We were standing almost back to back a few yards apart. Cautiously, we both turned around.
It was not a propitious time to start a serious discussion, poised as it was on the very brink of farce, but I had to have a stab at it. I said, ‘I came to pay a call on Mim. I like to assure myself that any dogs of my breeding are being well cared for. They’re like family to me. May I see her, please?’
He pushed back the hood of his oilskin jacket. He was both surprised and perturbed. He had been expecting anything but that. ‘No, you can’t,’ he snapped.
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘What I really came for was to tell you that we know what’s been going on. So if Daffy – Mrs Mearns – meets with any more mishaps, we’ll know who to blame and so will the police a few minutes later.’
His face flamed. ‘I dinna ken whit you’re on aboot,’ he said, but I could see that my words had hit him hard. The one thing the lawbreaker fears is being found out. In his perturbation his speech had slipped back to its roots.
‘Yes you do,’ I said. ‘You spiked Mrs Mearns’ soft drink with vodka and then called the police to report her for drink-driving. But that didn’t work and you knew that if she went on showing up at field trials she was bound to meet Mim at close quarters sooner or later. So last night, you callous bastard, you tried to run her down.’
He tried to look innocent and wronged but the expression did not sit well on his harsh features. ‘Whit way would I dae a thing like that?’ he demanded.
‘If you want me to spell it out,’ I said, ‘you didn’t want any of us to see Mim again, or at least not until memories had faded. That’s why you let my tyres down, to put me off coming to Lincraigs. But you particularly didn’t want to go on bumping into Daffy at field trials, because she was the one person who would have realized that the dog you were running as Mim wasn’t Mim at all.’
As I spoke, more and more facts and fragments of gossip fitted together and I was no longer guessing. Suddenly, I knew. ‘You only acquired Mim,’ I said, ‘to get a legitimate pedigree and registration to switch to your own very similar and very talented bitch, daughter of the unplanned mating by Dorothy Hatton’s dog. You couldn’t even get the Hattons to acknowledge the breeding because their dog isn’t registered and anyway other dogs had mated with yours before you got her back. On the other hand, assuming that it was Dorothy’s dog that fathered your pup, Champion Clunie of Netherbrae figures in both pedigrees. You had a throwback to Clunie, very talented, strongly resembling Mim but ineligible to compete.’
‘That means nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’
‘If you want to argue about it, we can always ask the police who tipped them off about Daffy – they don’t usually act on anonymous tips. And although the breeding of Mim and of your bitch is similar it isn’t identical. I still have a full sister of Mim. A DNA test would soon prove whether your bitch is one of that litter or not.’
As I finished speaking I suddenly saw the shape of another piece of the puzzle and I spoke out without giving myself time to think. ‘What’s more, I’ve only just figured out that that’s what Dougal Webb was trying to blackmail me about. He thought that I was your partner in the fraud.’ Another thought hit me. ‘I bet he tried to blackmail you too, and that’s why . . .’ I left the remainder of the thought unspoken. It was beyond utterance. It might also be actionable.
He jerked, nearly slipped and only caught his balance by a wild wave of his arms. The fight went out of him and he looked ten years older. ‘No,’ he said hoarsely.
‘You mean, that’s not why?’
‘I mean, I didn’t! God, when you jump to conclusions you fairly cover the ground! We’ll hae to enter you for the Grand National.’
I had forgotten the presence of Daffy and Hannah, and Quentin Cove had his back to them, but what I had been saying had not passed them by. While Hannah was still digesting my words, Daffy was out of the car. ‘What did he do with Mim?’ she cried. ‘What did he do with poor Mim?’ Something in her voice stabbed me through. I knew what it was like to love a dog.
‘Can you produce her?’ I asked him. He stood, silent. I think that he was too aware of his guilt, now that he was seeing it through the eyes of others, to protest any more. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Daffy.
‘He put her down? My darling Mim?’
At the same moment, Hannah erupted from the other side of the car. ‘He killed Dougal, isn’t that what you’re saying?’
Quentin Cove’s voice went up an octave. ‘Chrissake no! You can’t land me with that!’
