by Jo Bannister
Gabriel Ash didn’t so much mutter to himself as talk to his dog. If this was indeed a sign of madness, a great many of us would be eating our meals with plastic cutlery, but in fact it’s nothing of the kind. It can be a sign of loneliness. Or just that your social circle is such that there’s more satisfaction in talking to a dog.
Patience saw the group approaching before Ash did. She turned toward them with a low growl. She wasn’t a big dog, but there was a lean athleticism to her that emphasized those features hounds have always been bred for: speed and bite. The boys broke stride before they came within range of the long muzzle, which was nothing more than teeth covered by a curtain of lip, currently lifting at one corner.
“Hey, dummy—your dog’s growling at me!”
Gabriel kept walking and didn’t look around. He didn’t want trouble. He’d already had all the trouble one man could cope with.
“Hey, dummy, I’m talking to you! Your dog’s growling at me. What you going do about it?”
He still didn’t look around. “Take her home,” he said quietly. “Right now.”
“Shouldn’t have brought it out in public, a dangerous dog like that.”
“She isn’t dangerous, and she’s on a lead.”
“That’s a pit bull terrier, that is. Them’s illegal.”
Another voice, oddly reasonable: “No, it’s a lurcher.”
The boy who had spoken first turned on the one who’d joined in. “Who asked your opinion? Anyway, what’s a lurcher?”
“It’s a sporting dog. Gypsies use them to chase rabbits. Mostly got a bit of greyhound and a bit of terrier in them.”
At least he’d diverted attention away from Ash. His friends were staring at him as if they thought that knowledge, any knowledge, was a dangerous thing. “What makes you such a frigging expert?”
“My granddad used to breed lurchers. That one’s got a bit of pointer in it. He’d have called it a ‘gentleman’s lurcher.’”
The older youth was shaking his head darkly, perplexed and disapproving in equal measure. “You’re a constant frigging wonder to me, Saturday. Mostly, that I’ve known you for nine months without punching your frigging lights out. Now, find me a stick. I’ll teach this dummy to bring his dangerous dog into our park.”
The boy called, apparently, Saturday took a step back, shoving his fists deep into the pockets of his battered jeans. “You don’t need a stick. Just thump him. Like you usually do.”
“I need a stick,” said the older boy with a kind of heavy insistence, “because before I thump him I need to put that thing out of action. Get it?”
Saturday’s eyes flared unhappily. “My granddad says, ‘Only a coward takes a stick to a dog.’”
“Yeah? Well, I’ll thump your granddad as well, then, all right? Now find me a stick.”
“No!” But before his rebellion cost him too much, he added hurriedly, “But I’ll hold the dog while you thump him. That do?”
The older boy looked at Patience, looked at Saturday, looked at Ash. “You’ll hold the dog? That dog?”
“Yeah.”
“While we thump him?”
“Yeah.”
“What if you let it go?”
“I won’t.”
“What if it bites you?”
Saturday considered. “Thump him quickly. If it bites me, Trucker, damn sure I’m letting go.”
“Oh, for frig’s sake!”
But Saturday was already moving toward Ash, one hand out for the lead. “Give me your dog, mister,” he said softly. “Otherwise she’s going to get hurt.”
Ash held his gaze for a moment. He looked like the rest of them—maybe sixteen years old, thin, and none too clean—but there was something in his eyes, a spark of humanity, that made Ash think maybe he could trust him. After a moment he proferred the lead.
Saturday nodded and took it. “Come on, girl, you come with me. Your dad’s going to be … busy … for a minute or two.” He led her—growling and whining her protests, digging in her long paws and leaning all her weight into her collar—behind the group as it split and then gathered around the man.
He’d told Laura Fry that he was afraid all the time. But perhaps this wasn’t what he was afraid of. Or perhaps he’d lived with the fear long enough to learn a kind of fatalism. He made no attempt to evade what was coming, either to escape or to fight back. He stood with his head bowed and his hands spread slightly from his body, and he waited.
