by Kate Medina
Crossing the hallway, she walked into the sitting room, skirting quietly around the back of the sofa so as not to disturb Leo’s viewing. There were double doors to the garden in here too, matching those in the kitchen. She twisted the handle: locked. Of course they were. She and Simon liked to leave them all open in the summer, let the outside billow into the house, but since chilly autumn weather had arrived a few weeks ago, they hadn’t opened them.
With a piercing scream, she leapt back from the doors.
Her next thought, barely coherent: Leo, my baby. I must protect my baby.
Then: Oh God. God, God, God.
28
Jessie watched Cherry twist the sign on the front door from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’ and lock the door. She turned back to Jessie. ‘I didn’t use to lock it when I went out back to see the dogs, but I’ve had a visitor, so I’m more careful now.’
‘A visitor? Someone breaking in?’
‘No, not breaking in. Heavens, I don’t even know why I’m bothering to lock the door as they just seem to be able to get in anyway.’
Jessie met her gaze with a raised eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone or something has been getting into Paws for Thought at night.’
‘Every night?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Just sometimes.’
‘You don’t sound that sure.’
‘I’m not sure …’ Cherry tailed off with a shrug.
Jessie thought of the Fullers, of someone, something, tricking its way into their house. She looked past Cherry to the double doors, to the faint shape of her Mini outside. The tiny car park was lit only by the rectangle of light cast from the glass door to reception, most of it in darkness. She was pleased now that she’d have Lupo to accompany her when she left this evening. She’d wait for Cherry to lock up too, wait until she’d got into her car.
‘How do you know that someone’s been coming in at night then?’ she asked.
‘I found a muddy footprint on the doormat.’
Jessie frowned. The whole thing sounded mad. ‘When?’
‘About a month ago.’
Jessie turned back to the door. The doormat was red, carpet-style, surrounded by a black rubber border. It looked like the type of doormat that would be sold under the moniker ‘grabs dirt’. There was a scattering of faint footprints on it now, hers included, the most recent, still shiny with damp from the pothole she’d sunk into while feeling her way blindly across the car park.
‘What kind of shoe print was it?’
Cherry looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’
‘A man’s? Woman’s? Smooth-soled, a trainer, a rugged work-boot type?’
Cherry widened her eyes and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t even think about it at the time. We were open by then and I just saw a huge muddy print on my doormat.’
‘Huge?’
‘I don’t know. It was just a muddy print.’
‘But not a woman’s shoe?’ Jessie moved back to the doormat, and planted her boot next to the print she had made when she’d entered.
‘No, not a woman’s shoe, or not a dainty woman’s shoe anyway.’ Cherry sighed. ‘I just like things to be tidy. I think it’s important, don’t you think? Particularly for an animal charity. I think people come in here expecting us to be dirty and chaotic, and I want them to leave with entirely the opposite impression. I want them to know that they can adopt an animal from us without it being riddled in fleas or infested with mange.’
Jessie nodded. The reception area was spotless. Nothing here to rile her OCD, goad the electric suit into life.
‘When I saw the print, I just grabbed the Hoover from the cupboard and whizzed it over the doormat. It was only a bit later that I realized how odd it was that the print had been there at all, because I Hoover every night. It didn’t occur to me at the time as I was in such a rush, but clearly it shouldn’t have been there.’
‘Is there anything else that makes you think someone is breaking in at night?’
‘They’re not breaking in.’ Cherry sounded tense. She was clearly more disturbed by this visitor than she was admitting. ‘They’re letting themselves in.’
‘With a key?’
Cherry shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I assume that, or they’re picking the lock.’
‘What is the lock like?’
‘It’s a Yale lock. Nothing fancy.’ She paused, catching the look on Jessie’s face. ‘Do you think I should be worried?’
Jessie answered with a non-sequitur. ‘What security do you have?’ She did a three-sixty of the reception area. ‘Is that camera real?’
