To the hilt

CHAPTER SIX

'Al,' Himself asked thoughtfully, as we walked back from seeing Zoл Lang out to her taxi, 'how far would you actually go in defending the Honour of the Kinlochs?'

'Up to and including the hilt?'

'I'm not joking, Al.'

I glanced at his heavy troubled face.

"The answer,' I said, 'is that I don't know.'

After a pause he asked, 'Would you have given up the hilt to the four men who attacked you if they'd told you what they wanted and had used more than their fists?'

'I don't know.'

'But how much urge did you have anyway to tell them where to look?'

'None,' I said. 'I didn't like them.'

'Al, be serious.'

"They made me angry. They made me feel futile. I would have denied them anything I could.'

'I don't ask for you to suffer to keep that thing safe.

If they attack you again, don't let them hurt you. Tell them what they want to know.'

I said with humour, 'You wouldn't have said that two hundred years ago.'

'Times change.'

We went peacefully into his house and into his dining-room, where the black cube containing the King Alfred Gold Cup still lay on the table. We checked briefly to make sure that the gold prize was still inside, and I ran a finger over the faint indentations of Bede's Death Song: consider the evil one does on earth, because a reckoning awaits.

Was it good or evil, in changing times, to pay for physical relief on earth with one's eternal honour?

Where did common sense begin?

At what point did one duck the scream?

I had no need to ask such questions aloud. Himself - my august uncle, my hereditary clan chief - was the product of the same ancient ethos and conditioning that I had received from his brother, and I had willy nilly inherited the mainstream Kinloch mind, stubbornness and all.

Himself and I re-enclosed the black cube in its drawstring bag and replaced it in the cardboard box with the copies of Dickens on top. I restuck it all as best I could with the wide brown fastening tape, though the result couldn't be called secure, and we put the box back in the sideboard for the want of anywhere better.

'We can't leave it there for ever,' my uncle said.

'No.'

'Do you trust Dr Lang?'

I was surprised by the question, but said, 'I would trust her to be true to her beliefs.'

'Think of somewhere better for the Cup, Al.'

'I'll try.'

At his own request I hadn't told him to the inch where to find the hilt, though he knew it was somewhere at the bothy. After much consideration we had, as a precaution against us both inconveniently dying with our secret untold, like Henry VIII's evaders, entrusted Jed with the basic information.

'If you have to,' Himself had said to him, 'dig around and pull the bothy apart stone by stone. Otherwise, forget what we've told you.'

Jed couldn't, of course, forget it although he had never alluded to it since except to say once that he felt overwhelmed by our faith in his loyalty. If Jed had been going to betray us to the castle's administrators he could have done it at any time in the past few years, but instead had taken the game of hide and seek into his own private world in enjoyment, and it was certainly the basis of the solid friendship between the two of us.

Jed came back to the castle late in the afternoon, still with my gear in the boot of his car, wanting to know if he could drive me home to the bothy.

'No,' Himself said decisively. 'Al will stay here tonight. Sit down, Jed. Get yourself a drink.'

We were by then in the room my uncle considered his own private domain, a severe predominantly brown room with walls bearing stuffed fish in glass cases and deers' antlers from long-past battles on the hills. There were also three of my paintings of his racehorses and one painting of his favourite gun-dog, much loved but now dead.

Jed fixed a glass of whisky and water and sat down on one of the elderly hard-stuffed chairs.

Himself as usual made the decisions. 'I see Al seldom enough. He will stay here tonight and tomorrow night to please me, and on Monday morning you can take him to the bothy and the police station, and anywhere else you care to. I'll be fishing the Spey next week. I have guests Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday I'll be out on the moor with the guns…' He outlined his plans. 'James returns from sailing tomorrow. He'll be staying on here. His wife will take the children back to school. All clear, Jed?'

'Yes, sir.'

Jed and he discussed estate affairs for a while and I listened with half an ear and tried to imagine a good temporary home for Bede's Death Song engraved in gold.

