Going to the Dogs

by Dan Kavanagh

  ‘About this evening. My big night. PC Plod has told you, I assume.’

  ‘Right. Don’t play to the audience, that’s all.’

  ‘What audience?’

  ‘Well, me for a start.’

  ‘You? I am touched. Maybe we should meet for a gourmet Colonel Sanders beforehand or something.’

  ‘You don’t amuse me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh.’ Damian’s face fell theatrically. ‘Come on. You used to like me. A bit, anyway. Didn’t you? Didn’t you think I was brave about the cars?’

  ‘By the way, if there’s any trouble …’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘If there’s any trouble, if, say, for instance, they decide to rough you up a little, don’t worry. The coppers, who have been thoroughly informed of the esteem in which you hold them, will come running almost as fast as they’re able.’ That seemed to dispose of the confident expression on Damian’s face.

  A van prominently marked DUFFY SECURITY probably wouldn’t look too clever in the motorway caff car-park, so Duffy drove to the police station and took a lift with one of the tails. He was in position at a table by the door well in advance. At a quarter to seven Damian arrived, to be greeted like an old friend by one of the girls at the self-service counter. After a little ostentatious flirting he took a cup of coffee across to a table overlooking the car-park.

  Duffy played with his food and tried to guess from the backs of customers coming past him which was Damian’s meet. After about eight wrong guesses he picked right: a short fellow, mid-twenties, in a jeans jacket, who stood rather impatiently in the queue, tapping his foot as he waited to buy a cup of tea and a pork pie. The caff was by no means full, and Duffy noted with amusement how Damian and his meet played an elaborate game of dumb show before they ended up sharing a table. Damian did well: Duffy scarcely noted the envelope change hands. After a while, the runner got up. Duffy rose at the same moment, and spent some time scrabbling in his pockets looking for a tip to leave on the table. His head was down as he did this, but his eyes were not. Five five, he said to himself, dark brown hair over the collar, black eyes, broad face, bump in the nose, thin lips, ring in the left ear, jeans jacket, green T-shirt, black trousers, running-shoes, brand uncertain, but basic colour maroon. Do you see the man you observed on that occasion in court today? Would you point him out, please? Thank you.

  Duffy didn’t look at Damian, who had been instructed to wait at least ten minutes, and followed the man outside. He didn’t need to keep close, because he wasn’t tailing him: if Damian’s table overlooked the car-park, the car-park equally overlooked Damian’s table, and the officers who were to take the first stretch had already examined Damian’s meet. Duffy got into D/S Vine’s unmarked Cortina and watched the tail begin.

  ‘I hate this bit.’

  ‘Right,’ said Vine. ‘You set it up and then it just runs away from you. Those buggers in London either screw it all up or they claim all the credit. How did the boy do?’

  ‘All right. I mean he didn’t drop the envelope or anything. Looked a bit nervous, but that was what he was meant to be. I don’t think the runner had a degree in psychology.’

  ‘Right. Well, it’s back to the station, then.’

  They left the radio channel open, without expecting to hear much. The runner had climbed into a brown Fiesta and headed off south down the motorway. The coppers, who were under instruction to use as few words as possible, probably wouldn’t break radio silence until the first change-over at the Watford Gap, or perhaps even beyond that. Vine and Duffy chatted about the case. Vine confirmed that Jimmy’s condition, and Jimmy’s story, both remained the same. Duffy asked Vine about the semen test he’d outlined to Henry that afternoon.

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Vine. ‘Hasn’t reached the sticks yet.’ He chuckled. ‘Shouldn’t think it’ll be too popular with the medical fellows. Bad enough taking all that blood and pee. Now they’ll be giving out test-tubes with big wide ends or something.’

  ‘What if someone refused to give a sample?’ Duffy chuckled. ‘Do you think they’d have to …’

  ‘Shh.’ Vine cocked an ear towards the radio. ‘That’s funny.’

  The brown Fiesta, heading south from intersection 13, had turned off at intersection 11. But it hadn’t gone east, and it hadn’t gone west. It had rejoined the motorway and was now heading back north again. Vine pulled over and they waited in silence for the next report.