But his voice went unheeded. Whatever tension there might have been between the two kennel-maids at first, that had been years earlier when they were late teenagers. They were now friends and they had become used to working as a team. Their relationship had become almost telepathic. At this moment, it was as if they were a single organism with but one thought between them. Hannah had brought a heavy walking stick out of the car with her. Daffy, her stiffness marvellously cured for the moment, had emerged on the side nearer to the workbench in the barn and she grabbed a jack-handle out of the rack. They came at him together and they had the advantage of pushing off from the less slippery fringe of the yard. Gone were my two gentle helpers, who would brood over a sick puppy like mothers. These were two furies, hell-bent on revenge and caring for nobody.
Once they were on the ice they had to wave their arms for balance, adding menace to their advance. Seeing the weapons brandished by the advancing Valkyries, Quentin Cove paled. ‘They’ve gone bloody mad,’ he gasped. He tried to run, made no forward progress and ended up on his hands and knees. The tumble saved him for the moment. A swipe from Hannah passed over his head. The swing removed the last of her balance and she sat down heavily, still tobogganing on her rounded backside, while Daffy slid by, still upright but beyond swiping range.
Cove was right, of course. They had gone mad. I could hardly blame them. Each believed that he had killed their loved one. But a successful blow from either weapon, especially the jack-handle, would result in endless complications and possibly the loss of a good kennel-maid. As Cove and Hannah struggled back to their feet I tried to place myself between him and the avenging harpies at whatever personal risk.
How long the dance, macabre yet farcical, went on I cannot guess. Probably only a matter of seconds although it seemed to be for an age that Cove was trying for his own front door, Hannah and Daffy were aiming to outflank him and I was struggling to stay between. I took a crack on the elbow from the jack-handle. Cove’s luck held until the last second. A wild leap to avoid a swing from Daffy cost him his balance and he went down. As he struggled to rise, he took a great swipe from Hannah across his rounded bottom. The crack of it and his roar echoed around the farmyard and set the dogs barking again.
The mad pursuit was interrupted by the arrival of a small blue-and-white police car which crossed the yard in a well-controlled slide. The driver, I saw, was highly skilled. The car was nursed, at the very brink of control, into slowing and turning until it fetched up, parked neatly between my car and the mouth of the barn, without quite making contact with anything solid.
The driver’s door opened and out stepped DCI Ewell’s Sergeant, still immaculate in uniform and still looking far too young and pretty to be an officer. She needed only a glance to see who were the aggressors, who the defender and who was the intended victim and she launched herself valiantly in our direction. Some day I must find out what her shoes were soled with, because she kept her feet until the very last moment. Arriving and almost going past, she managed to grab Daffy’s sleeve and the hood of Hannah’s duffel coat. The jerk acted as the last straw to her balance and the three of them fell in a heap. Quentin Cove stood dumbstruck and so did I. Neither of us had seen quite so much leg before, except on a beach or in a chorus line.
The three began to pick themselves up while making themselves respectable and at the same time nursing bruised limbs. We were all breathing heavily. At some point the sun had come
out and I found that I was sweating.
The Sergeant was the first to make it to her feet. With her hair flying, her cravat adrift and dark patches of wet marking her uniform, she looked less pretty and yet somehow much more desirable. ‘You,’ she said to Quentin Cove, ‘had better go into your house and stay there.’
While the rest of us concentrated on catching our breaths, Cove nodded and set off for his door, adopting a skating action which seemed to meet the conditions. The burst pipe, I noticed, was still making its contribution to the water and ice. When he opened the door I could hear the drone of a vacuum cleaner. The door slammed and I heard the sound of the lock followed by two bolts. He was taking no risk of being followed inside by the kennel-maids from hell.
‘Now,’ said the Sergeant through clenched teeth, ‘you three can come and sit in my car and explain yourselves.’
The idea of being cooped up in a very small car with so much angry young womanhood had no appeal for me. ‘We’d have more room in my car,’ I suggested. ‘At least we would be in my own territory.’
The Sergeant nodded. ‘Very well. But I’ll take the driver’s seat.’
