‘Why wouldn’t they be?’ Beth demanded hotly. ‘It could be a carrier bag my husband brought home with some shopping.’
‘Hold it,’ I said. ‘Maybe it could and maybe it couldn’t. Inspector, are we talking about a blue carrier bag with black and white lettering?’
I saw him prepare to pounce. ‘What if we are?’ he said.
‘I found that bag against the wall behind the shrubs. It must have been left over from some previous sniffing session,’ I explained. ‘I picked it up, meaning to use it to collect some scraps of paper that were blowing around nearby.’
The Inspector nodded, half satisfied and half disappointed. ‘There were traces of what seems to be dried glue in the bag,’ he said. ‘So that was the bag that they—or somebody—poured glue into and then sniffed vapour from the bag. It’s what it may have been used for later that concerns us. Are you suggesting that Shotto’s fingerprints may have been on the bag from a sniffing party? Or that he used it to grip some weapon?’
‘Either or both,’ I said. ‘That’s for you to decide. I’m only explaining how mine got onto it.’
Burrard frowned. ‘There were no papers in it when it was picked up.’
‘I only lifted it as something to do while I waited for Charles Hopgood to arrive. He turned up before I could get started, so I tucked it between the gatepost and the wall.’
‘Securely? Or could it have blown away? It was picked up near where Mr Garnet was struck down, between your gate and the village.’
‘I tucked it in quite firmly,’ I said. ‘And there’s been very little wind since then.’
Henry, who had been listening in intent silence, stirred so that his basket chair gave a sudden creak. ‘And what wind there has been,’ he said, ‘was in the opposite direction.’
Detective Inspector Burrard stood looming silently for a while. I thought that he was considering the implications of the carrier bag, but it seemed that Charles Hopgood’s name had started a train of thought. ‘Mr Hopgood?’ he said. ‘That’s the client whose dog was poisoned? We only have his London address. Do you know where he’s staying? I must see him again as soon as possible.’
‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ I told him. ‘Charles Hopgood is still here. He’s considering another young dog as a possible replacement for the one that died. They’ve gone for a walk in the field to get to know one another. My son went with them.’
Burrard’s eyebrows went up. ‘He went for a walk with your little boy?’
‘It seemed to be a chance to keep Sam away from all the fuss and flap.’
‘Is there any reason we shouldn’t?’ Beth asked sharply.
‘None at all,’ Burrard said. ‘Excuse me.’ He went out of the room, trying to move quickly while trying not to be seen to hurry.
We looked at each other, puzzled and slightly perturbed.
‘I’ll go and see what he’s on about,’ I said.
‘All right. I’ll leave it to you,’ Beth said. ‘This time, wrap up well.’
I went through the other door, collecting my sheep-skin coat from the back lobby, and came out beside the tiny shop from which we dispense dogfood and equipment to occasional customers.
We were usually so careful about leaving Sam with a stranger. But Charles was not a stranger. Charles was a friend. We all liked him. I held myself back from breaking into a run.
Chapter Five
I caught up with the Inspector at the corner of the house. He had abandoned any pretence at sang-froid and had backed young Gribble against the wall by what seemed to be sheer force of panic. ‘I thought you were supposed to be keeping your eyes open,’ he ground out.
Gribble had given ground but he refused to be perturbed. ‘They’re open, sir,’ he said. ‘Wide open.’
‘The man and the boy who went into the field. Where are they?’
I had had time to move around and use my eyes. ‘They’re still in the field,’ I said. ‘If you come a little bit this way, you’ll see them.’
He took one pace to the side and leaned a little, and the figures emerged from behind a large straw bale. The larger human figure put up a hand. I heard a whistle and the spaniel, little more than a dark dot against the mixed snow and stubble, came streaking towards them. The Inspector closed his eyes for a moment and then, rather than acknowledge the anticlimax, nodded as if to say ‘Just testing’ and hurried to the gate.
