I wanted to discuss Aubrey Stoneham’s bombshell, but Beth cut me short with uncharacteristic abruptness. ‘Not just now,’ she said. ‘I want to think.’
A few years earlier, I would have made a sarcastic retort. Beth’s apparent youth and occasional shyness do not suggest the deep thinker, nor is she much given to cogitation. But I had found over the years that when Beth starts to ponder she is not easily turned aside, and she usually arrives at a goal that is eminently logical. So I sat and fretted until I dozed again.
It was after midnight before we turned in at the gates of Three Oaks. I had expected Isobel to be asleep in the spare room, quite possibly pickled although with everything firmly under control. But lights were on in the house and also over at the kennels and it was Henry who emerged from the front door as the car drew up.
He came straight to Beth’s window and bent down stiffly. ‘Isobel’s down with the dogs,’ he said. ‘Something’s happened. We don’t understand it and I won’t even try to tell you. We phoned the hotel but you’d already left. We guessed that you’d be on the way home. You’d better go and speak to her.’
‘Of course,’ Beth said. ‘We’ll have to go down and kennel these two anyway.’
We fetched Jason and Sunbeam out of the car and took them with us. Henry stood and watched us go. It was unlike him to stand aside during a crisis. I tried to imagine what fresh calamity had befallen us.
Between the house and the clusters of kennels was the isolation kennel with its own run. Stardust’s season seemed to have been a false heat but her real season was almost due so we were keeping her in the isolation kennel as a precaution. Under the harsh lamp which hung over the run Isobel was seated on the ground, making soothing noises to Stardust. She looked up as we approached.
‘Don’t come any nearer until you’ve put those dogs away,’ she said urgently. Usually, her first words would have been to ask what awards we’d brought back with us. ‘Let John do it.’
I walked on and kennelled Sunbeam and Jason. As I returned, I saw that Beth had walked up to the wire and that Isobel was gently stroking the spaniel bitch but, as I neared, Stardust bolted into the kennel. I stopped where I was, puzzled and hurt. For the first time in my life, a dog had given me a sense of rejection.
‘She did the same when Henry came near,’ Isobel said. She got up and dusted the skirt of her old tweed coat.
‘It’s not just me, then,’ I said weakly. ‘That’s a relief.’
‘But that’s not like Stardust,’ Beth said. ‘What’s come over her?’
‘It isn’t Stardust,’ Isobel said tersely.
Chapter Five
‘It looked like Stardust,’ I said, ‘from the brief glimpse I got of her backside.’ I groped for a sensible explanation. ‘Has one of the other bitches come in season?’
‘Not that I know of.’ Isobel joined us outside the run. ‘When I came out for a last check, I saw that the padlock had disappeared and Stardust seemed to be behaving oddly—’
‘Those padlocks are supposed to be unpickable,’ Beth protested.
‘Anybody with a pair of bolt-cutters could shear one off,’ I said. Something in my throat was making speech difficult. ‘Weren’t the microphones switched on?’ The dogs were our best burglar-alarm, so microphones over the kennels were linked to speakers in the house.
‘The wires had been cut, Henry says. He joined them up again and taped them, but we’ll have to get an electrician.’
‘But the wires are underground,’ Beth protested.
‘They were cut where they go up to come in at the side of the window.’
‘We’ll have to re-route them to enter the house below ground level,’ I said. ‘Go on, Isobel.’
‘That’s about it. I thought she’d had a fright but then I saw that it wasn’t the same bitch. She’s very similar – I think somebody’s added to her markings with a little dye – but I could see small differences straight away. She was nervous of me but she let me examine her. It was very peculiar and worrying so I phoned Henry and he came straight over, but his presence terrified her. She seems to be all right with women but she’s terrified of men. Some man’s ill-used her. There are marks . . .’
‘Why on earth would somebody substitute one bitch for another?’ I asked.
‘Perhaps he’d ruined one bitch and decided to start over again.’