  They looked at one another when they heard that the Fiesta had turned off at intersection 13, and was heading straight back into Vine’s manor. At first its direction seemed to be Talworth, then Illingham, then, after a bit of circling around, it seemed to settle on Fen Burton as a destination. Vine drove fast enough to get to the Seven Bells free house within five minutes of the brown Fiesta’s arrival. He got out and talked to the policeman in the tailing car, then came back to Duffy.

  ‘One of them’s gone in after him. Should be another car along in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Duffy, ‘that as I’m not on duty, there wouldn’t be any objection to a citizen having a drink himself.’

  ‘As long as you’re not planning to drive afterwards, sir.’

  Duffy strolled across the road to the Seven Bells. It was a normal village pub with all the traditional country entertainments like a juke box, a Space Invader machine and a one-armed bandit. To the background of this quiet popping and bleeping and blaring a couple of dozen locals were sinking a choice of eight different beers. Duffy ordered half a pint of something he’d never heard of, found a secluded table, nodded to the nearest drinkers, and looked around. He could almost not quite pick out the plain-clothes copper, who was sitting up at the bar. The driver of the brown Fiesta was in the far corner, pretending to watch a darts game, but scuttling a glance towards the door whenever he heard a noise. After a while he looked up and then didn’t look down immediately. Here he comes, thought Duffy, and squinted sideways without raising his head as a man walked past. He wasn’t big, but he was strongly built; either that or he had shoulder-pads in his raincoat. He bought a drink and went to sit by his runner. Duffy could see him in profile now and immediately ruled out the possibility of shoulder-pads.

  There was always something faintly pleasant about watching a suspect who didn’t know he was being watched. And in the present case, the pleasure was more than faint. Duffy watched the figures as they nodded and sipped their drinks; he noticed the envelope being transferred quite openly from one pocket to another; he smiled as the runner got up, hunched his shoulders in his jeans jacket, ducked his head as a farewell, and headed towards the door.

  Duffy continued to smile as he got slowly to his feet, a near-empty half-pint mug in his hand. Slowly he walked along the bar, deliberately nudging the copper as he went past. When he reached the corner near the darts players, he said quietly, ‘Can I buy you the other half, Taffy?’

  At this point things got a bit messy. Taffy half-stood up, a little bit of beer-foam glistening on his jazz-man’s beard, and said with an answering smile, ‘Why don’t I get it?’

  Duffy backed off a little but was firm. ‘No, it’s my turn.’

  Taffy, now fully on his feet, politely declined. ‘Oh, but I insist.’

  Duffy remained untouched by such generosity. ‘I really can’t let you pay, I’m afraid.’

  The conversation stalemated, Taffy resorted to non-verbal communication. Perhaps it was a tactic he’d picked up from Theories of Social Revolt. He shoulder-charged Duffy, who might have been knocked flat if he hadn’t half-turned and shoved his beer-glass at Taffy’s head. The unplanned angle of Duffy’s attack meant that the glass skidded off the side of the jazz-man’s face but did not break. A long red mark on Taffy’s cheek began to pop blood. Both men were half off-balance. In Duffy’s philosophy of fighting, if you had a small weapon and your opponent, though unarmed, had a reputation for thumping people with iron bars, then you got your retaliation in first. He pulled back his arm and prep
ared to mug Taffy more seriously this time, when his fist got stuck up in the air and a rural voice, belonging to someone who thought hooligans should fight in their own pubs, not other people’s, said, ‘You bloody yob.’ The voice’s owner bent Duffy’s forearm slowly behind his back; Taffy, surprised by such impartial intervention, thumped Duffy once more as he ran past.

  The plain-clothes man at the bar obviously thought that showing Taffy his warrant card wouldn’t cut much ice, so he tripped him up as he ran and watched unsentimentally as Taffy’s fall took him into a glass table full of drinks. Then he sat on his head, shouted ‘Police’, ordered two of the heftiest locals to hold down Taffy’s legs, and waved his warrant card when they hesitated. Everyone panted heavily for a while, then Duffy was frog-marched across the bar by his unseen assailant, who said proudly to the plain-clothes man, ‘I got the other one for you.’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Vine as Duffy, still puffing, settled himself in the front seat of the Cortina a few minutes later. ‘Now that is what I call an abuse of hospitality.’

  ‘Poor old Vic.’ Not that Duffy really meant it. It was nice to catch someone like Vic being naïve for once.

  ‘Where do you think Taffy got his supplies?’ Duffy asked.

