by Alice Castle
‘What about all your classes?’
‘The idea was that we’d get a nice quiet breed and the dog would just sit in the classes with me, keep me company. So many of my ladies love dogs. It really seemed like a puppy would be an asset,’ Katie explained.
Beth closed her mouth. Even on such short exposure, it was hard to imagine Teddy sitting sedately in a basket and watching the Lycra-clad ladies of Dulwich stretching their stuff, without wanting to give them a very thorough sniffing – and probably wee on them into the bargain.
‘I know what you’re going to say. I must have been crazy picking Teddy. But you see, when we went over, he was so docile. He was just adorable, like a rag doll.’
‘Did they drug him?’ asked Beth, before she could stop herself.
Katie shot her a look. ‘I think it’s just a bit of youthful exuberance. He’ll grow out of it soon. Well, that’s what Michael says, anyway.’
Beth had been wondering how Katie’s husband was adapting to the new addition. ‘How does he feel about it all?’
‘He absolutely adores him. But then, he only sees him for a couple of hours a week. By the time he gets back in the evening, Teddy is pretty relaxed – to the point of being comatose – because he’s run me ragged all day and then usually just eaten his weight in puppy food.’
‘Where exactly are we off to now? I’ve got to be back at work after lunch,’ said Beth, suddenly anxious. She peered out of the window. The car was already purring down Forest Hill Road.
‘Don’t worry, we’re just going to the Rye. It’s a bit more… anonymous,’ said Katie evasively.
‘The Rye?’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never been before? To Peckham Rye?’
‘I’ve been past it in a car, obviously. Not sure I’ve ever got out and wandered around,’ Beth admitted. ‘But we’ve got Dulwich Park right on our doorstep, so I suppose I’ve never felt the need to go anywhere else. And that reminds me, what actually happened with Teddy in Dulwich Park?’
‘Oh, people can be so precious about things in Dulwich,’ Katie said vaguely. ‘The Rye is a bit more… real.’
‘That’s not an answer,’ Beth said, quite mildly.
Katie sighed and seemed to make up her mind to speak. ‘Dog owners can be ridiculously over-sensitive. You’ve no idea, Beth. Honestly, you’d think little Teddy was some kind of Lothario, the way people were dragging their mutts out of his way. He’s only a baby. He did try and jump on a pug or two, but that’s just his way of being friendly, saying hello. He doesn’t mean anything by it, let alone, well, you know.’
Beth looked at her friend, but she was fully occupied swerving round a bus and avoiding an oncoming SUV. All she did know was that Katie had only had Teddy two minutes, but already she was as blind to his faults as any doting mama.
‘I bet Charlie loves him to bits,’ said Beth, rather ruefully. She had no intention of changing her own mind on the subject, which meant Ben was going to be horribly jealous and was bound to pile on the pressure.
‘He really does adore him. You should see them together when he gets home from school. They’re inseparable,’ said Katie, peering down the road in search of a parking spot. They’d come down the hill, and the Rye now stretched out and opened up before them, a welcome slash of green in the relentless brick and tarmac swirl of south London. On the left-hand side, a row of beautiful Georgian houses stood, like enormous tea caddies, looking out over the swathe of grass. It was here that Katie was searching for a space.
With some difficulty, Katie edged her behemoth of a car into a gap, the parking sensors waking the sleeping Teddy and provoking a pitiful wailing.
‘He’s going to have to get used to that sound. No way I can park this bus without them.’
For the thousandth time, Beth wondered why Katie, with her one child, had a car big enough to transport the entire Brady Bunch, but she knew that the answer must lie with Michael. Not only did he want his wife and son to travel in the urban equivalent of an armoured vehicle, safe against the slings and arrows of outrageous fellow road users, but he’d never really accustomed himself to the idea of such a small family. He’d been born and bred to be a country squire with a quiverful of children, and it still seemed a bizarre accident that he’d ended up running a publishing empire and living in Dulwich with one lad. Having a dog was a step as natural to him as breathing, as long as he didn’t have to concern himself with walking, feeding, or training the creature.
