‘Don’t mention it,’ I said. For once, I meant the trite phrase. It seemed to me that I had said nothing beyond the most mundane and obvious.
*
Henry arrived alone at Three Oaks on the Friday morning. Isobel had suffered a flare-up of toothache during the night and had gone off to the Dental Hospital in Dundee. Henry brought apologetic messages.
I was watching Beth and Jason on the grass at the time. They worked well together. They were hardly up to competition standard yet, but they were developing a relationship. I had already tested them at an evening roost-shoot of wood-pigeon and they would make an adequate team for a day’s picking-up and no doubt gain experience and cement their relationship in the process. Dogs are quick to sense a pecking order and Jason had already decided for himself that I was the pack leader with Beth as an acceptable deputy.
‘Don’t keep whistling at him unless he needs help,’ I told Beth. ‘Let him learn to use his nose.’ And to Henry, ‘Quite right. Isobel has to be on her best form tomorrow. But I’ll have to give Gargany a last-minute polish for her. She’s inclined to get above herself if she isn’t reminded of her proper place at regular intervals.’
‘Isobel?’ Henry said. ‘How true!’
‘Gargany, you ass,’ I retorted. ‘I’ll take her onto The Moss now.’
‘Can we come?’ Beth asked quickly.
After a second of consideration, I nodded. The runs were clean, the puppies fed and the dogs in various stages of training had been put through their exercises. ‘Hattie can mind the baby,’ I said. ‘Come and shoot for us, Henry?’
‘With the Dickson?’ Henry said.
‘If you insist.’
Gargany was one of those lucky chances which can happen to all of us but which usually only happen to others. She was a black and white springer bitch, the product of a litter sired by Samson out of one of my best brood bitches. There is a limit to how many young dogs a trainer can manage and I had intended to keep only one bitch pup out of the litter to train and sell as a working dog. Gargany had not been my choice. But while the rest of the pups had sold and sold well, Gargany, because of asymmetrical markings which gave her a peculiarly lopsided appearance, had failed to fetch her price. I had started bringing her on to sell as a worker. After a slow start she had suddenly shown talent and even the promise of future stardom. Tomorrow should see her take her first step towards champion status.
We crossed the road and walked towards The Moss over a stubble field, still unploughed thanks to a wet autumn. An early frost had thawed, but the light was still bright and clear. There was the chance of a covey of partridges and we had permission to shoot game as well as vermin, so I sent Gargany out. She soon settled into an efficient quartering pattern, Jason, as befitted his function in life, remained at Beth’s heel, watching Gargany’s work with an air of superiority. In his view, spaniels had been provided by nature to be his labourers.
Henry loaded the gun and walked between us. I felt a pang of jealousy. I was still in the honeymoon stage with that gun. I think that I would rather have seen Beth hanging on Henry’s arm than the Dickson.
There was time to chat. ‘I had a George Muir painting once,’ Henry said.
Gargany was getting too far out on my left. I gave her the turn whistle. ‘What happened to it?’ I asked.
‘Sold it when Isobel wanted capital to go into business with you. My investments were low at the time, but the painting fetched about a hundred times what I paid for it.’
‘Golly!’ Beth said.
A hare got up in front of us. True to their training, both dogs froze. Henry mounted the gun and then, to my relief, held his fire. I prefer hares alive rather than jugged.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said to Beth, ‘about the most unsettling thing that could happen to you would be for Jason to bring you a wounded hare. If you lose your nerve and start wringing your hands, you’ll just be making bad worse. Pick it up by the hind legs and give it a good whack on the back of the head – remind me, I’ll give you a “priest” to take with you. And tell the silly beggar who shot it to leave hares alone until he’s learned to shoot straight.’
‘On Lord Craill’s shoot, he’ll be a duke or an earl or something,’ Beth objected.
‘Possibly. Or the local dustman. Craill isn’t fussy – lords don’t need to be snobs. Tick the culprit off anyway.’
We had reached the hedge which bounded The Moss. It was threaded with a fence of rusty barbed wire. I held the wire down for Beth to step over. ‘Too bad about your painting,’ I told Henry.
