‘There’s a whole farm just beyond the hedge. You can’t have scoured the whole place for turned earth?’
‘Not all of it. The fields overlooked from where Mr Buccleugh lives didn’t seem very likely. And a lot of it’s taken up with stubble and winter barley. Any digging there would have shown up, even by moonlight.’
‘But the set-aside land.’ I looked through the hedge to where the fresh ploughing showed in a great rectangle of raw red earth.
‘That was the first place I looked at. You said that only the first strip had been ploughed before Horace was shot. The rest was done much later, after Mr Sievewright’s tractor part came. I looked at the first bit very carefully. It had been ploughed before that heavy thunderstorm, because the earth had been beaten down by rain. The crumb structure – what do you call it, tilth? – was destroyed over the first five or six furrows. The surface was almost polished. And I thought, what better way to cover up freshly dug earth than to light a bonfire above it? And the scent. Especially the scent.’
She was losing me again. ‘What about the new rose bushes along at the farmhouse?’ I asked.
‘I looked there. They were planted ages ago. I was going to dig here but I didn’t dare. Dark earth among the white ash, almost opposite the front door, would have stood out like I don’t know what.’
That put another ten questions into my mind, but we were interrupted. ‘You’d better come and see this,’ the foreman called. He stooped and took a look for himself. ‘It’s a dead dog.’
‘You go,’ Beth said hoarsely. ‘I don’t think I could bear to look, in case I’ve got it all wrong.’
I walked over to the excavation, hoping that I had read Beth’s mind correctly. The remains were unpleasant but still quite well preserved. They had been a collie, not a springer spaniel. ‘My brother’s dog,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that he’d buried her here. Move her aside and go on digging.’
‘Any deeper and the heat wouldn’t’ve reached the pipe,’ the foreman said. ‘And there’s no sign of leaking water.’
‘You’re not down to unbroken clay, are you?’ I asked. I held my breath.
He heeled a spade into the ground. ‘No. This has been dug.’
I breathed again. ‘Go on down a bit further,’ I said.
Beth had circled past towards the entrance drive. I joined her. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s not Stardust. It’s a collie.’
She nodded. ‘George Sievewright’s collie bitch. They’d have to get rid of her too. That’s what Horace was digging for, the smell of a bitch in season. And, as I said, the bonfire wouldn’t only cover up the dug earth, it would kill the scent. Dan Sievewright couldn’t admit that Horace had been after his brother’s collie, so he told you that Mr Ellingworth’s spaniel was on heat.’
‘But . . . but how could you be so sure?’ I asked her. ‘I was homing in on Dougal Henshaw. He does odd jobs for Aubrey Stoneham and he wouldn’t want to get in Arthur Lansdyke’s bad books and be kicked out of his cottage.’
She shook her head. In her tired state, the movement almost made her lose her balance. I caught her elbow. ‘He wasn’t here,’ she said. ‘Work it out for yourself. He goes offshore, two weeks on and two off, coming and going on Fridays. The day he arrived home, Mrs Ellingworth failed to turn up to meet Mrs Lansdyke.
‘There isn’t any single thing, as in the plays on the telly. It just all adds up, if you look at it the right way round. What could be so damning that somebody went to all that trouble to stop you asking questions? Well, think about it. What questions were you asking?’
‘About Horace,’ I said.
‘Right. So why was Horace important? Because,’ Beth said, answering several of her own questions, ‘Horace had been shot to stop him digging. If you asked enough questions, you might have found out why and where.
‘Next, when would George Sievewright be carrying on with Mrs Ellingworth?’
That was another easy question. ‘All the damn time, from what we’ve been hearing,’ I said.
‘Rubbish! While he’s working a farm with his brother, and while her husband’s around the smallholding?’ Beth dredged up a grin from somewhere. ‘Obviously you’ve got no experience of carrying on, I’m glad to see. Thursdays, you ass, when his brother and her husband went off to the market at Dunfermline together and always stopped off at the Cardenden Gun Club on the way home. But that Thursday, two weeks ago, there was a thunderstorm moving up from the south-west. It would have broken over Dunfermline and the Cardenden Club ages before it reached here. They wouldn’t stay and shoot clay pigeons in the pouring rain. So Mr Ellingworth would have arrived home unexpectedly. If you want a clincher, there were signs that cloth had been burned on the bonfire. Clothes, perhaps. Or bedsheets.’
