Dog in the Dark (Three Oaks Book 1), page 18
‘We’re settled where we are. I think we’d like to see him,’ she said. Her husband nodded.
‘Try not to show emotion,’ I said. ‘Don’t move or speak until I tell you.’
I called to Beth. She came in with Ben walking tidily to heel, off the leash. He never glanced at the other occupants of the room but I saw his nostrils twitch. He checked when he sensed who was present but at a sharp word he came back to heel. I was mentally kicking myself. Ben’s vision was already deteriorating and at least a part of his learning difficulty had been his inability to read the body language which often forms an important element in a command.
Beth walked him twice round the room. His eyes had found his owners and never left them. Beth stopped and Ben sat.
‘Now call him,’ I said. ‘And make a movement. A dog’s sight is much more sensitive to movement than to shapes.’
Mrs Sturges said, ‘Come, Ben,’ and lifted her hand. Ben looked up at Beth for approval and then walked gently forward and laid his head on his mistress’s knee. It was a performance quite different from his usual impetuous bounce. I had put a lot of work in on Ben, but not enough to explain such a change. I can still only think that those sensitive instincts had drawn some message out of the change in our attitudes to him.
‘It’s amazing,’ Mr Sturges said. ‘We hoped that you could help, but we never expected so much. And to find, after all that, that he’ll go blind . . . I’d like to keep him.’
‘So would I,’ said his wife. She looked at me.
‘What would you do,’ Sturges asked me, ‘if he were yours?’
I remembered pinning Dr Harper down with a similar question. He had my sympathy now. ‘If Ben were part of my stock in the kennels,’ I said, ‘I would put him down straight away. But if he were my personal dog I’d keep him, no matter what difficulties I might have to face.’
‘It wouldn’t be cruel?’
They were turning to me as if to a prophet, expecting answers which they could take as Gospel. It seemed very important that I should say the right things. ‘That’s a matter of opinion. If I ever lose my sight,’ I said, ‘I’ll still put up a hell of a fight if somebody wants to put me out of what he believes to be my misery. A dog doesn’t ask much. To be fed and loved and walked and allowed to sleep in comfort. To be part of a family and to know his place in it. And they depend much less on sight than we do. They live in a world of scent and hearing. The brain is smaller than ours and because the other senses take up more than their fair share of it only a tiny portion is available to process the signals from the eyes. They’re colour-blind except at close range and, although they’re quick to detect a movement, most of the unmoving world around them is probably only a greyish blur of unfocused shapes. For a dog, to go blind may be less than the loss of your hearing would be to you. But Ben will lose the early warning system which a dog gets from having vision sensitive to movement. You’d have to protect him from surprises.’
Mrs Sturges was rubbing Ben’s head behind the ears. ‘We’ll keep him,’ she said.
‘But you’re sure you know what you’d be taking on?’
‘Not all of it,’ she said. ‘We’ll find out as we go along. I think we owe him that much.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘My first reaction was that if you didn’t want him I’d keep him myself, but we’re in business here. My partner would have kittens if I started to fill the kennels with liabilities. Now that we know what we’re working towards, give me a week to polish him.’ But I remembered that in a week I would be down in London for more blood tests. ‘Make it a fortnight. Then I’ll give you a lesson in how to keep him up to scratch and how to cope as his sight deteriorates. After that, you can take him . . . home.’
Beth showed them out. Ben looked after them longingly but seemed to accept that he must stay. I found that I was blinking rapidly. Poor Ben had found a breach in my emotional defences. And, I told myself, I was unusually vulnerable after my collapse. Pure sentimentality, of course.
When she returned, Beth leaned back against the door and made ashamed use of her handkerchief. ‘I’m being stupid again, aren’t I?’ she said.
‘Not stupid at all,’ I said. ‘I feel exactly the same. Come and sit down beside me for a minute.’
She sat down at the other end of the settee. I reached out and captured her hand. It was warm and dry and absolutely right. This was the first time that I could remember making more than accidental physical contact with her and, once she had got over the initial strangeness of it, I felt a current flowing.
