The Curious Affair of the Third Dog

by Patricia Moyes

  “Nevertheless, he drove that car—”

  “No.”

  There was a moment of incredulous silence. Then Jane said, “But he did, Henry. Everybody knows that. The two other men stayed in the Bull, and the police found Harry slumped over the wheel after the accident.”

  “I know that,” said Henry, “but the fact is that there was, in the classic phrase, a third man. A man who waited hidden in the car until Heathfield came out into the pub yard, who bundled him into the car, made sure he had passed out cold, and then drove to Heathfield’s house, where he knew very well that Lawson would be waiting, by appointment, leaning up against the front wall. He deliberately ran Lawson down, arranged the unconscious Heathfield artistically behind the wheel, and left the scene of the crime with all speed.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Bill. “The woman next door heard the crash and looked out of her window—”

  “She was in bed and asleep,” Henry pointed out. “The crash woke her. She had to get out of bed, put on a dressing gown, go to the window, and draw back the curtains. The road isn’t lit, you know.”

  “Still, surely she’d have seen the other man—”

  “I doubt it. You see, he was a black man. And a black man in a black suit can disappear very effectively in the dark.”

  Jane had been looking worried. She said, “But Henry, Amanda’s evidence was…what’s the matter, Emmy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Of course something’s the matter,” said Jane, with a sisterly lack of finesse. “You’ve gone as red as a beetroot.”

  Henry said, “She told you, did she, darling?” Emmy nodded. To Jane, Henry said, “I’m afraid your friend Amanda perjured herself in court. She was in a difficult position. She had met this delightful young Mr. Pennington in London—and he had some sort of hold on her. I imagine it was money, wasn’t it?” He looked inquiringly at Emmy.

  “Yes,” said Emmy. “Oh, I suppose it doesn’t matter telling you. Amanda asked me to, anyhow. It seems she’s always been keen on racing, and liked to have a bit of a flutter—nothing terrible, but you know Sir Arthur’s views on the subject. She met Pennington, and he gave her a lot of so-called tips, some of which paid off but others didn’t. She gradually got thoroughly enmeshed—you know how it happens—and found she owed a great deal in gambling debts. Far more than she could afford. She didn’t dare tell her father. Then Pennington came to the rescue. He not only paid her debts—feeling guilty, he said, because she’d taken his advice and it hadn’t worked—but he also lent her money to start up her market-garden business. Funnily enough, Pennington’s philanthropy—well, his interest in Amanda—blossomed just after she had mentioned to him something that Tommy, the kennel lad at Hilltop, had told her—”

  Bill and Jane exclaimed in unison, “About Marlene’s Fancy and Griselda!”

  “That’s right,” said Emmy. “Apparently, Tommy took Griselda up to Doblington for her one and only race, and he noticed that the winner was a dead ringer for Griselda. He told Amanda, and she passed it on to Pennington, and—”

  “And so,” Henry said, “he asked her—very politely, I’m sure—if she’d do him a small favor.”

  “That’s right. It sounded perfectly innocent, Amanda said. He asked her to drive her car to a crossroads near the Bull at a certain time on a certain evening, and watch out for a certain other car going past. Weatherby’s car. He described it and gave her the license number. He said he was having some sort of legal wrangle with the owner, and wanted an independent witness who could testify that the car was in Gorsemere that evening. Amanda said it sounded a bit odd, but not in any way illegal—and she could hardly refuse when he’d been so generous to her.”

  “Generous!” Bill Spence snorted sardonically.

  “Well, she thought he had. Of course, it was the evening of the Heathfield affair. Amanda saw the car go by, all right. She says it was being driven fast and very competently, and that she couldn’t see the driver—he just looked like a shadow, she said. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that he might have been a black man, but of course that would explain it.

  “Next day, she called Pennington as promised and told him what she had seen—and it was then he broke it to her that she was to testify in court that the car was being driven in a slow, drunken, weaving way, and that she had positively recognized Harry Heathfield at the wheel. She was horrified and refused—whereupon he brought out the big stick. It appears he hadn’t paid her gambling debts at all… I didn’t quite understand how he worked it…”

  Henry said, “I can explain. Pennington’s occupation is listed as Company Director, and I had Sergeant Reynolds look him up. His companies are bookmakers and money-lenders—not under his own name, of course. When he so kindly put on Amanda’s bets for her, she had no idea that he was, in effect taking them himself. Of course, he could suspend them and tell her he’d paid them. Equally, he could bring out all the documentation of unpaid debts and threaten to sue.”

