The Curse of the Cockers

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘I only saw the boss-man’s Shogun when I came by,’ Isobel said. ‘They don’t open the bars on Ne’erday. But I couldn’t see round the back and I had no particular reason to look.’

  ‘Either it was something like that or it’s pure coincidence,’ I suggested. ‘Somebody may have dumped an unwanted Christmas present near where the accident was about to happen. The accident may even have happened because the driver was trying to avoid the pup.’

  ‘It isn’t the time of year yet for abandoning,’ Daffy said; ‘Christmas was only a week ago. The novelty wouldn’t have worn off yet. Unless the family was going off for a winter break and had just realized that they were going to have the scutter of kennelling the pup and that kennels are pretty fussy about inoculations. That happens sometimes.’ She turned and carried her bowl outside.

  ‘Aren’t people horrible?’ Beth said indignantly.

  I stopped myself from nodding agreement. Not all people are horrible. Quite a lot, but not all. ‘I know you believe that God should have stopped at gun dogs,’ I said, ‘but without people none of the present breeds would have happened at all. Anyway, we never sell pups for pets and I always make it clear that if there’s a change of heart – if, for instance, the wife puts her foot down – I’ll take the pup back. At a discount, of course.’

  ‘Of course. That’s you told,’ Isobel said to Beth with mock severity. ‘Now before getting down to work for another year, I’ll have that shandy and take a look at the visitor.’

  I brought the shandy to the surgery. Isobel was holding the now silent puppy. ‘About eight weeks,’ she said. ‘His tail’s been docked. His ears aren’t long enough to trip him up, so I’d say that he’s from working or field trial stock, which is becoming unusual these days – cockers seem to have gone out of fashion except for showing and as pets. Hold the glass for me.’ I held the shandy out while she took a swallow. ‘Better! I might live now, despite all previous prognoses. You noticed the stitches in his foot?’

  ‘Yes. Broken glass, you think?’ Glass is the commonest cause of damage to dogs’ feet.

  ‘I have my doubts. Hold him for me.’

  I put the glass down on Isobel’s instrument cabinet and took the puppy. He seemed to take comfort from being handled. He was quite unperturbed, nosing my hand and chewing playfully on my fingers as Isobel deftly snipped and removed the stitches. The cut remained closed. ‘No need for those any more,’ Isobel said, ‘and yet the cut doesn’t look as if it’s more than a day or two old. And it doesn’t seem to have gone through the web. More of a superficial scratch, in my book. Why would anybody suture a scratch?’

  ‘To satisfy an over-anxious owner?’ I suggested.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible,’ Isobel said doubtfully.

  Chapter Two

  The first local newspapers of the new year came out next morning, but reporters and editorial staff alike must have spent the First of January recuperating because the news all dated back to late December. The road fatality was not mentioned; attention was concentrated on a murder which had been discovered close to Dundee on 31st December although it was believed to have been committed on the previous day.

  The victim had been identified as Mrs Violet Wentworth and her body had been found at home by her husband. The body was in the bathtub and the lady was said to have drowned. That much was clearly stated. Beyond these facts, it seemed that the police had been more than usually secretive. The reporters had resorted to their customary habit of making bricks without straw.

  The victim’s age was given as thirty-two. She was, of course, described as a beautiful blonde, although for once, to judge from a photograph apparently enlarged from a snapshot, there seemed to have been some truth in the description. Another photograph showed the house where the alleged murder had occurred to be a new looking bungalow, apparently spacious and probably expensive, in a country setting.

  Of the death itself, few details had been given. The police spokesman had not even given a reason why the death was being treated as murder. Unless more information had been leaked or given under embargo, the reporters were probably drawing inferences from what was left unsaid and the expression on the spokesman’s face. The word ‘sadistic’ appeared several times in the text. In desperation to fill the vacuum, parallels were drawn with another unsolved Dundee case now five years old in which a young motorcyclist had been crippled and left to die of exposure. The similarity, if any, seemed remote.

  It was an unpleasant note to start the new year and I turned my mind away to other things.

