Ain't Nothing but a Pound Dog

by Jeannie Wycherley

  “We have no choice. Just promise me you’ll come and rescue me if they take me back to the Sanctuary?”

  “You have my word, but Toby—”

  Too late. Toby scampered back onto the pavement and ran down the street, praying that the couple hadn’t managed to travel very far.

  “Toby?” He heard Clarissa calling but ignored her, arriving at the T-Junction in a few seconds. Unfortunately, the couple and Miss Phoebe had already disappeared.

  They crossed here, I saw them do that, Toby told himself. He waited, hopping impatiently, as a car turned into the road. When it was clear, he dashed across and ran on to the next junction.

  Don’t let me lose them.

  His luck was in. Miss Phoebe, still reluctant to walk with the couple, took every opportunity to hang back or pull away, slowing their progress down. At the next junction, with no sign of them up ahead, Toby looked to his right down the street and spotted them. The man gesticulated angrily at the woman, who hauled Miss Phoebe behind her, and the woman shouted right back at him. They were clearly both unhappy people.

  With fewer pedestrians in the side street, now was the time for stealth. Toby trotted after them, skipping in and out of gates every time Miss Phoebe stopped, because every time Miss Phoebe pulled up, the couple were forced to halt once more. At last Toby caught up, until he was only a few yards behind them. Miss Phoebe, her hearing and sense of smell clearly more proficient than the humans, turned about when she sensed him there. She opened her mouth to call out to him.

  He shook his head and fixed her with his most piercing gaze so that she understood not to make a sound.

  “Will you get a move on?” the man asked. “Just drag her if she won’t come.”

  “We can’t sell her if she’s damaged goods, you know that,” the woman spat back.

  Clearly at the end of his tether, the man reached for Miss Phoebe’s lead. “We’ll sell her on to the dog fighters. They’re always after bait dogs.”

  “You can’t be serious? Do you know how much these little dogs are worth? Behave, Craig. I’ve got a great deal lined up. There’s already somebody interested. I’ll give him a ring when we get in.”

  The man grunted. “Well make sure you do, Lou. I want her gone by tonight. I’m sick of the sight of the whining little cry-baby.”

  “Alright, alright.”

  Miss Phoebe gave Toby one final frightened look and trotted obediently alongside the woman, covering the last few yards to their house. This street had a long line of early twentieth century terraces, similar in age and style to the semi-detached houses in Old Joe’s street. They were set back off the road by a dozen or so feet, the pavement separated from the property by a brick wall. Each house had the same five or six steps to the front entrance. Toby waited as the couple walked up the path and disappeared from view behind a hedge, expecting to see them again as they climbed the steps to their door.

  But they never reappeared.

  Toby’s heart skipped a beat. This was the most important bit of his mission. He had to know where the couple lived. He slunk along the wall to the gate and peered up their short pathway. The house had been divided into flats, and to the right of the front door was a narrow flight of stone steps down to the basement flat. Had the couple taken Miss Phoebe in there?

  He had to be sure.

  He mooched up the path, trying to hug the hedge but aware he could probably be seen, until he reached the top of the downward flight of steps. He sniffed around. Yes. That smelled like Miss Phoebe’s scent. He dropped down a few of the steps and peered through the window there. The lights were on inside, in spite of the fine weather outside, probably to dispel the basement’s gloom.

  The living room—what he could see of it—was a mess. A couple of worn and filthy couches. A large wooden coffee table covered in cans and bottles and ashtrays. There was a mattress on the floor and several dog crates to the side. On the wall, an enormous television was showing a home décor programme.

  The woman entered the living room with Miss Phoebe under her arm. She deposited the clearly terrified little dog into a crate and closed the gate. Phoebe shrank back into the corner. Toby couldn’t hear her, but he could tell she was whimpering.

  His stomach sank. Who were these people?

  “Hello mate.”

  Toby jumped a mile and turned about in shock.

  A young lad of about twelve, looking resplendent in his navy and black school uniform, was smiling down at him. “Are you lost?”

