Sting in the Tail

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Not in my book,’ I said, rather dazed by this sudden outpouring from a usually reticent man. I was also feeling my apprehension growing. If an anti-field-sports fanatic was becoming active against gundogs in the area, our kennels would be high on the target list. And the fanatics, who were given to such activities as desecrating graves and releasing mink into the countryside, had, as Charlie said, not shown any qualms about attacking dogs. Whenever a dog was maimed, until the culprit was caught, I always lived in hourly expectation of disaster.

  ‘I don’t know what they’re on about,’ Charlie resumed gloomily. ‘It’s not as if many of them are vegetarian. They don’t mind sinking their teeth into a bird which has been reared in semi-darkness, never been out of a cage in its life and has been slaughtered, with minimal consideration, as soon as it’s old enough to eat. Yet they bitterly resent my shooting a bird which was released into the wild for that very purpose and has had at least a few months, possibly several seasons, to enjoy it, and which stands at least an even chance of living to enjoy one or two more.’

  I looked round, but the socializing was still going on around the mobile bar and Angus was filling out game-cards. ‘Do you remember an old song of the Beverly Sisters?’ I asked Charlie. ‘The recurring theme was, “If there’s something you enjoy you can be certain that . . . It’s illegal, it’s immoral or it makes you fat.” If to illegality, immorality or high calories you add undesirability, I go along with it all the way.’

  ‘You surely don’t include field sports as undesirable?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘No, of course not. I was thinking that, for anyone who doesn’t do anything himself, the most fun that he gets is interfering with the activities of anyone he doesn’t agree with, whether or not he understands them. That’s what I was calling undesirable.’

  ‘But why do they enjoy it?’ Charlie asked again. ‘Why?’

  It was a subject to which I had given some thought. Charlie, who was working the depression out of his system, deserved an answer. ‘Nearly a hundred years ago,’ I said, ‘things changed. But up until then the nobs, who were also the rich, could spend most of their lives hunting or shooting, and so of course they tried to keep it for themselves. Naturally. That’s how things were in those days. Poaching was savagely put down.

  ‘That all altered early this century, with changes both in the law and social reform. But attitudes don’t change as quickly. They get handed down from generation to generation, not necessarily in words – a frown or a sniff is enough to tell a child what its parents think. So, to the left-wing city-dweller, shooting is still the rich man’s privilege and never mind that you and I have shot with chefs and window-cleaners. What gives credibility to that view is that good, driven shooting, like today’s, does cost money.’ I punched my own knee, quite painfully. ‘Of course it bloody does! If you want the best of anything, be it a car or a watch, a wine or a woman, you pay accordingly. But if you happen to have the money and you choose to spend it on a Rolex or a Ferrari, the bigots don’t give a tuppenny fart. But just try spending it on conservation on a grouse moor . . .’

  ‘Cool down,’ Charlie said, half laughing. ‘I’m the one with the excuse to get hot under the collar. I only told you so’s you’d be careful.’

  I took several deep breaths and began, as he said, to cool down. ‘We’ll be careful,’ I promised. ‘But it was a damnable thing to happen.’ Another thought came unbidden into my mind. ‘A nutter running around attacking spaniels would provide a perfect alibi for owners who want to get around the new legislation.’ Charlie suddenly became very white and looked as though he might be sick at any moment. He turned his back quickly on where the rest of the company were laughing and chatting. ‘Don’t take me seriously,’ I said. ‘I was only making a stupid joke to lighten the atmosphere.’

  ‘You weren’t to know,’ he said. He looked up into the rafters of the barn and went on very quickly in a choked voice. ‘But the whole business has brought me nothing but trouble. Quite apart from the pain to Buggins here –’ he pointed down at Clarence ‘– and the shock to us all. He injured his tail once before and I consulted my vet – McMahon – about docking. But McMahon’s is mostly a farm animal practice and he turned out to be fanatically opposed to docking. He lectured me for an hour on it being a prime instance of the sacrifice of a dog on the altar of the vanity of dog-owners. Then I had to take the dog to him to . . . to tidy up the mess and I think he must have tipped off the police and the SSPCA, because they’ve been harassing the hell out of me and I know they’ve been asking around about my views on the question of docking. They must think I chopped my own dog’s tail off so that McMahon would have to make a proper job of docking it.’

