by Alice Castle
What was that snippet she’d overheard in the chemists? Well, eavesdropped on, if you wanted to be strictly accurate. It had been something about Potter’s prescription. Beth had barely glanced at the slip of paper which she’d handed into the pharmacist. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested – she was interested in everything, all the time. But the drug, zopi-something, had meant nothing to her.
There hadn’t been time to Google it between being handed the piece of paper in the office, in front of Potter and the lady, and getting to the chemists just a few doors down. She supposed she’d been counting on getting the box over the counter. Then, if she’d been curious enough (and of course she was), she could have read the insert with all the instructions and the usually hair-raising contraindications, at her leisure, and pretended she’d been stuck in a queue.
But, of course, she’d come back empty-handed. All she had to go on was the half-whispered, half-remembered conversation between the pharmacy assistants. ‘Zimmer frame’, that had been it. Or something very like it. And the word on the original form had definitely started with the letters ZOP. So that was what she was looking for. It might mean nothing at all. But Beth was feeling hopeful as she turned the corner where Nina’s flats were located.
To her astonishment, despite the cold, there was a little knot of people gathered outside the block under a street lamp, including, she could now see, Nina, Wilf, and Ben. They were all bundled up against the chill, with Ben wearing one of Nina’s own hats – a signature Dulwich number in thick cable knit with a furry bobble right on top. It reminded Beth of Letty’s beautiful pale turquoise version – though she was willing to put money on the fact that Nina’s was a more modest Primark knock-off, which probably meant the style had caught on a little too far and the Dulwich cognoscenti would be moving restlessly to find the next It hat very soon. Goodness knew how Nina had persuaded Ben into something a bit girly and furry – but Beth was glad she had, it was freezing out here. She dashed over.
‘Nina? What on earth are you doing out here?’
‘Beth! Great! I was a bit worried we’d miss you in the dark,’ said Nina, grabbing her arm in greeting.
Beth hated to point it out, but Nina’s ample embonpoint and white coat, today teamed with a neon pink version of Ben’s hat, did mean that spotting her was not exactly a game of Where’s Wally?
‘It’s all kicking off here. There’s been another one,’ Nina said, with a significant glance at Wilf. His little pixie face was alight with excitement and expectancy, and he was gabbling to Ben, who was patiently standing at his side.
‘Another what?’ Beth was baffled.
Nina, over Wilf’s head, started to do a mime, sticking both hands behind her head and waggling them furiously, then staring at Beth as though she must know what that meant. Exasperated, she then turned round and started waving her arm low down at her side. This gesture Beth had seen often enough in the playground, when Ben or a friend had farted and found the whole business hysterically funny. But that had really only been in vogue when he’d been smaller. Beth backed away half a pace, put her head on one side, and wondered what she’d been thinking of letting this woman look after her son. Nina was now frantically mouthing a word. What was it? It looked like…
‘Golf? Golf,’ said Beth, her eyebrows disappearing into her fringe. Playing charades was all very well, and she was more or less braced for a few compulsory rounds of it after lunch on Christmas Day, but in the sub-zero temperatures of a Herne Hill housing estate? After a long day with the great dictator? Beth could feel her stocks of patience disappearing from the shelves like plasma tellies in a Black Friday sale.
Nina grabbed her arm again and hauled her off a few paces to the side, away from the boys and the crowd, which seemed to be growing. Ben watched his mum closely but seemed relaxed. Wilf continued to chatter away, oblivious.
‘What is it? What’s up?’ said Beth urgently.
‘I was saying woof! Honestly, what are you like? It’s another dog,’ said Nina, who still seemed to be expecting some sort of plaudits for her acting.
She’d be waiting a while, thought Beth, who was distinctly underwhelmed. ‘I was going to guess elephant, if you’d had a gun to my head. But what’s this about dogs?’
‘Another one’s been poisoned. Rosie.’
‘No!’ Beth felt cold. This was getting serious. ‘How many’s that, now? Roxie the dachshund, Lola the spaniel, Lancelot the Potter’s Great Dane. And I heard about another one, Truffle, the other day, though apparently that was old age. And now one here? Are you sure?’