He was a grown man; even now he was probably the match of any of these youths. But they were eight, and they hemmed him in so tightly that no one passing on the road or on foot through the park would have seen what was happening.
So there really was no need for the first blow to come from behind. That was Trucker, of course. Though Saturday couldn’t actually see him through the press of backs, it was always Trucker who struck the first blow, and usually from behind. He winced, bracing himself against the dog’s urgent efforts to free herself.
Ash thought he was ready. He knew he was going to take a beating. But a lot worse things had happened to him, and part of him didn’t even care.
But he was wrong. He wasn’t ready for the direction the assault came from, the lack of any warning, or the sheer vicious force of the blow. It took him in the small of the back and dropped him, gasping, to his knees, and down there it was only a matter of moments before they started using him as a football. He curled up tight, trying to take the worst of the assault on his arms and legs, but eight is a lot of people. Sixteen fists and sixteen feet. Half a minute of it and he couldn’t have risen to save his life. A minute more and there might have been nothing left to save.
Even Saturday, who’d seen it before, was startled by the mindless violence of the attack. He knew Trucker had a nasty temper and the others would follow where he led, but he hadn’t known they were capable of murder. In his head, in one of the long, terrible seconds while he watched, he amended that to we. If he hadn’t been holding this dog, he’d have been in there, too, doing what the rest of them were doing. Beating a man senseless. And then, if nothing came to stop them, beating him to death. For nothing. No reason, except that they were bored.
He looked about him, for once in his life hoping that a police patrol might cruise by. There were more of them than there used to be—it was called “zero-tolerance policing,” and apparently it went down well with the tax-payers—but not here, not now. The only other person in the park was an old lady walking a Westie, and she was shuffling away in the opposite direction as quickly as her lisle stockings would carry her.
Which left him and the dog. He thought about it for another crippling second; then he shrugged. “See what you can do,” he whispered, and dropped the lead.
Then, with a flash of foresight, he let out a yell. “Ow! You … bitch! Sorry, Trucker, she got away from me.…”
Impossible to judge if this attempt to cover himself had been registered, because before he had the last words out the loosed dog struck into the melee like an Exocet missile with teeth.
These are civilized days. Even the wolves around our hearths are for the most part pretty well behaved, with the result that most people have never seen a real, serious, mean-it dog attack and have no idea the destructive force of the canine mouth. Tacticians who talk about bringing power to a point could hardly find a better example than in the dentistry of the domestic dog. The canines, up front, sharp and penetrating to wound and grip; the serried ranks of the carnassials, farther back, where the shearing power of the jaw is greater, angled and honed to strip flesh off bone and then to splinter the bone. Two or three times a year, due to bad breeding, bad handling, or maybe just badness, somebody’s dog leaves the reservation—stops begging for biscuits, running after Frisbees, and Dying for England—and rips a child’s throat out. And everyone expresses horrified astonishment. But that’s what a dog is: a killing machine. You only have to look at the anatomy. The wonder is not that once in a blue moon it fulfills its potential, but that i
t happens so incredibly seldom. That an animal that could quite literally take your hand off almost always chooses to lick it instead.
The lurcher bitch Patience made the transition from faithful pet to apex predator in the time it took her to cross ten meters, which was about a second, and she arrived fangs-first at the wall of vicious aggression surrounding her owner.
A human backside is only soft flesh lightly upholstered. Her teeth met in the middle.
In another second the accompanying sound track, which had been grunts of effort and hoots of derision, turned to howls of pain and frantic yells of “Gerritoffame!” A space opened up as the gang abandoned its murderous sport and redirected its energies to self-defense. A few of the braver ones swung a leg at the flashing dog, but they were far too slow, presenting only another target for her to snap at in passing. The space widened, the little mob lost focus and organization, and then suddenly they were fleeing, overtaking one another in the desire to put distance between themselves and the furious animal. Saturday ran with them. A few seconds more and there was only Gabriel Ash, lying on the ground, bloody and unmoving, and Patience, prowling a defensive circle around him, long jaws panting wide, the white hairs still erect between her shoulder blades.
