Bloodlines (Three Oaks Book 8)

by Gerald Hammond

  Buchan looked uncertain whether to be relieved or offended that we should have taken precautions of our own without relying on our wonderful police. When he had taken himself off, I hurried down to the caravan. As I supposed, Dave, well wrapped up against the day, was pacing around the kennels with the dart-gun at the ready. I warned him that policemen as well as poisoners might be on the prowl.

  Chapter Seven

  Charles intercepted me on my way back to the house. He had Sid with him, walking tight to heel. When we stopped, the dog sat. I noticed that Sid was already eyeing Charles with the devotion that a spaniel can show to a master but usually reserves for the customary provider of food. Charles’s manner was definitely proprietorial.

  ‘The dragon-lady made me go and help her,’ he said plaintively. ‘I’ve only just got around to having another session with Hob.’

  I hid my smile. If the name-change was already in use then Charles had made up his mind, whether he knew it or not.

  ‘Isobel isn’t a dragon,’ I said. ‘She’s a very gentle soul. Sometimes she forgets that she isn’t still talking to spaniels, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, she scares the hell out of me,’ Charles admitted. ‘About Hob. He’s doing almost everything else but I still can’t get him to sit at a distance.’

  ‘He’s young,’ I reminded Charles, ‘and young dogs can only learn so much at a time. When they develop a blind spot, you just have to go slow and not imprint the wrong messages. Work on something else and come back to it after a few weeks. Sooner or later the penny will drop and you’ll wonder what you were worrying about.’

  Charles looked down at . . . Hob, and I saw his face soften. I would have to remind him to be firm. Spaniels are masters of the art of getting out of hand.

  ‘You’ve got a deal,’ Charles said. ‘But, if it wouldn’t hurt your feelings, I think I’ll take him away until this is all cleared up. Otherwise . . .’

  ‘You’d be waiting for it to happen again,’ I finished for him. ‘I’d probably be doing the same.’

  I hurried Charles back to the house and got a cheque from him before he had a chance to change his mind, although I considered that unlikely. A bond was developing before my eyes. A satisfying part of my life was as a marriage broker between man and dog, promoting attachments which often lasted longer and gave more satisfaction than the master’s other marriage.

  The day was being frittered away. Dusk was almost on us again. Beth was in the garden again, sanding the paths in the failing light, with Sam in his private enclosure nearby. I had the kitchen to myself for once. This time when I tried the number I got an answer in a female voice.

  ‘Mrs Campsie?’ I asked.

  ‘She isn’t here at the moment and I don’t have time to talk.’ She sounded harassed. It was a young voice, presumably the daughter’s—June, that was the name. ‘Unless . . . Where are you calling from?’

  ‘Roughly, between you and the road bridge. I’m John Cunningham, at Three Oaks Kennels.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard of you. And you want Mother? Listen, I’m in a jam. Mother’s train comes in to Cupar in about fifteen minutes and I’m supposed to meet her but the car won’t start. I think it needs a new flint or whiffletrees or something. I’ve been phoning round trying to get a garageman or a taxi or anybody, but every number’s engaged or they’ve all gone to the moon or somewhere.’

  ‘Would you like me to fetch her?’ I asked.

  ‘Would you? Please? You could collect me on the way if you like, but I’m all filthy from trying to get the horrible, beastly car to start. Honestly, it belongs in the South Ken. Science Museum. And the dogs are all over the garden. By the time I’d be ready she could have walked here.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I’ll be quicker going straight there and I’ll need my time. You’ll get her back safe and sound in about half an hour.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I could hear the relief in her voice. ‘You’re a pal.’

  I disconnected. She had not, it seemed, been brainwashed by her mother and Mrs Garnet into thinking of me as the root of all evil. It occurred to me to send Joe in the hope that he would ingratiate himself, but he was in his workaday clothes. Even if I had lent him our car in the stead of his old van he would not have impressed a potential mother-in-law.

