Whose Dog Are You

by Gerald Hammond

  His interest in the finding of the body was minimal. What he most wanted to know was about Anon – as we continued to call her. How certain was our identification? And where had she been worked?

  We said that the identification was definite but that there was no way of knowing what ground she had worked on except that she seemed to be familiar with woodpigeon. A week or ten days adrift around St Andrews had obliterated any traces of soil or seeds. He wanted at first to take the spaniel away for forensic examination until Isobel pointed out that she had been thoroughly shampooed and de-infested. And no, there had been nothing about the sheep-ticks to suggest where she had picked them up. One sheep-tick was very like another and if you’d seen one you’d seen them all.

  ‘You’d no business tampering with the dog,’ he said at last in exasperation.

  ‘Sergeant Ewell asked us to identify her,’ Isobel said, ‘not to preserve her in formalin.’

  ‘Or have her stuffed,’ I added. ‘And we could hardly have left her as she was. We’d have had the RSPCA at us.’

  ‘Sergeant Ewell should have taken her for forensic examination straight away.’

  ‘They’d probably have killed her,’ said Beth.

  The Chief Inspector seemed unimpressed by that likelihood. He left at last, muttering about the wanton destruction of evidence.

  The newspaper story brought several reporters to our door, each desperate to find some kind of a story to hang on the few facts available. I was about to let a photographer take a shot of Anon when I saw Henry, who had joined us for the morning and who was lurking in the background, shaking his head at me. I said that she was not giving any interviews and that if he cared to print a photograph of any passing springer we wouldn’t contradict and the public would never know the difference.

  I took Henry into the house and asked him what was bothering him. For once, Henry seemed uncertain. ‘Buggered if I know,’ he said. ‘But that was no murder enquiry detective. He asked the wrong questions.’

  ‘You think so?’ I poured us some coffee while I wondered. ‘His questions seemed reasonable to me. They want to know where the body was put in the water.’

  ‘The body and the ground would tell them more about that,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve come round to your way of thinking. The body was dropped off the bridge. It’s the one place you can take a car close to the water. They’ve no reason to believe that the dog got loose at the same place. If somebody was going to drown the dog, he wouldn’t try it where people are sleeping not far away. I can think of a dozen questions that policeman didn’t ask.’

  ‘I can’t think of any which haven’t already been asked by others,’ I said.

  ‘But this chap came here specially to ask for clues as to where the dog might have been. And he wasn’t particularly interested in the last ten days. He wanted to know all about what Mr Falconer had been up to before he was killed and he hoped that the dog could have told him where they’d been. If it had been part of a larger, murder enquiry, you’d have had two juniors here, not a senior man.’

  I was unconvinced. In my experience, you got whoever was spare at the time. Seniority depended more on the newsworthiness and the spin-offs of the enquiry rather than on its importance.

  *

  My monthly masterclass, so-called, came round again that Sunday. It was an event which had grown insidiously out of nothing over a period of years until by now there was a surprising number of dog-owners prepared regularly to travel a distance and pay a fee in order to be put through exercises which they must by then have known by heart. For those, the event seemed to be as much social as practical. Others came once or twice and dropped out when some individual problem had been solved or pronounced insoluble.

  The numbers attending seemed to vary from a peak early in the shooting season, when the results of the long layoff were uncomfortably apparent, to drop off at the end of the season and then increase again slowly as young pups came into training for the season after next.

  That winter, several litters of our pups had sold well and my class that Sunday was made up of eleven youngsters (eight of them from Three Oaks stock) plus one adult dog, a newcomer. This last was a remarkable animal, with a nose as long as that of a Shetland collie. His colour was neither the yellow of a Labrador nor the dark red of a setter but something in between, almost an orange and so bright that I could imagine it glowing in the dark. His owner, a thin, red-haired man with a blue chin, horn-rimmed glasses and an anxious manner, assured anyone who would listen that the dog was at least half Labrador, provoking much speculation among the class, whenever the proud owner was out of earshot, as to just what on earth the other half could have been. The Saluki was mentioned more than once, although it was clear that, unless the product was a freak or ‘sport’, at least one other grandparent had to have been involved. A sweepstake would have been held if there had been any way of settling the question.

  I was also assured that the dog was an excellent retriever, very good at finding lost game, responsive to the spoken word or to hand signals but absolutely deaf to the whistle. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the dog’s hearing so I took a look at the owner’s whistle. Beth took the two of them away with a few dummies and a pocketful of edible rewards, for a series of exercises of gradually increasing difficulty, while I tried to impress the puppy-owners with the need to make haste very, very slowly.

  A custom had grown up, and one which I had done little to discourage, whereby I was invited to lunch at the hotel as the guest of those who intended to eat there. I often delegated this pleasant duty to Beth, but on this occasion she preferred to stay and oversee one of our brood bitches who had run her time, although the bitch was perfectly capable of managing alone and Isobel had an uncanny instinct which always brought her to the kennels as whelping began. I was carried off to the hotel by two of the pup-owners. These were a brace of almost identical ladies, big-busted and blue-rinsed with loud voices and similar tweeds, whose husbands were already waiting in the bar. I had come to know all four over the previous winter.

