The Curse of the Cockers

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘No. But you could ask him if he isn’t missing a puppy,’ I suggested.

  Beth thought about it and then nodded. ‘I suppose I could. All right. At least you can buy me my lunch. Wait a minute while I organize things.’

  While I waited, I phoned Foleyknowe House and explained to an answering machine that due to a mishap with a car, I was without transport for the moment. Unless I heard to the contrary, I would come at the planned time but on the morrow.

  Beth’s minute stretched to nearly an hour while she attended to Sam, arranged with Daffy for his care over lunchtime, and changed into clothing more suitable for lunching out, but it was my guess that we had time to spare.

  We walked down to the village, but we took a footpath that ran behind the houses and brought us out near the inn and almost opposite the police station.

  ‘It may be over by now,’ Beth said as we walked.

  ‘You mean, Wentworth may have confessed?’

  ‘No, silly. I meant the championship.’

  I had forgotten about the big event of the spaniel year, but suddenly I could see it all in my mind. A slow-motion dance of nervous handlers and excited dogs among the walkers, the spectators, sporting journalists and photographers, judges, Guns, and stewards. Dogs being put out for speaking, for unsteadiness, for running jealous, or for missing game. Other dogs being called forward again for one more run while the handlers’ hopes rose. Then an anxious wait, probably in the rain, bladders ready to burst with anxiety and cold, while the judges conferred. Triumph and disappointment and a general move towards the nearest bar or telephone. I did not miss the tension of top-level competition, but I found that I was missing the atmosphere.

  ‘They’ll go on all afternoon,’ I said.

  ‘For the look of it. But the judges will have made their minds up by now.’

  ‘I doubt it very much.’ I had done some judging and sometimes I had not really made up my mind until a week after the awards had been given out and everybody had gone home.

  Outside the Police House a lanky figure was hosing traces of dung off the official Escort. A rising and gusting wind was blowing spray around, making rainbows in the weak sunshine. ‘You go on in,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a word with Constable Peel and catch up with you.’

  Beth nodded. ‘Keep Jason with you.’

  I snapped my fingers to bring Jason to heel and crossed the street. Peel finished a careful sluicing under the wings and turned off the hose. ‘I’ve called the service station,’ he said. ‘They said they’ll collect the car, but how they’ll get it out of there without it running away God alone knows.’

  ‘That’s their problem,’ I said. ‘Theirs and the insurers.’ I lowered my voice. ‘How’s the interview going?’

  ‘Finished.’ Peel’s voice was barely a murmur. ‘He went over to the inn for a bar lunch a few minutes ago. I had a word with the sergeant. Wentworth claimed to have an alibi, but he slept alone in an Inverness hotel the night his wife was killed and he could have sneaked out and driven both ways in the time available.’

  ‘Did anybody see him, or anybody like him, in the bar at Hogmanay?’

  Peel raised his eyes for a moment to the heavens. ‘Did you ever try asking somebody – who’s been drinking – who he saw in a crowded bar? By the time I was taken off the case we’d pegged most of the crowd and eliminated nearly all of them. Not less than three men and not more than seven – depending on whether or not the witnesses are describing the same ones – were unaccounted for but, of those, at least one had left while Dinnet was still on the scrounge.’

  ‘I’ll take a look at Wentworth and see if he rings any bells.’ A Land-Rover weaved uncertainly down the street. ‘That’s Harvey Welcome,’ I said. ‘He was in the bar that night. I’ve just remembered. I might have a word with him.’

  ‘I’ll be having the word with him,’ Peel said. ‘You needn’t bother. Apart from the drink he’d taken, he wasn’t wearing his contact lenses that evening, so the only way he recognized people was by their voices. And by the look of his driving he’s not wearing them now. It’s time I gave him another Last Warning.’

  As I crossed the road, I was deciding not to take any more action just yet. Beth and I would take the promised look at Mr Wentworth. Whether or not we recognized him, we would let the police know and then leave it to them. They had the resources and it seemed that they also had more than one suspect. Time enough to neglect my work and endanger my family when their attention was focused again on Angus.

