To the Hilt Read online

  “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 checkbook which he’d 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 duffel 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 clubhouse. 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.”

  “Cans 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 check for the new golf gear, and unload it into a locker, which I would have done better to do 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 bed-stead, 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 sneakers 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 ear-pieces: - 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 Berrick.

  Within five minutes 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 duffed 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 neighborhood 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 recognize 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 in 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 their 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 appearances 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 accounts. 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 realizing 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 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 gray 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 her, 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.

  T
o 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?”

  “Andrew—Himself’s young grandson—has run off with the King Alfred Gold Cup.”

  chapter 7

  I laughed. “Well,” Jed said, “I suppose it’s quite funny.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  It seemed that soon after Himself and his guests returned to the castle for a good Scots afternoon tea of hot scones and fortified cups, Dr. Zoë Lang had made an unheralded return visit, bringing with her an expert in precious and semiprecious stones. She couldn’t rest, she said, while her evaluation of the King Alfred Cup was incomplete.

  Himself, Dr. Lang, the jeweler and the fishing guests had all accordingly gone into the dining room in the quest for truth.

  The cardboard box had been retrieved from the sideboard and the copies of Dickens removed. The black leather cube had been lifted out and the gold clasp undone, and in the white satin nest ... nothing.

  My cousin James, who had returned from seeing his family onto the air shuttle from Glasgow to London, had instantly said he would tan the hide off his elder son, who had been fascinated by the Cup, but the Spacewatch good guy could not at that moment be reached for questioning, as he was by then somewhere on the road back to boarding school with his mother, who had no phone in her car.

  Jed said, “I called in to see Himself about estate business, and I found this old lady rather rudely telling him he shouldn’t be trusted to keep the Kinloch Hilt safe from robbers if he couldn’t guard things from his own grandson, and Himself just stood there benevolently agreeing with her, which seemed to make her even crosser. Anyway, after she’d gone, he asked me to ask you if you thought he ought to worry about Andrew, so do you?”

  “No.”

  Jed’s sigh was half a chuckle.

  “I told Himself you had carried out of the castle one of those big old game bags from the gun room, and he beamed. But what’s it all about? They were saying that that cup is a racing challenge trophy, that’s all. Is it really worth a lot?”