Before doing anything else, I decided on an experiment. I pulled the bullets from three cartridges and took my air rifle out to the log pile. The bullets flew neither as fast nor as accurately as waisted slugs, but they flew. Through a pump-up air rifle, they would be highly lethal. The remains of the cartridges, I buried.

  The rain had been heavy but was now no more than a drizzle. The Moss would be swampland. I took Ben into the barn. He had almost forgotten the lessons which I had drummed into him. We started again from the beginning and even made a little progress. I persevered until I was sure that the lessons were being imprinted, and stopped as soon as I thought that there was a danger of his becoming bored and rebellious. I was back in the kitchen, sitting in one of the fireside chairs and holding onto the arms through an attack of dizziness, when Isobel came in.

  She waved a four-figure cheque under my nose. We needed a few dozen cheques like that during the year just to keep going, but the bulk of our sales of trained dogs would come in the summer. Despite what Joe had said, I never failed to be surprised and relieved when purchasers paid up such sums for a trained dog. When you took the value of a puppy and added on the time and feeding needed to bring it to maturity and perfection our prices were not unreasonable, but would-be customers did not always see it that way. Sometimes, one of them would prefer to buy a pup and train it himself, only to bring a confused dog back to me in the hope that I could undo the damage. Those, I overcharged disgracefully and they usually thanked me for it.

  Isobel knew of my concern for the dogs’ futures. ‘The man’s a syndicate member, wants to get the dog used to him by next season. Seemed sensible. I think Oboe will be all right there.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said. I liked Oberon. He was a good dog who had come through his training with flying colours. If he had a fault it was that he over-reacted to correction. A sensible man could be counted on to allow for that. Beth showed much the same sensitivity but I was not always sensible.

  *

  The Tuesday was quiet, or at least as quiet as any day ever is around a busy breeding kennel. We had one dogfight, over nothing, necessitating stitches. Ben began to make sustained progress. Samson went back to his kennel. The young dogs seemed inattentive; a year-old bitch turned out to have come suddenly into her first season. Isobel had decided that Samson’s enteritis had not been of the infectious sort but, to be safe, we burned a sulphur candle in the isolation kennel and disinfected its run. The police left us alone, to wait and worry.

  And public interest in the murder had both attracted the curious and reminded the serious of our existence. We had four sets of visitors who were evidently just browsing, one reporter pretending to be a customer and an aspiring trainer who was looking for a young pup and prepared to pay for it. Man and pup went off happily together, seemingly delighted with each other. The reporter, failing to get a story, wrote a feature about the kennels which was later to bring us enquiries all through the spring. If this went on, we would be able to make a big saving on advertisements.

  It was not until the Wednesday that all hell broke loose.

  That day also started quietly enough. The pups were fed and the dogs exercised. Isobel and I gave some individual training while Beth cleaned the pens and refilled the water-dishes. Isobel decided that I was off-colour, so she took the advanced class off to The Moss while I taught the juniors on the lawn. Looking back, I believe that I was bored.

  After lunch, I gave Ben half an hour to himself. To my surprise he remembered the training of the previous days and seemed to take pleasure in showing it off. He even learned one or two new lessons. I was so pleased that I decided to show his paces before he backslid again.

  Isobel was back and catching up with the accounts and other paperwork. She had carried her papers into the kitchen, where she could command more table-space than anywhere else in the house as well as being handy for tea and gossip, but when I entered she was talking earnestly with Beth – about me, I suspected from the silence which fell immediately.

  I was too exhilarated to pay attention to what was their usual pattern of behaviour. ‘Look at this,’ I said. I walked him round the room at heel, sat him and walked away, called him, sent him out again and sat him at a distance. As an encore, he lay down on command. He was responding well to vocal commands but tended to ignore signals.

  Beth gave him a round of applause which he seemed to appreciate.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Isobel said. ‘He’ll never win a field trial, but he’ll make somebody an acceptable pet after all. I never thought you’d be able to do anything with the daft beggar.’

  She snapped her fingers and Ben went to her, expecting praise and a petting. Isobel produced the miniature torch which was always clipped to her dress and looked deep into his eyes. ‘Oh dear!’ she said on a falling tone.

