Beth was struggling. ‘Somebody else might have found Horace and driven him home. Mr Williamson could still think that he’d shot one of our dogs.’
‘Then why didn’t your “someone else” drive up to the door of Kilcolm?’ Isobel demanded. ‘And we don’t know of any connection between Williamson and Aubrey Stoneham. Stoneham isn’t his landlord, is he?’
‘The farm belongs to Lord Crail,’ I told her.
‘That doesn’t mean that no connection exists,’ Henry said. ‘The connection may be between Stoneham and Jarrow or Randall. But just how we check on that I’m damned if I know.’
‘We could ask Charles Buccleugh to do some telephoning,’ I said. ‘He must know everybody who dislikes Stoneham. If there’s a connection, one of them would know it. But I think it’s too much of a risk.’
‘Definitely,’ Beth said.
Henry and Isobel were looking at me hopefully. I got up and refilled their glasses. I usually put our drinks bill to the tax-man as ‘entertaining overseas clients’. It was a drain on our profit, but if our profit was intended to buy booze anyway . . .
‘If it’s only spite,’ Isobel said, ‘a complaint would have been made by now. Well, where do we go from here?’
There was another uncomfortable silence.
‘What about Stardust?’ Beth asked suddenly. ‘Somebody must be keeping her. One of the three.’
‘A lot more than three,’ I said.
‘If she’s alive,’ Isobel said, ‘which I wouldn’t bet on, she could be being kept by anybody anywhere. It’s easy enough to board a dog out. If any one of us goes poking around looking for a missing dog, the fat could really be in the fire.’
Silence fell again.
‘We’ve made enough progress for one day,’ Henry said at last. ‘I think we should sleep on it.’
His advice was too sensible and too negative to be immediately accepted, but after an age of fruitless discussion we agreed to do just that.
*
I helped Beth to wash up after a belated evening meal and was first into bed. Beth spent an age downstairs and when she came up she was in pensive mood. She pottered around, undressing in easy stages, spent more time in the bathroom than I would have believed possible and finally made it into a short nightgown. Then, arms raised and hair-brush in hand, she paused.
‘Suppose Mr Stoneham was trying to mislead us,’ she said. ‘Perhaps the questions you’d been asking about Horace were only an excuse for putting the screws on us.’
‘Out of spite?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. There could be something we don’t know about yet.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know like what. If I could think of it, I’d have said.’
‘Hurry up and come to bed before you freeze.’ I said it reluctantly. Beth, in her prettiest nightie and with hair-brush still poised, looked like something off one of the glamour calendars which I secretly admire.
She finished brushing her hair and got into bed, putting cold feet on my legs. ‘Warm me up,’ she said.
I put an arm around her. ‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I said.
‘What is?’
‘What you were suggesting. If somebody wanted us out of business. But I can’t see any reason. There’s enough competition in this business that our removal from it wouldn’t leave anybody a clear field. No, either it’s to stop us looking into Horace or it’s spite.’
‘Or somebody wanted to get their hands on Stardust. Or get rid of Walnut. Or something. You’ve trodden on enough toes from time to time. Perhaps he’s helping a friend to get his own back.’ She sighed deeply. The sigh moved her soft body against me.
The incessant talk about a threat to our livelihood and the impossibility of arriving at any logical conclusions from the facts available had dominated my thinking for too long. Now I only wished to clear my mind and try to sleep. Beth seemed to sense my renewed depression.
She clasped her arms around my waist and squeezed until I was almost out of breath. ‘You’re not to worry about it,’ she said. ‘We’ll still be happy and in business ten years from now. I promise you. Have you ever known me make a promise I couldn’t keep?’
I wanted to believe her. We hugged each other in the darkness and in exchanging reassurance we felt a renewal of passion. My sex-life had been spasmodic and uncertain since my illness; but the search for balm, to take and to give, brought a special poignancy to the act.
For once, neither of us had cause to be disappointed. In retrospect, it seems certain that our child was conceived that night.
