Doghouse (Three Oaks Book 3)

by Gerald Hammond

Hattie looked hard at my meatless frame. ‘I’m expecting you,’ she said. And she refilled my bowl with muesli and made me eat it up. Beth’s head was lowered over her egg, but I thought that she was hiding a grin.

  That subject, clearly, was now closed. Something else was troubling Hattie. ‘Alistair Young went back a long way with George,’ she said.

  ‘If he’s a friend of yours, I’m sorry,’ I said. Then I realised that my words were unintentionally double edged and I hurried on. ‘If I was out of line, forget what I said. But he did go out of his way to put my hackles up.’

  ‘He seems that way, sometimes.’ Hattie paused and shook her head. ‘Truth to tell, I’ve no great fondness for the man myself and I could do without his being quite so possessive. But the two of them have been a help to me and I’m sorry for Hilda. I feel I owe it to George to keep in wi’ any friends of his.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Don’t fret over it.’

  ‘I doubt that you do,’ she said unhappily. ‘I know that he did George a big favour in the past. And never let him forget it. But I thought at least that I could trust the man.’ She paused in the act of forcing more toast on me. I think that she would have spread it and cut it up into soldiers if I had allowed her. ‘Did you mean what you said about George’s old gun?’

  I said that I did.

  ‘Write me a cheque for two hundred, then, and it’s yours.’

  ‘But I could probably get you more,’ I protested.

  ‘You didn’t mean it, then?’

  Beth was avoiding my eye but I thought that she was hiding another smile. I am a non-gambler by nature, but Hattie had saved us as much or more by the gift of her ring. And I could always sell my old gun to cover the expense. I had a chequebook in my pocket. I wrote her a cheque.

  ‘You write me a note confirming the sale,’ I said, ‘so that I can get it from the police.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather that I sold it for you in Glasgow?’

  ‘I just want the whole thing settled. I’m happy to be rid of the worry of it.’

  She came out to the car with us when we left. ‘Be back by six,’ she said. ‘If, by any chance, I’m out, look for the key on the ledge above the door. I may be walking with Mona. She likes to be taken by the ways where George used to go with her. Drive carefully, now.’

  She stood back and waved as we started down the hill. It was a sharp, clear morning. The view eastward over the loch was truly superb. I could understand why she would want to keep the view, with or without the house. I had glimpsed the Youngs’ house from my bedroom window. It looked neat and rather prim in the morning sun.

  The police from Arrochar had dealt with George Muir’s death. I drove there, found the police station on the main road and slipped the car into a parking space.

  ‘You just can’t wait to find out whether your bet’s come off,’ Beth said.

  ‘You don’t mind waiting for a minute?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got my ring.’ She stretched out her hand to admire it again. ‘I can’t grudge you a new toy. Run along and enjoy yourself. I rather hope you’ve picked up a bargain, just to show Hattie that Mr Young’s a nasty piece of work.’

  ‘I rather think that she knows it.’

  In fact, preoccupied as I was with my worries over her uncle’s demise, until Beth spoke I had relegated the gun to a recess at the back of my mind. It was probably a pitted old relic belonging on the wall above the painting of the geese. I smiled and got out of the car.

  A civilian clerkess was in charge of the desk. She fetched a grey-haired sergeant to attend to me.

  It seemed easiest to start with the gun. I produced Hattie’s written confirmation of my purchase and, from my wallet of credit and bank cards, my own shotgun certificate. He fetched a bagged gun and I signed a receipt.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ I said lamely. He waited, polite and helpful, not even looking at me. A woman had come in to complain about a neighbour’s cats. ‘It should be confidential,’ I said.

  He took me into a small interview room and we settled in hard chairs. He seemed to be absorbed in a poster which advised interviewees of their rights. ‘Can you tell me who investigated George Muir’s death?’ I asked.

  That woke him up all right. He looked straight at me for the first time, but his politeness never faltered. ‘I was called to the scene,’ he said, ‘I phoned in that it was clearly an accident and followed it up with a written report. A CID sergeant came out from Stirling to confirm it. His report to the procurator fiscal must have agreed, because the fiscal didn’t order an enquiry. Does that answer your question? Now suppose you tell me what your interest is.’