It was a position Beth could heartily sympathise with as Katie began the extraction process, wrestling Teddy back into his lead while he was still confined to the boot of the car, then straining to stop him from chucking himself under every moving vehicle that passed once he’d been liberated. At least they didn’t have to wait long at the zebra crossing. Teddy launched himself across it, causing a taxi and a cross mummy in a Volvo to fracture their brake discs in unison.
Sensing freedom in the air and with the springy grass of the Rye under his young pads, Teddy pulled like a tug-of-war team on the maximum dosage of steroids, until Katie was leaning backwards on her end of the lead like a water-skier. Neither of the women had the breath or the time to speak, as Katie was towed forwards and Beth trotted to keep up.
The wide-open spaces of the Rye were dotted at irregular intervals with other dog-walkers. In the distance, Beth could see an enviably tall woman walking a red setter, then way ahead was a meaty, thickset man, head down, bundled into a nondescript coat, keeping up a spanking pace with a small dog that looked as though it would like to tone down the speed a little. Was he familiar? Before she had time to think, her eye was caught by a group of women straggling across the path, wandering and chatting with a retriever and a couple of spaniels.
Beth wondered what it would all look like from above – the seemingly random routes taken, their intersections and divergences. She’d once been up in the London Eye and had marvelled as the chaotic, crowded thoroughfares of the metropolis had become a chiselled, three-dimensional carpet of exceptional beauty, seeming to make a perfect sense which was entirely lacking at street level. Would all these meanderings be dignified with a purpose if seen from afar? The stout lady ahead of them with a frisky spaniel? The youngish man, head down, coat collar up, powering past them with a large black poodle on a red lead? What did they call those big poodles, anyway? Beth wondered idly. Standard, was it, like the lamps? Yes, she thought it was that, and the weeny ones were called miniature, which made sense. All these thoughts swirled through her head as they chugged along – partly to take her mind off the unwarranted amount of exercise she was getting. Beth started to pant.
Eventually, Katie turned to her friend. ‘I’m letting him off the lead,’ she said breathlessly.
Though she was already getting a stitch in her side, Beth was instantly worried. ‘Are you sure that’s such a good idea? Will he come back?’ she asked, eyebrows steepling.
‘Well, he’s got to learn. And my arm’s bloody agony,’ said Katie, reaching forward and slipping the lead off. Teddy, unchained, was a silky black bullet out of a gun, racing across the Rye, his ears and tail surging in the wind like pennants. It was a truly beautiful sight. He zig-zagged across the green for a while, pausing briefly to sexually assault what looked like a small spaniel – then he disappeared completely into a clump of trees in the far distance.
Katie started to run, and Beth, reluctantly, followed suit. If she’d known she’d be jogging, she’d have worn different shoes. Her little pixie boots were not built for speed – a bit like their owner. By the time she reached Katie, the stitch in her side was burning ferociously, her fringe was plastered to her sweaty forehead, and she was not feeling at all well disposed towards small, furry creatures. It was just as well, perhaps, that Teddy was nowhere to be seen.
‘Teddy! Teeeedddddy!’ Katie was calling in a sing-song voice.
Beth looked around. Even on this short acquaintance, she was willing to bet that Teddy would be in motion, wherever he was. Surely t
hey’d see the undergrowth moving, leaves rustling, a tree being thoroughly Teddied? But all was still and quiet in the little grove of trees. A bit too quiet for Beth’s liking.
She’d had quite a lot of unfortunate experiences recently, and something about the atmosphere in this little glade got the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. She looked from one side of the path to the other. Nothing untoward. Nothing that could possibly give rise to this level of unease. But the feeling didn’t go away.
Right ahead of her, veering off the tarmac, was a track through the undergrowth leading deeper into the thicket. Should she follow it? For a moment, thoughts of Red Riding Hood flashed through her mind. She shook them off. This was silly. She was a grown-up. She wasn’t carrying a basket of goodies for her grandmother, and she definitely wasn’t wearing scarlet. Yet she did have the feeling that someone, or something, was watching her. Knowing south London, it was most likely a feral pigeon, or a hungry rat. Better than a big bad wolf, but still not the nicest thought. She decided to stay on the path.
