The Curse of the Cockers

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Well, here’s another can-opener,’ Beth said. She cocked an ear and when I listened I could hear Sam beginning to whimper for his bottle and a frenzied yipping from the surgery. Beth sighed and got out of her chair. ‘Two more hungry mouths to feed. Have you checked the handwriting of that letter to see whether it belongs to the murdered woman?’

  She hurried out of the room.

  Peel stared at me with his mouth open.

  *

  When I walked back from the Moss on the following afternoon, the local Ford Escort police car or one very like it was standing by the front door, making my old estate car look very shabby. A figure in police uniform with sergeant’s stripes – a burly figure, verging on stout – was leaning over the pram. My approach across grass was silent. He was making chirruping noises.

  One of the two dogs at heel made a faint chuffing sound, the faintest vestige of a bark, as if he knew that I was already aware of the man’s presence but instinct demanded that he give me a warning anyway. At the sound, the Sergeant straightened up, turned, and glared at me.

  ‘Captain Cunningham?’

  ‘Mr Cunningham,’ I said. I see no need for anybody below the rank of general to carry a military rank into civilian life.

  ‘Sergeant Gall.’

  ‘From Cupar?’

  ‘Yes.’ He glared at me suspiciously. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘It was a guess,’ I said. ‘Constable Peel told me that he was working in harness with a sergeant from Cupar.’

  ‘That young man talks too much. I was hoping for a word with yourself and Mrs Cunningham.’

  ‘If the pram’s here, Beth won’t be far away. Let me kennel this pair and I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  He nodded graciously.

  As I came back from the kennels I met Beth and Daffy who were returning by way of a track which leads into the adjoining farmland. They were accompanied by two brood bitches at heel and what seemed like a myriad of puppies on leads. The puppies were busily turning their leads into knitting. (A major problem around a big kennels is the difficulty of keeping the area clean. We tried very hard not to allow the pups to have free-running exercise until the lawns were spotless or until they had reached clean grass or stubble in the neighbouring fields. The habit of eating faeces is too easily contracted in puppyhood and almost impossible to eradicate. Quite apart from the danger of picking up parasites, it is not a habit which impresses the new owner.)

  Beth handed her share of the leads to Daffy and came with me. ‘I’ve only been away a minute,’ she said defensively, ‘helping Daffy to bring the pups back from the field. The track’s too muddy for the pram. I could hear her cussing the puppies for running round her legs and I could see you in the distance, heading for home. If I could see you, you could see the house.’

  ‘I was paying more attention to the two dogs I had with me,’ I said. ‘I missed seeing a car arrive. Where was Isobel?’

  ‘She’s taken Henry’s car and gone for another load of puppy-meal.’

  ‘Not to worry. Sam’s been well guarded,’ I said as we arrived back at the front door.

  I introduced her to Sergeant Gall and we led him indoors, manoeuvring the pram as we went. The Sergeant’s manner was still stiff. Evidently I was not easily to be forgiven for catching him crooning over a baby. I led the way into the kitchen. He would find it more difficult to be formal in the large, jolly room with its scrubbed table and basket chairs than in the sitting room.

  Beth had her own and better way of making the Sergeant unbend. She left the pram in the hall, set me to warming a bottle which could as easily have stood in its pan of hot water on the table, and dumped Sam on the Sergeant’s knee.

  ‘Hold this thing, please, while I fetch the Carricot,’ she said. So the Sergeant sat opposite me, in the other basket chair, looking outraged and yet absurdly gratified, while Sam pulled at the buttons on his tunic, until Beth came back and relieved him.

  ‘Now,’ Beth said. She checked the temperature of the bottle. Sam latched onto it like a homing missile. ‘You wanted to see us about something?’

  Even seated at ease in the homely room, the Sergeant had recovered his air dignity. ‘Constable Peel showed me your statements – which I’ve brought for your signature. He also told me of certain suggestions made by yourselves.’

  ‘You needn’t try to sound as though they were indecent suggestions,’ I said. ‘They were well intended.’

  The Sergeant ignored my flippancy. ‘I would like to know what put them into your heads.’

