Sting in the Tail

by Gerald Hammond

  As if that was quite enough talk for one day, he turned his back without another word and set off up the garden.

  We returned by the path along the garden walls. The spaniel put up a pheasant, but we were still too near the dwellings even for a shot in the air. Just beyond the cottages, Henry stopped suddenly. A tumble-drier had been discarded and was lying on its side, rusting away and Henry pointed at it.

  ‘They’d probably be only too pleased if you took it with you,’ I said. Henry ties flies for his trout fishing, and copper wire from electric motors is always in demand. But he shook his head in annoyance and pointed out a vertical line of spots on the white enamel which could have been blood.

  ‘Wouldn’t the rain have washed it off?’ I asked.

  ‘That storm came from the east,’ Henry said. ‘This side would have been sheltered. But I don’t see how a dog with a severed tail could make a vertical line of spots.’

  ‘Perhaps it was standing upright at the time and it’s been knocked over since,’ I suggested. But when we moved the white box-shape it was obvious from the long-dead grass beneath that it had lain where it was for some time.

  Henry gasped suddenly. ‘Take another look,’ he said.

  When I looked I saw that there were more and fresher lines of droplets. Henry showed me his palm. There was a clean but shallow cut welling blood. We found a sharp sliver of metal at a corner of the tumble-drier. Some other person or animal had fallen foul of it.

  I rolled the dead machine over so that the razor-edge of steel was in the ground. It would soon rust away. ‘Come on back to the Land Rover,’ I said. ‘Angus keeps a first-aid box, mostly for any dog that gashes itself on barbed wire, but also for beaters who get peppered. I’ll put a dressing on it. Try not to get blood on your clothes.’

  The spaniel was back in the Land Rover, I had applied some antiseptic to Henry’s wound and was adding a plaster from Angus’s ample stock when Dodd the Father made his appearance. He was a small man, gaunt and wiry, of any age from fifty upwards, who always looked as though he had grown straight out of the ground, clothes and all. He launched straight into the usual tirade. Sheep had been frightened, gates left open, crops trodden underfoot, electric fences switched off, other fences broken down, litter deposited, fires started, vegetables stolen.

  None of it was true. Some of it would have been impossible at that season. I let him rant while I attended to Henry. When he had got it out of his system I said, ‘Do you ever see a spaniel wandering loose around here?’

  He looked at me hard, wondering which answer would annoy me more. ‘Now and again,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘When you do, what do you do about it?’

  ‘I haven’t seen one for months.’ His response was immediate, instinctive and could have been true or false.

  I decided to follow a different line. ‘Have you given anybody permission to take rabbits?’

  ‘What if I have? I’m allowed to control vermin.’

  ‘You know that your lease requires you to notify me of any such permissions. You haven’t done it, so if he poaches pheasants you’re liable for the cost.’

  He thought my bluff over and changed tacks. ‘There’s nobody has my leave to take rabbits. You’re supposed to be keeping them down and you’re no’ doing it. They’re eating me out of business.’

  ‘Last time I wanted to organize a rabbit-shoot, you said you liked to have them around,’ I reminded him. I was about to climb into the driver’s seat and leave him gobbling, when another question occurred to me. ‘Almost opposite your road-end, there’s a driveway and a bridge to a house among the trees. Who lives there?’ I asked.

  He grinned at me, gap-toothed. ‘Nearn House? That’ll be Mr Ricketts. A fine gentleman. You should pay him a call. You’d deal well together, the pair of you.’

  He plodded off towards the house without another word. I turned the Land Rover and set off after him. There was a wet patch where I thought that I might be able to spray him with mud as I went by – accidentally, of course. But he was already past it when I arrived. I drove on, consoling myself with the thought that a little more mud on him would never have been noticed.

  Chapter Four

  Time had slipped away from us and the lunch-hour was now well advanced. The hotel bar, when we entered it, contained a mixed throng of lunchers and drinkers. We pushed through to the bar counter, for beer and to order our lunches.