‘They’re saying it’s a serial killer,’ said Nina, her eyes round as saucers.
Beth was silent for a moment as it sunk in. Could you really be a serial killer of dogs? Was that glorifying a petty act of spite, probably carried out by a dreadfully maladjusted teenager? But on the other hand, these were blameless, loving, trusting pets, loved by their families, leaving broken-hearted children behind them. Whoever was doing this was not only destroying dogs, they were destroying childhood memories, too. It was evil.
‘But I don’t understand what everyone’s doing out here?’
‘Oh, this is what we do round here when something big happens. Bin lorry forgets to pick up the rubbish. Someone kills our dogs. Out on the streets. Solidarity. You probably don’t get this round the posh bits of Dulwich.’
You certainly didn’t, thought Beth. The worse things got in the outside world, the more Dulwich families seemed to close in on themselves. Yes, the Ocado deliveries started clanking more, the bottles of wine becoming a dire necessity rather than an occasional temptation due to the twenty-five per cent reduction on a half-dozen. But that was a secret between the householders, their extremely heavy recycling bins, and the exhausted supermarket drivers filling up GPs’ surgeries with their complaints of chronic back pain.
‘Whose dog was it this time?’
‘Oh, that bloke over there. The one sobbing on that fat geezer’s shoulder, can you see?’
Beth looked across and saw a chap whose head, covered with fine blond stubble showing up like a halo in the street light, was bowed as he leant into an equally shorn friend, and wept openly. It was shocking – you so rarely saw men give way to their feelings in public, even in this day and age, Beth realised. She certainly hadn’t seen her own father cry. Her brother rarely seemed capable of any of the deeper emotions, so determined was he to skate blithely across the surface of life. Ben still cried, earnestly and heartbreakingly, when he hurt himself, but somehow he’d learned to control tears of rage, chagrin or sorrow. She certainly hadn’t tried to teach him to repress his feelings – unless it was by example. It was a horrible thought, and Beth turned away from it and focused on the poor, bereft man in front of her.
He cried on, every now and then raising his voice incoherently then burying his head again in his friend’s meaty shoulder. That T-shirt must be sodden by now, Beth thought, admiring the restraint of the pal on the receiving end of all those tears. The erstwhile dog owner, meanwhile, still had a thick leather leash, encrusted with silver studs, dangling uselessly from his hand, its one careful lady owner now gone for good.
‘Poor man, he’s absolutely in bits,’ said Beth. It was an understatement. ‘Did you know the dog?’
‘We all knew Rosie. She was the loveliest Staffie. Looked tough but, like Bob, she was sweet as a nut, she really was.’
Beth didn’t like to admit that she most dogs quite scary – they were usually at an unfortunate height for her and seemed to delight in snuffling in places she’d much rather keep private. She knew, though, that Staffordshire Bull Terriers had had an unjustified (and ironic) mauling in the press a while back, resulting in Battersea Dogs’ and Cats’ Home, where she’d got her beloved Magpie, being full to bursting with the sad abandoned creatures, big-hearted and affectionate dogs who adored their families, but maybe didn’t boast the cuddlier appearance of a golden retriever.
‘How dreadful,’ she said sadly. ‘But
wait a minute, how does it help us all standing out here?’ she asked, not daring to add, ‘getting really cold.’ It didn’t seem very sympathetic.
‘Oh, you know, we’re just showing we all care. It’s what we do. Plus, the police are supposed to be on their way and we want to make sure they know we take this very seriously, very seriously indeed.’
Beth was starting to have a bad feeling about this. ‘Are you sure it’s a good idea for us to be out here with the kids?’ she said, conscious of sounding lame.
Ben and Wilf were watching proceedings with big eyes, seeming to find it all as fascinating as Bonfire Night or any other outdoor evening activity. She supposed, at their age, there were few occasions when they were really outside for long periods on a dark winter’s evening. And at six and at ten, novelty was always good. Plus, the mood of the crowd, part excited, part angry, part almost vengeful, was quite intoxicating. There might be precious little actually happening at the moment, but there was certainly an air of tense expectation, which was no doubt infecting the children. Beth felt it, too, and wondered with a stab of foreboding where all this was going to lead.