  ‘Nobody who knows you would believe such a thing,’ I said.

  ‘But what about those who don’t know me? A sheriff, for example?’ he asked.

  ‘They surely can’t drum up enough evidence for a prosecution.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Charlie said glumly. ‘But they’re getting bits and pieces. The lady next door, for instance. We’d fallen out over trivial things – I had to speak to her about popping slugs over the fence. What made it more annoying is that I rather like her, quite apart from the fact that she’s the best-looking woman for miles around.’ Charlie still looked moody but a hand came up, without intention on his part, to give his moustache a twirl. ‘She’s been telling them that she heard him squeal. Well, of course, he did squeal while I was applying the tourniquet but, the way she tells it, you could believe that he was screaming in agony.’

  I wanted to break off the discussion which was making me feel slightly sick, but I had an idea that talking about it into a sympathetic ear was doing Charlie some good. ‘Couldn’t you show them the trail of blood arriving?’ I asked. ‘Or even track it back to where it happened?’

  ‘I tried. But the rain had washed any traces away. And then I tried taking him for walks, to see if any particular place gave him the collywobbles.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘He’s still scared to go most places outside the house. When I want to walk him, I have to take him out in the car first. He seems to like it here. He associates this place with happy times, so he’s a lot more confident and relaxed.’

  Here at least I could help. ‘Walk him here any time,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell Angus.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Has it stopped him wandering?’

  ‘For the moment. It won’t last,’ Charlie said gloomily.

  I could think of nothing useful to say. The company was preparing to break up. ‘Come and collect your brace of birds,’ I said. ‘And then I think we’d better run you home. Unless you’re joining the others at the hotel?’

  ‘Drop us at home,’ he said. ‘I’m not in the mood for dining out and Hannah will be looking for me.’ He shook hands politely all round, tipped Angus and put Clarence into the back of my car.

  I let the pair of them out at Charlie’s front gate. Hannah must have been watching from a neighbour’s house, because she was on the scene before Clarence, who was being careful not to knock his tail, had made a cautious descent from the car. A pretty girl with all the physical charm that belongs to girls in their late teens, her manner towards her father was reserved but I had never seen much sign of the rebelliousness which worried Charlie so much. My own reading would have been that she was ready to throw off the shackles of family and school and had not yet learned restraint. She seemed to be happy by nature and had an infectious smile when she cared to use it. I thought that if Charlie would treat her as a full-blown adult she could respond. It might not yet be too late.

  ‘You could take her to the dinner,’ I said. ‘The others wouldn’t mind.’

  Charlie shook his head without speaking. I thought that he was perhaps being too sensitive. But Hannah was his daughter, not mine, and there were so many traps into which a parent could fall. I felt a sudden clutch of fear for Sam.

  Hannah knelt down beside Clarence and wrapped her arms a
round him. Clarence tried to restrain his tail but it wagged in spite of him.

  Hannah looked up at her father. ‘He’s all right?’ she asked sternly.

  ‘He’s fine, Poppet.’ Charlie gathered up his gun and his brace of birds. ‘Take him inside and we’ll give him his dinner.’

  The three of them went into their house without looking back.

  Chapter Two

  Angus was waiting impatiently for his wife in his Land Rover outside our house. The invaluable Mrs Todd had taken several messages, fed the puppies and kept Sam’s body and his soul together, but there were a host of tasks which we could neither ask nor expect her to undertake. Beth dashed around in a whirl of activity, dealing with Sam and the dogs and somehow contriving to whizz a meal through the microwave, assisted by Isobel and, after the nap which they combined to force on me, myself. We ate, rather after our usual time but happy in the recollection of a successful day during which none of the dogs had erred more than we could rectify within the week; and our clients had been pleased.

