Sting in the Tail

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Give me your phone number,’ the woman said to me. ‘While you’re gone, I’ll phone your wife and make sure that it’s all right with her.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said. Very sensibly, the woman wanted to check that I really did have a home and a wife and that Hannah would not be destined for the white slave trade. ‘Let her know that I’m only helping out in an emergency.’ I groped in my pocket for a business card. ‘You must be Mrs Turner,’ I said.

  She nodded briskly. ‘Mildred Turner.’ She studied my card. ‘Oh, you’re John Cunningham. Charlie Hopewell’s mentioned you.’

  For lack of any other answer, I shook her hand before driving off.

  Chapter Three

  ‘What on earth was I expected to say?’ Beth exploded as soon as Hannah, with Clarence on a lead, was out of earshot. ‘A strange woman phones up to ask if it’s all right for you to bring Charlie Hopewell’s delinquent daughter to stay with us. How could I say, “No, it bloody well isn’t. I’ve more than enough to do already and I don’t want somebody around that I have to watch all the time.”’

  ‘She isn’t that bad,’ I said feebly. ‘I don’t think you can call her delinquent. Whenever I’ve encountered her she’s seemed docile and helpful and perfectly capable of following instructions. It’s just that she resents her father’s lingering authority and she has a quick temper.’ Beth is usually peaceful and accommodating. To meet this resistance from her was a new and sad experience.

  Beth produced a glare which, coming from her youthful and gentle face, was as disturbing as a snarl from a china doll. ‘You don’t know anything about it. So she has a temper. That could mean anything or nothing. She’s probably the one who cut off Clarence’s tail, and you want to let her loose here, where we have – how many spaniels is it?’

  ‘They’re all docked already,’ I reminded her. ‘And when we discussed it earlier you said that you didn’t believe that she did it.’

  ‘I think I said that I didn’t want to believe it,’ Beth said. ‘She might not stop at tails, next time it might be ears or noses or . . . or worse. And it isn’t just the dogs. There’s Sam.’

  ‘Now you’re going overboard. She wouldn’t touch Sam. She didn’t touch Clarence. She’s the one person he’s completely at ease with. He’d surely react differently if she’d cut off his tail.’

  ‘That at least seemed to be true,’ Beth said, although secretly I did not refine too much on it. As soon as he was well away from the scene of the assault on his rear appendage, Clarence had reverted to his real, basic self – a happy and affectionate dog worried only about where the next meal was coming from. He had gone off with Hannah, securely on a lead, while they both explored their new temporary home. But dogs sometimes disbelieve or blame themselves for a single act of cruelty from a beloved owner.

  Clarence was also showing a definite tendency to cling close to Hannah and to us, but we were not fooled. The confirmed wanderer dog never reveals any wicked intent, but gives a perfect impression of one who has long outgrown such foolishness; and then suddenly just isn’t around any more. But the wanderer will, more often than not, stray from somewhere close to home so that return to the fold, when tired, satisfied or hungry, will be easy. Clarence, moreover, had probably been taught a salutary lesson about the perils of straying. All the same, rather than take any chances, we put him into our most secure accommodation and resolved to walk him only on the lead. This was apparently the regime at home and Hannah accepted it.

  Next morning, before the chores were finished, Mrs Turner arrived in a smart little Suzuki. Her conscience must have been pricking at relinquishing Hannah into a stranger’s care, because she seemed relieved to find that all was well and that Hannah was contentedly exercising dogs while their runs were cleaned.

  I wanted a warm before leaving for Foleyknowe, and Mrs Turner agreed to join me for coffee. I took her into the cluttered, friendly kitchen rather than the more austere sitting room, and she settled happily in one of the basket chairs.

  We spoke about Hannah. ‘She’s not a bad girl, you know,’ Mrs Turner said.

  I decided to delve deeper. ‘My wife’s a bit nervous about having her around,’ I said. ‘You know what young mothers are like.’

  Mrs Turner seemed amused. ‘Bless you, there’s no viciousness in the girl. Quite the reverse, in a way.’

  ‘After all,’ I said, ‘she was expelled from her school.’