‘Now,’ I said. ‘It’s time for a talk. I can guess what you did. But before I get carried away on an orgasm of curiosity and apprehension, for God’s sake tell me how and why.’
‘I should be helping Isobel,’ she said.
‘I’m an invalid. You’ve got to humour me.’
Chapter Sixteen
Beth looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. ‘It might be better if I didn’t tell you,’ she said at last.
‘Don’t be—’ I broke off. Isobel had reminded me not to throw accusations of stupidity around. ‘— over-cautious,’ I amended. ‘I can’t go on evading questions for ever. One of these days, our friend the Sergeant, or somebody further up the ladder, will put me on the spot and if I don’t know what you’ve done or said I may put my foot into it up to the neck.’
I waited.
‘What do you think I did?’ Beth asked quietly.
‘Isobel says that you said something about two being able to play at that game.’ I looked round. The door was closed and there was nobody at the window. Even so, I lowered my voice. ‘My guess is that that makes you the writer of the last anonymous letter. I hope you were careful.’
‘I wore Isobel’s surgical gloves and took a piece of typing paper from the middle of the pack,’ she said. ‘And I used a ruler to make capital letters. Was that careful enough?’
‘Quite enough, I should think. And you put the adaptor under the coal in Mrs Cory’s shed? That’s why you cleaned your shoes carefully when you got home?’
‘Yes. That’s where it had been. You said yourself that it was mucky. There was black dust on my duster after I wiped it. Well, I can tell coal-dust from household dust or gun-oil. I . . . I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Poor Mr Daiches was in trouble which he didn’t deserve and it was upsetting you and I couldn’t let it go trailing on for ever and . . . and . . .’
She was still sniffling away. It seemed a lot of emotional reaction to be no more than the aftermath of Ben’s salvation. I pulled gently on her hand and, as if absent-mindedly, she slid along the settee until I could put an arm around her. She leaned against me and her tension gradually drained out – through my arm and away to earth, it seemed.
‘Calm down,’ I said, ‘and tell me all about it. But, for Heaven’s sake, why Mrs Cory?’
‘Because it was her. I was right, wasn’t I?’
I put behind me any temptation to snap at her. Whatever she was, she was not stupid. Isobel had been right about that. Perhaps she had been right about the rest of it. ‘If Henry has the story straight,’ I said, ‘you were absolutely on the ball.’
‘I thought that it must have been Mr Cory at first,’ she said, ‘until I realised that he’d been in the pub at the time of the murder and again when Samson was poisoned. It had to be one of them. Nobody had been near us except the poisoner since Samson went into the isolation kennel, but when Mr Daiches came here he knew about it. And he said he hadn’t seen anybody except the Corys.’
‘He’d spoken to Mrs Spring on the phone,’ I pointed out.
‘That’s why I offered to phone up and ask whether they could take the brood bitch and her pups. I asked Mrs Spring, sort of casually, whether she’d heard anything about gastro-enteritis and she said that she hadn’t.’
I thought about it. The argument might be logical but it was hardly enough evidence to justify quite such drastic action. ‘It could as easily have been Jim Daiches himself,’ I said. ‘He seems to have had the motive. And he often came home to lunch in mid-week if he was seeing clients. He could have borrowed my adaptor.’
‘Yes, but at the time when Samson was poisoned he was the one person who couldn’t have gone wandering around without the police or somebody noticing. I mean, he was the husband of the murdered woman, the police caravan was next door, the police were in and out of the house and he’d stopped going outside. Anyway, he wasn’t lying when he talked to us. I could tell. And there’s another thing. He had a shotgun. Well, you’d know more about these things than I would, but how would you use a Coke bottle as a silencer on a double-barrel gun?’
It was a point which had not occurred to me and I felt a momentary pang of indignation that it took a chit of a girl to point out the obvious. ‘With some difficulty,’ I said, ‘although the police must have thought that it could be done. Was that all you had to go on? It doesn’t seem a lot of evidence to justify quite such drastic action.’
