Bloodlines (Three Oaks Book 8)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘I’m afraid it does,’ I told him. ‘Dog fanciers, especially in this country, can get more obsessive than almost any other group of fanatics. If one of them is a few grams short of a litre and has developed a fixation, especially about breeding or competing—and the two go hand in hand, Inspector, because success in competition goes a long way towards selling pups—then you wouldn’t believe how far he or she would go. At the top level, it has ceased to be sport and has become business, and cutthroat business at that. Chicanery doesn’t happen very often, but I’ve known records to be falsified and once I saw a handler, who thought he was out of everybody’s sight, sprinkle pepper on another competitor’s dog.’

  I heard a small sound as though the Inspector was scratching his head. He was certainly scratching something. ‘Who can you think of,’ he said at last, ‘who would be capable of that sort of obsession?’

  ‘I can think of one or two professionals or would-be pros who’d boil their grandmothers down for dogfood if they thought they could gain an advantage that way. Your problem may be that the average juror might not believe it—unless the procurator fiscal can get a jury of dog-lovers, of course. In which case they’ll probably side with the accused.’

  The Inspector was determined to persevere. ‘But who can you think of around here?’

  ‘That might be difficult,’ I said. ‘We’ve been taking a look at Ben Garnet’s customers. The only fanatic we’ve found is Mrs Campsie. She’s an anti-sporting fanatic, but whether she’s fanatical about the dogs themselves I don’t know. And the destination of one of Garnet’s pups is unaccounted for.’

  ‘I’m given to understand that Mr Garnet intends to keep two pups for breeding.’

  That made me open my eyes even if they could only see a faint glow from beyond the dressings. I could do without an indiscriminate breeder producing litters of pups from our line almost on my doorstep. Every hard-won triumph in field trials on our part would go towards marketing his pups as well as ours. ‘Did Ben Garnet tell you that?’ I asked.

  ‘When I last spoke to him he just smiled,’ said the Inspector curtly. I could imagine that smile and it would have made the Inspector want to hit him. ‘It was Mrs Cunningham who made that allegation.’

  ‘Did she say where it came from?’

  I heard the Inspector sigh. ‘Like Mr Garnet, she just smiled.’

  ‘A smile which made you want to turn her over and smack her bottom?’ I suggested. ‘No, don’t answer, Inspector. You needn’t incriminate yourself.’ I was going to go on and say that I knew that smile only too well. When Beth produced it, she not only knew that she was right but she nearly always was so.

  But at that moment I heard a repetitive noise which I put down as coming from some piece of hospital equipment until I overheard the Inspector answering his personal radio.

  ‘We’ve found it, Mr Burrard,’ said a tinny voice, very short on consonants. ‘A ball-peen hammer in the tractor shed. There’s been an attempt to clean it but we found faint traces of blood and one hair. It’s gone off to the lab. Shall we pull him in? Over.’

  ‘Any prints on the hammer? Over.’

  ‘Not to the naked eye. There’s not much hope but we’ll try the superglue cabinet. Over.’

  ‘Leave him for the moment,’ said Inspector Burrard. ‘For all we could prove to the contrary, anyone could have planted it. He won’t be going anywhere. Over and out. You heard that?’ he asked.

  I assumed that he was speaking to me. ‘I heard,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘Of course not. I was just going to take you into my confidence anyway. About what we were discussing just now. How does Augustus Mason fit the bill?’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘The boy you know as Guffy.’

  That at least told me which tractor shed the hammer had been found in. ‘I hope that he isn’t guilty,’ I said slowly. ‘I like young Guffy. We need more people with sunny natures like his. But I must admit that he fits. At one time, he was mad keen to get a dog, but I understood that Mr Garnet turned him down. He’s certainly capable of getting passionate on that subject or almost any other. And he’s . . . well, the circuits aren’t quite complete. God knows how he’d react if he thought that somebody was doing him down.’

  ‘According to Mrs Cunningham, he’s the culprit. But she can’t offer us any proof. If there aren’t any prints on the hammer, and I’ll be amazed if we find any, there’s no evidence at all so far to back her up. Am I supposed to take action on the basis of unsupported allegations?’