  All the same, I entered the inn through the back door. It was not much out of my way. There were two old-series short-chassis Land-Rovers in the car park. Each was battered-looking and rusty around the front bumper. One was muddy but the other had recently been washed and polished.

  It was still early for lunch but, the day being Saturday, there was a small throng of drinkers in the large and rambling bar. I recognized a farmer who had been in the bar at Hogmanay but had left early. The muddier of the two Land-Rovers would be his.

  Beth, a half-pint of shandy in her hand, was sharing a small table with a fair-haired man, in tweeds of too bright a check for one of his height, who was working his way through one of the inn’s individual steak pies. Low eyebrows and a turned-down mouth gave him a naturally peevish expression but Beth’s presence did not seem to have improved his mood.

  I took a stool at the end of the bar, within about six feet of them. Jason settled at my feet. Years of close acquaintance with firearms had spoiled my hearing at certain wavelengths, but when the conversations further along the bar were not too boisterous I could make out most of what they were saying. Lip-reading in the mirror behind the bar helped.

  ‘No, I’m not from the media,’ Beth was saying, with a merry little laugh that rang almost true. ‘Do I look like a media person?’

  I missed most of the reply. Wentworth was facing partly away from me. His voice did not carry as well as Beth’s higher tones and Florrie had come to take my order. I asked for the scampi and a pint of Guinness.

  ‘. . . won’t want to talk to strangers during your hour of grief,’ I heard Beth say.

  There was a lull in the other conversations and the man’s voice came through clearly, low and hostile. ‘You’re right. I don’t want to talk to strangers. Who are you, to be asking questions? You’re not just interested in some damn puppy.’

  ‘Just curious,’ Beth said weakly.

  ‘Curious be damned!’ Wentworth’s voice was rising to match his anger.

  Beth swallowed. ‘All right, I’ll tell you. I think my husband may have been visiting her. He was supposed to be bringing home a puppy.’

  ‘What sort of puppy?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Beth managed to sound almost tearful.

  Wentworth paused and when he spoke again his tone had softened and his voice had fallen lower. ‘That’s tough. I don’t know that I can say much to help you.’

  ‘I only want to be sure,’ Beth said plaintively. ‘Anything you can tell me, in confidence, might help set my mind at rest.’

  Wentworth sighed. ‘I don’t want anybody to get the wrong ideas. The stupidest thing I could do just now would be to try to give the impression that my late wife and I were all lovey-dovey when half the world knows that the honeymoon was long gone. So I’ll tell you what I’ve just been telling the police. We were due for a divorce. I have another lady in mind and she had a lover, but I don’t know who he was. It suited us to go on sharing the house until one or other of us was ready to make the break.

  ‘I’m sick to my heart at the way she went. I’d be sorry for anyone who died that way and I’ll never get over the jolt it gave me, finding her like that.’ His voice cracked for a moment. ‘I don’t know that it’ll ever be far from my mind and if I marry again I’ll never want to see my new wife in the bath. But this isn’t my “hour of grief”, as you put it.’

  Beth’s voice was partly swamped by laughter at the other end of the bar and Florrie distracted me by put
ting my pint in front of me and telling me conversationally that a big wind was forecast. When I had got rid of her without hurting her feelings more than slightly, I could hear Beth again.

  ‘. . . have the puppy safe not very far from here. You’re quite sure that he isn’t yours?’

  ‘I’ve told the police a dozen times and I’ll tell you once and for all,’ Wentworth said. ‘I loathe dogs. I’d sooner have a diarrhoeic goat in the house. Satisfied?’

  Beth pretended to misunderstand. ‘If your wife knew that you hated dogs, why did she get a puppy? Was it just to upset you?’

  There was a pause. In the mirror, I saw Wentworth chew and swallow. ‘I’m damn sure that she didn’t get any such thing. She knew that I’d have got rid of it in no time flat. Not by stamping on it, mind. Finding a dead puppy in the hall gave me a hell of a shock, but it was only the beginning . . . No, I’d have got the RSPCA to take it away. And, if she had been daft enough to buy a puppy, knowing how I feel about dogs, she wouldn’t have got a spaniel. That wasn’t her scene at all, tweeds and waxproofs and green wellies. She was a very elegant lady and she made sure that she came across that way. She enjoyed her elegancies. A borzoi or a saluki would have been more her thing.’

