Perran was slightly late arriving because the puppy was still unused to car travel and first vomited then shat in the Land Rover on the way over. Classes took place in a barn on a remote farm a few miles inland from Zennor. Evidently used for pony classes at other times, the old building was deeply carpeted with sawdust and its inside walls were marked out with whitewashed numbers at intervals.
As always, Chris greeted the dog not the owner.
‘Evening, Toffee.’
Perran pulled Toffee to heel and joined the other pupils walking in a large clockwise circle around her. The dogs varied from a ball of fluff, too young yet to do much more than follow its owner in a childish panic, to a magnificent Belgian Shepherd, forty times its size. There was a handful of clever mongrels, a Border Collie rejected for sheep training on account of an ‘hysterical tail’, an ancient, unexpectedly spiteful Labrador and two white lapdogs he could not place but suspected were French. The owners were as varied as the breeds. There were children dutifully attending with bewildered Christmas presents and two women, well into their sixties, who always wore gaudy fleeces and hats as though to suggest they were warmer than their wintry expressions suggested. These two had dogs who were exceptionally obedient, clearly veterans of many classes, so perhaps they only attended as a favour to Chris, to inspire and encourage.
‘Toffee, heel. Good boy,’ he said, remembering to keep his tone light and playful because apparently that was what puppies responded to best.
Toffee did not look like a puppy any more. Although only five months old, he was already well over twenty-five kilos and tall enough to rest his head on the kitchen table. He was a source of some guilt. Perran had always wanted a deerhound, had been fascinated by them ever since he was old enough to pore over guides to different breeds, doubly fascinated because there seemed to be none in the county, only lurchers of all shapes and coats and the occasional greyhound, retired from racing and rescued by a charity. He had watched them on the television – at Cruft’s or in period dramas – and had once been allowed to pet one as it waited obediently outside the beer tent at the Royal Cornwall Show. But owning one of his own had never been possible. First his father vetoed it, buying the family a golden retriever instead, precisely, bewilderingly, because that was what other people had. Then there was Val, his wife. Val liked dogs well enough, she maintained, but they should get children out of the way first because a farmhouse was cluttered enough without both. But then children had never come along, first because money was too short and then because of his technical difficulty.
When he saw deerhound puppies advertised in Farmer’s Weekly, he became like a man possessed. He twice found pretexts to drive out to Dartmoor to view the litter, each time feeling as guilty as he imagined a man must feel meeting a mistress. The third time he was unable to resist buying one. It cost a crazy amount, enough to pay a broccoli cutter’s wages for over twenty days, but he had some cash put by in a building society from when he got lucky on a horse, money Val knew nothing about. He introduced the puppy as a charming mongrel bought for a tenner from a man at the slaughterhouse, somewhere Val never went.
‘Ten quid, for that?’ she complained.
‘He says it’s nearly a deerhound,’ he told her. ‘At least half. Maybe more. You only have to look at him. We can call him Toffee, ‘cause he’s so soft.’
She fought it for a while but softened when Toffee licked her hand and fell heavily asleep against her feet, exhausted by the terrors of a first car journey. She was adamant, however, that the dog eat nothing more expensive than scraps, that it come no further into the house than the kitchen, that clearing up after it until it was housetrained was entirely his responsibility and that should it fail to be housetrained in six weeks, it was to live in the old milking parlour.
He agreed readily to all conditions in his excitement; the greatest triumph was still his, after all. He hid the pedigree documentation when it arrived from the Kennel Club (Toffee’s real name, his secret name, was Glencoe McTavish, of which Toffee had seemed a reasonable and plausible diminutive) and took care to lose his various pocket dog encyclopaedias in a bale of things for the parish jumble sale, to lower the chances of Val’s making comparisons between the breed ideal illustrated and the dramatically emerging lines of their so-called mongrel. Toffee was like a disguised prince in a fairytale; sooner or later his breeding would out.
The deadline for housetraining was two weeks gone. Perran always woke first anyway, trained to farming hours since boyhood, so it was easy enough to slip down to the kitchen, mop up any accidents, plead with Toffee to try to be good next time then slip back upstairs with a large enough mug of tea to keep Val sweet and in bed while the tell-tale taint of disinfectant floor cleaner had time to disperse. Obedience classes met with no objection; he knew she was glad to have one night a week to herself.