From the edge of the park, the two-tone of a fast-approaching police car. The old lady with the Westie had had a mobile phone in her handbag. Ignoring the signs, the driver came the direct route across the grass and his companion got out, edging cautiously toward the injured man while keeping her eyes constantly on the dog. But Patience, as if she understood, sat down and let her come.
* * *
Her name was Hazel Best, and she hadn’t been in Norbold long. In fact, she hadn’t been a police officer for very long. She was still on probation and this was her first posting.
The men and women she’d trained with had commiserated, thinking she’d drawn the short straw. Norbold wasn’t the sort of place where careers were made. For that you needed one of the big cities, where crime stalked the streets and some of the people it stalked were rich and famous. You needed the opportunity to disarm an ax maniac or foil a bank robbery from time to time. You needed the possibility of saving a celebrity’s toddler from kidnapping, or to be the thinnest of thin blue lines between a terrorist wearing the ultimate in hi-viz vests and his intended targets. Of course, you also needed to survive these experiences, but if you did, you could expect promotion, fast-tracking, maybe even a medal.
And all these things were more likely to happen on the streets of London, or Glasgow, or Birmingham or Manchester, than in a small West Midlands town where the biggest employer was a manufacturer of flowered tea sets and the average age of the population was fifty-three. Indeed, Norbold was famous—infamous, among Hazel Best’s fellow probationers—for its low crime rate. The general feeling was that, in order to build up some kind of an arrest record there, she’d have to stop people for being old and disorganized, and wielding a walker without due care and attention.
Hazel let them enjoy their joke. In fact, she was curious to learn how you policed a town so as to keep the level of almost all crimes consistently below the national average. And she’d been told the answer the first day she reported for duty. The answer was Johnny Fountain.
But Norbold’s charismatic chief superintendent and his signature brand of zero-tolerance policing had not been enough to save the man at her feet from the kind of beating that leaves people deaf, blind, or brain-damaged. While he was unconscious and masked in his own blood, there was no knowing how serious his injuries were. Hazel shouted, “Ambulance!” to her colleague in the car, then—still keeping one eye on the dog—reached down to touch the man’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said, using the calm of her voice to cut through the terror that had been his last conscious thought. “You’re safe now. We’ll look after you.”
Constable Wayne Budgen, having made the call, came over to help. He winced. “They fairly laid into him this time.”
Hazel looked up in surprise. “You mean this has happened before?”
“Not like this. But yes, he’s been roughed up a time or two. Local kids, mostly.”
“Why? Who is he?”
“I don’t know his name. Everyone calls him ‘Rambles.’” The frank incredulity in her stare made him flush. “‘Rambles With Dogs.’ You know—like Dances with Wolves? I think he’s a bit…” He made a spiral movement with one finger about his ear. “He wanders around the place talking to that dog.”
“You’re telling me that he’s suffering from a mental disability, and therefore the local youth make a hobby of kicking him up and down the park.”
Hazel’s voice was level, but Wayne Budgen knew perfectly well when he was being told off. And he wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Theoretically, he was senior to Hazel Best—he’d been on the job longer; that’s why he’d been given the task of showing her around. But she was a couple of years older than he was—twenty-five, twenty-six. She’d done something else before joining the police. He wasn’t sure what, but from the way she was looking at him, it might have been teaching.
He spread a defensive hand. “What can we do? We can’t lock him up.”
“No. Perhaps we should try locking them up.”
“It’s different ones each time. Look, I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it happens. Vulnerable people get bullied. We stop it when we see it.” He saw the skepticism in her gaze. “If you don’t believe me, look at the crime returns. Common assault—eight percent below the national average. Eight percent. That’s a lot of people—people like him—that get home safe in Norbold who’d be in Accidents & Emergency in most other towns.”
