Going to the Dogs

by Dan Kavanagh

  ‘Well, sort of, I suppose.’

  ‘And you want me to help you, to tell you things?’

  ‘Mmm. Well, I was hoping …’

  ‘So you will pay me, then.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Mrs Colin suddenly laughed. She pulled open the bottom left-hand drawer of her dressing-table and fished out a small buff envelope, which she handed to Duffy. ‘This is a manilla envelope,’ she said, repeating one of Mr Colin’s old jokes, ‘It is for sending to the Philippines.’ Then she turned her back on him.

  Duffy looked at the address printed in red; it was that of a church, presumably in Mrs Colin’s home town. He took out his wallet, stuffed a tenner into the envelope, paused, wondered if bribing Vic’s domestic staff could be claimed back from Vic as legitimate expenses, and put in another tenner. As he licked the gum on the envelope, he realized that Mrs Colin, with an oblique glance in the side-mirror, had monitored the extent of Duffy’s charitable impulse. She seemed to approve, and smiled shyly as she returned the envelope to her bottom drawer.

  ‘Mrs Colin, you’ve been with Mr and Mrs Crowther for …’

  ‘Five years. Two in London, three in the country.’

  ‘And you’re happy working for them?’

  ‘Very happy.’

  ‘No trouble?’

  ‘No. No trouble.’ This was just like talking to the policeman. Perhaps she should also have invited the Detective-Sergeant to assist the holy sisters at the Church of Our Lady of Penitence.

  ‘Mr Crowther said to tell you that he wants you to answer my questions as truthfully as possible.’ Mrs Colin nodded. Who did they think she was, these English policemen? She laid her hand gently against the bump of Our Saviour at her throat. Unlike the Detective-Sergeant, the stocky fellow with the white van didn’t have a notebook. Perhaps he remembered all the answers. ‘Did you see anyone near Miss Sally’s car at any time before it caught fire?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have there been any quarrels?’

  ‘Quarrels?’

  ‘In the house. Anyone been cross with anyone?’

  ‘Miss Blessing, she’s cross.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘No, I mean, she’s cross. That’s what she’s like. She’s often cross.’ Well, Mr Crowther had asked her to tell the truth. ‘And Mr Damian, he’s often cheeky. Very cheeky.’

  ‘But no quarrels.’

  ‘No quarrels.’

  ‘And while you’ve been down here, in the country, have you seen anything … naughty. I mean, anything wrong?’

  ‘Mr Hardcastle steals Mr Crowther’s wine.’ She said it as if it were a perfectly normal and regular occurrence, which perhaps it was.

  ‘How does he do that?’ Duffy felt slightly disappointed that he wasn’t alone in having made this discovery.

  ‘Oh, he waits until everybody is out and then he goes and takes it from the cellar.’

  Subtle ploy, that, thought Duffy. The touch of a master criminal. ‘You mean, a whole box of it?’

  ‘Sometimes. Sometimes just a few bottles. Depends whether Mr and Mrs Hardcastle are running short or not.’

  ‘Do they say anything to you about it?’

  ‘Yes, they say do I want a bottle? But I do not drink.’

  ‘Did they say anything else?’

  ‘Yes, they say it is an old British custom in the big houses.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell anyone about this?’

  ‘Who am I to question the old British customs?’ said Mrs Colin. She gave one of those smiles that were handy for all occasions.

  ‘And what about some of the newer British customs, Mrs Colin?’

  ‘Which you mean?’

  ‘Well, like, Look who’s sleeping in my bed.’

  ‘Who’s sleeping in your bed?’ Mrs Colin looked alarmed, as if something had gone wrong with the domestic arrangements at Braunscombe Hall and it might be her fault. At the same time, she wondered if this rather nice …

  ‘No, I mean, you’re delivering the breakfast trays, for instance, or you go in to turn the beds down, or to open a window. Or you just … notice things.’ Monogrammed knickers, for instance; lingerie with a giveaway salamander or a tell-tale phoenix.

  ‘You mean what Mr Damian calls fucky-fuck?’ Mrs Colin wasn’t to know that Mr Damian only used this expression when he knew that she was within earshot. He had several dozen other expressions for normal wear.

  ‘What Mr Damian calls fucky-fuck, yes.’

