The Unkindest Cut

by Gerald Hammond

  The last of the morning callers was an old lady whose parrot had made an escape and was circling above the town. Jane could only advise her to wait for the hungry bird to return home, meanwhile spreading the word in the town that anyone given the opportunity should drop a towel, a coat or a rug over the bird; and no, she would not attempt to dart the bird with tranquillizer because, firstly, she would almost certainly miss and anaesthetize some citizen with the descending missile and, secondly, the bird, if darted, would fall asleep in mid-air and break its neck on crash landing.

  Jane had just ushered the old dear out and was preparing to launch a fresh attack on the outstanding jobs when two more figures darkened the doorway carrying between them a bundle of no little weight. With a sinking heart she recognized the Hepworth brothers and she hurried to plant herself in their way.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bugger off, the pair of you. I told you last time never to come back. Not until it’s to bring me a kitten or a budgie or even a spaniel. But this isn’t any of those.’

  Bart Hepworth shook his balding head. He was a rough-looking man, roughly dressed. His brother, who was smaller and comparatively dapper, had shut the surgery door, greatly reducing the noise of a heavy vehicle passing through the Square, and hung Jane’s sign on it.

  ‘No,’ Bart said. ‘It isn’t one of those as you damn well know. It’s nothing that you haven’t done before.’

  ‘But I’m not going to do it again. I told you.’

  Bart waved aside the refusal. ‘You wouldn’t turn away an injured animal. I know you. And it’s against your oath or your professional obligations or something.’

  ‘It’s also against the law to do it,’ Jane said.

  ‘Not treating a dog,’ said the brother. Jane never knew his real name but he was always known as Ossy. ‘There’s no law says you mustn’t treat a dog.’

  ‘There’s laws that add up to saying that I mustn’t treat a dog that has obviously been wounded in an illegal fight.’

  ‘There’s never anything to say that the fight was illegal. It just broke out in the park.’

  They had had this argument a dozen times, but now that Jane was an established vet with surgical premises and her name in the Yellow Pages she was not going to be persuaded. ‘It would be becoming an accomplice,’ she said.

  Bart grinned, showing broken teeth. ‘There’s no law about accomplices in Scotland; they have to think up charges like breach of the peace and suchlike, which can’t apply to treating a dog. I asked a law student who won fifty quid on this one a fortnight back. This is Borden.’ Bart knew very well that once Jane had set eyes on an injured animal she would be unable to turn her back. He stooped and opened the old coat, revealing an unconscious dog of no very certain breed but partly resembling an American pit bull terrier. One side of its body and a foreleg were crusted with blood.

  ‘After Lizzie Borden, I suppose,’ Jane said. Bart usually named his dogs after famous killers.

  ‘Aye. Listen, you can’t leave the poor bugger to suffer. If you’ll not help him I’ll have to take my gun and put him down myself. And then I’ll tell the cops and the SSPCA of all the times you did it before. That’ll put a crimp in your business.’

  ‘You’d be confessing to promoting dogfights.’

  ‘I wouldn’t need to confess a damn thing. I’d just be telling what I know.’

  ‘It may not be that bad.’ Jane stooped for a good look. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘And you left the poor devil until now? Hoping the bleeding would stop of its own accord? Lift him through into the surgery. And, you listen to me. This dogfighting has to stop. This is the last time, you hear me?’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘I really mean it and next time I shan’t weaken. The poor beggar’s unconscious – blood loss, I suppose.’

  ‘I always have something to hand,’ Bart said. ‘Something herbal. But I know what you usually use and I brought …’ He opened his hand to show a phial and a cardboard package that she recognized as containing a tube.

  ‘Where did you get those?’ Jane demanded. ‘They look like what was taken from here on Saturday.’

  ‘I knew you’d been done on Sat’day. All over the town, isn’t it? This isn’t any of your stuff and you can ask at the chemist’s yourself. That’s where we went. The pharmacist would’ve wanted prescriptions but Ossy knows one of the girls.’

