Stray Dog

People who write about investigations must surely all have this problem—they know the result before they start. They can beat up the whole story, make it appear more dramatic than it was, cramming incidents together that were isolated in time and that no-one at the time believed were connected, squeezing from them a tension altogether different from the anxiety and confusion they felt. Or they can go too far in the other direction, playing down events and the connections between them out of some misplaced sense of tact. The conduct of an investigation is inevitably coloured by its conclusion—or lack of conclusion—and memory, unreliable memory, grasshoppers backwards more or less where it will.

In spite of the fact that Rae Evans’s innocence or guilt was never far from my thoughts, most of my energy over the next week or so was taken up with rescuing a dog.

. . .

There was no smell of oil, and when I looked more closely the viscous rainbow coils evaporated, leaving only the memory of sun on water, a playful reflection on the water’s skin.

The skin of rainwater, red-brown worms, and a dog so thin it carried a dark cave inside it, huge hollow shadows between each rib, a face all bones and ears.

I walked closer. A puppy was absorbed in licking up a line of worms that rippled down a slope of wet asphalt bordering my son’s school playground.

I squatted and held out my hand. The dog took off across the oval and I felt guilty for making it waste what little energy it had in running.

That evening, when I picked Peter up from after-school care, he complained of earache. My stomach dropped and I thought, not again. We were out of Panadol, so I sat Peter in front of The Simpsons with a drink, and told him I’d be back in a few minutes.

At the chemist’s I saw the dog again, a flash of sticky, iridescent brown, four leg bones curved like a miniature wrecked ship, darting through the automatic doors.

The doors closed behind me with a click, and I heard a loud voice say, ‘It’s the third time that animal’s been in here. I should call the pound.’

It was the combination of callousness and inaction in the phar­macist’s grim voice that made me say, hoping to forestall her, ‘Dogs shouldn’t be allowed to run round loose. I’ll phone the pound when I get home.’

The pharmacist stared at me. Then he asked, ‘Did you want ­something?’

‘Oh,’ I said, feeling the clean indifference of blue commercial carpet through the soles of my work shoes. ‘Yes, please. Liquid Panadol.’

Peter knew he was supposed to stay inside, but as I parked the car I heard him nattering over the fence to the Chinese boy whose family had just moved in next door. I left him there and went straight to the phone.

The woman at the RSPCA sounded young, harassed.

‘It must have been abandoned,’ I said. ‘It’s got no collar and it’s obviously starving.’

Peter came running in. ‘What’s starving?’

‘You,’ I said, hanging up the phone. ‘Like a Dany?’

‘Who were you talking to?’

‘Just someone.’

Peter had dashed in, flushed and grinning, his hair flopping in his eyes. He pushed it back with four fingers together, held stiff as a plank. At my evasion his shoulders rounded, shrinking yet defiant. I wondered how old he’d be before he accused me of lying, instead of just looking at me like that. I poured the analgesic into a green plastic crocodile with measurements along the side, and handed it to him without meeting his eyes.

. . .

‘In the morning we’ll go,’ I said. ‘In the morning, I promise we’ll go and look for him.’

It was a few hours later. Peter was sitting up in bed, reading to me in the voice he knew I liked best, pausing at full stops and commas.

I hadn’t intended telling him about the dog; it had just come out.

‘Mum!’ Peter had leapt out of bed, book flying, feet tangling in the sheet. ‘What if he’s still there!’

I’d had to stop him from running out the front door. Never mind that it was dark.

‘First thing in the morning,’ I assured him.

‘Mum?’ Peter asked, as I reached across to switch off his light, thinking that I wouldn’t put it past him to wait till I was asleep and sneak out by himself.

‘I hope it rains! There’ll be heaps of worms for him to eat!’

We found the stray dog at a long puddle along the edge of the asphalt at the school. It was walking along the puddle, systematically licking up the worms. Again, the dog reminded me of a small wrecked ship that you might find on a beach after many winters, washed and scoured by sand.

Peter ran, and the dog took off towards the road, but not very fast. He was limping. Peter threw himself, arching his body over the skinny, miserable creature, and brought him to the ground.

‘Careful!’ I called out.

