To the Hilt (12 page)

After a while, in which he briefly dozed, he said with weakness, “Patsy couldn’t have been sweeter when I was in the Clinic. She came every day, you know. She looked after my flowers ... I had so many plants, people were so kind.... Everyone in the Clinic said how lucky I was to have such a loving, thoughtful and beautiful daughter ... and perhaps she was in and out when Robert came, but I can’t think how she thought you had
stolen
the Cup ... You must be mistaken about that, you know.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

 

 

Armed with generous cash from my mother, I trekked back by rail to Reading and called to see the firm of Young and Uttley, the investigators recommended by Tobias. An unprepossessing male voice on the telephone having given me a time and a place, I found a soulless box of an office—outer room, inner room, desks, filing cabinets, computers and coat stand—with an inhabitant, a man of about my own age dressed in jeans, black hard boots, a grubby singlet with cut-out armholes and a heavy black hip-slung belt shining with aggressive studs. He had an unshaven chin, close-cropped dark hair, one earring dangling—right ear—and the word “HATE” in black letters across the backs of the fingers of both hands.

“Yeah?” he said, when I went in. “Want something?”

“I’m looking for Young and Uttley. I telephoned...”

“Yeah,” said the voice I’d heard on the phone. “See. Young and Uttley are
partners.
That’s their pictures on the wall, there. Which one do you want?”

He pointed to two glossy eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs thumbtacked to a framed corkboard hanging on a dingy wall. Alongside hung a framed certificate giving Young and Uttley license to operate as private investigators, though to my understanding no such license was necessary in Britain, nor existed. A ploy to impress ignorant clients, I supposed.

Mr. Young and Mr. Uttley were, first, a sober dark-suited man with a heavy mustache, a striped tie and a hat, and secondly, a wholesome fellow in a pale blue jogging suit, carrying a football and a whistle and looking like a dedicated schoolteacher going out to coach children.

I turned away, smiling, and said to the skinhead watching me, “I’ll take you as you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those pictures are both you.”

“Quick, aren’t you?” he said tartly. “And Tobe warned me, and all.”

“I asked him for someone good, honest and discreet.” “You got him. What do you want done?”

I said, “Where did you learn your trade?”

“Reform school. Various nicks. Do you want me or not?”

“I want the discreet bit most of all.”

“Priority.”

“Then I want you to follow someone and find out if he’s met, or knows where to find, four other people.”

“Done,” he said easily. “Who are they?”

I drew them for him in a mixture of pencil and ballpoint, having somewhere lost my charcoal. He looked at the drawings, one of Surtees Benchmark and one of each of my four attackers.

I told him Surtees’s name and address. I said I knew nothing about the others except their ability to punch.

“Are those four how you got that eye?”

“Yes. They robbed my house in Scotland, but they have southeast England voices.”

He nodded. “When did they hit you?”

“Tuesday morning.”

He mentioned his fee and I paid him a retainer for a week. I gave him Jed’s phone number and asked him to report.

“What do I call you?” I asked.

“Young or Uttley, take your pick.”

“Young and Utterly Outrageous, more like.”

“You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself.”

I went grinning to the train.

 

 

I spent the latter part of the afternoon shopping, accompanied by my long-suffering mother who paid for everything with her credit cards.

“I suppose,” she said at one point, “you weren’t
insured
against the loss of your winter clothes and your climbing gear and your paints?”

I looked at her sideways, amused.

She sighed.

“I did insure the jeep,” I said.

“That’s something, at least.”

Back at Park Crescent I changed into some of the new things and left the jodhpur boots, padded jacket, crash helmet and goggles for return to Emily sometime, and I told Ivan (having checked with Margaret Morden) that so far the brewery’s creditors were earning haloes and had agreed to meet on Monday.

“Why don’t you stay here?” he said, a shade petulantly. “Your mother would like it.”

I hadn’t told him about the attack on the bothy so as not to trouble him and he hadn’t persisted in asking how I’d hurt my eye. I explained my departure in the one way that would satisfy him.

