Walnut might by now be ready to accept another dose of sympathetic treatment. Hurrying her along might have its dangers, but the scandal might break at any time. I changed into my own kilt with the bare minimum of accessories, accepted the snack that Beth forced on me, filled my sporran with more chocolates and biscuits, put a brush in my jacket pocket and approached the isolation kennel making soothing noises. This time, the black and white face remained visible in the shadows. A biscuit tossed into the run from a few yards away was accepted, but when I entered the pen she retired again into the kennel.
I sat down again on my stool and reached inside with a biscuit.
Ten minutes and several titbits later, we began to make real progress. A biscuit was lifted gently off my palm and Walnut’s moist nose stayed just within my reach. When I stroked it I felt her tense, ready for a quick withdrawal, and then relax. Her tongue flicked once over my knuckles.
It must have been touch and go which ran out first – her timidity, my patience or her stomach capacity. I sat and coaxed her until my muscles ached and my legs were numb under me, but with each morsel she allowed herself to be persuaded nearer to the doorway and let me stroke a little more of her head and neck until she suddenly made up her mind and moved, to lie half out of the door, her head on her forepaws and her eyes rolled up to watch me.
Very slowly, I extricated the brush from my pocket and began to groom her coat. She flinched at the first touch but remained where she was. Being brushed is a sensation few dogs can resist, a pleasure in itself and a signal of family membership. Walnut inched further out so that I could reach the unscratchable area of her lower back. She left me in no doubt that bruising here and there still troubled her but already she trusted me to work carefully around her bruises, contenting herself with a subdued squeak if I found another tender spot. I brushed gently, keeping up the soothing words. The gloss began to come back to her coat. She was a sturdy and, as Buccleugh had said, an attractive spaniel with soft eyes and a gentle nature. I wondered what kind of a man could bring himself to ill-treat her.
‘Amazing!’ said Henry’s voice. I looked up. Magnificently kilted in the tartan of the McLeods, he was watching us from a distance, puffing luxuriously on a cheroot.
‘Come and make her acquaintance,’ I said.
Henry walked towards the wire mesh of the run. When he was still a few yards off I felt Walnut tense. An instant later, I was alone in the run.
‘What did I do?’ Henry asked plaintively. ‘Doesn’t she like my tartan?’
‘Nobody likes that tartan,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think it’s that. As your even older friend pointed out, they can recognise a villain a mile off.’ But then I relented. Henry was only trying to help. ‘He also said that it’s amazing what a dog can tell you, if you can read the language. I suggest you get rid of that cigar. Then go into the house and wash away all trace of the smell while I start again from Square One. We may learn something.’
When Henry returned, still grumbling that the tartan had been good enough for his mother’s ancestors, Walnut was once again outside the kennel and submitting to brushing. The smell of the cheroot must still have been clinging to his clothes because, although she suffered his approach, she would not stay in the pen with him.
‘That seems conclusive,’ I said. ‘And you know as well as I do that all the modern tartans were the inventions of Victorians who wanted to cut a dash. Let’s go into the house.’
There was time for one further check. Isobel, an occasional smoker, had some cigarettes in her handbag. We sent her down to discover Walnut’s reaction to cigarette smoke. Isobel returned to say that the spaniel had seemed, if anything, to enjoy it.
Beth phoned Charles Buccleugh to tell him that Walnut’s assailant had been a cigar smoker, but that the woman who had treated her more gently had probably smoked cigarettes.
Chapter Seven
There was wind in the night and when I woke on Monday morning the clouds had blown away, leaving cold sunshine and a brisk breeze.
I spent a few minutes after breakfast, consolidating my friendship with Walnut. But the routine work of a busy breeding and training kennel could not be shelved for long. Our field-trial hopefuls were in danger of getting rusty. For a crash course in steadiness to the sequence of the flush of a bird, a shot and a fall, I use another of my dummies with a pair of wings attached and my length of shock-cord pulled up to a high branch. I was digging the necessary bits and pieces out of my junk-room when Isobel, who was already labouring over the paperwork, called me into the house.
