“He’s very fat,” said Bertie. “Fatter even than you. And he was no good at cards. I won lots of money off him. But then he told Gerry to go and find our car, and Gerry did. He came back with our car. But it wasn’t exactly the same car. It was another car just like ours, but a bit different.”
The policeman looked thoughtful. “And did Daddy know it wasn’t your car?”
Bertie hesitated. He was not sure about that. He knew that adults often knew things but tried to pretend that they did not, and he thought that this might be such a case. On the other hand, his father had asked him not to tell his mother, which suggested that he knew that the car was not theirs all along.
What should he say? He should not tell the policeman any fibs because that would be wrong, and, anyway, if you told lies it was well known that your pants went on fire. But his father had never actually said that he thought it was somebody else’s car; he had never actually said that.
“No,” said Bertie. “He didn’t know that it wasn’t our car. I was the only one who knew that. You see, the handles on the door . . .”
The policeman looked rather disappointed. Off the hook, he thought. It was typical. These types always get themselves off the hook. Reset – having stolen goods in one’s possession – was a difficult crime to prove. You had to establish that the person knew that the goods were stolen (or should have known, perhaps), and it would be difficult to get anything to stick in this case. But there was still this O’Connor character to deal with, and this might just be a very good chance to sort him out.
It was Lard O’Connor that this wee boy was talking about –
that was pretty clear. Lard O’Connor, also known as Porky Sullivan. That was him. Strathclyde Police would love to get
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something on him, and they would be pretty sick if it came from Lothian and Borders! Hah!
“Well, Bertie,” said the policeman, snapping shut his notebook. “You’ve been very helpful. This Mr O’Connor character, I’m afraid, is not a very nice man. I fear that he might have given your Daddy a stolen car.”
Bertie swallowed. He liked Mr O’Connor and he was sure the policeman was wrong. It was Gerry who had stolen the car, not Lard. Surely if Mr O’Connor could be given the chance to explain then all would be made clear. Gerry is the fibber, thought Bertie. He’s the one whose pants will go on fire.
“I’ve got Mr O’Connor’s address,” said Bertie brightly. “I wrote it down. You can go and talk to him.”
The policeman reached out to shake Bertie’s hand. “Well done, son,” he said. “We’ll do just that.”
Stuart closed his eyes.
Pat was worried. Her unnerving encounter with her flatmate Tessie – an encounter that had ended in a barely- veiled threat of dire consequences should Pat have anything to do with Wolf
– had left her speechless. The threat, in fact, was the last thing that Tessie uttered before she walked out of the room, lips pursed, her expression calculated to leave Pat in no doubt of the seriousness of her intent.
For a few minutes after Tessie had left, Pat had contemplated following her into her room and asking her precisely what she meant by the threat. Yet it had been unambiguous enough, and Tessie might well merely have repeated it. Perhaps, then, she should assure her that she had in no sense encouraged Wolf and that she had no intention of doing so. That would, no doubt, reassure the other girl, but it would also amount to a complete capitulation in the face of aggression. It was rather like giving in to blackmail: if you did that, then it would simply come back again and again.
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Her first instinct had been to telephone her father for advice.
But then she decided that she could not go running to him over every setback. He would be supportive, of course, and patient too, but she could not burden him with this. What would he think of her if she confessed to him that she was attracted to a boy called Wolf who already had a girlfriend, and that girlfriend was her own flatmate? She could explain that she had not actually set out to attract Wolf (well she had, really: she had waited by the notice-board at the end of the seminar purely because he would walk past her). No, it would be better to talk to somebody else – somebody more her own age who would understand; somebody she knew reasonably well, but not too well; somebody like . . . Matthew.
There were several good reasons why she should talk to Matthew, not the least of these being that she had been feeling guilty about misleading him over Wolf. She wanted to make a clean breast of that to Matthew, and she could take the opportunity to talk to him about the awkward situation that had arisen in the flat. Matthew was a good listener. He had always been kind to her and had, on occasion, come up with useful advice.
And if she told him the truth about Wolf, then she could also
convincingly tell him that she thought of him as a confidant and not as anything else.
That day, following the confrontation with Tessie, she had a lecture to attend and planned to spend a couple of hours after that in the University Library. Matthew would be expecting her at twelve-thirty, so that she could look after the gallery while he went off for lunch, and she would stay there for several hours after he returned, as it was a Wednesday, and for some reason Wednesday afternoons in the gallery tended to be rather busy.
She arrived in the lecture hall ten minutes early, and she was one of the first there. She picked a seat in the middle, behind a small group of students who were poring over a letter which one of them had received, and were laughing at the contents.
She sat there, her pad of paper opened at the ready, as she paged through a photocopied article on proportion in the early Renaissance. It was a rather strange article, she thought, as the author was one of those people who believed that the ratio of phi would be found in every work of art of any significance.
Even the human face could have lines superimposed on it in such a way as to come up with phi, and the more beautiful the face appeared, the more would the distance between the eyes and the length of the nose and such measurements all embody phi. Could this be true?