Peter was groaning and laughing and crying. ‘Got him! Mum! I did it! I’ve got him!’

. . .

‘Do you want us to collect the dog?’ asked the woman from the RSPCA, a different one this time, older. She’d heard it all before.

‘We can keep him. But I wanted to check, I rang yesterday. Has anyone reported a puppy of that description missing?’

The woman took a long time to look it up, so long that I began to worry, though I was sure the dog was a stray. She came back on the line and told me no.

The smell of flea soap hung around our back step, as though Lyneham had some special local air inversion just to keep it there.

Within hours, the dog had put on weight. Peter would have fed him till he burst.

Ivan dropped by around three with a Saturday offering of cream cakes, and said that no self-respecting flea would dream of hitching a ride on such a heap of bones.

We’d already taken him to the vet. Close to the dog, I’d noticed a sweet, faintly rotting smell that reminded me of a time when I’d tried to cook sweet and sour pork and put in too much brown sugar. The vet said the smell was caused by ear mites, and gave us a bottle of stuff to wash his ears out with.

Peter was very solemn throughout the vet’s examination, each of his movements slow and careful, so small an action as unclipping the new lead a ceremony.

When it came to filling out his card, we guessed the dog’s age, and the vet surprised us by saying that he was at least a year old, maybe more.

‘But why isn’t—why didn’t—?’ Peter stammered.

‘He may’ve been living with a family,’ the vet said. ‘They may’ve moved, or maybe this fella left them.’

‘But we’ve called the PCA!’ Peter cried. I moved to put my arm around him, but he shook me off, clutching the puppy by his brittle forepaws.

‘If no-one’s reported the little fella missing,’ the vet said kindly, ‘then I think you’re pretty safe.’

It was Peter who insisted on the flea wash, extra vitamins. If he forgot the ear-drops, he acted as though something terrible would happen, and I had to stop him pouring in a double or a triple dose to make up for the one he’d missed. Nothing that concerned the dog was taken lightly.

He was christened Fred. Peter said that Fred was the right name for a dog who’d had to survive on worms.

Peter wrote to Derek describing every detail of Fred’s life, reading the sentences aloud as he composed them. I worried about Derek’s response, but Peter was so happy that I couldn’t bring myself to stop him. He made a toy out of a two-litre plastic bottle and a bit of rope. He called it dead bird, swung it round his head and yelled like a ­barbarian. Fred hid under the sofa and wouldn’t come out for a dog biscuit.

Peter refused to go to after-school care. No threats or inducements made the slightest difference. I walked into the house at five-thirty to find him and Fred curled up in front of the TV, with various plates and cups licked clean and strewn around them on the floor.

. . .

After a week of this, Fred had settled in so well that neither of us could imagine life without him. Feeling a little guilty, but not much, I cooked a meal, checked with my neighbours to make sure they’d be in for the evening, told Peter I’d be gone for a couple of hours and he was to go next door if he needed anything, and went to see Rae Evans.

Rae slowly twirled her wine glass by its stem and said, ‘The police took my electric toaster.’

‘It’s funny isn’t it?’ She set the glass down with a small sharp sound. Her face was weary and uncertain. ‘I don’t even have a home computer. If you’re ever raided in the middle of the night Sandra, the police will know what to take. They might leave your clothes in the cupboard.’

‘It must have been horrible.’

‘No,’ Rae said quietly. ‘It was unbelievable.’

‘I guess they were searching for old bank records.’

‘I always keep my bank statements in the toaster,’ Rae replied. ‘I find it does them to a turn.’

There was so much I wanted to tell her. I wanted to say, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the stupid money, where it went, or who took it, or why. We can just start here, start again.

When I arrived, I’d followed her out to the kitchen with the bottle of wine I’d brought, and watched Rae open it and pour two glasses. The kitchen was inhumanly clean. I guessed Rae didn’t cook in it enough to make a mess from one weekly cleaning lady’s visit to the next.

Now we sat opposite each other across a low glass table. I knew I should be pleased that she’d agreed to see me. But in those few minutes while she’d fetched glasses and poured the wine, my hopefulness had vanished. Worry overlaid it like a cushion.