  “No, I’m most definitely not lost,” Toby told him.

  “Hey Mum?” the boy called out, and from above came the sound of the front door being locked. Mum clumped down the steps clutching a large bunch of keys.

  “Not another one,” she said. “How many dogs do those people have?”

  “He may not belong to them,” the boy said, his voice rising in enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen him before. They’ve got a little silver one at the moment.”

  “They’ve always got different dogs. It’s not right. If you can’t look after one you shouldn’t just replace it with another one.”

  “Should we let them know this one’s got out?”

  “Good gracious no. Don’t do that,” Toby said.

  The boy laughed. “I like this one. It’s almost like he knows what we’re saying.” He reached out to pet Toby’s ears.

  “Come on Terry. We’re going to be late.” Mum walked with purpose away from the steps, flashing her keys. Toby heard the tell-tale blip of a car lock.

  “But Mum—”

  “I’ll give the dog warden a call when I get to work. Come on Terry. I said I’m going to be late!”

  The boy reached out to offer Toby a final stroke. “Sorry about that mate. Stay off the roads, okay?” He looked longingly at the dog once more, then hurried after his mother.

  Toby breathed a sigh of relief. That lad would make some lucky canine a good human one day, but Mum obviously had other ideas for now. At least they hadn’t knocked on the neighbour’s door and alerted them to Toby’s presence. The bad news, of course, was that Mum would phone the dog warden with a description and he would be along to look for him.

  Time for Toby to make himself scarce.

  Toby clattered through the dog flap into the kitchen to find Clarissa anxiously checking the time on her mobile.

  “You had me scared!” she reprimanded him, even as she knelt and held her arms out for a cuddle. He gladly took her up on her invitation and folded himself into her embrace. “I thought you’d scarpered, or been caught, or you’d run under a bus, or—”

  “You might try a little positive thinking,” Toby suggested, extracting himself from her hug. “Be more dog.”

  Clarissa guffawed, relieving her tension. “You’re right. So what happened? Did you track them down?”

  “Yes. I know where they live, and I can take you there. Then you’ll need to find a way to get Miss Phoebe out. They are definitely not her real owners. They’ve taken her out of the Sanctuary just so that they can sell her on to someone who wants a dog of that breed.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Toby nodded. “And worse than that, if poor old Miss Phoebe isn’t bought and paid for by this evening, the man human, Craig his name is, wants to pass her over to use as…” He stopped. “Well, it isn’t very nice. We need to rescue her, Clarissa.”

  “I could go to the police.” Clarissa picked up her phone, pondering who to ring. It wasn’t what you’d consider a proper emergency, so what would be the best number?

  “But would they even believe us?” Toby asked, worried that someone might investigate the pair of them, before arguing they could do nothing to help, and then he’d end up back in kennels and they still wouldn’t have rescued Miss Phoebe.

  Clarissa thought for a moment. “It would help if we could track down Miss Phoebe’s real owners.”

  Toby looked at her, his eyes full of hope. “But the kennels already tried that and didn’t have much luck.”

>   “How hard did they try?” Clarissa reached for her handbag on top of the work surface and extracted a tablet from it, along with a spectacle case. “I mean, she’s an unusual breed of dog and presumably her owners were looking for her too. They must be worried sick.” Taking a seat, she flipped over the cover of the tablet and it lit up.

  “You’d have thought so,” Toby agreed.

  Toby climbed onto the chair beside her so he could watch what she was doing. He couldn’t read, but all things being equal he could study the photos. Clarissa placed her notebook, pen and mobile on the table, and popped a pair of rainbow-coloured spectacles on.

  Toby stared at her in surprise. They lent her a professional and studious appearance.

  Clarissa began to tap the screen.

  “I’m just googling dogs missing in this area for starters.” She pointed at the screen. “There’s a surprising number of hits for a small town. We need to narrow it down.” She peered over the top of her glasses at Toby. “What breed did you say she was?”