  Henry took a look around. ‘Isn’t that the woman who was driving off from the cottages as we got there?’ he asked.

  I followed his eyes. He was looking at a thin woman in her forties who was sitting alone, eating a salad at a corner table. Her neatly styled hair, which had been allowed to go grey, looked familiar. ‘I think you’re right,’ I said. ‘Go and grab the table next to her. What do you want to eat?’

  ‘The steak pie,’ Henry said over his shoulder. He was already on his way. He just beat a young couple with a child to the table we wanted. They found another table and sat glaring at Henry.

  Our beers came. I ordered our meals and paid for the lot – Henry was never paid for his services but by tacit agreement he was our guest whenever he lent a hand. I carried his lager and my Guinness over. Henry had already drawn the woman into conversation, and although her intelligent features could have been severe, I saw that she was smiling. Henry might have left his boyhood far behind him but his boyish charm had weathered well. I sat down opposite Henry in the chair nearest to the lady.

  ‘I wasn’t mistaken,’ Henry said. ‘This is Mrs Bell. John Cunningham,’ he added in her direction.

  We said that we were pleased to meet each other. Mrs Bell was smartly but modestly dressed. At first glance I would have put her down as one of those acidulous females who can be counted on to disapprove of everybody and everything except their own immediate relatives, but when I looked again her smile had a humorous twist matched by an amused glint in her eye.

  ‘We saw you drive off as we walked past your house, about an hour ago,’ I said.

  ‘So Mr Kitts told me, by way of an introduction. I’ve seen you before, too.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I was taking some bulbs from my garden to a friend of mine in the village, yesterday. Her next-door neighbour’s daughter was kicking up a fuss and you stepped in, like a knight in shining armour. You’ll have to be more careful about your tendency to knight errantry or the girl will fall for you.’

  I hoped that she was joking. But without knowing it she had given me a valuable opening. ‘Your friend wouldn’t be Mrs Haven?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly not!’ She looked disapproving but only mildly so. ‘The other side. Mildred Turner, the lady that the Hopewell girl was supposed to stay with. You know that Mr Hopewell’s abroad just now, of course. Some accident to his son, I believe.’

  ‘A broken leg, skiing,’ Henry said. ‘John had already agreed to look after Charlie’s spaniel, Clarence, for him while he’s away bringing the invalid home.’ He gave me a meaningful look.

  I grabbed up the opportunity which Henry had handed me. ‘I have a kennels and my partner’s a vet,’ I said. ‘Charlie particularly wanted Clarence to be well cared for. Did you know that somebody chopped off part of Clarence’s tail about ten days ago?’

  The waitress arrived with Henry’s steak pie and my lemon sole. ‘I knew something, but no details,’ Mrs Bell said when our food had been safely delivered and the waitress had finished trying to be a little mother to us. ‘And I certainly saw Clarence going around with his tail in a sling – metaphorically speaking,’ she added quickly in case we should not realize that she was joking. ‘If you’re who I think you are, you operate the Foleyknowe shoot. Am I right?’

  ‘Quite right,’ I said.

  I prepared myself for the usual female blind assumption that shooting must ipso facto be cruel, but no such thought was in Mrs Bell’s mind. ‘I can see why you might be worried,’ she said. ‘All those dogs running loose. What do you suppose did happen to
Clarence?’

  ‘I’m spending my odd spare moments trying to find out,’ I said. ‘At present, we don’t even know where. It seems possible that he may have gone visiting in your direction. Were you at home in the morning, a week past Friday? The day of the rain?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Until mid-morning.’

  Most people, if asked what they were doing even a couple of days before, hum and haw and look in their engagement diaries unless something very significant happened on that day. Mrs Bell must have caught my speculative glance in her direction.

  ‘I’m at home every Friday morning,’ she explained. ‘It’s the day the butcher’s van comes round. He’s a surly devil but he carries good meat. That’s the one shopping facility that we most miss in the village. So I stay at home on Fridays and do my gardening and cleaning and laundry. Other days, I finish up by mid-morning and walk or drive into the village to do a little shopping and visiting. Usually I have lunch with Mildred Turner or she comes back with me. Today, she’s got visitors and the visitors have children and I do think that hell must be crowded with other people’s children. I didn’t fancy lunching alone in an empty house – I’ve had enough of that since my husband died. So I came here.’

