Which put Macdough's smile right back on his face, redoubled. "Ah, yes," he said. "They did tell me you'd call."

"Praps you could drop over this afternoon? Would four be convenient?"

"Certainly."

"Fine, then. Just ask for me at the cashier's desk."

"At the cashier's desk? Certainly. At four o'clock."

"Till then."

As Macdough cradled the receiver, his mind turned idly to the amazing series of events that had led him to this happy moment. The brawl in New York last winter, during the Queen's Own Caledonian Orchestra's performance (which he had attended through the generosity of old fellow-officers from the Brigade), his own lucky escape from the swarming police, and his utter astonishment when, in his hotel room next morning, he had awakened (a bit hung over) to find himself in possession of an extremely valuable painting stolen – according to the newspaper brought by room service with his breakfast – just the evening before. The terror he'd felt while smuggling the thing home (concealed inside a great mawkish framed landscape purchased for twenty-five dollars specifically for that purpose, the valuable Old Master undetected behind the dreadful New Monstrosity) was only a dim memory now, as was the utter bewilderment he had felt when faced with the question of how to turn his stroke of luck into actual cash. If Aunt Fiona hadn't chosen that moment to pass away (not prematurely; she was eighty-seven, as mad as an African general and as incontinent as Atlantis), Macdough would still be at a loss. Blessed Aunt Fiona, nothing became her life like the leaving of it.

The Macdough clan, which included Ian and his Aunt Fiona among its scores and multitudes, was one of the oldest and least successful families in all of Scottish history. Over the centuries, whenever the Scots fought the English they seemed to do so on Macdough land, and the Macdoughs got the worst of it. If Scot fought Scot, the Macdoughs invariably lined up on the wrong side. The Campbells and MacGregors might ebb and flow, but the Macdoughs immemorially ebbed.

So it was with low expectations that Macdough, as Aunt Fiona's sole heir, had first learned of her demise. The old lady had never owned anything in her life except rubbish bequeathed her by prior indigent Macdoughs. Several sheets of the inventory attached to the will were actually in scrabbly spidery eighteenth-century handwriting, describing pikestaffs and saddles and pewter plates which, while theoretically passing from hand to hand down the generations, had actually remained untouched and unwanted in various barns and basements and in the still-enclosed portion of the uninhabitable Castle Macdough high in the grim Monadhliath Mountains. However, the rituals had to be observed, and so Macdough had sat in a cluttered musty solicitor's office in Edinburgh and listened to the reading of the will, which included an endless droning recital of the inventory – what rubbish was here being gallantly preserved! – and was very nearly asleep when he suddenly sat bolt upright and stared at the solicitor, who, startled, stared right back. "What?" said Macdough.

The solicitor blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"What was that? What you just read there."

The solicitor found his place in the list: "Mead barrels, oak, six, with bungs."

"No, before that."

"Wounded stag with two rabbits, bronze, height sixteen inches, broken antler, one."

"Good God, man, before that."

"Frame, wood, gilt, ornate, with painting, oil, comic figures."

"Frame, wood," Macdough muttered. "Painting, oil. Comic figures?"

"So it says."

"Where is this, er, frame?"

"Mmm, mmmm." The solicitor had to leaf back through two pages of inventory to the nearest heading. "Castle Macdough."

"Ah," Macdough said. "I might find a use for a good wood frame." And he napped through the rest of the inventory, then drove his venerable Mini at high speed (well, its highest speed) north from Edinburgh, through Perth and Pitlochry on the A 9, turning off beyond Kingussie on the old road not even on the maps. More trail than road, and more gully than either, it climbed into the inhospitable mountains and arrived at last at Castle Macdough, a ravaged ruin covered with mildew. Some of the ground floor remained, windows broken and floors buckled, while below were fairly weather-tight storerooms strewn with rubbish, all of it carefully recorded in that everlasting inventory which now nestled against Ian Macdough's own will. (Macdough being a confirmed bachelor of a bluff, hearty, masculine yet asexual, peculiarly northern type, the next recipient of all this muck was slated to be a nephew of his, one Bruce Macdough, currently nine years of age.)

Stumbling over a baton used in relay races, Macdough struggled his way by flashlight from room to room until one bit of debris glittered back at him. Gilt? Yes. Frame, wood? Indubitably. Ornate? Good heavens, yes. Macdough pulled the object from its recess and found it to be almost exclusively frame; nearly four feet square, it was runnel and channel and riband and curlicue of gilded wood vastly surrounding a murky little picture possibly sixteen inches by eighteen. Dragging the thing into the light of day, Macdough found the tiny illustration thus so sumptuously engarbed was in fact an awkward amateurish comic drawing in oil of three drunken kilted men staggering on a road, trying to hold one another up. The moon in the sky was lopsided, though not by apparent intent.

Hadn't the inventory mentioned a double-bladed battle-axe? Descending into the depths, Macdough found the thing, carried it with some difficulty – it was damned heavy – up the slimy stone stairs, and proceeded to reduce the frame, wood, gilt, ornate, with its painting, oil, comic figures, to several zillion slivers. These were packed into the Mini and distributed into the air a few at a time over the next fifty miles.

It took another trip to Edinburgh to find an appropriately old frame which would match both the inventory's description and the stolen masterpiece's dimensions. This frame, happily, already contained an old painting – of a grandmotherly lady asleep in a rocker by the fire, a kitten and a ball of wool in her lap – so Macdough could use the same tacks to put the valuable Veenbes in its place. Another solitary trip to Castle Macdough was necessary, to seed the Veenbes there, and then Macdough awaited the right moment to introduce the subject of his inheritance into a conversation with a pair of old drinking pals, Cuffy and Tooth (both of whom had, as a matter of fact, been along on the night of the New York concert). Was it Cuffy who finally said, "Damn it, man, there could be something of value there. Why not have a look-see?" It might have been Tooth. In any event, it wasn't Macdough; he'd steered the conversation, but he'd let the others make the decisions, and when he asked them to join him for the projected look-see they fell in with the idea at once.

Neither of them, however, turned out to have the brains or the taste of a donkey, and after they'd both stumbled past the Veenbes without a second look Macdough had finally to discover the thing himself. "Now, look at this picture. Might be worth something, don't you think?"

"Not a bit of it," Cuffy said. "It's a mere daub, anyone can see that."

"The frame might be worth something," Tooth suggested.

"I'll take it along for the frame, then," Macdough decided, and so he did, and was subsequently astounded and delighted when word came from the Edinburgh art dealer that what he had was, in point of fact, a masterpiece of incredible value.

Borrowing on his prospects – the Parkeby-South valuation was security enough for Macdough's Inverness bankers – he had come here to London in July, two months before the auction that would make him rich, and was staying at the Savoy while looking about for a more permanent London abode; some flat, maisonette, pied-a-terre, some little somewhere to stay from now on, whenever he was "in town." Oh, by glory, but life was turning good!