  “A Bedlington Terrier.”

  “That’s right.” Clarissa entered that information into the search engine and tried again. “Mmm. Not locally.” She wiggled her fingers over the keyboard. “And how long ago did she join you in the kennels?”

  Time when you’re a dog is a rather different concept than it is to a human. Toby thought back and made a variety of calculations. How many nights? How many dinners? How many trips around the yard?

  “Probably a fortnight or so,” he said eventually, and Clarissa widened her search parameters.

  Suddenly she smacked the table with the palm of her left hand and reached for her biro. “Here! It’s even got her name. Somebody searching for her on Facebook… and…” She scrolled down and flipped the tablet so that Toby could see a photo. It was indeed Miss Phoebe, looking sleek and pristine after a grooming session. A far cry from how she looked now with her grubby and matted coat. “There was a write-up in the local paper.” Clarissa clicked a couple of buttons on her keyboard. “How did the dog warden miss this?”

  “Where does she come from?” asked Toby. He’d imagined she was local.

  “Looks like she’s from Abbotts Cromleigh.” A small town, a little inland from Durscombe. “It says here she became separated from her owner, Sally, while on a walk in the forest.” Clarissa made some notes on her pad. “I suppose if Miss Phoebe wandered over a long period of time, she may have come out this side of the woods and been picked up by the local warden and taken to Sunshine Valley Pet Sanctuary.”

  Toby stared at the photo. “You’d have thought the warden would have known that a Bedlington Terrier matching her description had been lost fairly locally though, wouldn’t you?”

  Clarissa tapped her pen on the notepad. “Yes,” she said slowly. “You would.”

  She stood and walked across the kitchen to the kettle, hefting it to see how much water it contained, before lighting the ring underneath its bottom. She popped a teabag into a mug and opened the fridge to remove the milk. Toby watched, his eyes hopeful, willing her to find a treat from somewhere.

  She stared at him for a moment, without really seeing him, then sighed and walked back to the table to pick up her phone. “I need to ring my boss and let him know that I’m investigating a story. He expected me in the office about forty minutes ago.”

  “Are you investigating a story?” Toby asked.

  Clarissa scowled and wiggled her nose, as she rapidly processed the myriad thoughts and theories racing through her mind. “Yes,” she said eventually. “I fear I am.”

  She took her seat next to him once more. “I want you to describe all the dogs that you spent time with whilst at the kennels. Names and distinguishing features. I’m playing a bit of a hunch here…”

  Four hours of exhaustive cross-checking and phone calls later, and Toby was feeling rather put out. Somewhere along the line, Clarissa had forgotten to feed him.

  Beside her tablet lay a pile of scrawled notes; phone numbers circled and underlined or crossed out, and lists of names and addresses. Old Joe didn’t have a printer—in actual fact, he hadn’t even had a computer—so Clarissa had been forced to do everything by longhand, the old-fashioned way.

  Now her fringe stuck up at an odd angle from where she’d had her hand clamped to her forehead for a large part of the afternoon, and if she’d looked tired before, now the shadows had deepened to black holes.

  “I could go a sammich,” Toby announced, not for the first time.

  Clarissa surfaced from wherever it was in her head she’d been and blinked at him through her spectacles.

  “Why? What time is it?” She pulled her mobile towards herself, yawned and stretched. “Hell’s bells. We’ve been at it a while, haven’t we?” She shuffled her notes together. “I think I have everything I need. We should probably take a walk and I’ll pick up some food for you.”

  “Sammich?” Toby wagged his tail eagerly.

  “You totally have a one-track mind, do you know that? I’m sure sandwiches are no good for you. I’ll buy you proper big-dog dog food today.”

  Toby grunted his disappointment and Clarissa laughed. “We’ll save sammiches for special occasions, shall we?”

  “Alright, but none of those little pouches I had before, alright?” Toby grumbled, and Clarissa agreed.

