Dog in the Dark (Three Oaks Book 1), page 14
I said that I was sorry.
‘Very well. A doctor in California, one of those dedicated men who put in their vacations giving a medical service in under-developed countries, ran an analysis of the plant and found several natural poisons and hallucinogens alongside the active ingredient. UCLA, on his behalf, tried to purify it but failed. Instead, they synthesised a chemical which approximates closely to that active ingredient. This was tested – if you can call it a test – on the very few cases which have since been discovered, with results that can be considered very satisfactory. A supply reached me this morning via LSTM. The accompanying letter suggests that if, after due consideration of the variables, you want to undergo the treatment, I give you the first injection and you let them study you and review progress in a week or two.’
Rather than be accused of trying to hog the discussion, I nodded and smiled and began to roll up my sleeve.
He snorted but half smiled. ‘Before we rush into it, a few words of warning. There would still be a long road to travel, more blood changes, more tests, all the things you’ve hated, but at the end of that road lies a high probability of a cure. There also lies a high probability of side-effects. At best, these might be no more than the symptoms you’re already suffering.’
‘And at worst?’ I asked.
‘We can only guess – for which reason you’d have to sign a disclaimer before I could treat you. But animal testing produced no deaths whatever except at far higher dosages than we would consider giving to a patient and the few human guinea-pigs are still thriving. At worst, I would expect occasional lassitude, perhaps nausea, dizziness, even blackouts. Possibly hallucinations or temporary amnesia. But the side-effects would lessen as treatment progressed.’
He was very solemn. I began to feel a distinct sensation of coldness about the feet. ‘You’re sure that I wouldn’t be being used as another guinea-pig?’ I asked.
‘Of course you’d be a guinea-pig. Did you think that you could pick up an almost unknown tropical bug and have some pharmacist take down the remedy from the top shelf? You can thank your stars that the necessary animal trials have already been conducted. It can now be tested on human volunteers. That’s you, in case you hadn’t realised it.’
‘Well, would I have to go into hospital again?’
‘For anyone else, I would book a bed at Ninewells,’ he said. ‘Frankly, I think it would be unnecessary, bearing in mind the unlikelihood of any serious effects and the uncertainty as to whether such effects would develop tomorrow or after several months. In your case, you make such a bad patient that I won’t even consider it. Even if you did react unfavourably, the only available treatment would be bed-rest. My advice would be, stay at home, stick to a light diet, avoid alcohol except in strictest moderation and try not to be alone.’
I thought of pointing out that I slept alone but held my peace. In the first place, he would probably have retorted that if I blacked out in my bed for a few hours no harm would be done and neither I nor anybody else would be likely to know it. And, in the second place, he might not have believed me.
‘Perhaps you’d better go away and think about it,’ he said more kindly.
If I thought about it, I knew that I would chicken out. ‘Let’s get on with it,’ I said.
His white eyebrows went up. ‘You’re sure you understand what you’re doing?’
‘No, of course I don’t,’ I said. ‘How could I? What would you do, if it were you?’ I asked him.
‘It wouldn’t be me. I’d have more sense than to go wading in swamps among infected leeches.’
‘Suppose you’d caught it from a blood transfusion or an infected needle. Would you accept this treatment?’
‘Taking such a decision in the face of reality would be quite different from a hypothetical case,’ he said. ‘But, yes. I think I would.’
‘Then it sounds like a reasonable bet,’ I said. ‘Let’s get on with it before I lose my nerve.’
He only nodded. The old devil had known what I would decide before he had even posed the question. ‘We start with a single injection. They’ll want you down in London for tests in ten days,’ he said, ‘or, if you’ve had a bad reaction, as soon after that as you’re fit to travel. But first, you’d better read this and sign.’
I signed without reading. If the stuff killed me, I would hardly be in a position to sue anybody.
