On the day after the girls had returned from their holiday in London, Mikki brought a copy of the North Devon Advertiser back from a shopping trip to the village. She handed the paper to Haig, folded to an inside page.
  "That's sad, isn't it?" she said.
  Haig read through the death notice that she had marked. "Is this the old lady Biffo stays with when he's not here?"
  "Yes, the girl in the greengrocer told me. She was all right up to about three weeks ago, then her daughter's been looking after her. She died on Sunday. She was eighty-six."
  "The sea air obviously agreed with her."
  "The funeral's tomorrow. Do you think we ought to send some flowers?"
  "What, from Biffo and all his friends? Or what did she call him?"
  "Hodge. After Dr. Johnson's cat."
  "Yes, I think we should do that. And maybe mention to the daughter about Biffo's second home in case she tries to find another home for her mum's cat."
  "Yes, we should do that," nodded Mikki. "Have you seen him recently?"
  "Not for a couple of days. He had his breakfast here on Monday, then he strolled off. So we could have a full-time cat now."
  "Unless he finds somewhere else, just in case."
  "I wouldn't put that past him," grinned Haig.

A fortnight after he had given Barry Fantony his prospecting licence, the Marquess of Arvonie had more or less forgotten about him. Apart from mutual guided tours over their homes, the one significantly longer in duration than the other, the marquess had seen nothing of his English visitors. His staff had reported occasional sightings during their first week on the estate, but nothing since. The marquess had assumed without coming to a conscious conclusion that the project had foundered on the rock of small success.
  He was somewhat surprised when his household manager, who would have been a butler in previous times, announced that a Mr. Fantony had arrived with a bag of gold. It was a grey, October Monday afternoon and the marquess had been struggling with the chore of bringing his financial records up to date. A man with gold was a welcome diversion.
  "Mr. Fantony," the marquess said with a smile when Barry arrived in his study, "I must admit, I thought you'd gone home in disgust."
  "I did think about it a couple of times," Barry lied as he took a chair in front of the desk. "But you have to stick with these jobs." He placed a self-sealing plastic bag about three inches square and a slip of paper the size of a credit-card receipt on the blotter and sat back to await comments.
  The marquess picked up the bag and examined the bright fragments closely. Then he turned to the piece of paper. It was a print-out from a bank's weighing machine. "Seventy-two grammes? That's extraordinary."
  Barry smiled. The bag contained enough fragments of gold to fill a 5 millilitre medicine measuring spoon. He had sorted out the bulkiest pieces deliberately to make the bag's contents look as impressive as possible.
  "Ah! Excuse me. Gold fever is making me forget my duties as a host. Could I offer you some of my malt whisky?"
  "Just a small one for someone's who's driving," Barry said.
  The marquess poured into two glasses, and added a little spring water to make Barry's drink look more generous. "Yes, I have heard stories of alluvial gold in the area," he remarked when he returned to the desk with the glasses. "Slainte mhath!"
  "Cheers!"
  "One is supposed to be able to peg a fleece from a sheep in a stream for a suitable interval and then burn the fleece to obtain a respectable amount of gold dust. I must admit, I've never quite believed it, personally. But I suppose I shall have to change my mind now."
  "Yes, that's the thing of it," nodded Barry. "There's tons and tons of gold in the rocks around here, but it's spread out very thinly. The trick is to look in places where Nature chooses to concentrate it."
  "Seventy-two grammes?" The marquess dabbed at his calculator. "And so my five per cent share comes to some three point six grammes. That's almost half the amount of gold in a sovereign, I gather from my reading up on the subject. I'm impressed, Mr. Fantony."
  "No, your Lordship, that's your five per cent." Barry produced another bank weight slip. "That's the total before we split off your share."
  "Good God!" The marquess stared at him in blank amazement. "There must be over five hundred pounds worth of gold in this small bag."
  "Doesn't look much, does it?" smiled Barry. "You'd think you'd get a lot more for five hundred pounds."
  "And you're sure this is all mine?"
  "Like I said, your Lordship, there are thousands of tons of gold in the rocks, but it's locked up in thousands of cubic miles of gold-bearing rock. In all these mountains you've got around here. But it does come out of the mountains when the forces of weathering grind them up, and if you can find a decent natural trap, you can pan it out by the ounce, or even get a pound or two."