She shook her head so that her hair tickled my face. ‘You can make any one thing sound silly,’ she said reproachfully. ‘But it was a whole lot of things coming together. Look at it this way. Suppose that one of us was in an accident or had a loss of memory. Suppose that it was me and you came to identify me and the police asked you how you knew it was me. How would your describe me?’
‘Very pretty,’ I said, ‘with dark hair and looks about fifteen.’
‘Really?’ She thought about that for a long moment and squeezed my hand against her. ‘Well, we can go into that later. If they asked me the same about you, I could only say that you were very thin and didn’t look well but that you had an infectious smile when you cared to use it. Do you see what I mean?’
‘You mean that it’s not individual items that matter but how the whole thing comes together.’
‘Sort of. You look at somebody, you notice and you know. What I was talking about earlier was what made me wonder about Mrs Cory. It was the whole picture coming together that made me sure. At first I couldn’t think why she’d have done such a thing. And then when Mrs Kitts started talking about RD and Lucasta of Coneyshaw it all seemed to click together. Do you want me to go over it?’
‘I think you’d better,’ I said. I was beginning to have a vague idea of what she was talking about but I hoped that she would never realise just how vague it was.
Beth wriggled round into a more comfortable position, still hugging my hand against herself. ‘I may not be very bright,’ she said, ‘but I never forget a dog. I knew that one of Mrs Cory’s bitches was shot, but I’d seen her walking Culrosa since then. She and Dalgetty looked almost the same – they had the same sire in common. Their markings were identical. I couldn’t point to any feature that you could point to as being special to one or the other. Yet there were little differences of expression and pace and the way they held their heads. I wasn’t in any doubt. But Isobel Kitts said that Culrosa had been shot. Well, she remembers all about pedigrees and records, the way I remember the dogs themselves.
‘I could only see one explanation. Because Culrosa was inclined to pass on retinal trouble, Mrs Cory must have been intending to phase her out and to bring on one of Dalgetty’s pups to take her place. That would only be sensible. But Dalgetty was shot. And Mrs Cory’s younger bitch was a full sister of Culrosa. Mr Cory’s business hadn’t been earning much lately, and there was going to be a lawsuit about the dead sheep and so on, so the money from breeding would be important, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. One or more litters a year, each of up to eight or ten pups from a winning spaniel strain, would be worth real money. ‘But Mrs Daiches was there. She’d have known which dog was shot.’
‘Mrs Daiches never had eyes for anybody else’s dogs. She’d accept whatever Mrs Cory told her. So what Mrs Cory did was to tell the Kennel Club and everybody else that Culrosa had been shot, and pass off her pups as Dalgetty’s. Dalgetty had taken some prizes when she was younger and had produced some prizewinning pups. She was clear of congenital defects. Mrs Cory could go on raking in the money until she could buy or breed replacements.’
I gave a surprised whistle. I must have nearly deafened Beth, because she put up a finger and wiggled it in her ear.
‘Breeders can sometimes be unscrupulous,’ I said, ‘but that takes the biscuit. And she’d get away with it . . . until RD showed up again. As in Ian West’s young dog,’ I remembered suddenly.
‘Exactly,’ Beth said. ‘When she sold a puppy, she probably said a few soothing words about congenital defects but she wouldn’t have put anything in writing. You know what they say about a verbal guarantee not being worth the paper it’s written on? Well, my guess was that the woman visitor, the one Mr Daiches saw speaking to his wife and Mrs Cory, was one of the purchasers whose dogs were going blind. She was raising hell and insisting on her money back or something, and Mrs Daiches was backing her up. Mrs Cory probably disputed the diagnosis or tried to blame bad feeding or an accident, or else just told the woman to go and play in the traffic. And she may not have been the first one.’
Belatedly, I was catching up with her. ‘And that gave Mrs Daiches the clue she needed to puzzle it out for herself,’ I said. ‘Whatever I’ve said about her blasted dogs, she wouldn’t have stood for deliberately passing on a strain of RD. She may have been misguided but at least she cared. That was why she put off making any signed statement.’
‘What do you think she’d have done about it?’ Beth asked.