‘And halt.’ All the owners halted. Half the dogs sat obediently. The other half had to be pushed down. A puppy yelped. You could always spot the puppies who would be a handful if they grew up unchecked, the monsters-in-making. It was the same with children. Everyone watched Chris expectantly. Half the fun of these classes was that you never knew what she would have you do next; jump little pony jumps, weave your dog in and out of poles, have it sit and stay while you walked to the fullest extent of the lead or even let go of the lead altogether and crossed the room, if you were showing off and your dog could do it.
He knew she was a lesbian, that she lived with a driving instructor who had cornered the market in teaching car-shy wives and widows, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t admire her. She was a good-looking woman, very neat, not like Val who dressed for warmth and had a horror of revealing herself. Chris showed off her trim figure by wearing jodhpurs and a tailored suede jacket. She carried a little riding crop for pointing with and tapped it against her thigh when they were performing tasks with a pattern to them.
‘And weave,’ tap, ‘and through the tunnel,’ tap, ‘and halt,’ tap. He liked that. She did this for love, since the tiny fee charged could barely cover costs of barn-hire and training treats, but there was a nice mystery to her because although she plainly loved dogs, she was here without one and you had no way of knowing what breed she favoured.
‘So ask her,’ Val said, typically, Val who could ask anyone anything. It took a woman without mystery to assume another had nothing to keep to herself.
Chris waited until she had everyone’s attention and a rescue greyhound called Misty had stopped yodelling.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘Now that we’re all here…’ That was meant for him and Perran looked suitably crestfallen, only no one was laughing. ‘I think you’ll all agree,’ Chris went on, ‘it’s only right we should have a minute’s silence to think about Janice.’ He looked around. Everyone was hanging their heads. One of the children was even dutifully mouthing what could have been a prayer. He hung his head too, so that Toffee looked up at him and produced one of his curious cries of uncertainty and impatience that was half yawn, half whimper.
He wanted to crouch down and give him a hug only Chris was always telling off the men in the class for leaning over their dogs too much. He supposed it was love he felt for him. Because of the lack of speech, love for animals was an odd affair, doomed to frustration. You couldn’t hug them as hard as you wanted or they’d be frightened. What you really wanted, he supposed, was to become them. You wanted to see out of their eyes and have them see out of yours. There was a bit of particularly soft fur, just behind Toffee’s huge black ears, that gave out a marvellous scent, a warm, brown biscuity smell, a bit like horse sweat, which brought on this feeling in a rush. He had heard Val talk with friends about babies often enough, heard, with an alien’s fascination, how often women were filled with a hot desire to eat them, had once even seen a woman thrust one of her baby’s feet entirely into her mouth and suck it. Perhaps this love of dogs and love of babies were not so dissimilar?
‘So long, Janice,’ Chris said at last. ‘We’ll miss you, girl.’ Someone blew their nose. ‘Now,’ Chris went on, having cleared her throat. ‘The police have asked if they can have a brief word with each of us afterwards. Don’t worry if you’ll be in a hurry. The sergeant can just take your details and pay a house call tomorrow or whatever. Otherwise they’ll want statements tonight.’
‘But I thought she was on holiday,’ one of the elderly fleece ladies said.
‘Were we the last to see her alive, then?’ asked her friend.
‘Looks like it.’
The greyhound yodelled again, breaking the gloomy spell.
‘Right,’ said Chris. ‘Dogs are getting bored. Let’s practise our downs. In a big circle now. That’s it. You first, Bessie. Off you go. Not too slow. That’s it. I’ll tell you when. Now.’
‘Down!’ said Bessie’s owner and Bessie dropped from her trot to flatten herself most impressively in the sawdust. It looked impressive but somehow insincere and you sensed she’d never do it so well without an audience.
So Janice was dead. Unthinkable. Janice Thomas. Haulage princess. The Broccoli Tsarina they had called her in The Cornishman once. Her father had begun the business in a small way, running three lorries that collected produce from the farms and took it to a wholesaler in the east. But Janice, hard-faced Janice, who nobody liked much in school, had been away to business college and made some changes when she came home. She wasn’t proud. She drove one of the lorries herself for a while until she got to know all the growers, however small. Then she used her knowledge of them to persuade them to sell through her instead of merely using her as haulier, so Proveg was born, sprawling across an industrial estate outside Camborne. She was no fool. She chose the site because there was high unemployment thanks to all the closed mines and retrenching china-clay works and labour was cheap. Soon everyone had a son or daughter or wife who had done time on the packing lines or in the quality control shed. The pay wasn’t brilliant but she was still regarded as something of a saviour. ‘She doesn’t have to do it,’ people said. ‘She could have worked anywhere. She could have worked in London for big money.’
