The Dog Who Came in From the Cold

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Berthea nodded. The delusions of which the human mind is capable are manifold and varied, she thought. We are imperfect creatures in every respect, and it was her job to lend wholeness to those who were shattered and unhappy. Not every mission ended quite as well as this one, but that did not mean that one should not try. Every day we should try, she said to herself; we should try to make life better for those around us, and for ourselves. We should try to be kinder. We should try to control our impatience with people like Terence – and others.

  “Dear Terence,” she said fondly. “Now you have your car back.”

  “Thanks to you,” said Terence. “Dearest Berthy.”

  Chapter 75: Dee and Martin do the Business

  If it is the case, and it undoubtedly is, that all business start-ups are fraught with fret and worry, then the bottling and marketing of Dee’s Sudoku Remedy was very atypical.

  The task of designing the packaging for the remedy had been referred to a client whom Dee knew to be a graphic designer. He had produced a label within a matter of days and had also been able to find a sympathetic and cheap printer. After that had been done, all that was required was to purchase a large quantity of Gingko biloba in pill form and have these pills put in bottles to which the label had been affixed. Again Dee had a contact who was able to arrange for this to be done on very favourable terms, and quickly too.

  “Simple, isn’t it?” Dee remarked to Martin. “Now we do a bit of advertising.” She paused. “Your five thousand pounds, Martin …”

  Martin had been impressed by the speed with which the project had progressed. “No problem,” he said. “It’s ready.” He looked away. It was his entire capital, and he was not sure how, if the money were to be lost, he would explain this to his godfather, who had given it to him. His godfather, who had a minicab firm in Essex, was short-tempered and, in Martin’s view, rather too close to certain criminal elements in Romford. He imagined that his godfather might, as he occasionally put it, “wish to have a fireside chat” with him if Dee’s scheme did not work out.

  But now there was no going back. An advertisement was booked in a puzzle magazine and in a daily newspaper. Want to improve your Sudoku performance? it asked. The Sudoku Remedy, an entirely herbal product, increases the supply of blood to the brain, thereby enhancing your skill at solving even the most complex sudokus. Also contains anti-oxidants.

  “I hope it works,” said Martin.

  “Hope what works?” asked Dee. “The product or the advertisement?”

  “Both,” said Martin. “But especially the product.”

  “Of course that’ll work,” said Dee. “We all know that

  Gingko biloba increases the supply of blood to the brain and improves mental performance. If it does that, then you’ll be able to do a sudoku better. Stands to reason.”

  Martin still looked concerned, and Dee tried to cheer him up. “Come on, Martin,” she said. “You have to have confidence in business. If you just sit on the sidelines and worry then nothing ever gets done. This is our big chance.”

  “Maybe,” said Martin. “It’s just that …”

  “Just that nothing,” said Dee. “This is going to work, Martin. You’ll see.”

  The product was launched on a Monday. The advertisement in the newspaper had listed the telephone number of the shop for orders and had also given a website address. By nine-thirty in the morning, when Dee and Martin turned on their computer in the shop, there were already over four thousand email orders.

  “Maybe it’s a mistake,” said Martin, looking over Dee’s shoulder as she scrolled down the list of emails. “Maybe it’s a virus.”

  “No,” said Dee, her voice cracking with excitement. “This is for real, Martin. And look, more are coming in.”

  Then the telephone began to ring, and more orders were taken. For the entire day Martin remained glued to the telephone, writing down the address of each customer and noting down how many bottles were wanted. Many took two; several took more than that, intending to send the remedy out to sudoku-addicted friends abroad.

  At the end of the day, in a state of utter exhaustion, the two of them switched off the computer and disconnected the telephone.

  “That’s that,” said Dee. “Now we have some breathing space we must get more staff.”

  Over the following week, Dee and Martin took on four people full-time. A further advertisement was booked in the newspaper, and this time the response was even larger. Then, at the end of the week, Richard Eadeston, the venture capitalist who had invested in the project, came to see them.

  “Fantastic trading,” he said. “Stellar performance. Well done!”

  Dee was almost too tired to talk. “Not bad,” she said.

  “Not bad?” mocked Richard Eadeston. “Seriously good. Grade One fab.”

  “Thank you,” said Dee.

  “And here’s the really good news,” said Richard Eadeston. “We’ve been approached by somebody who wants to put an offer to you. I don’t think that you’ll be able to turn it down, frankly.”

  “Try me,” said Dee.

  “If you are prepared to sell the business,” said Richard. “I’m authorised to offer you four and a half million pounds for it. That includes the intellectual rights to the product. “

  Dee closed her eyes. Four and a half million pounds. Three quarters for Richard Eadeston and his company, and a quarter split between her and Martin. Martin had not invested as much as she had, and therefore would not get as much return; but it would still be a lot.

  She opened her eyes and looked at Martin. “What shall we do?”