‘No, it’s a dummy. We’re only a small local charity and pretty backwater. I didn’t want to spend the money for a real one and I’ve never needed to.’
‘Before now.’
Cherry lifted her shoulders and gave a reluctant nod at the same time. ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
‘Get a real one. You can get them online for a pittance.’
‘Yes, but then I have to pay someone to connect it up, and that won’t come cheap. We’re hand to mouth here and I want to spend every penny we have on the dogs. We don’t have anything to steal and we’ve never had any problems. It’s not like we house the Crown Jewels.’ A defensive tone was rising in her voice and Jessie let it drop. Putting Cherry’s back up over her security arrangements wouldn’t help anyone, and she wasn’t here for that anyway.
‘You can get a stand-alone camera off the Internet really cheaply,’ she said, as a final parting shot. ‘Like a Teddy Cam.’
‘Huh?’
‘A Teddy Cam. It’s just a nickname. It’s a camera hidden in a stuffed toy, so that you can set it on the mantelpiece and have it watch your nanny, or whoever you want to watch. Or you can just get a small, very discreet wireless camera to prop on the top of the desk, or a light fitting, or stick on the wall. An intruder wouldn’t even notice it.’
‘Aren’t they just a green light for creepy snoopers?’
‘Yes, if you have a mind to be a creepy snooper. However, they’re also a green light for you to have CCTV cheaply.’ She paused. Cherry didn’t strike her as someone who was in the slightest bit au fait with modern technology, and she still looked unconvinced. ‘Have you told the police about your visitor?’
Cherry nodded. ‘They sent a community liaison officer around after I called the first time, the day after I found that print on the doormat, but he didn’t do anything. I think he thought I was nuts to be honest. To be fair to him, it’s not the most convincing story, is it? That someone breaks into a dog rescue centre to lie in a dog’s basket for a few hours.’
‘To do what?’
‘To lie in a basket.’ Cherry looked embarrassed. ‘Didn’t I say?’
Jessie shook her head, incredulous. ‘No, you didn’t say.’
Cherry pressed her fingertips to her forehead. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just so busy, my brain doesn’t seem to work half the time. That’s one of the reasons that I haven’t got around to sorting out a camera. I work as a freelance bookkeeper too, to pay the bills. I’m kind of maxed out. Sorry.’
‘It’s fine. Don’t worry.’ Jessie wanted Cherry to get back to the point. ‘Tell me about the basket.’
Cherry sighed. ‘After that first time, when I found that footprint on the doorstep, I had a good look around. Actually, I didn’t immediately, because, as I said, it didn’t occur to me that a footprint was strange. But while I was sitting down having lunch and I had a moment to think, I realized that the footprint shouldn’t have been there. I was sure that something must be missing, but I couldn’t find anything. None of the dogs had been taken, none of them hurt. All the computing equipment was still here, nothing taken from the desk or the kitchen. The dogs’ food supplies were undisturbed.’
‘But?’ Jessie pressed. She wanted Cherry to get to the point.
‘I keep one of the cages empty as much as I can, in case any emergency abuse cases come in. It’s the last cage on the right, at t
he back of the kennel room. I’ll show you when we go through to see Lupo. I looked in there last, and that’s when I noticed that the basket had an imprint in it.’
‘An imprint? Of what? A human?’
Cherry shrugged. ‘Of something big. A big dog, like a German shepherd.’ She paused. ‘Or, yes, a human.’
‘Are you telling me that you think someone has been breaking in here to sleep in a dog’s bed?’
‘I suppose so … I am, yeah.’ She paused. ‘And they also play with the toys.’
29
Denise sucked in a desperate breath, a free-diver surfacing from a hundred feet below, her heart jammed gaggingly thick in her mouth.
She could see what it was now. What it was that had made her almost expire with utter terror. No monstrous form in the garden eyeballing her through the glass, but only the reflection from the television, brighter than usual as the night was so pitch-black. The Scooby-Doo monster, frozen for a second on screen, a huge, pale, malevolent, masked monster.