“Himself wants me up there ... and I’d better do something about the Cup.”

Relaxing, he nodded. “Keep it safe.”

The three of us tranquilly ate an Edna-cooked dinner; then I shook Ivan’s hand, hugged my mother warmly, humped my bags and boxes along to Euston, boarded the Royal Highlander and slept my way to Scotland.

Even the air at Dalwhinnie smelled different. Smelled like home. Cold. Fresh. A promise of mountains.

Jed Parlane was striding up and down to keep warm and blowing on his fingers. He helped carry my clutter out to his car and said he was relieved to see me and how was I feeling.

“Good as new.”

“That’s more than can be said for the bothy.”

“Did you lock it?” I asked, trying not to sound anxious.

“Relax. Yes, I did. In fact I got a new lock for it. Whatever was there when you left is still there. Himself asks me to drive over and check every day. No one is sniffing around, that I can see. The police want to interview you, of course.”

“Sometime.”

Jed drove me not to the bothy but, as arranged, straight to Kinloch castle to talk to Himself.

The castle was no fairy-tale confection of Disney spires and white-sugar icing, but like all ancient Scottish castles had been heavily constructed to keep out both enemies and weather. It was of thick and plain perpendicular gray stone with a minimum of narrow windows that had once been arrow slots for archers. Built on a rise to command views of the valley at its foot, it looked dour and inhospitable and threatening even on sunny days, and could chill the soul under nimbostratus.

My father had grown up there, and as a grandson of the old earl I’d played there as a child until it held no terrors: but times had changed and the castle itself no longer belonged to the Kinloch family but was the property of Scotland, administered and run as a tourist attraction by one of the conservation organizations. Himself, who had effected the transfer, had pronounced the roof upkeep and the heating bills too much for even the Kinloch coffers, and had negotiated a retreat to a smaller snugger home in what had once been the kitchen wing with living quarters for a retinue of dozens.

Himself would on occasion dress in historic Highland finery and act as host to visiting monarchs in the castle’s vast main dining hall, and it had been after one such grand evening, about six years earlier, that an enterprising band of burglars in the livery of footmen had lifted and borne away an irreplaceable gold-leafed eighteenth-century dinner service for fifty. Not a side plate, not a charger had surfaced since.

It had been less than a year later, when a second theft had deprived the castle of several tapestry wall hangings, that Himself had thought of a way of keeping safe the best-known and most priceless of the many Kinloch treasures, the jewel-encrusted solid gold hilt of the ceremonial sword of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

It had, of course, meant taking the Hilt out of its supposedly thief-proof display case and replacing the real thing with a replica. Ever since he had whisked the genuine article to safety, Himself had politely refused to tell the castle’s administrators where to find it. It belonged to
him,
he maintained, as it had been given personally by Prince Charles Edward to his ancestor, the earl of Kinloch at the time, and had been handed down to him, the present earl, in the direct male line.

So had the castle, the administrators said. The Hilt belonged to the nation.

Not so, Himself argued. The castle transfer documents had not included personal property and had in fact specifically excluded the Hilt.

There had been hot debates in newspapers and on television as to when, if ever, a gift to one man became the property of all.

Moreover, as Himself pointed out, the Hilt had been given as thanks and appreciation for hospitality, horses and provisions. The facts were well attested. Prince Charles Edward, on his long retreat northwards (after his nearly successful campaign to win the English Crown), had stayed for two nights in Kinloch castle, had been comforted and revictualed, his retinue rested and re-horsed, for which services he had passed on to the then earl the hilt of his ceremonial sword, the blade having been earlier snapped off short in an accident.

The sword had never been used in or intended for battle: it was too heavy and too ornate, a symbol of power and pomp only. The prince, his dreams shattered like the blade, had left it behind and ridden on towards Inverness, to what proved to be his army’s last decisive defeat at Culloden.