  Beth’s smile was wiped away.

  I felt a cold hand grip the back of my neck, the hand of doom. ‘He hasn’t, has he?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘I’m afraid so. RD,’ Isobel said. ‘It’s at an early stage, but the signs are there. I’ll get out my ophthalmoscope later and make sure.’

  I felt stunned by the let-down. Retinal dysplasia, along with hip dysplasia and progressive retinal atrophy, is the skeleton at the feast where several of the gundog breeds are concerned. It is a congenital condition and very serious.

  ‘That’s an awful shame,’ Beth said. ‘After all your work. And he’s such a beautiful dog. His owners will be heartbroken.’

  ‘Try to say something helpful,’ I told her. In my disappointment, I sounded brusquer than I had intended and I saw her flinch. Isobel gave me a small headshake. I wanted to tell Beth that I was sorry but the right words would not come.

  Ben looked from one to the other of us with his soulful eyes, wondering why our voices had changed.

  ‘I meant to examine him earlier,’ Isobel said, ‘but I didn’t get around to it. When you gave me his pedigree, I noticed that he had Champion Lucasta of Coneyshaw for a great-granddam. There was RD on both sides of her pedigree and it’s cropped up with unpleasant regularity in her descendants.’

  Ben had come to me for reassurance and I kneaded the back of his neck while I tried to divert my mind from the dark future which faced him – if, indeed, he had any future at all. ‘Doesn’t Mrs Cory have one of Lucasta’s granddaughters?’ I asked. ‘I seem to remember her shooting her mouth off about having a Supreme Champion in the pedigree.’

  ‘She did,’ Isobel said. ‘That was Culrosa, the one that got shot. Just as well, if you ask me. Lucasta’s granddam also shows up in Culrosa’s sire’s pedigree so Culrosa got it with both barrels, you might say. Stupidest bit of breeding I ever came across.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Beth asked.

  Isobel’s chin went up. Any doubt cast on her phenomenal memory for pedigrees always annoyed her. ‘About what?’

  ‘Are you sure that Culrosa was shot? I thought that I’d seen her with Mrs Cory since then.’

  Isobel relaxed. ‘That was probably Dalgetty,’ she said. ‘They were half-sisters by the same sire and nearly identical. But Dalgetty’s dam came from a clear line, so she’s probably all right. Or she was until she was poisoned. There seems to be a curse on Olive Cory. She’s left with the younger bitch which is a full sister of Culrosa. She’d be out of her mind if she bred from her.’

  ‘She bred from Culrosa,’ I reminded her.

  ‘All right, so she’s out of her mind.’

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ Beth said thoughtfully. ‘But I worked for Mrs Cory for a few weeks before I came here, the time she broke her leg, and—’

  There was a knocking at the back door and Henry’s voice was raised on the threshold. ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the traveller, knocking on the shithouse door,’ he called as he pushed his way inside. His face, always of a high colour, seemed to have been picked out in tones of scarlet.

  Isobel blinked at her husband. ‘What on earth have you been drinking?’ she enquired, without censure.

  Beth, unasked, got up and put coffee on to percolate.

  ‘Beer, mostly, until my bladder capacity was exhausted,’ Henry said, flopping into a chair. ‘But news and rumour, in roughly equal proportions, were flying around the hotel at lunchtime and I thought I’d hang on until I’d collected most of it.’

  ‘And until the hotel ran out of whisky,’ Isobel said.

  ‘Didn’t run out,’ Henry said. ‘Just, Flora wouldn’t serve me any more. Anyway, I think I’d got most of it.’

  ‘Most of what?’ we said together. ‘The whisky?’ Isobel added.

  ‘The news. Did you know,’ Henry said, ‘that one of those plastic Coca-Cola bottles makes a dashed good silencer? Neill Cory said so. He was on his way to see somebody so he called at home for lunch and looked in for a drink. He says he used to do it often when he had a little four-ten shotgun. Went poaching at dawn, he said. Jus’ a minute,’ Henry added. ‘Got to have a pee.’ He heaved himself up and left the room, with surprising steadiness considering his condition.