  I favoured Beth with a very brief explanation and took off in the car. Dark was fast approaching. On the way I began to wonder how I would recognize Mrs Campsie. I had only the vaguest recollection of the banner-waving zealot in tattered waxproofs at Lord Crail’s gates. The local worthy coming off the train was unlikely to present the same picture. But I need not have worried. When I reached Cupar Station, the train had called and left and a solid figure in blue, complete with hat and gloves as described by Joe plus an unsuitably short skirt, was pacing to and fro in the lamplight forecourt.

  She glanced at my car in hope but then lost interest. I pulled up beside her and got out. ‘Mrs Campsie?’ I said. ‘My name’s John. June asked me to pick you up. She’s having trouble with the car.’ When she hesitated I added, ‘You can always phone her for confirmation, if you think I may be a kidnapper.’

  She looked at me sharply and then laughed a surprisingly musical laugh. She barely came up to my chin. She had a round, bland face with a large mole which had the look of a beauty spot although I was prepared to bet that she had to trim the hairs from it daily. She had on rather too much of a floral perfume which would have suited a younger woman. ‘If you were daft enough to kidnap me instead of June I doubt if you’d be clever enough to hold me for very long. My suitcase is over here.’

  I fetched her case and heaved it into the back of the car, thinking that if she had a heavy suitcase with her she must have been away from home for too long to have been our culprit. Of course, her daughter might have carried on the war . . . But, according to Joe, the daughter paid only lip service to her mother’s views.

  ‘John and June,’ Mrs Campsie said musingly as she settled herself in the passenger seat clutching a large handbag. ‘Have you known June for long?’ Evidently her daughter’s men-friends were more significant than any risk of being kidnapped.

  I got in and restarted the engine. ‘Neither long nor well,’ I said. ‘I just happened to be available when she was desperate for a car to go and collect you. Have you had a good journey?’ The Campsie residence was not far from Cupar. The sooner we got onto the subjects I wanted to discuss the better, but I needed an opening.

  ‘Very satisfactory,’ she said. ‘Killing two birds with one stone.’ She seemed quite unaware of how inappropriate the metaphor was on the lips of an avowed animal rights activist.

  ‘How’s that?’ I asked, politely but trying not to show any excessive interest.

  ‘I’ve been visiting my sister in Chelsea. But I did manage to join in a march, protesting at the export of British calves for veal.’

  ‘Good for you!’ I said. ‘I’d be happy to see it stopped.’ I was quite sincere. On the whole, I feel that well-meaning fanatics get very uptight over perfectly ethical activities or minor abuses which fade into insignificance when seen in the context of the terrors of nature. In the wild, it’s a rare creature that is privileged to die peacefully of old age. Predation, disease, starvation and cold are the killers. But I have never come to terms with veal. I accept it if a hostess puts it on my plate but I would neither order it in a restaurant nor let Beth serve it at home. I regret this, because the meat is so delicious; but the price in animal distress is too high.

  ‘Oh, I am so glad you agree. Can you pull over for a minute?’

  She was surely not going to try to seduce me on the back seat as a gesture of solidarity. Just in case, I stopped under the brightest street lamp.

  Her intent was not amorous. She rooted in her handbag and came up with a page from a Sunday paper. The headline referred to the protest march and a large photograph showed some of the leaders with Mrs Campsie, as she proudly pointed out, prominent in the foreground.

 
I congratulated her and drove off. We left the lights of Cupar behind. There could no longer be any suggestion that Mrs Campsie had been in our vicinity on the previous day and probably not for several days before that.

  Apparently she had not exhausted the subject of her concern. ‘And then there’s battery chickens,’ she said. ‘Have you any idea of how cruelly they’re kept and transported and killed?’

  I said that I had. I forbore from pointing out that I probably had a much better idea of it than she had. I had noticed severed feet beneath the wire cages on a transporting vehicle.

  ‘And the ones that they say are free range are mostly nothing of the sort,’ she said indignantly.

  An idea had fumbled its way into my mind and I started speaking before I had really thought it out. ‘I never eat supermarket chicken,’ I said truthfully. ‘No taste and too much contamination. My friends and I have solved that problem, at least to our own satisfaction.’