  Burrard was sounding so much more lost than any policeman that I had ever met before that I took pity on him. ‘I can tell you this much, Inspector,’ I said. ‘Beth may not yet have the sort of evidence you’d need for a court of law, but she never acts out of prejudice and not often out of female intuition. She’ll have something to go on.’

  ‘Then why won’t she tell me what?’

  ‘If I knew, I’d tell you,’ I said. ‘It may be something that she isn’t saying aloud for fear of being laughed at. It happened before. She was right all the time, but nobody believed her. When she gets the rest, she’ll come to you.’

  ‘But it’s my job to get the rest,’ the Inspector said, sounding more plaintive than ever. ‘Can’t you persuade her to give me what she’s got? Tell her that she’s more likely to be disbelieved and laughed at if she makes accusations without backing them up.’

  ‘She’s given you Guffy,’ I said. ‘Now that you know what you’re looking for you should be able to find it—such as where he was at the relevant times. You can’t expect Beth to do that for you.’

  The Inspector grunted. ‘That young man spends his spare time and half the night out and about on his bicycle. There’s no knowing where he was. If he’s to be believed, which is far from sure, he has little or no idea himself. So far, all that we’ve been able to find out from other enquiries is that Mrs Cunningham has already asked the same questions and got the same useless answers. But go on thinking aloud.’

  ‘What you really mean,’ I said, ‘is that you’re giving me an opportunity to tell you what Beth knows, but I’m afraid that if she knows anything she’s kept it hidden from me.’

  ‘I never suggested such a thing,’ the Inspector said with an indignation which I thought was feigned. In my little dark world I was becoming expert at reading hidden meanings in voices. ‘You’re an intelligent man and you probably have more information than I have. I’m not saying that you’re holding anything back,’ he added quickly when I opened my mouth to protest, ‘although I can’t say as much for Mrs Cunningham. But you’ve lived with it and seen all the details that don’t come over in a statement. You know the people. You may be able to suggest something I’ve missed.’

  He let me sit in silence for a minute but, faced with such a flattering request from a police officer, my mind, of course, went blank. I heard footsteps in the corridor, the voice of a nurse and then the jingle of a trolley.

  Suddenly my mind slipped into gear. ‘The gun,’ I said. ‘I’m told that Guffy was refused a shotgun certificate when his doctor refused to say that he was all there. As I said before, the poor boy’s one pup short of a litter. So he doesn’t own a gun. As I understand the law, he can quite legally borrow a gun for use when he’s accompanied by the occupier of the land, or on an approved clay-pigeon ground, but neither of those conditions would apply while he was taking a shot at me. So where would he have got a gun from?’

  ‘We looked into that,’ the Inspector said. ‘We found that he has been in the habit of borrowing a gun from Mr Fergusson, his superior. According to Fergusson, the boy was only given the gun under strictly controlled conditions and had to return it to the gun-safe under his personal supervision the moment that shooting was over. It turned out that there was a spare set of keys and that Mason could have known where they were kept. But go on thinking. You’re doing fine.’

  ‘I take it that you didn’t find the cartridge case?’

  Hi
s laugh was what is usually described as hollow. ‘To match the imprint with a firing pin? Nothing at the scene. There was a fertilizer bag half full of them at the farm and I’ll be surprised if there aren’t a score or more with Mason’s fingerprints and the firing-pin imprint from Fergusson’s gun. The pellets recovered from the scene were compatible with the commonest game cartridge represented there. Number seven, the experts tell me. You were lucky that he didn’t use something heavier. If he had had a load of BB, you wouldn’t have got off so comparatively lightly.’

  ‘What’s Mr Fergusson’s attitude?’ I asked. ‘How he is taking it?’

  ‘Defensively. He wants to protect the boy, so he’s making no admissions. I’m damn sure that he knows more than he’s telling us. I can only suspect that he feels vulnerable over the gun and doesn’t want the boy to be guilty.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ I told him. ‘I’ve heard it whispered that Guffy’s Mr Fergusson’s grandson on the wrong side of the blanket. There’s a resemblance, if you catch them in the right postures.’