I had asked Zoл Lang to read the poem aloud in Anglo-Saxon, and with enjoyment she had done so, her love of the old language giving the words shape and meaning and new life. I couldn't understand a syllable, but I could hear the throb and the pulse and the strong alliteration, and when I commented on it she'd told me a shade patronisingly that all Anglo-Saxon poetry had been written to be spoken, not read. The excitement, even the intoxication, she said, was engendered by the rhythmic beat as much as by the vivid imagery of the words. The poems describing battle could set sword-arms twitching. 'The Dream of the Rood' would make a Christian of an atheist.

Himself and I had listened respectfully, and I thought how much the outward appearance of age could colour one's expectation of a person's character. I wanted to paint her as young, vibrant, fanatical, with the ghost of the way she looked now superimposed in thin light grey lines, like age's cobwebs.

I strongly sensed a singular individual powerful entity that might have intensified with time, not faded. We were dealing with that inner woman, and should not forget it.

If I underpainted thickly in Payne's grey mixed with titanium white, I thought, and then brought the essential person to glowing life with strong bone structure in a faithful portrait, no colour tricks or linear gimmicks, and then scratched down into the grey for the unthinkable future… then with a steady hand and a strong vision I might produce a statement of terrible truth -or I might finish with a disaster fit only for the bin. To have the technique and the courage weren't always enough. Apart from vision as well, one needed luck.

Hide King Alfred's Gold Cup… my mind wandered back to the task in hand.

Hiding the Cup, for all its worth in gold, wasn't in the same sphere as hiding the hilt. Ivan might prize the Cup for reasons of his own, but as a symbol it wasn't entangled with history and an earl's beheading and generations of clan honour. The King Alfred Gold Cup had been fashioned a thousand years after the great king's days of glory: a tribute to him, undoubtedly, but never his own property.

The King Alfred Cup might be worth killing for… but not suffering for, or dying.

And yet… I asked myself again if I would have given the demon walkers that Cup if I'd known what they were looking for, if I'd had it to give, and I thought quite likely not. Anger… pride… cussedness.

Mad, weird, ridiculous Alexander.

The problem with hiding anything in the castle was that Himself was rarely in residence, while the administrators were not only in and out all the time but were also actively hunting treasure. In the family's private wing lived a full-time overall caretaker with his housekeeper wife, a conscientious worker who eviscerated private cupboards in the name of spring cleaning. The sideboard in the dining-room wouldn't shelter even a peanut for long. The discovery on the premises of a golden wonder, even if not the hilt, would have leaked into informed circles like burst pipes. If hiding the Cup involved hiding also any awareness of its existence, as I supposed it did, then the castle was out.

The castle grounds were out also, thanks to an efficient gardener.

So where?

Any thoughts anyone might have had about a peaceful evening were at that point blasted apart by the earthquake arrival of my friendly cousin James, who had listened to a gale-and-rain weather forecast and decided to run for port a day early, along with his boisterous family, who habitually lived fortissimo at Indy-car speed.

When the invasion stampeded upstairs to arrange bedrooms, I telephoned my mother and asked after Ivan. Things were no worse. There had been no further agitated crisis in the brewery's affairs: insolvency had gone into hiatus for the weekend.

'And Patsy?' I asked.

'Not a sound from her since yesterday morning.'

'My uncle Robert sends his regards.'

'And ours to him,' my mother said.

James, red haired and freckled, wandering by with gin and tonic in fist, asked amiably how the 'old boy' was doing.

'Depressed,' I said.

'Father says someone decamped with the brewery's nest egg.'

'Nest egg, chickens, battery hens, the lot.'

'What a lark, eh? How long are you staying?'

'Till Monday.'

'Great. Father's always saying we don't see enough of you. How are the daubs?'

'In abeyance,' I said, and gave him a lightweight account of the trouble at the bothy.

'Good Lord!' He stared. 'I didn't think you had much there worth stealing.'

'Jeep and golf clubs, and bits and pieces.'

'What rotten luck.'

His sympathy was genuine enough. James would always summon nurses to patch up one's wounds.

'Did they take your pipes?' he asked, concerned.

'Luckily they're in Inverness. The bag had sprung a leak.'

'Are you entering the contests this year?'

'I'm not good enough.'

'You don't practise enough, that's all.'

