Bloodlines (Three Oaks Book 8)

by Gerald Hammond

  His eyes gleamed and he nodded. I could guess just how much his assurance would be worth at a later date. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I can’t see why you want to get them registered.’

  That new line of argument brought him up short. I saw his face harden. If I had not had such a dislike of him he would have had some of my sympathy. The Kennel Club, having destroyed several good working breeds by imposing unrealistic show standards, had gained a stranglehold on gun-dog competitions. Despite the fact that the first ever field trial was won by a springer/cocker cross (‘sprocker’ to the facetious), entries were only accepted for registered dogs of unmixed breeds, progeny of registered ancestors on both sides. If Cleo’s pups were not registered, neither they nor any of their descendants to infinity could ever be registered; thus any kind of competition under the aegis of the Kennel Club would be out of court.

  Personally, I disagreed strongly with the KC attitude and I had said so loudly, often and in print. Our present working breeds had been compounded, very successfully, from combinations of older strains designed to foster specific attributes and talents. To close the gene pool permanently was a guarantee that no improvement by out-crossing, nor the attendant hybrid vigour, could ever be obtained. It was and is a cul-de-sac philosophy. But however great my dislike of the Kennel Club’s short-sightedness, my dislike of Ben Garnet and his sharp practices was greater.

  Garnet felt his way towards a new line of argument. ‘I guess they’ll have to be put down,’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘That’s often the best way,’ I agreed.

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘I care,’ I said truthfully. ‘I hate to see even new-born pups put down. But I’m still not going to be conned into letting a whole lot of Horace’s valuable bloodline go begging.’

  I was warmly dressed and booted but he was just out of his car. The breeze must have cut through his city clothes and the snow was definitely over the sides of his shoes. I wondered for how long I could spin out the discussion. I was pleased to note that his ears and fingers were turning blue but he was not going to give up. There was hard currency at stake. He shifted ground again. ‘Of course, I would expect to pay a reasonable stud fee,’ he said, with all the enthusiasm of one who is passing a kidney stone.

  This was the first mention of a fee; and his interpretation of the word reasonable and mine would never coincide. I searched around for a figure which would be more than he would pay but not so much as to be fantasy—the sort of figure, in fact, which would drive him mad in the witching hours. ‘One thousand pounds,’ I said suddenly. ‘Up front, now, today.’

  There was a pause during which I began to worry. He might well complicate the issue by agreeing to my figure. Both of us would know that it would never be paid. ‘You get my signature after your cheque has cleared,’ I added.

  ‘You’re mad!’ he said at last.

  ‘Pay the fee and I won’t be the least bit mad,’ I said. I started to turn away.

  ‘Come on, now. A hundred. No pup, no fee.’

  ‘Dream on! Resign yourself to having a litter of good working spaniels,’ I told him.

  ‘Be reasonable,’ he said. That word again! Nobody commends reason so strongly as those who go against it.

  ‘I am being very reasonable,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow, the price will have gone up. Substantially.’

  He brandished the form in my face. Charm had failed for the moment. Now was the time for bluster. His face switched instantly from bonhomie to antagonism. ‘Sign this bloody form,’ he growled.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll be sorry. I, personally, will see to that.’

  ‘Am I to take that as a threat?’

  ‘Take it any way you like, I’m telling you that you won’t get away with it. I’ll have you in court first.’

  ‘Do,’ I said. ‘And I can produce a dozen witnesses to swear that the mating wasn’t any of my doing and that the difference in value of a good litter of pups of that breeding between being registered and unregistered could be a thousand of anybody’s money. Except yours, of course.’

  He let his fury show—not just in his face, but every line of his body stiffened. I could see him searching for the most cutting Parthian shot. He let a sneer settle across his face. It looked more natural there than his usual bland expression. ‘Tell me, little man,’ he said. ‘What do you want to be . . . when you grow up?’