  ‘But would that work with a two-two rifle bullet?’ Beth asked me.

  ‘I’m sure it would,’ I said. ‘You’d hardly hear a sound if he used the subsonic cartridges.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Low-velocity. The ones which don’t break the sound barrier. They’re quiet to start off with. Even the noise of the high-velocity cartridges would be damped down.’

  Beth pointed a finger at me. I half expected her to say Bang! ‘That’s why a shot wasn’t heard,’ she said. ‘And why the police were asking whether Mrs Daiches was addicted to Coca-Cola.’

  Her deductions were too obvious to require a comment. ‘I expect they found a Coke bottle with a hole in the bottom,’ I said. ‘Probably in somebody’s dustbin.’

  The pipes hissed as Henry flushed the loo. We heard him coming back. When he was safely back in his chair, Isobel, who had gone back to her accounts, looked up and said, ‘What else did you hear?’

  ‘They’ve found a two-two bullet,’ Henry said. ‘A bullet, not an airgun slug. The pathologist told them that it had come out at an upward angle, so they started on the roofs. It turned up lodged between two slates. Not the Daiches house. Laurie Duffus’s.’

  I felt a hollowness inside. ‘I suppose it’s the right one?’ I said. ‘Two-two bullets can travel for miles. It could have been there for years, left over from somebody shooting crows.’

  Henry shrugged. ‘Could be. My information’s tenth-hand. But rumour has it that there was still a trace of blood on it. Anyway, it went to the forensic lab for study. Rifling marks, if any, and all that clever stuff.’

  ‘Did you find out anything else?’ Isobel asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Henry said. He winked, looking like an elderly satyr. ‘This next snippet has set the tongues wagging. Jim Daiches has been a naughty boy. He’s been rolling around with his secretary.’

  ‘I can’t say that I’m surprised,’ Isobel said. ‘The way Laura treated him, she was asking for that sort of trouble.’

  ‘Well, I’m bloody well astonished,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve seen the lady. She lives in Auchtermuchty,’ he added, winking at me again.

  ‘Not interested,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen her too.’

  ‘But Auchtermuchty’s conveniently on the way to Edinburgh. It seems they found a shotgun hidden away in the Daiches house. And they’re sure that Jim used to have a two-two adaptor for the gun. They think he kept it.’

  ‘But he was in Edinburgh,’ Beth said.

  ‘Ah, but was he? When the police checked up, he didn’t register for his weekend course until around eight p.m. on the Friday and nobody seemed to remember seeing him around before then. Plenty of time to have killed his wife and driven to Edinburgh. Not my own idea,’ Henry added hastily. ‘It’s what I’m told people think the police are thinking. According to Flora’s boyfriend, Jim now admits he took time off to visit his lady-love for a bout of how’s-your-father and she backs his story, but then she would, wouldn’t she? If she wanted him free to marry her.’

  This was terrible. Jim’s words and manner had stuck in my mind. I could recall every inflection and I would have sworn that he was telling nothing but the truth. I caught Beth’s eye and knew that she felt the same. I wanted to think, but the vagueness was creeping back over my mind. It was as if my brain had been tarred and feathered.

  ‘Do they have him in . . .’ My mental confusion was increasing. Now, suddenly, I found that the word custody refused to come. ‘. . . custard?’ was the nearest that I could get to it.

  Even Henry, whose tongue was only just within his control, was looking at me oddly. ‘He’s “helping the police with their enquiries”,’ Henry said. ‘And we all know what that means.’

  ‘We’ve got to . . .’ My eyes were still locked with Beth’s. I found that I was unable to pull them away. Words seemed to have dried up.

  Beth seemed to have equal difficulty in breaking off our eye-contact. But she got up suddenly and looked at the ceiling. ‘This has gone on long enough,’ she said clearly. ‘And I’m going to put a stop to it.’