*
I was up and about in good time. Beth, usually the earliest of risers but languorous that morning, watched me from under her tumbled hair and I knew that she was wondering whether my old insomnia was back. I was able to assure her that my unusual energy was accounted for by a better sleep than I had had in many days.
The early morning garden smelled deliciously of frosted greenery. I went first to sit in the run of the isolation kennel. I tried the newcomer with the name Duchess, but the name had bad vibes for her and she responded better to Walnut. I had to start with her again, if not from Square One then from Square Two or Three, and earn her trust afresh, but the process was quicker and easier.
Beth came out of the house and threw herself into the basic chores of feeding, grooming, cleaning out and exercising. My new pupil, the pointer, had settled in well. I put him through an elementary test to be sure that his early training had not been skipped, but once he had accepted me he passed with flying colours. I went on to give the older dogs a workout, one at a time, with dummies on the lawn, coaxing the timid, steadying the headstrong and trying always to anticipate the faults towards which each dog might become prone.
Isobel, who had walked over as usual, decided to spend some time with Horace – who still failed to respond – and then to look over the stores in her tiny surgery. Each of us wore a thoughtful frown but, by common agreement, we put off discussion until we had done our thinking.
I was preparing to take one or two of our more advanced competitors further afield for some exercise with the gun when Isobel came out of the house.
‘How’s the patient?’ I asked.
‘Horace? Still frightened for himself. I wanted to try a little massage, to get some movement going again, but he thinks I’m going to pull his leg off.’ She produced a sheet of paper. ‘I have a list here . . .’
The list was of items which she insisted must be replaced immediately so that she could be prepared for an outbreak of this or that. She could have borrowed my car, or walked home to take Henry’s, but there was a long-standing conspiracy to keep her out from behind the wheel whenever possible. Not only was she temperamentally unsuited to driving and so was a general danger on the roads, but if she happened to meet a convivial friend while she was in a vulnerable mood our usually reliable partner was quite capable of getting herself locked up and disqualified.
Beth had deserted the puppies for the moment. She made faces at me from behind Isobel’s back until I volunteered to double up a trip to Easter Colm with a couple of dogs and doing Isobel’s shopping along the way.
I drove first to Cupar. The streets, as usual, were busy. The hub of Cupar is a T-junction where a broad street leads south towards Kirkcaldy from the main road to St Andrews. I tried that area and managed to slot the car into one of the end-on spaces, almost outside Woolworth’s, saving myself a walk from a peripheral carpark.
Isobel’s list contained nothing exclusively veterinary. Returning with her purchases from Boots, I was unlocking the car door when a police car coasted to a halt across its tail and PC Peel, the constable who had sought my help over the fox, got out of the driver’s seat. He gave me a friendly grin and obviously expected one in return.
The last thing that I wanted was to be seen talking to any policeman. It might have been my visit to Kilcolm in his company that had provoked the frame-up in the first place. The usual stream of vehicles was
crawling along the main road a stone’s throw away and, although there was not enough traffic where we were to encourage him to move on, the pavements were busy. I could have pleaded that I was in a hurry, but in my experience that ploy only necessitates more time-wasting explanations. Short of telling him to get out of the way or be rammed, I was stuck.
‘Good morning to you,’ he said.
I put my purchases down and returned the greeting.
‘Seeing you there, I thought I’d just stop and tell you that we found the man who left the fox in the tree. Somebody spotted another snare and saw a man heading in that direction and I was in time to catch him visiting his snare. He’s been warned about his future behaviour.’
I had intended to keep my mouth shut. If somebody saw me listening in silence to a homily from the constable, I could hardly be blamed. But curiosity overcame me. ‘Who was it?’ I asked.
‘I’d be out of order to tell you that.’
‘Not Tony Ellingworth?’ I was remembering the Ellingworth chickens.
Constable Peel chuckled and leaned his elbows on the roof of my car. I realised that I should have kept to my resolution. This would be good for another five minutes. ‘Not him,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t set a snare to save his life. I know him quite well. Did you know that he’s moving away soon?’
