A Conspiracy of Friends (30 page)

The thought of pepper reminded him that he needed to buy some more. Basil refused to accept the black pepper sold in supermarkets. “Dust,” he said. “Like the tea they put in teabags. Dust.” How different were the fresh peppercorns he sent off for from a mail-order spice business in Sussex. This company imported pepper directly from Kerala and bagged it up for their clients in small linen sacks. These peppercorns, when put in the grinder and broken into fragments, released an aroma that tickled the nose and delighted the palate. It was a proper spice—a delicious, layered taste that bore little relation to the bland sneezing-powder sold as pepper to an unsuspecting public.

Basil’s attention returned to the photograph of the dog. Yes, it was very familiar … He smiled as he placed it. It was that dog upstairs—Freddie de la Hay—William French’s dog. Basil had always rather liked him, and on the relatively infrequent occasions on which he had met him, he had bent down and let Freddie lick the back of his hand appreciatively.

Of course, this would just be a dog who looked rather like Freddie—it was unlikely to be the same dog. Basil found that he never actually knew the people whose picture appeared in papers or magazines, and the same would apply
a fortiori
, perhaps, to pictures of dogs. Presumably people who featured in advertisements were recognised by their friends, who might say things like “Oh, there she is eating chocolate
again
,” or “Oh, there’s a picture of Bill shaving.” The male models were the funniest; they all sucked in their cheeks so assiduously. Perhaps the marketing experts had worked out that we were impressed by men who sucked in their cheeks when they faced the camera; that we trusted them and would therefore want whatever product they were advertising.

Basil’s eye ran across the advertisement. There was a tiny credit
printed along the side, and he strained to read it.
Photo: East Anglia Graphic Arts
;
model: FDLH
. He reread it, just to make sure.
FDLH
: Freddie de la Hay. It had to be him; most dogs did not have initials, or just had one, such as R. It was highly unlikely—indeed impossible—that there could be another dog with those initials. No, this was his friend, Freddie.

Basil wondered whether William had seen the advertisement. He had presumably lent his dog to the photographer for this purpose but he might not have seen the published photograph. If this were so, then he should perhaps take the magazine home and show it to him. It would be a neighbourly thing to do, decided Basil.

He opened his briefcase and was about to slip the magazine inside when a thought occurred to him. Was this magazine his now, or did it still belong to somebody else? Basil was scrupulously honest; so honest, indeed, that the tax authorities had asked him not to submit quite so many receipts when preparing his own tax returns. “We like to see the paper record, Mr. Wickramsinghe,” a tax inspector had said, “but a receipt for seven pence is probably taking things a bit far. And as for declaring a five-pound note that you found in the street and picked up—well, we’re not quite sure that that counts as income. Anyway, it’s not yours, you know.”

It was an interesting point that had sent Basil off to telephone a lawyer friend and ask him for a ruling.

“He’s right,” said the lawyer. “Lost property still belongs to the person who lost it. That fiver belongs to the poor chap out of whose pocket it dropped.”

“But what do I do if I don’t know who he is?”

“You hand it in to the police or a lost property department. They try to trace the owner—theoretically. I can’t imagine them making much effort with a five-pound note. But something big would be different.”

“And if the owner doesn’t come forward?” asked Basil.

“Then you get it as the finder,” said the lawyer. “Or I think that’s the rule.”

“Who owns rubbish?” asked Basil. “The things in the bin in the park? Who owns them?”

“I don’t think one would want to stick one’s hand in there. That’s abandoned property, I think—or it’s been made over to the council. The general rule is that if property is abandoned, it belongs to the person who finds it.”

Basil looked at the magazine. If it had been abandoned, then he could become the owner and it would be perfectly permissible to put it in his briefcase. He glanced around him. The two young women at the nearby table were certainly not the owners of
The World of Dogs
; had it been a copy of
Harper’s Bazaar
, then they might have been—but not this. What about the shop itself? No, he had never known them to leave magazines about the place.

With the magazine tucked away in his briefcase, Basil left the chocolatier’s shop and walked the short distance back to Corduroy Mansions. That evening, after he had eaten his solitary dinner in front of the television, he retrieved the magazine from his briefcase and went upstairs to knock at William’s door.

