44 Scotland Street (13 page)

“It must be frustrating for you,” she said.

The older policeman smiled. “Not really,” he said. “You get used to it. But my colleague here has it all in front of him. I’m

offsky this afternoon. My wife and I have bought a bed-andbreakfast in Prestonpans. That’s us fixed up.”

The younger policeman raised an eyebrow. “Will anybody want to stay in Prestonpans?”

“It gets visitors,” said the older policeman curtly.

“Why?”

The question was not answered, and they moved back into the main gallery. The older policeman walked about, looking at the paintings, leaving the younger man by Pat’s side.

“My name’s Chris,” said the policeman, his voice lowered.

Pat nodded. “Mine’s Pat.”

“He’s very cynical,” said the policeman. “You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” whispered Pat. “I do.”

“Not everyone I meet in this job knows what cynical means,” said Chris. “It’s nice to come across somebody who does.” He paused. “Would you like to go for a drink tonight? That is, if you’re not doing anything.”

Pat was taken by surprise and it was a few moments before she answered. She was free that evening, and there was no reason why she should not meet Chris for a drink. She had only just met him, of course, but if one couldn’t trust a policeman, then whom could one trust?

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said.

He was visibly pleased with her response and he gave her the name of a wine bar off George Street. He would be there at seven o’clock, he said, adding: “Not in uniform, of course. Hah, hah!”

Pat winced. She suddenly realised that she had made a terrible mistake. She could not go out with a man who said
hah, hah
like that. She just could not.
Offsky
, she thought.

32. Akrasia: The Essential Problem

Before Matthew came into Big Lou’s coffee bar that morning, full of the news of the attempted break-in at the gallery, Big Lou had been engaged in conversation with Ronnie and Pete about the possibility of weakness of the will.

“Ak-how much?” asked Ronnie.

“Akrasia,” said Big Lou, from her accustomed position behind the counter. “It’s a Greek word. You wouldn’t know about it, of course.”

“Used in Arbroath?” asked Ronnie coolly.

Big Lou ignored this. “I’m reading about it at the moment. A book on weakness of the will by a man called Willie Charlton, a philosopher. You won’t have heard of him.”

“From Arbroath?” asked Ronnie.

Big Lou appeared not to hear his remark. “Akrasia is weakness of the will. It means that you know what is good for you, but you can’t do it. You’re too weak.”

“Sounds familiar,” said Pete, stirring sugar into his coffee.

“Aye,” said Big Lou. “You’d know. You’re a gey fine case of weakness of the will. You know that sugar’s bad for you, but you still take it. That’s weakness of the will. That’s what philosophers all incontinence of the will.”

Pete glanced at Ronnie. “That’s something else. That’s diarrhoea of the will.”

Big Lou sighed. “Diarrhoea and akrasia are different. But it’s useless trying to explain things to you.”

“Sorry,” said Ronnie solemnly. “You tell us about akrasia, Lou.”

Big Lou picked up a cloth and began to wipe the counter. “The question is this. Does weakness of the will make sense? Surely if we do something, then that means that we want to do it. And if we want to do it, then that means that must be because we think that it’s in our best interests to do it.”

Ronnie thought for a moment. “So?”

Big Lou intensified her rubbing of the counter. “So there’s no such thing as a weakness of will because we always do what we want. All the time. You see?”

“No,” said Pete.

Big Lou looked at Ronnie. “And you? Do
you
see?”

“No.”

Big Lou sighed. It was difficult dealing with people who read nothing. But she chose to persist. “Take chocolate,” she began.

“Chocolate?” said Ronnie.

“Yes. Now imagine that you really want to eat chocolate but you know that you shouldn’t. Maybe you have a weight problem. You see a bar of chocolate and you think: that’s a great wee bar of chocolate! But then something inside you says: it’s not good for you to eat chocolate. You think for a while and then you eat it.”

“You eat the chocolate?”

“Yes. Because you know that eating the chocolate will make you happier. It will satisfy your desire to eat chocolate.”

“So?”

“Well, you can’t be weak because you have done what you really wanted to do. Your will was to eat the chocolate. Your will has won. Therefore your will has been shown not to be weak.”

