Dog in the Dark (Three Oaks Book 1), page 10
There were a thousand things which I should have said and done, but I felt as limp as a wet paper handkerchief and I was happy to leave it all to somebody else, even to Beth. I did as she said.
Chapter Nine
I woke for a little while during the night, confused and shivering, but after that I slept well. I was up in good time on a cold, bright Sunday morning, refreshed, concerned but with no time to worry about it. Isobel, although a tireless partner during the week, usually took Sundays off.
Most Sundays were restful, but to a limited degree. The dogs were given a day to forget the sins and bad habits of the previous week but they still had to be fed, cleaned, brushed and exercised. Over and above which, they had to be paid attention. Half the art of training is to keep the dogs happy even when unoccupied.
The second Sunday of each month, however, was given over to what I called, with inexcusable vanity, my ‘Masterclass’. This consisted of a variable number of dog-owners who were prepared to come and, for a fee, be put through their paces along with their dogs. Some came once or twice or until the pupil was firmly on the rails; others appreciated that they were being trained as trainers and persisted for months or years. One man enjoyed it so much that he came regularly from Aberdeen long after he must have known all my precepts by heart and with a dog which was now becoming too old to work let alone to learn anything. It was a social as well as an educational event and I enjoyed it as much as any of them.
That Sunday, there was snow on the high ground and many travellers, including the Aberdonian, had been deterred by the state of the roads. But six turned up. We worked out of doors in the extended garden, ignoring a chilly wind. I started off as usual by putting them through basic exercises, sitting, staying, heeling, coming, sitting at a distance, elementary retrieving and directing by hand signals. As we reached the limit of each dog’s ability, I would set the pair some practice exercises and move on. Beth went off with a man whose springer would not sit to command at a distance; she would keep the dog on the lead and make it sit whenever its master, from increasing distances, gave the order.
The last to drop out was a clever young Labrador bitch which had only attended once before. The owner, a stout man in bright green tweeds, was almost seething with frustration. She would, he explained, do almost everything except deliver to hand, preferring to run around with the dummy, just beyond his reach. The classic cure was to run off in the opposite direction, calling for the dog to follow, but ‘There’s a limit to how long you can go on doing that,’ he said. ‘I’d look a right Charlie on a big shoot, running off so that the bastard’ll follow me with a pheasant.’
That, I had to admit, was true. The bitch would probably not do the same with a real bird – unless the habit was allowed to become engrained. The Labrador, I discovered, only got a dummy in her mouth at the moment of the retrieve. Naturally she was reluctant to give up this splendid toy by which her master set such store. ‘Make her carry it at heel, on the lead,’ I said. ‘When she’s so fed up with it that she spits it out, you’re probably half-way there. Off you go.’
The first dog to have dropped out – indeed, he could hardly be said to have started – had been Ben. His owners were still trying to induce him to sit, but he was both too strong and too bewildered for them. He was a beautiful, very large, year-old liver and white springer with one of the handsomest heads that I ever saw, long and elegant and patterned with what I could only think of as ‘designer’ spots. His tail was undocked and, like his legs, beautifully feathered. If I had not known at first glance that he was show-bench and not working bred, the fact that he barely recognised his own name except as a call to food would have confirmed it. He was not my sort of a dog. But he had an affectionate nature and a sort of charm. I could hardly have guessed the passive but crucial part which he was destined to play.
His owners were a young couple. She was noticeably pregnant and close to tears. They had done everything by the book but Ben, although he loved people, could not understand that the noises which humans emitted were intended to convey any message to him. He was a loveable dog and they were reluctant to part with him, but, as the young woman said, he was strong and impetuous and when the baby was born she would never be able to manage a pram with Ben hauling on the lead. It would break their hearts, but if he could not learn to walk reliably to heel and to sit when told, he would have to go – to a good home if possible, but if not . . .