'The winners are nearly always army pipe majors. You know that. Why do I bother to say it?'

'I just like to encourage people,' he said, beaming; and I thought that that in truth was his great gift, to make people feel better about their lives.

The piping contests, held every autumn, took place from the far north all the way south to London. I had once or twice tried my hand in a piobaireachd competition, but it had been like a novice downhill skier taking on Klammer or Killy, an interesting experience memorable only for not having made an absolute fool of oneself.

Besides, I had political problems with some of the pibrochs, the ancient laments for the deaths and defeats of history. I couldn't - wouldn't - play 'My King has landed at Moidart', because the King that had landed was Prince Charles Edward, rightful King of England by descent, but disqualified (since Henry VIII's quarrel with the Pope) because of being Roman Catholic. Prince Charles Edward landed at Moidart in the Western Isles to begin his fateful march towards London, a thrust for the Crown, however understandable, that had led to the ruination of Scotland. In the wake of Prince Charles Edward's defeat at Culloden, the English, to remove the threat of a third upheaval (the 1715 and 1745 rebellions having been barely unsuccessful), had notoriously chased the Scots from their lands and had tried to wipe out nationhood by outlawing the speaking of Gaelic, the wearing of the tartan and the playing of the pipes. Scotland had never recovered. Sure, the tartan, the pipes and the slightly sentimental allegiances had crept back, but they were tourist attractions contrasting affectedly with the drab slab functional housing round the commercially regenerated modern city of Glasgow.

The direct descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots, had brought ruin, still unresolved, to most of Scotland - though even at Culloden, sixty per cent of those fighting against the Bonny Prince had been Scots themselves, not English - and although to please my uncle I guarded the lethal gift to my ancestor, I couldn't feel anything but fury for the inept, selfish, vain and ultimately faint-hearted Prince. I played laments for those he'd damaged. I played laments for the damage he'd done. I never felt love for the man.

Saturday evening passed in the chaos indigenous to James's family, and in the morning when I went downstairs in search of coffee I found Himself in the dining-room looking around him as if in bewilderment at an empty cardboard box, old faded leather-bound copies of Dickens, an empty black cube with white satin lining and a grey draw-string duster bag all lying about haphazardly on the floor.

The sideboard door stood open. The King Alfred Gold Cup had gone.

There were squeals from the kitchen next door. Children's voices. High.

Dazedly my uncle opened the connecting door and I followed him into the large unmodernised kitchen, an expanse of black and white tiling still called on old castle plans 'the cold preparation room'. Shades of old vegetables, I thought. Food nowadays mostly arrived at the castle in caterers' vans, wrapped in film and ready to heat and eat.

James was leaning against the sink, coffee mug in hand, indulgent smile in place.

His three unruly children - two boys and a girl - scrambled around on the floor, all of them wearing large saucepans on their heads with the handles pointing backwards. Spacewatch good guys, we were told.

The King Alfred Cup also stood on the floor, upside down. Himself bent from the waist and picked it up, finding it heavier than he expected.

'Hey,' objected his elder grandson, standing up to face him, 'that's the galactic core of M.100 with all its Cepheid variables in those red stones. We have to keep it safe from the black-hole suction mob.'

'I'm glad to hear it,' his grandfather said dryly.

The boy - Andrew - was eleven years old and already rebellious, hard-eyed and tough. If time took its normal course he would one day succeed James as earl. James might be open to soft persuasion but I wanted to know for sure about his son.

I said, 'Andrew, if you had a favourite toy, something you really valued, and someone tried very hard to take it away from you… suppose he even threatened to hurt you if you didn't give it to him, what would you do?'

He said promptly, as if he thought the question feeble, 'Bash his face in.'

My uncle smiled. James said with mild protest, 'Andy, you would talk it over and make a deal.'

His son repeated stalwartly, 'I'd bash his face in. Can we have the Cepheid monitor back?'

'No,' his grandfather said. 'You shouldn't have taken it out of its box.'

'We were looking for something worth fighting for,' Andrew said.

James defended them. 'They haven't done it any harm. What is it, anyway? It can't be real gold.'