We joined Beth, who had finished the first phase of the chores and returned to the kitchen to prepare the puppies’ feed. After squatting beside the isolation kennel, I was glad to settle for a minute in one of the basket chairs before all the walking that a day of dog-training entails. Isobel sat at the kitchen table, typing letters in answer to the inquiries that our last advertisement had brought in. The office, as we liked to call it, was far too small for more than the storage of records and was also isolated from the social hub.
‘Charles Buccleugh was on the phone,’ Isobel said.
‘Already?’
‘He doesn’t have many other calls on his time,’ she pointed out. ‘He says that he picked up one or two hints about dog-abuse yesterday, but nothing that he could confirm. He had to leave it until this morning, when people were hack in their offices. He got hold of an old friend, now a big wheel in the SSPCA.’ She saw me look up. ‘Don’t get your hopes too high,’ she said quickly. ‘Charles doesn’t think that he could do more than put in a good word, if the accusation is ever made. But he knows this chap well enough to check out the few names he’d accumulated. Most of them were non-starters – wrong breed, or dog destroyed, that sort of thing.
‘He’s left with one hopeful one. If a dog’s being knocked about, it doesn’t keep quiet about it and there’s usually a complaint; so, if this isn’t the source, Walnut must come from a very long way away or from somewhere too far out in the country for the neighbours to hear a dog yelping.
‘There was a complaint to the SSPCA, about a month ago, about a man beating a spaniel bitch, variety unspecified. A William Randall.’ She named a small village near Anstruther. ‘An SSPCA inspector called. Only a woman was at home. The bitch was nervous but didn’t seem to be carrying more marks than a spaniel can pick up working in thick cover. He had more urgent reports to follow up, so he decided that there was inadequate evidence and left it at that.’
‘Was the inspector wearing the kilt?’ I asked.
‘Charles says that he asked that question. His friend said that, knowing that particular inspector, probably yes. And it was the owner’s wife who showed him the dog. Charles doesn’t know anybody in that area and he seems to have come to a dead end. He’s asking whether we know anybody near there. I don’t. And I phoned Henry and he doesn’t either.’
‘Nor do I,’ I said. ‘So where do we go from here without rocking the boat?’
‘I think you do know somebody,’ Beth said. ‘I sorted out the telephone drawer the other day. You had a change-of-address card about a year ago. I’ll fetch it.’ She scuttled out of the room.
‘Damned if I know who that could be,’ I said.
‘You’re about to find out,’ Isobel said absently. She was peering through her glasses at a letter in a faint and spiky handwriting. ‘This man says he’s looking for a cooker. I suppose he means a cocker.’
Beth came back and dropped a slip of paper in front of me. It seemed to have been churned out from a word processor.
‘It’s from a Gordon Hemmeling,’ Beth said helpfully.
‘I’d forgotten all about it. He used to live somewhere near Bo’ness. Did we send him a Christmas card?’
‘Yes. But I did the envelope for you.’
‘That’s probably why it didn’t register,’ I said. ‘Gordon was an old army pal. He was invalided out at about the same time that I was.’
‘You’d better go and see him,’
Isobel said. ‘Do you know what questions to ask him?’
‘I’m not stupid,’ I said indignantly. ‘We want to know all about this – what was his name again?’
‘William Randall,’ Isobel said patiently. ‘You also want to know if he has any connection with Aubrey Stoneham or anybody else around these parts.’
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know that Gordon would be able to tell me about that.’
‘Perhaps not by name,’ Isobel agreed. ‘If you had photographs you could at least ask him whether any of those people had been seen with Randall.”
It seemed that I was stupid after all. ‘But we don’t have any photographs. Or do we?’ I added.
This time, Beth had no rabbit to pull out of a hat. She shook her head.
‘Sending somebody to fool around with a Polaroid would be too dangerous,’ Isobel said. ‘It might provoke the very reaction we’re trying to prevent. The local papers might have something. Henry knows somebody on the Fife Herald, but the last thing we could afford would be to make the press curious. You’ll have to make do with one of your scurrilous word-pictures for the moment. If that isn’t enough, you may have to fetch your friend over here and introduce him around.’