  ‘Not guilty knowledge, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ I told him. I could see that Beth, like myself, was in a quandary. We had no desire to drop Constable Peel in the mire by revealing all of his disclosures. ‘How much of our discussion did he pass on to you?’ I asked carefully.

  But for his dignity, I think that the Sergeant would have smiled. He knew perfectly well why we were hedging and he sympathized without approving. ‘If it’s of any help, he was as frank with me as he admits having been with yourselves.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘You had a dead pedestrian. Ostensibly an accident, but you had certain doubts, and rightly so from what we’ve heard. But why would anybody want to run over a relatively harmless sneak-thief? One possible reason occurred to us. If he was in the habit of renewing his clothes by theft, he might have stolen the wrong coat from the inn, a coat with something damning in the pockets.’

  ‘And the handwriting?’

  Beth, who had seemed to be wholly intent on Sam, looked up. ‘If it was the way John said, it would have to be something awful. I mean, the letter of assignation on its own needn’t have meant much, with no names and so on. Of course, it could have been something else, like a latchkey to a . . . a love-nest. But again, that might have been awkward but not as bad as all that. I mean, let’s suppose for a moment that John had a . . . a bit on the side.’ Beth turned pink and looked down at Sam. ‘I’m sure he hasn’t, but if he had; John, would you kill somebody to prevent me finding out?’

  That seemed to me the kind of question to which every answer is wrong. ‘You can’t expect me to tell you in front of the Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’m not the sort of person who could kill lightly.’

  ‘You must have killed, when you were in the Army,’ she said.

  ‘In the line of duty. And even then, not lightly.’

  Beth seemed satisfied with my answer. ‘There are you. Then I remembered the murder in Dundee. If the letter was in the dead woman’s writing, then that might make all the difference. He wouldn’t be protecting the secret of his affair, he’d be avoiding a charge of murder. That made a lot more sense. What you’ve done once comes more easily next time. Were our guesses good?’

  ‘Of course they were,’ I said. ‘Otherwise, the Sergeant wouldn’t be so concerned about how we had so much guilty knowledge.’

  ‘Apparently guilty.’ Sergeant Gall made a huffing sound which might have been a sigh. ‘As simple as that!’ he said. ‘Look at it that way round and it’s obvious. And yet we’d missed it.’

  ‘You’d have thought of it soon enough,’ Beth said.

  The Sergeant accepted the comfort reluctantly. ‘I don’t know that we would. Of course, we’re not detectives, just beat coppers investigating a traffic accident. All the same . . .

  ‘There was an unclaimed macintosh with a Glasgow label hanging in the inn, the pockets absolutely empty. The handwriting on the note matches the dead woman’s and one of her woman friends claims to recognize one of the pieces of junk jewellery, although she admits that the brooch is hardly unique. A key in the dead man’s pocket fitted her front door. Tayside Police are getting excited and my bosses are agitating for a report. One of them will be taking over.’ He paused for several long seconds before deciding to abandon his dignity altogether. ‘It would look better if we had a tidy theory to present him with. How do you see it?’

  I countered his question with one of my own. ‘Where would he have been heading for
? He’d have needed a bed for the night.’

  He hesitated and then made a gesture that might have been a shrug. ‘From what Strathclyde sent us, Dinnet never had a permanent abode. He didn’t mind sleeping rough but he rarely had to. Sometimes he took a room at a hotel and slipped away without paying the bill – but the man wouldn’t have hung around the inn after skipping out on his dinner bill. He’s been known to wander into a hotel, find an empty room, slip the lock, and kip down for the night. Other times, when he’s been travelling, he’s sometimes knocked on a door in some lonely place and passed himself off as a motorist who’s broken down a mile or two off. Or he might just sleep in a barn. Sometimes he’d hitch a lift through the night and sleep in the passenger seat of the vehicle.’

  ‘No particular destination, then,’ I said. ‘He’d treated himself to a good dinner and a lot of drink, all without paying for more than a coffee. Now he was going to move on. He was heading south, away from Dundee and in the general direction of Glasgow.’

  ‘Going home, maybe,’ said the Sergeant. ‘The men who chased him out of Glasgow have other worries at the moment.’