Himself thrust the Cup into my arms, where its weight again surprised. 'Put it away safely,' he said.

'OK.'

'It's a racing challenge trophy,' my uncle explained unexcitedly to his son. 'I can't keep it for more than a year and I need to give it back without dents in.'

The explanation satisfied James entirely and he told his children to look for a substitute galactic goody.

On an impulse I asked him if he would like to spend some of the day playing golf. We both belonged to the local club where, with varying success, I quite often walked after the elusive white ball, but there were seldom days when we could go out together.

He looked pleased, but said, 'I thought you said your clubs were stolen.'

'I might buy some new ones.'

'Great, then.'

He phoned the club, who found a slot for us in the afternoon, and we drove over in good time for the pro shop to kit me out with better clubs than the ones I'd lost: and, for good measure, I acquired snazzy black-and-white shoes with spikes on, and gloves and balls and umbrellas: also a lightweight blue waterproof bag to carry things in and a trolley like James's to pull everything along on wheels. Thus re-equipped I went out with my cousin into the wind and rain, which had arrived as forecast, and got happily soaked to the skin despite the umbrellas.

'Will you paint this?' James asked, squelching on wet grass.

'Yes, of course.'

'You're not really as weird as we all think, are you?'

I putted a ball to the rim of a hole, where it obstinately stopped.

'I paint frustration,' I said, and gave the ball a kick.

James laughed, and in good spirits we finished the eighteen holes and went back to the castle for the nineteenth.

My hands-on relationship with golf was essential to my work, I'd found. It wasn't that I had much skill, but in a way the failures were more revelatory than success: and I particularly liked to play with James who laughed and lost or won with equal lack of seriousness.

The only really warm room in the whole castle complex (apart from the caretaker's quarters) was the home of the vast hot water tank, where ranks of airers dried out the persistent Scottish rains. James and I accordingly showered, changed, and left all our wet things steaming, including my sopping new shoes and golf bag, and then ambled back to the dining-room for tinctures.

James's children were in there. The King Alfred Cup, though still in its white satin nest, lay in full glorious view on the polished table under a chandelier's light.

'You didn't say we couldn't look at it,' Andy objected to his father's mild rebuke. 'We couldn't find anything else worth fighting a space war for.'

I said to James, 'What about the hilt?'

'Oh yes.' He thought it over. 'But we'd only see the replica, and anyway, I can't let the children through into the castle proper. I promised Himself I wouldn't.'

'Let's ask him,' I said. So we found him in his own room and asked, with the result that all of us, Himself, James, James's wife and children and I, walked the length of the Great Hall and stood round the grilled glass cage, staring down at its floodlit treasure.

'That,' Andrew decided, 'would be worth fighting a galactic space war for. If it was real, of course.'

'And you, James,' Himself asked, 'would you too fight for it?'

James, no fool, answered soberly, making what must have been to him an unwelcome commitment, 'If I had to, I suppose so, yes.'

'Good. Let's hope it's never necessary.'

'Where is the real one?' Andrew asked.

His grandfather said, 'We have to keep it safe from the black-hole suction mob.'

Andy's face was an almost unpaintable mixture of glee and understanding. A boy worth fighting for, I thought.

Himself carefully didn't look at me once.

It was still raining on Monday morning. James took his family to set off south, Himself left to meet his guests and ghillies at Crathie to bother the silver swimmers in the Spey, and Jed arrived to pick me up and set my normal life back on course.

He brought with him a replacement credit card and cheque-book which he had had sent to his house for me, and he'd heard from Inverness that my bagpipes were ready for collection. He had freed one of the estate's Land Rovers for my temporary use, and he lent me a fully charged portable phone to put me in touch with events in London and Reading. Reception was poor in the mountains, but better than nothing, he said.

I said inadequately, 'Thanks, Jed,' and he shook his head and grinned, shrugging it off.

"There's a new lock on the bothy, like I told you, and here are two keys,' he said, handing them over. 'I have a third. There aren't any others.'