Ten minutes later, I was back in the street. Ben seemed relieved to see me. As we walked back, I explored my own senses, wondering whether I felt better or was about to go on a trip. To my surprise, I felt no different despite the presence of something alien in my bloodstream which might restore my health or knock me flat. But although dark clouds had closed in overhead I had a persistent delusion that the sun was still shining. Was that, I wondered, the first hallucination? Or the beginning of a light at the end of the tunnel?
In a mood which combined hope and fear, I wanted to give somebody a present. I had not been vary amiable to Beth – indeed, I was hard put to it to remember the last time that I had addressed a kind word to her although she was eternally catering to my needs. She was a good girl. I was nearing the shop. Beth had a sweet tooth. A large box of chocolates might begin to redress the balance.
Ben sat obediently while I entered the shop. Ian West was serving one of the local womenfolk. When she left, we had the place to ourselves. I had used the time to pick out the best from his modest selection of chocolates.
While he made change we swapped a few banal remarks about the weather. He seemed depressed; remarks about his airgun or my state of health would have seemed equally inapposite. He was handing me my purchase when I heard him gasp. I followed his eyes. Ben had followed me into the shop when the earlier customer opened the door and was standing, looking expectantly at Ian with his tail slowly waving. Dogs often get to know that a shopkeeper is a soft touch.
‘My God!’ Ian said. His voice was shaking. ‘For a moment, I could have sworn that it was Andy.’
‘What about Andy?’ I asked. I remembered, too late, that I had not seen Ian’s spaniel around for several weeks. And somebody had said something about Mrs Cory having ‘sold him a pup’.
‘Andy . . . had to be put down,’ Ian said. He turned away and became very busy with his shelves.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I know how it is.’ And I got out of there as quickly as I could. There are times when words are worse than nothing.
*
I had made up my mind to be evasive with Beth and Isobel unless and until circumstances forced me to be frank. We had had too many disappointments in the past and they would only have fussed. It was enough that I now had a chance of a normal life instead of only being fit to drift with the current. Some people are born to be passengers in life, but I preferred to be its captain.
In the event, the ladies were denied the opportunity to batter me with their questions. Sergeant Flodden was waiting for me on my return home. I took him into the sitting room and Ben came along with us, off the leash and beautifully to heel. There were signs that the room had been searched, but everything had been restored to comparative tidiness. Sounds of further searching came down through the ceiling.
The Sergeant sat and rested his notebook on his knee. His air, as usual, was maddeningly self-sufficient. Outside, the rain had started. The room was unusually dark. I switched on the lights before I sat down. The room looked cheerful and familiar again.
‘Have you found out anything useful?’ I asked.
He hesitated. ‘About the attempted poisoning? Slug pellets, as you suggested, and a popular brand at that, tucked into a nice piece of steak. The lab says that the steak had been frozen at one time, which may or may not be of help – always assuming that the dog-poisoning has anything to do with the crime.’
‘Poisoning somebody else’s dog is surely a crime in its own right,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes, of course.’ His voice suggested that it was a very much lesser crime than murder. ‘Almost every house around here has a freezer.’
‘You need one in the country. As far as I know, the Springs are the only vegetarians around here, if that’s any help,’ I added.
He thanked me and made a note of it, although I had the impression that he knew it already. ‘There were too many faint footprints around for us to make anything of them, and if the poisoner brought the steak in a box or a bag he took it away again with him.’
‘In other words, nothing,’ I said.
‘You could say so. But there was something else I wanted to ask you about.’
‘Go ahead and ask.’ I braced myself. Then I realised that he was watching me intently and I tried to relax my muscles. Ben must have sensed something. He sat up and nosed my hand, giving me an excuse to shift my position as I patted him.
‘We have been informed that you have an adaptor enabling small-bore ammunition to be fired through a shotgun.’
So there it was. I wished that Beth were there, if only to furnish moral support. If the Sergeant had known it, he could probably have got all that he wanted from me by means of a little gentle persuasion and the granting of some time for thought. By trying to push me, he was inducing an equal and opposite reaction. Like Beth, I decided not to lie if it could be avoided. ‘And just who gave you that supposed piece of information?’ I asked.