I worked with them for a while. There are ways of tricking a dog into sitting and I thought that we were making progress. But others needed my attention. A lady who hoped to become a picker-up on her husband’s shoot had little idea as to how much she should be expecting from her Labrador and I fetched out one of my older dogs and let her get the feel of the handler’s job. The man with the other Labrador came back. I took him off to the long cul-de-sac between the house and the barn. It was a place which I had used for the same purpose before. A dog which was doing a retrieve there could only come straight back because there was nowhere else to go. ‘Try it,’ I said. ‘Don’t stare at him as he comes back, but give him all the praise in the world if he does it right and then do it again and again.’
Eventually the Masterclass broke up. Several of them had become friends and went off for a lunch at the hotel. Sometimes I would join them, but Ben’s owners were waiting behind so I passed up the invitation. I took them into the large, bright sitting room which was little used except for entertainment and for business discussions. They wanted to know my terms for boarding and training a pupil. I gave them a Xeroxed page of breakdown.
The young man, a Mr Sturges, did not seem put off by my prices. Ben must have been held in an esteem which he had done nothing to deserve. Sturges hardly glanced at the page before he nodded. ‘If we left him with you for, say, a month, could you do anything with him?’
‘I don’t usually take dogs which aren’t going to do a job of work,’ I said. ‘I’ll stretch a point and take Ben if you like. After all, he is a spaniel of a sort. I think I could do some good. But I can’t give any guarantee. It would be up to you and at your risk. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.’
Sturges nodded. ‘We understand that,’ he said. ‘Look, we’re not the gambling sort but we like a flutter now and again. If you were a bookie, what odds would you give on being able to turn him into an acceptable house-dog?’
‘About evens,’ I said. ‘Or maybe six to four on.’
They looked at each other, which was all the consultation necessary. ‘We’ll leave him,’ the wife said. ‘If you find that he won’t learn . . . we wouldn’t want to see him again. Perhaps you could give him to somebody, or have him put down. We might buy one of your pups.’
‘I could find you something more suitable,’ I said tactfully. As I had told the Sergeant, I never sold my pups to non-shooting homes. It would have been like selling a favourite daughter into a harem. A dog is happiest doing what it was bred for, and very few breeds were intended to be pets. ‘Has he had all his shots?’ I asked.
Sturges produced the inoculation record from a folder. It was up to date.
‘If you have his pedigree there, leave it with me,’ I said.
Sturges frowned. ‘Is that usual?’
‘No. But my partner likes it. She runs computer programs on canine genealogy. It’s her substitute to knitting or doing the pools. Anyway, I’ll need it if I have to try and find a home for him.’
They gave me the pedigree. Beth took Ben for a walk while they made their escape. When he returned to find them gone he seemed puzzled rather than perturbed, as though he had mislaid something but could not remember what or where.
‘He’s nice,’ Beth said, ‘but he’s as thick as porridge.’ Ben, realising that he was the focus of attention, waved his plumed tail.
*
The Masterclass was for fun and public relations. After a late lunch, we set about the real work of the day.
A trained gundog is not only a valuable commodity. It is also a living being to whom we owe the care which they cannot give themselves. My own illness was a constant reminder about infection. Dogs are as vulnerable to gastro-enteritis as we are and have several diseases of their own. So, at the risk of being called a fusspot (which I never was to my face), I insisted that our level of hygiene should never fall below that which we would expect for ourselves. While Beth fed the puppies and dealt with the kennels and runs, I sterilised the feed dishes and then washed every dummy which had been used, set them to dry in the barn and brought out a fresh set. I seemed to own more dummies than a flourishing maternity hospital.
I was just finishing when the sound of the phone fetched me into the house. Henry’s voice came on the other end. ‘Isobel’s gone off visiting,’ he said. ‘I’m fed up on my own. Care to come over for a drink? Bring Beth if you like. In fact, bring her anyway. A pretty girl around the house helps to keep my last remaining hormone circulating.’
‘I’d rather not leave the place,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want to leave Beth on her own. Not if somebody’s buggering about. Come here, if you like. There’s gin or whisky and some cans of lager.’