‘No,’ Beth said loudly. We waited. ‘It’s all of a piece,’ she said more quietly. ‘We’ve had our own excitements. Let’s go inside before John gets frozen. And we haven’t had anything to eat since a couple of sandwiches at lunchtime.’
Henry was waiting in the hall. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘The same with John as with you,’ Isobel told him.
‘Hell!’
The large kitchen was warm, with the boiler muttering away in one corner, but its bright and cheerful aspect seemed to have fled. Beth, still in her sheepskin coat, sat me down at the table and heated canned soup in the microwave. While I nursed the hot mug in my hands and told Isobel and Henry about Aubrey Stoneham’s hints and the photographs, things began to sizzle in a frying pan.
‘The photographs are fakes, of course,’ Beth told Isobel. ‘Do you and Henry want to eat with us?’
‘Yes, of course they are,’ Isobel said. ‘I wouldn’t be in any doubt of that. And yes, that smells too good to pass up. Henry?’
Henry nodded.
‘Have mine,’ I said. The soup was warming and comforting but I was sure that I would never eat again.
‘Nonsense,’ Henry said briskly. ‘You’ll eat what’s put in front of you or Beth will feed you through a tube, and you know it. Are we to assume that the po-faced Stoneham was warning you off looking into the shooting of Horace?’
‘He didn’t put it in so many words,’ Beth said. ‘In fact, I think he chose his words rather carefully. But that’s what he meant.’
Henry raised his eyebrows. ‘A shot spaniel and one that’s been abused, surely there has to be a connection. The faking of photographs and the substitution of a dog seems rather drastic in the circumstances. And the shooting incident only happened a week ago. Your questions, John, could hardly have come to the notice of Horace’s would-be assassin before early to middle of this week. Not much time for such an elaborate plot and no time at all to find a dog resembling Stardust and reduce it to a state of terror. How good were the photographs?’
‘I sneaked one of them into my pocket,’ Beth said. ‘I’ll show you in a minute.’ She began to serve bacon, eggs and kidneys onto plates. ‘There was just one good photograph of John, raising his hand as if to give Dusty a slap – you know how he does.’ (Dusty was Beth’s occasional pet-name for Stardust.) ‘It’s only a pretence and even the dogs don’t take it seriously. That one was sharp and clear and it seemed to be on slightly different paper from the others. I couldn’t be sure, but I think it was taken at a Sunday Masterclass. The rest were like this.’
She put a photograph into Isobel’s hands and then resumed serving the food. It had been a long time since our sandwich lunch and the soup had brought my hunger back in a rush of saliva.
‘But this could be anybody,’ Isobel said. ‘And almost anywhere.’
Beth sat down with her own plate and picked up her fork. ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said. ‘A man with a build something like John’s, wearing a Barbour coat, jeans and Wellies and one of those fits-all-sizes caps, just as John was in the one good photograph. You never see his face again, but he’s laying into a spaniel that could be mistaken for Stardust. I suppose it’s that bitch out there.
‘So look at it this way round. Somebody wonders what sort of leverage he could get on us. He remembers that he has the original photograph available or knows where he can get a print of it. And suppose that he knows of somebody who’s been beating a spaniel. He gets a pal to pose in the act of giving it another hiding, or even does it himself if his camera has a delay. Then he waits for a chance to plant the dog on us. He may have had a choice of dogs,
because I remember John demonstrating his training methods and putting several of them through their paces. He picked on Dusty because she was in one of the original photographs and the substitute bitch looked most like her. It was just his luck that she was in the isolation kennel because of her season.’ She took her first mouthful. ‘This food’s cold,’ she said indignantly. She got up to reheat it in the microwave oven.
‘I was going to move her back among the others when her false season ended,’ Isobel said. ‘It didn’t seem worthwhile, when she’s so damned irregular. If she’d been in her usual kennel, the presence of a stranger would have set them all off. I’d probably have heard that, with or without the microphones.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said. The house was solidly built and double glazed.
My appetite had flagged again. I pushed my plate away. Beth pushed it back at me. ‘Take a look at the background,’ she said.