  *

  Unlike many of his kind (who seem obliged to address members of the public much as a headmaster would speak to a small boy who was certainly guilty of something even if it had not yet come to light) I had found Constable Peel to be human and friendly without being any the less conscientious. The police in general also tend to suspect a cheerful public. The theory seems to be that anyone happy must have got away with something. Peel, on the other hand, was a cheerful young man, more inclined to take a second look at anyone showing signs of stress.

  Beth – and I to a lesser degree – had been able to help him with a case which had resulted in his being covered in glory. We understood that his sergeant’s stripes were not far off. I was delighted when he was detached from Cupar to occupy the police house and station in the village. He was a thin man with a faintly Irish accent and a manner which had remained placid even during the arrest of a violent criminal.

  He walked up from the village that afternoon, disdaining the use of the Ford Escort supplied by the Constabulary, greeting each of us with a handshake and New Year wishes and asking after my health and the state of the business. These courtesies over, he settled with Beth and myself in the sitting room. I put a match to the fire.

  ‘I can’t offer you a drink?’ I asked him.

  ‘You carry on.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m on duty for the next half an hour.’

  ‘Before you go, then.’ I took a beer and poured a sherry for Beth. ‘Just to fill in the time, what can we do for you?’

  He produced a notebook and a ballpoint pen. ‘It’s about the road traffic fatality at Hogmanay. I already have statements from Mrs Kitts and Miss Macrae.’ (Miss Macrae, I remembered, was Daffy.) ‘We’re interviewing everybody who may have seen the dead man in the inn that night.’

  I noticed his choice of words. ‘You think that it may not have been an accident?’ I asked.

  ‘What put that into your mind?’

  ‘You said “fatality”, not “accident”,’ I reminded him.

  He nodded, looked at me consideringly for a moment and then decided that we had been helpful in the past and might be so again. ‘We just don’t know,’ he said. ‘This is just between ourselves. Mr and Mrs Kitts were adamant that they never saw brake lights come on. Well, brake lights sometimes fail, but there were no skid-marks in the road. The chiefs are of the opinion that the driver may have been looking down, fiddling with his radio or looking for the end of his seat-belt, just before the impact, and then, because he knew that he’d be in dire trouble if his breath was tested, drove on. So us Indians – that’s to say myself and a sergeant from Cupar – are left to look into it.’

  ‘We thought that the driver might have been trying to avoid the puppy,’ I said.

  ‘That’s no more than a possibility.’

  ‘But we didn’t see anything,’ Beth said. ‘By the time I went down there the ambulance was leaving and you had cones all round everything.’

  ‘That’s so.’ Constable Peel nodded approvingly. ‘But we’re trying to interview everybody who was in the bar that night. The vehicle may have come from there and we want to find out all we can about the dead man. Mrs Kitts tells us that you had spoken with him. Did he cadge a drink from you?’

  I nodded. ‘The oldest ploy in the world,’ I said, ‘and quite blatant about it. He was carrying an almost empty glass. He chatted us up, spoke of the weather, asked us what we did, and seemed very interes
ted in the dogs. I could hardly not include him in the next round, after which he spotted another couple whose glasses were nearly empty, pretended to see somebody he knew at the other end of the bar, and slipped away.’

  ‘That seems to have been his usual modus operandi,’ Peel said. ‘What time did you leave for home?’

  ‘About a quarter to eleven.’

  ‘Can you tell me who was still in the bar when you left it?’

  He had a list compounded from the statements that had already been taken and as we dug into our memories he marked little symbols against the names. ‘I’m afraid we’re not being much help,’ I said at last. ‘Apart from Angus Todd, the ones we knew all live within walking distance and not one of them has a Land-Rover.’

  ‘But any one of them may remember somebody else. That puppy now,’ Peel said. ‘The man was a stranger around here and it hardly seems likely that he’d been travelling with a young and expensive puppy. You’ve no idea where else it could have come from?’

