When Beth came into the room and began laying out the ingredients for our midday snack—too light and informal to be dignified with the title of ‘lunch’—Sam ran to her. Food was more fascinating even than telephones. Beth picked him up and dumped him firmly on my knee where he squirmed for a few seconds and then settled down.
‘Keep him in one place for a few seconds,’ Beth said.
‘Will do. Tell me more about Mrs Campsie.’ I hushed Sam quickly before he could get started again.
‘I think I’ve told you all I know,’ she said. ‘The others will be here in a minute. Ask them.’
‘Is Henry coming?’ In times of difficulty or doubt, he was the first I would turn to for advice or knowledge of the world.
‘Henry’s gone up to Aberdeen. Joe’s knocked off for the day. I told him to join us. Dave can stand guard and Joe can take him out some food later.’
Sure enough, as though drawn by the smell of food, Isobel came in. Sylvan, she said, had almost forgotten her manners and had been on the point of chasing a rabbit; but she had come to her senses almost instantly and would not, Isobel thought, have been penalized by even the strictest judge. Hannah arrived seconds later and set to washing the grime of her morning’s labours off at the sink. Daffy, who was supposed to be on a day off, came in to hear any news that was going and took a place at the table anyway. She looked more outrageous than ever, the pink stripe in her hair clashing abominably with the turquoise of what I could only think of as a tabard.
Joe and Charles came in last. ‘I chapped on Mrs Garnet’s door but she wasn’t at home,’ Joe said.
‘She’ll be off to Ninewells,’ Beth said, putting out mugs of soup. She included Charles, who had come with Joe from the site of his house, and he accepted her hospitality with only a token hesitation.
‘I caught her on the phone,’ I said. ‘She tells me that one of the pups is earmarked for Mrs Campsie.’
‘She’s off her rocker,’ Sam announced loudly before I could stop him.
Everybody laughed and Daffy said, ‘If he means Mrs Campsie, he’s not wrong.’
‘Don’t encourage him,’ I told them. ‘He could say that in the wrong company and start a feud. Or a lawsuit. Beth says that she’s . . . mildly eccentric, pro-animal and anti-sport, a protester. Well, anyone’s entitled to be wrong if that’s what turns them on. Can anybody tell me any more about the lady?’
Sam stirred in his chair. ‘Not you,’ I told him.
Daffy can be counted on to know all about everybody. ‘She lives on the back road out of Cupar heading this way, four or five miles from the town. Big, newish house that looks as though it belongs in the middle of a suburb, not out in the backwoods—God alone knows how they got planning permission. She’s also anti-nuclear, Greenham Common and all that jazz. She doesn’t only protest about things, she’s very much into good works—’
‘Meals on Wheels,’ I put in.
‘That’s right. And she’s a voluntary helper with all sorts of charitable bodies. She was sorely missed when she got herself sent down for ten days.’
‘She’s been in the pokey?’
‘Didn’t you know? It was all over the local rag. She sprayed a policeman with paint during a Ban the Atom demo,’ Daffy said. ‘And then she refused to pay for the damage to his uniform. Otherwise, she’d have got off.’
‘She doesn’t seem to be the sort of person to buy a gun-dog pup,’ Hannah observed. ‘I mean, she’d melt into a group of our usual clients like . . . like a cat in a flock of pigeons.’
‘More like a pigeon,’ Joe said, ‘in a . . . a what of cats?’
‘I don’t think there is a collective noun for cats,’ said Charles. ‘The cat’s too solitary an animal.’
‘Let’s try to stick to one subject,’ I said. Such was the nature of mealtime chats at Three Oaks that we might easily have spent the next half hour inventing ever unlikelier collective nouns.
‘Really, she doesn’t seem to be the sort of person to do any of the things she does,’ Beth remarked. ‘That’s pretty much what John said. She seems so dull and respectable. Her trouble is that she has a whole lot of bees in rather a lot of bonnets. It’s a pity, really, because she’s a nice person underneath it all. I think she just adores dogs indiscriminately and pays no heed to what they were bred for.’