I nodded and went out of doors with him, and found the boxes from London that I'd left in his car on Saturday evening already piled into the Land Rover. I'd taken into Himself's house only clothes in a paper carrier and I left with them (dry) in an all-purpose heavy duty duffle bag from the gun-room. The bag smelled of cartridges, moors and old tweed: very Edwardian, very lost world.

Jed commented on my new clubs.

'Yes,' I said, 'but this time I'm storing my kit in the club house. Where do you propose I should keep my pipes?'

Jed said awkwardly, 'Are you afraid the robbers will come back?'

'Would you be?'

'You can always stay with Flora and me.'

'Have you noticed,' I asked, 'how people tend to rebuild their earthquaked houses in the same place on the San Andreas fault? Or in the path of hurricanes?'

'You don't have to.'

'Call it blind faith,' I said.

'Call it obstinacy.'

I grinned. 'Definitely. But don't worry. This time I'll install a few burglar alarms.'

'There isn't any electricity.'

'Tins on strings with stones in.'

Jed shook his head. 'You're mad.'

'So they say.'

He gave up. 'The police are expecting you. Ask for Detective Sergeant Berrick. He came out with me to the bothy. He knows what the vandalism looks like.'

'OK.'

'Take care, Al. I mean it. Take care.'

'I will,' I said.

We drove off together but parted at the estate gates, from where I headed towards the bothy, stopping only once, briefly, to pay with a replacement cheque for the new golf gear, and unload it into a locker, which I would have done better to have done oftener in the past.

The new keys to the bothy door opened my way into the same old devastation that I'd left there six days earlier.

Nothing looked better. The only overall improvement was that it no longer hurt to move, a plus, I had to concede, of significant worth. With a sigh I dug out of the mess an unused plastic rubbish bag and, instead of its normal light load of paint-cleaning tissues, filled it with the debris of ruined acrylics and everything small but broken.

It was still raining out of doors. Indoors my mattress and bedding were soaked and smelling from a bucketful of dirty paint water. I wasn't sure what they'd done to my armchair, but it, too, smelled revolting.

Bastards.

Out of rainy-day habit I'd run the Land Rover into the shelter of the carport when I'd arrived, but at that point I backed it out again, and bit by bit stacked my ruined possessions in the dry space, painstakingly looking for anything not mine that might have been left behind by my attackers. When I'd finished, all that was left in the room was the bare metal and coiled wire bedstead, the chest of drawers (empty), one shelf of salvaged books, a frying pan with cooking tools and one easel (two broken). I swept the floor and collected coffee, sugar and sundry debris into a dustpan and gloomily looked at the dozens of superimposed paint-laden footprints on my wood-blocks, all left by the types of trainers sold by the million throughout Britain and useless for identifying the wearers.

In spite of the thoroughness of my search, the only thing I found that I hadn't had before was not a helpful half-used matchbook printed with the address and phone number of a boxing gym, but a pair of plastic-framed glasses.

I put them on and everything close went blurry. For long distances, they were sharp.

The prescription was stamped into one of the earpieces: -2.

They were, I thought, the sort of aid one could buy off revolving-stand displays all over the world. They were the sort of glasses worn by my attackers. A disguise. A theatrical prop. I wrapped them in a piece of tinfoil from a roll I sometimes used for instant makeshift palettes: one didn't have to scrape off old dry paint but could simply scrunch the whole thing up and throw it away. Some poverty-afflicted painters used old phone books that way all the time.

I carted the bags and boxes of new gear into the bothy from the Land Rover and stacked everything unopened on the bare springs of the bed. Then I locked the door, sat for a while in the Land Rover, thinking, and finally drove off in search of Detective Sergeant Derrick.

Within five minutes of my arrival, the Detective Sergeant had told me he implacably disliked drug dealers, prostitutes, Englishmen, the Celtic football team, the Conservative party, anyone educated beyond sixteen, all superior officers, paperwork, rules forbidding him to beat up suspects, long-haired gits - and in particular long-haired gits who lived on mountains and got themselves cuffed up while eating handouts from people with titles who ought to be abolished. Detective Sergeant Berrick, in fact, revealed himself as a typical good-hearted aggressive Scot with a strong sense of justice.

