A dog bolted under my feet, nearly bringing me down. The thief had lost his booty, but I was already committed.
If I ever looked at the car or van, it failed to register. As I recovered my balance, the torch showed me a figure, presumably male, in dark clothing. Something swung, glinting, from his left hand which might have been a chain dog-lead. I dropped the torch and plunged forward, angry at the intrusion and the theft but most of all at being woken up. It came to me, too late, that there had been another glint in his right hand.
My old training in unarmed combat was still with me, but my instructor had never prepared me for an encounter in the dark with an opponent who had a knife in one hand and a chain in the other. Something lashed me across the face and as I dropped one hand to parry a knife in the gut he switched to an overarm stab. My other hand caught him in the face but at the same moment something burned into my left shoulder.
I went down with the shock of it although there was no pain yet. I had time to hope that he had missed the carotid artery. Then a boot connected with my face. My head bounced off the road and I blacked out.
Chapter Four
I came round, slowly and painfully, alone in a single-bed ward. There was no need to ask where I was; I had occupied that bed before. Outside the large window, dark clouds were swirling ponderously across a lighter sky. I seemed to be on a drip and my left arm was immobilised. My shoulder was on fire, the parts of my face did not seem to fit together and the lump on the back of my head made the pillow feel like concrete. I was weaker than any kitten and, when I tried to move, my head swam.
Yet, underlying all those discomforts, there was a feeling that alertness and wellbeing were lurking not too far beyond my reach. I recognised that feeling immediately. I had felt the same symptoms of recovery during my long illness, whenever the frequent blood transfusions had renewed my depleted corpuscles. Somebody else’s blood was doing a grand job in my veins.
The electronics to which I was attached must have registered my awakening, because a nurse came in to take a look at me. She fetched a doctor who took a closer look and expressed qualified satisfaction. The knife, he said, had missed the main artery but had severed a lesser blood vessel and done some damage to the muscle. I was more concerned about my face but again he was reassuring. I might look for the moment like something in Frankenstein’s worst dream, he said, but my beauty was not ruined for ever. In a month or two, Beth would be able to look at me without a shudder.
The police must have been short-handed. There was no constable waiting at my bedside. But the nurse made a phone-call and Sergeant Ewell, neat as ever, showed up half an hour later and tutted sympathetically over my state. Beth had already given him the gist of the story – several times, I gathered, and in tones of mounting indignation. Beth was always inclined to repeat herself in periods of crisis. I filled in the details of my battle with the intruder. He pressed me to say whether the man, or his car, had been large or small, dark or light.
‘I wasn’t looking at his blasted car,’ I said. ‘I was trying to watch his hands. And he had something over his head – a balaclava or a ski-mask or the traditional stocking, I suppose.’
‘You must have gained an impression. Was he fat or thin?’
I tried to think back although my wits were still addled. ‘He seemed broad,’ I said at last, ‘but that might have been the effect of loose clothing.’ There was something else but whatever it was kept slipping away out of my reach.
The Sergeant changed his ground. ‘Would you jalouse,’ he said, ‘that your caller was after that particular dog? The wee bitch that belonged to the dead man?’
‘Guessing’s your business,’ I said, ‘not mine.’
‘We deduce,’ he said reprovingly. ‘We never guess.’
‘So you want me to do your guessing for you? If he was a thief, an unidentified bitch wouldn’t be much use to him. Even if he knew her identity and had the pedigree he couldn’t use a stolen dog for breeding. Logically, he had to be after Anon. But people aren’t logical. He could be some nutter who wanted a pet or a gundog.’
The Sergeant said umhumm, or words to that effect, and asked whether I had any ideas as to why somebody might want Anon in particular.
‘Unless some idiot was attracted by the newspaper accounts, I haven’t the least idea,’ I said. The Sergeant looked dashed. ‘Are you still hoping to solve the mystery single-handed?’ I asked him. ‘Didn’t the identification of the body give you enough of a boost?’