  Sally, it seemed, was the principal fucky-fuck artiste in the house; a fact which didn’t greatly surprise Duffy, given the view he’d had the other night in the billiard room. Damian liked fucky-fuck too, though it had apparently struck Mrs Colin that Damian often seemed to prefer staying up late talking about fucky-fuck to actually doing fucky-fuck. Lucretia liked a certain amount of fucky-fuck, though not as much as Sally. Taffy had asked Mrs Colin for fucky-fuck on a couple of occasions; though he had been very polite about it, and completely understood when she had declined.

  ‘Jimmy?’

  Mrs Colin giggled. ‘He likes fucky-fuck with girls in magazines,’ she said, remembering an occasion when she had gone to change the flowers in Jimmy’s room. She didn’t think Duffy would need to know the details of what she had seen.

  ‘Miss Angela?’

  ‘Miss Angela’s getting married. We’re all going to the wedding.’

  ‘So … Miss Angela and Mr Henry?’

  Suddenly, Mrs Colin giggled. Duffy repeated his question and Mrs Colin silently shook her head, though whether in ignorance or denial of the engaged couple’s sexual habits Duffy could not tell.

  ‘So … Miss Angela.’

  Mrs Colin shook her head again, more violently this time. Duffy noted this reaction. Then he dutifully checked the marital fidelity of Vic and Belinda with Mrs Colin, and moved on.

  ‘What about drugs?’

  ‘There are many drugs.’ That was the thing about the British. Their bars looked like chemists’ shops, and so did their bathroom cabinets. They were very worried about their health, the British. Perhaps they did not believe in God enough.

  ‘But… naughty drugs.’

  ‘You mean like the Beecham’s?’

  Duffy just about managed to look puzzled. ‘What’s the Beecham’s?’

  ‘The Beecham’s. You put it up your nose for the hay fever.’

  ‘Ah. And who has the hay fever?’

  Damian had the hay fever; he also, Duffy realized, had a teasing vocabulary with which he had infected Mrs Colin. The other person to have the hay fever was Sally. In fact Sally had the hay fever all the year round, even when there was snow on the ground, and she needed a lot of Beecham’s to cure it. Damian’s hay fever wasn’t half as bad as Sally’s. Mrs Colin wasn’t sure if there were any other sufferers in the household. Perhaps Lucretia, or Taffy? Perhaps; but she couldn’t tell. She hadn’t seen. Angela? No, she really couldn’t tell.

  The other thing that had to be kept at bay was the wasps. Damian had a special tobacco which he smoked to ward them off. It also worked, he said, for gnats, mosquitoes, midges, bees, tsetse flies and ladybirds. Unsurprisingly, Sally liked shooing away the wasps; Lucretia and Taffy didn’t mind distracting them, either. There had even been an occasion, Mrs Colin revealed, when they persuaded Jimmy to try. It had been on the terrace, after dinner, when Mr and Mrs Crowther had been out. Jimmy had coughed a lot, and the others had laughed. Miss Angela had laughed as well. Miss Angela also seemed to enjoy special tobacco.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the Beecham’s or the wasp tobacco?’ Mrs Colin looked doubtful. Duffy wondered what Damian’s euphemism for shooting up might be. ‘Has anyone got anything like diabetes?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a sort of illness. What you have to do if you’ve got it is take a little syringe and inject something into your arm. You have to do that for lots of other illnesses as well,’ Duffy added hopefully.
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  ‘Maybe you look in the medicine cabinets,’ said Mrs Colin. Really, the British were an odd people. Injecting themselves for all sorts of illnesses. In Davao only the doctor did that to you. Perhaps the doctors over here weren’t as good as everyone said. That was why everybody drank so much — ‘What’s your medicine?’ — and had to inject themselves.

  Duffy didn’t think he’d bother with the medicine cabinets; though it might be worth pulling open a few bottom drawers. Or rather — on the principle that people hide things not in the most obvious place but the next most obvious place — a few drawers up. He wondered whether Mrs Colin was quite as naïve as she made out. Perhaps she understood everything; perhaps she was finding a way to obey Mr Crowther’s instruction (which Duffy in any case had invented) while seeming not to betray his guests.

  ‘What about the dog?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did anyone … not like the dog?’