  ‘They asked Mr Hopewell to take her away,’ Mrs Turner said gently. ‘It isn’t quite the same thing. She came across another girl bullying a youngster and she took exception. There was quite a lot of sympathy for her point of view, I believe, but it was felt that quite such direct, physical reprisal was more than could be tolerated. And then, if your wife’s been hearing stories about the police being called in . . .’

  This was terrible. ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘There was nothing much to it.’ Mrs Turner half-smiled, reflectively. ‘A local lad made an over-enthusiastic pass at her, one dark night, and found that he’d bitten off quite a lot more than he could chew. There was more shouting than actual bodily harm, but blood had been shed – not much and only by her fingernails – so they were both given a stern warning. The young man is still inclined to jump out of his skin when spoken to suddenly, which is all to the good because everybody except his parents had been expecting him to come a worse cropper, the way he was carrying on.’

  As I saw Mrs Turner to her car, I decided that Beth would get only a censored version of the disclosures.

  Clarence was not among the dogs loaded into Angus’s Land Rover. Given the use of that vehicle (and provided that fresh rain did not make the steeper slopes impassable), I could transport, control and instruct several of our dogs in training without neglecting Angus’s chores, but Clarence had not been entrusted to us for training and I judged that he would recover his nerve sooner if kept far away from the site of his unhappy experience, wherever that had been. He might also keep Hannah occupied and out of Beth’s hair.

  At the last moment, Henry, who had walked over with Isobel, decided to join me. I accepted his company, glad to have a gate-opener and somebody to do some of Angus’s work for him while I got on with the real business of the partnership.

  We travelled in silence, each busy with his own thoughts, until we had crossed the Tay and were well on our way out of Dundee.

  ‘Do you really intend to find out what happened to Clarence?’ Henry asked suddenly.

  ‘That’s putting it a bit strongly,’ I said. ‘I have a feeling that something more is wrong, but I’m not planning to mount an investigation. It isn’t my business, it might make enemies and I couldn’t do it anyway. But, yes, I would like to know the answer, for our peace of mind, also for Charlie’s sake and so that that poor kid won’t have to go through life with a huge question-mark hanging over her head. If I get the chance to ask a question or two I’ll take it. Even if that doesn’t produce any answers, the fact that somebody’s asking questions may deter whoever did it from a repeat performance.’

  ‘You hope,’ Henry said. ‘Fair enough. In that case . . . I’ve been doing a little thinking – assuming, of course, that the deed wasn’t done by one of the family. Charlie Hopewell said that Clarence seemed to be coming back from a generally northward direction?’

  ‘So he said.’

  ‘That makes sense. There’s nothing much to the south to attract a dog and Clarence would surely have been seen if he’d come home through the village, girning and dripping blood.’

  I began to feel slightly sick. I tend to be sensitive about canine suffering and the picture Henry was conjuring up revolted me. ‘If he was losing much blood, he couldn’t have come very far,’ I said.

  ‘I asked Isobel about that. The blood vessels in the tail aren’t very major. He needn’t have been losing much blood. It depends how sharp the blade was.’

  ‘According to Charlie, the vet said “sharp”.’

  ‘He’d have meant sharp as opposed t
o Clarence having been caught up in machinery or run over by a train, not razor sharp. You know how your face can bleed when you nick yourself with a razor? When a cut’s made with a blunter blade, the capillaries close up and there’s a lot Jess bleeding. Isobel said that you’d have the devil of a job severing a tail-bone with a sharp knife unless you found a joint, which would be difficult with a struggling dog. Isobel said that it would be more a job for a metal-cutter or a pair of pruning snips, something like that. Or a hatchet.’

  ‘You mean, he needn’t have bled much and so he could have come quite a long way?’

  ‘Precisely. Or,’ Henry corrected himself, ‘not precisely precisely. How far is “a long way”? About as long as a piece of string or as far as a drunk can walk before he falls down. We’ll move on. If you were a dog, would anything attract you to the fields between Charlie’s house and our shoot?’