  ‘I hope very much that your report was absolutely correct,’ I said. ‘But I have my doubts and I thought that it was my duty to let you know.’

  As I explained my involvement and ran over the reasons for my disquiet, he turned a dull red and I could see him stiffening. ‘You have little enough to go on,’ he said. He seemed to be one of the old school, yet he was in no hurry to call me sir. For him, the form of address had to be earned.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said. ‘In your report, did you suggest that the lid was on the pot when the explosion happened?’

  His eyes went out of focus as he thought back. ‘I don’t think that I touched on it,’ he said at last. ‘But from the way the fragments flew around, the lid must have been in place.’

  ‘Then you might have wondered how a spark managed to get in. Or did you notice that a tiny hole had been made in the pot?’

  ‘I did not.’ He paused, holding my eyes with his own. ‘It’s my experience that you can never explain every smallest circumstance of a fatal accident. Folk do the damnedest things, you see. Assuming that you’re right, what do you propose to do with this information?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘Not a damn thing. I had doubts. I’ve told the police about them. Now I’d like to forget it. And if any more steps are taken, I’d prefer that my name was left out of it. Good day to you.’ I got up and began to walk out. That would be the end of it as far as I was concerned. The dignity of my exit was spoiled when he had to call me back to collect the forgotten gun.

  Back at the car, I handed the bagged gun to Beth and dropped into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Is it any good? Or was Alistair Young right after all? From your face . . .’

  ‘I haven’t even looked at it yet,’ I said. ‘I didn’t feel external hammers, so it’s probably less than a hundred years old.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should look?’

  I put George Muir’s death out of my mind and remembered that I had a present to open. That it was a present from myself robbed it of none of its surprise. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re right. But not in a public street. They’d think I had my eye on the bank.’

  ‘What took you the time?’ Beth asked. ‘I thought you must have taken it to bits and be going over it with a microscope.’

  ‘Formalities,’ I said. I got the car moving and turned back towards Tarbet.

  ‘What is it about men and guns?’ Beth asked. ‘You never look so perked up when I buy you a present. I thought you’d be sick of guns, after fighting in the army.’

  ‘The shotgun’s something different,’ I said. ‘An old armourer once pointed it out to me. A shotgun’s designed to come naturally to the shoulder and point where you’re looking. It’s the one object in the world which has every part of every surface placed perfectly to suit either its function or the human frame and hands. Add to that that it’s the product of around six hundred years of gradual refinement.’

  ‘Isobel says that it’s a phallic symbol,’ Beth said.

  ‘Maybe she’s right. Or maybe I’m just harking back to the small boy playing cowboys and Indians. But to me, a good gun is the supreme human artifact. A bad one’s an insult to human intelligence.’

  I got us onto the road for Glasgow, stopped in a layby and drew
the gun out of its bag – an awkward manoeuvre in the confines of the car. While I was driving, I had prepared myself for a disappointment. Hattie could have been wrong and so could I. George Muir might have bought himself a much older and cheaper gun and have had it altered to fit him by Dickson.

  What I took out was a Dickson Round Action, apparently in mint condition. The bores were mirror-perfect, the blueing unblemished and the stock was of best walnut, oil-polished to a subtle gloss.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ I said.

  Beth’s nose was almost making smears on the engraving. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Artifact or insult? It looks all right. I don’t think you were done. Uncle George liked good things.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been done if I’d put another nought on the end,’ I said. ‘This is valuable. What on earth do I do now?’

  ‘What would you have done if it had turned out to be rubbish?’ Beth asked.

  I bagged the gun again, twisted round to lay it very carefully beside the picture in the rear and got us back on the road. ‘I think I’d have decided that it served me right for shooting my mouth off.’

  ‘Right. But you made an offer, sight unseen. You warned Hattie. And you paid her twice what she’d been prepared to accept. Make an excuse to do Hattie an extra favour some time. But keep the gun, enjoy it and shut up worrying.’