  ‘Everyone liked the dog. No, that’s not true.’ Mrs Colin paused. She had been instructed to tell the truth, and so she would. Duffy was expectant. ‘Everyone liked the dog except for one person. Me. I didn’t like the dog. I was bitten by a dog in Davao when I was a girl. It was a dog that looked like Ricky.’

  It seemed unnecessary to check with Mrs Colin whether Ricky’s death was indeed a long-term Filipino canine revenge killing. He thanked her and left. He’d got … what? Confirmation rather than anything else. Bed-hopping, drugging — he’d more or less had that from Vic to start off with; Mrs Colin had just brought it more into focus, filled in who and what, relayed Damian’s jaunty euphemisms. There’d been something about Angela and fucky-fuck — some hesitation on Mrs Colin’s part — which might be worth pursuing. And he had, of course, received confirmation of Ron Hardcastle’s enthusiasm for the Vinho Verde and the pink champagne. Would Vic be pleased with the news? Look, Vic, I bribed one of your servants with twenty quid I’d like you to refund me, and she said that one of your other servants was nicking from you. How would Vic react? Perhaps he might suggest that Duffy wasn’t exactly concentrating on essentials.

  One of the essentials was the dog, even though Vic had tried to dispose of all the evidence. Duffy sat on an uncomfortable rustic bench looking back at the terrace and the french windows, which still had a papered hole in them. A bumblebee droned slowly past, and Duffy clamped his lips together in case the insect flew into his mouth and stung him on his windpipe which would immediately swell up and stop him breathing and kill him unless he had a swift tracheotomy which could of course be an amateur job performed with a penknife but probably the only person around Braunscombe Hall who knew that sort of stuff was Jimmy because he’d been in the Army and probably received emergency medical training but Jimmy was all locked up so Duffy would simply have to die a horrible suffocating death on the bench. Oooff. The bumblebee passed on, and Duffy, who had been using his teeth as well to clamp his lips shut, briefly relaxed. Perhaps he needed some of that special tobacco which drove the insects away. And what if you kept your mouth shut but the bumblebee flew up your nose?

  The dog, Duffy, the dog. What did the dog mean? Who was the dog aimed at? It was Angela’s dog, so the obvious deduction was that Ricky’s death was aimed at Angela. Someone, it seemed, had been trying to get at Angela, drive her potty, or whatever, and killing her dog was an intermediate stage between throwing a stone through her cottage window and kidnapping her in the wood. Was the same person responsible for all these actions? And was that person Jimmy? The police, who were looking as if they’d charge him quite soon, presumably thought so. Duffy was dubious. For a start, he instinctively distrusted the psycho theory — the one put forward by Henry and much loved by television script-writers. And what finally knocked it on the head for Duffy was the thing Jim Pringle had told him on the telephone. He hadn’t heard of that being done to a dog before. Not the chucking through the window — anyone might come up with that — but the thing they’d done before, the way Ricky had actually died. To Duffy’s mind, this ruled out Jimmy — poor old Jimmy, who in Mrs Colin’s account was so unfamiliar even with ordinary funny tobacco that he’d spluttered and coughed on the terrace one night. No, Jimmy might still have done that thing to Angela in the wood; but he wouldn’t have done the dog.

  And was it, in any case, aimed at Angela? That was another loose aspect to the case. Perhaps the target was someone else. Vic, for instance: a warning over some contract or other. Or even a warning to the whole house? The whole house — apart from Mrs Colin — had liked Ricky; and the whole house — apart from Damian — had taken him for walks. Sally used to exercise him a lot, apparently. Hmmm. It was time, he decided, for a bit of professional help.

  ‘I’ve never heard of that before,’ said Detective-Sergeant Vine.

  ‘Nor have I. Nasty.’

  ‘Very nasty. Sick, in fact. London?’

  ‘Could be.’ Duffy was non-committal.

  ‘London, definitely.’ D/S Vine didn’t have a whisper of evidence for this statement apart from somehow wanting it to be true. Country policemen tended to see the big cities as the source of all corruption. This wasn’t sentimentality about their own patch — they knew vice could flourish just as well among the bluebells as among the council flats — but observation. The criminal psyche always did seem to spawn its sickest novelties up in London or Glasgow or wherever. D/S Vine had a wife and kids — a dog, too, for that matter; and when you heard about some nasty new trick you always imagined it invading your own village. It tended to make you a little conservative; which was only normal.