He shrugged while unloading the gun and dropped a cartridge. ‘Isobel never liked it much anyway. It showed a terrier killing rats. Full of action but a little on the gruesome side.’ He grunted as he picked up the dropped cartridge and again as he stepped over the wire. ‘It was funny how I came by it. Years and years ago, I was at an auction. I only went because there was a table for sale that I rather fancied. It went for more than I could manage so that I was left sitting on some spare cash. There were two of George Muir’s paintings in the sale and I rather fancied one of them. This was before he was known.
‘When the other painting came up, it was bought by a big, fat chap. I noticed that the only person bidding against him was a small woman, and I’d seen the two of them together before the auction started. It puzzled me at first, because if they’d co-operated they could have got it much more cheaply. Then I realised that they must be working for the painter. It’s an old racket. What,’ he asked me abruptly, ‘is the value of something?’
I had been on the point of moving on, but Henry had suddenly caught my interest. A phrase which I had heard came into my mind. ‘What the next fools’ going to pay for it?’ I suggested.
‘Wrong. It’s what the last ten fools paid for something similar. If you’re Joe Snooks, the good but unknown artist, or if you have a corner in his work, you put examples of it up for auction and have them bought back at steadily increasing prices. Eventually, the record of prices fetched establishes that the true value of a Joe Snooks painting is umpty pounds. Then you start letting them go. It costs you the auctioneer’s commission each time, but that’s money well spent if your work fetches its full value while you’re still around to enjoy it instead of after you’re dead.
‘I was standing behind the two. I joined in the bidding when the picture I wanted came up. Each of them probably thought that the successful bid was the other’s and they looked baffled when it was knocked down to me. What I paid for it was probably over the odds at the time, but I liked it and I reckoned that if they went on conspiring to inflate the values I’d get my money back in the end. And so I did,’ Henry finished with satisfaction.
‘The fat chap,’ I said. ‘Did he have a built-in frown and jowls?’
‘As far as I remember. You know him?’
‘Alistair Young,’ I said. ‘He has a tiny wife. And Hattie told me that he’d been a friend of George Muir for yonks. Now we know why.’
We set off across The Moss. The rough ground was a magnet in winter for both game and vermin. After fifty yards, Gargany put two rabbits out of a gorse bush. Henry missed the first but killed the second dead.
‘Missed in front,’ he said. ‘For all its weight, this thing swings faster than you expect. Well balanced, I suppose.’
The dogs were sitting tight. ‘Do you want Gargany to pick it?’ Beth asked.
‘I want her to be reminded that not every shot means a retrieve for her,’ I said. ‘Send Jason.’
She sent the Labrador. Gargany looked at me with reproach. Jason brought the limp rabbit. Beth handed it to me to bag and we set off again.
Twenty minutes later we had worked our way round to near the patch of open woodland which formed the heart of The Moss. Fringed with reedy, wet ground and comprising scattered clumps of alders undergrown with brambles and heather and sudden patches of gorse, I had found it a valuable training area even when poached to emptiness by some of my less reputable neighbours.
; A cock pheasant exploded from under Beth’s feet, making her squeak with surprise. Henry was almost caught flatfooted, but he recovered, swung and fired. The pheasant turned over and dropped among the reeds.
Both the dogs and Beth were looking at me in restrained eagerness. I nodded to Beth. She gave Jason the signal with professional clarity and he cantered forward. But he sniffed at the reeds for a moment and then moved uncertainly towards the jungle. Beth whistled. He checked but went on again.
‘Leave him,’ I said. ‘I think we’ve got a runner.’
‘It didn’t look like a runner.’
‘When you can’t see, trust the dog,’ I told her. ‘If you’re lucky, he’s following the scent.’ Privately I rather hoped that Gargany would wipe Jason’s eye. It might teach them both a lesson.
‘I don’t suppose that Jason’s ever picked a pheasant before,’ Beth said.
She was probably right. Jason seemed puzzled. He was young and Edgar Lawrence’s ground was hardly in pheasant country. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Call him in.’