I followed on quickly. Sam seemed to be in good spirits, but if the Inspector thought that there was any reason why Charles should not be allowed out of sight with my son, I wanted to know. It might also signify that I should not take Charles’s cheques or even sell him a pup.
Sam, I noticed, had been throwing the dummy while Charles kept Sid under control. (Sam, the product of his environment, had developed a remarkable throw for a four-year-old. In the garden, one had to be sure to point him away from the windows.) When they saw us approaching, they walked to meet us. Sam had fast hold of Charles’s hand and Sid was tight to the man’s heel. The three seemed to have been enjoying themselves.
Ignoring Inspector Burrard except for a token nod, Charles was speaking to me before I was within ten yards. ‘He’s good, but he’s no Accer. He’s very slow to respond to hand signals.’
‘He’s younger than Accer was,’ I reminded him. ‘He’s just arriving at the age for rapid progress. I’d expect him to do most of his learning during the next few months.’
‘Good point,’ said Charles.
‘Good point,’ echoed Sam, tasting the words.
Detective Inspector Burrard put a stop to further chitchat by telling Charles firmly that he wanted a word with him. I decided that Sam should be out of earshot and detached him.
‘Your boy,’ Charles told me, ‘has been lecturing me on how to handle a dog.’
Henry had been given a watching brief by Beth. He was waiting by the gate rather than commit himself to the shallow climb. I took the lead from Charles, attached it to Sid’s collar and gave it to Sam. ‘Take this, go to your Uncle Henry and help him to put Sid in his kennel,’ I told Sam. The two of them scampered happily off across the hard ground. ‘Don’t take everything that Sam tells you as gospel,’ I said. ‘We differ on one or two of the finer points. Check with me first.’
Charles laughed. ‘So far, his advice has been better than much that I’ve been given over the years.’
Inspector Burrard had been waiting for the moment when he could speak with a good chance of having Charles’s attention. Now he waited for me to leave them together but I had every intention of hearing what was about to pass between them, either at first hand or later. Burrard glared at me and waited.
Charles saw the by-play but had his own idea. ‘You’ve been open with me, John,’ he said. ‘I can guess what’s coming and you must be wondering what it’s about. You may as well hear it now rather than have to take my word for it later.’
‘If you say so,’ I replied. ‘But let’s not stand and freeze while I hear it.’
‘Right,’ Charles said. We set off for the house.
Burrard was not going to be put off any longer. ‘Mr Hopgood,’ he said. ‘I want to know the nature of your quarrel with Mr Garnet.’
‘You do, do you?’ Charles said without slowing down.
‘Yes I do. And if you want to be interviewed in the presence of comparative strangers, that’s up to you. After the attack on Mr Garnet—you know about that?—we found your message on his answering machine, saying that he’d already made one mistake and if he didn’t return your call immediately he’d be making another one.’
‘And what’s wrong with that?’ Charles asked tartly. ‘It hardly adds up to a quarrel, would you say, John?’
‘An argument,’ I suggested.
‘Those words might or might not have been a threat,’ Burrard persisted. ‘They were enough to start some enquiries rolling. Some of the answers have just reached me. Last Sunday night you called at Mr Garnet’s house. His wife says that you were angry about someth
ing but she doesn’t know what.’
Charles was not one to show anger but I could hear a trace of irritation in his voice. ‘She told you that? I told her exactly what I was angry about.’
‘Now tell me,’ said Burrard. ‘Because this morning you called there again in a similar mood.’
Charles gave a shrug and swiped with his stick at a snow-girt weed-head. ‘This morning was when I heard for the first time that anything had happened to him. And in between, I was in London and can prove it.’
‘I still want to know what the quarrel was about.’
Charles was silent until we were in the sitting room with our coats off. I put a couple of logs on the still smouldering fire. The Inspector and I took seats as near to its warmth as we could and began to thaw out again.
Charles took a seat on the couch. ‘I may as well tell you,’ he said. ‘You can find out easily enough. When I made an offer for some land—’
‘The site for your house?’