  ‘If you remember that Friday—’ I began.

  Henry interrupted me. ‘John is about to ask you whether you saw or heard Clarence near your home. But, thinking it over, I’ve realized that Clarence must have lost his tail somewhere more isolated or the noise he’d have made would have been heard by everybody for miles around.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘Nature has it well figured out. For as long as the attack continues, a dog will give tongue, but a dog that’s been peppered, for instance, doesn’t always start yelping until some minutes later. Just as a soldier who stops a bullet doesn’t always feel the pain right away. Nature gives you time to get out of harm’s way and, while you’re running off, a lot of noise would only draw some more hostile attention to you.’

  ‘You should know,’ Henry said. ‘John was an army captain. Served in the Falklands.’

  ‘Well, you may both be perfectly correct,’ Mrs Bell said. ‘I’m sure you are. But Clarence could have squealed his head off and nobody would have heard him. Mr O’Toole, who does cabinet-making and furniture repairs in the sheds behind his cottage, was cutting up his new stock of hardwoods and putting it by to season. His big saw makes such a noise that you can’t hear yourself think. I didn’t even hear the butcher’s van arrive, although he always sounds his horn. When he was due, I looked out of the window to see what was keeping him, and there he was, waiting, not very patiently as it turned out.

  ‘Mr O’Toole doesn’t use the big saw very often, thank God! I’ll say that much for him. About three times a year, I suppose. If it was any oftener, I’d move away. But when he does use it, frankly, you couldn’t hear a bomb go off. The rest of the time, he’s merely a bloody nuisance, if you’ll pardon my French. He had already driven me indoors out of the garden, but the rain was obviously coming anyway. So as soon as the butcher had been, which was about eleven-thirty, I decided to forget about the hoovering, leave the washing-machine running and come down to visit Mildred for a little peace and quiet. So I can’t honestly claim to have seen or heard anything that day. And I don’t hold out too much hope of any of the others.’

  Mrs Bell had finished her meal and with it what looked like a half-pint of shandy. I offered her another drink but she shook her head. ‘I’d be running out all afternoon, thank you very much,’ she said frankly, not quite laughing at me. ‘But I’ll take a cup of coffee, if you’re on a spending spree.’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Henry said, rising.

  ‘Plain milk and no sugar, please.’

  Henry headed in the direction of the tea and coffee dispensers at the end of the bar counter.

  ‘Did you drive straight to Mildred’s house that day?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I think you’ll see,’ I said. ‘Were you there before Clarence’s return?’

  She smiled again. Her smile sat lightly on her severe features. ‘I think it was almost a dead heat. I could hear some yelping as I got out of the car and Mildred said something about Clarence seeming to have hurt himself.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said. ‘Which would you expect to do the journey more quickly, you driving or Clarence on foot?’

  Mrs Bell laughed. ‘I may not be that laddie Damon Hill, but I’ll back myself against Clarence any day of the week.’

  ‘So if Clarence got himself pruned in your neighbourhood, it must have been round about the time of the butcher’s van?’

  She gave it some thought, not smiling. Now and again she reminded me of a stern headmistress from my infant days, but moments later she might be alight with mischief. I thought that she must have been a hell of a girl in her day. ‘I’d say that that was about right. Certainly no later. But that’s rather a big if. The rain was fairly rattling down, so nobody was out for walkies. On the other hand, one does look out of the window now and again and we had to go out to visit the van-driver. Anybody moving around outdoors in the pouring rain is apt to attract attention.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said.

  ‘I remember the Hopewell girl going by on her bicycle while I was at the butcher’s van, soaking wet and dashing for home. And there was a yellow car going the other way. I think that’s all.’ She paused and gave me a sudden glance which was disconcertingly intense. ‘I can understand your interest. But why aren’t you leaving it to the SSPCA? Or the police?’