But now she’d lost track of both Teddy and Katie, too. Where was everybody?
Beth stepped forward, and suddenly everything was in motion again. A twig under her foot snapped, and she heard the snuffling of a very busy Teddy not far to the right of her. She walked on, the long tufts of unkempt grass brushing over her boots, still slightly damp from last night’s drizzle. Where was that blasted dog? And where, for that matter, had Katie vanished to?
Teddy was whining now, as well as making unmistakable digging sounds. Beth picked up her pace, hurrying towards the noise and, round a tree, saw him at last. But he wasn’t alone.
The first thing she saw, next to the puppy but apparently impervious to all his fervent attempts to scrape up a friendship, was an elderly-looking chocolate Labrador, which looked round solemnly as Beth approached then thumped its thick tail against the grass. The dog was sitting bolt upright in a curiously human way. If Beth had believed in anthropomorphism, she would have said it appeared both responsible and worried. Having studied her with sorrowful brown eyes, it turned immediately back to the cause of its concern – a form by its side, lying so still that Beth had somehow overlooked it before. Wait, was that someone lying on the grass?
Beth did a double-take, then wondered what on earth they could be doing there. Surely it was much too cold to be resting here, in this little copse? And too wet? Her own boots were feeling distinctly soggy now. She would have hated to lie down, even for a second. Something was wrong. She stepped quickly forward, wondering suddenly if the person had been taken ill.
But one look told her that, as usual, things were much worse than that.
Chapter Two
Part of Beth was wondering, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, why she was always getting mixed up in this stuff. But even as she was grappling with the shock, her mind whirling in denial, her vision going blurry and a ringing starting up in her ears, another part of her was taking in as much as it could of the horrifying tableau.
She took a deep breath and walked closer on steadier legs, trying not to disturb the Labrador. It was just as bad as she’d feared.
A man lay in the grass, arms stretched out, face mercifully turned to the side, as though he’d fallen in an ungainly way. But he’d never be getting up again. His pale beige windcheater coat was speckled and slashed with dark red, and there were rusty patches at his side in the grass which Teddy, horrifically, was dancing between, digging and licking at them as he bounced.
Beth darted forward and grabbed his collar just as Katie appeared in the clearing.
‘There he is! Naughty Teddy,’ she said, running straight over to Beth’s side, then stopping dead as she suddenly took in the hideous sight before her. The look on her face might have been funny, Beth thought – under entirely different circumstances. They stared mutely at one another, then looked down at the body again.
‘Oh no! I don’t believe this,’ said Katie, her face blanching.
Beth’s first thought was that Michael was definitely going to want to up sticks and move house now. Her second was that she must ring Harry straight away, and her third was that she needed to catch Katie before she fainted.
Looking back on the situation later, Beth realised that, however bad you might think it could possibly be stumbling on a murder victim, there was nothing like an exuberant, untrained puppy to make everything much, much worse. If Teddy wasn’t barking at the elderly Labrador, who seemed so static that he must be in shock, he was digging at the prone man’s feet or making ghastly lurches for the blood seeping away into the earth of the Rye. Every time Beth slackened her grip on the puppy, trying to take in the details of the murder scene, he got over-excited again. And if she hadn’t yanked him back very hard, he would have pranced all over the victim and probably attempted either to slobber him back to life or, more horribly, to eat him whole.
It was almost as much as Beth could do to drag Teddy a bit further off, so that she could ring Harry. The conversation was short and to the point. Beth could feel him restraining himself from saying a great deal more, and guessed he was in his office at Camberwell Police Station, with interested subordinates listening in. He and Beth would be able to talk more freely when he arrived, but from the sounds of his clipped words and terse instructions, that might not be very much fun. Honestly, he was acting as though she wanted to stumble over dead bodies and was doing it to annoy him. Nothing could be further from the truth. She was heartily looking forward to turning this whole matter over to him the second he arrived, and getting Katie away to a much-needed coffee.