  ‘That could be useful,’ the Inspector said thoughtfully.

  There was only one use to which the information could be put. ‘In cross-examination of Mr Fergusson?’ I suggested.

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  ‘You make me sorry that I mentioned it.’

  He let my comment with all its implications go by. I heard him stir as if to get up and leave, but once I had begun to think about the question of evidence my mind had begun to buzz. ‘What about voiceprints?’ I asked.

  I thought that the sharp sound which followed was the Inspector snapping his fingers. ‘I knew I could count on you to get me going again,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Young Mason gave us a sample of his voice in the process of telling us that he wouldn’t give us a sample. At the first attempt, the lab couldn’t make a good comparison because the tape I made from your answering machine was too degraded. I arranged for a technician with better equipment to go to you and make a better tape but it hasn’t been done yet. I’d better make sure that he does it before a power cut wipes off the message.’

  We batted the subject to and fro without getting anywhere. To be honest, I was spinning out the discussion for the sake of his company. He might not be the ideal visitor but he was all I had. I think that he knew how I felt, because he sat with me long after it had become obvious that there was nothing more of any usefulness to be said.

  When at last he got up to go, he had one last word for me. ‘Get Mrs Cunningham to tell me what she’s got,’ he said. ‘Or to tell you so that you can tell me. I’m spending police time and resources on young Mason. Any time now, my super’s going to ask me what I have to go on. And if I have to tell him that I only have an unsupported accusation from a lady who looks like a teenager, well, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘The shit will hit the fan?’ I suggested.

  ‘Worse than that,’ he said gloomily. ‘Much, much worse.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The consultant surgeon did his solemn round next morning, accompanied by his respectful tail of nurses, students and juniors. I was tenderly unwrapped, examined and used as a demonstration object. Despite the bruising which surrounded both my eyes, the discomfort had faded to a passing ache and a persistent itch which I was quite unable to scratch. However, I found that I could see more or less clearly, if only for short periods before my left eye began to smart and water.

  The consultant seemed pleased with my progress and confident that there was no debris left inside, so everybody else relaxed and gave me patronizing smiles. Provided that I took it easy, the consultant said, I would make a complete recovery. He wanted to keep me for observation for another couple of days, but at that point I began to rebel. The ensuing argument wasted a lot of breath and precious time and seemed to shock the hangers-on.

  The consultant must have been a true male chauvinist, one of a dying breed, because he only relented when I complained that my business had been left in the hands of four women—not mentioning that I could have trusted them to run it for years in my absence. I could go home, he said at last, if I promised to rest, to wear a patch over my left eye for at least a week and dark glasses outdoors after that whenever I felt discomfort, to seek medical help at the least adverse symptom and to attend his outpatient clinic whenever he felt like making an appointment for me. Fingers crossed under the bedclothes, I gave him my solemn word. I would have promised him my favourite brood bitch for a bedmate just to get out of there, back to my own bed and the company of my dogs and partners.

  Now that I was able to get round a little and to see in a rather cock-eyed manner, I could go in search of the telephone trolley, give the evil eye to the old lady who was monopolizing it until she hung up and call home. Hannah answered, sounding harassed. Henry and Rex had already left to escort Isobel to the Spaniel Championship. Beth, she thought, would be too busy to come for me but somebody would be over with clothes and transport whenever they could manage it. Hannah sounded amused about something. When I pressed her, she admitted that there had been an upset before Isobel and her companions got away, but she refused to go into any detail except to say that it was ‘nothing for me to worry about’, a sentiment which usually causes me to expect disaster.

  It was afternoon before Joe arrived, scandalizing the hospital staff by appearing in his working clothes complete with safety boots. He had brought my clothes and my Reactolite sunglasses, so I forgave him for any harm that he might have done to my image. I got dressed, said a hasty farewell to the nurses and made my escape.