  Our one customary indulgence at Three Oaks was for the partners, plus Henry and anybody else who happened to be around, to settle in the sitting room when the work was done, to mull over the day gone by and to plan for the future over a drink which was, by then, overdue after a day of sustained and often sober effort. Henry, who had an uncanny instinct in such matters, had been hosting the visitors at dinner but arrived by taxi as I poured the drinks.

  At first we were content to enjoy the deep chairs and the firelight and to congratulate ourselves that another perilous day had gone by without a serious hitch. Nobody had behaved dangerously, no dogs had run riot (except that Phinny had taken off after a rabbit which bolted from under her nose and she had ignored the stop whistle for the first few yards of the chase. It had been a small fault but one which would ruin her chances in competition. Some one-on-one retraining in the rabbit pen would be necessary, followed by a careful reintroduction to the real world). We moved on to plan ahead.

  The last few weeks of the season were almost on us. There would be a short break in the competition programme over the festive season – to allow the judges to recover from the effects of all the gifted bottles, so it was said – after which would come the biggest stakes of the year, climaxing for us in the Spaniel Championship. Meanwhile, at Foleyknowe, the most important shoots of the year were still to come and would have to be managed with equal precision and good fortune if the shoot’s accounts were to finish in the black for the year. Had we bitten off too much, we wondered sleepily? Time would tell.

  Time would also produce fresh problems. Our legislators, together with the Ministry, had made obligatory the European concept of setaside land. This they (the legislators and the Ministry) were hailing as a masterly step towards wildlife conservation; but in a single stroke they had snatched disaster from the jaws of success by decreeing that setaside land, after being left wild to attract all the wildlife in the area, should be mown to the ground just when it would be full of nesting birds and hares with young – and again in July, in case any had escaped.

  Over the second or third round of drinks, discussion of this piece of bureaucratic brilliance and of various ways by which we might at least try to minimize the damage to our wild stock of pheasants naturally led Isobel to her hobby-horse of tail-docking. I had meant to keep the story of Clarence to myself, but once Isobel had revealed as much as she knew about it, it was impossible for me not to tell the rest.

  Beth was a fervent advocate of the docking of working spaniels, but she was always the first by a short head to empathize with an injured dog. She exploded. Only a bloody-minded, sadistic psychopath, she said hotly, would even contemplate committing such an outrage.

  I was inclined to agree. I had a feeling that we were seeing the tip of a very nasty iceberg, although at the time I had no way of knowing how nasty. The others couldn’t quite go so far. Henry expressed it for us. ‘You may be right,’ he told Beth. ‘On the other hand, if there is such a psychopath around it’s remarkable that he has only broken out to the extent of one spaniel’s tail. After all, there are other possible explanations. Not probable ones, I hasten to add, but no less unlikely than your sadistic, bloody-minded psychopath.’

  Beth snorted in disgust. ‘I defy you to think of anything even faintly conceivable,’ she said angrily, waving her hands and spilling sherry.

  Isobel had been watching with amusement as the argument developed. ‘Hold your horses,’ she said. ‘Don’t I remember something about Charlie having a rather wild daughter?’

  Beth’s face dropped. ‘I’d forgotten,’ she said. ‘How awful! I met her once. She seemed such a nice girl.’

  The idea of Hannah as the assailant had no sooner entered Beth’s head than it had begun to take root. I realized suddenly that Charlie’s defensive attitude towards Hannah had been out of fear that the same reaction would be general. ‘I’ve met her several times,’ I said. ‘She’s never misbehaved while I was there, but piecing together what Charlie told me and what I’ve heard around, she’s going through the rebellious phase that we all went through at some point in our teens. She’s slightly hyperactive and definitely over-emotional and I’ve heard stories of a temper which she’s only just learning to control. But she’s not daft. Not as daft as Clarence, to be honest.’