  My vague ideas had firmed up. ‘Isobel – Mrs Kitts – told us that she saw him give a sort of wave. Perhaps he was trying to thumb a lift.

  ‘Before leaving the inn, while pretending to look for his own coat, he went through the pockets of the coats hanging there. If he was lucky, he recovered the cost of his coffee – men often carry coins in a coat pocket for car parks and bridge tolls. He pinched Henry’s gloves. Then he took the best coat of about his own size and slipped away.

  ‘Minutes later, the owner of the coat prepared to leave. He found that his coat had vanished and he remembered that in its pocket was the letter from the murdered woman and her door key.’

  ‘A careless murderer, to be carrying the letter with him,’ the Sergeant commented.

  Beth, who had been listening in silence, looked up suddenly and shook her head. ‘I think a man who’d only cheated on his wife would have got rid of the note without fail. But if he’d killed his ladyfriend he would have other things on his mind. Guilt, regret, fear. He might be too shaken up to remember to empty his pockets, until his coat went missing.’

  ‘That could be right,’ I said. ‘The coat’s owner may have seen Dinnet fumbling through the coats, so he could guess who he was looking for. He probably only intended to demand his property back, When he saw that Henry and Isobel were following Dinnet and not far behind, he only had a second or two to make up his mind. He made the wrong decision. The sensible thing to have done would have been to drive on and wait for him at the roadside further on. But, in the panic of the moment, he made a mistake.’

  The Sergeant was nodding but Beth was shaking her head again. I raised my eyebrows at her.

  ‘If Dinnet had been trying to thumb a lift,’ she said, ‘that would have made it easy for the other person. He’d only have had to pick him up, drive a bit, and then stop and threaten him until he got his coat back. Dinnet didn’t look like a hard man to me and he wouldn’t have had time to look at the letter.

  ‘Also, Isobel said that they stepped aside into the hedge when they heard the Land-Rover coming. The driver may not have seen them until he caught sight of them in his mirror against the lights of the village. Until then, he’d expected to be able to stop and recover his things. And you haven’t explained the puppy.’

  I just looked at her. Sometimes I find myself unsure whether Beth is being dim or brilliant.

  ‘You can explain the puppy?’ asked the Sergeant.

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Listen.’ But she fell silent.

  We listened. ‘I don’t hear anything,’ Sergeant Gall said.

  ‘Exactly.’ Beth still had Sam on her knees and she spoke almost absently while attending to his hygiene. ‘Remember the Sherlock Holmes story? The dog that didn’t bark? The pup’s stopped that yipping now. He’s accepted that the surgery is his home and that he’ll be fed and visited and looked after. Which goes to confirm that he had only just been separated from his dam and his litter-mates. Yet he settled down quietly in Henry’s pocket. That’s normal behaviour,’ she explained to the Sergeant. ‘Dogs are pack animals. Puppies often find aloneness a terrifying experience until they get used to it. They’re quite sure that they’re being abandoned and left to starve. A pocket probably reminds them of the womb.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘When Dinnet left the inn, Isobel thought that she heard him cry out, just after he’d got outside.’

  ‘She thought that he might have slipped,’ I said.

  ‘There wasn’t any ice. But wouldn’t you make a loud exclamation if you put your hand in a pocket and felt something warm, furry, and moving?’

  ‘Wow!’ I said. When I thought about it, I found that I was beginning to catch up with her reasoning. ‘By your theory, then, the other man had the puppy with him in the Land-Rover. He was visiting the inn and he didn’t want to leave the pup in the car, either because it would chew things or make messes or because its yelping would attract attention that he didn’t want. So he took it in his pocket. Barbours have large pockets for carrying shot game and cocker spaniel puppies are comparatively small. The pup fell comfortably asleep and stayed that way. It was warm in the bar and he felt that it was safe to take his coat off and hang it on one of the hooks. But Dinnet helped himself to it, not wasting time on a search but hoping that the weight in the pocket would turn out to be something valuable. Is that it?’

  ‘Just about,’ Beth said. She put the sleepy Sam down in his Carricot and faced us again. ‘When Dinnet found that he had somebody else’s puppy, he could have put the pup down and walked off. But he didn’t. He’d drink taken and it was Hogmanay and he was probably glad of some company. Pups aren’t the only creatures to feel loneliness. Dinnet walked on, possibly nursing the pup in his hands. I think that, underneath it all, Mr Dinnet may have been a good sort of man.’

