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

It had not occurred to the landlord that the attraction of this otherwise mediocre flat might be the neighbours. In the rental market, neighbours were usually a drawback rather than a positive feature, the one exception to this rule being celebrity neighbours, who by their mere presence could cause surrounding rentals to shoot skywards. To live next to a flamboyant and egocentric actor or actress should surely be counted a misfortune, but so great is the public fixation with the cult of celebrity that to many, such neighbours were a positive attraction rather than a drawback. The landlord, in fact, wondered whether this might explain the young woman’s desire to secure the lease on the flat at all costs. He believed that an ill-mannered celebrity chef lived in the vicinity, as did a minor rock star. He quickly drew up the lease, with its exorbitant rental provisions, and the deal was struck.

He had no idea that it was the flat on the other side of the landing that was the draw. He had let that property six months ago to an East European company, which wanted it for its London employees. They paid the deposit immediately and appeared to be good tenants although they were reluctant to invite him over the threshold once they had moved in. “There is no need for you to come in,” he had been told by a burly Russian who answered the door when he had called to see whether all was well. “There is nothing wrong. Everything functions. We are very happy. Goodbye.”

The prosaically named firm seemed completely inoffensive; nobody would give such a business a second thought, and certainly not a second glance. It was obviously concerned with international trade, although not trade in anything interesting; it must deal in bearings, perhaps, or pork futures, or steel.

In reality, the firm was far from bland: it was entirely concerned with blackmail, which it used as a means of securing the sensitive trade secrets of major companies and government departments. These were then sold on to Russian companies who found themselves in competition with western counterparts. The resulting revenues were divided equally between a shady and virtually unknown Russian security agency – which provided the London staff – and the commercial backers, a syndicate of wealthy St Petersburg investors with no sense of commercial propriety, or indeed any of other form of honesty and fair dealing.

The techniques of blackmail used by this organisation differed in few particulars from the blackmail that had been so widely practised by certain agencies of the former Soviet Union. The most common form was sexual: a target would be identified – a middle-ranking official in an appealing company – and his appetites assessed. Thereafter there would be a sustained and carefully planned attempt to compromise him. (The victims were entirely men; women, it appeared, were considered less prone to temptation.) Once an indiscretion had been made, it was extraordinary how cooperative the victim became. Even in a permissive society, where there were few limits to what one could do, people were still sensitive to a light being shone upon their private affairs and indiscretions, and they would risk everything – including their careers – to avoid exposure.

These techniques paid off handsomely. It was in this way, for instance, that the firm obtained the formula for an improved fuel additive that could prolong the engine life of domestic cars by up to eighteen per cent. It was in this way that a radically more efficient refrigerator, which was upon the point of being granted European and American patent protection, suddenly popped up in an attractively priced Chinese version, having been licensed by a St Petersburg engineering company that had previously done no work at all on refrigerators, or indeed on any other kind of engineering. And when several British inventions in gun-sight optics were produced in Moscow before the release of the United Kingdom prototype, and the detailed plans for these devices were found on the laptop computer of the personnel officer of the firm developing them, MI6 became involved.

And now Freddie de la Hay too. His role was to spend time with the Russians suspected of being behind these dubious affairs, not so much with a view to arresting and punishing the Russians– as to find out who was being targeted and get to them first, before they started doing their blackmailers’ bidding.

In order to identify the targets, MI6 had to hear what the Russians were saying. Unfortunately, attempts to bug the flat had failed, an electronic sweep by the Russians having quickly discovered the tiny hidden microphones. After that, the occupants of the flat had started to have long and earnest conversations among themselves as they walked in Kensington Gardens. It was not easy to eavesdrop on what was said in the open, of course, but if they were to take a dog on their walks, and the dog had a transmitter in his collar, then everything could be heard loudly and clearly in a loitering surveillance van bearing the livery of the Royal Parks …

This was the mission upon which Freddie de la Hay now embarked. Wearing his new collar, in which a small transmitter had been expertly concealed, the obliging and urbane Pimlico terrier was put on a lead and taken downstairs by Tilly Curtain. Freddie’s new career had begun. He was now officially in the service of his country.

For Freddie de la Hay it was just another walk, although he felt a bit strange wearing this new, rather heavier-than-usual collar. But it was not for him to argue with the choice of collar or lead: this, he recognised, was the domain of the humans in whose shadow he led his life. He had his views – which were strong enough, and sometimes vocal – on subjects such as biscuits, squirrels or smells, but when it came to the broader parameters of his life, as laid down by humans, Freddie understood that this was simply not his sphere. Had he possessed the words to express it, he would no doubt have said that this was part of the social contract that existed between man and dog, which had been negotiated a long time ago, presumably not long after the first dog had stood outside the early human cave, which was redolent of warmth and charred meat and comfort, and whined to be admitted. That was the moment that sealed the fate of both parties, but particularly of dogs. Man did not ask to join dog, dog asked man, and was therefore the supplicant to whom no concessions needed to be made.

Freddie missed William. Having no real sense of time, he had no idea how long William had been gone from his life. In human terms, it was less than a day; in dog terms, it could have been a month, a year, half a lifetime. He just knew that William was not there and might never be there again. But he did not dwell on what might or might not be; dogs do not see the point, they are concerned only with what is happening now, and with the possibilities of the present moment.

What was happening at that moment was that Freddie was in the park, constrained by a leash, at the other end of which was his temporary custodian, Tilly Curtain. There were intriguing smells at every turn, and Freddie applied his nose to the ground in quivering anticipation. Kensington Gardens was a mass of potential lines of enquiry; smells going in every direction; smells that ran straight along paths, smells that wound this way and that: smells that crossed flower beds and grass and path and then suddenly and inexplicably stopped at the base of a tree. It was enough to keep him busy for hours, for days perhaps, if this new person would only allow him the chance to investigate. But she was pulling on his collar, hauling him off in the direction of a thickset man who was standing on one of the paths, smoking a cigarette and looking pensive.