THE EXQUISITE ART

  of

  GETTING EVEN

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022

  by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Alexander McCall Smith, 2022

  The right of Alexander McCall Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 621 6

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78885 564 8

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  Typeset in Sabon and Adobe Garamond by Polygon, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

  CONTENTS

  VENGEANCE IS MINE

  THE PRINCIPLES of SOAP

  MONTY, TIGER, ROSE, ETC.

  ONE, TWO, THREE

  This book is for Graham Weir

  SWEET VENGEANCE

  An Introduction

  A desire for revenge is something that every one of us must have felt at one time or another, unless, of course, we are saints – which most of us are not. Somebody wrongs us and, as we nurse our pain and sense of injustice, we imagine the wrongdoer having exactly the same thing done to him or her – or even worse. This is revenge: the biter bit, and it is very satisfactory, a great theme for Elizabethan drama.

  Why – and whether – we should feel that way about revenge is a question that has interested students of human nature as much as it has troubled philosophers. The impulse to exact revenge is undoubtedly strong in the human psyche: one only has to observe the behaviour of small children to see how it rears its head at a very early stage. As W.H. Auden observed in his much appreciated (although subsequently suppressed) poem “September 1, 1939”: I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return. Auden was talking about political pathology, based on international wrongs, but the same observation might be made about our ordinary quotidian experience.

  Where does this desire for revenge come from? At its heart, there seems to be some notion of justice and reciprocity. What you do to others, you must expect to be done to you – that seems only fair. If we are to live together in harmony, it might be argued, it is important that the scales be balanced – everyone must understand that those who seek an unfair advantage over others will pay for what they do.

  But, strictly speaking, that is not so much revenge as retribution. Revenge is more personal – it is an action performed with a view to satisfying the feelings of one who has been wronged. Revenge has nothing to do with ensuring social peace or correcting any imbalance. It is invoked purely to make the wronged person feel better. Revenge is quite different from dispassionate retribution or correction: it is for this reason that revenge has been described as “wild justice”.

  Of course, that does not make revenge morally right. In fact, seeking revenge has always made philosophers feel uncomfortable. Exacting revenge adds to the sum total of human suffering, rather than subtracts from it. And, in terms of the recovery of the victim, there is a lot to be said for showing mercy and forgiveness rather than insisting on revenge. Forgiveness is more healing than the infliction of pain: there is ample evidence for that proposition, as any study of conflict resolution will tend to confirm. You don’t necessarily get better by making another suffer.

  And yet, we remain fascinated by revenge, which still plays a part in our affairs no matter how hard we try to overcome the urge to get even. We should not delude ourselves, though, as to the sterility of revenge. No Sicilian or Appalachian blood feud was ever ended by the taking of revenge, and we would do well to remind ourselves of that. Having said that, I am reminded of the story of the Spanish conquistador who, on his death bed, is asked by his confessor whether he has forgiven his enemies. “Enemies?” he replies. “I have no enemies, Father. I have killed them all.”

  The four stories that follow are all tales of revenge. Each has a particular background in terms of something that I have experienced or thought about. The first story, “Vengeance Is Mine”, occurred to me after I had paid a visit to a small Caribbean island some years ago. There was only one town of any consequence on this island, and that was more of a village than a town. Yet, as I walked down the main street there, a very large and extremely ostentatious car made its way down the road. I saw that the driver was a comparatively young man. Now, there are various ways of acquiring such a car, some of them even honest. I had the distinct impression that this car, though, might have been the fruit of less than honest activity. This was just a suspicion, but I’m afraid I thought of drug money. I may have been doing the owner a gross injustice, but it had that feel to me. And that was when the idea for this story occurred to me. What if somebody came back to his island, dripping in money? What if somebody on the island took moral exception to him?

  I changed the setting, and it became an island off Scotland’s west coast. Yet all islands have something in common: people take a close interest in the affairs of others, and, in some cases at least, there are people who don’t like to see others getting away with things they should not get away with. In Scotland, our Calvinist background underlines that. We still believe that people should pay for their transgressions. We still disapprove. We still rather enjoy seeing tall poppies cut down where they stand. All of which might deter a gangster from considering taking up residence on the Hebridean island of Mull.

  VENGEANCE

  IS

  MINE

  Murdo had a fishing boat. At twenty-eight feet, it was not considered a large one, but it was a good sea-keeper, and he could venture out, if he so desired, in all but the most severe weather. Down below was a Ford Dover marine diesel engine, over thirty years old, that had never once declined to start; nor had it ever faltered for a moment in its constant, patient thudding. “The boat’s heartbeat,” he said of that sound.