  Martin shrugged. “Maybe we should sell,” he said. ‘But then again, maybe we shouldn’t.”

  “Should I flip a coin?” asked Dee.

  “Why not?” replied Martin. “I’ll go along with that.”

  Dee took a pound coin out of her pocket. “Heads we sell,” she said. “Tails we keep the company.”

  The coin spun up in the air and was caught by Martin, who slapped it down on the top of his wrist, shielding it from view with his left hand. Then he exposed the coin.

  “Sell,” he said.

  Dee nodded. “We’ll sell the product,” she said. ‘Lock, stock and barrel.”

  “Very wise,” said Richard. “Well done.”

  Martin did not think that he deserved congratulation. He had produced nothing in any physical sense and yet here he was being offered a great deal of money. So this, he thought, is capitalism. It was a strange feeling.

  “That’s a lot you’ll be getting,” she whispered.

  Martin looked at her, his eyes fixed on hers. “A hundred thousand?”

  “Yes, at least. Like it?”

  Martin did not know what to say. He felt disconnected, and empty. He was not sure he wanted that much. It seemed such an impossibly large sum of money.

  “Be grateful,” said Dee. “Your life is about to change.”

  Martin thought she was right. His life was about to become different, although just how different he did not yet know, and would not know for another few months.

  Dee, by contrast, knew exactly how her life would change. She would buy a flat now and get out of Corduroy Mansions, would go to live in her own place. It was all very well living with a whole lot of others when one was young and impecunious; now things were different. My own place, she thought, with deep pleasure. All I want is a flat somewhere … Wouldn’t that be loverly … loverlee!

  Chapter 76: With One Leap ...

  Tilly Curtain told William to stay exactly where he was, in the coffee bar on Brook Street.

  “Has Ducky gone?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Sometimes he pretends to go, but still hangs around.”

  William looked around the coffee bar, then rose to peer out of the window. There were a few people on the street outside, but none of them, as far as he could see, was Sebastian Duck.

  “The coast seems quite clear,” he sa
id.

  Tilly Curtain arrived fifteen minutes later. Without taking off her coat, she sat down opposite him at the table. “All right,” she said. “Listen carefully. We know Freddie de la Hay is alive. Our ops people are monitoring the signal from the transmitter under his skin. He’s fine.”

  William reached out impulsively and took her hand. “I’m so relieved,” he said.

  “Yes. So am I. I’m … well, I’m fed up with all the lies, all the compromises. I’ve had it.”

  William watched her. He was not sure whether to raise the issue of her working for the Belgians. Perhaps he could hint that he knew and see if she took it up. “Everybody tells lies,” he says. “States operate on the basis of lies. They claim to be above it all, but there are tawdry lies underpinning everything, aren’t there? Even the Belgians …”

  She stared at him. “Did he say that? Did he say that I was a Belgian double agent?”

  William lowered his eyes. “He did.”

  Tilly sighed. “He’s made the accusation before. He’s told people I’m a Belgian mole. There’s just no truth in it, William. And you know why he says it? It’s because he himself is a Belgian agent! I’m sure of it.”

  William made a gesture of helplessness. “A world of mirrors reflecting mirrors,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Tilly. “But enough of that. Let’s go and get Freddie de la Hay.”

  They left the coffee bar and travelled by taxi to a street on the edge of St John’s Wood. “He’s in a mews house down there,” said Tilly. “I’ve already done a quick recce. It has a garden gate at the back. We can enter unobserved that way.”

  William followed her. There had been light rain, but it had stopped and London seemed bathed in a curious misty white light. He had got into the taxi without thinking; now he asked himself whether it was all about to end for him too. Had Duck been right? Was this woman he hardly knew working for the Belgians? In a shifting, confusing world, anything could be true; anything could be false.

  They made their way into a garden. There was a pergola; a bench; a child’s ball that had dropped in from a neighbouring garden and remained unretrieved. Fear makes us leave things where they are, thought William; makes us leave them the way they are.

  Tilly was ahead of him, crouching behind a bushy wisteria. She made a sign for him to join her. “Look,” she whispered. “Look up there.”

  William studied the back of the mews house, his gaze travelling up. There was a small dormer window in the roof, an afterthought child’s bedroom, perhaps. He squinted. There was a movement behind the glass, but it could just have been the sun, which had come from out of the clouds, breaking through that misty light and glinting off the glass. The sun upon glass can be like sun on the water – a movement, a liquid dash of gold, of silver.

  “Freddie de la Hay,” whispered Tilly.

  William looked again. His heart was thumping hard within him, as hard as a hammer. He felt as he had felt when he was about to be beaten as a boy. They had beaten him. Beaten him. That awful, horrid history master.

  Freddie de la Hay. It was Freddie de la Hay, his nose pressed up against the glass. And even though no sound could reach him, William knew that Freddie had seen him.

  “We must get him out,” William said. “Is that door locked?”

