The Tartan Conspiracy

Book 750: Murder Room

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

After his father dies of a heart attack, Ian Blackie finds an old box full of a bizarre assortment of papers in the attic of his parents' home. Hidden amongst the papers are some mysterious personal mementos belonging to General Alexander Ballantine, his father's old school friend, recently killed by an IRA bomb. Ian soon realises that his father had been conducting his own investigation into Ballantine's murder, refusing to believe the IRA angle. Intrigued, Ian decides to follow the clues he has left, which leads him to the Tartan Conspiracy and a race to prevent the murder of the Queen.

Release date: January 14, 2016

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 224

Sample

The tuck-box stood next to an old trunk in the centre of the attic. Heaped around them was all the lumber which three generations of a family might be expected to accumulate
over the years: old furniture, chipped and scratched, which Ian’s parents had been reluctant to discard, a child’s tricycle, a dressmaking dummy, a rusty birdcage, a tarpaulin, and a
stack of oil paintings of Scottish landscapes in heavy gilded frames. A sepia photograph, also framed, of Ian’s great-grandfather, which he remembered had once hung in the dining-room, had
also finally been banished to the anonymity of the attic.

The trunk was not locked, and after blowing away the dust which had settled on the lid he opened it. In the tray at the top, carefully covered with newspaper, lay his father’s
morning-dress suit. Ian could not help smiling for he remembered how, at least a dozen years ago, his father had grudgingly accepted that the suit no longer fitted him and had been obliged to hire
one on the occasion of a visit to Edinburgh by the Queen. He supposed that his father had kept the suit in the trunk, hoping that after retiring from the sedentary life of a civil servant he might
be able to lose enough weight to allow it to be reenlisted into service.

Beneath the tray in the body of the trunk he found relics of an earlier period, faded mementoes of his father’s youth; the cerise and white striped summer blazer of his Cambridge college,
the tasselled rugby cap of the 1st XV at Glenalmond, even the peaked cap of his preparatory school in Crieff. Interspersed among the clothes were reminders of his father’s many but fleeting
interests.

‘Last year it was curling, this year it’s rock climbing,’ Ian could remember his mother complaining to him when he was a lad. ‘Whatever your father’s next fad is
going to be, I wonder.’

Later the crazes had faded, but still put away in the trunk were the climbing boots, a Glengarry with the badges of a score of curling clubs pinned to it, a case of salmon flies, a camera with a
battery of lenses, three stamp albums. Among them was a Gaelic dictionary from the time when his father had been to evening classes in an attempt to learn the language.

Ian had always thought it curious that his father, who by application and unswerving singlemindedness had risen to almost the highest position open to him in the Scottish Office, should have
been so fickle with his hobbies. He decided that there was nothing in the trunk which could not be either thrown away or given to an Oxfam charity shop. When he turned his attention to the
tuck-box, he saw that it was locked with what appeared to be a shiny new padlock. When she had asked him to sort out the clothes and other belongings which his father had left, his mother had not
given him any keys, so he went to find her.

She was gardening. Fiona Blackie’s gardening was graceful and ineffective, modelled on how she believed Edwardian ladies had gardened. Many of her attitudes were based on her voracious
reading of the memoirs and novels of the Edwardian age. That day she was wearing the statutory broad-brimmed straw hat and gardening gloves and was cutting off the dead heads of roses, dropping
them in a basket which she was carrying slung over one arm. Nothing she did when gardening ever helped or hindered old Jamie, who came in two days every week to keep the lawn and the flowerbeds in
some sort of order.

When Ian asked her, she told him she knew nothing of a key to the padlock on the tuck-box. ‘Your father must have hidden it somewhere. You know how secretive he had become.’

‘Shall I force it open then?’

‘Do. There’ll be nothing of any consequence in the box, but we ought to make sure before we throw it away.’ Mrs Blackie smiled and Ian guessed that she was about to make a
gentle joke. ‘On the other hand, he may have made another will disinheriting us and left it there.’

