Tooth and Claw

by Oliver Davies

  There was a grunt from off to the side, and I looked up to see Stephen struggling with the guys he was holding as they tried to kick him.

  “Damn it,” I muttered, reluctantly pulling free from Brian. He leaned against the pub wall and waved me off so that I could go and help Stephen out.

  The backup officers finally turned up, efficiently taking Brian’s attackers off our hands. A couple of them went off to scout the streets for the third guy, the one I’d recognised and hadn’t even tried to follow, while Brian was loaded into a waiting ambulance.

  “Darren!” he called anxiously as the paramedics were trying to close the doors. I strode over to him, scanning his bloodied face.

  “What is it? Are you okay?”

  “My dog. He’s called Fido,” Brian told me all in a rush. “You’ve got to find him, please, Darren. He’s everything to me.”

  “Alright, look, just give me a second,” I said to both him and the paramedics, who weren't looking too impressed by the delay.

  I beelined over to Stephen, who was giving his account of what had happened to one of the officers to write down, but he looked up when I came over to him.

  “Y’alright, Mitch?”

  “Aye, I’m going to go with Brian to the hospital, okay? He’s worried about his dog, so I’ll forward the details once I know ‘em.”

  “Another missing dog? Coincidence?” Stephen wondered aloud with a slight frown.

  “I don’t know. The dog could be a Pomeranian for all I know. Look, I better go before the ambulance leaves without me.”

  “Sure, call me when you get to the hospital.”

  So I jumped into the back of the ambulance to ride with Brian to A&E, letting him tell me all about his dog, Fido, before the ambulance crew gave him some strong painkillers, and he lost focus. I called Stephen to give him an update as Brian was being seen by the doctors, and he answered on the second ring.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Brian’s probably got a twisted ankle, at least, but he’ll be alright. He managed to protect his head, which is the most important thing.” I took a breath, running out of air after speaking so quickly. “About his dog, it is a Staffy. Brian left the animal tied up outside the post office for no more than two minutes, he said. A couple of men were bundling Fido into a van as Brian was coming out, and Brian tried to tackle them.”

  “Brave but stupid. A bit like you, really,” Stephen said, making me laugh tightly.

  “Aye, exactly. So the guys drive off, and Brian tried to go after them, but another car pulled up with the three guys that attacked him, and he had to take off. You know the rest, obviously.”

  “Damn. So we’re looking at another possible theft of a dog specifically for dogfighting? I mean, that’s the first thing that comes to my mind.”

  “And mine,” I agreed.

  “I’ll get it out on the radio that we’re looking for a missing dog. Did Brian say what the dog looked like? I don’t suppose he got the van’s license plate?”

  “He remembered half of it,” I said, reeling it off. “And the dog’s a brindle, big white patch on his chest. Pretty big dog, Brian said, and its tail is docked. It was a rescue.”

  “That probably marked it out, poor thing,” Stephen said, and I hated to agree with him.

  I thought it unlikely that the dogfighters had planned to steal the dog. Instead, they spotted Fido left outside the post office and acted opportunistically in grabbing it when they saw that Fido was big, a Staffy, and had the markings of a fighting dog. But maybe they had seen Fido before, perhaps when Brian was out walking him, and followed Brian until Fido was left alone. We wouldn’t know until we talked to the two we’d grabbed if they’d talk.

  “And what about that guy you said you recognised? The one who ran off,” Stephen said, lowering his voice slightly. He was over at Hewford, and I wondered whether there was someone nearby who could be listening in.

  “He’s one of Phil’s mates. I’ve seen him down at the pub a couple of times, I’m sure of it. He could be Phil’s employee too, maybe.”

  “Well, he definitely seems to be involved in this dogfighting business if he’s going around stealing people’s dogs.” His face scrunched up in disgust.