  ‘Why on earth would you think that?’ I asked her.

  ‘When Isobel saw him make a gesture that was like a wave, he had already seen that the Land-Rover was coming at him. In an emergency like that, people react in funny ways. Instead of trying to save himself, I think he was tossing the puppy into the hedge, out of harm’s way. Not everybody would do that.’

  ‘Your instinct would be to do exactly that,’ I said.

  ‘And yours.’

  ‘Really? Me, I’d have dived headfirst into the hedge,’ said the Sergeant, ‘and remembered the puppy afterwards.’

  ‘But you’re not a sneak-thief with a low self-esteem,’ Beth said. ‘Perhaps he had a momentary revelation and realized that he valued himself lower than the pup.’

  Chapter Three

  Another and brighter day, but colder. In the afternoon, frost still sparkled on the leaves of the evergreens and our breaths steamed in the low sun.

  ‘. . . little or no reasoning power,’ I said. ‘A dog’s form of knowledge is: “This is what we always do.” Change “always” to “sometimes” and he’ll try to think for himself and you may not like what he thinks.

  ‘Now,’ I said sternly. ‘Before you go, give me some feedback. What are the high spots of what I’ve been telling you?’

  Allan Forsyth looked up from fussing with his spaniel and regarded me timidly. Months before, he had bought a pup from us and had made a mess of the training. So he had brought the young dog back to me and it had taken me two more months to eradicate the bad habits engendered by an indulgent and impatient owner. I was not angry with him. In such cases I overcharge disgracefully, so that sloppy owners are bread and butter to the firm. But because I liked him I was speaking to him severely for his own good.

  ‘Every walk is a training walk,’ he said obediently.

  We had to move to let a large and sleek but muddy Jag slide towards the front door. ‘On which . . .?’ I persisted.

  ‘Repeat all the basic exercises.’

  ‘Especially?’

  ‘Sit
to the stop whistle. Stay. Come. Heel.’

  ‘And when you feed him?’

  ‘Make him sit until he’s told to take it.’

  ‘That’s to remind him who is the pack leader. What else?’

  ‘Don’t shoot over him for at least a fortnight, preferably more. Is that really necessary?’ Allan asked plaintively. ‘The syndicate’s last shoot will be over by then, except the keeper’s day.’

  ‘So much the better,’ I told Alan. ‘Go to the shoot by all means, but if you take the dog leave the gun behind. Keep up the basic training all summer. Shoot a few rabbits for him but stop immediately if he shows any sign of running in. He’s still impetuous and he’s inclined to be headstrong. I warned you about that before you bought him. You’ve got to keep on top of him.’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ he said. But as he drove off I could see the dog leaping around inside of the Land-Rover like a demented squirrel and I was sure that both my training and my good advice would soon be forgotten.

  The Jag’s driver had got out of the car. He was a large man, somewhere in his forties. His face was bland but something in his manner, a hint of latent self-confidence, made me think that he might be one of the senior policemen foretold by Sergeant Gall. On the other hand, his clothes looked too expensive even for a chief superintendent, if the matter merited such seniority.

  He was looking with amusement in the direction of Allan Forsyth’s departing Land-Rover. ‘You’re on a loser, trying to educate that young man,’ he said. His accent was good, what would have been called BBC before the Beeb decided that regional accents were ‘in’. ‘The dog knows exactly who’s the master, and it isn’t the man. What’s more, I’ll bet that dog’s seriously overweight by next season.’

  I knew better than to comment on one client to somebody who I hoped would become another, but I admitted to myself that this man was a judge of human and canine behaviour. Allan’s springer had been as fat as a pig when brought back for retraining.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I asked. ‘I’m John Cunningham.’

  ‘My name’s Morgan. I’ve been thinking of getting another spaniel pup to train for the gun. You seem to be getting more than your fair share of champions and I was reminded of where you are when I saw your name in the papers this morning. Something about a fatal accident to a jewel thief, wasn’t it? You’re looking after the dead man’s pup?’