Sting in the Tail

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘You’re not making a very good case for him,’ I said.

  ‘I’m being honest. And showing need. Besides, you can cope, you’re famous for it. The other neighbour, the gorgeous one, used to look after him for short periods if my son was away, but I can’t ask her now.’ Charlie blew a sigh which was almost a raspberry. ‘I don’t know who she thinks she is, her husband’s only a postman.’

  ‘An expensive area for a postman, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘There was some money came with her, from what I heard. Probably her dad paid him to take her away – she has trouble written all over her, or as much of her as I’ve been able to study so far. Listen, I don’t have time to shop around, and anyway I don’t want Clarence too near here while he’s frightened, and for all I know somebody may be after him. I know you’d keep him safe and try to calm him down. You’ll do it?’

  ‘Hold your horses,’ I said. ‘What’s the sudden panic? We have a rule about not taking in boarders, and if I break it I’ll never be able to control Beth next time she takes pity on some widow with an overweight poodle and an invitation to Brighton for a dirty weekend.’ This last had been an actual example.

  Charlie cast an anguished glance at his watch. ‘The panic,’ he said, ‘is that my son and his wife, who usually take Clarence for me if I’m going away, went for a winter break in the French Alps and they got more break than they bargained for. My son broke his leg skiing and his wife doesn’t drive. He’s got unmissable business appointments next week and they’ve made a balls of the travel insurance, so I’ve got to fly out and chauffeur the pair of them home.’

  I hardened my heart. ‘Tell him to fly home and he can go back for his car after he’s got his cast off,’ I suggested.

  ‘But he took my car,’ Charlie said simply.

  ‘That’s different.’ I gave the matter some serious thought. I would have to help him out but at least I could extract a substantial quid pro quo. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll look after Clarence at no charge if you’ll do me a favour in return.’

  ‘Anything. Within reason,’ Charlie added hastily.

  ‘It’s within reason all right,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got a real log-jam coming up in January. We’ve got a dog qualified to run in the Spaniel Championship. That takes Isobel and Beth away. We’ve also entered two of the cockers in a puppy stake, which we’d hoped would set at least one of them on the track for next year, and that happens to coincide with the second day of the Championship. I was going to do that one, but it looked as though we were going to have to cancel, because a corporate booking came in for the shoot for the same day. One of the oil companies entertaining visiting American consultants. All the money in the world and just when we had a flat spot in the bookings. We simply can’t afford to let it escape.’

  ‘And where would I come in?’ Charlie asked suspiciously.

  ‘You run the shoot that day.’

  The look of horror on his face would have been excessive if I had suggested that he drive in a Grand Prix or run for Queen. ‘I couldn’t manage it,’ he said earnestly. ‘I wouldn’t know how.’

  ‘Nothing to it,’ I said. ‘Angus will control the beating line. All you do is meet the visitors, make sure that lunch is booked, collect the balance of the money, let them draw numbers, place the Guns however Angus has told you, dish out cartridges and make sure they get three hundred birds, not less and not too many more. They’re all experienced shots so you won’t have to worry about novices. You can shoot with them if you want,’ I added as an irresistible inducement. ‘And at the end, tell them how brilliantly they did, hand out a brace of birds apiece and take a brace for yourself.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Charlie asked weakly.

  ‘Almost. Act as barman between drives, but you may have Henry to help you there. We’ll arrange for several pickers-up, you just have to time things so that the pickers-up can hunt for any pricked birds and catch up again in time for the next drive. Pay off the beaters and the pickers-up and give them a brace each. Hand over the rest of the birds to the game-dealer. Solve any problems and deal with any complaints. If anybody gets dangerously fu’, send him to sit in one of the cars. I’ll write it all out for you.’

  Charlie was looking horrified again. ‘I couldn’t order a rich American to go and sit in a car!’

  ‘If he’s had too much to drink and he’s waving a shotgun around, all the others will back you up. Even Americans take loaded guns seriously. Will you do it or won’t you?’

