‘He certainly took that danger very seriously,’ I said. ‘He even took the risk of bringing Hugh’s dog here to my masterclass.’
‘It wasn’t so much of a risk,’ she said. ‘No more risky than being somewhere else. If you change your hair and your habits and the way you dress, go somewhere you’re not known and call yourself Mr Smith or Miss Jones, nobody cares a damn who you are. I’ve proved that. If he’d met anybody here who knew him or Hugh, he could have turned around and gone away.’
‘But why did he add to the risk by using Mr McConnelly’s name?’ Beth asked.
‘Because it’s well known that I insist on inoculation certificates,’ I said. Now that we knew most of the story, the remainder was almost explaining itself. ‘He wanted a dog that knew him and would work for him. McConnelly had left his dog in kennels ready for his holiday. He collected the certificate from the boarding kennels along with the dog and it had Hugh McConnelly’s name on it. Although what good he expected to get out of the visit . . .’
Beth looked stricken. ‘When you sent us off to practise, he seemed curious about the spaniel. So I showed her to him. Does that make it my fault that you were stabbed?’
‘No way,’ I said. ‘You just made it a bit easier for him to brief Gus Brown where to find her.’
Our visitor had been following us. Her brow was creased in thought. ‘So what became of Tang?’ she asked.
‘Tang?’
‘Hugh’s dog. He called him Tangerine.’
‘I can see why he would,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid Tang’s dead. We heard an hour ago that his body had been found, buried in Mr McConnelly’s garden. I’m afraid that he – Dave – kept Tang just long enough to use him as an excuse to study the layout here. Then he killed him. He seems to have been as ruthless with dogs as he was with people. When I took the bitch to the States, he had somebody waiting. Damned nearly got his own wife killed.’
‘From what Hugh said, that mightn’t have worried Dave a lot. He cared about his wife but he cared a damned sight more about his own skin. He was the lowest sort of rat.’ She paused, sipped tea with her little finger crooked and looked thoughtfully at the door. I decided that she was wondering whether to go out and kick the corpse again. Apparently she decided not to bother. ‘Anyway, Hugh had a friend living in Fife.’
‘The thickset man who brought the gun to the Stoneleigh Hotel?’ Beth asked.
The muzzles of the gun stilled, pointed somewhere close to Beth’s feet. ‘You’re not thinking of making trouble for him? He didn’t know anything.’
Beth shook her head dumbly.
‘Forget him. All he did was to deliver the gun, and to help me a little, afterwards. He knows nothing. He’d been in the States. He and Hugh first met when Hugh was studying in Dallas. He put me in touch with a private detective in San Diego, a man who he said could be trusted. He cost a bomb, but I had Hugh’s money, remember.
‘Hugh had never told me where Dave came from. But Dave told Hugh and Hugh told me the story of Langtry, Texas, and how Judge Roy Bean fell in love with a picture of the Jersey Lily and wrote to her all the time, but she never visited Texas until the year after the judge died. Only Hugh said that the place was named Langtry before Judge Bean ever arrived there.’ She paused and gave a little sigh for another legend destroyed. ‘Starting from there, he looked around to find where Dave’s wife had been living. He heard about a shooting. The woman was exonerated, but she’d moved away immediately afterwards. And he – my detective – found out some other things. The spaniel – Salmon – had arrived there just before the man was shot, while you were away from here.’
‘You were watching us?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, looking surprised. ‘Whenever I could. He’d vanished and I wanted to find him more than I’ve wanted anything on this earth. I thought that he’d gone abroad and it seems that I was right but that he came back. You were my last link with him in this country. There was something in the papers about you taking the dog out to the States and I thought that my last link had broken. Then one more thing my detective found out was that somebody else in the same line of business had been hired to find out where the wife had gone. But she’d covered her tracks very cleverly.
‘Thinking about it, I guessed that his wife was afraid that somebody would come after her so she’d run off with the money. The thoughtless swine hadn’t even bothered to tell her that he was still alive, not even while he was contacting some roughneck to lie in wait for the spaniel. When he turned up at last, she was gone and his dog with her.
‘For all I knew, he might have decided not to bother. He had other money now and there are plenty of women who’ll take up with a man who can spend. But he might care for his wife enough to look for her, and if anybody knew where she’d gone it might be you. If I could work that out, he could. And then again, I had to be somewhere.’ she sighed again. ‘One place was as good as another now that Hugh was dead. There didn’t seem to be much else to do with my life. I might just as well be here as anywhere, watching in case he came to find out where his wife had gone. Now that he’s dead, I’m free.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ Beth asked.