Ronnie took a sip from his sugared coffee. “Where do you get all this stuff from, Lou?”

“I read,” she said. “I happen to own some books. I read them. Nothing odd in that.”

“Lou’s great that way,” said Ronnie. “No, don’t laugh, Pete. You and me are ignorant. Put us in a pub quiz and we’d be laughed off the stage. Put Lou on and she’d win. I respect her for that. No, I really do.”

“Thank you,” said Lou. “Akrasia is an interesting thing. I’d never really thought about it before, but now …”

She was interrupted by the arrival of Matthew, who slammed the door behind him as he came in and turned to face his friends, flushed with excitement.

“A break-in,” he said. “Wood all over the place. The cops have been.”

They looked at him in silence.

“The gallery?” asked Pete.

Matthew moved over towards the counter. “Yes, the gallery. They were disturbed, thank God, and nothing was taken. I could have lost everything.”

“Bad luck,” said Ronnie. “That might have helped.”

There was a silence. Big Lou glared at Ronnie, who lowered his gaze. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that. I meant to say that it was bad luck that they tried to break in. That’s what I meant.” He paused. “What else could I have meant? Why the sensitivity?”

Matthew said nothing. “They could have taken the Peploe. In fact, I reckon that’s what they were after.”

Pete looked up. “The one worth forty grand?”

“Yes,” said Matthew. “They must have been after that. All the rest is rubbish.”

Ronnie looked thoughtful. “That character wanting to buy the painting the other day – he must be the one. Who else knows about it?”

Matthew frowned. “Nobody, as far as I know. Just us.”

“Then, it’s him,” said Ronnie.

“Or one of us,” said Big Lou, looking at Pete.

Nobody spoke. Big Lou turned to make Matthew his coffee. “Not a serious remark,” she said. “It just slipped out.”

“Weakness of the will?” said Ronnie.

33. Peploe?

“This is no time for levity,” said Matthew. “The fact is, somebody is after my Peploe.”

“
If
it’s a Peploe,” interrupted Ronnie. “You don’t know, do you? So far, the only person who’s said it’s a Peploe is that girl, Pat. And what does she know about it? And you know nothing, as we all know.”

“All right,” said Matthew. “We’ll call it my
Peploe?
That is, Peploe with a question mark after it. Satisfied? Right then, what do we do?”

“Remove it from the gallery,” suggested Pete. “Take it home. Put it in a cupboard. Nobody’s going to think there’s a Peploe? in your cupboard.”

Big Lou had been following the conversation closely and had stopped wiping the counter. “That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “If this person – the one who was interested in it – is really after it, then he’ll have found out who Matthew is. Are you in the phone book, Matthew?”

Matthew nodded.

“Well, there you are,” said Lou. “He’ll know where you live. And if he was prepared to break into your gallery, then he’ll be prepared to break into your flat. Take the Peploe? somewhere else.”

“The bank,” said Pete. “I knew this guy who kept a Charles Rennie Mackintosh bureau in the Bank of Scotland. It was so valuable that he couldn’t afford the insurance. It was cheaper to keep it in the bank.”

“What’s the point of that?” asked Lou, frowning. “What’s the point of having a bureau if you can’t use it?”

“They’d keep kippers in it up in Arbroath,” said Ronnie. “Smokies even.”

“What do you know about Arbroath?” asked Lou. “You tell me. What do you know about Arbroath?”

Pete answered for him. “Nothing. He’s never been there.”

Matthew was becoming impatient. “I don’t think that we should be talking about Arbroath,” he said, irritably. “You two should stop needling Lou. The real question is: what do I do with my Peploe??”

They sat in silence, the three of them at the table, and Lou standing at her counter. Ronnie glanced at Matthew; he might have arranged the break-in to claim insurance. But if he had done that, then why had none of the paintings disappeared? There were several possible answers to that, one of which was that this was just the cover – the real stealing of the painting would come later. But if the Peploe? were to prove to be a Peploe, then why would he need to have it stolen in the first place? He would get his forty thousand or whatever it was by taking the picture to an auction. Why go to all the trouble of claiming the insurance, particularly when he would have no evidence of value to back up his claim?

