by Francis - TO THE HILT

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.