Then she began to show her sharper side, bailing out farmers and truck owners in trouble so that she seemed their rescuer until their fortunes took enough of an upturn for them to realize that she now owned their truck or most of their farm. Or rather, that Proveg did. Janice always played a clever game of making out she was just one of the workers and speaking of Proveg as though it owned her too and she was merely another employee, paid just enough to stay loyal but never quite enough to break away.
She put her father in a home when he went peculiar – a home substantially refurbished by Proveg’s charity. She drove several growers to the wall. There was a suicide or two, nothing compared to what BSE caused, but enough to register as a local outrage. Women in their cups joked that some lucky bloke would get his hands on the money soon enough but no man tamed Janice in matrimony. No woman either, for all the mutinous gossip. She lived alone in the hacienda-style estate that had sprouted from the paternal bungalow. She went to church; her pretence of worker solidarity didn’t extend to attending Chapel. She smoked with defiant satisfaction. She took one holiday a year – in the brief interval between the end of the winter cauliflowers and the start of the early potatoes – always somewhere fiercely hot from where she would return with a leathery tan that showed off the gold chains that were her only visible finery. She kept a horse and bred Dobermans. She had been bringing the latest puppy to classes for several weeks now. She favoured the lean, houndlike ones rather than the overweight thugs.
When he had mentioned this, Val said, ‘Lean or no, she’ll never get a husband with those around the house. Devil dogs, they are.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t want one,’ he said. ‘A husband, I mean. Maybe she’s happy as she is.’
‘Happy? Her?’ Val asked and snorted in the way she did when she wanted to imply that there were some things only a woman could understand.
‘Toffee, heel. Good boy. That’s it. Down. Down!’
‘Don’t repeat your order,’ Chris said, as he knew she would. ‘He’ll just learn to ignore you.’ But Toffee went down after a fashion, largely because he was tired.
‘Good boy,’ Perran said, then tugged him back onto his feet. ‘Toffee, heel. Good boy.’
Val set great store by marriage. She thought he couldn’t understand or wasn’t interested, but he could tell. He saw how she divided women into sheep and goats with marriage the fiery divide between them. Women who lived with a man without marrying him first she thought not loose but foolish. She did not despise spinsters or think them sad, not out loud at least, but it was plain she thought of them as lesser beings. Childlessness, her childlessness, was thus a great wound in her self-esteem. He could tell from the way she huffed and puffed over the young mothers in the village who sometimes blocked its one stretch of pavement with their double-occupancy pushchairs.
‘As if they’re something really special,’ she snorted but her glare would have a kind of hunger to it.
He did not mind staying on to give a statement. He was collecting Val from the First and Last and she wouldn’t thank him for appearing early and cramping her style. He gave his name and recognized the sergeant from schooldays. Garth Tresawle. A mate’s younger brother, forever trailing behind them as they skived off, whining wait for me. And they’d had to wait because even then he had a tendency to take notes and bear witness.
‘And when did you last see Ms Thomas?’
‘Here,’ Perran said. ‘Last time we had a class. We talked a bit about boarding kennels because she was about to go on holiday to Morocco. The next day, she said.’
‘You drove straight home afterwards?’
‘Not exactly. I stopped off at the pub to pick up my wife.’
‘What time was that?’
‘Nearly closing time. Only she wasn’t there. Found out later some friends had taken her on to theirs. Someone’s birthday. I went back on my own.’
‘Talk to anyone at the pub?’
‘Er…’ He cast his mind back to smoke, music, turned backs around the television. ‘No.’
‘Did anyone see you get back?’
‘No. There’s just the two of us and I was asleep when Val got back.’ He remembered her drunken curses as she stubbed a toe on one of the bed’s sticking-out legs.
‘What time was that?’
‘I was asleep. Past midnight.’
‘How well did you know Ms Thomas?’
‘We were at school together. You remember that, Garth. You were there too.’
‘Sorry, Perran,’ Garth sighed. ‘We have to do this by the book.’