I was studying the photograph more closely than I had done at the hotel. ‘Grass, part of the trunk of an oak and a lot of sky,’ I said, ‘and mostly out of focus. This was taken from closer than the one that really is of me.’
‘And I’ll tell you why,’ Beth said. ‘So that there wouldn’t be much background. The original photograph, the genuine one, was taken in the summer. The photographer came in closer this time so as not to show any detail of the tree and also so that the lack of leaves on the tree wouldn’t show. The original photograph would only make the fakes look authentic if they all seem to have been taken at the same time and place.’ She picked up her fork and resumed eating.
Henry placed his cutlery neatly on his empty plate. ‘There must be more going on than we know about so far,’ he said. ‘I still think that it’s too much trouble and risk – let alone giving away a potentially valuable dog – for anyone to go to over peppering somebody else’s spaniel, a shooting that could possibly have been passed off as an accident in the field. An apology and an offer to pay the vet’s bill would usually be enough. Unless, of course, there’s somebody who’s absolutely dependent on Arthur Lansdyke’s goodwill. When do you speak to him again?’ he asked Isobel.
‘I expect him to phone tomorrow. I could ask him who’d have most to lose by angering him.’
‘Yes, do,’ Beth said. ‘What other steps can we take?’
‘None,’ I said. I pushed my plate away again. I was surprised to notice that I had almost finished it.
This time, Beth let me leave the remainder. ‘You mean that we lie down and play dead?’
‘If you want to put it that way. Stoneham didn’t only make a threat. He also showed us that a hostile judge can take away our just awards. Our reputation, and the prices we can ask, depend on our success in trials. That’s one side of it. The other is that a scandal about cruel training methods would ruin us. We have some friends who’d refuse to believe it, but not many of the dog-owning public know us as well as that. Just imagine the effect of a prosecution by the SSPCA and denunciation in the tabloids.
‘We know that that poor beast out there isn’t Stardust; but how do we prove it to those who don’t know her as intimately as we do? I don’t think that any really detailed and authenticated photographs of her exist.’
‘She appears once or twice among groups of dogs in the sporting magazines,’ Isobel said, ‘but I wouldn’t expect anyone to identify her from one of those. Could we try genetic fingerprinting?’
‘We don’t have Stardust and she hasn’t had pups,’ I pointed out. ‘Her sire was put down last year and her dam’s been taken abroad. We’d have to get tissue from several of her siblings. We could only find them through the Kennel Club. God knows who’d learn what we were up to. We could provoke the very disaster that we’re hoping to avoid. And we’d be out of business long before I could clear myself.’ I nearly added that genetic fingerprints cost nearly two hundred quid each but I stopped myself. I had a nasty feeling that money was going to be no object by the time the crisis was over. Henry and Isobel considered me to be a skinflint; but they had money and no dependants while I had a shred of a pension and I was still hoping that dependants would come along some day.
‘But that means leaving Stardust in the hands of whoever took her,’ Beth protested.
I shrugged.
‘What John doesn’t want to say aloud,’ Henry put in, ‘is that Stardust may very well be dead and buried by now.’
Beth turned white and blinked several times. ‘But there must be something we can do,’ she said bravely. ‘Couldn’t we strike first? Get Mr Hautry over from the SSPCA, show him the bitch and explain about the fake photographs? Then, if the photographs ever did surface, he wouldn’t take them at face value.’
‘He might just think that Qui s’excuse s’accuse,’ Henry said.
‘He could see that that isn’t one of our oak trees,’ Beth said doggedly.
Henry picked up the photograph again. ‘I’m not sure that he could. It’s too fuzzy. Perhaps you should get rid of the changeling.’
‘Put her down, you mean?’ Beth asked indignantly.
‘Not necessarily. Board her out, somewhere a long way away.’
‘If that ever came out, it would look much worse,’ I said. I was so tired that I was holding my eyelids up by conscious willpower. ‘Do whatever you like, just as long as you can be absolutely sure that word of it can’t get back to whoever faked those photographs.’
Beth had to help me to my feet. I stumbled upstairs.