  Jane nodded. The explanation was credible. Ossy probably knew all the girls. Jane could not see it herself but other females all seemed to go weak at the knees and everywhere else when he produced his suggestive smirk.

  Jane sighed. ‘Cash up front,’ she said. Interrupted by only two phone calls, neither of which was urgent, she fell to work washing and sterilizing the wounds preparatory to sewing them up.

  Once the wounds had been sewn back up and the dog looked more comfortable in its anaesthesia-induced sleep, Jane admonished the Hepworth brothers again with a promise not to fall for their threats next time and hurriedly ushered them out the door.

  Roland was lunching with Simon Parbitter, courtesy of Simon’s wife, so Jane ate alone in the café in the Square. She had spent more time than she thought she could spare in mopping up Borden’s blood and some remaining traces from Saturday’s puppy; but she had dealt with a short list of afternoon clients and was tidying up again when Ian’s message arrived, phoned by DS Bright, inviting her to the police building for another urgent round table.

  The former gymnasium had suffered a major change. More wall had been covered with whiteboard, which in turn was covered with lists and charts and photographs with more arriving and being Blu-tacked up by the minute, in three groups. Many of the photographs had been tactfully trimmed to remove the more scandalous views of the bride and a woman constable was repeating this process of censorship with a fresh batch. In many cases such butchery would have removed the identities of some of the guests, in which instances the editing was achieved by the use of a Magic Marker. The woman constable, however, was limiting herself to scribbling over the gauzy inserts in the nightdress, producing an effect indistinguishable from black lace. Most of Ian’s little team, which had acquired two new faces, was assembled in a semicircle fronting on the photograph wall, and were assisting the censorship with advice and comments which ceased abruptly when it was observed that the subject of the photographs had arrived.

  ‘Jane,’ Ian said – loudly, in case someone had failed to register her presence – ‘come in and take a seat. As the central figure at the wedding you’re the person most likely to identify the guests. I’ll explain. As near as we can work it out, Knifeman left your surgery at about three-fifty. It is possible that he had some faster form of transport than the supposed bicycle so we’re assuming that he could have reached the reception by four. This first block of photographs is of those timed before then. The middle group is of those taken after four. The third batch is of those without the time on them, but it will be possible to time most of them by the context.

  ‘For the moment, we’ll confine our interest to the middle group. To save you wasting time and mental energy I may as well tell you that all the photographs have been examined but, as far as can be seen, nobody has shiny hands, so if Knifeman figures here he had already removed the gloves, which makes sense really considering he’s trying to blend in at a wedding celebration.

  ‘We’ll take a look at anyone who is absent from the early photographs but appears suddenly in the later shots.

  ‘Now, we have already put numbers to the characters and we’ll try to give them all identities whenever we can. And by that I mean everybody, not just youngsters in jeans, because anybody may be a witness and they’ll all have to be interviewed in due course.’

  ‘And,’ said the collator gloomily, ‘it will be my pleasure to tabulate everybody’s movements to discover who may be able to confirm the alibi of each of the suspect youths over an uncertain period. Isn’t life wonderful?’ Secretly he was lookin
g forward to a task that could be approached methodically; one that would produce end results that would be seen and appreciated; and which would keep him well away from his wife’s demands for as long as it could be spun out.

  Jane stood and approached the wall of photographs. ‘May we have the lights up, please?’ she asked. ‘And can you lend me a large magnifier? Where do you want me to write the names and numbers?’

  She settled down for an hour’s labour. At her suggestion Mr Nicholson took the telephone directory and one of the constables the laptop and they added phone numbers and addresses when they could. Jane was surprised to discover that she could recognize more than half of the densely packed crowd.

  Upon reaching the last photograph on the whiteboard, Jane stretched her back and rolled her shoulders, relieved to have finally finished her arduous task. She noticed that Ian was busy on a phone call, so she said a quick goodbye to the collator and the constable who’d been helping her, and made her not unwelcome escape.