‘Correct, Inspector. At that time, a rectangle was pegged out in the paddock. It enclosed several fine trees and the makings of a good garden. But, of course, the bargain was concluded on the basis of a dimensioned drawing. The plan had a note to the effect that the locations of the trees shown on the plan might not be to scale, but I thought nothing of it. You see, at the time, I hadn’t heard of Mr Garnet’s reputation.’
Detective Inspector Burrard only nodded. It seemed that Ben Garnet’s reputation was not unknown to the police even if his activities were more or less legal.
‘Oh dear!’ I said.
Charles flicked an eye at me and looked a little less grim. ‘That just about sums it up. The architect’s drawings seemed to fill up more of the site than I’d expected,’ he continued. ‘I assumed that I’d been deceived by the scale and that houses always seem to get bigger in relation to the site.’
‘Other way round,’ I said.
‘I realize that now. It was only when the builder came on site and pegged out his boundaries that I realized that the site was smaller than I’d been led to believe. Garnet’s pegs had disappeared by then and you couldn’t even see the holes. But as my solicitor explained, even if the pegs had still been there they would have had no bearing unless Garnet had assured me in front of witnesses that they demarked the site. Otherwise, it was only my rash assumption and one which I could easily have disproved if I had cared to measure the boundaries for myself.
‘To make it worse, several fine trees were now outside the boundary and Garnet had told my builder that he intended to take them down for the sake of selling the timber. He may have been bluffing—the removal of the trees would have damaged his outlook almost as much as mine. There was a hint that if I paid him the value of several fine hardwood trees, they would remain up. Or I could buy more land—at developer’s rates.
‘The last straw was that my deal with Garnet included permission to connect to his sewer, which ran under the line of pegs at one side of my site; but the new position of the boundary meant that I had some yards of his land to cross to reach it and my solicitor reported that Garnet wanted more money for the way-leave. And to crown it all, as if there was not the least tension between us, he followed up by inviting me to join what he airily referred to as “his” shooting syndicate. He seemed to think that that would heal all wounds. Can you believe it?’
He was looking at the Inspector but I decided to answer for both of us. ‘Very easily,’ I said.
‘That he’d choose to make a quick buck and at the same time make an enemy of somebody who was going to be his next-door neighbour?’
‘I wouldn’t believe it of anybody else,’ I said, ‘but for Ben Garnet that’s about par for the course. He seems to believe that anything more above board is sissy.’
‘In that case, there must be hundreds with sound motives for catching him in the dark with something hard and heavy.’ Charles looked at the Detective Inspector again. ‘But however much the man had annoyed me, you’ll surely see that, even if I had been here and not in London, I would have had nothing to gain from Garnet’s death.’
But Burrard, it seemed, did not see anything of the sort. ‘Point One,’ he said, ‘you might not have needed anything to gain—anger is often sufficient. Point Two, the blow is not always struck by the man with the motive. I’m not saying that there was an accomplice, but the possibility is there. So much for your defence of alibi. Point Three, Garnet didn’t die. The attack may have been meant only to intimidate him. Point Four, and alternative to Three, he might have been meant to die. You might have hoped to get a better deal from the widow.’
‘And a pretty feeble hope that would have been,’ Charles retorted with spirit. ‘You can check with the lady. When I saw her this morning, I found that her husband had left her under the impression that the deal was already concluded. She thought that I’d called round to leave my cheque and when I tried to correct that impression she made up her mind that I was trying to pull a fast one, taking advantage of her husband while he was in hospital. Either that, or she’s a better actress than I give her credit for. She called me a swindler.’
‘You have now been taken to the cleaners by a professional. Welcome to the club. So what will you do?’ I asked curiously.
He shrugged. ‘I shan’t join any syndicate that has him for a member,’ he said, ‘that’s one thing certain. For the moment the other matters are in the hands of my solicitor. If he can’t find a loophole, well, I may pay for the trees but I’d rather double the cost and lay my own sewer and build my own septic tank before I’d put one avoidable penny into that man’s pocket—’ He paused and looked at the Inspector. ‘Or attack him,’ he added.