Chapter Six
I was sure that I had fallen asleep in my clothes and on top of the duvet. I seemed to sleep like the dead but I was aware of Beth’s restlessness beside me. When I awoke, in my pyjamas and inside the bed, she was gone and a cup of tea was cooling beside the bed clothes. This was not unusual. I had slept late, by our standards. Sometimes my sleep was light and I was up and about before dawn. If I slept in, Beth would slip away and leave me.
When I arrived downstairs, I found that the chores had been done meticulously and my breakfast had been laid on the kitchen table. Although Isobel often took Sundays off, she had stayed the night as planned and was exercising the puppies on the lawn. I guessed that she would find it difficult to stay away while a threat was hanging over us. Beth had disappeared in my car.
Toying with breakfast, I found that during the night my thoughts had come together. I tried to arrange them in logical sequence. Life would have to go on until the axe fell. I would have to resume my constant training programme with the older dogs, but there was one task which seemed to be more urgent. The unpleasant Mr Stoneham had conveyed to us, from an unknown source, a threat of dire consequences unless we refrained from asking further questions. Those consequences would spell ruin and so, I had decided, investigation was at an end. But we were stuck with a spaniel bitch, resembling the now absent Stardust but with a fear of men. That fear might prove to be the strongest evidence against us. The wisest course might, as Henry had hinted, have been a large injection of tranquilliser and a quiet burial in the night, although I knew that none of us would have the heart for so ruthless an action. But our unknown enemy would neither know nor care if we did our best for our visitor; indeed, he would expect nothing else. He might even want the bitch back some day – but that, I was determined, would be quite another story.
I filled my coat pockets with a variety of the sort of titbits that dogs crave, picked up a low fishing stool from my junk room and went out into the cool, damp air of early winter. Isobel seemed to be fully occupied in teaching a young pup to retrieve a rolled-up sock, so I passed her by.
Somebody had taken a spare padlock out of store, set it to our standard combination and locked the isolation kennel. Some ill-disposed person had carried off one of our padlocks and if he cared to dismantle it with a hacksaw he might well be able to discover the setting. The padlocks had been chosen, at a hellish cost, because the combinations could be reset and it would be only sensible to reset the whole lot. But that would have to wait. I let myself into the wire mesh run.
T
he wooden kennel – with metal corners to prevent chewing – formed the end wall of the run. There was no sign of the bitch except for small rustlings inside the kennel. If she had made use of the run for sanitary purposes, Beth had cleaned up the traces. I seated myself where she would at least see my hands through the low, open doorway and began to speak to her in the most soothing voice I could manage.
There was absolute silence from inside the kennel.
We needed a name for the visitor, but names were in short supply. A consistent theme both helps to identify the strain from a particular kennel and makes the choosing of individual names less contentious. Our purchases of breeding stock had, of course, already been named and registered, while young puppies were usually named by their buyers. But, stemming from my two bitches who had begun the strain, the spaniels we bred and raised had been given kennel-names derived from the light and shade of the sun, moon and stars. Names originating from fire were usually reserved for males although Lucy had begun life as Lucifer. (Henry’s suggestions, which had included Taillight and Foglamp, had been shouted down.)
We had more or less decided to switch to the world of horticulture. Reference to the gardening books suggested that there were more than enough names to supply us indefinitely. We considered naming the dogs after trees and the bitches after flowers; but I broke that rule before it was introduced by calling the new bitch Walnut, for no reason that my conscious mind could perceive.
After some minutes of this one-sided conversation, the small noises resumed as Walnut began to relax; but I did not hear the patting sound that a dog’s tail makes in response to a friendly voice.
Still speaking gently, although I was hard put to it to find anything to say, I opened my pen-knife and cut up an apple. I reached as far as I could into the kennel and placed a segment of apple on the clean floor, adding a biscuit and a piece of chocolate. There was no immediate reaction, but a minute or two later I heard a stir inside the kennel and, when I leaned down to look, the biscuit and the chocolate had disappeared.
Give a Dog a Name (Three Oaks Book 4) Page 5