Joe swallowed a large mouthful whole. ‘Church on Sunday in gloves and her best hat. I think she only goes to pray for the birds and bunnies. She has a daughter living with her,’ he said.
Daffy stared at him. ‘Joe’s blushing,’ she said. ‘Are you sweet on the daughter, Joe?’
If Joe had not been blushing before he definitely was now. ‘She’s a bit above my touch,’ he said. ‘Her mum looks at me as though I’m a piece of sh . . . sharn,’ he amended hastily, ‘just because I work with my hands. But I’ve fetched her home from the hops a time or two and we get on great. She’s a wee cracker,’ he finished.
Joe was no longer a manual worker but a valued member of the building team, but this was neither the time nor the company in which to pursue details of Joe’s amours although I could see Beth making up her mind to pursue her own enquiries next time that she had Joe to herself.
‘Getting back to the mother,’ I said firmly, ‘—although I’m sure the daughter’s much more interesting—Mrs C seems to be a fanatic, but could she be enough of a fanatic, either about the pup or about field sports, to want to assault me and poison a dog?’
‘She’d be more like to poison me,’ Joe said. ‘Mind you, June, the daughter, would never get mixed up in anything bad.’
‘She was carrying a placard along with her mother on the day of Lord Crail’s shoot,’ I said.
‘Aye. She does that to oblige her mum,’ Joe said. ‘But she doesn’t mean a word of it. She used to go beagling when she was a student, she told me, and she’d be beagling yet if it wasn’t for that mother of hers. She sneaks out to help out as a beater, once in a while. The other beaters never let on, if they see her carrying a board with her mother the next week.’
That seemed to exhaust the subject of Mrs Campsie. ‘I’ll find an excuse to go and see the lady,’ I said. ‘And now to the next item of business.’ I wiped honey off my fingers and got up to play the tape that I had made of the message stolen from the Garnets’ answering machine. ‘Would anybody care to put a name to that voice?’
‘I’ve heard it,’ Isobel said after a long hiatus. ‘Or one very like it. Not often and not recently and I’m damned if I can remember when or where. Leave the tape where I can play it over now and again and maybe it’ll come to me. And I’ll play it to Henry.’
‘No other offers?’ I asked. ‘Then that’s how we’ll have to leave it for the moment. All we know about him is his voice.’
‘We know more than that,’ Hannah said softly.
‘You know him?’ Beth said.
Hannah shook her head. ‘I didn’t say that. I know something about him. And so do you. For a start, we know that he doesn’t know that Mr Garnet’s in hospital.’
‘We don’t know how old the message is,’ said Daffy. ‘It could have been on the machine since before Mr Garnet got whacked.’
Joe made a negative sound in his throat. ‘Mr McArthur left a message on her machine for Mrs Garnet yesterday, just something polite to say that he hoped her husband would be home soon. This has to be after that.’
‘Right,’ Hannah said. ‘And he’s insisting on the pup being registered, so he wants to breed or to compete.’
‘Or maybe to show,’ Beth said, ‘though our breeding isn’t for showing. We breed for health and working ability and we like the looks that come as a result, and never mind what the Kennel Club says a spaniel should look like. He may just be keeping his options open in case the pup turns out well.’
‘Could be,’ I said. ‘Anything else?’
‘There’s a trace of an accent,’ Hannah said.
I played the tape again. Although the telephone usually exaggerates an accent,
this one was very faint. I still thought American, Daffy thought Belfast and Isobel was sure that it was Australian. Or possibly New Zealand, she added.
‘Let’s do some figuring,’ I said. ‘There are seven pups; one earmarked for Mrs Campsie, two for members of the shoot run by Mr Cochrane, one for Charles’s architect, one for Joe’s boss. That’s five. Plus two we don’t know about. Yet.’
‘I don’t want to cause another digression,’ Charles said, ‘but I still don’t know why you wouldn’t sell Lewis Sowerby a puppy.’
‘I just don’t think he’s a fit owner.’
‘Oh come on,’ Daffy said. ‘We won’t give you any peace until you’ve coughed up the story.’
‘And if there’s anything wrong with the man who designed my house,’ Charles said, ‘I want to know about it.’