The prince, tougher in flight, had famously escaped across Scotland to the Western Isles, making it safely back to France. The earl of Kinloch, not so lucky, had been beheaded by the English for his allegiance (like poor fat old Lord Lovat), but had by then passed the splendid Hilt to his son, who passed it to his son, and so on down the generations. It had become known as “the Honor of the Kinlochs,” and Himself, the present earl, though he had had to cede his castle, had finally won a declaration in the courts (still disputed) that the Hilt, for his lifetime at least, belonged to
him.

Since he had “disappeared” the Hilt, the castle had been further robbed of a display of Highland artifacts: shields, claymores and brooches. Himself, in residence in London at the time of that break-in, had made sarcastic remarks about bureaucrats being hopeless custodians of treasures. Ill feeling flew like barbs in the air. The castle’s bruised administrators were now hell-bent on finding the Hilt, to prove that Himself was no better at guarding things than they were.

Under guise of rewiring and refurbishing the castle, including Himself’s wing, they were inching with probes everywhere, determined on uncovering the cache. All they had wrung out of Himself was a promise that the Honor of the Kinlochs had not left his property. The ill feeling and the search went on.

Jed having decanted me at the private wing’s seldom locked door, I went inside and found my uncle in his dining room, dressed in tweeds despite the early hour and pouring coffee from a pot on the sideboard.

He gave me, as always when we met after an interval, the salutation of my whole name, to which I replied with old and easy formality.

“Alexander.”

“My lord.”

He nodded, smiled faintly and gestured to the coffee.

“Breakfast?”

“Thank you.”

He took his cup over to the table and began eating toast. Two places had been laid at the table, and he waved me to the free one.

“That’s laid for you,” he said. “My wife stayed in London.”

I sat and ate toast and he asked me if I’d had a good journey.

“I slept all the way.”

“Good.”

He was a tall man, topping me by at least four inches, and broad and large without looking fat. At sixty-five he had gray hair showing a white future, a strong nose, heavy chin and guarded eyes. His physical movements tended to be uncoordinated and clumsy: his mind was as tough and solid as an oak. If it was true that he’d told Ivan he would trust me with his life, then the reverse in general was also true, but like many good men he tended to trust too many people, and I wouldn’t have staked my life on his absolute silence, even though any indiscretion would have been unintentional.

He said, spreading marmalade, “Jed told me what happened at the bothy.”

“Boring.”

He wanted me to tell him in detail what had happened, so I did, though with distaste. I told him also about Ivan giving me the powers of attorney, and my experiences in Reading.

He drank three cups of coffee, stretching as if absently for slice after slice of toast.

Eventually I asked him calmly, “So do you have the King Alfred Gold Cup? Is it here?”

He answered broodingly, “I did tell Ivan you were good at hiding things.”

“Mm.” I paused. “Probably someone heard you.”

“God, Al.”

I said, “I think it was the chalice, not the Hilt, that those men were trying to find at the bothy. I also think they hadn’t been told precisely what they were looking for. They kept saying, ‘Where is it?’ but they didn’t say what they meant by ‘it.’ I thought at the time they meant the Hilt, because I didn’t know Ivan had given you the Cup; but also it seemed possible they were simply fishing for anything I valued.” I sighed. “Anyway, I’d say now the ‘it’ was definitely the Cup.”

He said heavily, “Jed said they’d hurt you badly.” “That was Tuesday. Today’s Saturday, and I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“Was it my fault?”

“It was the Finance Director’s fault for running off with the brewery’s cash.”

“But mine for suggesting you to Ivan.”

“It’s history.”

He hesitated. “I still have to decide what to do with that damned lump of gold.”

I did not make instant glad-eyed offers to keep it safe.

He listened to my silence and gave me a rueful shake of the head.

“I can’t ask it of you, I suppose,” he said.

Next time you’ll scream ...
There would be no next time.

I said, “Patsy has told a few people that I already have the Cup. She’s saying I stole it from the brewery.”