  ‘You realize …’ he began, but Duffy cut him off with a nod and a grunt before he got going. He was about to mention freelancing, and cowboys, and the illegal removing of evidence in a criminal case. But on the other hand it had been this ex-copper who had led him to the camp in the woods, and if this ex-copper had removed evidence from the scene of the crime and taken it to London for examination, he had also found that evidence after it had disappeared in the first place. Or rather, caused it to be found. Jimmy in his frogman suit had done the diving. Jimmy, who had only been charged with assault to be going on with, just to hold him. They were taking advice on the merits of gross indecency versus attempted rape versus something even tastier; and there would be a kidnapping charge as well in due course.

  But for the moment Vine saw there was too much going on around Braunscombe Hall for him not to need all the inside help he could get. When the case had merely been a question of a disappearing female he had not been struck by the helpfulness of the Hall’s inhabitants and house guests. Some of them were unconcerned, some of them downright cheeky. And when that car had gone up, they didn’t seem much more bothered. When he’d asked the owner to describe what had happened, she’d giggled and replied, ‘I’m afraid these foreign motors are frightfully unstable.’ Now there was the dog as well.

  ‘I shall have to ask you …’

  ‘Sure. I’ll go down and fetch it. Probably tomorrow, if that’s all right.’ One thing about being an ex-copper was that it made you guess what coppers were going to ask.

  D/S Vine was a fair man; and feeling a touch unhappy about a case made you perhaps even fairer. ‘Look, I’m grateful …’

  ‘Sure,’ said Duffy. ‘But this is a police investigation into a serious offence and you’re not going to start trading information with a freelance, and on the other hand it is of course my duty to turn over to you immediately anything I do discover.’

  ‘Something like that.’ Vine grinned. ‘Don’t know why you ever left the Force.’ Duffy didn’t return the smile. ‘But what I will say is I’m not going to tell you to keep your nose out of things. That’s strictly off the record, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Duffy. ‘And when I bring you the dog back I’m sure I wouldn’t like to overhear you talking to yourself about what made that car explode. I mean, some of the locals have this theory that a squirrel might have bitten through an electric cable or something.’

 
; ‘Strictly off the record,’ said Vine, ‘I think I can let you know that there was a shortage of electrocuted squirrel bodies found at the scene of the incident. And I have been known to start talking to myself occasionally. But only when I’m under stress.’

  ‘This looks a pretty stressful case to me,’ said Duffy.

  ‘Could be. By the way, I can’t work out why Vic Crowther doesn’t have a record.’

  Duffy grinned. ‘Nor could we. We did our best when he was down in our manor. Still, Taffy more than makes up for it.’

  ‘He told me. Not that I didn’t know already. Sometimes I think I’d rather talk to a straightforward villain who’s lying through his teeth than to a reformed ex-con with a degree in sociology or whatever he’s got.’

  ‘Did he tell you the one about getting nicked being a symbolic reintegration into society?’

  ‘Sounds a laugh a minute,’ said Vine. ‘Perhaps I could pay him not to tell me.’

  ‘First you’d have to listen to him thinking aloud about whether or not to take the money. He’s got this phobia about not boring you.’

  D/S Vine nodded at Duffy. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Ditto.’

  It felt like a reasonable arrangement to Duffy. In fact, it felt like the best arrangement he could hope for. Vine was using him as a sniffer dog. Nothing wrong in that, as long as the collar wasn’t too tight and the choke-chain wasn’t pulled on him whenever he found something naughty going on under his nose. At the same time, Duffy hadn’t made any promises to Vine. The detective-sergeant hadn’t overtly rebuked him for his freelance treatment of Ricky’s body, and Duffy took this as a wink of permission in case he wanted to forget about the small print of legality on a similar occasion. Provided things worked out right, of course. If they didn’t… well, he’d only come to mend the burglar alarm, Chief Inspector, honest.

  It was plain to Duffy that the case needed a bit of forcing. The coppers were concentrating on Jimmy at the moment —quite right, too, it was the most serious part of the business so far — and were waiting for the report on the car and then the delivery of Ricky. It gave Duffy a day or two in which to press. The obvious place to press was Angela. She was where it all started.