‘I’m not in a position to tell you that,’ he said. He tacked on one of his very rare Sirs as an afterthought.
‘Then I don’t feel obliged to comment,’ I said. ‘I’ve given you every possible facility for looking around. Did you find such a thing about the place?’
‘Not yet. Your partner let us into the shop, but she didn’t have a key to your gun-safe.’
‘You’ve already seen inside my gun-safe,’ I said.
‘Something might well have been locked away in it since then.’
I sighed, probably overdoing it, and gave him the gun-safe key. ‘I suppose it’s your job to be suspicious,’ I said.
The Sergeant permitted himself a faint smile. ‘When we’re suspicious, you’ll know it,’ he said. ‘At the moment, we’re at the stage of gathering every fact that we can. So, of course, we have to follow up every statement.’
There was a slight hesitation in there somewhere. I decided that I had found a chink worth hammering a wedge into. ‘A statement from whom?’
‘That is not the sort of information that we divulge.’ His voice, I thought, was very slightly defensive.
‘You’ll divulge it soon enough if you repeat any such allegation in court,’ I said.
He locked eyes with me. I tried to match his self-confidence. The Sergeant suddenly became more human. ‘If I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t. The information came in the form of an anonymous letter.’
‘Did it, by God!’ I said, although the news hardly came as a surprise. Beth, I remembered, had predicted something of the sort.
‘We’ve had a spate of them,’ the Sergeant said. ‘All apparently from the same source. Ruled capitals on plain typing paper. No fingerprints. We don’t usually like acting on anonymous letters. But very accurate most of the information has proved. Not always relevant, but accurate. Until now.’
‘As accurate as the information that Henry Kitts had an off-certificate rifle?’ I asked him.
He had the grace to smile, more openly this time, and to unbend a little more. ‘You know about that little fiasco, do you? Well, I suppose you would, Mr Kitts being your partner’s husband. As far as we know, that particular information was incorrect. But his air rifle looks very much like a firearm. It would be an easy mistake to make.’
‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘Anybody who knew about guns could tell the difference.’
‘Our letter-writer may not be an expert on guns—’
‘In which case,’ I said, ‘your letter-writer may have confused my blank cartridge adaptor with a rifle adaptor.’
‘That might be possible,’ he said. He was his stiff and uncompromising self again. ‘On the other hand, the letter-writer may merely have had a grudge against Mr Kitts.’
‘And against me.’
‘The paper is exactly the same as that in your office.’
I saw what he was getting at and I did not like it. I thought of asking him why I might have a grudge against Henry, but Henry’s tactless remarks in the hotel might well have been overheard. The subject was better avoided. ‘That paper’s almost universal,’ I said. ‘And I certainly wouldn’t accuse myself of anything.’
‘They usually do. Whenever we get a series of anonymous letters, the writer almost always turns out to have sent one to himself – or herself – as a blind. They think they’re being very clever. Nine times out often, the recipient of the least damaging letter is also the poison pen. You’re sure you don’t want to make any comment?’
He seemed to be admitting that the letter about my adaptor was the least damaging, but I had a mad thought that it might be necessary to produce the adaptor in order to prove that I was not a writer of anonymous letters. I pushed it aside. ‘The comment I’d like to make,’ I said, ‘would curl your ears. If you’re paying attention to anonymous letters, I don’t feel inclined to make any more comments until I’ve seen . . .’
‘Your solicitor?’
‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘Jim Daiches has been my solicitor ever since I came here. But I could hardly consult him about a matter touching on his wife’s murder, now could I?’
The Sergeant thought it over. ‘That would take more than a touch of brass neck,’ he said. ‘No, I suppose you couldn’t.’
‘I’ll find another solicitor if and when it seems necessary,’ I said. ‘Until then I’ll give you any help I can, short of commenting on the outpourings of anonymous letter-writers.’