  The man with the orange retriever decided at the last moment to join us. His name, I had learnt from the dog’s inoculation certificate, was McConnelly and he was understood to be a civil servant. Why he attended the lunch was a mystery. He was a teetotaller, he lived less than an hour away, and because of a grumbling ulcer he limited himself to a small selection of the blandest foods.

  The two ladies, who were evidently also the drivers, were equally abstemious; but their husbands had been idling away a couple of hours in the bar. One of them, a tall man whose bald head was compensated for by a huge moustache, was the first to drag the conversation, which was dog-oriented, away from the general and towards the particular.

  ‘You had an eventful wildfowling trip last week,’ he said.

  ‘A body!’ said the lady who I think was his wife. I never was quite sure who was married to whom. ‘I’m sure I’d have made an exhibition of myself.’

  My mind refused to come up with a suitably inoffensive answer so I held my peace.

  ‘Have they identified him yet?’ the man with the moustache asked.

  ‘Not for sure, as far as I know,’ I said cautiously. Sergeant Ewell had not exactly sworn me to secrecy but I had a feeling that a little discretion would be appreciated. ‘The police aren’t telling me anything.’

  ‘According to the local rag,’ said the man with the moustache, ‘they want to interview somebody called Falconer. My guess was that that’s who they thought the body was.’

  ‘But wasn’t there something about a dog?’ the other husband asked. He was stout and tweedy and smelled of gin and aftershave.

  ‘They found a springer bitch which had been on the loose around St Andrews for a week or two,’ I said. That much had been in the papers. ‘There’s no easy way to tell whether she had belonged to the dead man.’

  ‘A dead wildfowler without a dog and a loose gundog without an owner, in the same area at the same time,’ one of the ladi
es said thoughtfully. ‘That would be stretching coincidence a bit far, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Stranger things happen,’ Mr McConnelly said, looking up for the first time through his heavy spectacles.

  ‘That’s true,’ said the man with the moustache. ‘They’d have a hell of a job proving the identity of a dog. I’ve always said that we ought to tattoo a number inside the ear or something. A trained dog costs a lot of money.’

  ‘But tissue-typing would work on a dog, wouldn’t it?’ said the other husband. ‘Genetic fingerprinting, they call it.’

  As it happened, I knew something about the genetic fingerprinting of dogs; indeed, I had nearly had to resort to it the year before in a dispute over Jason’s ownership. ‘If her sire and dam are still alive,’ I said, ‘or if they could trace other offspring from the same pair, they could prove that she had come from one of those joint litters. Unless they could account for every other pup from those matings, I think that that’s as far as they could go.’

  ‘They can do it from hair, can’t they?’ said the man with the moustache. ‘I mean, if they had some hair from the basket they think the bitch came from they could prove that the bitch they’d found was the same one. Couldn’t they?’

  ‘Wouldn’t help much if they couldn’t prove a connection with the dead man,’ said the other husband. He had taken aboard a good few drinks but his mind was still working. ‘Not as a help to proving the man’s death for probate purposes, I mean.’ He paused, took a sip of his red wine and chuckled. Unfortunately he tried to do both at the same time. One of the ladies – possibly his wife – dabbed at him with a napkin and the conversation was side-tracked into the staining properties of Rhône wines for a minute or two.

  ‘What I was thinking,’ he resumed at last, ‘was this. Imagine that he was murdered. Imagine that his murderer also had a springer bitch and she’d run off while he was dumping the body. The murderer ends up with the dead man’s dog. Rather than attract attention, he leaves matters as they are. The possibilities for confusion are endless.’

  ‘You read too many of those detective stories,’ said the woman who I thought wasn’t his wife.

  ‘Maybe. But can’t you imagine a murderer combing out some other springer bitch and sprinkling the hairs over the dead man’s dog-basket?’

  I stopped listening. I had quite enough problems to solve without wasting mental effort on hypotheses which were as muddled as they were fanciful.

  Beth pounced on me as soon as I got back to Three Oaks. She knew a great deal about dog training but was always keen to learn more. ‘How did you work the magic on that man’s dog?’ she demanded. ‘You sent us off to do some exercises which had no business making any difference; and when we came to using the whistle the dog hesitated once and then got it right every time.’

  I thought of testing her but decided to be kind. ‘He was embarrassed enough, showing his mutt among all the pedigree dogs,’ I said. ‘I wanted to spare his blushes. If he wants a proper dog next time around he may come back to us.’

  ‘But how did you do it?’

  ‘Very simple,’ I said. ‘You noticed what kind of whistle it was?’

  ‘One of the silent whistles,’ she said. ‘When you gave it back to him, you’d screwed the barrel out so that its pitch had come down to within human hearing. But that wouldn’t make any difference to a dog.’

  ‘I also gave it a poke through while he wasn’t looking. It was the silentest whistle you didn’t ever hear. It was bunged up with a hardened mixture of spit, pocket fluff and the sort of detritus which seems to collect in the pockets of shooting men.’

  Beth had often cleaned out my pockets. ‘Bits of pigeon feather and rape-seeds. And I thought you’d done something clever,’ she said disgustedly.