  "And that's what you do? Use the traditional panning method? Swirling the gravel round in water, and so on?"
  "It works very well on a small scale," nodded Barry. "And I haven't finished yet. I'm sure I'll be back with a lot more on the next trip. There might even be enough to get a goldsmith to make you a wine goblet or something like that out of gold from your own estate."
  "That's a damn good idea. Would you consider selling me some of your portion?"
  "Yes, as much as you like at the going rate that's printed in the paper every morning. It might as well go to you as some bullion dealer in London."
  "And you're telling me you have some three pounds of gold in the bank?" The marquess shook his head over the weight slip. "And you found that much in a week or two? I find that pretty incredible. But it's obviously true if you have it."
  "Well, I did start with the some of the best prospects, your Lordship. But you never know till you look whether something that looks good as a gold-trap on the computer has really collected any gold."
  "I suppose not. Do you have any plans for your gold?"
  "Not yet. To tell you the truth, I wasn't expecting to find nearly so much of it," grinned Barry. "The wife's going to get some of it put in a block of clear plastic as an ornament. I don't know if that's something you'd want to do as a way of raising money for the estate? Selling paperweights or ornaments with real Scottish gold in them."
  "And packaged in a tartan box?" smiled the marquess. "You know, if one put about half an ounce, or even an ounce of gold into the plastic, I'm sure rich Japanese customers would buy your paperweights. Probably for about twice the value of the metal; or even more for the scarcity value. And I suppose one could put just a pinch of gold into cheaper ones for the home and European markets. You know, this is something I'd like to explore further. If you're interested in joining in a business venture."
  "Maybe I'd better give you my brother's phone number," said Barry. "He's the businessman of the family. I just do daft things like looking for gold. Mind you, I bet he'll be laughing on the other side of his face when he sees how much I've got."
  "I'm sure he will," smiled the marquess.
  "So I might as well leave the rest of the gold in the bank in Inverness? We just took about that much for ourselves to show people, so we could prove we found something." Barry pointed to the bag on the blotter.
  "Ah, yes. I certainly think we can find a use for all of it. I wonder how easy it would be to authenticate it?" The marquess looked at Barry, who returned a blank frown. "Certify it as coming from Scotland," the marquess added.
  Barry shrugged. "I don't know. I'm sure that's definitely the genuine article. And gold's gold. Isn't it? " He was under orders not to appear to be any sort of expert.
  "Apparently not. According to something I was reading, it also contains tiny traces of other metals, such as silver, lead and even arsenic, which vary according to the part of the world where it was been found. Something I shall have to look in to in more detail. You mentioned another trip just now. I take it you're heading for home? The weather for the rest of the week is looking decidedly unpleasant, if the forecasters have it right. Decidedly unpleasant. Possibly even worse than the great storm of nineteen eighty-seven."
  "Yes, I've been listening to all the bad weather warnings on the radio. And all the people remembering the hurricane that never was," Barry added with a grin. "I'll probably be back next week. Let's hope we get a bit more gold washed into the traps in the meantime."
  "Yes, indeed!" smiled the marquess.
  "And now I suppose I'd better be making a move," added Barry. "It's a long drive home."
  Barry headed out on the road to Loch Ness feeling very cheerful. Ornaments or paperweights containing Scottish gold had been his idea, even if brother Michael had suggested that he should mention it casually to see if the marquess bit. It was a scheme that promised easy profits, and the money that came in had no apparent connection with stolen silver bullion.
  The scheme would keep him going until Michael got his act together and arranged Barry's Big Strike. It was a pity that idea was taking so long to set up, especially with a really good storm on the way. Still, Barry was confident that a good drop of rain that set streams and rivers racing in the Highlands would make finding twenty or thirty thousand pounds worth of gold seem reasonable.

The walls of the tower were so thick that they reduced the first serious autumn storm to a distant mutter. They muffled the shriek of the wind to an almost subsonic rumble, more felt than heard. A music centre or a television could drown out crashing, rolling thunder and the steel shutters on the double glazing and the curtains shut out jagged forks of lighting.
