IDON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT ART, BUT I KNOW WHAT I DON'T like. I don't like paintings that go walkabout after I've set up the security system. I especially don't like them when I've packed my business partner off to the Antipodes for two months with the calm assurance that I can handle things while he's gone.

The painting in question was a small Monet. When I say small, I mean in size, not in value. It would barely cover the hole my lover, Richard, punched in the wall of his living room in a moment of drunken ecstasy when Eric Cantona clinched the double for Manchester United, but it was worth a good dozen times as much as both our adjoining bungalows put together. Which, incidentally, they never will be. The painting depicted an apple tree in blossom and not a lot else. You could tell it was an apple tree; according to our office manager, Shel­ley, that's because it was painted quite early on in Monet's ca­reer, before his eyesight began to go and his whole world started to look like an Impressionist painting. Imagine, a whole artistic movement emanating from one bloke's duff eye­sight. Amazing what you can learn from the Open University. Shelley started a degree course last year, and what she doesn't know about the history of art I'm certainly not qualified to un­cover. It's not one of the course options in Teach Yourself Pri­vate Dicking.

The Monet in question, called, imaginatively enough, Apple Tree in Blossom, belonged to Henry Naismith, Lord of the Manor of Birchfield with Polver. Henry to his friends, and, thanks to John Major's classless society, to mere tradespeople like me. There were no airs and graces with Henry, but that didn't mean he didn't hide his thoughts and feelings behind his charming facade. That's how I knew it was serious when I picked up the phone to his perfect vowels that September morning. "Kate? Henry Naismith," he started. I leaned back in my chair, expecting the usual cheery chat about his recent exploits before we got down to the nuts and bolts. Not today. "Can you come over to the house?" he asked.

I straightened up. This sounded like the kind of start to a Monday morning that makes me wish I'd stayed in bed. "When did you have in mind, Henry?"

"As soon as you can. We, ah... we had a burglary in the night and a chap from the police is popping round for more de­tails. He'll want to know things about the security system that I probably won't be able to answer, and I'd be awfully grateful if you could take a run over." All this barely pausing for breath, never mind giving me the opportunity to ask ques­tions.

I didn't have to check the diary to know that I had nothing more pressing than routine inquiries into the whereabouts of a company chairman whose directors were rather eager to ask him some questions about the balance sheet. "No problem," I said. "What's missing?" I prayed it was going to be the TV and the video.

No such luck. There was silence on the end of the phone. I thought I could hear Henry drawing in a deep breath. "The Monet," he said tersely.

My stomach clenched. Birchfield Place was the first security system I'd designed and watched installed. My partner, Bill Mortensen, is the security expert, and he'd checked my work, but it was still down to me. "I'm leaving now," I said.

I drove out through the southern suburbs to the motorway on automatic pilot. Even the inevitable, ubiquitous roadworks didn't impinge. I was too busy reviewing Mortensen and Brannigan's involvement with Henry Naismith. When I'd seen his original appointment in the office diary, I'd thought Shelley was kidding me, especially since I'd been having one of my pe­riodic antimonarchy rants only the day before, triggered by the heir to the throne asserting that what was wrong with the country was not enough Shakespeare and smacking of small children. Once I realized the appointment was for real, I'd ex­pected some chinless wonder with the sort of inbred stupidity that's only found among the aristocracy and the population of isolated mountain villages. I couldn't have been more wrong, on both counts.

Henry Naismith was in his late twenties, built like an Australian lifeguard with the blond hair to match and with more than enough chin to provide a boxer with a target. According to Who's Who, his only recreations were sailing and ocean yacht racing, something I could have guessed for myself the first time I saw him. He had sailor's eyes, always looking be­yond me to some distant horizon only he could see. His face was burnished a ruddy brown by wind and sun, apart from the white creases round those dark blue eyes. He'd been educated at Marlborough and New College, Oxford. Even though I'd grown up there, I didn't think his city of dreaming spires and mine of car factories would give us much in common to remi­nisce about. He had the same clipped accent as Prince Charles, but in spite of that and everything else, I liked him. I liked anybody who was prepared to get off his backside and work hard. And Henry could graft, no messing. Anybody that tells you yacht racing is a holiday doesn't know an anchor from a wanker.

The newspaper archive database that we use had colored in the outline. Henry had inherited his title, a black-and-white Tudor manor house in Cheshire, a clutch of valuable paintings and not a lot of readies a couple of years before when his par­ents had been caught in an avalanche in some chic Alpine re­sort. Henry had been sailing in the Caribbean at the time. Life's a bitch, and then you marry one. Only Henry hadn't. Married, that is. He was right up there in the gossip colum­nists' lists of eligible bachelors. Maybe not in the top twenty, on account of the lack of dough, but the good looks and the tasty house put him in the running nevertheless.