Ruh-roh, Raggy.
Gone now, the Mystery Machine chugging across the glass in its place. If she hadn’t still been so tense that she could barely catch breath, she would have laughed out loud with relief.
She turned. Leo’s frightened little face stared at her from the sofa, his mouth popped into a horrified, startled ‘O’. He looked as if he was about to cry. He looked as she felt.
‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry darling.’ Hand pressed to her chest, to try to force her breath to calm, she sat down next to him on the sofa. ‘Mummy’s fine, bean.’
Wrapping her arms around him, she pulled him onto her knee and hugged him tight. The jumbled look of fear and concern on his little face made her feel as if the wad in her throat would pop right out of her mouth on a gush of tears. Her beautiful, sensitive little boy.
Pressing her lips to the top of his head, she murmured, ‘I love you so much, bean.’ She didn’t even realize that she was crying until the dampness on his duck’s-fluff hair wet her cheek. ‘I love you so much. So so much and whatever happens, I will always, always look after you.’ She smeared the tears into her sleeve and forced a smile. ‘Ruh-roh, my little Raggy-boy.’
He smiled back, a lopsided, not-really-sure smile. ‘Ruh-roh, Mummy.’
30
They exited the reception area, into a second, much larger room, ten metres wide and twenty or so long, concrete-floored, built-in cages lining either wall, a walkway in between. As soon as Cherry cracked open the door from the reception area, a tide of barking rose: a few excited yaps at first and then more, louder, deeper; a cat’s chorus, if it hadn’t been dogs, as if barking was contagious, which Jessie reasoned it probably was. By the time Cherry had closed the door behind them, locking them together in the kennel room, there was a line of excited dogs jumping against their cage doors. At the far end of the walkway, beyond the double rows of cages, was a glass door that led into a grassy, high-walled outside space.
‘Lupo is at the far end,’ Cherry shouted above the noise. ‘Don’t put your fingers through any of the cages. They’re all friendly, but some are a mite too friendly and it’s feeding time soon.’
The barking rose and then fell, like some ‘normal distribution’ of dog noise as Jessie and Cherry walked down the walkway, past a motley assortment of mutts of all shapes and sizes.
Cherry stopped at the second-to-last cage on the right-hand side. ‘Here’s Lupo,’ she said.
Jessie’s eyes widened. She hadn’t expected him to be so big. In fact, she hadn’t known what she’d been expecting – stupidly hadn’t thought beyond Claudine Fuller’s sad, bedraggled body, beyond those photos of Lupo, her baby, everywhere in that cold mausoleum of a house, beyond the sad horror of her dream. God, along with Callan he’d fill the whole of her tiny sitting room. Two Gullivers in Lilliput, one human and one canine.
Cherry must have picked up on her hesitation. ‘He’s lovely, very gentle. Really, no trouble at all.’ She paused. ‘We need the cage.’
Jessie nodded in a way she hoped looked more unequivocally firm than it felt. ‘I’m taking him, of course. I just—’
‘Didn’t expect him to be so big?’
‘Yes.’
Eunice Hargreaves, the old lady who had seen him tied to the lamp post, had described him as a wolf – a wild wolf roaming free in the Canadian Rockies – and here and now Jessie could see why. He didn’t belong in a concrete cage. He probably didn’t belong in a tiny workman’s cottage in the Surrey Hills, but at least she had a decent garden and her cottage was surrounded by countryside. Callan ran most mornings before work, so he could take his doppelganger Gulliver with him, and she could walk him too. Once this case was over. Once she got back to her normal life again, or at least until Marilyn came knocking again. Once … once … once. The case had hardly begun and she so desperately wanted it to end.
‘Is that the empty cage you were talking about?’ Jessie asked, tilting her head. ‘The one you found the imprint in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Sure, but there’s nothing to see.’
‘What about the bed, the imprint?’
‘I shook the bed out, put it back as it should be. I like things to be tidy.’
