Bloodlines (Three Oaks Book 8)

by Gerald Hammond

  It was my turn to pause for thought. ‘There was a threatening message on my answering machine,’ I said.

  ‘Saying what?’

  I decided to open up. ‘Saying that there would be awful consequences if I didn’t sign the Kennel Club form so that all your pups could be registered. Haven’t the police asked you whether you were somewhere behind it?’

  ‘No, they haven’t got around to that yet.’

  ‘They will,’ I said, ‘when you get your memory back.’

  There was another and even longer silence. I thought that he might have taken umbrage or even walked out on me, but he was only weighing up the information to decide where his best interests lay. ‘Never thought of it,’ he said at last. ‘But you’ve reminded me. You never did get around to signing the form. I have it here,’ I heard paper rustle.

  ‘Who do you suppose are now in the front line of suspects?’ I asked him.

  His reply, as ever, was directed to looking after Number One. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Like yourself, I was a victim. And I was in here when you were shot.’

  There was also Mrs Garnet, it occurred to me. She had sounded quite angry enough to have taken a shot at me. ‘The police will certainly want a list of your clients for the pups,’ I said. ‘Who are they, by the way?’

  Perhaps I had tried too hard to sound casual. I could hear the smirk in his voice. ‘You tried to winkle that out of my wife,’ he said, ‘and got nowhere. The police may be entitled to that information, if and when they care to ask for it. You definitely are not. When are you going to sign the form?’

  The time for soft words had passed. ‘Certainly not before you tell me what I want to know,’ I said. ‘I hear that you decided to keep one of the pups for yourself. Start from there.’

  ‘That’s what you’ve heard, is it?’ He was openly laughing at me. Then his voice became stern. I had dangled a hint that I might sign the form although I had no intention of doing so; but even so small a concession as to give me his clients’ names in order to obtain what he wanted without hassle would have been anathema to him. ‘You listen to me, Cocky,’ he snapped. His voice dipped for a moment, I think as he looked round to be sure that the door was closed. ‘Like it or not, you’re going to sign that form. You seemed to think that I was pulling a fast one over the parentage of those pups. But how about if I have proof that you’ve done the same thing? You’re in the business. Who’s going to be hurt most, you or me?’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ I demanded.

  ‘I have a witness who’ll swear that you palmed off pups that weren’t sired by the champion you claimed they were.’ So there! added his tone of voice.

  I had to think for several seconds to recall what he was talking about and then I laughed aloud. Immediately, I could feel Garnet’s indignation radiating like heat. ‘You’ve been speaking to Alfred Ashdown,’ I said. ‘He’s a nutcase. Because of an imagined resemblance to one stud dog rather than another, he accused me of claiming the wrong sire. We had all four dogs genetically fingerprinted and it proved beyond doubt that the breeding was exactly as I said it was. He ended up paying for the DNA tests and all the lawyers’ fees and you’ll do the same if you try that one, and quite likely the cost of a libel action on top. Stuff your form.’

  I thought that I had pulled his teeth but I was wrong.

  ‘You’ll sign that form,’ he said, ‘or my memory will come back with a vengeance. And who do you think I was looking at, the moment before I was clubbed?

  ‘I’m getting home, probably first thing in the morning. So you sign that form and you sign it now. You said yourself that the police will be along to ask questions. If that form isn’t signed, they’ll get answers you won’t like one damn bit.’

  I felt a piece of paper being pushed under my hand. My brain was racing to try and find an answer but I could only think of one delaying tactic. ‘I’m not signing anything I can’t read,’ I said. ‘For all I know I could be signing away my house or my whole business.’

  ‘That’s reasonable,’ he said. He sounded quite surprised that we should have even this small meeting of minds. ‘All right, then. I can get my memory back any time in the next day or two. Your wife will be coming in to see you. She can read you the form and guide your hand. But if I don’t get that form by, say, tomorrow night, you’re going to have problems.’

  I heard him get up. ‘Tell me, little man,’ he said, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’

  ‘Try to think of a new insult,’ I said. ‘You used that once before.’