  He threw himself into the driver’s seat of his car and started off with a burst of wheelspin and a slither that nearly swung the tail into me. It would have looked accidental but it was absolutely deliberate. I watched him out of sight. If he should slide off the road or be stopped by the police, I would not have wanted to miss it. But I was doomed to disappointment. I went into the house. I could afford to ignore his parting words. He was at most five years older than myself, probably less.

  I took off my many outer layers inside the back door and came into the large, bright kitchen which is the hub of the house and of our business. In the lobby I passed our two kennel-maids, Hannah and Daffy, who were on the way out with puppyfood. Hannah was looking scandalized but Daffy grinned at me. I gathered that my conversation with Ben Garnet had been audible indoors.

  In the kitchen, I was greeted loudly by Sam, who was in his high chair and being fed by Beth. Isobel, my other partner, was putting a plate of soup for me on the table where her elderly husband, Henry, was already seated. Henry is not a member of the firm but he is often around, helping, advising or just lending moral support. Home, for Henry, would have been a silent bungalow a couple of miles away, but here he could find companionship, banter and youth. Too many of his contemporaries, he said, had retired to the garden or the bowling green and allowed their intellects to atrophy. His body might be failing but Henry liked to keep his mind alive.

  Isobel flashed her unsuitable spectacles at me. By strangers she could have been taken for any unassuming lady with no outdoor aspirations; but she is a qualified vet as well as being a naturally talented dog handler with a string of wins and several championships to her credit. She also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of gundog bloodlines and a computer program to back it up.

  ‘Are you sure that that was wise?’ Isobel asked, putting crusty bread beside the soup.

  I found that I was ravenously hungry but I delayed long enough to ask, ‘What can he do?’

  ‘He could make a nuisance of himself, but that’s not what I was thinking,’ Isobel said. ‘It seems to me that Horace is the perfect stud for Cleo. They both have Champion Knutsford Walfrey for a grandsire,’ she said—reverently, for she was speaking of the great and good—‘and you know what sort of a line he throws. The rest of their pedigrees complement each other. There’s no eye trouble in either strain and they both have low hip scores.’

  The soup was very hot but I managed to swallow my mouthful. ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘So get after him. Say you’ll sign the form provided that you get, say, three pups of your choice out of the litter.’

  ‘Golly!’ Beth said and Sam repeated the word over and over. Even Henry shot his wife a startled look. I had to agree with all three of them. First choice of one pup is the customary alternative to a fee. But, of course, that would presuppose that the parties were on equal terms. Perhaps Ben Garnet had outsmarted himself.

  I emptied my mouth again. ‘You can put it to him if you want to,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough of him. I may try it on if he comes back to the attack.’

  ‘When, not if,’ Henry said. ‘You know what he’s like. And I suggest that you warn the Kennel Club to look very hard at your signature if Ken Garnet’s name turns up on a Form One.’

  *

  As if the forces of nature were pursuing a plot to drive out of their minds those sentimental souls who yearned for a white Christmas, the first thaw came in late December. Instead of a white Christmas we had one that was sloshy, soggy and just plain wet. It was succeeded by a white New Year; only a few inches this time, but the frost that follow
ed held the snow and kept it crisp while the roadsides turned grey and paths became pedestrian accident black spots. When a wind blew, the cold was bitter; but mostly it was a period of short, calm days with skies of an incredible blue above a white landscape patterned with black.

  Three days into the year, I came back from exercising several young dogs on the Moss and glanced into the sitting room to find the message indicator on our answering machine blinking. We had put off that particular extravagance from year to year on grounds of cost, the inability of Beth and the girls to cope with gadgets and the fact that the house was very rarely empty. The new generation of tapeless answering machines had brought the rental of a phone with answering facility down to very little more than the rent of a naked telephone. With so many women in the house I had usually been the thrifty partner when telephones were discussed but, as soon as I was told that we had actually lost a sale because the client had been unable to reach us, I had insisted that the time for such a machine had arrived. It had soon proved its value. The snag was that nobody but myself ever looked at it unless they were specifically expecting a call.

  This message was from a well-spoken Mr Hopgood, requesting a call-back. From the area code, he was calling from not many miles away.

