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

“Don’t underestimate the peculiarity of the British,” said one of the men. “It’s perfectly possible that their security people put their names on their transmitters. It’s probably part of their perverse sense of play.”

The other man agreed. “Yes. It’s the same as using flies when you know that the real way to catch the fish is with a worm. Stupid people.”

Podgornin looked at the ceiling. “Unless they want us to think they’ve been bugging us. That may be why they put Property of MI6 on the transmitter. They might have thought that we would discover it and then think that they—”

“Why?” snapped the woman. “Why would they want us to think that they have been bugging us, when they have?”

One of the men had an idea. “Perhaps they want us to think that they think that we think that they think that we think they’re bugging us. That way we’ll think that—”

“Quiet!” said the woman. “I think that you think—”

“I don’t think anything,” shouted Podgornin, interrupting her. “Except this: this is the thing I think …”

He stopped, and they all stared at him, including Freddie de la Hay, who was relieved that attention seemed to have shifted from him.

“What do you think, Anatoly Mikhailovich?” asked one of the men.

Podgornin glared at the woman. “I think this,” he began. “I think that we have been listened to. So I think, therefore, that we are compromised. Our entire effort – all the work we’ve done – has been compromised.”

“And it’s your fault,” said the woman, glaring at him angrily.

“I do not think fault comes into it,” said Podgornin. “Every one of us in this room – and I mean everyone – has at some point or other compromised security. Yes, I mean it. You, too. Which of us can hold our hand up and say that he – or she – has not at some point in his career – or her career,” this accompanied by a glance in the woman’s direction, “committed some little act of carelessness that has compromised security? I cannot say that. Nor, I think, can any of you.”

There was complete silence. One of the men looked briefly at the other, who averted his gaze. Each heart – such as it was – was laid bare by Podgornin’s frank words.

“Very well,” said the woman. “So what do we do now?”

“We disperse,” said Podgornin. “We leave the country, as provided for in our dispersal plan. And we start now.”

One of the men got up from his chair and looked at his watch. “There’s a flight to Moscow …”

Podgornin held up a hand. “We go through France,” he said. “It’s all in the plan.”

The woman suddenly pointed at Freddie de la Hay. “And him? What do we do about the dog.”

“Shoot him,” said one of the men. “They won’t like that.”

“Yes,” said the woman.

Podgornin looked at Freddie, who looked back up at him with dark, liquid eyes. “He’s innocent,” he said.

“Of course he’s innocent,” said the woman impatiently. “But that’s not the point, is it? The point is to get the message back to them that if they use animals in this way, this will be the consequence. They won’t like it. Dmitri is right – we need to show them.”

Podgornin looked again at Freddie de la Hay. “I will deal with him,” he said. “Leave it to me. I brought him here, and I shall deal with him.”

How?” asked the woman. “You tell us, Anatoly. How?” Her manner was entirely rude and aggressive, and, unlike the others, she did not address Podgornin by his patronymic.

“I shall give him something,” he said. “I shall take him to a place where they will definitely find him and I shall administer something lethal. You leave it to me.”

The woman looked doubtful. “The whole operation ruined by a dog,” she said.

“As in Shakespeare,” said one of the men.

“It was a horse,” said Podgornin. “The king needed a horse, not a dog.”

“This is no time to discuss literature,” said the woman. “It’s time to act.”

“We are all actors,” mused Podgornin.

“What do you mean by that?”

He said nothing. He lifted up the now transmitter-less collar and approached Freddie de la Hay. Freddie watched him warily.

“Come along, my boy,” Podgornin said quietly. “Come here. Come to your uncle Anatoly.”

For Caroline, it was a time of reappraisal. Her frank discussion with James, during which he had dashed such hopes as she had been harbouring for a romantic relationship, had been painful. She liked James, whose company she found both amusing and undemanding. They could talk together about anything and everything; he was considerate; he was understanding; they laughed at the same things. Now he had closed the door on anything more than a friendship between them, and she felt a curious emptiness that bordered on numbness.

It was not that James had gone away or refused to see her any more, as can happen when a romance comes to an end; it was not like that. He was still there, and he still wanted them to be friends. But after his declaration that their relationship had no chance of becoming a physical one, she felt that they were both on a path that led nowhere: a cul-de-sac.

She wanted to talk to somebody about this, but who? Many people have a friend at work whom they can confide in, but Caroline worked for Tim Something, the photographer, who employed nobody else. She wondered whether she could talk to Tim, but decided against it. One could not talk to a man about this, or not to most men; one could certainly talk to James about such questions, but then one could obviously not discuss this particular case with him. No, it would have to be a girlfriend, and there, Caroline had to admit, she had a problem.

Caroline was not one of those women who had difficulty in forming friendships with others of her sex. She had been reasonably gregarious at school and university, but since she came to London she found that she had not kept up with the friends she had made in those days. Her school friends had certainly drifted off – or she had drifted off from them – and although she occasionally saw members of her circle from university days, a number of them had become either engaged or even married, and this had resulted in another form of drifting apart. The world, she decided, was designed for couples; a discovery that the recently divorced or widowed also often reported. Couples might protest that this was not true, but it was something that Caroline was beginning to feel herself. And now she was in need of friends to discuss the very social isolation that came from not having friends.

Of course there were her flatmates in Corduroy Mansions, and in normal circumstances who better to turn to than a group of female flatmates? But circumstances were not normal, because again Caroline felt that she had drifted away from the other three. She had never been particularly close to Dee, and recently, of course, Dee had lied to her about having dinner with James. This meant that she could definitely not discuss James with her. And even if she did, Dee was so obsessive that any discussion would probably end up being diverted into a conversation with a nutritional bent.

No, Dee would not do, which left Jo, her Australian flatmate, whom she had barely seen for weeks, and Jenny, who had spent the last two months in Mexico with a software engineer from Sheffield. The software engineer was working on a contract in Cancun and Jenny had gone with him. They had received a few quite lengthy emails from her, saying that the two of them liked Mexico a great deal and were thinking of staying. George, the software engineer, had taken up scuba diving and Jenny was thinking of doing so too. They were both learning Spanish, and George was almost fluent, having previously done an A Level in the language at school. They had made numerous friends and George’s hair had been bleached by the sun. “I have a whole new life,” Jenny had written. “When I think of what I put up with when I worked for Oedipus Snark, it makes me sick. I wasted all that time when I could have been here, learning to scuba dive and having my nails painted.”