  ‘Oh God! I suppose so.’ Charlie was looking past me. ‘Here’s my taxi. Clarence is in his kennel behind my house. You can collect him.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. I slapped a pen and a used envelope down on the table. ‘Write me out some sort of a note, in case somebody asks me why I’m stealing a spaniel.’ Charlie dithered between complying and rushing for his taxi. ‘Otherwise,’ I said, ‘I’ll just tell them that you’re paying me to take him away and abandon him on the M90. They’d believe that.’

  Charlie uttered a rude word and grabbed up the pen.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ I said. I hardened my heart. ‘Where was Hannah when Clarence’s tail was cut off?’

  Charlie jumped so that a perfect symbol for a hiccup appeared on the paper. He glared at me, but decided that to protest might be to rock the boat. ‘She was with me,’ he said stoutly. I did not believe him, but I thought that he had chosen the answer for its brevity rather than for any other reason.

  *

  The heart of the village, clustered around a small green in front of the hotel, was built of small stone houses and a pair of shops, with tall trees and the spire of a church for background. More modern if less picturesque houses had been added on the outskirts and Charlie’s house, as I remembered from the previous Saturday, was in a cul-de-sac of detached bungalows behind the hotel. His back windows looked across a patchwork of fields to the rising ground where our shoot began.

  I parked in the short drive, took out one of the nylon slip-leads with which my car is always well-provided and walked round the house.

  The accommodation that Charlie had supplied for Clarence stood in the corner of a back garden that was mostly grass with a surrounding border. It had begun as a wooden kennel in a conventional run of chicken wire. The wire had later been reinforced with welded mesh and the whole run had been added to or reinforced, using a variety of materials, whenever Clarence had made his escape over, under or through the wire, until now it would surely have been proof against anything from a swarm of bees to a grizzly bear. Only a Chubb lock was lacking, but I had to draw back no fewer than four big bolts before I could drag open the gate of heavy piping and corrugated metal.

  Clarence had retired deep inside the kennel. I could have opened the back of the kennel but, remembering the attack that he had recently suffered, I judged that he would be less frightened if I stooped to the small doorway and made coaxing noises, hoping that he would soon recognize my scent and remember me as a friend.

  I had been half aware of gardening sounds from beyond a boundary wall of decorative concrete blocks. The sound of digging ceased when I began my overtures to Clarence and a few moments later a mellow voice but with a nondescript English accent, definitely not local, said, ‘Who are you and what are you doing there?’ The voice sounded curious rather than angry or nervous.

  I straightened up. The woman beyond the mesh and the boundary wall was surely the culprit who had been throwing slugs into Charlie’s garden. She was, as Charlie had said, a looker. No, I amended my mental note. Not so much a looker. Her face was pleasing enough in an ordinary sort of way and what could be seen of her figure was good, full-breasted and round-hipped. But it was not just a matter of looks.

  Most women, no matter how seductive they may be when with a lover, also carry within them a neutral being who can speak or work with a man on equal terms – if she chooses to do so. There are others who carry the atmosphere of the bedroom with them and this was a perfect spec
imen. Thanks to some indefinable miracle of body language or pheromones, the windblown disarray of her dark hair and the faint sweat on her brow suggested the aftermath of a romp between or above the sheets rather than a stint of outdoor labour. I had to blink twice to assure myself that she was wearing jeans and a heavy sweater and not, as had been my first impression, something quite scandalous in lace and ribbons. Even in the garden, her make-up was perfect, and when she pulled off her gardening gloves I saw that her nails were varnished a dark brown to match her lipstick. The colour was unusual but it perfectly complemented the colouring of her dark hair and brown eyes. She knew how to make the most of her powers, this lady.

  It took me a second or two to recover my voice, which had unaccountably deserted me. She waited patiently, seeming accustomed to having that effect on men. ‘I’m collecting Clarence on behalf of Charlie Hopewell,’ I said at last. ‘His son’s had an accident on holiday and Charlie’s gone to help out. He wants me to take care of Clarence for him.’