  ‘Perhaps her lover,’ Beth suggested. ‘Was he the sort of man . . .?’ Her voice tailed away. I decided that she was showing a remarkable talent for interrogation.

  ‘How the hell would I know?’ Wentworth demanded angrily. ‘I knew that there was somebody but I didn’t know who and I didn’t want to know and I still don’t. Frankly, I had more important things to think about, like whether I needed a new toothbrush. She was discreet about it, I’ll say that for her, and that’s all that mattered. But an old biddy who spends her time peeping from behind the lace curtains at the dead end road up to my house insisted on telling me whenever my wife had been entertaining while I was away on business.’

  ‘Has she described him to the police?’

  Wentworth drained his beer glass and signalled to Florrie for his bill. ‘After a fashion,’ he said. ‘Same man each time, she’s sure, but it could have been anybody from your husband to the local minister.’

  ‘Did he come in a Land-Rover?’

  ‘Sometimes. But sometimes in a car she didn’t recognize except to say that it looked expensive. You’d better ask her for yourself if you want to eliminate your husband’s car.’

  ‘Perhaps I should,’ Beth said. ‘Did she say whether the lover was there the night your wife died?’

  It seemed to me to be a reasonable question for a worried wife to ask but it hit the wrong note with Wentworth. He stood up and towered over Beth. ‘Who the hell are you? I didn’t get a name. What are you after?’

  Beth, visibly uncertain how to go on, looked at me. I would have liked to see how she coped, but Wentworth’s deep anger was nearing the surface again and it was quite possible that he was a serial killer. I decided to intervene before she gave away our identities. I slipped off my stool and came up behind Wentworth, clicking my fingers to bring Jason to heel. ‘So this is the man you’ve been sneaking away to meet,’ I growled to Beth.

  Wentworth spun round and met the most ferocious expression that I could assume. He was beginning to flare up when he looked down to see Jason sniffing at his leg. He turned on his heel and walked away quickly.

  ‘There goes somebody who doesn’t think I look like a pussy cat,’ I said.

  ‘He was running away from Jason,’ Beth said indignantly. ‘He said that he hated dogs. Can I have the gammon steak?’

  *

  While Beth ate her gammon steak, I had another pint and a word with the landlord. He and the barmaids had been questioned over and again by the police, but none of them could be sure who had been in the bar at around the time of the fatality, let alone who left on the heels of the unfortunate Dinnet. To them, when the bar was busy, the customers were voices ordering drinks and hands delivering money. The landlord rather thought that Angus had still been around until he was ready to lock up. One of the part-time barmaids, who had been on duty at Hogmanay and was serving again in the public bar, remembered seeing Angus in deep discussion with a strange – in the sense of ‘unfamiliar’ – gentleman who I presumed was Mr de Forgan, but she had no idea when the stranger had departed and her description was so vague that I was left without any mental picture of him at all.

  As we came out of the inn the service station’s recovery vehicle went by, towing Henry’s car and followed by a police Range Rover.

  We set off for home by the path behind the houses. Beth had to raise her voice to be heard in the rising wind. ‘That didn’t do us much good,’ she said. ‘But he’s one of our best suspects so far, isn’t he?’

  ‘Apart from Angus,’ I said.

  ‘I could sooner believe in Mr Wentworth as a murdering sadist than in Angus.’

  ‘You’d suspect anybody who didn’t like dogs,’ I told her. ‘Sadism is very much a suppressed emotion. Our murderer will probably turn out to be known as a gentle soul, kind to animals and noted for taking comforts to the sick. There were concentration-camp guards in Nazi Germany who sang sentimental songs about their mothers with tears in their eyes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Beth thought that over in silence. ‘We’re not getting on very well, are we?’ she said at last.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ I said. ‘The police have all the skills and facilities and manpower that we lack. I think we’ve got to wait and shoot holes in their case if they finally pick on Angus. But I doubt if Angus will need much help from us. And I think that the murderer is somebody quite different.’