  Mr Hopgood proved to be resident in a small private hotel. A voice that claimed to be Reception (but was probably that of the maid of all work) put me through and he answered his phone on the second ring. I introduced myself.

  ‘Thank you for calling me back,’ he said politely. ‘I’m told that you might have a trained or half-trained spaniel to suit me. My old dog had to be put down last week. Kidney failure.’

  I commiserated and we discussed his requirements. He wanted a dog for rough shooting, some wildfowling and occasional driven days, preferred males, was not interested in competing and got on well with the exuberant type of dog. Accer came to mind at once. He had made great leaps forward, sometimes literally, in the past month. Some dogs seem incapable of learning and then develop with a rush. ‘I have one that you might like,’ I said. ‘He’s just seeing the light. You’d have to stay on top of him, let him see that you won’t stand for any nonsense.’

  ‘That sounds like my kind of dog,’ he said. ‘Some people prefer the shy and anxious type but while I’ve never owned one I don’t think I could come to terms with it.’

  I mentioned the price. That was the moment at which some enquirers made some excuse to break off the discussion, often promising another call which never came, but Mr Hopgood seemed to have a good idea of the present run of prices. ‘When can I see the dog?’

  I glanced at my watch. A client should never be given time to cool off or to tell his wife what he has in mind. If I grabbed an early lunch, we could still manage a couple of hours of daylight. ‘Can you come over in about an hour?’ I asked him. ‘I’d prefer you to see him working. Bring a gun if you like.’

  ‘Now that’s what I call sensible,’ he said.

  I hurried into the kitchen to beg a quick snack. My share of the afternoon’s programme was readily divided among the ladies. They knew as well as I did that just after the end of the shooting season was a good time to buy a dog but a hard time to sell one. A trained dog still unsold at that time was likely to remain, a hungry mouth and demander of attention, until the next season began to loom in late summer, without increasing in value.

  Within the hour I was outside again, Accer at my heel and my gun over my arm. There was no sign of Mr Hopgood yet and I offered up a silent prayer that he had not changed his mind or had it changed for him by Mrs Hopgood.

  The drive had been cleared of snow and I kept Accer carefully on it. He would undoubtedly get wet during our outing, but first impressions are important and a wet spaniel looks a ragamuffin. To while away a few minutes I sat him at the edge of the drive and walked along between the shrubs at the bottom of the lawn and the shoulder-high wall that bordered the road. Rubbish sometimes blew over the wall or was thrown over by passing litterbugs. This was a source of disproportionate annoyance to Beth, who managed to remain as proud of the garden as she was of the house despite the damage that any dog can inflict if left unsupervised for more than a few seconds.

  Beth, I thought, had a right to be proud. She had worked hard on it. The deciduous bushes at the front of the border, now of course bare, were backed by foliage shrubs which provided the only relief in the frozen landscape. A viburnum was blooming pink in defiance of winter and the forsythia was budding nicely. The strip of bare ground against the wall where the snow had not found its way was fairly clear of rubbish, but what I took at first to be a clump of early crocuses turned out to be a small plastic carrier bag with multicoloured printing. Not only that, but when I picked it up in order to collect some of the few scraps of paper from among the dead leaves I found it stiff with dried glue.

  Our end of Fife is not generally prone to trouble. To the south-west lie industrial and mining areas, but hereabouts the land is agricultural. Small residential colonies were only established by commuters using what were originally private ferries to Dundee; and even the construction of first the rail and then the road bridge across the Firth of Tay had little effect beyond the first mile or two.

  Recently, however, there had been signs that the maladies bred elsewhere from unemployment and boredom were appearing in our quiet backwater and the more obvious of these was solvent abuse. Twice I had chased small parties of three of four glue-sniffers out of the barn. Only one of their faces had been known to me, which comfortingly suggested that even those small numbers had had to congregate from further afield.

  I had little doubt that Tom Shotto was the ringleader. The others had seemed to have themselves under control and had offered me only impertinence and verbal abuse. On the second occasion young Shotto had been as high as a kite and ripe for violence, but when I made it clear that I recognized him and knew his identity the others had hustled him away. He was a tall lout, too lean even for his light build, with a spotty face and a round head covered only thinly with a haze of pale hair.