He was thin, somewhere in the tail-end thirties, and would probably soon be promoted to become one of the superiors he despised. His manner to me was artificially correct and a touch self-righteous, a long way from the paternal instincts of his friendly old neighbourhood predecessor who had turned bad boys into good citizens for years but was now flying a desk in far off Perth, made useless by age regulations and the reclassification of paternalism as a dirty word.

Sergeant Berrick told me not to expect to get my goods back.

I said, 'I was wondering if you might have some luck with the paintings.'

'What paintings?' He peered at a list. 'Oh yes, here we are. Four paintings of scenes of golf courses.' He looked up. 'There was paint all over your place.'

'Yes.'

'And you painted those pictures yourself?'

'Yes.'

'Is there any way we could recognise them?'

'They had stickers on the back, in the top left-hand corner,' I said. 'Copyright stickers giving my name, Alexander, and this year's date.'

'Stickers can be pulled off,' he said.

'These stickers can't. The glue bonds with the canvas.'

He gave me a don't-bother-me stare but punched up my file on a computer.

'Copyright stickers on backs,' he said aloud, typing in the words. He shrugged. 'You never know.'

'Thanks,' I said.

'You could put another sticker over the top,' he said.

'Yes, you could,' I agreed, 'but you might not know my name is printed in an ink that shows up in X-rays.'

He stared. 'Tricky, aren't you?'

'It's a wicked world,' I said, and got an unpremeditated smile in return.

'We'll see what we can do,' he promised. 'How's that?'

'I'll paint your portrait if you find my pictures.'

He spread out on his desk the drawings I'd done at Dalwhinnie station of my assailants, and changed his challenging attitude to one of convinced interest.

'Paint my wife,' he said.

'Done.'

A few doors along from the police station I visited a shop that was a campers' heaven aimed at tourists, and there acquired a sleeping bag and enough essentials to make living in the stripped bothy possible, and then drove a long detour to Donald Cameron's far-flung post office to see if any letters had arrived for me in the past week, and to stock up, as I usually did, with food and a full gas cylinder.

'Will you be wanting to use my telephone, Mr Kinloch?' old Donald asked hopefully. 'There's something amiss with the one outside.'

I bet there is, I thought; but to please the old beggar I made one call on his instrument, asking the bagpipe restorers if there was any chance of their delivering my pipes either to Jed Parlane's house or to Donald Cameron's shop.

Old Donald practically snatched the receiver out of my hand and told the pipe people he would be going to Inverness on Wednesday and would collect my pipes for me personally: and so it was arranged. Donald, restoring the phone to its cradle, beamed at me with expectation.

'How much?' I asked, resigned, and negotiated a minor king's ransom.

'Always at your service, Mr Kinloch.'

It rained all the way up the muddy track to the bothy. Once there I sat in the comparative comfort of the Land Rover outside my locked front door and made inroads into the battery power of Jed's portable phone. Poor reception, but possible.

It was still office hours in Reading. I tried Tobias Tollright first with trepidation, but he was reasonably reassuring.

'Mrs Morden wants to talk to you. She held the meeting of creditors. They did at least attend.'

'And that's good?'

'Encouraging.'

I said, 'Tobe…'

'What is it?'

'Young and Uttley.'

Tobias laughed. 'He's a genius. Wait and see. I wouldn't recommend him to everyone, or everyone to him, but you're two of a kind. You both think sideways. You'll get on well together. Give him a chance.'

'Did he tell you that I engaged him?'

'Er…' The guilt of his voice raised horrible doubts in my mind.

'He surely didn't tell you what I asked him to do?' I said.

'Er…'

'So much for discretion.'

Tobias said again, lightheartedly, 'Give him a chance, Al.'

It was too late by then, I thought ruefully, to do anything else.

I phoned Margaret Morden and listened to her crisp voice.

'I laid out all the figures. The creditors all needed smelling salts. Norman Quorn took off with every last available cent, a really remarkable job. But I've persuaded the bank and the Inland Revenue to try to come up with solutions, and we are meeting again on Wednesday, when they've had a chance to consult then-head offices. The best that one can say is that the brewery is basically still trading at a profit, and while it still has the services of Desmond Finch and the present brewmaster, it should go on doing so.'