  ‘London, probably. We’ll have a go, but I shouldn’t think we’ll get anywhere. He looks a tough nut.’

  ‘It pisses me off that you never find out.’

  ‘Well, if you want someone to blame,’ said Vine, ‘it goes like this. Taffy bought it in London from someone else, who bought it from an importer, who got it from somewhere tacky in Spain, who had it flown in from the West Indies, who had it flown in from probably Colombia, where it was grown by a peasant who you can’t blame because he can’t live off any crop apart from that because his land is so poor, and then does that make it the Government’s fault, well no because the Government’s only a puppet Government, so who’s paying the bills and you end up with Washington, and so you blame the American President. Why not?’

  ‘Are you political by any chance?’

  ‘No, I’m just saying you go daft if you start thinking about it. We got two tonight. They may not be big, but we got two, and that’s a good night’s shopping.’

  ‘Check. You might have a problem with the charges, though.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Damian’s story, which you’re acting on, was that he was being blackmailed. So it depends on how Taffy reacts to that. If he knows he’s going down, would he rather go down for blackmail or for drugs? He’d have to weigh up the sentencing, wouldn’t he? And if it seemed six of one and half a dozen of the other, he might just want to take Damian down with him.’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘Do you get more for blackmail or for drugs around here?’

  ‘Bit of a toss-up. Depends on the drugs. Depends on which judge you draw. Depends what he had for breakfast.’

  ‘Sounds like a good pay-day for the lawyers.’

  Vine nodded. ‘I don’t think I’d like to be that Damian fellow over the next few months,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll pass it on.’

  Vine dropped him at the station and Duffy picked up the van. It had been a good evening. Something had got solved, and he’d hardly been beaten up. He reckoned the local force should consider recruiting that fellow who had held back his arm. Except he was probably earning more dragging double-decker buses along by his teeth at local fairs.

  Duffy returned to Braunscombe Hall with the cheerfulness of someone bearing interesting news. He might just put Damian through it a bit as well. But when he got there, he didn’t have the chance. A late-night parliamentary session consisting of Vic, Belinda, Lucretia and a depleted whisky bottle was gathered at the kitchen table. They looked up at Duffy when he came in, but didn’t greet him. OK, so he wasn’t popular, well, stuff that, thought Duffy. They can bloody well hear the latest about two of their esteemed house-guests.

  He had just shuffled his chair into position when Vic said, ‘Henry shot himself.’

  ‘Christ. Dead?’

  ‘Oh yes, dead. He wouldn’t miss from that range. Gave himself both barrels.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear this again,’ said Belinda. ‘I’ll go and see how Ange is sleeping.’

  ‘About six o’clock this evening,’ said Vic, answering the unasked question. ‘He did it in the snooker room. Didn’t leave a note or anything.’

  ‘Billiard room,’ said Duffy. ‘They called it the billiard room there.’

  ‘His mum found him, apparently. Said there was blood all over the cloth.’

  ‘How’s Angela taking it?’

  ‘She just wanted some pills. So we called the doctor and he told us what to let her have, and she’s been out ever since.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Duffy. ‘I didn’t think he’d do that.’ He coughed, and instead of explaining his heroic role in the capture of a criminal house-guest, found himself explaining his unheroic role in the suicide of a neighbour. He told them about his first snooker lesson, his second snooker lesson, and the conversation that followed it. He told them it all as accurately as he could remember, in preparation for repeating it to D/S Vine. He missed out the bit about Vine never having heard of semen typing.

  ‘You killed him,’ said Lucretia at the end.

  ‘No, he killed himself,’ said Duffy. ‘That’s what suicide means. You kill yourself.’ It was a point people often preferred to evade.

  ‘You killed him.’

  ‘He did that thing to your friend Angela in the woods,’ said Duffy. ‘He was quite happy to see your friend Jimmy go down for ten years. And when he thought he might get found out he didn’t make it easier for either of them, did he? Or his mum for that matter.’

  ‘His mother’s an old cow,’ said Lucretia.

  ‘So he did all that other stuff, then?’ Vic asked.

  ‘He did all the harassing to start off with. Maybe he thought he’d drive her a bit nutty, then he wouldn’t have to marry her. She came to you for protection, and he decided to up the ante. Use more forceful methods.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just break off the engagement?’ Lucretia was still asking the obvious, and therefore difficult, questions.