‘Coffee would do,’ he said. ‘I’m half pissed already. But that doesn’t matter because Isobel took the car. I’ll walk over. I was in the hotel at lunchtime.’
‘I guessed that much.’
‘Got some more information. I’ll be about half an hour.’
I went to tell Beth and found her measuring out feed for the adult dogs’ main meal. ‘Henry’s coming over for coffee in about half an hour,’ I said. ‘That is, if he can walk it in half an hour with several pints leaking out of him. Can you cope?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring coffee in as soon as he’s here. You go and sit down. In the sitting room,’ she added firmly.
‘Henry’s quite happy in the kitchen.’
‘I’m not happy with him in the kitchen. It’s the wrong place for guests.’
It was never worth arguing with Beth on that subject. ‘Give Ben his dinner now and I’ll take him with me.’ This was our first peaceful moment alone together. ‘What did you do with the you-know-what?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t think I should tell you. Then if somebody asks about it, you can say that you don’t know where there’d be a thing like that around here.’ If a woman can tell the truth in a way that totally obscures its meaning, she feels that she has not sinned.
Ben wolfed his meal. I took him outside for a few minutes to relieve himself.
The sitting room, which some previous owner had thrown together with a former dining room, was large and pleasantly old-fashioned, being furnished with some relics from the family home which my mother had once re-covered with what I suppose was chintz. The pastel colours looked well against the pale walls. The carpet was good but too old for dog-hairs to matter. Beth had hung a few pictures and filled a large vase with a fan of twigs bearing copper beech leaves. The room was warm but the space, the colours and the comparative bareness made it look cold. I put a match to the fire. The logs from our fallen oak began to spread a cheerful glow.
Ben was relieved at having been fed but he still felt lost in his new surroundings. I wanted to get the measure of him, but first I had to get and keep his attention despite such interesting competition as a leaf fluttering against the window, dancing firelight or a noise in the chimney. Pandering to gluttony is not often a good basis for training, but there are times when it is easier to fix the dog’s attention by the reward of tidbits and to break the habit of expectation later. Ben was, I had found, almost indifferent to the small chocolate-flavoured sweets which I usually use for the purpose but he turned out to be addicted to salted peanuts. He realised at last that the only way to get the peanuts was by giving me his undivided attention. We began to make a little progress. When Henry arrived, not long behind his promised time, Ben was sitting on command twice out of three times.
Henry recognised Ben immediately for what he was. ‘A beautiful nincompoop,’ he said as he eased himself down into a chair. ‘You surely don’t think you’re going to make anything of him?’
‘He’ll never make a shooter’s dog,’ I admitted. ‘If I can turn him into a biddable pet, his owners will be satisfied.’
‘If you can, they’ll probably do a sacrifice to you. Preferably of that dim beast,’ Henry added as Ben tried to lick his face.
Beth brought the coffee in and poured it. ‘The dogs have been fed,’ she said. ‘Samson didn’t seem to fancy his dinner much. I think he’s a little off-colour. He has a slight temperature and his nose is dry. Perhaps he picked up something yesterday. I’ve moved him into the isolation kennel.’
‘I’ll ask Isobel to take a look at him,’ I said. ‘He’s probably been at the dustbins again. What he’s picked up has been some leftover too far gone even for his cast-iron gut.’
‘He hasn’t been on the loose,’ Beth said indignantly. ‘And we don’t have dustbins any more. What’s more, the whole bin-bag’s gone. Vanished.’
‘Your Sergeant will have taken it,’ Henry said. ‘They’ve been collecting refuse bags. Somebody was saying that they get at more truth that way than by taking statements.’
‘And no more unsavoury,’ I said. ‘To the police, the truth usually stinks.’
Beth gave Henry a biscuit and forced a large slice of cake on me. She never missed an opportunity to try to put some weight on my bones. The coffee had, as usual, been percolated from freshly ground beans. With Beth, coffee-making was a ritual. I suspected that she bought only beans which had been picked at a certain phase of the moon and then muttered incantations as it brewed. After so much effort, it always surprised me by tasting slightly less palatable than instant coffee.