‘I was not going to drive off with you,’ I said mildly.
The Sergeant was neither amused nor insulted. ‘I like a steering-wheel to rest my notebook,’ she said.
We slipped and slithered our ways back across the yard without disaster. Daffy and Hannah scurried into the rear, leaving me the front passenger seat. The Sergeant placed a small tape-recorder on the dash and pressed two keys. A tiny needle began to jump whenever we spoke. The Sergeant told the tape-recorder the date, time and place and who was present while repeating the information in her notebook. She also told the machine her name. She was, it seemed, Sergeant Bremner. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me what this was about.’
I decided that I had an equally interesting question to ask. ‘Do you mind telling me how you come to be here?’
‘I don’t mind in the least. I’ll even answer you. Mrs Cunningham phoned in. She felt that you might be under a misapprehension and that any possibility of hasty action should be nipped in the bud.’
The mention of misapprehension was interesting but I decided to withhold comment until I knew a little more. ‘Very sensible of her,’ I said. Hannah and Daffy listened in silence while I explained the events of the last couple of days. The Sergeant listened intently while making an occasional note.
‘There does seem to have been some jumping to conclusions,’ the Sergeant said when I had finished. ‘You make an interesting point about the substitution of dogs. You may be right in what you surmise about blackmail. But motive never makes a case. To leap from there to an assumption of murder—’
Hannah spoke up from behind me. ‘Mr Cunningham never said anything about Mr Cove having murdered Dougal,’ she said. ‘I was the one who jumped to that conclusion.’
‘I was going to say it, Hannah,’ I said. ‘But it seems that I was probably wrong. Mr Cove wasn’t the only man your Dougal put the bite on.’
‘I see.’ Sergeant Bremner thought for a moment. ‘I think I should tell you that your conclusions were, as you say, almost certainly wrong. We have not, as you seem to suppose, been sitting on our hands waiting for somebody like yourselves to do our jobs for us. Mr Little made a statement about witnessing the quarrel between Mr Cove and Mr Webb. He also stated that Mr Webb then drove off in a hurry. Mr Cove remained and supplied him with a bag of dog-meal. The transaction was hurried because Mr Cove was leaving to keep an appointment. That appointment was with six other men for drinks and a meal. They then went to a performance at the Byre Theatre. All this is heavily vouched for. By the time that Mr Cove left his friends and returned home, Miss Hopewell was already worried about the disappearance of Mr Webb and was actually waiting right here, where she remained until around four a.m.’
‘But—’ Hannah began.
‘It’s my turn to jump to conclusions,’ the Sergeant said firmly, ‘because I can guess what you want to say. And yes, it’s possible to come up with several scenarios in which Mr Cove might have done mischief to Mr Webb. It’s possible, for instance, that Mr Webb had gone off on some errand of his own about which we know nothing, forgetting his date with Miss Hopewell or else just plain standing her up. He could then have returned after she left here, roused his employer from his bed – just before dawn – resumed the quarrel and the rest followed. But that all seems very improbable and since we don’t yet have confirmation that the body in the bonfire was that of Mr Webb, there seems little point discussing it.’
‘I accept that,’ Hannah said in a very small voice. ‘But there’s one thing I must know. Was Dougal really a blackmailer?’
Glancing sideways I saw that the Sergeant had written the word was in longhand and capitals and put a box round it. ‘I’m afraid so,’ she said. ‘We’ve come across several instances that fall within the definition. He was too cautious to make a direct demand for money or money’s-worth with menaces, but we now know that when he took a fancy to some valuable personal item he was not above making oblique threats in order to drive home a very hard bargain. He may even have convinced himself that using knowledge to gain better terms was an acceptable business practice. That, I suppose, could have furnished any number of motives for his murder. On the other hand, it would equally give Mr Webb a motive for disappearing, if he knew that his misdeeds were coming to light.’
‘Is that how he acquired the Lotus?’ I asked her.
‘You can’t seriously expect me to tell you that. But, Miss Hopewell,’ she added over her shoulder, ‘if you are now thinking of blaming yourself on the grounds that he took to blackmail in order to finance his courtship of you and your possible future together, you can put it firmly out of your mind. He set out on that path before you and he had even met.’