  ‘Ah.’ Robbed of its context it could have been the sigh that follows orgasm. She nodded and smiled a tiny, knowing smile, suggesting strange intimacies. ‘I knew about the accident. Walter – Charlie’s son – and Helen live two doors the other side. That’s why Charlie came to live here when he retired. They leave the key with me when they’re away and Helen phoned to ask what was in the mail and to get me to go on keeping an eye on things. I keep Charlie’s spare key as well.’ She frowned, prettily. ‘Charlie usually got me to look after Clarence when they all went away together. He’d leave Clarence in his kennel and run and I’d feed him and take him out for exercise and clean up any doodies.’ She stopped and looked at me, obviously expecting an explanation.

  ‘I gathered that there had been some sort of a coldness,’ I said.

  ‘Because I accidentally popped a couple of slugs over the wall? He isn’t still holding that against me, is he? I forgot which way I was facing and thought that I was throwing them into the field. I explained that to Charlie,’ she said, in the tones of one who is grievously misunderstood. ‘I’m sorry if he’s still holding a grudge. I rather like the old boy. Charlie, I mean. Clarence I can take or leave. A Houdini among dogs, and when he gets out he chases my cat.’

  ‘He doesn’t escape from this run, does he?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so much since Charlie put the new gate on. More often from the house or the overhead wire.’ She lifted her brown eyes for a moment and I looked and saw that what I had taken for a clothes-line, although at high level, had a pulley to slide on it. ‘Charlie likes to give Clarence the freedom of the grass when he can.’

  It seemed to be a heaven-sent opportunity to pry a little further into Clarence’s mishap. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘Charlie felt that he could hardly leave Clarence in your care when you suspected him of chopping off Clarence’s tail.’

  She blinked at me, managing to turn the tiny reaction into a flutter of eyelashes. Her mouth made an ‘O’ which seemed to invite a kiss. ‘I never suspected him of any such thing. I wouldn’t. I like Charlie.’ The ‘O’ had become a complacent smile. ‘He flirts outrageously. I told him once that he was too old for that sort of behaviour, but he said that it was hardly his fault that I’d been born about thirty years later than fate intended.’

  ‘Charlie believes that you reported hearing Clarence screaming.’

  ‘Is that all?’ She stopped smiling and laughed nervously. ‘When the local bobby and the SSPCA man came round, I told them that I’d heard Clarence squealing. Well, it was only the truth, wasn’t it? Even Charlie admitted that Clarence had squealed. I wasn’t to know whether it was because of having his tail cut off or a tourniquet being put on the wound, which is what Charlie said later had been happening at the time.’

  ‘You couldn’t see what was happening?’

  ‘I was indoors. By the time I’d woken up to what I was hearing and dashed outside, it was all over. Charlie had Clarence in his kitchen and the doors shut. A few minutes later he put Clarence and the girl in his car and they were off to the vet.’

  ‘So you never saw the offcut of tail?’ I asked her. She shook her head. ‘You don’t know whether it was ever found? And you didn’t see what direction Clarence came home from?’

  ‘If he really was coming home. No, I didn’t.’ She came closer and leaned her elbows on the wall and her bosom on her forearms. I tried not to admire too obviously the pair of high-slung spheroids, and wondered how one could know how something would feel just by looking from a distance. ‘Look, what is all this?’ she asked.

  ‘Charlie’s a friend,’ I said. ‘He swears that Clarence came home with his tail docked and bleeding, but there seem to be some wild accusations flying around. I’d like to get at the truth.’

  ‘Well, I’ve told you all I know.’ She looked at me consideringly. ‘I was just going inside for a cup of coffee. Would you care for one? My husband’s away just now. I’m Carol, by the way. Carol Haven.’

  As an invitation, accompanied by some more eyelash fluttering, it was pretty blatant. It was not an invitation which I was inclined to accept. Although my general health was recovering by leaps and bounds, Beth was still more than enough woman for me to try and keep pace with. And, anyway, I was already due to meet Angus. I thanked her and promised to join her for coffee on some other occasion.