Henry had come to us precisely because of the serious defi­ciencies in the cash-flow area. Because his father hadn't an­ticipated dying at the age of forty-seven, he hadn't got round to the sort of arrangements the landed gentry usually make to avoid the Exchequer getting their mitts on the widow's mite. Having done his sums, Henry realized the only way he was go­ing to be able to hang on to the house and the art collection and still spend half the year at the helm of a racing yacht was to bite the bullet and open Birchfield Place to the day-trippers.

The great British public are notoriously sticky-fingered on the stately-home circuit. You wouldn't think it to look at the coachloads of little old ladies that roll up on Bank Holidays, but they'll walk off with anything that isn't actually nailed down, and one or two things that are. This makes insurance companies even more twitchy than usual when it comes to pro­viding cover, which in turn makes the security business a nice little earner for private-investigation agencies like us. These days, security makes up about a quarter of our annual turnover, which is why Bill and I had decided I needed to learn that side of the business.

It's impossible to make any building impregnable, unless you brick up the doors and windows, which makes it hard to get a decent light to do your petit point. The best you can do is make it obvious that you've made it as hard as possible to

get in, so the prospective burglar turns away discouraged and turns over the next manor down the road. To make sure I got it right, as well as picking Bill's brains I'd consulted my old friend Dennis, himself a recovering burglar. "You know the one deterrent, Brannigan?" Dennis had demanded.

"Heat-seeking thermonuclear missiles?" I'd hazarded.

"A dog. You get a big Alsatian, give him the run of the place and your professional thief doesn't want to know. When I was at it, there wasn't an alarm system in the world that I wouldn't have a pop at. But dogs? Forget it."

Unfortunately, clients aren't too keen on having Rottweilers running around on their priceless oriental carpets. They're too worried about finding dog hairs-or worse-on the Hepplewhite. So Birchfield Place had relied, like most stately homes, on a state-of-the-art mix of hardwired detectors on doors and windows, passive infrared detectors at all key points and pres­sure-activated alert pads in front of any items of significance. Given the fail-safes I'd put in place, I couldn't for the life of me see how anyone could have got through my system undetected without setting off enough bells to drive Quasimodo com­pletely round the twist.

I turned off the motorway and headed into the depths of the leafy Cheshire stockbroker, soap-star and football-player belt. As usual, I almost missed the gap in the tall hedgerow that marked the end of Birchfield Place's drive. The trippers' en­trance was round the back, but I had no intention of parking in a field half a mile from the house. I yanked the wheel round just in time and turned on to a narrow ribbon of road curling be­tween fields where placid sheep didn't even glance up from their chewing as I passed. I always feel slightly edgy out in the coun­try; I don't know the names of anything and very quickly I de­velop anxiety about where my next meal is coming from. Give me an urban landscape where no sheep in its right mind would think for even a fleeting moment it might safely graze. The field gave way to thick coppices of assorted trees that looked like they'd been on the planet longer than my Granny Brannigan. Then, suddenly, the drive took a sharp right-hand bend and I shot out of the trees to a full-frontal view of Birchfield Place.

Built by some distant Naismith who had done some un­mentionable service to his monarch, the house looked as if it should be on a postcard or a jigsaw. The passage of time had skewed its black beams and white panels just enough to make sure no self-respecting building society would grant you a mortgage on it. It never looked real to me.

I pulled up beside an anonymous Ford, which I assumed be­longed to the police on account of the radio. A peacock screamed in the distance, more shattering to my composure than any amount of midnight sirens. I only knew it was a pea­cock because Henry had told me the first time one had made me jump out of my skin. Before I could reach out for the an­cient bell-pull, the door swung open and Henry smiled apolo­getically at me. "I really appreciate this, Kate," he said.

"All part of the service," I said reassuringly. "The police here?"

"An Inspector Mellor from the Art Squad," Henry said as he led the way across the inner courtyard to the Great Hall, where the Impressionist paintings hung incongruously. "He doesn't say much."

We passed through the Hall Porch, whose solid oak door looked like it had taken a few blows from a heavy sledgeham­mer. At the door of the Great Hall, I put out a hand to delay Henry. "So what exactly happened?"

Henry rubbed his jaw. "The alarm woke me. Just before three, according to the clock. I checked the main panel. It said Hall Porch, Great Hall door, Great Hall and pressure pads. I phoned the police to confirm it wasn't a false alarm, and ran downstairs. When I got to the Hall, there was nobody in sight and the Monet was gone. They must have been in and out again in less than five minutes." He sighed. "They obviously knew what they were looking for."

"Didn't the beeper on the courtyard security lights waken you?" I asked, puzzled.

Henry looked sheepish. "I turned the beeper off. We've been having a bit of a problem with foxes, and I got fed up with be­ing wakened up night after night." I said nothing. I hoped the look on my face said it for me. "I know, I know," Henry said. "I don't think Inspector Mellor's overly impressed either. Shall we?"