Oh God. What about evidence?
‘What about—’ she broke off. This wasn’t about a murder. It wasn’t even about theft or vandalism. Whoever was visiting hadn’t broken in, they had a key or had picked the front door lock. They came quietly, left as quietly and did – what? – in between? Lay down in a dog’s bed? Played with dog toys? She glanced over at Cherry with her mad shock of hot-orange hair, thick black eyeliner and orange lipstick. Jessie wasn’t surprised that the community liaison officer hadn’t believed her. Jessie was struggling to believe her.
‘And the toys?’
‘I can’t get the teeth marks out of them, obviously, but I wash them.’
Stepping sideways, leaving Lupo – the only dog who hadn’t leapt against his door when they walked past – sitting in his basket looking as forlorn as that poor little Jack Russell in the oil painting in the reception area, Jessie unlatched the door of the empty cage. It was a spotless space that she would have been delighted to call her own: not a speck of dirt on the concrete floor, the dog bed, a large circular disc of royal-blue fleece, clean and thickly padded, two stainless-steel dog bowls, both empty and sparkling clean, and a selection of toys laid out next to the bowls. Ducking down, Jessie pressed her hand into the fleece bed. It sprang back at her, without leaving a dent.
‘Can I lie on it?’
Cherry looked doubtful. ‘I thought that you said you weren’t police.’
‘I’m not. But I do work with them. I’m a—’ What? What was she? Marilyn wished that she was Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes’ resident psychic, but at the moment she felt like excess baggage, dead wood. ‘I’m a clinical psychologist and I work with the police to help them get into the mind of killers.’
Cherry looked doubly doubtful. ‘So, you could help me understand why some whacko keeps breaking into my facility and hanging out in one of the dogs’ cages?’
Jessie didn’t even nod to that question. Crouching, she twisted sideways and planted her backside in the centre of the large disc of padded fleece. It felt springy and comfortable. Twisting on her side, she curled up in a ball, resting her head on her arms. She was too embarrassed to catch Cherry’s eye.
‘It’s comfortable,’ she said, purely to make conversation.
It was comfortable. She lay for what felt like three hours, though was probably less than a minute, withering under Cherry’s cynical gaze, and then pushed herself to her feet and looked down at the disc of royal-blue fleece.
‘There’s no imprint, no indication that I was ever there, so whoever comes obviously stays for a decent amount of time and squashes the stuffing flat. What is it stuffed with, by the way?’
Cherry’s shrug was frustrated. ‘I don’t know.’
Ducking back down,
Jessie picked up the rubber bone and inspected it. There were faint marks, like two dashes – incisors – and a dent either side of the dashes – canines.
‘They’re faint,’ Cherry said by way of explanation.
Jessie rotated the bone in her hands. There were more tooth marks on the toy, as if it had been chewed multiple times. The same on the small rubber ball.
‘How many times do you think this … this, uh … you’ve been visited?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cherry said. ‘I only discovered that we were being visited because of the muddy footprint and that was a month ago.’
‘And the imprint and the teeth marks?’
‘I only saw those when I had a good look around because of the footprint. I have a couple of staff members, who get the cages ready for occupants. But, as I said, this cage is kept empty and clean. We have no cause to go in there unless we have an abuse case being admitted. And we’re always in a rush here. We have space for twenty dogs and that’s a lot of animals to look after, and they’re always coming and going, so there’s the home visits to organize and carry out, and the paperwork, endless paperwork. There’s only ever two of us working here, so we’re stretched.’ She sounded defensive.
‘How many teeth marks were there on the bone when you checked, after you found the muddy footprint?’
Cherry’s brow wrinkled, with concern. ‘Oh God, I hadn’t thought …’
‘Were there a few?’
She nodded.
‘So they could have been visiting for months and you wouldn’t have noticed?’
Cherry shuddered. ‘Oh God, do you honestly think that might be the case? That’s a horrible thought.’