  Until that moment I had been no more than an audience and a possible suitor for an unmarried daughter, but now her awareness of me sharpened. ‘Have you?’ she asked quickly. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘We go in for really and truly free-range poultry. We release the birds onto farm land from six or seven weeks old. We still provide feed but we hope that they’re supplementing it with insects and seeds. If necessary, we pay the farmer to plant suitable strips of feed and cover. Four or five months later, when they’re fully grown, we start to recover them for the table, but if we get only fifty per cent of them back we think it worthwhile. With a little luck, some of the others may breed in the wild. Doing it that way, there are no additives, no salmonella, no avoidable suffering. They’re truly free range.’

  She must have been tired from her journey because she still had not caught on that I was talking about pheasants. ‘That sounds wonderful,’ she said.

  We were arriving at what I thought was her gate, which stood wide. The front door was open, spilling light and dogs. I had to speak quickly. ‘What’s more, we take a pride in trying to make death, when it comes, as merciful as possible. We try to make sure that they go out on a high point and never know what hit them.’

  I got out of the car and hoisted her case out of the back. She thanked me absently. ‘How do you manage that?’ she asked.

  I dropped back into the driver’s seat. I had to speak up to be heard above the welcome that the dogs were giving her. ‘With a shotgun,’ I said.

  As I drove off, I glanced in the mirror. A slim figure had come out of the house and joined her mother but the older woman was rooted to the spot, looking after the departing car.

  I did not suppose that I had made an instant convert. If the next time that she carried a placard protesting against Lord Crail’s shoot she wondered for a moment if she might not be making an ass of herself, I would be satisfied. But of course I was unlikely ever to know. On the whole, I thought it improbable. She was of a type which was easily inflamed but not given to rethinking established attitudes, or admitting to any change of mind that took place. All the same, I was glad that I had spoken out. I despise people who would turn us into a nation of couch potatoes or channel us into activities which they, and only they, consider to be politically correct. It will be a poor world when we no longer sail the oceans or dive under them, race on horseback, jump out of aeroplanes, box and wrestle and, of course, pursue our own meat.

  As I neared my own front gates, my mind was taken up with my own form of bigotry, so that when my headlights caught a scruffy figure idling along the verge and kicking an empty can against the high stone wall of the garden I nearly ignored it. But I had no difficulty recognizing the lanky form and translucent hair of Tom Shotto.

  I stopped a few yards short so that my lights would illuminate him and got out of the car. Seen close to he was even less prepossessing, being moist as well as spotty. He was dressed in his usual jeans, which were tattered in a way not prescribed by any designer, and a worn leather jacket with suspiciously bulging pockets. A brand-new pair of trainers made the rest of him look even more tatty by comparison.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I demanded. I was angry. Disreputable and hostile teenagers were not to be welcomed. I would have laid hands on him if he had not been such a sorry specimen. Deep down I was afraid that he would burst and spray me with something dreadful.

  ‘You’ve no right—’ he began. His voice turned into a whine. ‘It’s a public road.’

  ‘My garden isn’t a public park for glue-sniffers,’ I told him. ‘Have you been giving yourself a buzz on the other side of the wall?’

  He seemed about to deny it but then to decide that lying would be too much effort. ‘I thought of it,’ he admitted. ‘But I was jumped on by a big, rough-looking bastard.’

  ‘And kicked out of there? Serve you bloody well right,’ I said. ‘I’ve warned you often enough.’

  ‘I never came near here again for weeks,’ he said. ‘It’s getting more difficult to find anywhere. I was using a phone-box but they took it away.’

  ‘You were daft to start coming back here at all. Didn’t the police tell you that we’d had a dog poisoned.’

  ‘That was nothing to do wi’ me,’ he said shrilly. ‘Why would I? The snoots believed me.’

  His voice reminded me of something. After a few moments the penny dropped. ‘Who put you up to making a threatening phone call?’ I asked him.

  ‘I didn’t.’ His look of outraged innocence could have passed for genuine. ‘I bloody didn’t. Never.’