Beth whistled and Jason came reluctantly back to her. I sent Gargany. The spaniel picked up a scent and vanished.
We waited. There was little warmth in the low sunshine but no bite in the breeze.
‘I like this gun,’ Henry said suddenly. ‘How would you like to swap it for Isobel’s share of your year’s profit?’
‘Isobel might have something to say about that,’ I pointed out.
‘I could coax her.’
‘John’s going to keep his gun,’ Beth said firmly. ‘I want him to have it. And you are a nasty old man, Henry, calling my uncle a fraud and then trying to diddle John.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Henry protested. ‘I made him a good offer. And I didn’t say anything about fraud. As far as I know, there’s nothing illegal in getting a friend to buy your own pictures for you. Nobody was forced to pay the new prices and if they did they still made a good investment.’
‘Alistair Young really is a fraud, though,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t avoid telling Sergeant Bedale about his try-on over Hattie’s house and I could see her mind starting to work, just as clearly as if her thoughts were in a cartoonist’s bubble above her head. “Next-door neighbour. Bound to know about the key above the door. First on the scene after the widow, who would have been too shaken to notice something like a wire leading out of the window.” That sort of thing.’
‘From what Isobel relayed to me,’ Henry said, ‘he has an alibi of a sort for the time of the explosion.’
‘His wife and his brother-in-law,’ Beth said. ‘He could get them to say anything.’
Gargany came out of the jungle with a limp cock pheasant in her jaws, looking very pleased with herself. She presented it, sitting, to Beth. I took it and felt it carefully, but the rib-cage was intact. The bird had not been bitten, it had been mortally shot, but had still had a few yards left in it.
‘Would Alistair Young kill, just to give himself an opportunity to try to swindle the widow?’ I asked.
‘We don’t know what other motive he might have had,’ Beth said. She looked at me meaningfully.
Somehow I could not see the petite and skinny Mrs Young as meat for the predatory George Muir. ‘More to the point,’ I said, ‘he had the best opportunity to remove anything incriminating before the police arrived.’
‘He didn’t act very guilty,’ Beth said.
‘That sort of aggressiveness often covers up a bad conscience. Let’s move on. You’d better try Jason on that pheasant in the open.’
Beth looked at me in uncertainty. ‘I thought that you taught dogs to ignore quarry which had already been handled,’ she said. ‘This will have my scent all over it.’
‘That’s for workers,’ I said. ‘You’re planning to compete with Jason; and they sometimes plant handled game as a final test in a run-off.’
I hid the dead bird between two clumps of heather some fifty yards away and Beth handled Jason onto it. The young Labrador hesitated and then lifted the bird. His tail was thrashing as he came back. ‘From now on, that’s a scent he’ll never forget,’ I said.
‘Why would Lawrence be training the dog competition-style if it was promised to a wildfowler?’ Henry asked.
I shrugged. I did not want to voice the most obvious reason, but it was difficult to think of any others.
Chapter Seven
Breeding and training gundogs may be one of the least tedious means of earning a living for anyone of my inclinations; but it is a way of life which cannot be suspended at short notice. Dogs have to be guarded against theft or malicious attack, fed, exercised, humanised and entertained. In addition, phones have to be answered and visitors confronted. With Hattie and Isobel going off to the field trial and Beth coming with me to Lord Craill’s shoot, Henry stepped into the breach as often before. He always grumbled, but I believe that he enjoyed those occasional days of peaceful responsibility. Whenever we returned, we found all in perfect order and Henry almost sober.
Beth and I made a point of being at the beaters’ assembly area before the appointed time. Lord Craill was served by a keeper who had at one time been a warrant officer in the Scots Guards, and he ran each shoot with the discipline and precision of a military exercise. Any team prefers to know exactly what it should do and when, so the estate was never short of beaters. If the Guns were still milling about and chatting when the birds began to come over, that was their loss; it seldom happened again after the first drive.