  Emmy said, “I think if Amanda had had only herself to think of, she might have said, ‘Sue and be damned.’ But there was her father. Sir Arthur, fourth baronet, squire of the village, Chairman of the Board of Magistrates, and a well-known anti-gambler. Think what the Daily Scoop would make of it—‘Baronet’s Daughter in Gaming Debt Scandal’—just the sort of thing they love.”

  Jane nodded, slowly. “It would have finished Sir Arthur,” she said.

  “Well,” Emmy went on, “that’s why Amanda finally agreed. Pennington seems to have half-persuaded her that Heathfield was guilty anyway and that it was him she saw at the wheel. Anyhow, once she’d been idiot enough to give perjured evidence, Pennington had a real stranglehold on her.”

  “And yet he tried to kill her this evening, if I understand aright?” Bill remarked.

  “Yes,” said Henry. “You see, she was the only person left who could identify Pennington and tie him in with Lawson’s murder and the business of the greyhounds. She was too dangerous. That’s why we had to get him tonight before he got her, and it was a near thing.”

  Jane said, “All right, that seems to take care of Amanda and her part in all this. But there’s a whole lot more to explain. Who is this Pennington, anyway, and how does he come to be mixed up in all this?”

  “That’s a very good question, Jane,” Henry said, “because it goes right to the heart of the matter. Once you understand who Albert Pennington is, it becomes very much easier to understand why he did what he did.”

  “Well, who is he?”

  “He’s the son of the late Sir Humphrey Pennington, a larger-than-life, hard-drinking, heavy-gambling character from the fifties, who ran through most of his considerable inheritance—largely thanks to his string of thoroughbred horses. Albert inherited what was left of the money—still enough to leave him a rich man by most standards—together with tendencies to compulsive gambling, transvestism, homosexuality, violence, and—above all—slumming. He couldn’t compete in the really wealthy world of horseracing, so he turned his attention to the humbler dog track. For some years now he has been amusing himself by assuming two personalities. On the one hand, the mustachioed, upper-class Mr. Pennington, crony of Major Weatherby, acquaintance of Sir Arthur Bratt-Cunningham and his charming daughter, and behind-the-scenes Mr. Big of the Red Dicky Marsh dog track mob. On the other, and always in drag, a formidable, foul-mouthed female—the mysterious, unnamed boss of the Larry Lawson gang. With his warped sense of humor, he must have had a lot of giggles, turning one gang against the other and watching the fun from his elegant Chelsea house.”

  Emmy said, “I don’t know how you can be sure of all this, Henry. Well—perhaps you know it now, when Scotland Yard’s been mobilized to investigate Pennington—but what made you suspect it?”

  Henry said, “For a long time, I didn’t. I tried to make logical deductions—but certain facts simply wouldn’t fit into the pattern. There had to be somebody in the know on both sides, manipulating both gangs, pulling the strin
gs. Well, given a set of facts like that, my rule is always to assume the impossible—or at least the unlikely—and look around to see if the cap fits. As soon as I visited Albert Pennington, I could see that this cap was tailor-made for him.”

  “That’s as clear as mud,” said Emmy succinctly. “Try going back a bit, or something. Tell us what happened to the greyhounds.”

  “All right,” said Henry. “That’s as good a starting point as any. The trouble really began when Larry Lawson bought Marlene’s Fancy, and she turned out to be a champion.” The bitch in question, her sleeping attention perhaps caught by the mention of her name, rolled over onto her back and yawned hugely. Henry grinned at her. “Yes, you started it all, young lady. You, and your namesake, Marlene. The fact of the matter was that Larry Lawson was getting above himself. Before, he’d been a little third-rate crook, and easy for Pennington to twist round his little finger. Then, a couple of years ago, things changed. Larry Lawson met and married Marlene Bertini, who is an intelligent and formidable girl. He also bought this greyhound bitch, registered in his mother-in-law’s name, and began to rake in money. Marlene demanded a large house, and of course Pennington—or rather one of his companies—financed the buying of the Lawson house in Finchley, which gave him a hold of some sort on Marlene and Larry—but it wasn’t enough. They were doing well, and they certainly weren’t going to go on taking orders from any unidentified female on the telephone. It soon got so that only Shorty Bates and poor Mrs. Bertini were really impressed by Pennington’s ridiculous alter ego.”