  He lived on Mull, an island off the west coast of Scotland. To the north lay Skye and its attendant small isles – Rum, Eigg, Canna, and the evocatively named Muck. The small isles were home to a handful of people – fifteen, in the case of Canna, while Muck somehow supported enough to have a tiny school, with a single teacher. Murdo’s island was considerably bigger and had a population of several thousand people, living on farms and smallholdings dotted amongst its hills and modest glens. There was one town, Tobermory, and a smattering of villages. Here and there, harbours tucked away on the island’s jagged coast were home to a small number of fishing vessels, of which Murdo’s boat, the Iolaire, was one. Iolaire means “eagle” in Gaelic, and Murdo had a sea eagle, wings wide in flight, painted just off the bow, on the port side. The painting was the work of his cousin’s son, who fancied himself as an artist but was not very good at portraying birds, or anything else, really. The eagle seemed to have only one eye and its talons were far from aquiline, resembling, some said, the feet of a greylag goose. But Murdo was loyal and would hear no criticism of his nephew’s artistic endeavours.

  Murdo’s house was no more than a stone’s throw from the harbour in which he kept the Iolaire. The village itself was on the west side of the island, looking out past a cluster of small islets – mostly tidal rocks – towards the Treshnish Isles and then to Coll. Beyond that was the Sea of the Hebrides, the stretch of water known as the Minch, and the final outposts of Scotland, the outer isles of Barra, Mingulay, the Uists, and, as a lonely afterthought, the abandoned isles of St Kilda. Then there was nothing until Canada, across mile upon mile of empty Atlantic, vast, cold fields on which pelagic fish were hunted.

  Murdo was forty-eight and had the strength and robust health of one who spent his life out of doors, earning his living under an open sky. Unlike some of the islanders, whose fondness for whisky was well known, Murdo was temperate in his drinking habits. He liked peaty whiskies from the distilleries of Islay, to the south, but he would never take more than a single dram on any evening, and he always diluted whisky with water, an act of chemistry that he said improved both liquids considerably.

  He had been married once but now described himself as a bachelor. It was possible that he was divorced: his wife, Helen, had served him with papers to that effect, but he had tossed them aside unread. He had no time for lawyers and their wiles. It made no difference to him. She had assured him that she would never ask him for money, as she was well provided for by her new partner, the proprietor of a successful fish-and-chip van in Glasgow, and since Murdo had no intention of ever marrying again, his matrimonial status, it seemed to him, was of no significance. It was no business of the government, nor of anybody else, he thought, whether he was married or not.

  He had met her at a dance in Tobermory, when he was in his early thirties. She had been working as a barmaid in a hotel, a rambling Victorian building that clung to a clifftop overlooking the Sound of Mull. One day, people said, the hotel would fall into the sea, but they were t
alking nonsense, as the cliff edge was a good way away and had shown no sign of getting any closer. Helen was six years younger than he was and came from Gourock, a town on the Clyde, not far from Glasgow. She had been given the job at the hotel on the strength of her appearance – she was strikingly good-looking, in a rather blousy way, prompting the hotel manager to whisper to his wife, “Barmaid material, if ever there was. Put her behind the bar, and we’re in business.”

  After they had married and settled back in the village, Helen quickly became bored. Her job now was to drive the day’s catch to the other side of the island, where it would be loaded on a boat that plied regularly between Mull and Oban. She did not like this work, which she said should be done by a man. “I’m not designed to howk fish about,” she said.

  He laughed at that. There were all those old photographs of women carrying fish baskets on their backs uncomplainingly. She must have seen them. “Remember the herring girls? Remember them? They did all that work up and down the coast. No complaint from them, was there?”

  She pouted. “Poor women,” she said and shook her head.

  “Just them?” he challenged. People were always going on about how hard it was for women, but what about men? It was hard for everybody, he thought. “What about the men? They went out in all manner of seas. Swept overboard and drowned. What about them?”

  “Poor men,” she said.

  In spite of Helen’s distaste for the work she was expected to do, they somehow got by. Then, one June, on a brilliant summer day, when Ben More, the highest mountain on the island, was sharp against the sky, she packed a suitcase and caught the bus that went over the hill. At Craignure she boarded the ferry to Oban, where she took another bus all the way down to Glasgow. There she stayed for a few days with her younger sister, having left a message for Murdo that she might be back in a few weeks’ time, or might not. It was probably best, she said, for him not to expect her.

  The sister was a regular at a ballroom called the Palais de Dance, one of the dance halls that injected a bit of glitter into the hard lives of working-class Glaswegians. She took Helen there three nights in a row, and on the third night she met a man called Andy McNiven.

  “Andy has a fish-and-chip van,” her sister said, on introducing them.

  “And pies,” said Andy.

  “Yes, and pies,” the sister confirmed.

  “That’s great,” said Helen.

  She and Andy got on well. He offered her a job in the fish-and-chip van because his wife, who had helped him for years, had gone off with a sailor from the nuclear submarine base on the Holy Loch.

  After a month, Andy asked Helen to marry him. “I never actually married Maggie,” he said. “People thought we were married, but we weren’t. Not legally, if you see what I mean.”