  ‘Dunno. Maybe he reckoned people would start looking at him if he did that, start wondering if he was queer or something. Maybe he thought if Angela pulled out or went potty, he wouldn’t ever have to marry. Could play the tragic lover with the broken engagement and that would last until his mum died and then the pressure would be off. Look, maybe it’s a bit like at the greyhound racing, people betting against their own dogs. It doesn’t make sense to you, but it makes sense to them.’

  ‘Oh, spare us your working-class analogies,’ said Lucretia.

  ‘Talking of dogs,’ said Vic. ‘Did he do Ricky?’

  ‘No, someone else did Ricky. That wasn’t Henry.’

  ‘Are you queer as well?’ The question did not come from Vic.

  Duffy looked at Lucretia. ‘It depends,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes I don’t think you’d notice the difference.’

  ‘You’re queer. You killed Henry and you’re queer.’ It came with sudden violence, as if she really had fancied Duffy all along and was now relieved to have found a belated excuse for having turned him down. Duffy registered her tone of voice, as you would register a belt round the ear; its possible implications only came to him later.

  ‘Kids,’ said Vic wearily, ‘that’s enough for tonight.’

  Duffy woke up feeling depressed. It was a beautiful autumn morning, with a crisp sun and the sky a super-crystallate blue; there was a crust of russet on the woods to the south. He had solved a case, and Mrs Colin had brought him breakfast in bed with a smile that seemed to exceed the call of duty. But Duffy felt depressed. He longed to be back in London, where, on the whole, blokes didn’t half-rape their fiancées and then top themselves because they felt a stir at tight-trousered bums bent over snooker tables. He remembered Vic’s sentimental homage to social mobili
ty and rearranged it while he shaved. England is a place where your Rons can steal from your Vics, where your Damians can blackmail your Angelas, where your Taffies can strongarm your Sallies, and where your Henries will let your Jimmies go to the stake for them.

  Most of the morning was spent with D/S Vine. Taffy was still dishing out the expected line about the two thousand quid in the brown envelope being a gambling debt; but the runner wasn’t so smart, and Vine thought they’d break through quite soon. Whether they could pin the dog and the car directly on Taffy was the only problem area. He might well have contracted out for these two jobs.

  ‘He claims to have this phobia about fire,’ said Duffy, ‘so he may have got someone else in. On the other hand, he could just have been lying.’

  ‘Odd how they can’t tell the truth, isn’t it? It’s a sort of habit, I suppose. And the trouble is, it gets infectious. I mean, us coppers sometimes find ourselves telling a few fibs as well, just to see how they react.’

  ‘You might find yourself fibbing about the dog and the car?’

  ‘Always possible. Finding dog-hairs in his trouser pockets, that sort of thing. Course I wouldn’t have to do it if he told the truth. By the way, why do you reckon he did the dog? Given that it wasn’t Sally’s.’

  ‘I thought about that,’ said Duffy. ‘I guess it was just handy. It didn’t have to be Sally’s, and it was a bonus that she was fond of Ricky. She was obviously meant to find out what they’d done to it, and then a nasty phone-call. Your turn next, darling, or whatever. Except Vic got tidy-minded and the dog did a runner.’

  Two things happened after lunch. As they rose from the table, Damian reminded Duffy about their return snooker match.

  ‘I was thinking of getting back quite soon, actually.’

  ‘You can’t let me down. Not now. After all, they might not have a table in the slammer.’

  They went along to the billiard room and shut the curtains against the bright autumn sun. Before he broke, Damian melodramatically pulled apart the lids of his right eye with two fingers and put his face up close to Duffy’s. ‘Look, no marching powder,’ he declared. Then, without the help of anything illegal, he beat Duffy by two frames to none. Duffy’s heart wasn’t in it; besides, Vic’s table felt like corrugated iron after Henry’s Thurston. He wondered why Henry had topped himself where he had. Was it to do with the lessons, or that argument he’d had with his mum about replacing the cloth? Was it because that part of the house was originally intended only for men? Perhaps it was mere chance — he just happened to be there when the terrible decision made itself for him. Damian set up a third frame and blasted the reds apart. To Duffy they looked like a glistening scatter of blood on an 1866 Thurston. It was time to go. He racked his cue and left Damian to it.