BASIL STARED AT the glossy photograph of Freddie de la Hay. The dog looked familiar, but it took him a while to establish why this should be. Dogs of the same breed were all very much alike, in his view; how would one tell one Labrador from another? he wondered. And yet presumably owners of Labradors could pick out their own dog in a crowd of other Labradors. He thought that this might be on the basis of facial expression, or something to do with the eyes, but he was not sure.
A dog, of course, could identify its owner in a large group of humans. Basil knew that there had been a lot of research into how people recognised one another, but he doubted whether anybody had been able to understand how it worked for dogs. They probably used the sense of smell more than visual clues; that, he had read, was how they remembered—the smells were filed away in a massive olfactory memory. How weak was our own memory of smells, Basil reflected. What did he remember? Incense, truffle oil, vanilla, cardamom, thyme, freshly ground pepper.
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.