She felt terrible as she made her second call – to work – and explained that she wouldn’t be able to make it in, even for the tiny sliver of time she’d allotted to her job that day. She spoke to her friend Janice’s temporary replacement, Sam. She was lovely but didn’t have such a sure grasp on the tiller, and was thrown into twittering panic by Beth’s quick outline of her predicament. Janice, now married to the headmaster Dr Grover, was on maternity leave and spending every waking minute cooing over her new-born miracle. Beth sorely missed her comforting presence on the phone. Janice would have known what to say, and what to do.
Beth did her best to bring Sam back from the edge of hysterics, and promised she’d be in tomorrow morning – with all the details. Most schools ran on custard creams and gossip, and Wyatt’s, though in many ways a sleek ocean-going liner in a sea of beaten-up fishing smacks, was not a jot different in this respect. Beth was willing to bet that once Sam got over the initial horror, she’d be bombing over to the staff room to spread the grim tidings that a body had been found on the Rye.
Beth herself knew a fair bit more these days about the drill surrounding sudden death. Until Harry got here with the forensic bods, she really had to stay at the scene. The Rye was much larger than Dulwich Park, and the chances were that many dog-walkers would be wending their way through the little grove this morning, which meant that potentially vital evidence could be worn away forever by paws and feet.
As Katie had more or less collapsed at the base of a tree, Beth had to do her best to keep people away single-handedly. At least the Labrador showed no signs of going anywhere. His gaze, now directed at what must be his late master, seemed full of dignified sorrow.
Soon the only sound that could be heard in the little copse was Teddy’s sporadic yapping, interspersed with frantic scratching and digging. A bird started to sing high in the trees. Despite the ghastliness of the situation, her acute awareness that Katie was suffering, and the knowledge that, just feet away, a man had horribly lost his life, Beth couldn’t help listening to the liquid pattern of the notes and appreciating its beauty.
It wasn’t long until she heard the reassuring tramp of feet that sounded much too purposeful to be ordinary walkers, and soon DI Harry York was elbowing his way into the little stand of trees, accompanied by a troupe of white-clad SOCOs. Beth could tell, even from this distance, that Harry was in a truly towering rage.
He was an impressive figure any day of the week, standing six foot four in his socks. Fully suited and booted, in his navy-blue pea coat with a cream Shetland jersey underneath, with dark chinos and, she happened to know, boxers with a rather special red heart print that she’d bought him herself, he was drop-dead gorgeous. Normally, she would have melted into a puddle at his feet. Unfortunately, today’s outfit was accessorised by a mean and narrow-eyed stare from flinty blue eyes, and it was directed right at her.
She supposed her discovery was a bit much, coming right on top of having to get rid of Magpie’s kill this morning. But it was hardly her fault, was it? She rushed over to him, hoping a good dose of candour would win him round.
‘I found him like this, with the dog sitting there. Obviously, I haven’t touched anything…’
‘No, you know the drill by now, don’t you?’ York ground out, his eyes reduced to slits.
‘I don’t know what you’re so cross about,’ Beth said, lowering her voice. She was conscious of the interested glances of the SOCOs, who were rustling about, assessing the scene and opening up their boxes of tricks, but perfectly able to eavesdrop at the same time.
‘Honestly, Beth, is there some sort of unwritten rule of the universe that if someone gets murdered in south London, you have to find the body?’
‘That’s a bit unfair, Harry, it’s not like I want to be constantly falling over corpses. And Katie was with me this time. We were walking her puppy, Teddy.’ She pointed over to where Katie was now smiling rather greenly up at York. In fact, Katie hadn’t been exactly with her, as they’d both been looking frantically for Teddy – but this wasn’t the moment to go into that. The little dog, hearing his name, rushed towards Beth, inadvertently tripping two of the SOCOs with his trailing lead. Harry tutted, and Beth made to start disentangling everyone.
‘Look, it’ll be best if you take Katie and, er, that dog, and just leave us in peace. You’ll both need to be interviewed later, of course. And Beth…’ York stepped closer to Beth and stooped to whisper in her ear. She felt the brush of his scratchy chin as he leaned down, and the heat coming off his body. In other circumstances, it would have felt quite urgent and sexy, but now all she felt was his white-hot anger. ‘I thought you were going straight to work?’