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ I said, ‘those fields are part of the shoot. We pay a peppercorn rent for them because they’re so utterly useless for holding birds. If we could get on top of the predators we might release a few partridges—’

  ‘Or if there were trees and you could teach partridges to roost in them like any other sensible bird,’ Henry put in.

  ‘Failing which,’ I said, ‘we only bother to include that ground at all because our pheasants sometimes stray there and it helps to stop anybody else going after them before the birds realize that they’ve made a mistake and wander home again. And very occasionally, if the wind’s right, we can turn things round and do a drive in that direction. The stubbles have been ploughed, the rest of it was mown for silage and there isn’t a decent hedge anywhere away from the roads. There’s damn all to attract a dog, not even any sheep.’

  ‘And nobody could have been working in the fields?’

  ‘Not for any reason that I can think of.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Henry. ‘And much the same applies to the land across the two roads. But alongside the roads, that’s different. You’ve got hedges and rough banks where a spaniel could have a lovely hunt for rabbits and wandering pheasants. You’ve got scattered houses and cottages where there might be a bitch in season or a cat to chase—’

  ‘Or unguarded food,’ I said, ‘bread thrown out for the birds and the universal dustbins.’ I was managing to think myself into the mind of a spaniel, a knack which often helped me with training problems. ‘Children to play with . . .’

  I came to suddenly. I had made the turning off the main road without noticing it and we were running into the village. I took the right-hand fork, which seemed to be heading towards Glamis or Forfar, but which was only posted to ‘Milkeerie’, a destination of which I had otherwise never heard. ‘Thanks, Henry,’ I said. ‘You’ve clarified my thinking. Not much on this road, though. One farmhouse, a smallholding . . . and a house I never noticed before,’ I added as we passed an old stone villa tucked in between two strips of trees. ‘Amazing what you don’t see when you’re driving. There are rather more dwellings on the other road and some of our regular beaters live there.’

  ‘A rough bunch,’ Henry said, ‘but good to their dogs. You could do worse than enlist their help.’

  I grunted a noncommittal sort of agreement although privately I had my doubts. One or two of the beaters seemed ever ready to lay a stick across a misbehaving dog, whether their own or somebody else’s. There had been one or two near-fights arising from such causes and I knew that Angus was in the habit of sending certain men to opposite ends of the beating line for that very reason.

  ‘You’ve got one thing wrong,’ Henry said. ‘Pull over.

  I drew up on the verge. ‘What?’

  We had left the village and where we had stopped the road was on a slight rise. We had a panoramic view of the farmland between the village and the hills. It had turned into one of our better winter days, clear, sharp and calm. Henry pointed to a field in the distance, just below the first hill. ‘Sheep,’ he said.

  He was right. The white dots were sheep. They were hidden from Charlie’s back garden by the same rise that we were now on. The driver sees much less of the view than does the passenger; even so, I would have expected to know that they were there – unless, of course, they had only just arrived, which seemed unlikely. ‘Bill Finlay’s the farmer,’ I said. ‘He usually spends most of the summer stockpiling hay and silage. Then he buys in stirks in the autumn, fattens them under cover during the winter and sells them in the spring when the price is high. He doesn’t usually bother with sheep. Somebody must have offered him a thief’s bargain.’

  ‘Does Clarence chase sheep?’ Henry asked thoughtfully.

  ‘Not that I know of. He’s never shown the least interest in them while he’s been near me. But sheep can take fright and farmers can jump to conclusions. Afterwards, the dog isn’t around to deny the charge and a strand of wool between the teeth would be all the justification that was needed.’

  I put Angus’s Land Rover into gear and we jerked into motion.

  ‘What you’re saying assumes a bullet,’ Henry said. ‘But from what the vet said, Clarence’s tail wasn’t shot off. And I don’t see how a farmer could hope to get his hands on an alleged sheep-worrier – which, of course, is why the law empowers him to open fire.’

  ‘I don’t think that Bill Finlay has a rifle,’ I said, ‘but let’s assume that he does and that he took a shot at Clarence, didn’t give enough forward allowance and nicked or severed his tail.’

  ‘The vet wouldn’t describe that as being a cut by a sharp instrument.’

