He sat at his desk and contemplated the piles of mail. He had left Edinburgh a newly married man, blissfully happy, excited beyond measure. Now he was back as a man who had faced death in shark-infested waters, who had been rescued by a dolphin – a rescue he could not bring himself to talk about because nobody would believe him; a man who had been wrongfully detained and threatened with psychiatric confinement; a man who had thought that he was his father’s son, only to discover that he might well be the son of another man altogether, the president of the Cat Society of Singapore. Those were transforming events for anybody, but how much more so for one who had been on his honeymoon at the time?

He had left Elspeth behind in the flat, still in bed, still deep asleep in her state of unadjusted jet lag. He had looked at her fondly from the door of the bedroom, standing there gazing upon the form under the blankets: his wife. The word still came uneasily to his tongue; it was so new. And he, Matthew, who had thought that he would never find anybody, was now a husband; moreover he was a husband setting off to work. It was such a mundane, unexceptional situation, the great domestic cliché, but for Matthew it was something to be relished, and committed to memory.

They had not discussed what Elspeth was to do. She had said that she would no longer teach, but that she wanted to be occupied in some way. Matthew had suggested that she work in the gallery with him, but she had been reluctant to do that: a marriage, she thought, stood its best chance if both parties had their own areas of activity within it. Seeing one another all day and then again in the evening could become claustrophobic, Elspeth thought, even if one was head-over-heels in love with one’s spouse. So the gallery would be Matthew’s, and she would do something else.

“Something will turn up,” she said.

And he had agreed. She was the sort of person for whom something would always turn up.

Matthew thought of this as he sat at his desk in the gallery and worked through the pile of mail. Even if there were bills – and one of them, a bill from his framers, was quite large – there was good financial news from the managers of his portfolio. Some of his shares had done particularly well during his absence on honeymoon and the letter was bullish in tone. “Even further gains can be anticipated,” it said, “and we are inclined to advise against profit-taking at this point.” He was relieved that he was no poorer, but he was not sure if he necessarily wanted to be all that much richer. And he was convinced that he did not want to engage in profit-taking, either now or at some stage in the future. That sounded so greedy, he thought; the sort of thing that fat cats took, or the sellers of junk bonds, or speculators in currency. They took profits and gobbled them up in the way in which a greedy person cuts off the best part of a pie.

He laid aside the financial report and attended to the rest of the letters. One was a hand-written note in a script he recognised: that of Angus Lordie.

Dear Matthew, Welcome back! Make sure you contact me the moment you get in as I have some extraordinary news for you. Remember Lard O’Connor, your somewhat dubious pal from Glasgow? He of the ample proportions? Well, he turned up while you were away – with a picture for you, which he consigned to my eager hands pro tem. You’ll never guess what it is! A well-known Scottish portrait painter, Raeburn, no less! And his subject? A Scottish poet, from Ayrshire, to be precise. Yes! Contact me soonest for delivery of said masterpiece and chat about what can be done.

Matthew looked at his watch. If Angus came round shortly, they could go over the road for coffee, and Big Lou would welcome them warmly, as she always did. That was the reassuring thing about Edinburgh. It was always the same; nothing ever changed.

Matthew’s telephone call produced an assurance from Angus that he would be round at the gallery within half an hour. “With the painting,” Angus added. “It may as well have another outing, since it’s been carried around the streets of Edinburgh ever since Mr. O’Connor graced us with his presence. And he brought it over from Glasgow in the train. He probably put it in the guard’s van.”

“There are no guard’s vans any more,” Matthew pointed out. “In fact, many of our trains don’t even have seats any more. Look at the number of people who have to stand.”

Angus rang off and Matthew returned to his pile of mail. There was a sale of Scottish art coming up at Sotheby’s, and he had been sent the catalogue. There was a Raeburn, but an undistinguished one, thought Matthew; one might walk right past it and not bother to enquire as to who the sitter was. But Robert Burns… One could not walk past him.

He was still looking at the catalogue when Angus arrived twenty minutes later. He was carrying a large, wrapped parcel, and Cyril was with him. On entering the gallery, Cyril, who liked Matthew, ran across the room to greet him, licking his hands appreciatively. Then he lay down at Matthew’s feet and stared at his ankles.

Cyril had long wanted to bite Matthew’s ankles. He did not want to do this out of hostility – quite the contrary: Cyril admired Matthew’s ankles, which he thought presented the perfect target into which to sink one’s teeth. Had he been able to articulate this desire, he would have had to resort to Mallory’s famous explanation as to why he wanted to climb Everest: because it was there. Matthew’s ankles were there too, and the sight of them made Cyril drool as he rested his head on the carpet below Matthew’s desk. Just one little nip, he wondered. If he was quick enough about it, they might not even notice. But it was not to be. Cyril knew that he was just a dog, and that it was not given to dogs to do all the things they might wish to do. There was neither rhyme nor reason for this limitation; it, again, was just there. Angus, who fed him and took him for walks, was a god; and in Cyril’s theology, vaguely sensed, like some obscure article of faith handed down from a previous generation, it was the duty of dogs to do the bidding of their gods and to accept whatever small mercies they might be shown. Cyril’s heart, therefore, was filled with gratitude: gratitude for Angus, for whom he would sacrifice his life if called upon to do so; gratitude for the smells which suffused his world, smells sometimes so strange and beguiling that they challenged even his acute olfactory memory; gratitude for being here with these two men rather than outside.

After a quick enquiry about Matthew’s trip, Angus busied himself with the unwrapping of the painting. “Your fat friend from Glasgow has surpassed himself,” he whispered. “The missing Raeburn portrait of Burns. Absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt. And he had it! Lard O’Connor had it!”

Matthew examined the painting carefully, crouching to do so, and exposing a further portion of ankle. Cyril watched, his eyes narrowing, focused on the glimpse of taut white flesh. His whiskers twitched.

“Well, it looks like Raeburn all right,” Matthew said, straightening up. “Did Lard know what he had?”

“Not the first clue,” said Angus.

Matthew was thinking aloud. “Of course there’s the question of provenance,” he said. “We can assume that it’s stolen. Lard is a gangster, you know.”

Angus’s face fell. “Does that mean that we have to hand it in?”

Matthew sighed. “Well, we can hardly ignore the fact that it probably belongs to somebody else.”

“But can’t we just ask him where he got it from?” asked Angus. “There may be an innocent explanation, for all you know. People sometimes have these old things in the family. They don’t know what it is they have. Maybe the O’Connors had…”