  After all the anaesthetics and bedrest I found that I felt distinctly feeble. Joe carried my almost empty bag for me up the steps to where his van was waiting. I kept my eyes closed for most of the trip but not because of any complaint about Joe’s driving.

  When we were clear of the traffic I said, ‘I met Mrs Campsie the other day.’

  ‘What did you make of her?’ Joe asked after a pause.

  ‘I’ve met a dozen like her, well meaning but with their minds blinkered to new ideas. At a guess, she went to a third-rate school where she was fed a lot of facts and off-the-peg, preconceived opinions, but nobody ever taught her to think. So, instead, she goes by gut reaction. Would you like my advice? You don’t have to have it if you don’t want it,’ I added quickly. During my army days, the younger men of my company had often come to me for ‘advice to the lovelorn’, but I knew that unsolicited advice was often resented.

  There was a longer pause. ‘Aye,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve put your finger on her so far.’

  I turned my mind quickly away from the mental picture his words suggested. I had no desire to put my finger anywhere on Mrs Campsie. ‘She’s not the type to change her mind easily,’ I said, ‘But if you worked at it you could get there. She sees the image, not the person, and she’s old-fashioned. So never let her see you again without a smart suit on, complete with collar and tie.’

  ‘I don’t even—’

  ‘Then you’ll have to buy one,’ I said, ‘if you want to win the girl. Hair neatly cut, fingernails clean, talk “pan loaf” and agree with everything she says. Never let her see this van again, borrow Dave’s car instead and give it a polish.’

  ‘You think that would do it?’ Joe asked doubtfully.

  ‘In a month, she’ll be ready to marry you herself.’

  I think that Joe winced. The van swerved slightly.

  At Three Oaks, Beth was struggling on the lawn with the two cocker spaniels under the critical eye of Sam. She seemed happy to call a halt. ‘You still look as though you lost a fight,’ she said. ‘And that eyepatch makes you look like a pirate. Are you seeing all right?’

  ‘You have a smudge on your nose,’ I told her.

  ‘And with the other eye.’

  ‘It’s still sore, but it can see.’

  That seemed to satisfy her. She scrubbed at her nose with a slightly grubby handkerchief and sent me indoors while she kennelled the cockers. She
found me in the kitchen, sitting in one of the basket chairs and wondering how soon I could decently take to my bed.

  She dropped onto the chair opposite with Sam on her knee. ‘We’ll have to call it off,’ she said despairingly. ‘I’m getting nowhere. Those little ber-beggers don’t want to do a thing I tell them. I’m going to withdraw.’ That Beth should nearly swear, and in Sam’s presence, was a measure of how low her morale had sunk.

  ‘No you are not going to withdraw,’ I told her. ‘After watching you for all of fifteen seconds, I can tell you exactly what the problem is. You’re too tense and you’re too busy thinking about Guffy. You’re not giving the dogs your full attention and they know it, so naturally they’re playing you up. Cockers are worse than springers that way. Relax and concentrate on them, don’t put up with any nonsense and they’ll jump through hoops for you. They only want to please but you’re not giving them the right signals.’

  She brightened slightly. ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know it,’ I said. ‘Now tell me, what was the flap about before Isobel went off to the championships?’

  ‘How did you know about that?’ she asked indignantly.

  ‘Hannah let it out but she wouldn’t tell me what it was about.’

  Beth sighed and then choked back a laugh. ‘Isobel went for a last walk with Sylvan over the fields. Sylvan found a place where the farmer had been marking some sheep with a red dye and she rolled in it. And, of course, it wouldn’t wash out.’

  ‘It’s specially made not to wash out,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Isobel didn’t want to go to the championships with a liver and white and scarlet springer. But I told her that you’d hit the ceiling if she backed out.’

  The picture of myself as an ogre to my partners was not one that I wanted to dwell on. ‘It may not be a bad thing. Dogs with white rumps seem on average to do best in trials and I think it’s because they catch the judge’s eye. What didn’t you tell Inspector Burrard?’ I asked. ‘And why? What made you so sure that poor Guffy was to blame?’