  ‘From what Charlie Hopewell told me,’ I said, ‘some of his neighbours have been putting in the poison. They seem to have given the authorities reason to believe that Charlie may have docked his own dog’s tail.’

  ‘Rubbish! I believe he’d kill anyone who laid a finger—’ she stopped abruptly.

  ‘That’s pretty much what I said,’ I told her. ‘Between ourselves, I think he’s afraid that his daughter may be blamed. So afraid that he’s scared to say it aloud.’

  ‘That’s just as silly,’ she said stoutly. ‘I’ve met the girl at Mildred’s house a dozen times. She’s temperamental but there’s no cruelty in her. At her age, I believe I was a greater rebel against authority.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very likely,’ I agreed. ‘But the authorities must be used to all kinds of inexplicable behaviour towards animals. They may be envisaging either Charlie or his daughter taking a swipe at Clarence in a fit of temper, breaking his tail and then chopping it off to cover up the deed. Suppose, for instance, that Clarence snapped at a biscuit and gave Hannah a nip in the process?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Bell indignantly, ‘I still wouldn’t believe it and the authorities certainly didn’t get any such ideas from Mildred or from me. It must have been that flighty young woman on the other side. Pure invention, of course. Charlie Hopewell dotes on that dog and patience is his middle name. Not literally, you understand?’ It seemed to be her habit to use imaginative figures of speech and then worry about being taken literally.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘That sounded silly, but I wouldn’t want you to think that he had a girl’s name,’ Mrs Bell said, laughing gently at herself. ‘Hannah’s very good with domestic animals. And Charlie’s been more patient with Clarence than most owners would have been.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘We’ve watched. The side-window of Mildred’s sitting room looks that way and it catches the sun, so we often sit there. Most men would have given up, had Clarence neutered or put down. But no. At first, Clarence only ran off when he was loose, so Mr Hopewell took to keeping him on the lead. Next, he went over the top of the run from the roof of his kennel. So Mr Hopewell made it higher and higher until not even Clarence could go that high. And he had to reinforce the gate. He said to Mildred once that if he’d known that he was going to spend his retirement building Colditz for a spaniel he’d have stayed in business.
Next thing, Clarence dug under the wire and Mr Hopewell had to mix a whole lot of concrete. He and Hannah did it between them.

  ‘That stopped Clarence getting out of the pen. But Mr Hopewell must have felt sorry for the dog, cooped up in a kennel and a concrete run all day except when he was being walked on a lead or at work. So he takes Clarence into the house whenever he can although Clarence can nose open a window and I’m sure that he can also work the lever handle of any door that opens away from him. And Charlie strung a high wire across the garden, like a washing-line . . . Thank you,’ she added to Henry, who had returned with three coffees.

  ‘I saw it,’ I said. ‘I thought at first that it really was a washing-line.’

  ‘Mr Hopewell sends everything to the laundry. He says that if he was still working he could find time for doing the washing but retirement time is too precious to waste. No, he put that wire up specially. At first he just had the ring sliding on it and attached to a sort of long dog-lead, so that Clarence had access to the patio and most of the lawn, but Clarence soon learned to shake his head until the loop of chain slipped off. Leather collars are no good on Clarence – unless they’re tight enough to strangle him he just pulls until they come off over his head. We’ve watched it all happening, a sort of duel of wits, wondering who would win the next round. Next, Mr Hopewell hooked on one of those extending dog-leads. With the other end looped round Clarence’s neck, the pull of the spring should have been just enough to prevent the loop of chain falling slack.’ Mrs Bell grinned in delighted recollection. ‘It took Clarence just two days to beat that one. He pulled out a length of lead, walked three times round one of the posts and then shook the chain loop off over his head.’

  As I laughed, I was thinking that dogs are not noted for reasoning ability, spaniels come low in the league table and show-bred spaniels very near the bottom. If Clarence was an intelligent mutation, perhaps we should get a service or two. The habit of wandering may be partly hereditary but it can usually be averted by the right training.