Lord Craill, who was a pleasant young man with sandy hair and a slight stammer, owned a considerable acreage of land in Fife. This was mostly too scattered to be of use for pheasants, but he had contrived to bring together the sporting rights to four arable farms on well-wooded and contoured ground.
On such hilly land, Beth was usually out of my sight; and with only two pickers-up serving a line of eight guns, I was too busy during the drives to keep an eye on her. Some of the guests were second-rate shots and I had to watch each bird to judge whether it was pricked and a potential runner. When I caught her between drives she looked anxious but claimed to be more concerned as to whether I was getting chilled in the frosty air; and I was relieved to hear one guest remark to Lord Craill that it restored his faith in the coming generation to see good Labrador-handling by a pretty teenager. After that, I could relax and concentrate on working Samson and Brockleton. The spaniels were fractious – they would have preferred to be with the beating line. The ‘teenager’ comment I filed away, to tease Beth.
It would have been usual for the pickers-up to lunch on beer and sandwiches with the beaters but Lord Craill, as he often did, invited me to join his guests. Beth, who would probably have preferred the humbler lunch, was added to the invitation.
Rather than waste valuable shooting time by a return to the Big House, a buffet meal had been laid out on a trestle table in a large barn. Wallace, the head keeper, had bolted his own meal and had appointed himself to preside over the drinks table. This, and a basilisk glare at anyone taking more than a single sip from a flask, enabled him to ensure that the Guns would face the afternoon in a state of reasonable sobriety. What to the guests was primarily a social event was, in the keeper’s view, an occasion for filling the game cart and thereby paying for next year’s birds. When I collected a single beer from him and a soda for Beth, he unbent enough to praise her work with Jason.
I joined Beth where she was sitting shyly on one of the straw bales which had been ranged round the walls of the barn. Several of the guests paused to talk with us about dogs but most moved on. An American, who seemed to know very few of the other guests, settled beside us. He introduced himself as Kenneth James Boyce from Houston. ‘Most folks,’ he said, ‘call me Kenny.’ He was a small man and slim, remarkably so for a Texan, with high cheekbones and a pointed chin. We compared spaniels with the Shorthaired Pointers which were his usual shooting companions.
‘I’m only here by chance,’ he said when we seemed to have exhausted the subject. ‘I was suppose
d to be here and gone by now, but my passport came up missing some time back, stolen I guess, and you wouldn’t believe the time it takes to get a replacement.’
‘It takes even longer over here,’ I said.
‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘If you say so. Seems hard to believe, though. Anyways, I came over to visit our subsidiary here in Fife and I was having a dinner with our sales manager over this side at Braidie Castle Hotel – I’m staying there. We met up with Lord Craill and fell to talking over a drink. It seems that Bruce was already coming to this shoot. When Lord Craill heard that I was a hunter he invited me to come along as an extra.
‘Well, I sure did want to try your driven pheasants, but I’ve read about it and I had an idea how an extra guest could louse it up for all the others. But Bruce said that he had a whole lot of work stacked up and he’d be happy to give up his place to me. Lord Craill said that that was great and Bruce could come here next time. Bruce let me borrow his gun.’
‘Are you enjoying it as much as you thought you would?’ Beth asked.
‘It’s great,’ he said. ‘But I’m not doing so good with a strange gun. It’s side by side, you see, and I’m used to an over and under. Yet the chokes aren’t any different to speak of. I don’t differ much from Bruce in build and my eye seems to come in lie with the rib.’
This was a problem I had come across before. ‘You’re missing under?’ I asked him.
‘Seems like it. Bruce fixed me up with some of his reloads, but they feel pretty much like my own.’
‘You may be aiming low with your left hand because you’re used to the deeper fore-end on an over-under. Try stuffing a handkerchief into the palm of your left glove.’
‘That could be right,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Darn it, I should of thought of that.’
The repeated mentions of ‘Bruce’ combined with the other circumstances suddenly threw up an identity in my mind. ‘Would that be Bruce Fullerton?’ I asked. ‘He works for an American concern and I met him on this shoot last year.’
Doghouse (Three Oaks Book 3) Page 11