Beth’s question, I could tell from the fear in her voice, was directed towards the question of what she intended to do with us, but our guest considered it carefully. ‘God knows,’ she said at last. ‘It’s a clean slate. I’ve money but I’ve no ties, no job and no man any more. I might go and be a missionary or something. Perhaps it’s time I did some good in the world – other than ridding it of . . . him.’
We fell silent. I was thinking about the slim chance which had brought her to our door at the right moment and how near I had come to repeating the impetuous mistake which had nearly proved disastrous in Texas.
She looked at her watch again and then at me. The gun came up and for a gut-watering moment I expected a load of shot. ‘Time’s running out,’ she said. ‘Would you please empty your pockets on to the floor.’ I looked at her blankly. ‘Keys,’ she said in explanation.
I gave her my keys and restored my few other oddments to my pockets.
‘We don’t even know your name,’ Beth said.
‘That’s true. Now, where’s this shop?’
The shop, so called, was an attached stone outbuilding which had come into its use because visitors sometimes bought a spaniel on impulse without having a bed or a lead or even a scrap of dogfood for it. It had become a recognised supplier of training aids for the district. I led the way out of the kitchen by the outside door and across a small porch and we stood back while she fiddled with the good security lock. The stock was no more valuable than the contents of the house, but my guns lived in the workshop and junk room behind the shop.
I led Beth in, switching on the light. The woman followed us in and took a look at the barred window. Then the door slammed on us. ‘The keys will be on the table,’ called her voice.
Beth thanked her. The politeness of our exchanges seemed to be infectious.
We could hear her moving around, faintly, somewhere in the house. ‘What’s she doing?’ Beth asked me in a whisper.
‘I think she’s searching the body. He probably has his share of the money on him, or a clue to where it’s waiting.’
Beth shivered.
We heard her voice once more. In a way, it was the most remarkable courtesy of all. She came back to the door. ‘Do you mind if I use your bathroom before I go?’ she asked.
We looked at each other in surprise. ‘Not at all,’ I said.
We heard water running and the toilet flushed. Then all was silence.
‘Mad,’ Beth said in a small voice. ‘Quite mad. I can understand her doing what she did. I . . . I hope I’d have the strength to do the same if somebody killed you. But to be so polite about it, that’s unnatural.’
‘I think she’s walking a sort of tightrope,’ I said. ‘She needs something familiar to hang on to. When she isn’t under stress, she’s polite and considerate.’<
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‘Well, I still say it’s not natural. Can you get us out of here? Shoot the lock off or something?’
I pointed out that my guns were in a steel safe and the keys were on the kitchen table.
‘We’re here for the night then?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘But we don’t have to be uncomfortable.’ A stock of dog-nests had been delivered only a few days before. I made a comfortable pile of them in a corner, out of the way of any draughts, and switched off the light. We sat down and then lay back, pleasantly intimate.
‘Now,’ said Beth’s voice, ‘you can tell me all about what happened in Texas.’
Perhaps it was the relief at evading death, but my body was sending me messages. ‘I can think of something much more interesting to do,’ I said.
Beth turned in the circle of my arms and kissed my nose. ‘Tell me first,’ she said comfortably.
She listened intently as I spoke into the darkness. Her sympathies were entirely with Jess. Beth herself would not have hesitated to kill a man who was going to shoot Jason. And while we spoke, our passion crept out of hiding.
We were keyed up. Even after we had made love, gently and successfully, sleep was slow to come. The dog-nests had not been designed for human use and our minds were too alert after the events of the day. I was exhausted but whenever I fell into a doze Beth’s fidgets jerked me awake again.
‘Empty your head,’ I told her at last. ‘Imagine that you’re hunting for fleas on a black velvet curtain.’
We settled down again. I was falling at last into a deep sleep when she sat up suddenly. ‘I got one of them,’ she said sleepily. ‘Take it from me.’
*
We heard the scream when Isobel arrived in the morning, but before we could attract her attention she had dashed off down to the village to phone the Sergeant about the body in our hall. As she explained later, her detective plays had taught her that nothing must be touched; but I believe that she had been afraid to penetrate deeper into the house in case she found Beth and me, equally dead and similarly gory. We had to wait another half-hour before we were released. By then, it was eventually learned, the lady’s plane had already left Gatwick.
She sent us a Christmas card from Beirut.
We saw her once more, in a TV news item about the famine in Ethiopia. She was among a group of relief workers and seemed to be enjoying herself, striding around and bossing the natives. Her hair was cropped short but there was no doubt that it was the same woman. Against her dark tan the crooked teeth flashed white as she smiled and smiled.
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