I got up to reach the wall-phone, dialled Gordon Hemmeling and sank back into my chair. Gordon was loudly pleased to hear my voice. I explained that I wanted to come and see him, on a matter so confidential that I would prefer my face to be seen as little as possible.
‘Drive right in and up to the garage door,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave the side door unlocked for you. Dive straight inside. When are you coming?’
‘Straight away,’ I told him. ‘If that’s all right?’
‘Right as rain,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk when you arrive.’
He gave me precise directions and we disconnected.
‘You’d better have something to eat before you go,’ Beth said.
‘Unless Gordon’s a changed man he’ll be in the kitchen by now, preparing the fatted calf.’
‘Don’t let him give you a lot of drink if you’re driving.’ Beth looked at me anxiously. ‘Would you like me to come and drive?’
‘It’ll take him less than an hour each way,’ Isobel said. ‘He can surely hold together for that long.’
‘I suppose so,’ Beth said. She was looking doubtful. My illness had given her several frights and she always expected disaster if I was out of her sight for more than a few minutes.
‘You’ll almost pass the door of the Speer’s Wood Kennels,’ Isobel said. ‘Drop the cocker spaniel letter off with them. They had a litter of them last month.’
Gordon would have pulled my leg unmercifully if I had turned up in a kilt. I changed into slacks before driving off.
*
A stiff breeze was chasing whitecaps down the estuary of the Forth but the village was sheltered in a broad hollow running down to a bay where, despite the lateness of the season, several boats were dancing at anchor. Following Gordon’s directions, I found his house just where he had said it would be, a rambling bungalow, stone-fronted but roughcast at the sides, set in at least half an acre of designer garden. I drove up to the garage and ducked in at the side door without being seen by anyone other than some gulls and a girl on a pony.
Gordon limped through to escort me back to his living-room. He had lost part of his right foot to a left-over mine in the Falklands at about the time when I had been transferred from those islands and was being bitten by an infected leech in Central America.
Physically, we had both changed in the intervening years. My illness had left me so underweight as to be a worry to Beth and my doctor while Gordon, who had always enjoyed his victuals but could no longer take the exercise needed to control the flesh, was now distinctly tubby. He had also cultivated a set of whiskers which the army would never have tolerated since about the time of Gallipoli. He was now, I remembered, a moderately successful writer of historical romances; but he was rumoured also to write, under a female nom de plume, rather more modern and torrid romances of a distinctly voluptuous character. There seemed to be no shortage of money; but his disability pension plus the earnings of a working wife must have amplified very comfortably his royalties as a writer.
The house was at the very end of the main street of the village, beyond the T-junction with the road, so that the living-room window had a view down the street and across the Forth to where the Isle of May lay like a stranded whale. The room was uncluttered and expensively equipped with the latest and best in hide-covered furniture; but a mismatched table was set up in the window, complete with a word-processor and untidy stacks of books and paper. Gordon had a study at the rear of the house, he told me, but he preferred to work where the passing scene could trigger ideas or, at least, let him know that the real and modern world was still around him.
On another table, coffee was already percolating and several calorie-laden cakes were waiting. It was my chance, under Gordon’s gluttonous influence, to please Beth by putting back a little weight. Perversely, my appetite declined. I nibbled a biscuit while we talked, remembering old friends now dead or in the higher ranks and wild days long past. We exchanged grumbles about the disasters that had ended our service careers. Gordon was quite willing to discuss his historical books but flatly denied writing anything else.
‘But you didn’t come here to accuse me of writing soft porn, nor so that we could gossip like a pair of wives across a garden fence,’ he said suddenly. ‘And I’ve seen that look before, of a cat waiting for its moment to pounce. Let’s put you out of your misery. How can I help you?’
‘How well do you know your neighbours?’ I asked him.