  As a Parthian shot it was feeble and he treated it as such. He only grunted and shuffled out in his slippers, leaving the form behind.

  Chapter Ten

  I fretted for half an hour, shuffling a few facts and many suppositions over and over in my head, hoping that a simple solution would pop up somewhere and that I would recognize it on its way past. But the more I thought about it the more hopeless it seemed.

  When I felt the wave of depression about to break over my head I decided to phone and ask Beth to come soon, now, and bluster her way in, never mind visiting hours. I started asking for the telephone trolley but it must have been in constant use. I knew that my irritation must have become obvious when a nurse asked me whether I wanted an enema. I nearly accepted it just to relieve the boredom.

  Beth turned up at last, bringing my radio and a comforting presence. Instead of borrowing Henry’s car again she had persuaded or permitted Henry to drive her and the two arrived together. Pleased as I was to welcome Henry’s wise old brains, his presence meant renewed talk about my health, my eyes and how long I would be out of commission.

  After ten minutes or so I managed to drop the subject and drag the conversation by brute force round to Ben Garnet’s visit, his attitude and his threat.

  Beth was immediately up in arms. She spoke about scratching his eyes out, but if Ben Garnet had walked into my side-ward at that moment she would have been furious enough to try to castrate him with her teeth. ‘You didn’t sign his blasted form, did you?’ she demanded.

  ‘You made me promise not to,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Just in case you weaken, I’ll take it.’ I heard paper being folded and the snap of a handbag.

  Henry tackled the subject with more logic and less passion. ‘It still seems to me,’ he said, ‘that the only other way out of your quandary would be to identify the real culprit.’

  ‘I’ve been flogging my brains, such as they are, to do just that,’ I said, ‘and I still can’t see how we can get any further.’

  Beth had cooled down a bit. ‘Charles spoke to Mr Sowerby,’ she said. ‘He—Mr Sowerby—said that he was taking the pup whether it was registered or not, because he isn’t interested in showing or breeding or competing, he just wants a jolly good working dog. I think he’s done a deal with Ben Garnet, a sort of mutual back-scratching.’

  ‘That fits in with what I know of him,’ I said.

  ‘And I’ve been running up our phone bill. I thought I might check up on Charles. We still had his London number, so I phoned his wife and asked for him. She said that he left London to fly up here on Friday, which is what he told us.’

  ‘Did she sound natural?’ Henry asked.

  ‘She certainly didn’t sound as though she was putting over a rehearsed tarradiddle. I believed her. And I’ve spoken again to Mr Fergusson and to Guffy’s aunt and other people and I can’t find anybody who’d heard anything about him trying to get a pup off Ben Garnet. I’m running out of ideas. What are you thinking?’ she asked Henry.

  ‘Let’s think together,’ Henry said. ‘Something may come out of it. You have one purchaser of Ben Garnet’s pups not yet identified. For his own reasons, Garnet was not divulging the name.’

  ‘He had his reasons,’ I said. ‘Sheer bloody-mindedness.’

  ‘But surely the police would get the names out of him?’ Beth said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘If they cared to. But would they tell us? And would he
necessarily tell them the truth if they did ask him? It would be a first if he did.’

  ‘We would find out the names of the purchasers eventually via the Kennel Club registrations,’ Beth pointed out.

  ‘A lot of damage might have been done by then,’ said Henry, ‘and it might be too late for serious investigation and the gathering of proof. And again, suppose that Garnet had already picked out the mystery client as the double assailant and dog-poisoner. Would you put blackmail beyond him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put anything beyond that man,’ Beth said.

  ‘There you are. If he could screw money out of his client some other way, would he still feel honour bound to part with a pup? He might cancel the sale of the pup and bleed the other man dry, in which case you would never identify him from the Kennel Club registration.

  ‘But we do know where six other pups are going. So far as we know, none of the purchasers is unbalanced enough to make threats and try to carry them out just to make sure of a registered pup; but there’s no limit to the extraordinary ideas some people can get into their heads. On the face of it, each of those looks innocent, but as soon as you accept the possibility of accomplices, the list is wide open again.’