Sergeant Flodden looked at me placidly for a few seconds and then got to his feet. ‘You could always ask Mr Daiches to recommend another solicitor,’ he said. ‘When it seems necessary, of course. I believe he intends to come and see you on another matter this afternoon. You could ask him then.’
He walked out of the room, leaving me quite as shaken as he had intended.
Chapter Thirteen
The Sergeant had departed, no doubt to report my stubborn refusal to fall on his neck and make a tearful confession, but the place still seemed to be infested with policemen. We tried to ignore them. Beth, who, out of the goodness of her heart, had been providing them with tea for most of the morning, called me for lunch. I told her that I was supposed to go onto a light diet. She sniffed and said that I never took anything else. She seemed to have accepted that my visit to the doctor had been routine; but a gift of chocolates might have set her thinking so I hid them in a drawer.
The rain had set in. I could have gone for a training walk with a few of the dogs, but I was taking seriously Dr Harper’s admonition about not being alone. Also, I had no wish to land Beth with a handful of wet and muddy spaniels to dry and brush. Instead, I took several dogs at a time into the barn for exercises suited to their stages of training. If I blacked out, I thought that one of them would surely have the sense to go for help, or at least to bark until somebody came.
I finished the afternoon session with the advanced class. I had them seated around me and four dummies were out in the piles of straw in the four corners of the barn when I became aware of the shadow of a figure from the bright doorway. It was not the time to be distracted, when temptation was high and a breach of discipline might set training back a week. I sent the dogs, one at a time by name, for the dummies in random order and seated the dogs again before looking round.
Jim Daiches was standing there in a wet, waxproofed coat, dark suit and black tie, upright in the middle of the doorway as though it would be disrespectful for a newly-made widower to lean against the doorpost. His round face was solemn and even his moustache seemed to droop in mourning, but his stance was firm and I would have hesitated before calling him a broken man.
‘Very impressive,’ he said. ‘Laura’s beauty queens can’t do more than pose elegantly wherever they’re put.’
I told the dogs to stay and went to him, choosing my words carefully as I went. ‘You have my sympathy,’ I said, which was no more than the truth. ‘You must be having a hard time.’
He shrugged. ‘Everyone’s being very kind,’ he said. ‘Well, perhaps that’s overstating it. The police are monitoring my phone but in their heavy-handed way they’re trying not to make life impossible. They’ve been passing on sympathetic messages. The Corys have been helpful. I haven’t seen anyone else until now, but there have been some conventional letters of sympathy through the door. I’m hoping that you can be another friend and help me out.’
‘If I possibly can,’ I said. ‘I was going to call but I decided that you’d have your hands full. Go into the house. If you see Beth, ask her to bring tea or something into the sitting room. Or help yourself to a drink if you fancy it.’
‘Tea would do,’ he said. His smile was hardly more than a twitch of the muscles around his eyes. ‘The Corys seem to be conspiring with the police to make me into an alcoholic. I’m a one-pint man, as you know, but every time I turn around somebody’s offering me another glass of medicinal brandy. My own brandy, of course.’
Either the police had finished with the garden or the rain had driven them indoors. I kennelled the dogs, hung up my coat near the kitchen boiler and joined Jim who was pacing around in the sitting room. Samson was curled up on the hearth-rug, taking full advantage of his status as an invalid and never bothering to move even when Jim had to step over him on every circuit.
Jim sat down – reluctantly, I thought, as though his mood was restive. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘It is hard. Laura . . . wasn’t always easy to live with, but she’d been a part of my life for more than twenty years. And you never quite forget the early days. You wouldn’t want to. Even as somebody ages, you can still see through the older flesh to an image of what they once were. I suppose we were both very different people then, very close, very wrapped up in each other. Perhaps if I’d made a better job of being a husband she might have stayed the tender person that she used to be.’ He paused and looked at the ceiling, too proud to wipe his eyes. ‘Nobody should have to go like that,’ he said.