  We exchanged a blank look. ‘No idea at all,’ I said. ‘Of course, although the pup looks pure-bred it’s not easy to tell at that age. If it was the result of an accidental mating, it might not be valuable at all. You’ve still had no reports of a puppy missing?’

  ‘There’s been nothing reported in Fife. We’re waiting to hear back from Tayside.’

  ‘I just don’t understand,’ Beth said. ‘He was scrounging his drinks and yet he couldn’t have been badly off. He was quite smartly dressed.’

  Peel looked at his watch. I glanced at mine and saw that the half-hour was up. ‘If your shift’s over,’ I said, ‘you could take a drink now.’

  ‘You’re very kind. A beer, then.’

  I gave him a beer and topped up our glasses. ‘Have you identified him yet?’ I asked.

  Peel put away his notebook. Clearly, he was now off duty. ‘You’ll treat this as confidential?’ he asked.

  We said that of course we would.

  ‘Considering the time of year, we’ve got a long way forward. There was no identification on him. As a first routine step, Kirkcaldy checked his fingerprints and then wired them to other forces. It turns out that he had a record a mile long, but nothing very serious. Sneak-thief, shoplifter, and living by his wits generally. There are a thousand like him, though he was better at it than most.

  ‘He belonged in and around Glasgow but he’d pulled a fiddle on some hard men thereabouts and he was moving around the country while he waited for the heat to cool.

  ‘You say, Mrs Cunningham, that he didn’t seem short of a pound or two. He had less than a fiver on him. He was well dressed, you say. He had on a new sports jacket. That jacket had the label of a Dundee store, one of the few that doesn’t have the new electronic tags. The staff of the store found a similar jacket, but wrinkled and grubby, hanging among the new ones.’

  ‘You mean,’ Beth said, ‘that he’d tried on the new one in the fitting room and then hung up the old one in its place and walked out?’

  ‘Just that. His boots were the leather safety boots the oil companies hand out and never recover. They look smart enough.’ Peel smiled suddenly. ‘I could be doing with a pair myself. I have a cousin that works offshore, but both my feet would go into one of his boots. It isn’t true what they say about policemen.

  ‘When he died, the man was wearing a good Barbour coat not more than a few months old. Pinched off a coat-rack somewhere, I’ve no doubt. Appearances are important to the likes of him. Nobody trusts a scruff.’

  ‘I see that,’ Beth said, but she was looking puzzled. If anyone ever produces a league table of the most honest people in the world, Beth’s name will certainly figure among the top ten, so the concept of somebody who lived entirely by defrauding others was a foreign language to her.

  Now that the formal questioning was over, Constable Peel lay back in his chair, ready for a good chat. I accepted this at face value, but I knew that some policemen expect to gather more hard facts and useful suggestions during a cosy gossip over the teacups when guards are down than by any amount of hectoring.

  ‘For an example,’ he said, ‘he had had a good dinner at the inn. He collected his bill but, before going to the desk and settling it, he moved through into the coffee room and had coffee and collected another bill for that. Guess which bill he paid.’

  ‘The coffee?’ Beth said, round-eyed.

  ‘Right.’

  The dead man’s character as a petty crook seemed irrelevant. ‘Did Mrs Kitts tell you about the stitches in the puppy’s foot?’ I asked.

  ‘She did. That’s another thing makes us doubt that the pup was to do with him. He wasn’t the sort of man to pay a vet good money for no good reason.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ I said. ‘I once knew an old lady who grudged heating her house on her pension. In cold weather, she lived in perpetual danger of hypothermia. Her family were worried about her. Even when they gave her the money, she wouldn’t spend it on heat. So they bought her a budgerigar and told her that she mustn’t on any account let the budgie get cold or it would die. After that, the house was always warm. People are funny where their pets are concerned.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Peel. ‘And not only about their pets. I remember putting one young thug away. His only concern was for his cat.’

  ‘Isobel didn’t think that the cut was worth stitches,’ Beth said.

  ‘So she told us. But how much weight would you put on that?’