  ‘That is what I have been lying here and thinking about,’ I said. ‘And I don’t see any possibility that we could mount that sort of an investigation.’

  ‘The police could,’ said Beth.

  ‘Eventually,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe that Garnet ever saw his attacker. But if he doesn’t get that form signed by tomorrow night, he’s going to tell the police that I whacked him. Once they get that idea stuck in their heads again, their chances of coming up with the culprits responsible for shooting me and poisoning Accer will almost vanish.’

  ‘We might trigger the police into doing the investigation for us,’ Beth said thoughtfully.

  ‘How?’ I demanded.

  ‘By feeding them some evidence. It needn’t be exactly kosher—’

  I felt myself shudder. When she felt threatened, Beth was capable of contemplating and even enacting the damnedest scenarios. ‘By which,’ I said, ‘you mean that it would be faked. Don’t even think about it. One hint of you tampering with the evidence is all it would take to convince Burrard and his boys once and for all that we were guilty of everything from murder to illegal parking. Did Rex get anything out of Tom Shotto?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Beth. ‘He said that the little drip denied everything and he was inclined to believe him, no more than that.’

  ‘You could still try Guffy on him,’ I suggested. ‘He’s more in tune with Shotto; I caught Guffy in our barn in the company of the glue-sniffing brigade once—I told RSM Fergusson and he hit the roof. I think he’s tried to keep Guffy out of bad company ever since. But at least they might have a common language, so to speak. And if Guffy is the culprit he might give himself away.’

  ‘How?’ Beth asked.

  ‘How would I know?’ I asked rhetorically. ‘He might do something silly, like trying to fabricate a story to pin it all on Shotto. Something like that.’

  ‘Is that a crack at me,’ Beth asked in a small voice, ‘for suggesting that we might give the Detective Inspector a little push?’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ Beth said. ‘Talking of Guffy, I meant to tell you. Not one single damn thing is working out for us. Guffy phoned. He sounded fed up. He doesn’t want the work any more.’

  ‘Either he’s gone off the idea of a pup,’ I said, ‘which doesn’t seem likely, or else he’s saved enough for the one he’s after. Never mind; whether he wants to do the work or not, you could still get hold of him and sick him onto Tom Shotto. Offer him an inducement.’

  ‘Have you changed your mind about letting him have a pup?’ Beth asked.

  ‘That I have definitely not!’ I said. ‘I couldn’t trust him not to be too heavy-handed once the novelty wore off. But I might find him a pup from an accidental mating, one that would otherwise be put down. In those circumstances, the pup would be better off with a slightly dotty master than dead. I could give young Guffy a damn good talking-to first. It’s worth a try.’

  ‘I’ll ask RSM Fergusson to sound him out,’ Beth said. ‘But, John, even if we do identify the culprit, isn’t there a danger that he’ll only be charged with the shooting and dog-poisoning? You could still be accused of the attack on Mr Garnet?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Henry said. ‘But once the police were pointed at the guilty party they’d be duty bound to investigate him and his friends. And there is always evidence somewhere, to be found if they look for it. A rash word overheard . . . blood on a hammer . . . contact traces . . . these things do turn up.’

  ‘They do,’ Beth said, suddenly brisk. ‘But sometimes they need a little help. John, we’re going to have to love you and leave you. I may be back over the next day or two if I can get away, but the weekend’s coming closer and there are things to be done if we’re to do ourselves justice, so don’t worry if you don’t see . . . hear me, I mean. Just, please, concentrate very hard on getting better and getting home.’

  I said that I would do that very thing.

  ‘Good. If I can’t visit, one of the girls may come and deputize for me.’

  ‘How far is she expected to deputize for you?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘Not very far,’ Beth said sternly.