‘You’ll get hell from the police for spoiling the evidence,’ I said. ‘Or rather, I will.’
Beth raised a hand to brush away that little problem as insignificant. ‘The evidence is still there. We’ve just rearranged it a little. Put what I’ve said together with all sorts of other things. Why did Dan Sievewright tell you not to shoot over his land any more and then change his mind when you told him that Horace wouldn’t be fit to go shooting for months if ever?’
‘Dan Sievewright’s involved?’
‘Well, of course he is. George would never have let Dan plough up the set-aside land. So why was Dan already ploughing it when, from what he’d said to you, George was only away looking at another farm? How did he know that George wasn’t coming back? The brothers never got on. And the farm’s only rented. It was Dan’s chance to get the farm to himself, plus a few fields that he owned instead of renting and a smaller, comfortable house instead of that big tumbledown barrack of a place. I’ll bet he drove the bargain of a lifetime with Mr Ellingworth.’
‘Blackmail?’
‘They call it negotiating from strength,’ Beth said.
*
I was still struggling to fit the pieces of the puzzle together when a large and dirty car, comparatively new but already bearing the signs of much hard use, pulled in behind the van. Isobel was in the front passenger’s seat. She put up both hands in a gesture of helplessness.
‘They’re miles too early,’ Beth said indignantly. ‘But we can use up some time. I hope it’s enough. There’s something I haven’t told you.’
‘There’s a hell of a lot you haven’t told me,’ I retorted, but she had already turned away towards the contractor’s van.
The man who bobbed up out of the driver’s seat of the car was obviously a reporter – young, hyperactive and brash. He was dark, with a predatory face. His clothes were scruffy, but his scruffiness was a different brand from Tony Ellingworth’s, being the kind of big-city scruffiness that is a calculated gesture in the face of the establishment and which pays good money to have its leather jacket stained and its jeans vandalised by a competent designer before deigning to wear them. An older man, carrying an expensive camera, climbed more slowly out of the back.
We were well within earshot of the labourers and the reporter was about to utter my name. My mind stalled but Beth, who must have been close to exhaustion, still had her wits about her. ‘Here you are at last,’ she said. ‘Come with me. I’ve something to show you.’ She led the way past the house towards the outbuildings that fringed a small barn. She was carrying a short crowbar. The back of the contractor’s van was standing open and I guessed that she had abstracted it from there.
As I moved after them, wondering what tricks Beth could still pull, Isobel caught up with me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I couldn’t hold them any longer. Is it a disaster?’
‘Probably,’ I said.
Beth took us to a shed which was as ramshackle as the rest of the buildings. She stopped and caught my eye. ‘This is what I was doing for the other half of the night – driving around and using the silent whistle. I didn’t know which houses Walnut’s real owner and his friend lived in, so I woke up every dog in the village. At the two farms
, I just set collies barking. This is the only place I got a response that sounded like the right one and I had to get out in a hurry because lights were coming on. You know how Stardust yips when she hears one of us coming, whistling.’ She caught the reporter’s eye. ‘Mrs Kitts showed you the other spaniel?’
‘She did.’ The reporter looked stern. ‘It was obviously scared out of its wits.’
‘By you?’
The reporter could recognise a loaded question when a victim dared to point one at him. He changed ground quickly. ‘Mrs Kitts said that it was a ringer.’
‘It is. Now take a look here.’ The shed’s door was divided like a stable door. The upper half was secured by a new-looking hasp and padlock. She pushed the crowbar into the widest gap. ‘I think that our dog is in here.’
I knew that she was right. At the sound of our voices a dog inside the shed set up a hullabaloo. A dog’s voice is often more distinctive than its appearance and I recognised Stardust. I felt a flood of relief, more for Stardust herself than for my reputation.