  *

  As the man with the moustache had said, trained gun-dogs are valuable assets. Even more so is a breeding strain with a successful record in field trials. I was sometimes both amazed and relieved that people came to our door prepared to pay our prices, but when feed and time and stud fees were taken into account, not to mention our investment in kennels and runs, those prices represented only a modest profit margin. The shrinking of the keepering profession had removed some of the sternest competition.

  We had had our troubles. Any business which is highly competitive and which touches on matters which some consider to be contentious can expect occasional attempts at theft or sabotage.

  Our original, rather primitive security system had so far averted any serious losses. This was based on the fact that, while electronic detectors respond to any passing bird, the dogs themselves soon learn to be a more selective alarm-system. The kennels were set at a distance from the house which was itself relatively soundproof, so a system of hidden microphones relayed any night-noises to loudspeakers in the house. False alarms were sometimes caused by prowling foxes or by stray dogs attracted to the scent of a bitch in season, but in general the system had worked so well that we had never seen fit to replace it but had merely extended it by fitting each kennel with a padlock. The multiplicity of keys which ordinary locks would have entailed was not to be contemplated, so we had settled for combination padlocks of the type sold for bicycles, all set to the same combination.

  That same Sunday night, a tumult of barking over the loudspeakers dragged me, if not out of my sleep, at least somewhere close to the surface where consciousness begins. I wrapped sleep around my mind, hoping against hope that whatever was making all the noise would go away.

  Beth dug me in the ribs with her elbow. ‘The dogs are barking,’ she said.

  I had been in the middle of a dream about walking the dogs until my feet were sore, so naturally I took both the barking and her comment to be part of that dream and snuggled down. But she was made of sterner stuff. She elbowed me again.

  ‘We’ve got an intruder,’ she said loudly and clearly.

  I came to the surface and stayed there or thereabouts. ‘Probably only a fox,’ I said, with much less clarity.

  She managed to extract a meaning from my mumble. ‘That isn’t the way they bark at a fox,’ she said. ‘It isn’t “keep away” barking. It’s more like “I don’t like this game at all” barking. Get up and do something.’

  Without quite relinquishing my hold on sleep, I got out of bed and tottered towards where I remembered having seen the window. The night was dark, but in daylight most of the kennels and their runs were visible away to the right. Near where I knew them to be, somebody was messing about with a torch.

  Suddenly, I was fully awake. ‘We’ve got an intruder,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what—’

  ‘I’m going out,’ I said. I let the heavy curtains fall back into place, groped my way back to the bed and switched on the bedside lamp. ‘You call the cops.’

  I grabbed for my slippers and dressing-gown, discarded them again and began to drag on whatever clothing came to hand. The heating was off and the cool of the room reminded me that it was still February outside. I was not going to freeze for any intruder. I could hear Beth gabbling into the phone as I felt my way downstairs. Rather than give warning to the intruders I groped around in the dark. By the time I had found my own torch and a pair of shoes Beth was at my side again, dressed as for an Arctic expedition.

  ‘It doesn’t need both of us,’ I said.

  ‘It might. Anyway, I’m not being left in here on my own.’

  I decided that I had no wish to be alone in the dark and cold either, so I gave a grunt which she could take for reluctant acquiescence and opened the front door.

  The torchlight seemed to have vanished. Darkness was almost total but I knew every inch of the ground and two of the dogs – Samson and Moonbeam from their voices – were still barking. I ran in that direction over wet grass, hoping to hell that nobody had left a wheelbarrow in the way.

  The barks were subsiding. Evidently the dogs had decided that the emergency was over. I was less certain. Rather than collide in the dark with an intruder who
had heard me coming, I switched on the torch and found that I had covered more ground than I thought and was about to bump into the wire of the isolation kennel. I pulled up and Beth ran into my back.

  ‘There’s nobody here now,’ she said. ‘But look!’ She took my hand and steadied the beam of the torch.

  I looked. A hole had been clipped in the heavy wire of the run and Anon seemed to have vanished. The motherly bitch we had put in with her was sitting wide-eyed in the run, obviously wondering what was meant by these unfamiliar events in the night.

  If the intruder had been after one particular bitch, it would have taken him time to identify Anon and more time to fiddle with the combination padlock before giving up and beginning to cut the wire. If he was making for a car, we could not be far behind. If he was heading across country, we had lost him.

  I turned towards the gates and at that moment the yelp of a dog came from somewhere in the road. I oriented myself, switched off the torch and ran. Behind me, I heard Beth fall over something.

  The night had seemed pitch dark, but my eyes were adjusting and there was faint starlight. I stopped at the gates, looked around and listened. Two miles away a disgruntled pair of headlights swept along the main road. Further off, I could make out the blinking of a blue lamp and the yodel of a police klaxon reached through the silent air. Beth’s phone-call was producing prompt results or somebody else had troubles.

  Not far to my right, a darker mass, a vehicle, came into focus against the dark strip of the road. Near it, something was moving.

  The obvious and sensible action was to stand back and use the torch to see faces and read the car’s numberplate. That was what Beth told me later, more than once. Instead, I ran towards the movement, switching on the torch at the last moment.