I brought Rae up to date. I broke the news about Jim Wilcox’s abusive email—at least, I assumed it was news to Rae. I told her I believed that Compic had got hold of Access Computing’s list of subscribers, and my list of interviewers and outworkers, and were using them to bully Access Computing members into buying software packages from them.

‘Do you know how the money got into your account?’ I asked.

‘I told you,’ Rae said, ‘I have no idea.’

Her skin looked dry as parchment, as if no amount of face cream would ever be enough to moisten it. Her once-shiny silver hair was dull and dry. I realised that since the first time I’d seen Rae—well, maybe not at the interview—but since that first morning I stood in her office doorway clutching a potted cyclamen, she’d had these brittle edges. She’d had them well before the story broke about the missing money.

‘Why would Access Computing be involved in a plan to get rid of you?’ I asked. ‘You’re their golden goose.’

‘Not a very big egg.’ Rae attempted a weak smile.

‘But an egg nevertheless,’ I went on. ‘You gave them a grant. Why would Access Computing frame you for theft, or collude in a plan to frame you?’

‘Are you saying you think that’s what they did?’

‘I don’t know. But it seems as though a million dollars did go to Access Computing and someone transferred money from Access Computing to your bank account.’

‘Do you have a family, Sandra?’ Rae asked suddenly. ‘I mean uncles, aunts?’

‘My mother lost contact with her family.’ I stared at Rae, wondering where this question had come from.

Rae’s eyes turned dark grey. All the depth and moisture that had gone from her face seemed to soak down into them.

‘Did your mother ever mention me?’ she asked. ‘Did she talk about me at all?’

‘Not that I remember.’

Rae said, ‘Lilian and I used to meet at conferences. Those were heady days.’

‘I know that.’

‘I guess I hoped that somewhere along the line my name might have come up, she might have talked to you about me.’

‘How was it you—why didn’t you—my mother was ill for years before she died.’

Rae nodded. ‘She said she didn’t want to see me again. I didn’t accept that. I mean, I tried—pestered her I suppose—and then I gave up because I couldn’t see that there was anything else for me to do.’

OK, I thought. But Mum’s been dead for eight years. Surely you would have heard.

I hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation I saw that Rae was stuck—not in the way my mother had been stuck, from a lack of formal education and the need to fill my mouth and hers, but stuck because of a gap, a lack in her personality.

The conviction came to me more strongly than ever that if Rae was at fault, it was a fault of omission, of oversight, rather than a deliberate plan to deceive.

Rae was sitting hunched over, shoulders rounded. In a bulky tracksuit top, crinkled at armpits and neck, she looked lumpy, overweight.

I said, ‘You gave me a job as a way of getting to my mother.’

‘At the interview—when I saw you—I liked you straight away—I knew you could do it—I had no trouble convincing the rest of the panel.’

‘You were counting on the fact that I’d tell Mum about my new job, tell her about you. Mum would be up here some time visiting me. There’d be a way for you to meet.’

‘If that was true I’d’ve paid no more attention to you to once I found out she was dead.’ Rae’s voice was cold and disdainful. In just that way she dismissed people she had no interest in, people she looked down on, Felix Wenborn for instance.

Suddenly, I’d had enough. I stood up and said, ‘My mother was nothing like you. I don’t want to discuss her.’

I headed for the door. Rae didn’t try to stop me leaving. She said goodnight and thanked me for coming to see her, as though I’d paid a social visit, nothing more.

As I drove home to Peter, Rae’s dark face by the lake, the face I hadn’t been able to see clearly, kept coming back to me. My mother and Rae Evans. I waited for it, the sick, empty feeling. It didn’t come. There was dullness, apathy, where I expected raw chafing and a plunge into the dark. I would put aside what Rae had told me, at least for the time being. I wouldn’t think about it. If I did, it would become another layer of blame, of me blaming myself for not understanding, for being blind and deaf to who my mother really was.

I have this picture of myself outside a house with my hand raised, about to knock, and the door, the house, everything disappears.

What becomes wicked is only an extension of the ordinary along a certain plane. No-one has to pass through a needle’s eye to get there. The ordinary can extend into a fast, unfitting shape, or else contract into a needle’s eye.