He had the grace to look abashed. ‘You did me some good,’ he admitted. ‘One more like that might just do the trick.’
‘Don’t count on me,’ I told him.
Sergeant Ewell made it clear that he had expected more from me. He left and the nurse took over. I was fed, washed and emptied with dispassionate precision and left in a state fit to be seen by another visitor.
This turned out to be Henry, as tall and worn and lively as ever. I looked past him but there was no sign of Beth and I suddenly realised that I had little or no idea what had happened after I was knocked out.
‘Is Beth all right?’ I asked him.
He looked at me curiously. ‘She’s well. The question is whether you approximate to the same condition.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. But despite my brave words I must still have been in an emotional state, because I could think of only one other explanation for her absence. ‘Doesn’t she care?’ I asked shrilly.
Henry made soothing gestures. ‘Of course she cares,’ he said. ‘She cares too much. Every time your name comes up she starts weeping again. Isobel told me to come and see how you were before we let her visit. At least we can prepare her for the shock.’ That news would have been comforting but Henry spoiled the effect. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘they’re both busy. Starlight’s on the point of whelping and you aren’t there to keep things going. I’ve tried to help when I could.’
That, although humbling, made sense. Our living depended on the litters; and the health and fecundity of one of our best brood bitches was not to be neglected. ‘Ask her to come and see me when she has time,’ I said.
Henry seated himself carefully in the one chair, deposited a paper bag of assorted fruit on the locker and studied me with interest. ‘The way you look just now,’ he said at last, ‘you’re hardly a reassuring spectacle to greet a young bride. How do you feel?’
‘It depends who I’m feeling,’ I said. ‘Don’t be daft, Henry. I feel bloody awful.’
‘You look as though you might. Did you know that you’ve got the marks of a chain across the lump on your face?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘They’ve been keeping mirrors out of my reach. But I believe you. I think he had a chain dog-lead. That would explain something. You know how a chain slip-lead can come off over a dog’s head if it falls slack.’ I broke off on another thought. ‘Did we get Anon back?’
‘You did,’ he said. ‘Beth seems to have behaved with remarkable common sense. More so, I may say, than yourself. You’d left her behind in the dark. She heard the car drive off – it sounded a bit of a rattletrap, she says – so she headed in that direction. She stumbled across you and found your torch and she stayed with you, maintaining pressure on your wound, until the police showed up and radioed for an ambulance. She gave them a quick statement and then did a tour, whistling and calling for Anon – who turned up again not far from the house. Then and only then did Beth phone us, enlist our aid and comfort and allow herself the luxury of a good cry.
‘Anon, I may add, is none the worse and, at Sergeant Ewell’s request, has been transferred to a boarding kennel some miles away and under a different name.’
‘The Sergeant was here about half an hour ago, but he never told me that. I wonder why.’ As I spoke the answer came to me. ‘If somebody wants Anon and doesn’t know that she’s been removed, there may be more visitors. Henry—’
‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘Isobel and I have moved in with Beth for the moment. The Sergeant is keeping
as much of an eye on the place as he can manage and if there are any more noises in the night we’re to phone him, at his home if need be, and not to go outside until he gets there.’
I relaxed again. ‘My brain isn’t working properly yet,’ I said. ‘I can’t think why the hell anybody would want to steal Anon.’
Henry waggled his shaggy eyebrows at me. ‘My brain, on the other hand, is working perfectly,’ he said, ‘and I can’t think of a reason either. We’re beginning to sound like our womenfolk,’ he added. ‘Until Starlight started to pup, they were beating their brains out, and mine, on the subject. In fact, they only had two topics of conversation – that and your prospects of surviving.’
‘Did they come to any conclusions?’