  *

  As the last effects of the cocktail of anaesthetics and painkillers wore off, I felt the effects of the damage and of the subsequent surgery more and more. The hospital and I each passed a restless night. I heard the ward rouse itself from a light doze, struggled messily with breakfast and then, exhausted, was falling into a deeper sleep when the consultant made his rounds, complete with his tail of acolytes.

  In the carefully dimmed room the bandages were removed. I was relieved to find that, although I felt as if my eyeballs had been sandpapered and, because of the swelling, neither of my eyes could be dragged more than half open, the fluorescent green haze had dissipated and I could see quite clearly the faces which were peering at me. They were not very handsome faces, in fact some of them were downright ugly, but the reassurance this clear vision gave me rendered them beautiful.

  ‘You’re doing well,’ the consultant told me as the dressings were renewed. ‘One more day behind the blindfold and we’ll consider exposing you to the light of day.’

  I was also allowed out of bed, but this was not as much of a blessing as it might have been. Despite my one quick look round the room while the bandages were off, I never did find my way around the unfamiliar layout without falling over things. The sole gain was that, though the chair in my room was not very comfortable, sitting vertically in it made a change from lying flat.

  The monotony was only relieved by a blanket bath, given me by a pair of young and giggly nurses who were quite prepared for a little ribald flirtation, and a single visitor from the outside world. Hannah had been deputized by the others to bring me soft drinks and encouraging messages and to take back news of my progress. Beth, she said, was working with the cockers and getting on very well in between dashing about all over the place in a hired car and making phone calls. Exactly what Beth was up to, Hannah had no idea.

  Either my eyes were recovering or I was getting used to the sandpapered feeling, and my mind must have been easier now that Beth was taking action, because I slept well that night. In the morning the usual hospital routine, in which I was washed and wiped and emptied and refilled with breakfast, kept boredom at bay at first. Later, boredom was dispelled altogether by another visit from Inspector Burrard. He arrived, for once, alone.

  The Detective Inspector was much more conciliatory than ever before. He asked after my recovery and commiserated that I was still in a state of blackout. He chatted vaguely without ever quite saying anything, until I decided that if he wouldn’t get down to business of his own accord I would have to do it for him. ‘Are you satisfied now that I didn�
��t shoot myself, poison a client’s dog and knock a neighbour on the head?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not a fair question, sir,’ he answered cautiously. It was the first time that he had ever called me ‘sir’. ‘And not the kind of question that I’m ever prepared to answer until a charge is laid. You may be free to jump to whatever conclusions you like, but I’m not. I’m still at the stage of asking questions. I can only tell you that I think the end is very near.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ I said. ‘Are you recording this?’

  ‘Just to help my memory.’

  ‘Go ahead and ask your questions.’

  Instead, the Inspector went off at a tangent. ‘That wife of yours,’ he said. ‘She’s a very remarkable young woman.’

  ‘No doubt about that,’ I agreed.

  ‘She seems so young . . .’

  ‘She’s twenty-nine,’ I said. Even so, I was giving Beth the benefit of a year or two.

  ‘Is she, by golly? That makes it a little easier to believe.’

  ‘Makes what easier to believe, Inspector? That she’s taken over the initiative? Hijacked your investigation?’

  ‘She’s been in touch with you, has she, sir?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I know how she operates. She’s done it before. You can trust her,’ I added. ‘She won’t be trying to pull a fast one, nor to steal your thunder. Like you, she just wants the truth.’

  ‘She seems certain that she’s getting it. She may be right. But I wish I knew how.’ The Inspector sounded wistful. ‘She sounds confident and she makes a certain amount of sense but she doesn’t explain herself. How am I supposed . . .?’ His voice tailed off.

  It sounded as though Beth was beginning to get results. All the same, I was not in a mood to let the Inspector ramble vaguely. ‘Since I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Inspector, I can’t help very much.’

  ‘I think perhaps you can,’ he said. ‘Your good lady is adamant that the criminal in this case is obsessed with obtaining a puppy. A spaniel puppy. A working spaniel puppy,’ he went on, ‘of specific breeding, complete with authenticated pedigree. You know the field, Mr Cunningham. Does it make sense to you?’