Ian was relieved to hear her making jokes. His father had died suddenly of a heart-attack only ten days ago, and he had come home at once from Edinburgh to find her crushed and helpless,
seemingly incapable of absorbing the shock. He had stayed until after the funeral and then returned to Edinburgh briefly, leaving her with her sister for company. Now he was back again, and, seeing
her resilience and her composure, he began to wonder whether it had been necessary to take three weeks’ leave to be with her. It might have been better to take her to live for a time with him
in Edinburgh. Settling his father’s estate could just as easily have been done there, for the family’s solicitors had their offices in the New Town, not far from Charlotte Square.

Using a chisel which he found in a tool-box in the garage, he forced the padlock on the trunk. The hasp and the plate to which it was fixed came away easily, for the wood behind it must have
been rotten with age. To his surprise the box was almost full. Lying right on top was yet another memento of his father’s youth, a large mounted photograph of the 1st XV rugby team at
Glenalmond. His father, standing at one end of the back row, seemed puny alongside most of the other players. He had not been a large man, but wiry and strong until his heart trouble and Ian knew
he had played scrum-half at Glenalmond. The face of the captain of the team, who stood in the centre of the middle row, seemed faintly familiar to Ian. In the photograph he was smiling confidently
and almost with an arrogance, as though the position was his by right and he knew it.

Thinking that the names of the team might have been written on the back of the mount, he turned the photograph over and found a letter which had been attached to it with a piece of sticky tape.
It was scarcely a letter, no more than a handwritten note on faded blue paper and with the words ‘Galashiels, July 17’ in the top right-hand corner. The handwriting was full of
flourish, though the letters were not very well formed.

Dear Andy,

Now that it is over I had to write and thank you for the support you gave me during my year as Captain of the Coll. It was a pretty good year, wasn’t it, with the
fifteen unbeaten, the eleven beating the M.C.C., your scholarship to Cambridge and two others to Oxford? The old man has written me a most gushing letter of thanks to send me on my way! I
don’t mind telling you now that last September I was shitting myself at the prospect of being Captain. Didn’t think I would be able to cope. I was hardly a popular choice was I? But
the lads rallyed round and I know that was your doing. I should have realized that you as my closest and very special friend, would see me through.

Now we have to go our seperate ways, you to Cambridge, me to the army, but we mustn’t lose touch. Don’t ever let that happen, Andy. I shall miss you.

Yours aye

Sandy.

As he read the letter, Ian had the uncomfortable feeling that he was eavesdropping. The letter’s boyish enthusiasm, immature handwriting, and poor spelling were a kind of reincarnation of
a part of his father’s life which Ian had never known and which, he now felt, was not meant to know. Even reading the diminutive of his father’s name made him feel uncomfortable. He had
never heard anyone, not even his mother, use it when his father was alive.

Beneath the rugby-team photograph was another, equal in size but in colour. In it a crowd of young people were standing in a quadrangle, all wearing evening dress and all looking up at the
camera, which must have been aimed down at them from an upper window or a balcony. Ian’s father was not difficult to spot, for he was wearing his dress kilt with a Kenmore doublet, jabot, and
fur sporran. Standing next to him was a dark-haired girl with a hawkish face whom Ian did not recognize. The photograph, he realized, must have been taken during a May Ball in Cambridge, at first
light after the last waltz and before the energetic left to punt up to Grantchester for breakfast.

When he looked more closely he saw that another young man in a kilt was standing immediately behind his father. He was taller than his father and broader, an imposing figure among the other
undergraduates. The faces in the photograph were too small for him to be sure, but he thought it might be the same young man as he had seen in the Glenalmond rugby group, the captain of the team.
Next to the college photograph was an envelope full of old black and white snapshots taken on different occasions and in different places. In all of them his father featured with his same friend,
on top of a rock face which they had evidently scaled, in waders by a river, in a sailing boat. Ian supposed that they must date back forty years or more when his father was in his twenties and
still a bachelor.