  Jane said, “So that’s the mysterious ‘she’ that the girl and her mother were talking about in the bar at Bunstead.”

  Henry was interested. “You mean you overheard a conversation between Marlene and Mrs. Bertini? That could be important. What did they say?”

  “I can’t remember word for word. It started with Mrs. Bertini swanking about being an owner, and her daughter shutting her up. Then they started on about the purple and silver dress, which I gathered had been a present from ‘her’—and then Marlene said something about ‘she’ having told them some scandal about Larry and another woman. That must sound pretty garbled, but it’s as near as I can remember.”

  “It sounds one hundred percent accurate to me,” Henry said. “It completes the jigsaw neatly. Pennington was in the process of liquidating both his gangs, which had ceased to be amusing and had become an embarrassment. He intended to clean up financially on Lady Griselda’s win, and that was to be the end. However, there were some awkward loose ends hanging around. Amanda, who knew there was something shady in Pennington’s connection with the Heathfield case. And Marlene and her mother.”

  “And Bates?” Emmy suggested.

  Henry shook his head. “Too small a fish for Pennington to worry about. Bates had never seen him, even in drag—and with the gang thoroughly dispersed, Bates would simply have disappeared back into the mud, where he came from. No, it was the women who worried Pennington, and so he thought up a typical scheme. To murder Amanda and frame Mrs. Bertini for the crime. He made sure she would be wearing a most conspicuous outfit, which he duplicated for himself and hid in his car. He made sure she would be in or around the car park at the time of the shooting. And to provide a motive, he fed Marlene and her mother with a tale about goings-on between Larry Lawson and that attractive girl who gave evidence at Heathfield’s trial. What—he must have asked Marlene—did she think her husband was doing down in Gorsemere anyway? It’s clear Marlene didn’t know. If he’d got away with it—slipped off and changed back into his city-gent clothes and false mustache, having made sure that somebody got a glimpse of the purple dress—what chance do you think Mrs. Bertini would have had of being believed when she protested her innocence?” Suddenly, Henry hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Of course. Weatherby. Major George Weatherby, the eternally convenient witness. Weatherby would have served a double purpose—he’d have provided an alibi for his friend Pennington, who never left his side all evening, and he’d have conveniently happened to notice a blonde woman in a striking outfit hurrying toward the car park. Thank God I was there.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Bill said, “Well, I’m as much in the dark as Marlene. What was Lawson doing in Gorsemere that evening?”

  “He was being set up to be murdered,” said Henry grimly, “but he imagined that he had a date with Harry Heathfield to discuss the purchase of Lady Griselda. Once Pennington heard from Amanda about the virtually identical greyhounds, he worked out a scheme which was designed with a double purpose. To make a lot of money, and to dispose of his unwanted minions by setting them against each other. Heathfield had no appointment with Lawson, of course, but Pennington assured Lawson it was all arranged. In that way, he knew exactly where Lawson would be, at what time. They had, of course, mapped out the substitution plan. Lawson imagined he was on to a good thing, and agreed enthusiastically. So far, so good.

  “Pennington’s next step was to go to the rival mob—Red Dicky Marsh and the West Indian Cal Smith—and tip them off. He outlined a most attractive scheme whereby the Marsh gang could not only dispose of Lawson permanently and be sure of pinning the blame on an innocent man; as a bonus, the man in question, the owner of this potentially valuable hound, was certain to be hauled off to prison—at which moment, what could be easier than to steal Lady Griselda? Whoever would notice if a dog was missing?