  My musings were interrupted by the arrival of a car. I tucked the bag between the gatepost and the wall and forgot about it.

  Mr Hopgood—Charles, as he introduced himself—was a well-built man in his forties, cheerful of manner and evidently very fit. He had a ruddy face, large but with disproportionately small features which gave him a slightly owlish appearance. His voice was deep and with a neutral accent although as I became tuned to it I thought, correctly as I learned later, that I could detect a trace of Edinburgh. He was sensibly dressed for a country walk through the Scottish January with flat cap, tweed coat, breeks and leather boots. He bent down to pull Accer’s ear and the spaniel accepted the greeting with a violent wagging of his docked tail and latter end followed by an attempt to jump up which was instantly checked. The omens were good.

  ‘If you don’t mind walking a mile or so,’ I said, ‘I can show you how far he’s progressed. This end of the Moss is a morass but the far side’s passable.’

  ‘We can take my car,’ he said. His Isuzu Trooper looked almost new. Accer took to the back without hesitation. We got out at the mouth of a rarely used track and let the dog dismount. He wanted to race around and play.

  ‘Call him to heel,’ I said. I handed over a stag-horn whistle. ‘This is the whistle he’s been trained to,’ I explained. ‘It helps a dog to settle in if the same whistle goes with him.’ I might have added that it also sells a lot of expensive whistles, but I kept that to myself.

  We unbagged our guns. He had a very nice Cogswell and Harrison but I was not ashamed of the Dickson. We were in thick cover as soon as we moved off. Even in midwinter, that part of the Moss was sheltered by scattered clumps of spruce interspersed with gorse bushes and the dead remains of grass and reeds which had been drawn up into fallen brushwood.

  ‘Tell him to “Get on”,’ I said.

  Charles Hopgood repeated the age-old words. Accer shot away and vanished into the conifers. ‘He�
��s going a bit far ahead, isn’t he?’ Charles said doubtfully after a few seconds.

  ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘And him. He knows exactly where we are. He’s taught himself to travel a figure-of-eight pattern which covers the ground very well. I don’t know what gave him the idea, but it works.’ Something black and white flashed through the bushes in front of us. ‘If you want to see him, give him the “Turn” whistle. Two peeps.’

  Charles gave two peeps on the whistle. The black and white streak came from behind this time, zipped almost over our toes and vanished again.

  The Moss is trafficked by dog walkers and steadily poached, and I was using it again for dog training now that we had lost Foleyknowe, but an occasional pheasant still found its way there and decided to settle down. Accer homed in on a large cock among a tangle of dead grasses and sent him up with a whirr and an angry clocking.

  ‘Yours,’ I said quickly. The bird was on his side.

  Charles was caught off balance by the sudden explosion of the bird and the sun was against him. He fired too late, low and behind, and swore under his breath. The bird gained height, set its wings and glided from sight.

  We started moving again. ‘Better call him on,’ I said. ‘He’ll stay sitting until you do.’

  Peep-peep. Whoosh!

  We were forced apart by an almost impenetrable thicket of gorse—although Accer seemed to ignore it as he hurled himself through. When we met up again, I said, ‘Believe it or not, he can keep going at that pace all day.’

  ‘What it is to be young!’ Charles said. ‘I like this dog. I think we can do business.’

  Peep-peep. Zoom!

  ‘Let’s keep going,’ I told him. ‘I want to see you two get on the same wavelength. A common understanding now prevents cross-purposes later.’

  Further on, we came into more open ground where thin snow, marked by the tracks and droppings of rabbits, lay between widely scattered clumps of gorse. I had Charles direct Accer by hand signals, trying to bring out their common language of movements, limited vocabulary, whistles and tone of voice. Even in midwinter there were rabbits which had rashly taken shelter in clumps of gorse which, overlying rocky ground, allowed no digging of bolt-holes. Accer bolted one, sat tight while Charles rolled it over and then fetched it to his hand on command.