44 Scotland Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

of an island, in bright colours, with strong brush strokes. She could just hear the voice of her art teacher at school, intoning, reverentially: “That, boys and girls, is a Peploe.”
    But it couldn’t be a Peploe. Impossible.

 
     
     
     
    6. Bruce Takes a Look at a Place
     
    Bruce worked in a firm of surveyors called Macaulay Holmes Richardson Black. In spite of the name, which implied at least four partners and a global reach, it was not a large firm. There were in fact only two partners, Gordon Todd and his brother, Raeburn, known to the staff as Gordon and Todd. They were good employers, and both of them were prominent in the affairs of their professional association, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Gordon always wore a tie with the Institute crest on it, and Todd had a gold signet ring on which the same crest had been engraved. Both were strong golfers. Gordon had become a member of Muirfield (after a rather long wait), and Todd was hoping that the same honour would one day befall him.
    “I can’t understand why I have to wait longer than he did,” Todd said to his wife, Sasha.
    “Does it matter?” she asked. “What’s so special about that place? Surely one golf course is much the same as another. Fairways, greens, holes. What’s so special about Muirfield?”
    Todd had looked at her with pity. “Women don’t understand,” he said. “They just don’t.”
    “Oh yes we do,” she said. “We understand very well.”
    “Then explain it!” Todd had crowed.
    “But that’s what I just asked you to do,” she said. “I asked you what the difference was, and you don’t answer that question by batting it back to me. What’s the difference? You tell me.”
    Todd had said nothing. He was confident that Muirfield was special, but he was not sure that he could explain it. Ultimately, it had something to do with the people who played there; special people. But that was not something one could put into words – without a measure of embarrassment – and it was certainly not something that his wife would understand. She would not think of these people as special; that was her mistake.
    The firm preferred, if at all possible, to employ sporting assistants. Both brothers found that they could relate easily to sporty types, and such people were also rather good at generating business. Business was done on golf courses (or some of them), and it helped to have sociable employees who would meet clients at parties and in pubs. It was a sociable profession.
    Bruce was popular in the firm. Both brothers liked him, to an extent, and Todd had given him a spare seat at Murrayfield on several occasions. Todd had a daughter, Lizzie, who might be suitable for Bruce, so Todd thought, if only she would get over her unreasonable prejudice about him. She seemed to have taken against him on first meeting, and it was quite unfair, although there was perhaps something about this young man which was not quite right – something to do with the way he preened himself? Todd had seen him preening once, looking at himself in the rearview mirror of the firm’s Land Rover, and he had been slightly surprised by it.
    “Satisfied?” he had said to him, in a joking tone, and Bruce had leapt up, surprised, and muttered something about needing a haircut. But there had been something else going on, and Todd had remembered it.
    Now, as he arrived in the office that morning, the morning on which Pat began at the gallery, Bruce saw that Todd had put

    a file on his desk, to await him. He was to do a survey by eleven o’clock that morning, to report back to the client by eleven-thirty. The property in question, a large top-floor flat overlooking the Dean Valley, had offers closing at noon and the client wanted to bid. This was tight, as he would need to pick up the keys, inspect the property, and dictate a short written report within half an hour of returning to the office.
    Bruce took a taxi to the firm of solicitors in York