  Helen explained that she thought that she and Murdo were probably still legally married but that she would see a lawyer and change all that. “I think you have some forms to fill in, and then you go and see the sheriff, and that’s that,” she said.

  “Sounds simple enough,” said Andy.

  Some years later, a friend said to Murdo, “Looking back at it, Murdo, do you regret marrying Helen? Of course, don’t answer if you think the question is too personal.”

  Murdo considered this for a few moments. He did not have to think for long before replying, “Not really. We weren’t a brilliant match, but that wasn’t her fault. I shouldn’t have asked her to marry me. That’s down to me. You get what you ask for, you see.”

  The friend frowned. “You mean – what goes around, comes around? That sort of thing.”

  “Aye,” said Murdo. “You get what you deserve, I think. In general, that is.”

  The friend looked out of the window. They were in Murdo’s kitchen at the time, a pot of strong tea on the table before them. “Do you think so?” he asked.

  Murdo nodded. “I think so. Yes. I’ve always felt that. If you do something wrong, then sooner or later . . .” He shrugged. “Sooner or later, you’ll suffer the consequences.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said the friend. “I think that a lot of folk get away with it, especially these days, when everything’s gone to the dogs. You know how it is – nobody cares any longer about who does what.”

  Murdo looked at his friend. He was right, he thought. He shook his head. “You may have a point, Donald,” he said. “In the old days—”

  Donald interrupted him. He smiled. “When exactly were the old days, Murdo?”

  “The day before yesterday,” came the answer. “When you and I were young, Donald. In the old days, if you did something you shouldn’t do, you knew that you’d pay for it.”

  “Which is why people were a bit better behaved,” mused Donald.

  “Perhaps. There were policemen then . . . You saw them in the street. Even in Tobermory. There was that Constable Frazer – remember him, Donald? Big fellow with red hair. You wouldn’t cross him, sure enough.”

  “He gave that Billy Jamieson a clip round the ear,” Donald remembered. “Taught him not to help himself to other people’s lobster pots.”

  “That was before human rights,” said Murdo. “Human rights stopped that sort of . . . What do they call it? Some fancy name. Community policing?” He sighed. “Changed days. People can do pretty much as they please.”

  “Looks like it,” said Donald. “No avenging angel. No justice. Nothing.”

  Donald brought the conversation back to Helen and her departure. “You’ve been by yourself for a long time now,” he said. “Ever thought of getting yourself fixed up again?”

  Murdo shook his head. “Not really. I’m all right with my own company. I’m comfortable enough.” He paused. “And now I’m an elder of the kirk, you know. That keeps me busy.”

  Donald understood. He had heard about his friend’s appointment as a church elder – it had been in the Oban Times – but had forgotten to congratulate him.

  “That’s a very important position,” he said.

  Murdo nodded. “The new minister is a breath of fresh air,” he said. “That last fellow was too . . . How shall I put it? Too wishy-washy. I’m not sure he believed in very much. This new one has very clear ideas. He can’t be doing with all this liberal theology stuff.”

  “This new one believes in judgement?”

  “Definitely,” said Murdo. “Of other people, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a day of judgement,” Murdo remarked. “People get uneasy these days if you start talking about that sort of thing. But just not mentioning something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, does it?”

  It took Donald a little while to sort that question out. Then he replied, “We’ll pay for it, you know. We’re creating a hell for ourselves right here – let alone anything down below. People rampage around. They show no respect for anybody else. It’s not right, Murdo – it’s not right. We need to try to get our sense of justice back. We need to teach people that if you behave badly, you’ll get it. It’s as simple as that.”

  “You’re right there,” agreed Murdo.

  Donald looked regretful. “Too late,” he said. “Too late for any of that, Murdo. Things have . . . How do they put it these days? Things have moved on.”

  “I haven’t moved on,” Murdo said meditatively. “And I don’t think it’s too late, you know.”

  Donald would remember those words later on. I don’t think it’s too late.

  Nor did the new minister at the church near the harbour think it was too late. He was called the Reverend Lachlan Maclean, and he came from Stornoway, on one of the largest of the outer islands. He had been brought up in a Gaelic-speaking household but was perfectly bilingual and felt as confident – and as convinced – in English as he felt in Gaelic. He was a graduate of New College, the divinity school of the University of Edinburgh and, thanks to a St Andrew’s Society scholarship, of the Union Theological Seminary at Princeton. At Princeton, he had written a thesis on Calvin and won a prestigious prize for an essay on the concept of sin, subsequently published under the title The Rehabilitation of Sin. The Reverend Maclean was in no doubt about the existence of sin, and he strongly disputed the notion that wrongdoing was a relative notion, its contours defined by individual preference. “We all know exactly what sin is,” he said, with that directness for which he was widely admired. “Sins, you see, are things you shouldn’t do, and we all know what those things are. They are the same for all times and all places, and for all men. No problem there, if you ask me. That’s about as clear as anything ever can be.”