The upper half of the door splintered and swung open under Beth’s attack. There was no need to open the lower half. Stardust treated it as a fence and came over in a huge leap. She raced round us in a mad circle and then took another leap, straight up into my arms, and began to lick my face. I could hear the camera clicking and whirring.
‘Do you see the resemblance?’ Beth asked. Stardust leaped out of my arms to jump up against her and then came back to me.
In spite of himself, the reporter was impressed. He produced a small tape recorder. ‘So what’s it all about?’ he asked.
We had begun to walk back towards the cars. Beth stopped. I could see that she was playing for time. ‘A gentleman who lives further along this road brought us his dog. That’s the spaniel in the back of our car. Somebody had shot at him and tried to kill him. That was almost a fortnight ago, but he still can’t get up onto his feet. There’d been no reports of sheep-worrying for weeks. This bothered us. We have a stock of dogs and pups and they aren’t always tight to heel. So John Captain Cunningham—’
‘Mister,’ I said.
‘So Mr Cunningham asked a few questions. Somebody thought that he might find out too much about something much more serious and decided to get a weapon to hold over us. And, when that didn’t work, they wanted to put us out of business altogether. They knew where there was a spaniel that had been ill-treated and which they could fake to look like Stardust here. And they had one genuine photograph of Mr Cunningham. Show them, John. Do what you do when a dog’s getting over-excited.’
Stardust was circling round me. I told her to sit, but in her relief at being back among friends she only wanted to dance. I stooped and lifted my hand. She sat quickly, grinning idiotically. She knew perfectly well that I would not have smacked her for anything short of stealing our Sunday dinner. The absence of any real fear was obvious even to one who knew nothing of dogs.
The reporter was leafing through a handful of prints similar to those that Aubrey Stoneham had shown us. ‘I see what you’re suggesting,’ he said. ‘But have you any proof?’
‘We’re giving it to you as fast as we can,’ Beth said. We had moved on as far as the corner of the house. I saw her glance in the direction of the workmen. They were working steadily and the pile of displaced earth was beginning to loom over them.
We seemed to have finished with Stardust for the moment. I walked her at heel to the car and put her in with Horace.
‘We called in Mr Hautry of the SSPCA,’ Beth was saying when I returned to the group. ‘He thinks that they altered the markings of the dog you saw, using black dye, to increase her resemblance to this one. He took some hair samples for testing. You’ll get the results as soon as we know them.’
The reporter thought it over and nodded slowly. ‘We could hold off long enough for that,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to answer one more question. Without the answer, the whole thing makes no sense. What was the “something more serious” they were so uptight about?’
Beth cast another agonised glance at the workmen who were still steadily digging. They might think that we were in the wrong place, but as long as we were ready to pay they were willing to dig. She made another play for time. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘are you going to let me tell this in my own way or do I give the story to some other rag and leave you to read about somebody else’s scoop?’
I saw his disbelief rekindle. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Tell it your own way.’
Beth paused for thought. From this point on, it seemed to me that we had no more than speculation to offer. To help her out, I embarked on a rambling explanation, beginning with the thunderstorm and hoping against hope that I would be interrupted before I had to make any slanderous allegations which I would not be able to prove and which might even turn out to be wrong.
The interruption arrived in good time but it was not the one for which I was hoping. A Mercedes of the current registration pulled in behind the reporter’s car and was forced to stop there. Dan Sievewright was in the driver’s seat. Out of the other door erupted a furious Tony Ellingworth, gobbling like a turkey. As much of his face as was visible was scarlet and even his beard seemed to have flushed with fury.
‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he demanded. And then, when he saw the workmen at their digging, he tried to rush forward. ‘Stop!’ he screamed. ‘Stop!’
I stepped forward and caught his coat, bringing him to a halt. Such was his fury that everybody else seemed to take a step back. He turned and swung a punch at me but he was an unskilled fighter and I had once been a highly trained soldier. I ducked under his fist, swung him round and held him by the elbows – at arms’ length, to avoid the heels that he aimed at my shins and any risk to my genitals from his fists. He was still shouting. He struggled to face me but I held on.