  ‘No,’ I conceded. ‘But Clarence is soft, even for a spaniel, and he likes and trusts people. He wouldn’t know where the pain came from. He’d go straight to the first person who called him, for succour.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Henry said. ‘If I were a dog and I suffered a sudden and unexplained pain in the arse, I’d bolt home by the shortest route, avoiding people.’

  We had already passed the by-road to Bill Finlay’s house, but I could picture him clearly, a youngish man, hard-working but slovenly, not very bright and certainly not one to consider the feelings of other people, let alone animals. The possibility that any of our dogs coming down after a pricked bird might be met with a bullet was frightening. We might have time for a word with him on the way back.

  I stopped at the shed and heaved a couple of bags of barley into the back of the Land Rover, refusing Henry’s help in deference to his years. For a different reason I discouraged him from taking Angus’s ATV. I had seen Henry having fun on it once before and egg production had definitely been down that spring.

  Climbing the hill by the route that Angus had taken two days earlier, I could see an equally battered Land Rover in the middle distance. I turned off through an open gate and crossed a stubble field. Duggie McKillop, the tenant farmer on the eastern half of the shoot, was at work replacing some rotted fence-posts, his collie sitting tight nearby. Duggie was a middle-aged man, skinny and creased. For no very clear reason I had got on well with him from the start, perhaps because we had always discussed our plans with him before a shoot and dropped in a brace of birds afterwards. Our strict control of foxes may have helped. Duggie kept sheep and twice had had a lamb decapitated by a fox before its body had even emerged from the mother ewe.

  Duggie put down his maul – with relief, I thought – and wiped sweat from his face while greeting Henry and myself. We chatted for a minute about Duggie’s setaside plans and the possible use of a flushing bar, damning the Government and the EEC for their joint folly, before I found an opening.

  ‘The Friday before last,’ I said, ‘in mid-morning. Did you see a spaniel roaming around loose?’

  ‘One of yours?’

  ‘No,’ I said, stung on the raw. ‘Definitely not one of ours. It was from the village. Somebody seems to have docked its tail for it.’

  Duggie tutted. He took off a moth-eaten old cap and scratched his bald spot. ‘Couldn’t have seen it that morning,’ he said. ‘I wasno’ her
e. See, there was a roup on near Errol and the wife and I went wi’ Bill Finlay. A dashed waste of time; there was nocht there that I wanted and Bill bought a puckle sheep that I’d no’ ha’ gi’en tuppence for.’

  That, if confirmed, would seem to be that. The sheep had not been around when Clarence lost his tail, and two of the nearest three farmers had been away at the sale. Duggie was ready for a chat, but we tore ourselves away and I nursed the Land Rover up to the crest.

  Angus had filled the feed hoppers the day before, but an occasional habit of pheasants is to prefer one particular feeder, emptying it and then either standing around and starving while waiting for it to be refilled or else scattering over the boundary, ignoring a dozen other feeders of identical appearance and contents. While I took two dogs onto the nearest grass for a training session, Henry paid his way by setting off with two carrier bags of feed and, on a thong from his belt, what we referred to as the archbishop – a super-priest or club for dealing with any fox found in a snare.

  Giving the dogs a brief rest between exercises, I looked down on the road by which we had arrived. On this side of the road stood Foleyknowe House and two farmhouses, but beyond the road was the house which I had noticed for the first time. Somewhere among a scattering of substantial outbuildings, sparks were flickering; possibly a welder, but more probably from a mechanical grinder. Evidently the buildings were in some kind of industrial use.

  The first rule of dog-training is never to prolong it until boredom sets in. Henry had only been waiting at the Land Rover for a minute or two when I returned with my pupils. ‘Not a sign of a fox,’ he said, ‘except for some splashes of feathers that look to be several days old.’

  We crossed the saddle. Henry climbed down stiffly to open the gate in the farm boundary and walked ahead to chase the pheasants out of the track. Given an unobstructed run, I coaxed the Land Rover past where Angus had nearly bogged down. I stopped at the second group of feeders and released the other pair of dogs while Henry set off on his patrol again.