the message could decode the massage if they possessed the same sheet from the same one time pad. If the sheet were used only once and for a single message, the lack of repetition would prevent decryption. So to break the code he would need to one time pad. Could it really be somewhere within the book?
He now had to find the key word that formed the one time pad. So when he thought of the odd million words he might have used Stuart felt pretty hopeless. But about three o'clock he had a sudden inspiration.
The name Norman flashed across my memory. Simon had said it was the key to the whole operation, and it occurred to Stuart to try it on his cipher.
It worked. The six letters of 'Norman' gave him the position of the vowels.
A was N, the fourteen letter of the alphabet, and so represented by XIV in the cipher. E was O was XV, and so on.
The next word that stood for the constantans was the next bit of the puzzle to work out. Then he remembered that he had been to Paris. That might be the word. He tried it out but it just did not seem to work, and then he remembered Simon telling him about his friends in Moscow. Perhaps Moscow might work. It did and it gave him the consonants that he needed.
Quickly Stuart scribbled that scheme on a bit of paper and sat down to read Simon’s pages.
In half an hour, he was reading with a whitish face and fingers that drummed away.
A few minutes later, he glanced out of his tent and saw a big black Range Rover coming up the track towards where he was camped. It drew up to the Loch, and there was the sound of people alighting.
Two men got out of the car. One of the men, was a dark-eyed thin fellow with bushy eyebrows, he had several gold teeth and a burn scar on the back of his right hand and a small tattoos on both forearms. The other man with short hair had various tribal style tattoos including the name of the band 'Slipknot' on his inner left forearm.
Stuart watched from his tent that was hidden from their view as they stopped a walker on their way south.
They asked if the walker had seen Stuart to the North. They gave a very good description of him even down to the clothes he had been wearing.
Three minutes later Stuart heard the men get back into the car. He heard the engine start up and driving away.
‘That was close’ muttered Stuart.
A mixed set of feelings came over him. He felt relieved that the men had gone but concerned that they had almost tracked him down.
Stuart then packed his tent up and started to walk north. About twenty minutes later as he came to another road. Stuart saw the same car come across some farmland from the opposite direction.
It passed Stuart and then stopped two hundred yards off in a shelter below a patch of wood. Stuart noticed that its occupants carefully reversed it before leaving it. A minute or two later he heard their steps on the gravel.
Stuart crossed a dyke, crawled down the side of a small stream, and quickly circumnavigated a small hill before he entered a trail on the far side of the patch of trees. There stood a cycle. A few yards to the side, was a man urinating in a wood? Without a second thought, Stuart jumped on the bike and quickly cycled the bike away. He gathered speed looking back at the man shouting at him with his fist raised up in the air. Within a few minutes, he was far away from the men in the car and into safety.