  TEN

  ‘I suppose,’ Jane said to her husband that evening, ‘that if there’s some weirdie going around threatening people with a sharp knife Ian has to do something about it. And if he’s got no other starting point I suppose he has to tackle it whatever way he can. It does seem to me that he’s taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut but I don’t know what else he could do. He may be getting a kick out of conducting a murder enquiry in miniature, but if it keeps a dozen officious busybodies from haunting the streets and persecuting motorists then it has my support. It just takes up rather a lot of my time and mental energy.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Roland. ‘You’ve changed your tune. Have you been parking on double yellows again?’

  ‘Only once.’ The washing up was finished. Jane, rather red about the face and ears, turned and leaned back against the kitchen worktop, her legs really stiff now after being on her feet with little let-up over the past few hours. ‘Doctors get away with parking wherever the car happens to stop. Well, I’m a doctor and my patients are animals who can’t even pop into the pharmacy for their own medicines.’

  ‘Nice try, but I doubt if you’ll ever get away with it.’

  ‘Both the traffic wardens have dogs. I’m just waiting for the day that one of them tries to cross the road and gets run over and I’ll take my time walking from the official car park.’

  Roland chuckled. ‘You won’t and you know it,’ he said. ‘You could no more leave an animal in pain than you could flap your arms and fly. You’d park beside the injured dog and its owner would prosecute you. How did you get on with Ian’s identification parade?’

  Jane moved back to a hard kitchen/dining chair. She thought of suggesting a move to the sitting room where she could collapse into a comfortable leather armchair, but the sky had cleared and a low evening sun was slanting in and making the kitchen glow. The sitting room would be dull and probably cold. ‘I’ve got to hand it to Ian,’ she said. ‘He kept it methodical; and his new collator was right on the ball. I managed to put names to about half the faces in the photographs and our local bobbies added some more. I’ve identified the young boy’s mother, you know the boy who brought in the badly injured puppy on our wedding morning, so they’re going to rout out the boy and interview him, just to make sure he’s not the culprit, but I’m fairly confident he’s not. Anyway, the collator was jumping around, picking up on the people who had been there all morning and knocking them off the list. How he kept track, when each photograph might show ten or twenty people, I don’t know; but he seemed to manage. Then I was invited to pick out the physiques and head shapes most resembling what I had said about my attacker, and there I got stuck because my memory was fading to the point that I had stopped being sure what were real memories and which were me remembering things I’d thought since. Am I making sense?’

  ‘As much as you ever do.’

  Jane grinned and gave Roland a friendly punch on the shoulder. ‘That’s all right then. At the same time, the list was being compared with the other list, the one of what we know about Knifeman, which isn’t a lot but it was quite possible to remove the very old, the very young, the one-legged or deformed, those with heads of shapes that I would definitely have remembered; and soon, I suppose, Hugh Dodd will be subjected to much the same inquisition. And I’m quite prepared to bet that his list and mine will only fit where they touch.

  ‘And talking of bets,’ Jane went on, ‘Bart Hepworth and his brother came to the surgery again.’

  ‘With Crippen?’

  ‘I think they’ve retired Crippen, he’d been in too many bouts. They’ve got a new one, Borden. Just as chewed up. I tried to tell them to bugger off but it was the same old story. I had to sew up the wounds or they’d spill the beans about all the patch-up jobs I did in the past.’

  Roland, whose mind had been at least half on his current writing rather than wholly on his conversation with his wife, returned it to Jane. ‘You should have stuck to your guns,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t drop you in the shit without following you in, and deeper. I suspect that it was your sympathy for the dog that motivated you.’

  ‘Well, maybe. He looked at me as though he knew that I was the person who could make the pain go away. Which is a step forward. Usually they look at me as if to say, “Touch me with that needle and I’ll have you for dinner”.’