  She clipped him to his lead once more and allowed him to drag her to the back door, but once there she paused, thought for a second and then dropped the lead. Returning to the living room she collected together her notes, her tablet and phone, and stuffed them into her handbag. “I daren’t leave these here,” she said. “It’s just a gut feeling I have.”

  “Is that a witchy gut feeling?” Toby asked, once they were out of the house.

  “Like a sixth sense, you mean?” Clarissa laughed. “Maybe. Perhaps it’s just me being suspicious of everybody and everything.”

  “For a witch you don’t seem to do a great deal of magic stuff,” Toby observed.

  Clarissa rolled her eyes at him. “What would you like me to do? Turn you into a frog or something?” It was a fair point, however. “I do belong to the Silver Winds coven, but I think some of my parents’ disdain for magick must have rubbed off on me somewhere along the way. I try to live in the mundane world, but…” she sighed and bent down, caressing his face, “I’ll be honest. Magick is just not that important to me at this point in my life. Although I do have my moments, believe me.” She tugged gently on his lead. “And let’s face it, if my theory is correct, then we wouldn’t even be able to have this conversation unless I was a witch.”

  “Because The Pointy Woman made a mistake when she hexed me,” Toby agreed. “We have to be glad that The Pointy Woman isn’t as good at magick as she seems to think she is.” Clarissa pulled up short, and Toby frowned when he spotted the shadow that crossed her face. She stooped beside him where she was, in the middle of the pavement.

  “You know, she worries me,” Clarissa whispered. “We oughtn’t to make light of her or what she is capable of doing. If your ‘pointy woman’ is my Aunt Miranda, and she did kill Old Joe, then we need to shine some light on that. And we definitely need to watch our backs.”

  Toby turned around in alarm. “Is she behind us?”

  “Metaphorically speaking, I meant.”

  “Oh.” Toby uttered a whimper of relief.

  “I lay in bed last night thinking about this. What possible reason could she have for wanting him dead? And now that you and I have linked up and know about it, what are the likely repercussions for us?”

  “Maybe there won’t be any?” Toby tried to think positively.

  “Well let’s hope not. Maybe I ought to run it by the police when I talk to them about Miss Phoebe.”

  “You’re going to get the police involved?” Toby asked. A pulse began to beat inside his head. He had a bad feeling about Clarissa’s plan. The last time he’d had anything to do with the police, they’d carted him off to the rescue.

  Whe
re he hadn’t been rescued.

  He hated to think of the same thing happening again.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll have everything under control. I’ll call them when we get back to the house.”

  Toby turned reluctantly and pointed with his nose at a building on the corner of the street. “You don’t need to call them. They’re in the building next door to that one.”

  Clarissa stood. “That’s a police station?”

  “It’s not really a station. More a couple of rooms. I went in there with Old Joe once. He found a wallet in the park and handed it in.”

  Clarissa tapped the bag containing all her research that hung by her side.

  “Let’s go and speak to them.”

  As Toby had suggested, the police station was a small affair, more of a community hub than a centre for strategic operations. In the entrance room, which doubled as both foyer and waiting area, there was a desk behind Perspex glass, with a sergeant typing away on a computer and answering the phone, and several large display boards with official posters and a variety of handwritten signs.

  Clarissa ended the phone call she’d been making and stood and read a few of the notices while Toby sniffed around the chair legs. To the right of the main desk were two doors. One the police used as an entry, and a second that displayed a little plaque that read, ‘Interview Room’. Perhaps there was some office space upstairs, and somewhere there may have been a holding cell or two, but this place did not have the air of a busy station by any means.

  Eventually the first door opened, and a young police officer dressed in a smart navy-blue suit came out.

  “Clarissa Page?” he asked, consulting a note on his pad. He looked enquiringly at her.

  “That’s a good guess,” Toby said. They were the only people in residence—besides the desk sergeant—on the ground floor of the building at least.

  “Shh,” Clarissa hissed at him.

  The young officer looked down at Toby. “You’re a handsome lad,” he said, and held his pen hand out for Toby to sniff. “Have we met before?”