Just then, Beth thought she saw someone she knew moving through the crowd. His head was down, he was wearing a dark coat, but there was something very familiar about his gait. Wait a minute, could it be? Yes, he hurried past a street lamp, and she saw him clearly. It was him. Tom Seasons, the Bursar of Wyatt’s. What on earth was he doing here?
He disappeared round the corner, and then Beth had something else to worry about. There was the distinctive flash of blue lights advancing up Red Post Hill, bouncing off the buildings, and a very familiar plain clothes police car drew up, followed by a patrol vehicle. The crowd started to move, pushing forward towards the cars for reasons Beth didn’t understand at all. She immediately shrank back into the crowd, looking for Ben, grabbing his hand. He tried to shake her off, but for once she held on tightly, not caring a jot if he lost face or if she was being embarrassing. Nina, she noticed, dived for Wilf as well, and they stood together in the thick of the press of people. Beth’s ears were on stalks, listening out. And then she heard him.
‘Evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ came Harry’s voice, the very slight Irish burr always a little stronger when he was under pressure, though you’d never know it from his measured tones. Immediately, she felt a bit calmer. It was going to be all right.
‘Now, I understand there’s been an incident, and I’m here to look into that. I’ll be talking to Mr Fletcher here, and we’ll be doing everything we can to get to the bottom of this occurrence—’
‘Occurrence? It’s blimmin’ murder, mate, that’s what it is,’ piped up a lad in a hoodie from the back of the crowd. Beth peered over.
Immediately, the crowd murmured approval. ‘What you going to do about it then, eh?’
‘What about our dogs, are they going to be next?’
‘It’ll be the kids after, that’s what,’ came an angry woman’s voice from right behind Beth.
Beth ducked down, but too late. Harry York, a good six foot four in his socks, scanned the crowd, his eyes came to rest on her, widened incredulously and, to his credit, roamed on until he found the woman who’d just spoken, puffed up with her own aggression and busily gathering the approval of her neighbours.
‘Madam, I’d like to say to you, and to every one of you here now, we are looking into this incident and will be treating it very seriously indeed. Very seriously,’ said York, and if Beth wasn’t mistaken, he narrowed his eyes directly at her. ‘We’ll be canvassing all of you, house-to-house, and that will be the moment when any of you can raise concerns directly with me, or one of my officers. Please do pass on any information you may have. We’re going to get to the bottom of this together, aren’t we?’
There were murmurs of assent now, and Beth thought admiringly how well her Harry – if she could call him that – had played things. There had been ugly moments when it looked as though feelings, already running high, were going to spill over into aggression and defiance. But they had been skilfully defused. Now Harry stepped forward and took Rosie’s owner to one side, and was handing him a wad of tissues and patting him on the back. His friend looked a little relieved to have had the sobbing weight removed from his shoulders and, sure enough, his thin T-shirt looked damp, even from this distance. How could he stand the cold, dressed like that? Beth thought, turning to make sure Ben’s coat was done up to the chin and also calculating how soon they could make their escape and sidle away from Harry’s inevitable disapproval.
At that moment, Harry clapped the bereaved dog owner on the back one last time and turned, inexorably, to face her. The crowd had thinned out disappointingly by now, Beth realised, people melting away almost as quickly as they had assembled, no-one wanting to linger in the freezing temperatures now that the show was so evidently over. Nina, her arm round little Wilf, smiled merrily at Beth, ignoring her beseeching eyes, and said, ‘Tomorrow, yeah?’ making for the door of the flats before Beth could remonstrate with her.
Beth turned back to Harry and tried a smile. He narrowed his eyes a little at her, despatched the PCs with him to the four corners of the estate, and then said, ‘Beth. Fancy meeting you here.’
‘Mm,’ she squeaked, acutely conscious of Ben’s ears flapping away as he sensed something very interesting going in the dynamic between his mum and her friend. ‘I was just passing…’
‘I’m surprised you’re still up, mate,’ said York, addressing Ben directly and, of course, going straight to the heart of Beth’s ever-present, over-active maternal guilt gland. ‘Quite late for a school night.’