'Did you… did you ask the creditors about the race?'

'They see your point. They'll discuss it on Wednesday.'

'There's hope, then?'

'But they want Sir Ivan back in charge.'

I said fervently, 'So do I.'

'Meanwhile you may still sign for him. He is adamant it should be you and no one else.'

'Not his daughter?'

'I asked him myself. He agreed to speak to me. Alexander, he said. No one else.'

'Then I'll do anything you need, and… Margaret…'

'Yes?'

'What are you wearing today?'

She gasped, and then laughed. 'Coffee and cream.'

'Soft and pretty?'

'It gets subliminal results. Wednesday - a gentle practical dark blue, touches of white. Businesslike but not threatening.'

'Appearances help.'

'Indeed they do…' her voice tailed off hesitantly. 'There's something odd, though.'

'Odd about what?'

'About the appearance of the brewery's accounts.'

Alarmed, I said, 'What exactly is odd?'

'I don't know. I can't identify it. You know when you can smell something but you don't know what it is? It's like that.'

'You worry me,' I said.

'It's probably nothing.'

'I trust your instincts.'

She sighed. 'Tobias Tollright drew up the audit. He's very reliable. If there were anything incongruous, he would have noticed.'

'Don't alarm the creditors,' I pleaded.

"They are interested only in the future. In getting their money. What I feel - a whisper of disquiet - is in the past. I'll sleep on it. Solutions often come in the night.'

I wished her useful dreams, and sat on my Scottish mountainside in the rain-spattered Land Rover realising how little I knew, and how much I relied on Tobe and Margaret and Young (or Uttley) for answers to questions I hadn't the knowledge to ask.

I wanted to paint.

I could feel the compulsion, the fusing of mental vision with the physical longing to feel the paint in my hands that came always before I did any picture worth looking at: the mysterious impetus that one had to call creation, whether the results were worth the process or not.

Inside the bothy there was an old familiar easel and the new painting supplies from London, and I had to instruct myself severely that two more phone calls had to be made before I could light a lamp (new from the camping shop) and prepare a canvas ready for morning.

Tack cotton duck onto a stretched frame. Prime three times with gesso to produce a good surface, let it dry. Lay on the Payne's grey mixed with titanium white. Make working drawings. Plan. Sleep. Dream.

I phoned my mother.

Ivan was no worse, no better. He had agreed to talk to some woman or other about saving the brewery, but he still wanted me to act for him, as he couldn't yet summon the strength.

'OK,' I said.

'The real trouble at present,' my mother said, 'is Surtees.'

'What about him?'

'He is paranoid. Patsy is furious with him. Patsy is furious about everything. I do wish you would come back. Alexander, you're the only person she can't bully.'

'Is she bullying Ivan?'

'She bullies him terribly, but he can't see it. He told Oliver Grantchester he wants to write a codicil to his Will, and it seems Oliver mentioned it to Patsy, and now Patsy is demanding to know what Ivan wants a codicil for, and for once Ivan won't tell me, and oh dear, it's so bad for Ivan. And she's practically living here, she's at his elbow every minute.'

'And Surtees? Why is he paranoid?'

'He says he's being followed everywhere by a skinhead.'

I said weakly, 'What?'

'I know. It's stupid. No one else has seen this skinhead. Surtees says the skinhead disappears whenever he, Surtees, is with other people. Patsy's livid with him. I do wish they wouldn't crowd in here all the time. Ivan needs rest and quiet. Come back, Alexander… please.'

The overt uncharacteristic plea was almost too much. Too many people wanted too much. I could see that they needed someone to decide things - Ivan, my mother, Tobias, Margaret, even my uncle Robert - but I didn't feel strong enough myself to give them all strength.

I wanted to paint.

To my mother I said, 'I'll come back soon.'

'When?'

Dear heaven, I thought, and said helplessly, 'Wednesday night.'

We said goodbye and, finally, I phoned Jed.

He said, 'All hell has broken loose at the castle.'

'What sort of hell?'

'Andy - Himself's young grandson - has run off with the King Alfred Gold Cup.'