Suddenly, by intuition rather than recognition, he knew who the young man must be. Although his father had never mentioned the fact, he recalled his mother telling him that General Alexander
Ballantine had been a friend of his father at Glenalmond. Once again Ian had the feeling that he was invading his father’s privacy and he put the snapshots back in the envelope.

Beneath them lay a buff folder containing two sheaves of press cuttings, each sheaf neatly clipped together. One glance at them confirmed that his guess about the young man in the Cambridge
photograph had been right. The clippings in the first sheaf were mostly from local newspapers in the Borders and must have been collected over many years. Through them one could follow the life of
Sandy Ballantine from the time that he was a lad. The earliest one reported how he, the son of a shopkeeper in Galashiels, had won scholarships which would enable him to be educated at Glenalmond
College. Another cutting, which carried a photo, told how he had passed out of Sandhurst, winning the Sword of Honour. There were accounts of rugby matches in which he had played, representing the
Army and the South of Scotland. Only a posting overseas, one correspondent claimed, had prevented Lieutenant Ballantine winning an international cap. Not many years afterwards he was decorated for
gallantry in Korea and the citation was printed in full. Another press photo, dating back some ten years, showed him in the uniform of a colonel outside a church in a wedding group taken after his
marriage to the widow of a fellow Army officer.

The clippings in the other batch were all more recent and more sensational. One from the front page of the Scotsman carried a glaring headline: IRA MURDER SCOTS WAR
HERO.

The report told how General Alexander Ballantine CBE, DSO had died while on holiday off the west coast of Scotland, when the boat in which he had been cruising had been destroyed by a bomb. The
IRA had claimed responsibility for the assassination – a legitimate act of war was how they had described it – even though General Ballantine had never served in Northern Ireland.

Other clippings from the tabloids gave lurid accounts of the bombing, describing how local boatmen from the small town of Ardnadaig, speeding to the scene of the explosion, had found the
General’s mutilated body floating among the debris of the boat. There were interviews with people on shore who claimed to have seen suspicious strangers loitering the previous day around the
harbour where the boat had been moored. A woman who had served the General his breakfast in the inn where he had been staying said that he had seemed preoccupied, as though he may have been warned
of the impending attack on his life. The vortex of sensation had sucked in everyone who wanted his name in the papers, his face on the television screens. Some reports mentioned briefly that a
young boy, son of a fisherman, who had been in the boat with Ballantine had also been killed.

Also among the cuttings Ian found two obituaries, one from the Scotsman, which wrote in glowing terms of General Ballantine’s life and achievements, the other, shorter and less
euphoric, from The Times. The supercilious scribblers in London would see a Scots general as not deserving much space, Ian thought with a pang of resentment. Both obituaries reported that
the General’s wife had died three years previously and that he was survived only by his two stepdaughters, one of whom was Isobel Gillespie, the well-known writer of children’s
books.

Ian found himself wondering why his father should have collected and locked away these mementoes of Sandy Ballantine. He remembered being told that they had been at school together, but had not
formed the impression that their friendship had been particularly close. A few days after the General’s death he had come home from Edinburgh for the weekend and it had been his mother who
had seemed upset by the news. ‘Wasn’t it dreadful about poor Sandy Ballantine?’ had been her comment. His father had said nothing.

When Andrew Blackie had retired from the Scottish Office and he and his wife had come to live in the family home at Invermuir he had seemed relaxed and contented. Now, he had said, he would have
time to concentrate on all the pleasures he had neglected, golf, fishing, stalking, and of course his stamp collection. In retrospect, Ian realized, things had not appeared to have worked out that
way. His father had gradually changed. Mrs Blackie thought he had become secretive. To Ian it was almost as though he had withdrawn into a private world, one of which he never spoke and in which
neither his family nor his friends were welcome.

