Going to the Dogs

by Dan Kavanagh

  Inside, they walked down a dim corridor with heavy glass doors at intervals. They climbed up to a sharply tiered restaurant and looked down through large windows at a track lit half by the evening sun and half by floodlights. Jolly signs dotted here and there said WELCOME TO THE STOW. Beneath them a corpulent man in jodhpurs and a bowler hat led the parade for the first race: he was followed by six men in white coats, like off-duty chemists, proudly showing six dogs of varied colour and elegance. Away to their left the tote board flickered constantly as the odds changed. Duffy caught the arm of a motherly waitress in a tight black skirt and frilly white blouse. As the traps sprang up and the six dogs leapt into the bright lights in vain pursuit of a hare they would never catch and which wasn’t a hare in the first place anyway, Duffy popped the cork on the Veuve du Vernay, filled their glasses, put his arm proprietorially round Carol, and murmured, ‘Welcome to the Stow.’

  ‘You are a scream, Duffy.’ Still, he was taking her out, that was something; and Carol knew not to examine the reasons for it too closely. They ordered the prawn cocktail — Duffy asking for extra sauce as if he were a gastronome who knew that the bottled stuff they served here was especially fine —followed by the rump steak and chips. They looked at their programme, a cyclostyled single sheet of paper with the following Thursday’s details on the other side. Nine more races to come, three big ones over 640 metres, the other six over 475. ‘Billy’s Flyer,’ Duffy read out, ‘Philomena’s Ark, Rockfield Rover, Bernie’s Gamble, Ding Along Dell and Desert Dancer. Fancy any of them?’

  Carol couldn’t decide. Duffy squinted at previous form and announced knowingly, ‘It must be between Bernie’s Gamble and Ding Along Dell.’

  ‘I’ll have Desert Dancer then.’

  He grinned and pushed down a switch on the bet-summoner, swiftly bringing a waitress with a large tray to their table.

  ‘A fiver for the lady on number two.’

  ‘Duffy, that’s a lot of money. And by the way, you’re beginning to sound a bit posh. A fiver for the lady on number two,’ she mimicked.

  He grinned. He still grinned when Desert Dancer was pipped on the line by Ding Along Dell. They ate their prawn cocktails and drank their Veuve du Vernay and backed another loser.

  ‘You know,’ said Carol, ‘you could have quite a nice time if you let yourself.’

  Duffy grunted. He wasn’t sure if that was what it was about. Those people up on the Buckinghamshire/Bedfordshire borders — they were all out to have a nice time, weren’t they? And look at them. Duffy shook the vision from his head, wolfed a few chips, and tried to concentrate on more important matters. Should he have gone for Rhincrew Doc or Chiming Valley? He hadn’t been able to make up his mind, and it was too late now as the stadium lights were dimmed and several thousand faces pointed towards a little row of stalls where six dogs yelped quietly in anticipation. Thirty seconds later the electric hare was being covered up again with a cloth, the six dogs had been recaptured, and Duffy was a bit relieved as neither Rhincrew Doc nor Chiming Valley had got a nose near the hindquarters of Art Grass. At the table behind, a permed gran celebrated noisily.

  They walked out through a slurry of discarded tote tickets into the warm night air. The two coppers were rocking on their heels and bidding some of the punters goodnight. There hadn’t been a sniff of trouble all evening. The winners were happy; the losers were pretty sure they’d be winners next time round. As they climbed into the van, Duffy said, ‘It’s really nice there. I could do that again.’

  ‘It’s rather a long way.’ And she had to get up for the early shift.

  ‘But it’s really nice. Nice people, nice dogs, no trouble. Nice food.’

  ‘Duffy,’ said Carol, with a teasing sharpness in her voice, ‘are you going soggy or something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Duffy, what makes you think there weren’t as many villains in that crowd as there are in any other crowd?’

  ‘Well, there were whole families and stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, villains taking their families out. Probably a few nice deals going on over the prawn cocktails. I mean, it’s a handy sort of place to go, isn’t it?’

  But Duffy wasn’t to be deterred. ‘Nah. It’s really nice. And you can tell they love those dogs, can’t you? Always patting them, stroking them. Probably give them lumps of sugar when they get back to the kennels.’