I gave an ostentatious sigh, just to let them know that I was plagued by nosy people with butterfly minds. ‘He’s a gadget fiend,’ I said. ‘His answer to any of life’s problems is to buy or make some complicated device to do the job for him. He bought a young dog from me a few years ago. He was fixated on the dog but he’d built himself a new house in Broughty Ferry, a bit of a show house by all accounts and fitted with everything that opens and shuts, and his wife was fixated on the house. Any time the dog went out into the garden to do his business and came in again she swore that she could smell the doings on him. It got so that she didn’t want the dog in the house at all.
‘So, Sowerby being what he is, instead of building an outside kennel like any sensible man, he almost rebuilt the utility room where the dog slept. He made a short tunnel under the fitments with a flap at each end and a delay so that the dog couldn’t walk straight through. And he put in a spray of warm, soapy water where the dog’s back end would be, followed by fresh water followed by hot air. This only switched on when the dog was inward bound, you understand.’
‘Sounds like a good idea,’ Beth said. She sounded at least half serious. ‘We could do with something like that.’
‘If we go for it,’ I said, ‘we won’t let Sowerby design it. At the first shot, it lifted the poor beast clean off the floor and more or less pinned it to the overhead surface.’
‘Like a ping-pong ball at a shooting gallery?’ Hannah suggested.
‘Exactly like. The poor tyke had a terror of dog-flaps after that and Sowerby brought it to me, asking me to train the dog to use his contraption after he’d de-tuned it. I told him he was out of his skull. We were still arguing about it when the dog was killed a couple of months later. That’s why I won’t sell him another pup. God alone knows what high-tech idiocies he’d inflict on it. Can we get on, now?’
‘Fire ahead,’ Beth said.
‘Of the last two pups,’ I said, ‘one may go to the man on the tape. But as Hannah pointed out, it doesn’t seem that he knows that Garnet’s in hospital, in which case he couldn’t have put him there. Unless it’s a bluff for the benefit of the police. Either way, we want to know who he is.’
‘Finally, there’s one more. We believe that they’re all spoken for but, if that’s true, we know nothing about the last one.’
‘We’ll ask around,’ Daffy said. Somebody must know. Now, while I’m here, are you coping?’ she asked Hannah.
The two girls got up and began preparing feeds. Charles said that he would go along with them—to lend a hand, he said, but when he borrowed a pair of dummies I knew that he intended to visit Sid.
The gathering broke up. I moved to the basket chair and looked up Mrs Campsie’s number.
My first call to Mrs Campsie was unanswered—not even by an answering machine which might have coughed up some fragment of information. Just a distant unceasing ring which told me nothing except that nobody picked up the call.
The girls were ready with feed; suitable diets for young pups and the nursing dam, and a diet high in protein and calcium for the one pregnant boarder. Beth gave Charles a tray with a plate and mug. ‘Give it to Dave, if he’s still on guard,’ she said.
‘And if he isn’t, come back and tell me,’ I put in. ‘This isn’t a good day for being sneaked up on.’ In retrospect, it wasn’t my day for syntax either.
Isobel had gone out to resume her work on Sylvan after exacting a promise from me to join her later, to throw dummies and fire blanks for her.
I tried Mrs Campsie’s number again with no better result.
Beth was finishing her own lunch which had, as usual, been delayed by the needs of Sam. I got out of my chair and began the washing-up by hand. ‘Who do we know,’ I asked over my shoulder, ‘who knows Mrs Garnet well enough to ask her whose voice that is?’
‘I can think of one or two. But how would they explain having heard a message from the Garnets’ answering machine? It’s probably covered by the Data Protection Act or something.’
I chewed on that one while drying the dishes but, although I was fairly sure that the law had not yet taken account of answering machines, there was no obvious answer. I did however come up with one fresh thought. The news of the assault on Ben Garnet had made the local papers but not until after the message might already have been left on Garnet’s answering machine. The gruff-voiced man might still have been responsible for the attack, the threatening message and the poisoning if he was under the impression that I was the man he had struck down. In which case, if I were the real target, he would by now have realized his mistake.
Ouch!