I wondered what I would have done in the circumstances. ‘She’d certainly have told her old friend to stop breeding from Culrosa,’ I said, ‘and not to show any dogs until she’d put matters to rights. She probably told her to buy back every defective puppy. In fact, God knows what she’d told her to do, but whatever it was it would have rocked her rather precarious financial boat for her.’
‘And hurt her pride,’ Beth said. ‘Mrs Cory may even have threatened her – Laurie Duffus heard Mrs Daiches’ voice telling somebody not to come near her . . . “until this is settled”.’
Another thought caught up with me. ‘I’ll bet that’s what her row was about with the vet. A valuable bitch had been shot. But she’d need a valuation for insurance purposes. If she passed the corpse off as the less valuable bitch and the vet knew about the genetic defect, the vet’s valuation would be low. Mrs Cory would be hoist with her own petard. She’d be fizzing mad.’
‘She does have a rather low fizz threshold,’ Beth said.
‘And while she was wondering how she could dig herself out of the mire, it occurred to her that Mrs Daiches’ death would not only remove the immediate threat but would make fresh breeding stock available to her.’ It was really Beth’s story to tell but I felt a compulsion to join in, just to show that I also was capable of reasoning. ‘But Mrs Daiches, sensibly, wouldn’t let her come within reach. Her husband’s shotgun was available, but there would be no mistaking the slam of a twelve-bore. The neighbours would probably have come running. Then, when she came up here in search of dogfood or something, she found the shop unlocked. She recognised the adaptor. She had used Neill’s one, years before. But what would she do for ammunition? Mine was all locked up.’
‘Two-two ammunition wouldn’t be difficult to come by,’ Beth said. ‘I mean, whatever the Firearms Act says, men carry it in their pockets, drop it around or leave it in dishes on hall tables.’
Out of her sight, I made a face. I had been guilty of all those sins. ‘She couldn’t count on something like that if she wanted cartridges suddenly and in a hurry,’ I said.
She shook her head, tickling my nose with her hair again. ‘But I thought – and you can tell me if I’m wrong – that if she’d seen the bullets in Joe Little’s car and knew that she could take one or two of them, and then she spotted your adaptor when she found the shop open, it might occur to her to take one or two of the blanks for your dummy launcher. From what Mr Kitts said, she used to be quite familiar with all those things. If she put the adaptor into her husband’s shotgun and pushed a bullet into the chamber of the adaptor and put a launcher blank up behind it . . . Would that work?’ she asked anxiously.
‘I should think it would work to perfection,’ I said. ‘Those blanks kick like hell and throw a half-pound dummy nearly a hundred yards. If that’s what she used, no wonder she put a bullet right through Mrs Daiches.’
‘Would it be noisy?’
‘I think it might. But Neill Cory’s single-barrel shotgun would take a plastic Coke-bottle for a silencer without much difficulty. From memory, the neck of one of those bottles is about the size of a twelve-bore barrel, give or take a little sticky tape. I don’t know how quiet that would make it, but if Laurie Duffus was banging in nails at the time I don’t suppose that anybody would notice. Hammering tends to be rhythmical and it would be easy to synchronise the shot with one of his hammer blows. The neighbours would be trying to close their ears to the hammering, so if they noticed anything they’d put it down to Laurie having produced an extra loud wallop or his hammer having skidded off the head of a nail.’
‘That’s pretty much what I was thinking.’ Beth screwed her head round and looked at me from a few inches. Her lashes looked enormous. I thought that I had never realised before how much a brown eye could say. ‘But then, if Mrs Daiches wasn’t killed outright, why go into the garden and strangle her? Why not another bullet?’
I was ready for that one. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘if you’re not familiar with adaptors, you don’t line up the extractor properly with the extractor in the gun.’
‘That’s the thing that pushes out the fired cartridge?’
‘Right. So when you open the gun, the whole adaptor tube comes up instead of the extractor just pushing up the empty cartridge case. She’d have to wait until she got home and under a light before she could puzzle it out and extract the fired case. What beats me is what all the dog-poisoning was about.’