  Something else clicked together in my mind. ‘That phone-box. The one you were using for your trips. Was it at Stouriden?’

  ‘Not far. Why? What’s it to you?’

  ‘Then that was your shoe-sole stuck to the floor? When did that happen?’ He shrugged helplessly. The days of the week meant very little to him. ‘How many days ago?’ I asked.

  ‘Three. Two, maybe. Or four. See, I’d bought a tube of superglue—’

  ‘Shoplifted it, more likely,’ I put in.

  He did not pause to deny it. ‘I thought superglue would give a superbuzz. Losh, I was wrong about that! But it was enough that I dropped the tube and trod on it without noticing. A whole big tube,’ he said plaintively. ‘A while later I found that my shoe was stuck to the floor. And could I get it off without ruining a good pair of trainers? Could I hell!’

  ‘An expensive evening for you,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Getting back to that phone call—’

  He was just the type to have been bribed to make the phone call while the real culprit established an alibi elsewhere—a plan which would have been damaged severely when the message was left on our answering machine and remained unnoticed for an indeterminate period. I was about to pursue the matter but his nerve suddenly broke. He ducked past me, grabbed up an old bicycle which I had not seen lying among the dead weeds and cranked his way towards the village.

  I could easily have overtaken him in the car, but what then? The more pressure I put on him the less sure I would be of the truth of his answers. Let him sweat for a day or two, I thought, and then approach him through one or two of his contemporaries with a mixture of threats and bribes and we would turn him inside out. Tom Shotto was not the type to keep a secret for long.

  The chill of the night was beginning to eat into me. Counting on the shelter of the car, I had hurried out without a coat. I got back into the warm and drove the short distance to the house. The glow of lights through the curtains made the old farmhouse look infinitely welcoming. Dinnertime had come and gone, but Beth had saved my portion in a warm oven. While I thawed out and ate and she attended to a sleepy Sam, I gave her the details of my outing.

  ‘Our list of suspects seems to have been cut down to two,’ she said at the end. ‘One who we only know has a gruff voice and one we know nothing about at all. If you’re right and that was Tom Shotto’s voice on the phone—and I’m not saying that you are, the voice could have been almost anybody’s—he’
s our best link. Leave it with me. I’ll have a word with Daffy in the morning.’

  ‘You think she—?’

  ‘It’s possible. Or if she can’t, Rex almost certainly can. He talks the language.’

  I had to agree. Despite his current yuppie image Daffy’s husband had once been a real tearaway.

  ‘Or there’s Guffy,’ I suggested.

  Beth thought it over while absently stuffing Sam into his pyjamas. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Too dangerous—for him, I mean. The boy doesn’t have all his marbles. He’d make a better suspect than an investigator if there was any sign of him among Ben Garnet’s clientele. Poor Guffy couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret and we’d be setting him to ask questions about somebody who isn’t averse to bonking people with heavy objects.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. Failing which,’ I said, ‘Mrs Garnet may still come up with something.’

  And so she did, but it was not in the least what we had been hoping for.

  I gave the Garnets’ answering machine a call but there was nothing new on it except for a message from a man who I recognized as one of Dundee’s shiftier councillors, enquiring, rather anxiously I thought, after Ben Garnet’s prognosis. I listened carefully in the hope of detecting some hint that the councillor’s anxiety was for a promised puppy, but matters canine were not mentioned. Even from the guarded words it was clear that some devious and probably illegal deal was in the offing.

  Mrs Garnet phoned an hour later and it was at once clear that this was no longer the same vaguely affable woman. ‘How could you, Mr Cunningham?’ she squawked indignantly. ‘You deceived me, and you a captain!’ She was sounding like a betrayed virgin but I could not find an opening to say so. She also seemed to think that a captaincy was a guarantee of veracity which I knew from experience to be far from the truth. ‘You assured me that you were just about to sign the Kennel Club form but Ben says that you’re still shilly-dillying or whatever the proper word is and that you were pulling my wool in the hope of getting me to tell you things and I think that that’s despicable.’ She paused to draw breath.