  Since that was exactly what I wanted most in the world to do, Beth’s common sense found an eager response in me. Even so, I knew that it would be years before I would be able to look Hattie in the eye again.

  *

  The improvements to the A82 had made the run past Balloch and Dumbarton seem much shorter if less scenic than when the road had switchbacked and twisted along the lochside. We entered Glasgow by Dumbarton Road, left the car in a multi-storey carpark and walked the rest of the way. I was struggling with the painting, which had a tendency to act as a sail in the fitful breeze, and Beth had the gunbag slung over her shoulder. Beth grumbled both at the weight and at the curious glances which we both drew; but I was not leaving the gun behind. Cars are too easily entered and there are no hiding places in the average estate car.

  The only picture restorer known to me had a shop in a small street just outside the city centre. I had visited him occasionally over the restoration of some regimental portraits and, when I came out from behind the painting, he recognised me immediately.

  ‘Captain Cunningham!’ he said. ‘This is a pleasure.’

  ‘Mister Cunningham now, Mr Grogan,’ I said. ‘Invalided out several years ago. But it’s good to see you again. Personal business this time, not regimental.’ I introduced him to Beth and he smiled at her as if deciding that her complexion could do without rebacking.

  He tutted over the damage to the George Muir painting, but admitted that it would yield to his magic. I could collect it in a fortnight, framed just as we wanted it.

  ‘Terrible thing, him being killed that way,’ he said when our business was concluded. ‘Very sad. You’ve seen the studio? How bad is the damage?’

  His concern would not be for the building. ‘I was there last night,’ I said. ‘And it’s bad. Some of the paintings are almost shredded. Most have rips in them. Mrs Muir intends to get an agent to uplift the best of them. I was wondering whether to suggest that somebody like yourself advised her first.’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ he said. ‘That’s what the agent would do, and he’d put his own profit onto my work.’

  ‘Give me your card,’ I said. ‘I’ll pass it on to her. If she cares to follow it up, you can give her a quotation.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said soberly. ‘It’ll not be cheap. But it’d be money well spent, even on the worst damaged of them. His pictures’ll take a big jump in value now that he’s awa’. There’ll be no more, you see. Not ever.’ He paused and lowered his voice. ‘You could trust my discretion regarding anything out of the ordinary.’

  ‘I’m sure we could,’ Beth said. She tugged at my sleeve.

  We left the gun in his care and went for lunch.

  ‘What was Grogan talking about?’ I asked Beth. ‘“Anything out of the ordinary”?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ she said. ‘All Uncle George’s work was out of the ordinary. But I expect your Mr Grogan knows what he’s doing.’

  Chapter Four

  Edgar Lawrence lived in the agricultural fringe between Glasgow’s peripheral industries and the Lennox Hills. We went out through Bearsden and followed the instructions he had given to Beth over the phone. These brought us through alternating strips of prosperity and industrial decay, until we arrived at a narrow and potholed road through landscape which still bore the scars of earlier quarrying or opencast mining, long since defunct and now mostly overgrown. It was a backwater, not affluent but not displeasing.

  We found a row of four brick cottages, once workmen’s dwellings but now forced up-market by the pressures from the city. The same pressure would eventually force their conversion into one or two houses of more respectable size, with colour-washed walls, cedar panels and double glazing, but for the moment, as we could see by the doors and fences, they were still as poky and utilitarian as when they had been built.

  We draped coats over the gun and locked the car up carefully. According to the numbering, Edgar occupied the gable cottage at the nearer end, but a hearty rat-tat with a rusty knocker brought no response except for some disinterested barking from beyond the house.

  The front door of the adjoining cottage gritted open and a woman put her head out and then emerged cautiously. She was thin but with enormous hips. I thought that she was not as young as her style of dress would have had us believe, nor her hair as blonde; but I supposed that I was being unfair. Most women looked secondhand to me beside Beth’s freshness.