The taste reminded me. ‘That Sergeant said something about a dog being poisoned,’ I said to Henry. ‘I think that he said it was one of Mrs Daiches’.’
‘If he did, he was leading you up the garden path again,’ Henry said. ‘Mrs Cory lost one of her bitches late last week. She’s down to one now. Somebody threw some meat over the wire, loaded with poison. He probably meant to get both of them, but the older bitch guzzled the lot. The Corys reported it to the police at the time, but otherwise they’ve kept very quiet about it. Now that the fact’s out, of course, she’s started going around playing the martyr and accusing absolutely anybody.’
Beth was looking shocked. ‘You said something about that last night but I didn’t take it in,’ she said. ‘That’s a terrible thing to do! Poisoning a dog, I mean.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘But it happens.’
‘Who’d do such a thing?’
‘Sometimes a prospective burglar,’ Henry said. ‘More often, it turns out to be a neighbour who’s fed up at the barking or turds on the pavement or just plain hates the dog’s owner. But Olive Cory keeps her dogs in or walks them in the fields. I hadn’t heard of any complaints about barking, but I don’t suppose anybody would grumble to me.’ Henry and Isobel lived in a pair of joined and converted cottages more than a mile beyond the village.
‘They barked all right,’ I said. ‘If you took the path behind her garden without a dog, they barked their stupid heads off. If you had a dog, they only growled. If you think about it, that shows a sort of twisted, Irish logic. But who lives next door to her?’
‘Old Tommy Frost,’ Beth said.
‘Does he indeed?’ I said. ‘Well, Tommy’s as deaf as the proverbial post. So he wouldn’t object to barking. And if a relatively quiet shot was fired towards the Daiches’ house from the field beyond the fence, only the Corys would be likely to hear it.’
Henry stretched his legs out towards the fireplace. The room was warm from the central heating but the glow of the fire was magnetic. ‘We’re back to the murder, are we? There’s Laurie Duffus, next to the Daiches,’ he said. ‘But the word is that from the time he came home from work he was out in his back garden with a lamp hanging up, building yet another shed. He can’t have much garden left by now. His neighbours say that the noise of hammering never stopped.’
‘That’s the sort of daft remark people make,’ I said, ‘because they’re only aware of the noise while it’s happening. Nobody could hammer all the time. They have to stop to fetch more boards or cut them. The hammering could have stopped for ten minutes and they wouldn’t have noticed.’
‘And there’s Mr Daiches himself,’ Beth said. ‘He’d surely have heard a shot if he was at home.’
‘He wasn’t,’ Henry said. ‘That’s why she wasn’t found until morning. He went down to Edinburgh for a weekend course on arbitration. The police had to fetch him back. He probably had more motive than most to put a slug into his wife – they used to fight like terriers – but he’s the one person who couldn’t have done it.’
‘Is a slug the same as a bullet?’ Beth asked.
Henry seemed surprised. ‘Did I say slug? Sometimes they can be much the same thing. Bullet usually implies something fired by a propellant and a slug comes out of an airgun. It’s shaped . . . well, more like yourself, my dear, with a small waist and a skirt. The air pressure expands the skirt to grip the rifling. Perhaps it was a Freudian slip. You see, Ian West – the redhaired man who keeps the shop, you know him? – he seems to have got himself into trouble with the law. Mr Cory had to account for his own movements, just like anybody else, and he was flighting pigeon with Ian keeping him company until about four. Not that that would do either of them much good. I hear that the pathologist fixed the time of death at around six in the evening, at which time it was her custom to go out and feed her dogs.’
‘Had they been fed?’ I asked.
‘So I’m told,’ Henry said. ‘Her murderer must have caught her on her way back to the house. Which gives me a convenient alibi. I was in the hotel and talking to Neill Cory and some others from opening time onward.’ Henry sounded rather disappointed at being struck off the list of suspects.