  My hearing was also behaving oddly. I could have sworn that she said ‘shop’ rather than ‘stop’. My mind was still playing with the connotations of the words when I blacked out, suddenly and completely.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I think that I came to in near-darkness. Somebody was moving in the room. But my mind was taken up with a macabre dance of disembodied faces. The bed felt comfortable and familiar so that I drifted off to sleep again, but not before Joe Little’s square face, wearing an expression far from his usual look of tolerant kindness, had swallowed the other. I could see his hands and he carried a dummy launcher in each of them.

  It was full daylight when I woke up although the room was dimmed by drawn curtains. Physically I felt drained, but mentally I was alert although light-headed. Isobel, in a blue dressing-gown, was sitting in the basket-chair, doing her nails. Something heavy was lying across my feet.

  ‘What the hell?’ I said.

  She jerked her head up, looked at me anxiously and then let a slow smile wash over her face. ‘That’s my boy,’ she said. ‘I had a bet with Henry that those would be your first words. How do you feel?’

  ‘I feel much, much better,’ I said. I tried to sit up, but the effort was too great. The heavy object on my feet turned out to be Ben. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘He was more worried than any of us. He refused to come out, so I left him. He couldn’t do any harm except perhaps to pass on a flea or two, and he might even do some good. Stroking a furry animal is supposed to be good therapy.’

  ‘Tell me what’s been going on.’

  ‘How much do you remember?’

  It was a difficult question. If you have forgotten something, how do you know it? ‘I think I remember everything up to the moment when Beth said that she was going to do something. I was on the way out at the time and I didn’t really understand her. What happened after that?’

  ‘I didn’t understand her either,’ Isobel said. ‘I still don’t. After that, you flopped gently forward onto the table. I made you more comfortable and checked that you still had a pulse and weren’t choking on your tongue. Beth was already at the phone and screaming for Doc Harper. He was at home. He said he’d told you that a blackout had always been on the cards; but he must have been worried because he made it up here in about three minutes.’ Isobel broke off and shook her head at me. ‘You young idiot, why didn’t you tell us that you were on a new treatment and might flake out, instead of letting us think you’d died all over the kitchen table?’

  Trying to watch her face was too great a strain on my neck. I let my head flop in the pillows. ‘I didn’t want to keep finding the pair of you behind me, waiting for me to fall backwards,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes? Typical! Some people aren’t man enough to accept help from women. You think that it impugns your virility, or something. The doctor said that he’d have put you into hospital except that he didn’t think they’d have you after the nuisance you made of yourself once before. Beth was getting in a panic at the idea of being left alone with all the dogs plus a moribund employer. She kept using words like coma and Dr Harper kept using longer words which he meant to be reassuring but which made it sound even worse, so I kept translating into veterinary terms which I thought she’d understand more easily. I suppose I made you sound like a puppy with distemper, but it helped to calm her down. Even so I had to agree to stay for a night or two to help out. Henry’s sleeping at home but coming here for his meals.

  ‘And talking of meals,’ she said, ‘I feel like a cup of tea.’ She waited, expectantly.

  I realised that I had not eaten since lunch on what I presumed to have been the previous day. ‘I feel a bit empty,’ I said.

  She beamed at me. ‘Doc said not to force food on you until you asked for it. He said that the worst would be over when you did.’

  ‘I’m asking,’ I said. ‘But first, tell me. Are the police waiting to interview me?’

  ‘Of course they’re not,’ she said, pausing in the doorway. ‘What could you tell them?’

  She vanished before I could answer her or ask any more questions and I was left to puzzle over a thousand conundrums. Ten minutes later, she brought me in a tray of scrambled eggs, toast and tea. The smell drove all anxieties out of my mind. Ben wanted to share my breakfast with me, but my need was the greater.

  ‘I’m still hungry,’ I said, swallowing the last of the toast. ‘In fact, I’m ravenous.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for more than a year to hear you say that,’ she said. Something in her voice made me raise my head again. She was blinking hard. ‘But it’s light diet for you today. You can get up for a little while this afternoon if you feel up to it, and have a full diet tomorrow if you can take it and keep it down.’

  I wanted to get up straight away and raid the kitchen, but my limbs still felt like spaghetti. ‘Go on telling me what happened,’ I said.

 

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