  “That seems like the most probable reason.” I dragged a hand through my hair. I needed to get it cut before the dogfight, but I hadn’t got around to going to a barber’s yet. “I’m sorry I didn’t grab him, I didn’t want him catching sight of me and-”

  “I know, mate, you made the right call. I think so, anyway, but we’ll have to see what Rashford thinks, I suppose. We couldn’t have held him, anyway. We already had two perps, plus a badly injured civvie. We had to prioritise. Hopefully, he’ll get picked up on CCTV from the pub or nearby, and we’ll get him without you having to go anywhere near him.”

  “Aye, fingers crossed. We’ll just have to hope that he didn’t see me before he bolted. If he tells Phil that, it’s all over for me.”

  The worst part was that I wouldn’t know whether or not I was completely in the clear until the fight was over and done and I was safely back home. I didn’t think that Phil was the type to play games, but he could theoretically hold out on saying that he knew who I was until we were right in the middle of a crowd of dogfighters. If I was exposed there, I’d been torn apart like Acteon was by his hounds. The thought turned my stomach.

  Stephen fixed me with a long look. “If you get any inkling, even the slightest hint, that Phil or anyone else knows about you, you get the hell out of there, Mitch, y’hear me?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Don’t hang around like you did at the farm. You ditch and run immediately. Promise me.”

  I thought about waving him off, somewhat irritated by his demanding tone, but I could see the fear in his eyes, and I made myself nod.

  “Aye, okay, I hear you.”

  “Good.”

  He gave me a relieved smile, and I patted him on the shoulder, trying to tell him without words that everything would turn out just fine. I had no guarantee of that, of course, but I had to stay calm and steady in the run-up to this event or I wouldn’t be able to do it. And I had to because there wasn’t anyone else who could.

  That night, I was up late, unable to sleep despite the rigorous self-defence lesson I had after work. My bones ached with tiredness, but my mind was spinning in circles, turning over all the possible scenarios for the case and keeping me awake.

  I finally got myself out of bed and fixed myself a peppermint tea. I was craving a coffee, but I certainly didn’t need any more caffeine. Mug in hand, I ended up in the sitting room, sitting on the floor in front of one of the cardboard boxes of my dad’s things that’d come from Phil’s attic. I’d gone through the two boxes whilst at Phil’s and had since thrown out or donated most of it, but there was still a thick wedge of paperwork at the bottom of this box that I hadn’t gone through yet.

  I hadn’t touched it yet, not having the energy for sorting through all of it and trying to decide if any of it warranted keeping, but I was still too awake to sleep right now, so I got started.

  The dust on the pages made me sneeze, and I grimaced as I brushed it off. I started at the top of the pile and worked methodically through them, sighing when I realised that they hadn’t been sorted in the slightest. There were documents put together that were ten years apart in date, banking paperwork resting right alongside letters from the dentist. My dad clearly hadn’t thrown much out, and Phil must’ve kept it all without looking through it.

  Not that I blamed him. He’d been dealing with sorting through all of my dad’s things, plus selling the house and organising the funeral, so it was hardly surprising that he’d not had the time to look through a collection of old papers.

  My heart still twinged slightly with gratitude at the memory of Phil handling all the practicalities after my dad’s death. I sighed aloud, wishing that Phil had got himself on the straight and narrow like I had. I didn’t let myself imagine how thi
ngs might’ve been different if Phil had got himself a regular job and we’d met again at this time of life because the thought was painful.

  I focused on getting the papers into some semblance of order, sorting them by date and topic. Most of them were bills or bank statements, but I did find one hand-written letter addressed to my dad from my mum, which I turned over as soon as I realised what it was. That was private, and I didn’t feel right reading it. I set that aside to give to my mum the next time I saw her, so that she could do with it as she willed. The thought that I would be seeing her again soon after so long of trying not to think about her sent a pulse of happiness through me.

  That feeling was extinguished as surely as a blown-out candle as I looked over the next piece of paper. I swore quietly, dropping the page like it’d burnt me, and stared at it blankly, my mind racing. I fumbled in my pocket for my phone and took a picture of it, sending it to Stephen so that he’d see it in the morning. I didn’t add a caption, trusting that he’d realise what it was as soon as he read it.