  ‘Some,’ I said. ‘But you can’t always tell. A clean cut can heal up very neatly sometimes. You could ask around the vets and find out whether one of them wasn’t stuck with a bad debt. Perhaps the man was supposed to pay when he brought the pup back to have the stitches removed.’

  ‘Now, that’s a thought,’ Peel said. He dug out his book and made a note. ‘If you have any more thoughts like that, pass them along. Especially if they’re about cocker spaniel puppies.’

  ‘Why especially that?’ asked Beth.

  Peel hesitated and then shrugged. ‘You’ll be reading about it in the Courier in a day or two anyway. You saw about the woman who was drowned in Dundee?’

  ‘We saw what it said in the Courier,’ I told him. ‘Half a page of guesswork and about two lines of fact.’

  ‘There’s a lot they were keeping back. It was a bad business. She was tied up, good and tight, and left in the bath with the plug in place and the cold tap dribbling.’

  We fell silent while we digested the news. All murder is evil but there are degrees of evil; and this was repugnant beyond any conceivable norm. No wonder that the reporters had divined enough to categorize it as ‘sadistic’.

  ‘There’s more,’ Peel said. ‘A black cocker spaniel puppy was found in the house, kicked or crushed to death. As far as the nearest neighbour knew, it didn’t belong to the dead woman. That scrap of news will be released tomorrow, in the hope that somebody’s missing a pup or noticed one that vanished. Of course, Tayside Police were on to us in minutes when they heard about another spaniel puppy being found at the scene of a death. But it’s hard to see how the two could be connected.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘A mad spaniel breeder, perhaps, leaving pups at the scenes of his crimes?’

  ‘All spaniel breeders are mad,’ I said. ‘They have to be, to go in for anything so risky and such hard work. But we’re not as mad as that. Another beer?’

  ‘Well . . . I wouldn’t say no.’

  I opened another can of beer for him and added a log to the fire. ‘Was there anything out of the ordinary in his pockets?’ I asked.

  He made a face. ‘That depends on what you consider ordinary. He had much what you’d expect for a man of his trade. Several credit cards, none of them in his own name – which was Dinnet, by the way. Odds and ends. Some pieces of costume jewellery. Quite a few unidentifiable keys. Two lighters and three packs of cigarettes of different brands. A pair of pigskin gloves, property of Mr Henry Kitts.’

  ‘Isobel told us that the man – Dinnet, was it?
– seemed to be having trouble finding his own coat,’ I said.

  ‘Going through the pockets for what he could find,’ Peel said.

  ‘I suppose . . .’ Beth began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I suppose he didn’t find more than was good for him?’

  Peel gave her a nod and a smile. ‘We wondered the same thing. And, in fact, there was a mildly compromising letter tucked into the bottom of a pocket. But there were no names and no address, so I can’t see anybody being overly worried about it. Darling, come and see me tonight. The old man will be away. That sort of thing. Comparatively innocent in this day and age.’

  ‘Certainly nothing to run a man over for,’ I said. ‘Unless, of course, the late Mr Dinnet happened to know who wrote it and to whom. Backed by a handwriting expert and if one of those keys happened to fit the wrong door, it could add up to valuable evidence in a divorce case.’

  ‘But most people seem not to worry about divorce any more,’ Beth said.

  ‘A wealthy husband with a greedy wife might worry himself sick about it,’ I pointed out.

  Beth gave the matter some thought. ‘Oh well,’ she said at last, ‘you’re not rich and I’m not greedy. How do you suppose he got his hands on the Barbour coat?’

  Peel looked at her in puzzlement. ‘Any way except by legitimate purchase. As I said, he probably lifted it off a coat-rack somewhere.’

  ‘And have you checked to see if there isn’t an unclaimed coat still hanging in the bar?’

  The Constable sat up suddenly and then slowly relaxed again. ‘No, we haven’t. And if he happened to take a fancy to a good coat and walked off with it . . . and the rightful owner didn’t make a squawk about it . . . that could open up what they call – what’s that expression they use on the telly?’

  ‘A whole new can of worms?’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s the one.’