  “Pennington knew from Amanda that Heathfield always took a pint or so in the White Bull, and he undertook to make sure he passed out at the appropriate time. Cal Smith, of course, was waiting in the car outside and did the actual killing of Lawson. That disposed neatly of him, too, because it gave Pennington an absolute hold over him. Like the ten little Indians, Pennington’s potentially awkward associates were being rubbed out at a satisfactory rate.”

  “And I suppose it was Smith who stole Griselda while Harry was in court?” said Jane.

  “Smith or Marsh or both,” said Henry. “In any case, they hid her in the shed of the house they shared in Wimbledon. Their next move was supposed to be to take her up north to the kennels where Marlene’s Fancy was boarded, and do a swap. Lawson was out of the way, and neither Mrs. Bertini—the so-called owner—nor her daughter had ever seen the greyhound. Bates was too stupid to matter. It would be in the bag, and they could clean up a packet once they had possession of both dogs. It all sounded very attractive—but it didn’t work out like that. The very next evening after Griselda was stolen, Marsh was in the hospital and Smith was in prison.”

  Emmy looked at her husband, her eyes widening. “Henry, you don’t mean it was Pennington—?”

  “Of course it was. The only honest witness we could lay hands on after the Runworth shooting gave it as his impression that the shots were fired by a tall, blonde woman. Does that remind you of anything?”

  “Pennington’s not particularly tall,” Jane objected.

  “Not for a man,” Henry pointed out. “He’s five-foot-nine. That’s pretty tall for a woman.”

  “And of course,” Emmy added thoughtfully, “Smith and Marsh knew him as Albert Pennington, the company director of Chelsea.”

  “That’s right. For once, Dicky Marsh was speaking the truth when he told the police afterward that he had no idea who had shot him.”

  “You’re making my head burst, trying to follow all this,” Bill complained. “We seem to have reached a point where the Marsh-Smith setup is out of action. Right?”

  “Right. Whereupon, the mysterious ‘she’ calls up Shorty Bates and tells him that he can collect Lady Griselda at his leisure from the Wimbledon garden shed. Armed with a letter from Mrs. Bertini authorizing him to remove Marlene’s Fancy from her Yorkshire kennels, Bates—not to mention Marlene and her mother—will be sitting pretty, with both greyhounds in their possession. All they have to do is to make the switch and run Marlene’s Fancy in Lady Griselda’s name, and everyone’ll be rich.”

  “I don’t see how you can be sure of all th
is,” Jane said. “It must be guesswork.”

  “Not really. Thanks to the vigilance of a certain Mrs. Rundle-Webster and the conscientiousness of Constable Hawthorn, I definitely established that Bates turned up in his blue van at the Wimbledon house the evening Smith was arrested, which means he must have taken Griselda. He then arranged with Marlene to board her temporarily at the Lawson’s empty house in Finchley, where I as near as dammit caught up with them. Bates literally whisked Griselda out of there from under my nose, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Pennington, meanwhile, had arranged with Amanda and Tommy to have her boarded quietly at an old kennel at Hilltop.”

  Bill whistled. “I say,” he said. “Amanda was pretty deep into all this, wasn’t she?”

  “She had no choice,” said Henry. “As I explained. As for Tommy, the kennel boy, they used a mixture of stick and carrot—bribes and threats. It wasn’t difficult to hide one extra greyhound in that vast establishment.”

  “Simon and Bella didn’t know, then?”

  “No, I’m sure they didn’t.” Henry smiled, a little ruefully. “There we all were, scouring the countryside for Griselda, and all the time she was sitting quietly at home.”

  Emmy, who had been calculating days of the week on her fingers, said, “But there was a delay of several days before they raced Marlene’s Fancy as Lady Griselda for the first time. Why was that?”

  “It was the minimum time possible,” Henry explained. “Marlene’s Fancy had to be collected from Yorkshire, and then re-boarded at a perfectly respectable training establishment in the Midlands as Lady Griselda. She was then entered from this kennel for the Kevingfield race, which of course she won. That was to give an air of respectability to her big win at Bunstead, and also to ensure that her card didn’t have to go back to the NGRC between the two races. Meanwhile, Pennington, Bates, and the two women were quietly placing large numbers of smallish bets under various names on Lady Griselda to win the 8:30 at Bunstead. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. And then I got too close behind them.”