  I had no memory of there ever being dogs in the house while I was a kid, but this paperwork detailed the shipping of a dog from Finland. From my research, I knew too well that the poor animal had almost certainly been a fighting dog, and here was my dad’s name put down in plain ink paying for the transfer.

  The date on it told me that this had happened when I was a toddler, and I wondered why my dad had stopped. He seemed to have stayed involved in the dogfighting scene for a decade or more afterwards, judging by the dates on the dogfighting magazines, and yet there were no more papers about dogs, and I’d never heard him talk about it. Maybe my mum had talked him out of it, I thought, but she’d denied knowing anything about him being involved in dogfighting. Perhaps that’s why he hadn’t bought another dog, to keep her from knowing.

  Or maybe, I thought cynically, he’d just run out of money. Well-bred fighting dogs weren’t cheap, and that wasn’t to mention the transfer costs between countries.

  I swallowed down the lump in my throat and took a sip of my lukewarm tea. I knew it was illogical because I’d only been a child when this happened, but reading my dad’s name on the paper made guilt swirl in my stomach. I thought about the times I could’ve talked to the authorities as a teenager when I’d suspected my dad’s job wasn’t exactly what he said it was, but it was pointless dwelling on a past I couldn’t change. I’d only been a lad, and I would’ve ended up in foster care if my dad had been charged and taken away.

  Despite it all, he’d been a decent dad to me, and I couldn’t regret the years I had with him as a teen, even knowing what he’d been into and how it’ll all turned out.

  Still, this felt like a legacy I needed to fix. My dad had died before he’d faced any consequences, and now I felt responsible for ensuring that justice would be served. Dark as it was, the fact that he wasn’t here to see me now relieved me because I knew he would’ve hated that I’d become a cop. I’d been born into a house where the lights were kept on through ill-begotten money, and now I felt that I owed it to those brutalised dogs and to all the others that had surely been hurt through my dad’s greed for more, to set things right.

  It wasn’t what my dad would’ve wanted, but it was what I had to do.

  Twenty-Three

  Phil got in touch to tell me that the fight would be happening on Friday night. Of course, he didn’t call it that, but we both knew what he was talking about. I did my self-defence classes and tried to reassure both Sam and Stephen as I got ready, as well as keeping myself calm. Ross and Rashford worked with us to get a rough strategy in place, as well as some contingency plans, though Rashford reminded me multiple times that I’d be primarily on my own once I was in there.

  Friday came around too slow and too fast at once, and I bounced my leg under the table as I waited in the pub. I was set to meet Phil there, and then he’d drive a couple of his other pals and me over to the fight. I got the impression that I was the only newbie, and I didn’t find that too reassuring, but it was what it was. I was as prepared as I could be, and I’d just have to roll with the punches from here on out.

  I’d ummed and ahhed over whether to wear a tiny camera and a microphone or not. I’d been persuaded into it because my eyewitness account wouldn’t be enough to totally sink these people without video and audio footage as well, and I didn’t really want to have to do this whole thing again. On the other hand, I’d been talking to Freddie to hear all he could tell me, and he’d warned me that people were often patted down before a fight and if I was found with a mike and camera, I’d be dead meat.

  I was still worrying about it when Phil turned up, slapping my back as he pulled me into a bro hug before he led the way out to his car. It was a truly frozen night, the roads icy where they hadn’t been gritted, and I made sure that my seatbelt was buckled up tightly as I got in. Phil put me in the passenger seat next to him, making it clear that my status as his oldest mate put me above his work colleagues and employees. It made me slightly uneasy, and I swore I could feel the other two guys sitting in the back glaring a hole in the back of my neck, but I didn’t turn around to check.

  “The place isn’t too far now,” Phil told us, his chatter filling the car.

  The blokes in the back joined in, their energy and excitement clear as they talked about the dogs that were going to be there and which ones they’d be betting on. My heart sped up as I listened, but I kept my cool when one of them asked which dogs I was looking at. Keira Adams, our tech expert at Hewford, had dug up a Facebook page filled with posts on local dogfights, including dogs who were in the game.