  ‘I think you ought to see a specialist,’ said Carol. ‘Do you think it’s cleaner than any other sport?’

  ‘Must be,’ said Duffy, smiling at the traffic in the Seven Sisters Road.

  ‘I knew a Detective-Constable once, he was on a case with the dogs. Somewhere out Romford way I think it was. Said it was awful the things he found out they did to the dogs to make them run faster. He wouldn’t tell me some of them. But it stands to reason. Think what those athletes get up to — and they’re doing it to themselves. If it was only a dog, you wouldn’t think twice, would you?’

  ‘You can tell they love those dogs,’ said Duffy warmly.

  ‘But it’s about money, isn’t it? There was a lot of money changing hands tonight, I don’t know if you noticed. Well, you should have done, quite a lot of it was yours.’

  ‘Do you know what the top prize was tonight? Seventy-five quid plus a trophy, with twenty-five quid to the second. That’s peanuts.’

  ‘It’s the betting. Same as the horses. It’s all about betting. And if there’s only six dogs in each race, it’s easier to predict than with the horses, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nah. If you gave your dog something special to make it go faster, they’d catch you, wouldn’t they? They must test the winners.’

  ‘You don’t have to do it that way round, Duffy. Say there are two class dogs in a race and one of them’s yours. You can’t make yours go faster without being caught, so what do you do? You make yours go slower.’

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Feed it prawn cocktail and steak and chips the night before. Cut its toenails so that it hurts or something. Then you bet on the other dog.’

  ‘So you bet against yourself?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Duffy continued to look a bit disbelieving, as if he declined to let this sour burst of scepticism invade the pleasure of the evening. They drove along in silence for a bit, then Duffy nodded, swerved towards the kerb, braked sharply, causing a protest of horns from behind, pulled on the handbrake and turned to Carol. ‘Has anyone ever told you, you might be a genius?’ he asked.

  She reached across and patted him on the thigh. ‘You really are soggy tonight, aren’t you?’

  7. Neighbourhood

  DID HE HAVE A runner? Had Carol given him a tip and did he have a runner? This was the question Duffy debated as he headed back up the M1 with nothing but a ragout of dog in a plastic bag for company. And if he did have a runner, the next problem was, which race was it in? The trouble with this case was that the runners kept on turning out not to be in the races you thought they’d been entered for. For instance, Angela’s dog gets knocked off, but does this have anything to do with Angela? It ought to, and it ought to connect up with the blackmail, but it didn’t seem to: the blackmail was a nice regular weekly transaction. What happened to Ricky wasn’t being used to raise the stakes.

  Then there was the blackmail itself. When Henry had toddled up on his bicycle, it looked as if that put him in the frame, but it didn’t. Or take Jimmy and the business up at his camp: that had looked a pretty reliable runner, but it too had gone lame. The coppers had charged him, but even they knew a bit more was needed to make things stick. The only aspect of the case with no obvious runners so far was the car. Well, perhaps it would be the responsibility of a delinquent squirrel after all.

  At his meeting with Detective-Sergeant Vine he traded his plastic bag for the information that there was still no information on the Datsun Cherry: they hadn’t found any bits of timer, or traces of familiar explosive. It might turn out to be something simple like a bit of rop
e dipped in tar; one of your good old-fashioned country ways of setting fire to things, none of your city tricks. D/S Vine had interviewed the Datsun’s owner, but hadn’t got anything out of her, which he suspected was because there wasn’t much inside her anyway. Duffy forgot to tell Vine about the encounter by the grit-bin — well, nothing had really happened, had it? — but did venture the opinion that some of the folk at Braunscombe Hall got on his tits. Vine chuckled.

  ‘By the way, anything new out of old Jimmy?’

  ‘Remanded for a week. Sits in his cell and says he didn’t do it. He seems a bit potty to me. Might have to get in the headshrinker to take a squint at him.’

  ‘Get him to give the rest of the Hall the once-over while he’s about it,’ said Duffy. ‘By the way, talking of something completely different, do you get much drugs around here?’