I was still consumed with impatience. Also I was getting cold and I wanted a pee. But the constable’s gossip was becoming ever more interesting. ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said.
‘I spotted him an hour ago, coming out of the dogfood shop.’ Peel nodded across the road. ‘I stopped to ask him if he’d be at the clay pigeons on Thursday.’
‘We can’t be talking about the same Ellingworth,’ I said. ‘The one I know doesn’t have a gun of his own.’
Peel was chatting comfortably but his eyes were missing no detail of the passing traffic. ‘No more does this one. He and Dan Sievewright of Easter Colm usually go through to the mart at Dunfermline together on Thursdays and they stop off at the Cardenden Gun Club on the way back. I’m a member and I’m usually there on a Thursday if I’m off duty. Mr Ellingworth borrows Mr Sievewright’s gun. It doesn’t fit him well but he gets by. He could be good if his heart was in it and he got his own gun.’
That explained the puzzle of why Tony Ellingworth had a shotgun certificate but no gun of his own. On an unapproved ground he would need a certificate even to use a borrowed gun. But if the constable’s words answered one question they raised at least one other.
‘I didn’t think those two liked each other much,’ I said.
‘They get on all right, when they’re on the loose. Boys together out of school. The only friction between them was that Mr Sievewright always wanted to get his hands on Ellingworth’s bit of land – and his house. Easter Colm farmhouse is only fit for demolition. Sometimes they’d needle each other about it in the clubhouse. Ellingworth was holding out, but now he’s agreed to sell his place to Mr Sievewright and he’s heading off down south again.’ The radio in his car began to chatter. ‘Time I wasn’t here,’ Peel said. ‘Just thought I’d give you the news.’
He got back into the car and drove off. I went and relieved myself in the Drookit Dug and then sat in the car for a few minutes before following. So there was a connection between both Sievewright and Ellingworth, through the Cardenden Gun Club, to Randall and Jarrow. And Thursday, which was the day of the Dunfermline mart, was also the day the farm shop closed.
Well, well, well!
*
I drove past Kilcolm to Easter Colm, giving less thought to the Highway Code than to any possible consequences of my accidental encounter. It might not matter if I had been seen in deep discussion with Constable Peel in Cupar. There were plenty of innocuous topics which could have been engrossing us, although I wished that I had thought to brandish my driving licence aloft while we spoke. Best, I thought, to carry on as normal. Any change to my routine might be taken by our invisible enemy to signal a threat.
There was unlikely to be much but rabbits on Easter Colm, but rabbits can provide the basis of good training provided that the dog is under tight control, and myxomatosis had thinned them to vanishing point nearer home. I parked beside a barn and took Lucy and my gun out of the car. I had noticed the dilapidated state of the house earlier but now, looking at it in the light of Constable Peel’s remarks, I could see that there was a sag to the roof and that one gable was leaning.
Lucy knew that sport was coming and she wanted to dance, but discipline held and she sat, shuffling gradually forward on her bottom, while I strapped on a cartridge belt and added a coat against a day which was turning bitterly cold. She stayed tight at heel until I cast her out and then she fell into a quartering pattern in front of me, well within gunshot.
A tractor was working in the distance, ploughing over what had been the rough set-aside land behind the Old Manse. That was where many of the rabbits had dwelt. I felt sad. Another useful wild-life haven was being sacrificed on the altar of prairie farming. I headed in that direction, putting Lucy through the hedge-bottoms along the way; but the few rabbits broke out on the other side of the hedge and we arrived at the ploughing without getting the chance of a shot.
Dan Sievewright, at the wheel of the tractor, had only a few more passes to make. He gave me a nod as he went by. Some of the rabbits would already have fled, or have been buried in their burrows, but my guess was that a few would have been driven into the remaining strip of long grass and weeds and would bolt at the last moment. I took up a position, looking along the field of dark plough towards the hedge bordering the Old Manse Garden.
