How the hunt for £5m Titian ended with an old man, a bag and a bus stop

It took a Vietnam veteran turned private art detective seven years to find it, but after a succession of false leads, the trail of a stolen £5m Renaissance masterpiece finally led to an anonymous bus-stop in the London suburbs.

Titian's Rest on the Flight to Egypt, which vanished in a raid on the Marquess of Bath's Longleat home in 1995, was discovered last week in a red, white and blue plastic shopping bag at a bus stop in Richmond, south-west London.

Charles Hill, 56, a former head of Scotland Yard's art and antiques unit, was led to the spot near his offices after being approached by a man he described as a cross between Arthur Daley and Lovejoy.

The man had offered to take Mr Hill to the 16th-century masterpiece in return for an offered £100,000 reward. Mr Hill drove the contact around Richmond and was told to pull up where an old man was standing next to the shopping bag.

"There it is," said the Arthur Daley figure. Inside the bag, Mr Hill found the 2ft-wide artwork wrapped in cardboard, without a frame, but undamaged.

Yesterday the painting showing the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus as an infant was displayed in public for the first time since it disappeared from the wall of Longleat's state drawing room where it took pride of place.

It was the most historically important painting at Longleat as well as the most popular with visitors. Lord Bath called it a tragedy when thieves stole it from his Wiltshire estate. They had disabled floodlights out- side his home, propped a ladder against the wall, smashed a window to get in and escaped while alarm bells rang around them.

Lord Bath was desperate to stop the thieves destroying a painting bought by his great-grandfather, the 4th marquess, and he made repeated appeals for its return. Its provenance made it impossible to sell and the marquess was at first optimistic he would get it back, but after a year he appeared to give up hope and accepted £1m from his insurers.

But Mr Hill, now security adviser to the Historic Houses Association, and Longleat staff continued to follow dozens of leads, some coming from behind bars, as well as consulting a medium. One early lead involved a prisoner who was recaptured after escaping from Erlestoke jail at Devizes, Wiltshire, the Christmas before the Longleat raid. He was questioned about that raid as well as more than 100 break-ins at country houses.

But the trail appeared to have gone cold until June when Mr Hill turned for help to a convicted art criminal, David Duddin. Mr Duddin, 56, was jailed for handling Rembrandt's Mother, a £5m painting stolen from the Earl of Pembroke in November 1994, a theft initially linked to the Longleat burglary. After serving half of a nine-year sentence he was paroled and agreed to help, claiming he had become "quite close" to the thieves and promising to contact them via an advert in Exchange & Mart. "These people are more likely to read that than they are The Spectator," he said.

Mr Duddin was widely assumed to be Mr Hill's informant, but yesterday Longleat's general manager Tim Moore, described claims that the £100,000 reward had gone to him as "total rubbish". He said: "Mr Hill did speak to David Duddin, but he was not the crucial informant."

Mr Hill, born in Britain, moved to Washington as a child and joined the US Army as a teenager, fighting in Vietnam. He said the breakthrough came after he discussed the case on radio four months ago. "A man contacted me and I went to talk to him. He said, 'Are you interested in getting the Titian back? I think I can help'. To our surprise he said he would be able to do it if he got the reward."

Alexander Hope, a Christie's art expert, said he was delighted that what he called a "major milestone in Western art" had been returned intact. "Lord Bath may want to get a restorer to look at it for cosmetic affect, but it is completely unharmed," he said. "Its condition is pretty much as it was when it was taken off the wall at Longleat."

There are now just two loose ends. Lord Bath will have to pay back the £1m insurance money, and he remains short of two paintings, a 16th century portrait of Eleanor of Austria, attributed to the circle of Joos Van Cleeve, and A Personification of Justice, by Bonifazio De Pitai, also taken in the burglary.

One other mystery remains. The identity of the Arthur Daley character believed to have collected the £100,000 reward was not revealed.