Lou, too, was thinking about the situation. Pete had been right to suggest that the painting should be removed from the gallery. But they would have to ensure that it was kept somewhere else. Should she offer to look after it for him? It would be safe in her flat, tucked away behind a pile of books, but did she want to have something so valuable – and so portable – sitting there? Forty thousand pounds could buy a perfectly reasonable place to live in Arbroath. No, it would be better for the Peploe? to go elsewhere.

“Pat!” she said abruptly. “Get that girl to take the painting back to her place. She’s the one who identified it. Let her look after it.”

“John won’t know who she is,” said Pete. “She won’t have told him …”

Matthew turned to Pete. “Who’s John?” he asked.

Pete looked down at his coffee. “John? I didn’t say John.”

“You did,” said Matthew. “You said something about John not knowing who Pat was. But why did you call him John? Do you know him?”

Pete shook his head. “You misheard me. I didn’t say anything about a John. I don’t know any Johns.”

“Rubbish,” said Lou. “Don’t know any Johns? Rubbish.”

“What I said was that
he
– this man who wants the Peploe? – whoever he is, and how would I know he’s called John? –
he’ll
not know who Pat is and won’t know where she lives. Which is, where?”

“No idea,” said Matthew.

Pete shrugged. “All right. Tell her to take it back to her place and keep it in a cupboard until you’ve decided what to do with it. It’ll be safe there.”

“Good idea,” said Matthew. “I’ll speak to her about it. I’ll ask her to take it home this evening.”

They finished their coffee in silence. Matthew was the first to go, leaving the other two men at their table.

“I suppose we have to get back,” said Ronnie after a while. He looked at Lou. “Perhaps I should have been a philosopher instead, Lou. Easier job, I think.”

Lou smiled. “I wouldn’t know. But I suspect that it’s not as easy as you think. They worry a lot. Life’s not simple for them.”

“Nor for us,” said Pete, rising to his feet.

“Maybe,” said Big Lou. “But then, ignorance can be comfortable, can’t it?”

34. On the Way to the Floatarium

Irene had an appointment at the Floatarium, but with a good half-hour in hand before she was due to submit to the tank’s womb-like embrace, she had time to enjoy the bright, late spring day. Strolling along Cumberland Street that morning, she noted the changes brought by relentless gentrification. A few years back there had been at least some lace curtains; now the windows with their newly-restored astragals were reassuringly bare, the better to allow, at ground level at least, expensive minimalist or neopost-Georgian furniture to be admired. Irene paused before the windows of one flat and pondered the colour scheme. No, she would not have chosen that red, which was almost cloying in its richness. Their own flat was painted white throughout, apart from Bertie’s room, which they had chosen to paint pink, to break the sexist mould. Or, rather, she had chosen to paint the walls pink. Stuart, her husband, had been less certain about this and had argued for white, but had been overruled. Irene was not sure about Stuart’s commitment to the project of Bertie’s education, and she had even wondered on occasions whether he fully understood what she was trying to do. The discussion over colour schemes had been a case in point.

“Boys don’t like pink,” he had observed. “I didn’t, when I was a boy.”

Irene had been patient. “That, of course, was some time ago, and your upbringing, as we both know, was not exactly enlightened, was it? Attitudes are different now.”

“Attitudes may be different,” said Stuart, “but are boys? Boys are much the same as they always were, I would have thought.”

Irene was not prepared to let such a patently false argument

go unrefuted. “Boys are not the same!” she said. “No! Definitely not! Boys are constructed socially. We make them what they are. A patriarchal society produces patriarchal boys. A civilised society produces civilised boys.”

Stuart looked doubtful. “But boys still want to do boyish things. If you put them in a room with dolls and toy cars, won’t they choose the cars? Isn’t that what they do?”

Irene sighed. “Only boys who have had no other options will go for cars. Some boys will go for other things.”

“Dolls?”

“Yes, dolls. If you give them the chance. Boys love playing with dolls.”

“Do they?”

“Yes. As I said, if you make the environment right.”

Stuart thought for a moment. “Well, look at Bertie. He loves trains, doesn’t he? He’s always going on about the train set at the nursery school. He loves it.”