Jay and Martha turned to look at him. ‘Buddy’s a dog [or dorg],’ Jay said carefully.
‘A pedigree Weimaraner,’ Martha elaborated.
‘Weimaraner,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘as in Weimar Republic?’
‘I’ve got an essay to do,’ I said, beating a quiet retreat.
‘Keep an eye out for Buddy,’ Jay shouted after me and I heard Professor Cousins murmur, ‘Oh, what a horrible idea,’ as I shut the door behind me.
Detour
I FINALLY MANAGED TO ESCAPE FROM THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT and into the cold and inadequate daylight of the real world. I had got as far as The Grosvenor pub on the Perth Road when I realized that someone was kerb-crawling me. When I stopped, a familiar rusting shape drew to a halt alongside me and the passenger door of the Cortina opened. ‘Want to go for a hurl?’ Chick asked.
I demurred; the Cortina looked as if it was actually decomposing now. Chick, too, seemed to have deteriorated since I last saw him.
‘Go on, get in,’ he said in a way that he must have thought persuasive. Getting in a car once with him was foolishness, twice might have been from necessity, but to get into the Cortina a third time was nothing short of lunacy.
‘I’m supposed to be doing an essay on George Eliot,’ I said, climbing into the cold, smelly car.
‘Oh yeah, who’s he?’ Chick asked, pulling away from the kerb in a nasty grinding of gears.
‘She ’s a woman.’
‘Really?’ Chick said. ‘I knew a woman once called Sidney, she worked as a stoker on the White Star line, can you believe that?’
A greasy fish supper sat on the dashboard. ‘Chip?’ Chick offered, holding up something cold and limp. ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said to himself when I waved it away. He ate the chips as he drove. ‘How’s the Prof? Nice guy, that. And the Yank?’
‘Terri.’
‘That’s a man’s name,’ Chick said.
‘She’s not a man.’
Chick finished his poke of chips, threw the paper out of the window and wiped his hands on the knees of his trousers. We were covering Dundee in an apparently random fashion on a route that took us along the Hawkhill and up the Hilltown and then back to the Sinderins and the Hawkhill again. This route took us to a newsagent, two different betting shops, a phone-box, an off-licence, a slow, mystifying drive past the Sheriff Court and a short tour of the docks. I noticed Watson Grant coming out of one of the betting shops. ‘Look,’ I said, giving Chick a dig in the ribs because he was absorbed in reading his Sporting Life (although, interestingly, still driving the Cortina), ‘there’s Grant Watson.’
‘Who?’
‘Watson Grant, you’re working for him, remember? Following his wife?’
‘Not any more,’ Chick said, ‘he couldn’t pay his bloody bill. Mr middle-class university lecturer,’ Chick said with some disgust, ‘he’s a bloody compulsive gambler.’
‘No?’
‘Yep.’
‘Maybe that’s why his wife’s having an affair,’ I said, remembering Aileen Grant’s rather sorrowful features.
‘Bet your bottom dollar she’ll leave him,’ Chick said, ‘then he’ll be in a real pickle.’
‘Why?’
‘Insurance policy,’ Chick said, ‘on his mother-in-law.’
‘Mrs Macbeth?’
‘You know her?’ Chick said suspiciously.
‘So, Grant Watson has an insurance policy on Mrs Macbeth?’
‘No, his wife has one on her, what’s-her-name?’
‘Aileen.’
‘Aileen, she’s got the insurance policy, but it’ll walk when she walks.’
‘I think I see. If Mrs Macbeth died now, or indeed if Aileen Grant died now, Watson Grant would get the money. But if Aileen divorces him he won’t get any money when Mrs Macbeth dies?’
— I like this exposition, Nora says, everything being explained in black and white, you should do more of it.
‘Yes, but,’ Chick said, ‘in black and white terms—’ but we were interrupted by his dropping his burning cigarette into his lap and narrowly avoiding a lamp-post that was ‘in the way’.
Everything Chick did seemed invested with suspicious intent, although much of his behaviour was probably harmless. He stopped off for a ‘pish’ in the public conveniences in Castle Street. He went to Wallace’s for the classic Dundee take-away — a plain bridie and ‘an inginininaa’ (‘an onion one as well, if you would be so kind’). I declined one. After driving through the Seagate Bus Station — to the extreme irritation of a driver trying to reverse a huge Bluebird bound for Perth — we paused near the gates of the High School where a torrent of pupils was emerging from its dark neo-classical portals.
A tall pretty girl separated herself from the mass and walked towards the car. She had cropped dark hair and was so very neat and tidy in her public school grey that I felt I should offer to write out lines, ‘First impressions can never be made twice,’ and so on. She was carrying a huge briefcase of homework and wearing the yellow hoops of a prefect on her blazer sleeve.
Chick rolled down the window as she drew nearer and I wondered if I shouldn’t shout out a warning, especially when he took out a packet of Polos and offered one to her. Chick looked exactly like the kind of person who starred in public information films about not taking sweets from strangers. The girl took the mint, bent down, kissed Chick on the cheek and said, ‘Thanks, Dad,’ gave him a little wave, and carried on walking.
I was astonished. ‘That was the “mingin’ little bastard”?’
‘One of them,’ he said gruffly, driving off in a horrible grinding of gears. He drew level with the girl and said, ‘I suppose you want a lift?’
‘No thanks,’ she said, ‘I’m fine.’
‘Just as well,’ Chick said, ‘because I’m not a bloody taxi service.’
The girl laughed.
‘You must have quite weak genes,’ I said to Chick.
Our next port of call was a funeral parlour in Stobswell, where we settled into what I now recognized as surveillance mode, that is to say, Chick stubbed out his cigarette, folded his newspaper and closed his eyes.
‘Is there anything you want me to keep an eye on?’ I asked him, and felt an absent and invisible Professor Cousins give a little shiver of horror.
‘Just anything fishy,’ Chick said. Within seconds he was snoring.
No-one came or went and nothing fishy occurred, I reported when Chick woke up again.
‘Right, we’d better go and have a look, then,’ Chick said, heaving himself out of the car.
I followed him into the funeral parlour, where we were greeted by a businesslike undertaker. What a shame Terri wasn’t with us, she would have thoroughly enjoyed this kind of visit. Undertaking was probably the perfect profession for her. The bland atmosphere in the funeral parlour would have disappointed her, though — it felt more like the Haze-freshened front office of a plumbers’ supplies merchant than a house of death.
‘Come to see the deceased,’ Chick said to the undertaker.
It turned out that the funeral parlour was affording temporary shelter to several deceased and Chick was unsure which one he was visiting. ‘The one from The Anchorage,’ he tried. The undertaker was polite but wary and it was only when Chick flashed his defunct warrant card that we were finally allowed to visit our chosen corpse.
‘This had better not be anyone I know,’ I warned Chick. I had never seen a dead body, never known anyone who had died—
Nora begins to count the dead on her fingers again, and I tell her to stop. She shrugs. She is drying the wet hanks of her hair in front of a fire made from sappy green wood salvaged from the beach.