I decided that Sergeant Bremner was a perceptive and humane young woman, undoubtedly destined for high rank. I added those labels to several others which I had mentally attached to her.
‘Thank you,’ Hannah whispered. ‘I’ll remember that.’
‘That’s all very well,’ Daffy said suddenly, ‘but we haven’t dealt with the matter of the dog.’
‘We’re going to deal with it now,’ said the Sergeant. She used the driving mirror to tidy herself further. ‘Come with me, Mr Cunningham. You two, wait there, please.’
We made our way cautiously around the edge of the yard. As we did so, the spray of water leaking past the bandage on the fractured pipe diminished and stopped. The Sergeant knocked on the door. After some clattering of locks and bolts, it was opened by Mrs Dundee. She was very businesslike in a floral pinny and plastic gloves, with a large duster in her hand and a smell of polish wafting around her. ‘He’s below,’ she said with great formality. ‘Who’ll I say is after him?’
‘The police,’ said the Sergeant. Then, noticing the unfortunate combination of phrasing, she added quickly, ‘I’m not after him, I just want a quick word with him.’
Mrs Dundee stood aside as Quentin Cove came up through a trapdoor, rather like a pantomime Demon King in slow motion. He had removed his waterproofs and was in dusty overalls. ‘Hell of a place to put a stopcock,’ he said angrily. ‘But that’ll have to stay off until the plumber comes. And God knows when that’ll be – half the pipes in the kingdom have burst. You’d better come in. You can carry on upstairs,’ he added to Mrs Dundee. ‘Don’t run any water without speaking to me first.’
He led us into a shabby sitting room which smelt of mingled dust and polish. We took stuffed chairs which had sagged over the years into comfortable shapes. It was warm in the central heating and I took off my coat.
Cove shrugged out of his bib-and-braces dungarees and took his own chair. ‘I don’t know what this bugger’s been saying,’ he began.
‘Then we’ll let him go over it again,’ the Sergeant said. She went through the same drill of briefing her tape-recorder and simultaneously making notes. Then she glanced at me. ‘Now.’
> ‘Your farm manager, Dougal Webb,’ I told Cove, ‘made an attempt to blackmail me. At the time I couldn’t think what he was hinting at, but he seemed to think that mention of the Kennel Club would put the fear of God into me.’ For the sake of the record, I decided to spell it out clearly. ‘Then other things began to add up. You were very keen to buy Mim, a seriously gun-shy pup, from Mrs Daffodil Mearns, one of my kennel-maids, but when she encountered you with Mim at a novice trial, which you won, there was no sign of gun-shyness. As far as I know, there’s no cure for gun-shyness.’
Cove sneered. ‘That only goes to show that I’m a better trainer than you are.’
I refused to be needled. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But you were very careful to keep Mim away from Daffy at the time. On her way home, Daffy went into a pub with Mrs Kitts. You arrived on their heels and bought Daffy the soft drink that she wanted. That drink was spiked and somebody phoned the police to say that she was drinking and driving. They were stopped and Daffy was breathalysed, but she was just within the legal limit. Last night, Daffy was nearly run down by a vehicle in the dark and snow. To top it all, you stopped me coming to your farm after the rabbits, on the grounds that you’d let the rough-shooting to somebody else although there’s no sign of a shooting tenant and you told Joe Little that he could come onto your land. While I was at the farm next door, my tyres were let down. It all adds up to the fact that you don’t want anybody who knew Mim to meet up with her again.
‘You may be able to suggest any number of explanations for this combination of facts. I can think of only one. I know that your neighbour’s springer covered one of your bitches some time ago. His dog isn’t registered, so none of the pups could be registered nor any of their descendants to infinity. You were giving the pups away for peanuts. But I think you kept one to train as a worker and that she turned out to be brilliant. You’re a well-to-do farmer without many worlds left to conquer. Your one unfulfilled ambition has been to make a name for yourself in field trials. So you were desperate to go trialling with your bitch, but only pedigreed pups can be registered and only registered dogs can be entered.
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