‘Certainly not that you were going to make it back to health. They had you relapsed, wheelchair-bound, brain-damaged and contracting Aids from the blood transfusions – despite all the reassurances from the doctors,’ Henry added hastily in case I should be taking him seriously. ‘Nor about Anon. Even if she belonged to the dead man, and even if she witnessed his demise, she hardly constitutes an incriminating witness. Dogs, after all, take likes or dislikes to people for reasons which our atrophied senses can’t perceive, so that a growl or a fawn, or even a bite, would hardly be evidence of anything other than an unfamiliar aftershave, an inadvertent threat expressed in some obscure aspect of body language or even the smell of a fox or weasel tracked in from the garden.’
The point seemed to be a good one, yet there surely had to be a reason somewhere. ‘You’re sure that Beth recovered the same bitch?’ I asked. ‘It wasn’t a clever substitution?’
‘They both seemed satisfied. All three, if you count the bitch.’
‘It was a silly idea,’ I admitted.
‘Not half so silly as some of the birdbrained theories those two have been bandying around. Before Anon’s transfer elsewhere, Isobel examined her for implants and got quite peevish when I enquired whether she suspected that Anon was carrying secret microphones on behalf of a foreign power; and Beth went over her, hair by hair, in the hope that she had been tattooed with a secret map or message and her coat then allowed to grow back over it again. Apart from a few of the scars which any shooting dog collects, and the fact that she seems to be pregnant after her time on the loose among the randy tykes in St Andrews, she’s in more or less mint condition.’
We pondered in silence. ‘Damned if I know,’ I said at last. ‘It isn’t as if the presumed owner was alive to pay a reward.’
‘Or a ransom.’ Henry stretched his long legs and tried to settle himself more comfortably in the hard chair. ‘And even if he were still among those present, he doesn’t seem to have been the sort of man who would part with good cash for the sake of a dog. Quite a lot of facts have been emerging about him. There was a whole screed about him in yesterday’s paper.’
I thought back. Had my injuries left me with a memory gap? ‘I don’t remember that,’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t,’ Henry said. He hummed and hawed for a while and then said, ‘I suppose it’s all right to tell you. This is Tuesday. You’ve lost a day, in surgery and under sedation. I’ll bring you the cutting, if you like.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You’re not too tired?’
‘From bitter experience,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be bored out of my skull. And I won’t be able to sleep with bits of me hurting like hell and while I’m lying idle in a strange bed. There’s a lump in the mattress which feels exactly like a dead baby. For God’s sake give me something else to think about.’
‘If you’re sure,’ he said doubtfully. ‘At least your tongue seems to have recovered its cutting edge. They’ve identified him as a much wanted American con artist. As it happens, I can fill in a bit more of the financial background than was known to the reporter on the local rag.’ (Henry had once been a power among the financial institutions and even in his long retirement had made a point of keeping up with news from the world’s markets.) ‘Also, Sergeant Ewell was in a chatty mood. You may not know it, but since the Savings and Loan business in America was deregulated, that sphere of operations has become a public scandal. Millions of dollars have been pouring through that market and it’s only too easy for an unscrupulous management to siphon off large wads of it. The method most often favoured is for one member to buy a parcel of cheap land for development. Then they sell it from one to the other at a heavy mark-up. I’ve heard of the same parcel of land changing hands as often as twenty or thirty times in a single day. Then, when they reckon they’ve squeezed all the juice out of the fruit, the company buys the land and a hotel or a supermarket gets built, all with the investors’ money. The investors are allowed to see a small profit, but nothing like what they were entitled to.
‘But our late friend – he seems to have been known as Peregrine at that time – was reluctant either to wait or to share. He went through the motions of setting up a legitimate Savings and Loan company and then, working alone from a rented office, he placed some impressive advertisements, stating that his company would pay one per cent above the going rate. Money came pouring in. He made some conspicuous but low-cost speculations, paid some interest out of capital and then chose the optimum moment to grab the money and run.
‘They’ve been looking for him, and even more intently for the money, all over the States; but like the Snark (or was it the Boojum?) he had “swiftly and suddenly vanished away as though he had never been there”. They still don’t even know his real identity.’
‘I don’t think it was either of them,’ I said.