I followed him into the Hall. It was a surprisingly bright room for the period. It was two stories high, with a white­washed vaulted ceiling and a gallery for Blondel unplugged. The wall that gave on to the inner courtyard had a couple of feet of wood paneling above floor level, then it was hundreds of tiny leaded panes of glass to a height of about eight feet. The outer wall's paneling was about four feet high before it gave way to more windows. I didn't envy the window cleaner. At the far end was a raised dais where Henry's distant ancestors had sat and lorded it over the plebs and railed against the iniqui­ties of the window-tax. It was around the dais that the paint­ings hung. A tall, thin man was stooped like a crane over the space where the Monet used to be. As we entered, he turned to­ward us and fixed me with a glum stare.

Henry performed the introductions while Inspector Mellor and I weighed each other up. He looked more patrician than Henry, with a high forehead over a beaky nose and a small, Cu­pid's bow mouth. At his request, I ran him through the secu­rity arrangements. He nodded noncommittally as he listened, then said, "Not a lot more you could have done, short of hav­ing closed-circuit TV"

"Professional job, yeah?" I said.

"No doubt about it. They obviously chose their target, cased the place thoroughly, then did a quick in-and-out. No identifi­able forensic traces, according to my colleagues who turned up after the event." Mellor looked as depressed as I felt.

"Does it put you in mind of anyone in particular?" I asked

Mellor shrugged. "I've seen jobs like this, but we haven't managed an arrest on any of them yet."

Henry closed his eyes and sighed. "Is there any chance of getting my Monet back?" he asked wearily.

"If I'm honest, sir, not a lot. Thieves like this only take what they've already got a market for," Mellor said. "Sooner or later, we'll get a lucky break and we'll nail them. It could be on this case. What I'd like to do is send a couple of my lads over when your staff are next in. These thieves will have been round the house more than once. It's just possible one of your atten­dants noticed repeat visitors."

"They'll be in at half past nine on Thursday," Henry said. "The house is closed to the public on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, excepting Bank Holidays."

Mellor turned away and spent a few minutes studying the Boudin, the Renoir and the two Pisarros that flanked the space where the Monet had been. "Personally," he said softly, "I'd have gone for the Boudin."

Not me. The Monet would have looked much better with my color scheme. But maybe Inspector Mellor's living room was blue-based rather than green, cream and peach. While Henry escorted Mellor off the premises, I mooched around the hall, wondering what to do next. Mellor's plan to interrogate the staff had disposed of the only idea I had for pursuing any kind of investigation. I slumped in the attendant's chair by the door and stared down the hall at the wires sticking out of the an­cient paneling where the Monet had been attached to the alarm system and the wall. Inspiration failed to strike; but then, nothing does in this country anymore.

When Henry came back, I forced myself upright and said brightly, "Well, Henry, Mellor didn't sound too optimistic about what the forces of law and order can achieve. Looks like it's down to me to get your Monet back."

Henry tugged at the lobe of his ear and looked uncomfort­able. "Is there much point, Kate?" he asked. "I mean, if the specialists don't know where to start looking, how can you ex­pect to succeed?"

"Well, Henry, people have a tendency to tell me things they don't necessarily want to share with the police. And that in­cludes insurance companies. I also have more unorthodox sources of information. I'm sure I can develop leads the police will never encounter." It was all true. Well, all except the last sentence.

"I don't know, Kate. These are professional thieves. Look­ing at the state of the porch door, they're clearly quite com­fortable with a considerable degree of violence. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy about you pursuing them," he said dubi­ously.

"Henry, I might only be five foot three, but I can look after myself," I said, trying not to think about the last occasion where I'd told the men in my life the same damn lie. The scar on my head was just a distant twinge when I brushed my hair now, but the scar inside went a lot deeper. I hadn't exactly lost my battle; I'd just acquired an overdose of wariness.

"Besides," I carried on, seeing his look of frank disbelief, "you're entitled to the first thirty hours of my time for free, ac­cording to your contract."

"Ah. Yes. Of course." His reserve was nailed firmly in place again, the eyes locked on the middle distance.

"Apart from anything else, me nosing around will convince your insurance company that you're not trying it on," I added.

His eyes narrowed, like a man who's seen a bloody great wave heading straight for his bows. "Why should they think that?" he said sharply.

"It wouldn't be the first time somebody's set up their own burglary for the insurance," I said. "It happens all the time round where I live." A frown flickered across Henry's face. "There's nothing you want to tell me, Henry, is there?" I added apprehensively. "There's no earthly reason why I should arrange this," he said stiffly. "The police and the insurance company are wel­come to check the books. We're making a profit here. House admissions are up on last year, the gift shop has increased its turnover by twenty-five percent and the Great Hall is booked for banquets almost every Saturday between now and Febru­ary. The only thing I'm concerned about is that I'm due to leave for Australia in three weeks and I'd like the matter re­solved by then."

"I'd better get weaving, in that case," I said mildly.

I drove back to Manchester with a lot on my mind. I don't like secrets. It's one of the reasons I became a private eye in the first place. I especially don't like them when they're ones my client is keeping from me.