  There was no danger of lighting hitting the TV aerial, which was situated on the roof of the garage, over sixty feet below the level of the twin lightning conductors. The violent electrical discharges would be heard as swishing fizzes on speakers, and the lights flickered occasionally, but these were the only signs of a filthy night outside.
  Biffo, who had returned to the tower on the day of his former half-owner's funeral, had retired to his cupboard. He seemed not to be particularly nervous, but he could sense that there was something going on that he might not like if he found out about it in more detail. Haig had switched on his emergency generator as a routine precaution.
  Both radio and television weather staff had started to issue increasingly confident warnings of severe weather over the weekend. By Tuesday evening, they had been forecasting high winds and heavy rain up and down the west coast of the entire British Isles. The black arrows on television weather maps had been especially big and numerous in the south-west. If the much milder storm of three weeks before had brought electricity blackouts and flash floods to parts of the region, Haig felt sure that this one would do even more damage. Cynics kept pointing out that it was getting the build-up that should have been given to the hurricane-that-never-was of 1987.
  The girls quite liked storms; when they were safe inside the tower. They enjoyed watching displays of lightning that were divorced from the crash of thunder, unlike Haig's sister Prunella, who was generally a bundle of nerves in a storm; until someone had poured several generous glasses of wine or a couple of stiff gins and tonic into her. But Pru had her memories of a particularly bad thunderstorm, which had caught up with a film crew somewhere in the Australian bush and killed one of her colleagues.
  The storm had begun at around dawn, postponing first light for several hours. By breakfast time, listening to the reports of chaos on the roads and railways, Haig and Vanessa were glad to be self-employed and able to choose to stay indoors. Mikki had decided to take a day off from her college about five minutes before a fax had come in to tell her that most of the site was without power and that all students were advised to take a study day at home.
  Weather maps with graphics predicting the course of the storm showed the black heart clipping the south-western corner of Ireland before crashing across the West Country and invading France via Brittany and the Cherbourg peninsula. The effects would be felt as far away as Scotland, however.
  Haig decided to close all the shutters on the west and north sides of the tower when the wind speed reached 9 on the Beaufort Scale, officially a strong gale. The storm had enough energy then to take branches off trees and strip slates from roofs. Haig was not sure that the wind would be able to carry any missiles far enough to hurl them at the tower but taking the precaution was preferable to the inconvenience of a broken window.
  Biffo ventured out to answer a call of Nature and returned highly indignant and soaking wet. Mikki felt obliged to dry him with kitchen towels and give him some raw mince to prove that there were good things in life. When the afternoon tide reached the usual high-water mark at a belt of sun-dried seaweed, it seemed to be intent on marching further inland to swallow up Farne village. There was no noticeable evening low tide. Whenever Haig looked out at it, the bay seemed to be showing no signs of emptying as winds of storm force 11 drove the stormy sea into Farnescombe Bay, crashing it with explosive force past the Farne Rock.

Thursday brightened into an overcast, showery day with belts of dark and paler grey cloud scudding across the sky. The news was bringing reports of storm damage in France, now. The sun managed to peep out to spark on wavelets as Farnescombe Bay emptied. When Haig and the girls ventured out at seven-thirty, they could see small groups of people on the beach, waiting to advance into the bay to look for Spanish loot.
  Emerging from the cave at the end of his private staircase, Haig sat down on a ledge of fairly dry rock while the girls tried to work out how soon the water would be shallow enough to let them wade about in it so that they could search with a second-best metal detector shrouded in a hole-less plastic bag.
  "This is what having a bit of money is all about," Haig called to them. "The freedom to sit here and enjoy the show without having to rush down there and start grubbing for coins. You can enjoy the whole spectacle instead of small bits of it."
  "Are you going to sit there all day, or what?" called Vanessa. "We can get into this quite soon."
  "I'm just wondering whether to go up to the top of the cliff for a better view of the bay," said Haig. "And maybe sit there and watch the next tide bury anything that's left after the locusts have finished. Seeing something nobody else has seen for over a century should be all that matters."
  "I bet it's going to be a dead loss after all the stories we've heard," said Mikki. "You're not going to see a proper Storm Tide if there's no sun to shine on the gold coins."
  "That's the trouble with real life," Haig said wisely. "It's always rubbish next to the stories."