'They can have a day's cattle rustling included if they're willing to pay for it,' he answered. 'You'd do well to give some attention to indoor events and entertainments. A wet day will spoil any outdoor excursion, no matter how fine the views when the weather's clear. Have you considered movies with a Scottish theme? Give the Yanks a bunch of heather, plenty of photo opportunities and a tin of shortbread and they'll probably be happy enough, as long as we can keep them entertained.'
His sense of humour was fine, but at times he tended to be hectoring and argumentative. Vincent's two consultants went up to Scotland several times to see the Dunblane hotel and discuss local arrangements with him, and they said he was domineering towards his staff. My commitments in London made the trip impossible for me, but they brought back photographs which gave a fair impression of the place, inside and out, and of some of the nearby attractions, a golf course, a local salmon stream and a distillery.
As long as the hotel and Andrew's businesses were trouble free, working a day a week for Vincent was manageable. However, tiredness after a couple of months of this workload was inevitable, and a few weeks after the turn of the year an incident at the garden centre put me under real pressure.
The manager rang me late one afternoon to tell me that a member of his staff had run off with the day's takings. Leaving the hotel unattended I hurried over to find him talking to two heavily built men near the cash desk. They looked unlikely customers for winter flowering plants. They stopped talking as I approached and stood glaring at the manager across the counter. Since I'd gone over straight away his casual dismissive greeting, 'I'll join you upstairs in a second,' annoyed me.
I went up to the little staff room to wait. When he came up I asked, 'Who on earth were they?'
'They came in by mistake. Seem to have been given the wrong address. Anyway, about the theft, sorry to drag you over here. He's got away with the best part of the day's takings. Fortunately I'm always taking money out of the cash drawer and putting it away in the safe, but he timed his move well.'
There was a self-contradiction in these statements. If he frequently removed money from the cash drawer the best part of a day's takings would not have been there to be stolen, but this was not a good time to query the inconsistency. 'Who did you say took the money?'