  “Locked and alarmed,” said Tilly. “But are you prepared to climb up on the roof? Its pretty low, if I give you a hike up you could break the window and get him out. Could you do that?”

  William did not hesitate. “Of course.”

  They crept forward. When they came to the back wall of the house, Tilly Curtain bent down and invited William to step on her back. “I can take it,” she muttered. “Go ahead.”

  He climbed carefully on top of her. It was a long time since I’ve climbed on somebody’s back, he thought. Here I am, very late forties, a MW (failed), and I’m climbing on a woman’s back. But he put such thoughts out of his mind as he clambered up on to the roof. There above him was the window, and there was guttering to give him purchase. He climbed further up, and in less than a minute he was just below the window at which he had seen Freddie de la Hay.

  He peered in, and Freddie de la Hay looked back at him. Neither moved for a few moments. Then William called out, “Sit, Freddie! Sit!” He did not want Freddie to be right in front of the glass when he broke it.

  Freddie de la Hay sat, and that gave William his chance. Taking from his pocket the stone he had picked up in the garden, he brought it down sharply on the glass pane. From within, Freddie gave a yelp of surprise. William wondered whether he had been hit by shattering glass, but it was too late to stop. He quickly cleared the window frame of the last few vicious shards. Then he called to Freddie. “Come here, Freddie! Quick, Freddie! Good boy, Freddie de la Hay!”

  The dog responded immediately. Leaping up, he hurled himself out of the window, straight into the arms of his owner.

  “Oh, Freddie,” William shouted with joy. He did not care who heard him. He did not care what happened now. Freddie de la Hay was free. Freddie de la Hay was coming home.

  In the taxi, which they hailed at the end of the street, William examined Freddie for injury. The dog seemed in good shape, he thought, apart from a small cut that he had received from a piece of glass still in the window frame. There were a few drops of blood – bright, canine blood – and William thought as he dabbed his handkerchief on the tiny wound, Freddie de la Hay has shed this blood for his country. It is blood no different from that which other animal heroes have shed. He remembered the monument to animals in war, that strange, unexpected monument on the edge of Hyde Park, where people left small, movingly inscribed wreaths; where the words said that they had no choice …

  “We’d normally take him to a safe kennel in these circumstances,” said Tilly. “But I think that, given everything that’s happened, he should go right home with you.”

  “I think so too,” said William. He looked at her. “And thank you, Tilly. Thank you.”

  She seemed embarrassed by his words of appreciation, and glanced away. He wondered for a moment whether he should invite her for dinner that night, but then he decided, No. She came from a different world; she still inhabited a world of deceit and deception. There was no place for him, he thought, in that shadowy landscape.

  They would go home together, he and Freddie de la Hay – back to Corduroy Mansions.

  Chapter 77: A Kind and Generous Soul

  In Hatchards on Piccadilly, Rupert Porter stood, Patum Peperium on his shoes, wondering what to do. He had told Roger Katz that he was looking for a tall man, of somewhat hirsute appearance, and Roger had confirmed that such a person had recently gone upstairs. So now, at long last, he was within grasping distance of the yeti, if that was what he was pursuing. In reality, of course, there was no yeti – he was sure of that. What he was therefore pursuing was a person who looked like a yeti, a person of sufficient cunning not only to have given him the slip in Fortnum & Mason but also to have persuaded the time-served travel writer Errol Greatorex that he was a genuine abominable – or perhaps a genuinely abominable – snowman.

  For the first time in this pursuit, Rupert Porter felt fear. He had not been frightened in Fortnum & Mason, and he had not been the least bit concerned while tearing down Piccadilly. But now, in the narrower confines of Hatchards, he felt a frisson of anxiety that was not far, he realised, from fear. He wondered why he should be afraid. The yeti was presumably unarmed, and it was highly unlikely that he would set upon anybody in broad daylight, in the middle of London. Yetis had no record of harming anybody; in fact, the yeti was meant to be a shy and elusive character, given to loping off into the snowy wastes should anybody get too close. There was no reason to believe, then, that this yeti – if he was a yeti, which of course he was not – would behave any differently.

  And yet Rupert could not get out of his mind that terrifying scene in Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now where the art historian pursues a tiny red-coated figure thro
ugh the streets of Venice, and, in a petrifying denouement, is suddenly confronted by a malign knife-bearing dwarf. What a harrowing story that was, and how tragic the outcome. What if he were to confront the yeti and, to the strains of Mahler or whatever it was, have his throat slit from side to side with a sweep of a blade? He would slip to the floor and see the blood ebb out, the flow matching the last beats of the heart, a pumping that would diminish and stop as the last chords of Mahler played out. Or was that Visconti? It was, he remembered, and the outcome there had not been very good either.

  Roger Katz was suddenly called away and could no longer attend him. “You should find your friend upstairs,” he said. “I’ll see later on.”