We had not heard the arrival of yet another car but our grim dance was interrupted when a voice with a faintly Irish accent said, ‘What’s the problem here? Calm down now, everybody, and tell me what this is about.’
The voice was backed by a dark uniform. Silence fell, the calm before the storm. Constable Peel had arrived rather in advance of his cue.
I let Ellingworth jerk out of my grip. He faced the constable. ‘These men are digging on my land and without my permission. Get them out of here. Now.’
Peel met my eye. ‘Is this true?’ he asked.
I hesitated.
The foreman had left his work and joined us. ‘That’s what I want to know,’ he said. ‘This gentleman’ – pointing at me – ‘led me to believe that he was the occupier. He has us digging for a water-pipe that I don’t believe’s there. And what I want to know is, who’s going to pay for a’ this work.’
‘You’ll be paid,’ I said. I could feel my face prickling with embarrassment.
‘No you bloody well won’t,’ Ellingworth said furiously. ‘Not by me. Pack up your tools and get off my land right away. And as for you,’ he turned on me, ‘I’m going to prosecute.’
‘For digging your garden?’ I asked him. ‘There’s no law of trespass in Scotland.’
Ellingworth’s answer would have interested me but he was never to make it. The labourers had continued their work. Arguments between employers were of no concern to them. They had been told to dig, so they dug. There was a sudden shout.
‘Maybe they’ve found a water-pipe after all,’ the foreman said.
One of the men came running towards us. ‘There’s a hand,’ he said shakily. ‘Poking up out of the earth. I thought it was a root and I bent to pull it up. There’s a body in there.’ The other workmen were standing beside the hole, staring.
‘I think you’ll find,’ Beth said, ‘that there are two.’
Ellingworth cast a desperate look around but the entrance was obstructed by the constable’s car and escape on foot over the fields was out of the question. He had gone from red to white. ‘These people seem to know more about it than I do,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I th
ink you’ll agree that they have some questions to answer.’
Peel was already speaking into the personal radio that was clipped to his breast pocket, identifying himself to his controller. ‘I’m at the Old Manse at Colm,’ he said. ‘Please tell Inspector McLean that I have a report of a dead body. Am investigating. Out. And now,’ he said, ‘you will all stand back and disturb nothing. Come away from there,’ he told the workmen.
We gathered into a large group. I found Dan Sievewright standing beside me. ‘We thought you’d gone to Dunfermline,’ I said.
He shook his head. He seemed both amused and detached. ‘There was a roup at one of the farms near Pitscottie. No’ a damn thing worth bidding for in the sale, so we’re back early.’ He managed to attract Constable Peel’s attention. ‘This is nothing to do wi’ me,’ he said. ‘If you’ll move your car, I’ll awa’ hame.’
‘If it was nothing to do with you,’ Beth said into a sudden hush, ‘why were you telling everybody your brother had moved to a farm on the west coast when he’s buried here with his dog and Mrs Ellingworth?’
The reporter was putting a fresh cassette into his recorder and I saw the photographer hurriedly changing his film.
Dan Sievewright was looking murder at Beth but he had found his voice again. ‘I honest-to-God thought they’d run off together,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t about to tell the whole world that. This is the first I knew of them being buried. If it’s them,’ he added hastily.
Ellingworth must have known that it was too late for bluff. At this attempt to leave him to face the music alone, he lost his head completely. ‘That bugger!’ he shouted. ‘He helped me bury them.’ A silence fell, so complete that I could hear the call of a distant pigeon and the whirr of the reporter’s tape.
Ellingworth’s position was hopeless. After his outburst, he gave up all attempt at evasion. ‘We were rained off,’ he said, ‘and I got home early. I found them together. I heard their voices upstairs as soon as I got in the door. There was a cast-iron doorstep that came from my mother’s house. I took it with me—’
Give a Dog a Name (Three Oaks Book 4) Page 13