‘Okay. Sorry.’ Toffee whined and Perran settled him back on the sawdust. The wind was rising again, whistling round the barn roof and flapping a loosened tab of corrugated steel. ‘I was at school with her so you could say I’d known her all my life, but we weren’t friends. Of course I had dealings with her later, through Proveg. She buys…I mean she bought our broccoli and crispers. Pushed a hard bargain. Did with everyone. She won’t have many friends, I reckon.’
‘You harvest your own broccoli?’
‘What with?’
‘Knives. Same as everyone else.’
‘Stainless steel?’
‘No. Proveg have been on at us to change. New rules. Supermarkets don’t want rust on their precious broccoli stalks. But there’s nothing wrong with the old ones if you look after them. Dry and oil them. Keep them sharp with an angle grinder. And they’re not brittle. The stainless ones get chipped on all the stones.’
He had been cutting broccoli since he was twelve, and in that time had seen the move from boxing them up in hessian-lined wooden crates that were taken to Penzance Station on a trailer to bagging them individually and arranging them in supermarket crates on the spot. There were health and safety regulations now. Knives had to be signed out and in by the cutters and so did any (regulation blue) sticking plasters, for fear someone get a nasty shock of finding a bloody bandage in their cauliflower cheese. Other Proveg rules forbidding smoking, eating or dogs and insisting that in the absence of a chemical toilet, allowable where teams number five or less, antiseptic wet wipes are to be handed out to workers needing to relieve themselves in the field he and Val blithely ignored. They had even discovered that, once the tractor had driven down a row once or twice so that tracks were well cut into the mud, it was possible to send the tractor slowly through the field without a driver, thus freeing up an extra pair of hands to cut while Val rode in the makeshift rig at the back trimming, bagging and packing. Health and safety regs would surely have outlawed this but Val kept a weather eye open and if she saw a Proveg four-wheel-drive in the distance could tip him the wink to down knife and drive for a while.
Garth Tresawle made an extra note and underlined it. He looked up.
‘How many do you have?’ he asked.
‘Four.’
‘Where d’you keep them?’
‘In a shed. And no. It isn’t locked.’
‘How many men work for you?’
‘On the broccoli?’ Garth nodded. ‘Two. Ernest Penrose and Peter Newson.’ He gave their addresses, as best as he could remember them, and his own, and that was all.
They would have a hard time pinning charges on the mere basis of a knife. West Penwith was bristling with knives at this time of year. The daffodil and broccoli harvests brought crowds of itinerant workers into the area in search of hard labour and tax-free bundles of earthy notes. There was some resentment among the local hands, jobs being scarce, but Eastern Europeans would always be prepared to work for that little bit less than Cornishmen, especially with the threat of deportation hanging over them. Every winter there was a flurry of lightning raids by customs officers and police, tipped off about the latest troupe of illegal immigrants slaving in the eerily weedless bulb fields or in stinking acres of vegetable but every spring brought fresh vanloads. Many of them slept rough in barns and hedges to save money. Perran had found them in his sheds occasionally, or evidence of their passing through.
It was said that many of the home-grown cutters were fresh out of prison or dodging parole. He had seen the way Val discreetly clicked down the locks on the car doors when she rounded a corner at dusk to find a gang spilling across a lane, their shapes bulked out with extra clothing, their muddy knives flashing as the headlamps swept across them. There was no lack of suspicious and appropriately armed strangers to pin a local murder on.
As always, Toffee was too exhausted by the class even to remember to be carsick on the way home. Perran left him in the Land Rover while he went inside the pub.
It was a ladies’ darts match night – Val played on the pub team – so there was a scattering of unfamiliar faces, though not half as many as during the tourist season. Then everyone staying on the windswept campsite would take refuge in here until closing time forced them back to caravan and canvas. There was, however, an unmistakable holiday atmosphere tonight. He would have expected to find the women in one room, garrulous around a table, the men hunched, wordless, around Sky Sports in the other. Instead, he found the outsize television neglected and almost everyone squeezed around two long tables beside the fire, a jumble of glasses, exploded crisp packets and overflowing ashtrays in their midst. The landlady was with them, sure sign of a rare celebration, like the occasions – cup finals, the occasional wake – when she locked the doors and declared the gathering a perfectly legal private party. Ordinarily sat amongst her cronies, women she had known since childhood, Val would only have acknowledged him to demand he bought the next round or a packet of cigarettes. She certainly would not have asked him to join them but would expect him to wait with the men until she was ready to leave.