  Mrs Haven opened her eyes wide in surprise and turned away. I watched her rear view until the back door hid it from me. Her figure might be a gift of nature, but her walk, which had been perfected after years of practice, was meant to be admired and I saw no reason not to oblige.

  When I looked down, Clarence had emerged from his kennel and was nosing my leg in a subdued version of his usual friendly manner and cautiously wagging what was left of his tail. When he looked up at me, it seemed to be knowingly – one dog of the world to another. I slipped the lead round his neck and took him out. He dragged his feet as we neared the gate and then bolted into the back of the car where he seemed soon to be quite at ease with the other dogs.

  Clarence would probably settle more happily if he had some familiar object with him – his bedding, perhaps, or a bowl. I went back round the house to the kennel. Mrs Haven was already back at her gardening and did not look up.

  I returned to Charlie’s front garden carrying a rolled-up dog-mattress of denim cover and polystyrene beads, and found more drama developing. Hannah, Charlie’s daughter, key in hand, was heading for her home front door. She was clean and tidy but had made no attempt to glamorize herself. To me, fresh from the hothouse sophistication of Mrs Haven, Hannah’s artless youth would have come as a breath of fresh air after a suffocation of deodorant, except that she was moving with the stamping gait of someone in a furious temper and her expression would have stopped a charging mastiff in its tracks.

  From the neighbouring house on the further side from the luscious Mrs Haven, an older woman emerged. ‘Do come back, you silly child,’ she called. There was another face at the window.

  Hannah paused and looked round. ‘I’m not a child,’ she shouted. ‘And no way am I coming back. Not with you thinking what you’re thinking.’

  The woman came out onto the pavement, but stopped when it was clear that Hannah intended to run if she approached any closer. ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ she said more softly. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. Do come back.’ She was a sensible-looking woman in middle age, expensively but unfashionably dressed.

  ‘How dare you tell me to stay away from the Dicksons’ dog?’ Hannah demanded indignantly. Tears were staining her cheeks. ‘I’ve known Sandy for years. If you think that I hurt Clarence, you must be off your trolley. Clarence is my friend, the only friend I’ve got.’

  ‘Do please be sensible,’ the woman begged. She cast a horrified look around the street, but most of the listening ears were discreetly out of sight. ‘You can’t possibly stay there on your own. Your father left you with me. What is he going to say if I let you stay alone in that house and try to do your own cooking?�
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  ‘I didn’t hurt Clarence, whatever you think,’ the girl retorted in a choked voice, ‘and I’m not coming back with you. I may not be much of a cook, but I can spread things.’ Hannah looked wildly around and saw me hovering uncertainly at the corner of the house. For a moment I thought that she was going to bolt for home and shut out the world. But she stood her ground and began to calm down. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You’re John. You’re a friend of Dad’s.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Dad was going to ask you to look after Clarence. Did you tell him that you’d do it?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve just put him in the car.’

  Hannah’s brow cleared. She smiled. ‘You go in for spaniel training. You have lots of dogs, don’t you?’

  ‘Oodles,’ I said.

  ‘And I remember your wife,’ Hannah said. ‘Betty, is it?’

  ‘Beth.’

  ‘That’s right. Beth. She’s nice. She was showing me how to teach Clarence to walk properly at heel and not pull.’ She came closer. ‘Can I come with Clarence and stay with you and Beth until Daddy gets back? He said that he’d only be away for a few days.’

  The woman was looking scandalized and yet at the same time relieved. I wasn’t at all sure what Beth would say if I went for a dog and brought back a girl. ‘I suppose, if it’s all right,’ I began weakly.

  ‘It might be the best answer,’ said the woman helplessly. ‘Once she makes up her mind like this she never changes it. I’m afraid I was a bit ham-fisted.’

  I looked at my watch. Angus would be getting up a head of steam by now. ‘I have to go and swap cars,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back quite soon. If you’re sure that it’s what you want, can you pack all that you’ll need and be waiting for me?’

  Hannah nodded, quite happy. ‘I’ll be ready,’ she said.

  ‘Bring country things mostly. Thick sweaters and welly boots.’