Stuart was all lit up, possessed with a kind of electric frenzy that made him pace the floor in agitation as the words tumbled out of him. ‘It’s unbelievable. I’ve had experts hunting for it for years. We scoured every likely location for miles around. Spent months on end searching for Cluny’s cave, where the Prince is said to have hidden from the English after his defeat at Culloden. I thought he might have stashed the treasure there, but we never found any such cave. I wasn’t about to let that defeat me, however. Next I had historians analyse the letter that was found in a secondhand shop in Winchester in 2003, purporting to detail the deathbed confession of Neill Iain Ruari, who claimed to have witnessed the Jacobite clansmen burying the gold. Nothing came of that either. So I dug into the Clan Cameron archives, which tell of the efforts of one of the Prince’s loyal followers on a covert mission to Scotland in 1753 to recover the lost treasure and plot the assassination of George II and the royal family. Zilch. Every historical text has been thoroughly examined. No stone left unturned. And yet this numbskull Ross Campbell, some local pipsqueak surveyor, somehow manages to stumble across what people have been dedicated to finding for centuries.’

‘Just pure chance,’ Ben said. ‘The find of a lifetime. Not that he lived very long to enjoy it.’

‘That’s right, he didn’t. You know how the saying goes, Mr Hope. To the victor belong the spoils. That would be me. And here’s the part I like the most. I have no intention of paying for it. Nada. Not one penny. Am I clear? There will be no cash settlement involved in this trade.’

‘I’d have thought a few million was peanuts to a man of your wealth.’

‘And you’d be right,’ Stuart said. ‘But you won’t be getting any of it. How’s that make you feel? Knowing that you’re the loser, and I’m the winner? My kind will always be. Genetics. Try not to feel too bad about it.’

The guy was so conceited that Ben almost wanted to tell him that there was no gold, just to see the expression on his face.

‘Your illustrious ancestor,’ Ben said, jerking his thumb back at the painting over the fireplace. ‘I suppose that’d be him up there, would it?’