*
I left them together for the Inspector to ask his routine questions while I gave a hand with the inescapable chores of the business. The peak of the trialling season was almost on us. The freezing weather had at least reduced the burden of wet and muddy dogs; on the other hand, in most years we would have avoided having pups in January. We had no control over the family planning of bitches left as boarders, but our Viola had failed to conceive from a mating the previous spring and had been put back to stud in the autumn. The result was a litter which seemed to be ten times the work of a litter born in summer when the pups could have been left to play in the sunshine.
The light was failing when I met the Inspector on the doorstep. ‘That will be all tonight,’ he said. ‘We will doubtless be back in the morning.’
I looked around. Gribble was already seated at the wheel of the Inspector’s car and Sergeant McAndrew was getting into his own. ‘Just a holy minute!’ I said. ‘We’ve had a threatening message, somebody’s been clobbered on our doorstep and you were almost witness to a fatal dog-poisoning. You’re not just going to walk off?’
He looked at me, his face a blank. ‘What did you have in mind?’
‘Does crime prevention not fall within your remit?’
I seemed to have caught him on the raw because even in the poor light I could see that he flushed. It did not seem to be my day for winning friends and influencing Detective Inspectors. ‘We simply do not have the manpower to mount a guard,’ he said stiffly. ‘Buchan will be told to keep an eye on the place.’
‘And where is he now?’
‘He just went off duty.’
Before I could put up any arguments he was into his car and away.
There was a pale van on the tarmac so I was not surprised to find Joe in the kitchen along with everybody else. The whole party, eight souls at a quick count including Sam, seemed to be enjoying a combination of what was either the lunch that we had missed or a rather early dinner combined with the usual knocking-off session of drinks and a discussion of the day’s doings.
‘Burrard refuses to leave anybody on guard,’ I reported.
‘That was to be expected,’ said Henry gloomily. ‘He thinks that one of us may have clobbered Ben Garnet and that some or all of us are covering up, which is particularly irritating when we ha
ven’t even had the pleasure of doing the deed.’
Beth glanced down to be sure that Sam was not following our discussion but he was absorbed in a game with his building blocks. ‘Shouldn’t somebody be out there?’ she asked.
I checked that the loudspeaker, linked to the microphones at the kennels, was on. When I turned up the volume I could hear the rustle of bedding and one of the dogs, Samson I thought, grumbling to himself. ‘The dogs will tell us if anybody approaches,’ I said. I took my place at the scrubbed table and began to eat ravenously. Beth nodded approval. There were cans of beer of an unfamiliar brand on the table and a glass was poured for me. I guessed that Joe had come bearing rich gifts.
‘The dogs won’t tell you if somebody lobs more poisoned meat over the wall,’ said Henry.
‘Somebody can lob from the road all he wants to,’ Daffy said. ‘It won’t do us any harm provided we pick it all up in the morning before we let the dogs out. We’ve moved them out of any kennels within throwing distance of the wall. It meant some doubling up but the dogs don’t mind.’
‘What do you call throwing distance?’ I asked. A young woman’s throw could fall far short of that of, say, a cricketer.
‘Daffy threw a ball from the road,’ Hannah said. She never usually touched beer but she had a glass of it in her hand. Joe must have been persuasive. She made a throwing gesture and slopped beer across the kitchen floor. ‘Oops! She threw it a lot further than I could have done. Then we doubled the distance.’
That seemed safe enough. ‘It’ll do for the moment,’ I said. ‘But somebody could approach from the fields. We can’t keep watch at night and still do a day’s work. Should we hire a security firm?’
‘You could,’ Charles said. ‘But from my experience of them, you might get a report at the end of the month, saying that a man had been observed throwing poisoned meat into one of the runs. I once received a report that welding cylinders had been seen in the courtyard, beside an open manhole, and pipes disappearing in the direction of the strong room. That had been in the small hours of the morning a fortnight before the report. Luckily it was only somebody working on the central heating.’
Bloodlines (Three Oaks Book 8) Page 8