  There was a brief pause after I mentioned one of the promising-looking dogs, and I had a second to worry that I’d given myself away before Phil started nodding.

  “Yeah, he’s a strong one. Gonna go far, I reckon.”

  “Yeah, sound choice,” one of the guys in the back agreed grudgingly.

  I realised that they’d been trying to embarrass me, knowing that I was newer to the scene, and hadn’t expected me to have an answer. I released a breath when the conversation moved away to less dangerous territories, and the drive wore on.

  The further we went, the more complete the blackness out the car windows became until I could see no lights at all. The absolute darkness outside turned the glass of the window into a monochrome mirror, and I looked at my tense, serious face for a moment before I turned back to the front.

  “You’ve done something to your hair, right mate?” Phil said a minute later, glancing over at me.

  “Just had it cut,” I said, running a hand over it self-consciously.

  I hadn’t had it this short since I was in training for the police, and having it out of my face and off the back of my neck made me feel even more exposed. I’d stuck on a pair of glasses with clear lenses, too, and it had been strange how the smallest of changes altered my face and made me look like a stranger to myself. But that was the idea.

  “It looks good. Reminds me of we were in school,” Phil said, chuckling.

  “You mean I look like my skinny, pimply teenage self? Thanks, mate,” I said, forcing myself to relax enough to joke.

  “Oh hell, you know what I meant,” he laughed.

  The conversation went on, and I settled back for a while, feeling the rumble of the car’s engine under my feet and forcing myself not to fiddle with the microphone attached to my chest.

  “-after last time got called off, I’m raring to go, y’feel me?” Phil was talking, and I straightened up.

  “What’re you saying?” I asked. Phil glanced over at me and waved his hand.

  “It’s just these troubles we’ve been having, man. The cops sniffing around, sitting around on their arses and watching things.”

  If I’d ever been in any doubt about Phil’s views on the subject, the absolute disgust in his voice when he said ‘cops’ told me what he’d think of my job. He’d blow a gasket if he knew he was sitting right next to a cop, I thought sourly.

  “Wha
t do you mean? Is it safe?” I said, pulling my head back into the game and trying to sound like it was the police I was worried about and not anything else.

  Phil snorted. “You should know these things aren’t ever really safe, but that’s why we go, right? But if you’re talking about a cop raid tonight, nah. Not happening. It’ll be fine. They’ve run out of money to keep snooping around, I reckon.”

  “You want to go abroad, that’s what I keep telling you,” one of the guys from the back spoke up. “No cops at all ‘cus they don’t give a damn, it’s ruddy heaven.”

  I listened as they continued to talk, but mostly kept quiet, preparing myself for what was coming. I wouldn’t only need to appear to be tolerating the dogfighting but to be actively enjoying it, and right now, I was wondering if that was going to prove beyond me. These men were talking about driving a hundred miles or catching a plane to a whole other country to go to these bloodthirsty, awful fights, and I couldn’t even begin to see the appeal.

  We arrived before I was really ready, but I braced myself and climbed out of the car. We were out in the middle of nowhere, and Phil had kept the location deliberately mysterious from the rest of us, but I thought I knew exactly where we were. LACS had been right about the farm not being completely abandoned, and here I was, back again only days after Stephen and I had dug that poor dog up from behind the barn.

  I tried not to let it show that I recognised the place as Phil led the way forwards up the lane towards the barn with lights on inside. It relieved me to see that the barn they’d chosen was a reasonably sturdy-looking one, so this night hopefully wouldn’t end with the building collapsing on top of us.

  At the entrance to the barn, a bulky pair of blokes stood with their arms crossed, and I tensed. There was a short queue to get in, and I fought the urge to fidget nervously as we got closer. The men were broader across the shoulders than even Stephen, and they looked to be taller than me too, but it was when I realised what they were doing that I felt the blood go out of my face. They were there to supervise and ensure compliance as another smaller man patted down the visitors arriving, searching their clothes thoroughly.