  ‘No, not really. If we do, it comes down from London. We’ve got a drugs squad, of course, but that’s mainly because the local paper thinks we ought to have one. They’re on other duties most of the time.’

  ‘So no big local suppliers?’

  ‘Not that we know of. And I think we would know, even if we couldn’t make a case. You want me to get the Hall raided by any chance?’

  ‘That’s jumping the gun a bit. Just something I’m working on.’

  ‘I’m sure the squad’d like it. They spend most of their time dressing up like hippies and waiting to get approached in pubs. The most that happens is the publican throws them out because he doesn’t like smelly hippies in his bar.’

  ‘Well, keep them on hold.’

  ‘Will do.’

  When Duffy got back to Braunscombe Hall he didn’t give the salamander a glance and he wasn’t too careful with Vic’s gravel as he pulled up. He was pissed off with being patronized. He’d taken against these people at first, that was only normal, then one after the other — Belinda, Lucretia, Angela, Damian — they’d half-made him quarter-like them. It hadn’t been much of a shift, but it had made him uncertain how he saw things. That was bad. It was also unprofessional.

  He started by calling Henry and asking if he could come over for a snooker lesson on his 1866 Thurston that afternoon. Good, and sure, he’d be happy to have tea with Henry’s mum afterwards. Then he rounded up Damian and Sally, who were loitering over a late breakfast in the kitchen. He took them into the billiard room. The curtains were drawn back, and the morning light made the baize a fainter colour than the spotlights did; the room seemed unfamiliar, colder somehow. Duffy told them to sit on the chintz sofa. Then he stood facing them, his bottom half-perched on the rail.

  ‘I always find,’ Damian remarked to Sally, ‘that attacks of masterfulness in men are directly related to disappointment in love.’

  So he had been listening. Or maybe he’d just been told. Duffy didn’t care. That was a day and a half ago. He’d been greyhound racing since then. He wasn’t so certain any more that he’d taken to the sport, but he thought he’d keep it in reserve, for those times when he felt tempted to like the wrong sort of people. Come and sit on my lap, Duffy? No, I’m off down the Stow. Listen to my old school song? Sorry, I’m going to the dogs.

  ‘You could get yourselves killed,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, God, here we go again.’ Sally’s tone was sarcastically bored. ‘Old spoilsport sticking his nose in. Don’t put your heels on the cloth you might rip it. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t have a little fun or you might kill yourself. One drink leads to another, one roll-up and next day you’re making with the syringe. Government health warning number twenty-three.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Duffy replied. He felt Damian’s eyes on him, while Sally was looking angrily away. ‘I didn’t say you’d kill yourselves. As far as I’m concerned you can stick what you like up your nose and you can stick what you like in your arm. I didn’t say you could kill yourselves. I said you could get yourselves killed.’

  ‘Speak on, O wise man from the East End,’ said Damian.

  ‘I don’t think you’re making connections. I’m not sure they’re all obvious to me, but they ought to be to you.’ Damian uttered a stagey sigh — the schoolboy irritated by the pedantic master.

  ‘Did Angela tell you how Ricky died?’ They shook their heads. ‘Ricky didn’t die from being thrown through the french windows.’ He paused, and Damian gave him a get-on-with-it twitch of the head. ‘Ricky died from being injected with enough heroin to kill a cow.’ Actually Duffy didn’t know how much more heroin this took than was required to dispose of a dog, but the phrase sounded tasty.

  ‘Poor old Ricky,’ Sally wailed, and turned her head into Damian’s shoulder on the sofa.

  ‘So you found the body?’ Damian, at least, seemed to be taking things a little more usefully than Sally. Duffy nodded. ‘But why did they get rid of it in the first place?’

  ‘Someone else did. Someone with a tidy mind that happened along.’

  ‘Someone whose name you’re not going to tell us.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So why should anyone do that to Angela’s dog?’

  ‘You’re not making the connection, are you?’

  ‘What connection?’

  ‘The dog and the car. The dog and the car.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Sally took her head out of Damian’s shoulder. ‘Ricky was Angela’s dog. And the thing about these foreign motors’ — Sally started to grin in a hysterical manner — ‘is that they’re so frightfully …’

  ‘Shut up, Sal. Listen.’