Tonight was quite different. She spotted him at once and called out, ‘Here he is,’ with something like eagerness. A drink was bought him and space made on the settle beside her. It was quite as though they had all been waiting for him. Someone asked how the puppy classes were going and he told her but quickly realized no one was really interested.
Then Val said, ‘Well?’ and it transpired that they had heard the police were questioning everyone at the class because Garth and a couple of detectives had been in the pub at the beginning of the evening and one of the detectives, the younger one with the funny eye, was a cousin by marriage of the landlady. It was not like on television, where the facts of a murder were kept under wraps so as not to influence key witnesses. Correct police procedure was near impossible in a community this small and inter-related. They might have thought they were withholding crucial details but the women who had found the body, or most of it, Proveg employees on the night shift, were cousins of a woman on the visiting darts team and, in any case, had been far too traumatized by their discovery not to phone at least two people each before the police arrived on the scene.
Janice had been stabbed in the stomach repeatedly with a cauliflower knife. This last detail was a fair guess, given the width of the wounds the less squeamish of the witnesses had glimpsed on lifting Janice’s shirt. There was no blood on the floor, so presumably she had been killed elsewhere. Her mouth had been stuffed to overflowing with cauliflower florets and a Proveg Cornish Giant Cauliflower bag strapped over her head. Her hands and arms had been hacked off. The girls could find no trace of them but, hours later, there were horrified phone calls from branches of Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s, Safeway’s and the Co-Op where they had arrived, neatly tucked into trays of Proveg quality assured produce. And the body was said not to be fresh so the landlady, something of an expert on serial murder, was backing the theory that Janice had never been on holiday at all. No one knew what had become of the Dobermans or the horse but Perran asking that gave rise to a small wave of horror-struck and morbidly inventive suggestions.
‘Still,’ Val put in, barely keeping the relish from her voice. ‘At least it looks as though they didn’t suffocate her. She must have been dead already when they put the stuff in her mouth because there was no sign of a struggle. Judy said the florets weren’t broken at all. Still fit to cook, she said. So what did they ask you, love?’
‘Oh.’ Perran shrugged. ‘How long I’d known her. If we talked at the class that night – which we did, of course. What time I got home. What kind of knives we use.’
‘Reckon Garth thinks you did it, boy,’ someone put in. Laughter faded quickly into uneasiness.
‘Well,’ Perran admitted. ‘I don’t have a whatsit. An alibi.’
‘You do!’ Val insisted.
‘Hardly,’ he told her. ‘You were out when I got home and drunk when you finally made it in.’
There was uproarious laughter at that then one of the women said, ‘Maybe Val did it. She always had it in for that bitch.’
‘Val had an alibi. She was with us.’
‘Not like Perran. Who’d have thought it!’
‘Ooh, Perran! Here, Val. You sure you’re safe going home with him and everything?’
‘Good on you, boy. She had it coming.’
There was teasing and laughter and, amazingly, Val clutched his thigh under the table as she laughed back and faked girlish terror. Perran felt an unfamiliar sensation as the teasing and backslapping continued and the conversation turned to Proveg and how the growers might now join forces to buy it and run it as a co-operative, which is what they should have done all along. It took a minute or two for him to identify it as pride. He had not felt like this since their wedding day.
‘She’ll stop,’ he thought, ‘once we’re alone. Once we’re back outside.’
And certainly Val seemed sobered by the night chill and the silence in the Land Rover. But as he drove her back to the farm, she slipped her hand over his where it rested on the gear stick.
‘Poor Janice, though,’ she said. ‘I mean, I know she was a cow but the thought of her all alone…Things like that don’t happen to married women. Not so often, anyway. I’m glad there’s you. You too, Muttface,’ she added because Toffee had woken and was leaning over from the back, sniffing the smoke in her hair. ‘I’m glad there’s you too. You’ll keep us safe, won’t you, boy?’
‘Reckon he’d just wag his tail and lick the blood off the mad axeman’s fingers,’ he said.
‘Don’t!’ she squeaked and shuddered.
They drove the few minutes home in silence but when he pulled up inside the garage and cut the engine she turned to him in the darkness and asked, ‘You didn’t do it. Did you?’ And from something in her voice he sensed the distinct possibility of sex.