‘Not as well as I should,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I spend too much time in here. Writing’s a solitary business. And people tend to treat the writer as an alien creature, probably an intellectual and certain to suck them dry and spit them out as a character in a book. They talk, guardedly, but they don’t get close. They watch me and I observe them and we each get a certain amount of amusement out of it. Does that disappoint you?’
‘Not in the least. You know about them without being intimate. So I can ask you questions – in absolute confidence?’
‘Ask away. Who about?’
‘One William Randall. Is he a friend of yours?’
Gordon’s expression told me the answer before he opened his mouth. ‘I couldn’t claim to have any friends here,’ he said, ‘not as we understand the term. Just the odd acquaintance. As for Randall, I know him well enough to exchange a pint if we meet in the pub and happen to feel sociable. But he isn’t somebody I’d want to know better than that. There’s something sly about him.’
I relaxed. ‘Some day,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you all about it. That I promise. For the moment, I need to know all you can tell me about Randall, but no word must get back to him that I’m interested in him. That’s vital.’
‘You’ve got it,’ Gordon said simply. ‘Now, what can I tell you? What do you want to know?’
‘Anything you can tell me.’
He linked his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Bill Randall . . . He’s small, thin, dark and ebullient. Volatile might be a better word. Usually cheerful, but he can go down into the dumps or lose his rag over things that you or I would laugh off. And once he’s got a bee in his bonnet it never gets out again. High cheekbones and a small mouth – in looks, he reminds me a little of CSM Grant.’ Gordon’s eyes returned to my level. ‘You remember him?’
We wasted a minute or two remembering CSM Grant, who had terrorised the men in his company and worked them unmercifully but would have faced up to a field marshal in defence of any one of them who had got himself into trouble. We got back to Randall at last.
‘He runs a farm shop,’ Gordon said, ‘so he’s away from here on most weekdays except that they shut on Thursdays. You know the sort of place?’
‘Wellies and oilskins at about a third of the price you’d pay elsewhere?’
‘That sort of thing. But he’s the local agent for one of the farm-machinery companies. The shop seems to be well run but I don’t know that I’d buy a second-hand tractor off him. I don’t think that he’s short of a few quid. He’s never tidy but his wife’s always well dressed. She’s thin and big-boned; not very attractive, but her heart’s in the right place and I’d trust her ten times as far as I’d trust her husband.’
Mention of a wife reminded me. ‘Do they smoke?’ I asked.
Gordon blinked at me in surprise. ‘I never see her without a cigarette in her mouth. He sometimes smokes a small cigar.’
The black cloud which had settled above my head at Dalry began to lift at last. We could be on the right track, but did it go anywhere? Leading questions might reveal too much to Gordon. I trusted his good intentions, but tongues can slip. I tried to think of an oblique approach.
‘What interests does he have, outside of the business?’ I asked cautiously.
‘Not a lot, now, except for the pub.’
I nearly missed it, but the word ‘now’ caught my ear. ‘And earlier?’
‘He used to shoot a lot. Wild-fowling, and he had access to several small farms, he and another chap. The farm shop must have given him some useful introductions.’
‘He gave up shooting?’ I waited anxiously. Something was coming, I knew it.
Gordon reached for a can of beer. He raised his eyebrows at me but I shook my head. He poured with care. ‘Say rather that it gave him up. He still goes to the clay pigeons with his pal, to the Cardenden Gun Club – I’ve heard them talking about it. As I understand it, you can use a borrowed gun quite legally at an approved ground without needing to hold a shotgun certificate.’
‘Lost his certificate, did he?’
Gordon nodded. ‘He strayed onto Lord Crail’s land with a gun. He was fined and the police jerked his certificate.’ Gordon paused to take a pull at his beer. ‘The way he tells it – and, remember, I’ve heard only his side of the story – he was shooting near the march. On that farm, he had permission to shoot pheasants. A cock pheasant got up, well out in front of him. He fired at it and was sure that he’d missed. His dog – a nice little spaniel bitch but not very well trained – didn’t agree. She took off after it across the boundary.
Give a Dog a Name (Three Oaks Book 4) Page 7