  ‘You walked the dog a lot, didn’t you, Sally? You walked the dog as much as Angela did?’ She nodded silently. ‘They thought the dog was yours. Well, they got that wrong. But they knew the car was yours so they got that right. But you should have made the connection. The third time they won’t be after dogs and cars. They’ll be after bits of you that break easily. And the time after that you could get yourselves killed. I’ve seen it all before. Lots of times, and I can assure you it’s a lot nastier than when you don’t keep up the hire-purchase on the spin-drier.’

  Damian looked as if he was going to smirk at Duffy’s analogy, but the expression never got going. He turned to Sally and said, ‘Maybe we’ll have to go to your pater on our bendeds.’ When she didn’t reply, he turned to Duffy and said, ‘Any suggestions?’

  ‘How much do you owe?’

  ‘About eight.’

  ‘Christ. How much did you start off owing?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Christ. So,’ Duffy went on pedantically, ‘you’ve paid off seven.’

  ‘About that.’

  Seven. Six plus one. Three twos are six, went Duffy. Gotcha. ‘And who’s using?’ Damian and Sally looked at one another. ‘OK, you’re both using. Is it fifty-fifty?’

  ‘No,’ said Sally, it’s nearly all me.’

  ‘I only use it for snooker, more or less, ‘said Damian ingratiatingly. ‘Find it settles the nerves wonderfully. Stops that sort of cue-twitch I see you’ve still got, my dear Duffy. Makes you see shots you didn’t know were on. That plant across the table into the middle pocket — you’d never even spot it without a little help.’

  It was Damian’s last attempt at a flourish. Duffy went remorselessly on. ‘So she uses almost all of it, gives you a little gratuity to help with the snooker. But you’re the one who does the shopping?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Well, if I were them I’d go to work on you first, and probably make quite a mess of you, and if they decided they couldn’t get any more out of you, they’d move on to her.’

  ‘I had thought of selling the Datsun,’ said Sally. ‘Until they blew it up. That’s cutting off their nose to spite their face.’

  ‘They’re more likely to cut off your nose,’ said Duffy brutally.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Damian. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’

  ‘What are we actually talking about?’ said Duffy. ‘A variety of substances or just the one?’

  ‘Only coke, for Christ’s
sake.’ Damian sounded angry. ‘I wouldn’t touch the other stuff. And anyway,’ he added with needless disloyalty, ‘she’s the user, not me.’

  Sure, thought Duffy. She’s the user, you’re just the shopper. She’s the one who climbs up on the snooker table and takes off her knickers, you’re just the innocent fellow with the cue. She’s the one who lets down my van tyres, you’re the one who suggests it and then bottles out at the last minute in case someone’s coming. She’s going to be the casualty, you’re going to be the survivor; but without people like you she’d never have been a casualty in the first place. Have a taste of this, go on, no, I’m not feeling hungry myself. Bed? You’re not on the pill? Come on, let’s risk it, be a sport. Have another drink, why not have a double, actually I won’t, I’m driving myself. Then the Damians of this world would skedaddle away leaving the Sallies addicted, pregnant, drunk, wrecked. If there was anything to be said for the rough justice administered by the pushers, it was that it treated the Damians and the Sallies with even-handedness.

  ‘So you started off with a bill of fifteen. How did you let it get that big?’

  ‘They have this wonderful system of credit,’ said Damian enthusiastically, then stopped. It was obviously a phrase from before the trouble started.

  ‘And you had about a thousand, but that left you owing fourteen, so you had this idea of getting it out of Angela.’ He said it as a statement of the obvious. When they didn’t reply, he went on. ‘I’m not a copper. On the other hand, I’m not stupid. I just don’t see why you didn’t ask her for a loan.’

  ‘People are funny about money,’ said Sally, as if he ought to know. ‘Well, she’s got it, she doesn’t know what to do with it, she’s going to get more when she marries Henry. Anyway, it was more fun this way.’

  Of course, thought Duffy, I keep forgetting about the fun factor, it’s more fun to blackmail one of your friends than just ask her for money which you might later have to repay. That’s the big difference between the two ways of doing it: the fun.