Alexander McCall Smith - The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

He nodded. He had not slept well the previous night. There had been a barking dog somewhere down the road; a magnesium-deficient dog, probably.

“I’ll give you a magnesium supplement,” she said. “Try it for a few weeks and you’ll see the difference.”

He thanked her. “But I think we should talk about your proposition. You said that you had a new product you want to develop.” He took out a notebook. “Tell me about it.”

Dee looked at him doubtfully. “You wouldn’t … take the idea, would you? I’m sorry to sound distrustful, but obviously …”

He held up a hand. “No, don’t apologise. Not for natural caution. Of course you have to be careful. Intellectual property gets stolen every day. You come up with a good idea and the next minute it’s in production somewhere else. And it’s not your name on the packet.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. But I assure you, you’re safe with us. We’d never do something like that.”

There was a silence, another one of those periods of unspoken mutual assessment that occur when we weigh up another person and choose between trust or natural, self-protective suspicion. What do I know about him? thought Dee. The University of Sussex – a shared background there. The Shaggy Dump – a shared pub. What else? He liked peppermint tea and he likely had a magnesium deficiency. That was all the information she had.

She made her decision. “There’s a substance called Ginkgo biloba,” she said. “We sell a lot of it, particularly to people who are worried about memory loss or failing brain power.”

“Who isn’t?” he asked.

“Exactly. And I think that it helps. I really do.”

“And?”

Dee reached for a small bottle from a display on the counter. “See this?” she asked. “This is echinacea. It’s a very common, popular remedy for toning up the immune system. But here it’s being sold as a pill to protect you from germs on aircraft. You take one before you board. People love it. We all know that we’re breathing the same air as a hundred other passengers when we’re on a flight. So we take a pill. And I happen to believe it works.”

Richard was watching her closely. She noticed that he had a slight tic in his right eye. It twitched slightly, almost imperceptibly. “I see where you’re going,” he said quietly. “And I like it. So what are you wanting to sell this Gingko stuff as?”

“A Sudoku remedy,” said Dee. “Improve your Sudoku performance with a pill.”

Richard sat back in his chair. He was beaming.

“Well, I’m very sorry to say it, Rupert, but that meal was not terribly good.”

Rupert Porter looked at his wife, reproachfully at first, but then he too shook his head in disapproval. “You’re right, Gloria,” he agreed. “It was ghastly. And on your birthday, too! I’m so sorry, my dear.”

Gloria reached out across the table and took his hand. “Don’t even think about it, darling. It’s not your fault. The important thing is that you took me out to dinner.”

He was placated, but not entirely. “It really annoys me, you know. What if we were Americans, for instance, or a fortiori French? What would we think of London, paying what we just have for a meal like that?”

“If we were French,” said Gloria, “we would take the view that our prejudices are confirmed. Les rosbifs know nothing about food.”

Rupert smiled wryly. “Perhaps we should have ordered le rosbif rather than the Dublin Bay prawns.” He paused. “When do you think those Dublin Bay prawns last saw Dublin Bay?”

“A long time ago. A month or two perhaps.”

Rupert nodded his agreement. “Months in the freezer.”

They rose from their table. As they did so, a man sitting in the corner of the restaurant looked in their direction. Gloria noticed his stare, and returned it. How rude, she thought. But the man did not look away. After a moment, she averted her gaze.

“Rupert, that man,” she whispered. “Over there.”

Rupert was struggling with his coat, a rather smart camel hair that he had bought in Jermyn Street. He was proud of this coat, with its velvet collar, which gave him, he thought, a rather raffish look. Prosperous and raffish. “Mr Ten Per Cent,” Barbara Ragg had muttered when she had first seen him wearing it. He had seen her lips move but had not caught what she said.

“What?”

“I said, what a fetching coat.”

He had preened. “Rather smart, isn’t it. Camel hair, you know.”

“It makes you look … quite the man about town.”

Now, the coat having been donned, he glanced in the direction indicated by Gloria. At first he noticed nothing unusual, but then he intercepted the man’s stare. Quickly he turned away.

“Do you know him?” whispered Gloria.

Rupert made a hurried gesture. “Later,” he muttered. “We can talk later.”

Outside the restaurant Rupert looked at his watch. “The night is still young … Do you know, I’ve had a wonderful idea.”

Gloria took his arm. “All your ideas are wonderful, Rupert.”

“Have you got those keys on you?”

“Which keys?”

“The ones I gave you. The keys to La Ragg’s flat. Or rather, the keys to the flat that she occupies.” He gave Gloria a sideways look, and she understood the meaning immediately. This was a reference to his claim to Barbara’s flat – a claim that might have had no substance in law (in the strictest sense) but had a moral backing which he felt only the deliberately perverse could deny. So he spoke about the flat in the same tones as an irredentist might speak about some ancient and painful territorial claim, or as they might speak in certain quarters about the Spratly Islands or some remote corners of South America – and with equal passion, too.

Gloria glanced in her handbag. “They’re there,” she said. “But, look, that man back there. Did you know him?”

Rupert looked evasive. “Perhaps.”

“What do you mean perhaps? Either you knew him or you didn’t. And he certainly seemed to know us – he was boring a hole in my back with his stare.”

“He’s a chap called Ratty Mason,” muttered Rupert. “I knew him at school.”

Gloria stopped in her tracks, almost causing Rupert to stumble into her. “Ratty Mason? That’s Ratty Mason?”

Rupert tugged at her arm, encouraging her to walk on. “I think so. I could be wrong, though. It was dark in there.”

“Well, well,” exclaimed Gloria. “At long last I’ve caught sight of Ratty Mason. How long is it since you saw him?”

“Ages,” said Rupert. “Not since I was at Uppingham. A long time ago, as you know.”

Gloria was not going to let matters rest at that. She had tried before to get Rupert to talk about Ratty Mason, whose name had come up in some context that she did not recall. Rupert had refused, changing the subject rather quickly. She was determined to find out now, though, and she pressed him again. “Why was he called Ratty?”

“He just was,” said Rupert. “That’s what we called him in those days. Everybody had a nickname.”

“Was he ratty?”

“Not especially. Sometimes the nicknames were chosen at random. There was a boy called Octopus Watkins. I have no idea how he got that name. He didn’t have eight arms and legs, as I recall. Did you have nicknames at your school?”

Gloria could spot an attempt to change the subject. “Ratty,” she persisted, “suggests that he was, well, rat-like. Or that he turned people in to the authorities. One rats on people, doesn’t one?”

“Maybe.”

She stopped him again. “Come on, Rupert, you can’t fool me. There’s something fishy here. Why this reticence about Ratty Mason?”