‘Either of who?’
‘The snark, or—’
Henry glared at me. ‘For God’s sake!’ he said. ‘Do you want to hear the story or don’t you?’
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘But do try to get the facts right.’
‘Pick one more nit and I’ll leave you wondering,’ Henry said. ‘When our police contacted the FBI, looking for help in identifying a corpse, presumed to be American, with a faked passport and a certain description, some bright lad noticed the falconry theme running through the names and sent over a set of fingerprints and an Indentikit. The Identikit was instantly recognised by Mrs Thingummy at the Stoneleigh Hotel. The fingertips of the body only yielded some inadequate fragments of prints, but the fingerprints from America turned up again in a hired car parked on the golf course in St Andrews. Nobody had bothered about it until the hirer became anxious because a rental payment was overdue.’
If I failed to sleep now, it would be from having too much rather than too little to think about. ‘If he was pulling a scam over here,’ I said, ‘that could well explain why he was knocked off.’
‘He was and it could,’ Henry said, ‘although it seems that the biggest loser is probably the British taxpayer. Our Mr Falconer must have realised that he had made the States a little too hot for himself. So he came over with a load of faked documentation, ostensibly to set up a factory making computer hardware for the oil industry. His references, although spurious, were good and he was welcomed with open arms. He rented space near Glenrothes, hired a few staff, obtained every grant and loan available and all the credit which could be arranged, ordered and re-sold some very expensive equipment, took deposits against orders and is believed to have converted the whole lot into cash.’
‘Which has disappeared?’
‘Which, as you say, has mysteriously disappeared. It’s to be presumed that he intended to do the same, although not in the manner which eventuated.’
‘So whoever knocked him off scooped the pool?’ I suggested.
Henry pulled a face indicative of uncertainty. ‘That doesn’t necessarily follow, although one would suppose so. Reading between the lines, they must suspect that he had some help over here; he found his way too smoothly through the morass of red tape to have been an ignorant Yankee making a raid. And he must have planned his vanishing act for roughly when it happened, because all personal mail stopped dead.
‘Ac
cording to the press – who do, for once, seem to have been making a token gesture in the direction of accuracy – Mrs – um—’
‘Blagdon,’ I said.
‘Thank you. Mrs Blagdon at the hotel says that he had a friend in these parts. They never saw the friend or heard his name, but she knows that they spent some time roughshooting or wildfowling together. And because the friend hasn’t come forward it’s a fair guess that he was implicated.’
‘What about the wife?’ I said. ‘I suppose that she really was his wife?’
‘Who knows? She came, she went.’
I had a host of questions to ask but another nurse entered at that moment and made shooing noises at Henry. ‘You were only supposed to stay for five minutes,’ she said. ‘You were only allowed in at all because you promised not to excite the patient.’
Henry left and the nurse started to do some of the more personal things that nurses do to patients. ‘So it’s all right for you to excite me?’ I said. ‘But not Henry?’
She gave me a playful slap across the backside and left me to my thoughts. So there was a large sum of money adrift, probably in the hands of the murdering associate but quite possibly not. Mr Falconer might have concealed the money before his unkind friend drowned him in the bathtub. Suppose, I thought, just suppose that the cash had been translated into something small but precious, such as one large diamond, which had then been implanted into the spaniel ready for shipment back to the States.
But no, I told myself. I had faith in my partners. Isobel had looked for signs of an implant. And Beth, in her hair by hair examination, would not have missed the signs of recent surgery.
Would she?
It helped to keep my mind off my discomforts. I wove fantasies around the subject until I fell asleep again.
*
They kept me in hospital for ten dull and humiliating days. I make a bad patient, despite having had a great deal of practice. I would have rebelled sooner, except that March was indeed coming in like the proverbial lion. Wind and rain were lashing the ward window. Confinement at home would be as bad. Beth, I knew, would be rushed off her feet in that weather, with an army of spaniels to dry after exercise or training. Caring for an invalid might be the last straw.
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