He delved further into the tuck-box, half afraid that he would find it was no more than a repository for sentimental reminders of what was beginning to appear as his father’s obsessive
attachment for his school friend. Instead he found an assortment of papers, books, and posters, none of which seemed to have any association with General Ballantine. An old copy of Hansard lay on
top and he saw that it carried a report dated some years previously of a debate in the House of Commons on Scottish devolution. He remembered the debate and the publicity it had been given. One of
the speeches had been that of the current Prime Minister, Alisdair Buchanan, at that time a backbencher. Himself a Scot, he had spoken with passion of Scotland’s right for self-government.
Now, as his critics from north of the border were always reminding him, that passion had become strangely muted.

Next to the Hansard was an Ordnance Survey map, number 52 in the Landranger series, covering the area north of Perth, and beneath the map four books: A Grandfather’s Tales by
Walter Scott, Inglorious Failure by Gordon Strachan, and two books on climbing, one listing the Munros of Scotland and the other describing some of the best rock climbs in the Highlands.
The Scott history, though worn and old, was bound in leather and, thinking that it might have been one of the school prizes won by his father, Ian opened it. There was nothing on the fly-leaf to
show that it had been a prize but on the inside of the cover a price had been written in pencil, suggesting that it had been bought at a second-hand book shop and, judged by the amount, fairly
recently.

Inglorious Failure was a paperback with a lurid cover, showing the flag of Scotland in flames against a shadowy background of Edinburgh Castle. Underneath the main title was a subtitle
printed in what he supposed were meant to be letters of blood, The Betrayal of Scotland. Ian remembered the book appearing five or six years previously and that it was a hysterical attack
on the ineffectiveness of the Scottish National Party as well as on the hybrid militant movements which nationalism had spawned – the Scottish National Liberation Army, Siol Nan Gaidheal, the
1320 Club, and a handful of others.

He opened the book and saw that it was heavily annotated and recognized his father’s handwriting. Some passages of the book had been underlined, against others in the margin his father had
written remarks of approval or scorn – ‘Quite right’, ‘Absolutely true’, ‘Inept!’, ‘Futile!’, ‘Unbelievable stupidity!’ Comments of
contempt heavily outweighed those of approval.

Even though it had aroused scarcely a flutter of interest when it had been published, Ian was not surprised that his father should have read the book with such interest. Andrew Blackie had
always been a fervent believer in Scottish nationalism, even though his employment in government service and his loyalty to that service had restrained him from taking any part in politics. From
time to time at home he would make a comment or, when he had been roused by some event, what was for him a short speech, which showed that he strongly believed that Scotland had a right to govern
herself. What did surprise Ian was that his father should have kept the book locked up in the attic, rather than find a place for it in the bookshelves downstairs, where there were other
publications, mostly academic and less emotive, on Scotland’s aspirations for independence.

Beneath the map and the books, thrown into the box at random, it seemed, were pamphlets and leaflets. Among them Ian found a publicity brochure issued by the West Highland Scotch Whisky Company,
which gave an account of the company’s history, illustrated with colour photographs of its two malt whisky distilleries, Loch Maree and Glen Torridon. Next to it was the current Annual
Statistical Review, published by the Scotch Whisky Association. Towards the back of the review was an alphabetical list of all the countries in the world to which Scotch whisky was exported,
giving the volume and value of shipments made during the previous year. Ian noticed that his father had marked the entries for two or three countries on the first page of the list.

At the bottom of the box were a selection of posters produced by organizations supporting independence for Scotland, one of which, issued by Siol Nan Gaidheal some years previously, carried a
drawing of a hooded man carrying a rifle and a dramatic quotation from the Declaration of Arbroath: ‘. . . so long as 100 of us remain alive we will never submit to ENGLISH RULE.’ When
Ian unfolded the poster he saw beneath it, perhaps hidden there, a Japanese microcassette pocket tape-recorder of the type used by businessmen when travelling, to dictate letters or file reports.
There was a cassette in the recorder and another one in a tiny plastic box lay beside it.

The recorder seemed to be almost new and in good condition; too good to be left in the attic or thrown aw. . .