  ‘Was you wanting Mr Lawrence?’ she asked. Her metallic accent would have sounded abrasive, even coming from a Clydeside docker.

  My first impulse was to point out that we would hardly have been knocking at his door if we had not wanted him, but Beth jabbed me with her elbow. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

  The woman frowned. ‘He was expecting his cousin.’

  ‘That’s me,’ Beth said.

  The woman frowned again and then her face cleared. ‘I mind now, Edgar said as you was a grown woman but looked like a teeny-bopper. He had a call to go back to his work. He asked me to take you round to have a keek at your wee dog. I’m Jeannie McLaine.’

  She led us round the gable of the terrace and through a small garden where some trouble had been taken and mostly wasted on vegetables which had bolted to seed. Edgar’s kennels, a row of small sheds, sturdy but ill-matched, each with a tiny, earth-floored run enclosed by wired mesh, stood in the corner of a scrubby field.

  ‘Your dog’s in the first kennel, Edgar said. He left out dummies, in case you wanted to try him.’

  The name Jason was chalked over the entry to the first run we came to. It held a small, black Labrador. I was conscious of a sense of disappointment. The sudden acquisition of a George Muir painting, an engagement ring and an excellent shotgun had evoked the spirit of childhood Christmas, encouraging me to expect something rather special. On this trip down the chimney, however, Santa had failed to live up to his previous record. This animal was rather narrow in the head and long legged. Beauty is not a prerequisite in the working dog. Arbitrary and sometimes ill-advised standards set by the Kennel Club had caused show-dog strains to drift away, in size and form, from the dogs bred for work; but the show and working strains had become less separated in the Labrador than in perhaps any other breed and it was quite common to see Labradors competing at field trials which would not have been out of place in the show ring.

  Beth, putting aside her chagrin at being likened to a teeny-bopper, opened the gate of the pen and the dog came out willingly enough, glad to be free of the confinement of the run. Other dogs were standing against the mesh, hoping for a walk, food or some other break in the monotony. While I strolled along the row of kenn
els, Beth walked her dog, trying him at heel. He seemed, at first glance, to be nervous but steady.

  There was no name on the furthest run. The run was empty and the door of the shed was closed and latched. I glanced back. The woman was watching me uncertainly. Beth was putting her dog through some simple exercises. It was an ungainly mover, but fast. I ducked through the entry to the run and unlatched the door of the kennel. Another Labrador emerged, stretching, and nosed my hand.

  To somebody unused to dogs, one of any breed may look very like any other; but when you live and work with them, their faces and builds and movements become as individual as those of people and often more so. My suspicions crystallised and I called to Beth.

  ‘Come over here.’

  She brought the other dog over and sat him outside the run. He was obedient, but you can teach a Labrador anything short of how to make tea.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong dog,’ I said. ‘That one’s snipe-headed. No way did the pup your uncle drew grow into that thing. How old is he supposed to be?’

  ‘Eleven months.’

  ‘That dog looks twice that age. Now look over here.’ I nodded toward the dog in the pen. He shuffled uneasily, aware that he was being discussed but unable to understand. He was going to develop into a very handsome animal. ‘This one’s about the right age, and he’s exactly what the dog in your uncle’s drawing would have grown into.’

  The woman, Jeannie McLaine, had come closer. ‘I don’t know about this,’ she said. It was almost a whine. ‘I only know what Edgar said. He said your dog was in the first kennel.’

  ‘But from which end?’

  ‘Jason’s name was chalked up,’ Beth said doubtfully.

  ‘That could be months old,’ I said. ‘Your cousin could have forgotten about it. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. There’s not another dog here that comes near the right age or build. Have you seen Jason’s pedigree?’

  ‘I have it here.’ Beth fumbled in her coat pocket. ‘Uncle George kept it and Hattie sent it on to me.’

  One glance was enough for me. ‘His grandsire in the male line was Farthingale Bonus, who has a head like the front of a bus. None of his line ever threw a narrow-headed pup. Look at Joe Little’s dogs if you don’t believe me.’