The Underground City(14)

“Man!” Wullie looked at him in awe. “Man, that’s … that’s …”

“The Bank of Scotland!” crowed Murdo. “Yon passage there’ll take us right into its vaults or I’m a Dutchman.”

Wullie eyed Murdo questioningly. “A Dutchman?” he echoed. “I … er … I always thought you were, well, Scottish like me?” Wullie sounded confused.

Murdo gave him a look and was about to make a really cutting remark when he saw the wisdom of keeping Wullie sweet. Wullie was six feet tall and as tough as they come. He was going to need Wullie and, when the time came to blow up the vaults, probably Tammy Souter as well.

Wullie agreed. “Aye,” he nodded at the mention of Tammy Souter’s name. “Aye, Tammy’s a good chap with a stick of dynamite. We’ll get in there fine, nae bother,” he said. Then he paused. “But … but didn’t I read in the papers that that branch has shut down, like? It’s a museum or something. Are you sure they still keep money there?” he asked anxiously.

“Trust me, Wullie!” Murdo grinned, tapping the side of his nose meaningfully.

Getting into the passages had proved a problem at first but Deacon Brodie’s Tavern was always a busy place at night and as the Gents was half-way down the cellar stair they had no trouble in avoiding the brightly-lit main cellars and sneaking into an older, little used part of the building that seemed, if anything, to be a store.

“There’ll be a trapdoor or something,” Murdo had muttered as they looked in one room after another, all of them stacked with empty boxes and old crates. “Has to be, for these tunnels are deep.”

It was Wullie who found the trapdoor in the end. By that time, they’d all but given up hope and Wullie glowed with pride at Murdo’s assertion that he was a genius.

“Not just a pretty face,” he agreed, shining his torch down into the blackness of the pit.

“We’ll need a rope ladder or something to get down there, won’t we?” Murdo muttered.

“No we won’t,” Willie disagreed, his mind working with unaccustomed clarity. “If we heft some of these empty crates down the hole we can easily climb down onto them. Let me go first and then you can pass the crates to me.”

Clambering carefully down the rough stair that Wullie had created out of stacked crates, Murdo shone his torch into the blackness of the Underground City. The powerful beam of light lit long narrow streets with walls of crumbling brickwork and as they moved through the maze of alleys, it didn’t take them long to realize that finding the right one wasn’t going to be easy; for the jumble of passageways that spread in all directions seemed to bear little resemblance to their carefully drawn map. Indeed, had Murdo not remembered that the Bank of Scotland lay downhill from Deacon Brodie’s Tavern, they might never have latched onto the right one at all. As it was, his eyes gleamed hopefully when they stumbled on a grim alley that sloped steeply downwards. Although it ran in the right direction, however, disappointment crossed their faces when they turned a bend and found it blocked by a fall of bricks.

Wullie looked at it, assessing the damage by the light of the torch. “It’ll take weeks to shift that lot, Murdo lad,” he said gloomily. “In fact, I reckon we’ll be lucky to get through it by Christmas.”

“There’s no rush,” Murdo replied. “We’ll take it nice and easy. It’ll take time to get picks and shovels down here for a start. We’ll just play it cool. Bring in stuff bit by bit like.”

The ghosts hadn’t bothered them at first. Although they didn’t know it, it was the old Codger who had first discovered them. He’d heard the thump of the pick and the scrape of the shovel and drifted along through alleys, dusty streets and a few solid walls to find out what was going on. It hadn’t taken him long to suss them out either. He’d just hung around, listened to their chat, looked at their map and drifted off again to report to Mary King.

The ghosts had hoped that scaring tactics might work. It was, unfortunately, their only weapon, but Murdo and Wullie had proved a tough proposition. Especially Murdo! Murdo was a tough, lean, hard-bitten crook. Nothing fazed him, not even the hardest push and, while Wullie shivered with cold as the ghosts hugged him close, Murdo would cheer him up and give him what he called Dutch courage out of a flask. Wullie always accepted gratefully but to this day the involvement of the Dutch still puzzles him.

“Look, Wullie,” Murdo said on one occasion when the ghosts had worn themselves to a frazzle trying to scare them, “the worst they seem to be able to do is push us around and try to freeze us solid! We’ll wear more clothes tomorrow and ignore the rest. We can’t see them and if that’s the best they can do then we can put up with it! I’m not going to let them beat us. Just think of all the lovely lolly that’s in the bank! We’ll be millionaires! Now won’t it be worth it, Wullie — going through all this and getting rich? You don’t get millions for nothing, you know! You’ve got to suffer, one way or another. Nothing in this world is free!”