  ‘All the same,’ Beth said, ‘although I hate to say it, and I can’t imagine that sweet girl taking a knife to Clarence, it does make a sort of sense. Dogs can be damned annoying if you don’t understand how their minds work. Clarence annoyed her and the famous temper went off pop.’

  ‘I’ll bet you the neighbours are saying the same thing. I think that that’s what’s worrying Charlie most. Not that he thinks that she could have done it – she loves Clarence and he seemed pleased to see her – but that it may spoil her relationships with other people and set back her development.’

  ‘I see all that,’ said Beth. ‘I wouldn’t have believed her capable of such a thing. Yet I don’t believe that there’s any more credible explanation.’

  ‘Do you want to make a bet on it?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Definitely no,’ I said quickly. Beth would have felt obliged to back her honour, but I had no wish to see our precious funds diverted in the direction of Henry, who never made a bet unless he was very confident of winning it.

  ‘A pity,’ Henry said. ‘Never mind. Let’s look at it methodically, all the same. One, somebody had a grudge against Clarence or wanted to deter him from paying any more visits. Is Clarence a randy dog?’

  ‘Charlie told me that he was,’ said Beth. ‘He seemed quite proud of him. Owners usually are. And it’s usually true, because most male dog’s are randy by nature.’

  ‘I can confirm it, in Clarence’s case,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him try to mate with a dead vixen.’

  ‘There you are, then. Some owner of a bitch or bitches got fed up with Clarence coming around with an evil gleam in his eye. Cutting off his tail was a rather ruthless way of saying, “And don’t come back”, and rather less drastic than murder or castration. That’s more believable than a psychopath, isn’t it?’

  ‘Much,’ I said.

  ‘And more credible than the Hopewell girl being the culprit?’

  ‘That also.’

  Although he was stretched out in his chair so that his long legs almost crossed the room, Henry managed to sketch a bow. ‘Two,’ he said, ‘somebody has a grudge against Clarence’s owner. I remember him. A mild man, but even mild men can make enemies. It could have been a threatening gesture or a secretive way of hurting him, but it might even turn out to be a subtle way of trying to provoke him. I have known such a thing. If somebody had a motive, such as an impending legal action, for wanting friend Charlie to blot his copy-book . . .’

  ‘I think my psychopath’s more likely than that,’ Beth growled.

  ‘Perhaps it’s my devious mind at work,’ Henry conceded cheerfully. ‘We’ll let that one stick to the wall. Three, conceive of som
ebody on the run, perhaps an escaped prisoner. He’s hiding out in a barn or shed when Clarence comes round and won’t go away.

  ‘Then, four, let’s consider accidents.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Beth said. ‘You can’t cut off a dog’s tail accidentally.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘But, Henry, it was a soaking wet day. Nobody would have taken out a tractor or tried to cut silage, anything like that – even if it was the right time of year, which it wasn’t.’

  ‘If a man’s hand or foot can be cut off accidentally,’ Henry said, ‘so can a dog’s tail. Imagine a chainsaw. Or a man using one of those petrol-driven brush-cutters, like a strimmer with a saw blade instead of the nylon cord. They’re noisy, so the operator has no warning. Imagine it. Say the dog’s hiding under a bush with just his tail sticking out. Or the dog comes running, tries to turn away but skids down a muddy bank. The man’s left with a severed tail. He doesn’t want any trouble and he doesn’t know whose dog it was anyway. The dog can’t give evidence against him. He tosses the tail into the boiler or buries it and says nothing.’

  ‘You may as well stop droning on now,’ Isobel said. ‘I think you’ve made your point.’

  Henry grinned at her. He had a startlingly youthful grin for such a well-worn face. ‘I’ve almost finished. I’ll offer you one more suggestion. The vet said that it was a clean cut. But you open up a much wider field of possibilities if you think of somebody trying to cover up some other accident. Imagine, for instance, somebody engaged in an illegal activity. Poaching, perhaps. Clarence’s tail gets punctured by a two-two bullet or caught in an illegal trap. Or –’ Henry’s face lit up ‘– soaked in blood. Would he come to a stranger?’