‘There’s no school, silly. It’s Christmas!’ sang out Ben, pointing to all the decorations in the flats behind him. Sure enough, there was even a fake Santa straggling down the façade of the building, complete with a sack of presents, both of which looking as though they’d seen better years, let alone days. And reindeers, elves, stars, and trees blazed down on them from all sides. Outdoor decorations in Dulwich itself were restricted to the odd string of white fairy lights draped terribly tastefully over a hedge, but no-one in this postcode seemed to have got the memo, and the morass of twinkling electricity could probably be seen from Mars.
Beth, a little worried that calling a policeman silly was an arrestable offence even if you were extremely overexcited and ten, smiled as winningly as she could. ‘We were just visiting a friend, got caught up in the whole thing… I’m not sure how,’ she tailed off.
Harry, in his dark navy coat, with a thick cream scarf wrapped round his chin, looked tall, forbidding, very official despite the plain clothes, and not nearly as smiley as she’d have liked. Not at all like the last picture she had of him in her mind’s eye, rumpled from a busy night and giving her a long, lingering kiss before sneaking out of her house without waking Ben.
‘Funny how that seems to happen to you,’ said Harry drily, unbendingly addressing her from his full height. ‘Well, you off home now?’
‘Yes, yes, I think it’s time we got you to bed,’ Beth said to Ben in the false-bright way that she knew he hated most.
‘Fancy a lift?’ Harry put his head on one side. The question was directed solely at Ben.
The boy nodded furiously for a moment, then thought of something. ‘Can we have the flashing lights on?’
‘Nope,’ smiled Harry.
‘Sirens, then?’ asked Ben irrepressibly. Beth couldn’t blame him for trying, but Harry just laughed, shook his head once and opened the back door of the discreet, dark saloon car to let him slide in. He then did the same for Beth, with a little more irony. But he touched her hand as she got into the car, and immediately she had the warm feeling that everything would be fine. He couldn’t really be cross with her just for being in the wrong place, could he?
But already she had that feeling she’d sometimes got long ago at school, when the Headmistress was banging on about some minor infraction of the rules, like lying down on the lawn outside the science block wh
ere they would be – gasp – visible to people on the top decks of passing buses, or buying cigarettes from the newsagents opposite the school gates. Every time, from the woman’s demeanour, you’d have thought murder had been committed, there in the hall. And despite herself, without fail, Beth had always started to feel guilty, no matter how clean her hands were of whatever the terrible crime was. By the end of those assemblies, her cheeks would be as scarlet as the culprit’s should have been.
And now she felt as though she was going to be raked over the coals again. This time, though, she had a weapon at her disposal that she’d never possessed as a schoolgirl.
Harry did try to be stern with her, once Ben, inevitably protesting he wasn’t tired but caught out in a colossal yawn, had been packed off unceremoniously to bed. ‘Why is it that, whenever there’s any trouble in Dulwich, you’re in the thick of it?’ he asked, sounding exasperated and pushing his hands through his thick blond hair.
‘Well, this time, I think you mean Herne Hill,’ Beth said, straight-faced. ‘That’s completely different, you know,’ she added, ducking as Harry chucked a cushion at her. ‘Here, mind out, you nearly got Magpie with that,’ she said. The cat stalked off, deeply unimpressed, pausing only to dart a glance of profound dislike at Harry out of her emerald chip eyes before disappearing into the kitchen. She then wriggled herself out of the cat flap with some difficulty. It was hard making a dignified exit when you were getting to the comfortably fluffy phase of feline life.
Back in the sitting room, Beth was braced for more of a telling off, but luckily some of the fight seemed to have gone out of Harry.
‘You know, I just worry about you, Beth. You’re such a, well, you’re not a trouble-maker, but my mum would definitely call you a trouble-magnet. You really don’t need to have a finger in every pie in Dulwich – or Herne Hill, or wherever. You know what you should have done, when you saw trouble brewing? You should have called me. As it was, we got an anonymous tip at the station.’