I seemed to be stymied for the moment. On the principle of when in doubt do something useful, I decided to spare Isobel a few minutes to take the two cockers onto the Moss in preparation for Saturday’s trial. There would be little on offer but rabbits, but a dog which is steady to fur can be steady to anything. A fox had managed to dig into our rabbit pen and although the slaughter had been minimal any survivors had escaped through the tunnel which the fox had dug for them. I would borrow a ferret and some purse-nets and restock the pen when I had time to spare, if that day ever dawned.
My good intentions went for nothing. I was still gathering up what I needed when the portly figure of Constable Buchan arrived at the door.
Buchan was unusually friendly and considerate. He asked politely whether he might come in. I took him into the sitting room and put a match to the fire.
‘Captain—’ he began and then corrected himself. ‘Mr Cunningham, I’m sent by Inspector Burrard to get a statement from you. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Normal procedure.’ I might well have asked him why he was so apologetic about obtaining a statement, but I could make a good guess. If the Inspector had believed that I had been the intended victim of the assault and that the threatening message was genuine, he would not have left the next interview to the local Bobby. All that he was hoping for would be that I would commit myself to what he still believed to be the lies I had already told him, to be used against me once he had evidence.
We had to go slowly because Buchan was writing down my answers in longhand as well as making notes on a typed document which I took to be a transcript from the tapes of my earlier dealings with the Inspector. For once, I tried to be a model of patience. I explained Beth’s belief that I had left the house on Thursday evening. ‘I still think that she’s mistaken,’ I said, ‘but she could be right. Such a stroll wouldn’t be routine or significant—one of the girls usually does the last round, to check on the dogs and take a feed to any newly weaned pups; mine would just be for a breath of air while I ordered my thoughts. Not the kind of thing you remember to put in your diary.’
‘I understand,’ he said. He wrote it all down. We spent a full half-hour on our working routine as affecting a potential poisoner.
‘I think that’s the lot,’ he said at last.
‘Satisfied?’ I said.
It was a casual remark rather than a serious question but I saw his face darken. ‘In a way I’m satisfied. Between ourselves—?’ (I nodded) ‘—I’m satisfied that you’re telling the absolute truth. We’ve had deal
ings before and what I know of you bears out what you’re telling me. Aye, and what I know about Mr Garnet as well. The Inspector only knows the facts he’s been told about and he doesn’t know the folks at all.’
Whatever iniquities were being practised on me they were no fault of Buchan’s, but I decided that I might as well ram the message home in the hope of enlisting sympathy or support. ‘So although I’ve been threatened and one of my dogs was poisoned,’ I said, ‘and a man who looks very like me was attacked near here in the dark, the police aren’t going to look out for me?’
‘My orders are to keep any eye on the place,’ Buchan said.
‘Between your other duties?’
‘Aye.’ Buchan lifted his chin and looked stubborn. ‘But that’s not to say that I’d turn my back on you. I’ve a duty to guard against crime, whether or no some Inspector tells me to. I took a good look round late last night and again early the morn and twice more since. More nor that I can’t manage.’
‘Thank you for that much,’ I said. I was touched by his concern but I had a concern of my own. If he had visited late at night, the Constable must have been lucky not to have been pounced on by Joe or Dave. If several men were going to guard independently, they had better know about each other. On the other hand, an immediate visit to the caravan might not be a good idea. Rather than risk Dave becoming over-enthusiastic with a shotgun, I had lent him my Conservator dart-gun—a necessary item of equipment at a quarantine kennels, but one which I had on a previous occasion had cause to use on a human being and had found remarkably effective.
The dart-gun might have the advantage of leaving very little mark and no other evidence once the victim had recovered, but Buchan might not be impressed to find Joe’s brother-in-law sitting outside the caravan with something resembling a rifle or shotgun across his knees like some old-time sheriff in a bad Western. ‘Friends of ours are staying in their caravan right among the kennels,’ I said, ‘so between you and them we should be safe. If you come into the grounds at night, you’d better be ready to identify yourself to them—quickly, just in case they mistake you for an intruder of evil intent.’
Bloodlines (Three Oaks Book 8) Page 11