  ‘So do I. Who do you suspect?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then I don’t know what you’re on about,’ she said peevishly.

  I pulled her out of the wind into the shelter of a clump of holly. ‘Forensic science has come a long way in the last few years,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it can point a finger at the culprit, but not usually. I mean, the scientist can’t find a hair or a fibre or some other faint trace and say, “Charlie Jones did this deed.” What happens more often is that routine produces the suspect. After that, forensic science can usually prove conclusively whether he’s guilty or not.

  ‘In this case, they have a coat which can be assumed to belong to the murderer. You can be pretty sure that hairs and fibres from the coat have been passed under the microscope. Ditto hairs and fibres traceable back to Angus, Mr Wentworth, and any other good suspects. There would have been an arrest by now if any of them had matched.

  ‘That suggests to me that Wentworth is in the clear, at least as far as the running-down of Dinnet is concerned. So it seems almost certain that Mrs Wentworth was murdered by her lover rather than her husband.’

  ‘Did you hear what he said about the cars?’

  ‘Most of it.’

  ‘The neighbour saw a Land-Rover,’ Beth said. ‘But I don’t see Angus in that role. Are you warm enough?’

  ‘I’m all right. I can imagine Angus having an affair, but even apart from what I just said I couldn’t imagine an “elegant and fastidious” lady having an affair with him.’

  ‘She might have wanted what they call “a bit of rough”,’ Beth suggested.

  ‘Not that damn rough. Anyway, if he’d left detectable traces in her house he’d have been charged by now.’

  ‘So Angus is in the clear?’

  ‘Probably. Unless they decide to go ahead with the hit-and-run charge and keep the rest of it separate. He could have been an accomplice of Mrs Wentworth’s murderer or the victim of an appalling coincidence.’

  ‘You mean, he had a genuine accident which happened to be with the man who’d just stolen the murderer’s coat?’ Beth wrinkled her nose at me. ‘I can’t believe that.’

  ‘I didn’t say that I believed it,’ I pointed out. ‘But it could have happened.’

  ‘Millions of things could have happened but most of them didn’t,’ Beth said. ‘Come on.’ She pulled me out into the wind again.
<
br />   At Three Oaks, two clients were waiting and Sam was fretful. I sold a young part-trained dog and accepted a cocker spaniel for training before I was free to phone the service station. The police had released Henry’s car but it would take several days, I was told, to get the parts. I begged them to make all possible speed. Henry rarely used his car, but if deprived of the use of it he was inclined to fret.

  The afternoon was too blustery for normal training. The dogs were distracted by the wind and the sound of a whistle was lost in it. I resorted to the barn, teaching obedience and elementary retrieving to the youngsters and reminding the older dogs of response to hand signals.

  At six, when the phone rang, I was nursing Sam and a drink in the kitchen while Beth prepared our meal. I reached for the phone and switched on the amplifier which would let Beth hear both ends of the conversation. Daffy appeared out of nowhere.

  Isobel was on the line. Her voice was cheerful and only slightly slurred. ‘Well, that’s it over for another year.’

  ‘With what result?’

  ‘I can’t imagine a better one for us.’

  ‘We won?’

  ‘No.’ I could hear somebody snorting with laughter in the background. Henry or a good impersonator.

  Beth and Daffy, who had broken into grins, looked shattered. Even Sam produced a whimper.

  ‘Don’t talk in riddles,’ I told Isobel severely. ‘Break it to us. Or go and have a black coffee and call us again. What happened?’

  ‘Lob got second and Rowan got a Certificate of Merit,’ Isobel said. The girls began to grin again. That made Lob up to champion and it was a further distinction for Rowan who had already attained that status. ‘And the winner,’ Isobel went on, ‘was Charles Hipple with Crab. Registered name—’

  ‘Crabapple of Throaks,’ Beth and Daffy said in chorus. They linked arms and did a little dance. Crab was one of Briar’s pups.

  ‘So that’s first, second, and a certificate for our stock,’ Isobel said, pointing out the obvious. ‘And we’ve made damn sure that the journalists realized it. That should be worth ten per cent on the price of a pup.’