Terri regarded this recovery with a certain suspicion. ‘He’s probably in shock,’ she said, her little white face pinched with worry. ‘We still need to get him to a vet.’
‘You’re joking,’ the Cortina driver said. ‘I had to be somewhere else half an hour ago.’ Terri began to hiss like a malevolent kettle, showing her little pointy teeth. Looking more surprised than shocked, the dog waited expectantly for its fate to be decided between the two warring parties. It was the Cortina driver who eventually backed down. ‘Oh all right then,’ he relented, ‘but quickly then, I’m very late,’ and started ushering us all urgently into the car.
The car – which didn’t look as if it had ever seen better days – was a rusted white, more rust than white. I got in the back, followed by Terri and the dog which scrambled in awkwardly and insisted on sitting between us. Professor Cousins climbed gingerly into the front, behaving as if motor cars were a new and untested invention.
‘A jaunt. This is fun,’ he remarked and held out his hand towards the driver. ‘Professor Cousins,’ he said, ‘lovely to meet you. And you are?’
The Cortina driver answered reluctantly, as if the information might be used against him at a later date, ‘Chick. Chick Petrie.’
‘Call me Gabriel,’ Professor Cousins said, smiling and nodding his head.
‘But that’s not your name, is it?’ I asked, puzzled by this sudden alteration of Professor Cousins’ usual Christian names of Edward and Neville, but he just smiled cheerfully and said, ‘Why not?’ and Chick said, ‘What’s in a name and all that, eh, Prof?’
Professor Cousins beamed. ‘Exactly! A man after my own heart, Chick.’
‘A professor, eh?’ Chick said. ‘Me, of course, I was educated in the School of Hard Knocks and the University of Life.’
‘And I’m sure it was a very broad and interesting education, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said.
‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there,’ Chick observed darkly. Terri clapped her hands over the dog’s ears. Chick started the engine and a strange smell immediately began to fill the car, the smell of something sweet but dead – rotting strawberries and decaying rat. Before anyone could comment on this assault to our olfactory sensibilities, Chick drove off the pavement with a jolt and into the traffic with a jerk, without looking to see if anything was coming, resulting in a cacophony of hooting horns following us down the Nethergate.
Professor Cousins gestured vaguely behind us saying something about there being a vet at the top of South Tay Street, but before the words had left his lips we had passed the turning and were accelerating round the Angus roundabout as if we were on the Dodgems. Within seconds we were roaring along the approach to the road bridge. Terri shouted at Chick that he was going the wrong way and he shouted back, ‘Wrong way for you maybe, but the right way for me.’ He didn’t even stop at the toll-booth, merely slowing down in what appeared to be a practised manoeuvre and thrusting the toll money into the hand of the collector as he passed, before speeding onto the long, straight stretch of the bridge. I supposed we were in the hands of a madman. Terri leant forward and prodded Chick sharply in the back of the neck. ‘What about the vet?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the mutt,’ Chick grumbled, glancing at the dog in his rear-view mirror. It was true, the dog did now look the picture of health, sitting up on the seat and as alert as any back-seat driver. But the smell in the car had grown much worse – a foul stench getting fouler the further we drove. ‘What is that?’ Professor Cousins asked.
‘What’s what?’ Chick asked.
‘That smell.’
Chick inhaled as if he was taking the sea-air. ‘Vindaloo,’ he said. He thought for a few seconds before adding ‘and cat.’
‘Cat?’ I queried in alarm.
‘Don’t panic,’ Chick said, ‘it’s dead.’
‘None of us want to go with you,’ Terri said sullenly to Chick.
‘Kidnapped?’ Professor Cousins said, growing quite merry. ‘How exciting. Won’t we have a tale to tell.’
Terri, clutching a handful of dirty yellow fur in one hand, was beginning to look a little green around the gills. ‘It’s a crime, you know,’ she persisted, ‘taking people against their will. You can go to jail.’
Chick snorted dismissively and said, with a certain personal bitterness, that the people who had committed the really serious crimes (murder, mayhem, et cetera) were not to be found behind prison walls but were roaming free in Brazil, or Argentina, ‘or even Fife’.