There was no sign of any of the Ellingworths although what I could see of the garden looked tidier than usual. The bonfire had been rebuilt on its previous site and was sending a column of smoke through the leafless branches. The small fields belonging to the Old Manse, which Ellingworth had kept for grazing his few sheep or renting to pony riders, would certainly let Dan Sievewright improve his ploughing pattern by turning two large L-shaped fields into tidy rectangles.
The tractor began its last cut. Lucy looked past me suddenly and I swung round, too late, as a rabbit broke out behind me and bobbed away towards the nearest ditch. I could see the tips of the grasses moving as rabbits darted ahead of the plough. Then they broke all, at once, a dozen or more, streaming out and heading across the grass for the ditch or the hedge beyond. I bowled two over, reloaded and caught another before it was out of range. The nearest was still kicking.
Lucy had held steady. She wanted to go for the one that was kicking on the bare earth a few yards from us but I sent her for the furthest and picked up the two nearer ones myself, as a reminder that she was not there to do anything but what she was told to do. She returned with the rabbit hanging limp in her jaws as I finished the coup de grâce, and she delivered it to hand, sitting.
While I hung the rabbits in the leather loops of my game carrier, Dan Sievewright had halted the tractor at the end of his last furrow and stopped the engine. He jumped down and lit a cigarette before leaning back against the muddy wheel. He was looking at me. Evidently I was expected to walk to him.
He was in an uncharacteristically friendly mood. ‘Yon wee dog’s good,’ he said as I came up.
‘She’s coming along,’ I said. ‘She’s had a win in an open stake already.’
‘What’ll you be asking for her?’
I told him and he gave a scandalised whistle. ‘We couldn’t sell her for less,’ I said. ‘Not if we add up my time and all the food she’s eaten, plus a dozen other oncosts. If you can buy Tony Ellingworth’s place, you can surely afford the price of a first-class shooting dog.’
‘Who telled you that I was buying the Old Manse?’ he asked sharply, defensive as always.
It was my chance to start broadcasting the true version of my activities. ‘One of the local bobbies stopped me in Cupar,’ I said. ‘I’d helped him by explaining a skinned fox that had been left hanging in a tree by Kilcolm and he wanted to t
ell me the outcome. He’d just had the news from Tony Ellingworth, so he passed it along.’
The conversation seemed to die the death. We both waited. To break the silence, I said, ‘I thought this was your set-aside land.’
He scowled, not at me but at some thought. ‘It was,’ he said. ‘George was aye for taking the EEC’s money. I telled him and telled him that it was a bad bargain and no more than making a home for a’ the vermin in the world, but he was benset on’t. And now look what was adae.’
‘What?’
‘The dug flourish got intil’t, that’s what.’
I had heard the Scots expression before but it took me a second or two to pin down. ‘Ragwort?’ I said.
‘Aye. A notifiable weed. The council served a notice on me. A fortune in selective weedkiller. Well, I’m having no more to do wi’ their set-asides.’
Rather than start debating the merits and demerits of cereal mountains, wild-life conservation and the European Community, I decided to change the subject. ‘George is definitely staying on in the west, then?’
He nodded slowly. ‘Found a good wee place near Tarbet,’ he said. ‘Hill country, but George aye liked working with sheep. We’ve struck a deal.’
‘I dare say you’ll both be happier now.’
His eyes were suddenly locked with mine and I disliked the look in them. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing in particular,’ I said. ‘Just that sharing the farm didn’t seem to be a comfortable arrangement for either of you.’
He relaxed once more against the tractor’s wheel and fumbled out another cigarette. ‘It’s as bad as sharing a woman,’ he said. The idea seemed to amuse him. ‘There’s more rabbits over by the western march. I mustn’t keep you.’
This was a barely polite formula for telling me to go away. I took Lucy back to the car and collected the pointer.
*
Give a Dog a Name (Three Oaks Book 4) Page 9