W
ILLIAM CONSIDERED
B
ASIL
Wickramsinghe to be the ideal neighbour: quiet, courteous and helpful. In fact, the only respect in which the domestic arrangements in Corduroy Mansions could be improved upon, he thought, would be if Basil Wickramsinghe were to move from the ground-floor flat to the flat immediately below his own, and if Caroline and the girls—there was a boy now too, he noticed—were
to move into the ground-floor flat in place of Basil. This view was not formed by any antipathy to Caroline or her flatmates; it was just that there were occasions, and not many at that, when he heard a bit of noise coming from the flat below. Basil, by contrast, was as quiet as a church mouse.

“Mr. Wickramsinghe!” William exclaimed when he answered the door that evening. “Do come in, please. This is a rare honour!”

“I do not like to disturb you,” said Basil. “I hope that this isn’t inconvenient.”

“Of course it’s not inconvenient. Come in, come in. May I offer you something? A glass of something?”

“Last time I was here you gave me an extremely delicious glass of wine,” said Basil. “It had a nutty flavour, as I recall.”

“That will have been Madeira,” said William. “Very suitable to be taken by the glass. That particular Madeira, I think, was recommended by my friend, Will Lyons. I don’t know whether you’ve read his column at all, but he knows what he’s talking about in my view. That was quite an old Blandy’s. None left, I’m afraid, but I can offer—”

“Please don’t open anything special for me,” said Basil.

It was typical of his neighbour’s self-effacing modesty, thought William; others would have no compunction in sampling the best thing on offer when visiting the flat of a wine-dealer.

“But I do have another Madeira, as it happens,” said William. “I’ll find it and we can sample it.”

William went to fetch the Madeira, returning with two generous glasses of an iodine-coloured liquid. Handing one to Basil, he raised his glass in a toast, which Basil reciprocated.

They sat together in the drawing room. To begin with, the conversation was mostly small talk. William asked what had been happening in the James VI and I Society, and Basil replied that there was very little going on. “We’re mostly reactive,” he said. “We exist
to protect the reputation of James. If anybody launches an attack, then we’re ready to defend his memory. But at the moment, nobody seems to have it in for him.”

“I know so little about him,” mused William. “It’s odd, isn’t it, how you find so few people these days who mention James I. You get a bit of discussion down at the pub about Charles I, and Charles II too. But James—nothing really.”

“Which pub?” asked Basil with interest. “Which pub do they discuss Charles I in?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean any particular pub,” said William. “I meant pubs in general.”

Basil looked disappointed. “I would love to find a pub where these matters are debated,” he said. “It’s usually football. And I’m afraid I have no interest in that at all.”

“I don’t blame you,” said William. “All these prima donnas prancing about the football field. I thought it was meant to be a team game.”

“It’s the same with everything,” said Basil. “The cult of celebrity has infected everything.” He paused. “And their wives. People keep going on about footballers’ wives. Why not other wives? Mathematicians’ wives, for example. How about taking an interest in them?”

William laughed. “The wives of mathematicians will surely be very different,” he said. “But I suspect that they won’t make such entertaining television.”

Basil nodded. “Indeed,” he said.

Then Basil glanced round the room. “Where’s Freddie?” he asked.

William looked down into his glass; the feeling of loss was every bit as raw as it had been when he drove down to London on that melancholy evening. “Frankly,” he confessed, “I don’t know. He may be dead—in fact, I think he is.”

Basil was aghast. “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t—”

William brushed the apology aside. “Nothing to apologise for,” he said. “You weren’t to know.”

Basil asked what had happened and received a full account of Freddie’s disappearance at the farm and the fruitless search that followed. “I phoned the RSPCA,” William went on. “I put the word out, but no dogs answering his description have been handed in. So I fear that we’ve lost Freddie altogether—probably down a rabbit hole or something like that.”

Basil reached into his briefcase, which he had brought upstairs with him. “Do you know this magazine?” he asked, extracting
The World of Dogs
.