  Roland turned to face her. ‘Now, you listen to me. All right, dogfighting is an offence that quite rightly they take seriously. If you don’t patch up the damage, what’s going to happen? They try to find another vet. If they can’t, and if the dog dies, they’ll bury it quietly in the woods. But if the authorities get on to you, what then?’

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Jane said. They were alone but she lowered her voice. ‘You know the SSPCA man, the curly-haired one? I put it to him once as a hypothetical question. If somebody brought me a dog injured in a fight, what should I do? His answer was perfectly positive. I should treat the dog but call the SSPCA who would notify the police. I pointed out that there was no way to tell whether the injuries had been caused in a street confrontation or an organized fight but he said that that didn’t matter, it was for the police to investigate and decide.’

  ‘He’d soon change his tune if you started getting him out of bed for every dog-bite that’s brought to you. Anyway, you can deny everything. The Hepworths came to you for the first time and threatened that if you didn’t help them they’d make up a story about all the times you’d helped them in the past. Beyond that point you could hide behind medical confidentiality.’

  ‘Which doesn’t apply to animals.’

  Roland pointed a finger at her and then tapped her on the nose. ‘But you’ve been told that it does.’

  She ducked her head aside. ‘Who by?’

  ‘By me. I’m wrongly sure of my facts.’

  ‘You crime writers. Always ready with the devious escape. But being wrongly advised about the law has never been an accepted excuse. The sun’s going in, let’s move through. There’s something coming on the telly that I want to see – and those are words that I never dared hope to hear passing my lips again.’

  When they had settled in one of the enormous leather chairs, Jane picked up the remote control of the TV, but she hesitated before saying cryptically, ‘Something Bart said started me thinking. He mentioned that a law student won around fifty quid or something, betting on Borden, just a couple of weeks ago. That’s got me wondering whether there isn’t something Bart can do for me … I’d like another word with that man before giving up on him.’

  ELEVEN

  The activities of Knifeman seemed likely to become the prime topic of interest around Newton Lauder, but Jane and Roland were soon taken out of those discussions. The kind of happy chance that occurs too rarely in this life brought together all the elements needed for a perfect and immediate honeymoon. A letter from a big-time art dealer informed Jane that two major collectors had become willing to accept the provenance of the Raeburn painting and had tried to o
utbid each other. Jane emailed immediate instructions to sell quickly before the white heat of enthusiasm had time to cool.

  The postponed honeymoon was now financially possible. At the same time, Jane heard that a colleague with a veterinary practice near Edinburgh had been forced by a serious illness in the family to cancel a planned luxury cruise. The tickets were available as were the services of the locum who had been booked for the period. Their passports were valid.

  It was a win-win-win situation. The locum was given the keys to Whinmount and a hasty briefing on such matters as which dog would swallow any item left unattended on the floor and which owner was almost certain to mistake breathed-in fluff for kennel cough. Mr and Mrs Fox were airborne within thirty-six hours.

  They joined the ship at Naples. Their cabin was luxurious, the cuisine deserved the maximum number of stars and the Eastern Mediterranean was at its beautiful best. Roland had his laptop with him and was polishing off his outstanding chores for Simon Parbitter while enlarging the scope of his incipient novel. By working several of the Greek island backgrounds into the plot he hoped to make the whole trip tax deductible. Jane spent her time reading all the novels she’d meant to read for the past few years and just never had the time, as well as perusing various veterinary journals she’d brought with her, to make sure she was keeping up with the most up-to-date practices and drugs in the world of animal medicine. She also spent a certain amount of time in the self-indulgent pastime of just relaxing and doing nothing very much at all apart from lying down on beautifully comfortable deck chairs and anticipating how her life was about to change once the new baby was born – although it was still a fair few months away – and whether she’d ever get a moment to put her feet up again! Back to the present, and Jane’s locum had only consulted her by phone on two or three occasions but stuck strictly to business, so there wasn’t too much to concern herself with regarding their lives back home. They could truly feel a million miles away from the mundanities of their normal life.