Hazel sighed. “Yes. Yes, I know, Wayne. I’m not blaming you. Like you say, some things are always going to happen. It’s just, if you’re one of the people it always happens to, it won’t seem that important that people somewhere else have it even worse.”
Across the park they heard the sound of the ambulance. It seemed to mean something to the man on the ground, too, because finally he started to uncurl and make vague gestures toward getting up. Hazel knelt beside him.
“How are you feeling? I’m Hazel, by the way. Maybe you shouldn’t move around too much until the paramedics have had a look at you.”
“I’m all right,” he mumbled. She wasn’t sure how much of his lack of clarity was due to his broken lip, how much to concussion, how much to his mental condition. He looked around for his dog, and then, having located her, looked at Hazel. “Really. I don’t need the paramedics.”
“Well, they’re here now,” said Hazel reasonably, “so they might as well check you over. You’ve got some nasty cuts there. They’ll probably take you to the Royal to get a few stitches put in.”
“No.” Ash shook his head with infinite caution. “I’m not going to the hospital. They can slap on some of those butterfly plasters, they’ll do just as well.”
Which rather surprised Hazel Best. He didn’t talk like a man with psychiatric problems. He talked the way she talked—the way normal people talk.
Guided by the old mantra that no head injury is so trivial it can safely be ignored nor so serious it should be despaired of, the paramedics wanted to take him in for X-rays. Ash refused. “I’m not going to the hospital,” he said again. “I don’t want to be rude. I’m grateful for your help, but you can’t make me.”
Constable Budgen frowned. “What’s the problem? You one of these religious nuts … people?”
Gabriel Ash gave a little snort that seemed closer to laughter than anything else. “No, just an ordinary nut.”
“You’re worried about your dog, aren’t you?” Hazel realized. “Because you can’t take it into the hospital. I’ll look after it for you, if you like.”
He smiled. A bloody, beaten thing it was, too, but the warmth was genuine. “Thank you. But I don’t need to go to the hospital. If you want to help, help me up.”
It was a bit of a dilemma. People are entitled to refuse offers of assis
tance, however well intentioned and indeed well advised. On the other hand, if there was some doubt about his mental capacity …
“How do you feel about police stations?” asked Hazel. “Ours is just around the corner. The police surgeon can have a look at you, we’ll have a cup of coffee—I don’t know about you, but I need one, and Wayne here’s desperate for a fag break—and you and your dog can have a quiet sit-down for an hour. If you still seem all right then, I’ll take you home. Deal?”
He thought about it. “Deal.”
She helped him up. She gave him the dog’s lead. “I don’t know your name.”
“Gabriel Ash. And this is Patience.”
CHAPTER 3
CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT John Fountain regarded the reflection in the mirror with fond solemnity. Not his own face, which had been a thing of no great beauty when he was young and now showed the effects of too many late nights and pie and chip suppers, but that of his wife behind him, the tip of her tongue protruding between her lips as she concentrated on the bow tie he himself had given up on. Her name was Denise, and he supposed that by conventional standards she wasn’t a thing of any great beauty, either; but she was to him. She was the only woman he’d ever loved, and he loved her more now than when they were twenty.
Which is why he went on sitting at the dressing-table mirror while she fiddled with the stupid strip of fabric instead of groping around in his chest of drawers for the ready-made one. Denis—he called her Denis: it had been their joke for so long it didn’t even seem like a joke anymore—insisted that an occasion like tonight demanded the real thing. Fountain doubted that anyone in the Town Hall would care or even notice whether his bow tie was elasticized or not; and if the speeches went on long enough for someone to pay that much attention to his attire, he knew they’d know he wasn’t the one who had tied it. Johnny Fountain wasn’t the kind of man who spent time prettifying himself. He was the kind of man who rugby-tackled football hooligans and arm-wrestled them into the backs of Land Rovers while younger, more cautious officers were leafing through the police manual.