William glanced at the magazine and shook his head sadly. “I can’t say I’ve ever seen it.” He paused. “Oh look, I’m not thinking of getting a replacement just yet. Freddie de la Hay is—or should I say
was
—the most wonderful dog. He will be a hard act for any dog to follow, I’m afraid.”

“No, that’s not why I’ve brought this along,” said Basil.

“You’re getting a dog yourself?”

“No. But look …” He paged through the magazine. “Here. Look at this.”

“My goodness, that’s a dead ringer for my Freddie. Look at it. He had a patch of colour right there, where this dog has. Perhaps they’re related—I can imagine that Pimlico terriers are all related in one way or another.”

“I think it’s your dog,” said Basil quietly. “In fact, I’m
sure
it’s your dog.”

“I don’t see how you can say that,” said William. “Just because he looks …”

He did not finish. Basil pointed to the side of the picture where the credits were set out, and William saw the initials:
FDLH
. “I just don’t believe it,” he said. “I just don’t.”

“But it must be him,” said Basil. “Those are his initials, and I
doubt that there is another dog in these islands who has the same combination of letters in his name. I think it’s an open-and-shut case.”

William looked at Basil, and smiled. “Thank God for you,” he said.

“Would you like me to track him down?” said Basil. “I have a few days off, and I would love to play the amateur detective. Please let me recover him for you. I’ll track down the photographer and get the name of the modelling agency or whatever. It’ll be plain sailing after that.”

William did not have to ponder this offer for long.

“I accept,” he said. And he thought: You nice, nice man. You kind, helpful man. You generous, decent man.

T
HE NEXT DAY
was perhaps one of the most eventful days of Terence Moongrove’s life. That is not to say that his life over the last few years had been without incident. There had been his trip to Bulgaria—arranged by a few like-minded residents of Cheltenham—when he had first encountered the works of Peter Deunov and become involved in the sacred dance movement. That had been not only fascinating, but perilous as well: adherents of Deunov enjoy dancing on mountain tops—the better to communicate with Beings of Light—and Terence had very nearly slipped at an important stage in proceedings; very nearly, but had not, and had survived to found the ultimately highly successful Cheltenham Deunov Association. Then there had been the business with the Green Man, whom Terence had seen among the
rhododendron bushes of his garden. It is given to few of us—in sobriety at least—to see an actual Green Man, and Terence was adamant that his had been no mere apparition. He was not to know, of course, that the Green Man in question was really Lennie Marchbanks bedecked in leaves, at the behest of his sister, Berthea Snark. And most recently there had been the purchase, with Monty Bismarck, of the 1932 Frazer Nash, which he and Monty were now planning to race.

Monty Bismarck had lost no time in collecting the expensive racing car from Richard Latcham, a gifted and generous restorer of such vehicles. Richard had not met Monty before and was concerned that the young man knew what he was doing.

“You will be careful,” he warned. “These cars can be tricky, particularly on bends. Please drive it responsibly.”

“Yeah, sure, sure,” said Monty. “No probs.”

“And you mentioned a co-driver,” said Richard.

“Yeah,” said Monty. “He’s the geezer who’s paying for it. Nice guy. Terence Moongrove. Lives over in Cheltenham, near my old man. Heard of him?”

Richard shook his head. “I can’t say I have.”

“Drives a Porsche,” continued Monty. “Really keen on motoring. Great guy.”

The Frazer Nash was brought back to Cheltenham, where it was much admired by Terence. Berthea, who was staying with her brother at the time, watched from an upstairs window as Monty and Terence examined the car on the front drive. She shook her head with a sense of foreboding.

“I’ve lined up our first race meeting,” said Monty. “Tomorrow, in fact. There’s a good racing circuit not too far away—I’ve entered us for a couple of races. Me first, then you. We each get a go.”

“That’s jolly exciting, Monty,” said Terence. “And I’ve already bought one of those old leather thingies you wear when you race
these vintage cars—you know the cap thingies with the goggles? I’ll lend it to you, if you like.”

“Cool,” said Monty. Then he added, “Don’t try to go fast, Mr. Moongrove. Not the first few times. Let the others get to the front; you just drive quietly behind them. Then you might have your chance to put your foot down at the end—who knows? But safety first, OK? Let’s make that the motto of Team Bismarck.”