The story that follows deals with a time, and a way of life, that no longer exists: a time when the restricted world I lived in was ruled by bad-tempered, humourless adult males. Nowadays, as an adult myself, I can see that in most instances, it really wasn’t the fault of the individual men, because they themselves had been reared in a dour, humourless, and all too often hypocritical Calvinist society that left them hidebound by harsh and crippling expectations that were, almost by definition, incapable of being met. Those unfortunate Scots males, most of them Presbyterian and reared between the two world wars, had to live according to stifling behavioural codes of sixteenth-century puritanism that constrained the men themselves just as much as—and sometimes even worse than—they affected the other people, men and women, boys and girls, who were bullied and browbeaten by them.
As a healthy pre-teenaged boy, it was an integral part of my duties, and of my nature, to confound any limitations that unsmiling grown-ups tried to impose on me. My friends and I had absolutely no idea of where, when, or how adulthood began, but we had no desire to experience it, and we refused to kowtow to it. Adults were the enemy: the Great Unknown. It didn’t matter to us who they were in their own eyes—crabby old men, dirty old men, scruffy old men, and disapproving old men, they all appeared to us to exist solely to interfere with our enjoyment of life, and so we took great pleasure in hoodwinking them, sidestepping their disapproval and getting on with things we really needed to do.
No one ever told us that we were learning behaviour patterns of our own that would accompany us through life. But there are times today when I realize just how blessed my friends and I were to live at that time.
Kids today have gadgets, computers, and smart phones; we had long summer evenings of running wild through woodlands that had never welcomed our working-class families or heard our unabashed laughter before, lands that had been carefully tended for hundreds of years and were full of game birds—pheasant, partridge, and grouse. We were free, in our boyhood, to walk or run along the rich, rhododendron-bordered bridle paths that lined the banks of rivers teeming with brown and speckled trout, our imaginations staggering with the excesses of our surroundings. And yet despite the half century of distance between my boyhood environment and the technological universe that kids inhabit today, not too many of the eternal verities have changed, just as the essential nature of adolescence itself hasn’t changed since organized societies began: the Adolescent Creed exhorts each new generation to mature as no one ever has before. “Come to your own terms with life,” it says. “Don’t let anyone else tell you how to live or think. And above all, pay no attention to old folk, for they know nothing about what we’re discovering.”
The next three stories, then, describe events that occurred to a group of three boys in a part of central Scotland on a single day in the early 1950s. Two of those boys are now dead, but I, the sole remaining participant, remember these incidents with stark clarity, perhaps because I was the leader of the pack in those days. Until recently, though, I had always remembered that day as an exciting, fun-filled one, the hands-down pinnacle of that year’s summer holidays and the embodiment of the answer to the perennial challenge of every new school year: the inevitable essay on the topic, “How I spent my summer holidays.”
It was only very recently that the real truth about that long-ago day dawned on me, when something jogged my memory and set me thinking of my two old school chums and the times we had together before we were forced to grow up. I realized that these incidents hadn’t happened quite as precisely as I recalled them, on one single, halcyon day. But there is an undeniable emotional truth to that conceit, and so that is how I’ve chosen to present them here, with fictitious names to protect the unsuspecting.
I
In the middle of the last century, before the growth of mass tourism, the few visiting tourists were often surprised to find sheep grazing on the fairways of rural Scottish golf courses, but it was common until quite recently. The grazing animals kept the grass short in times of petrol rationing, and golfers accepted the piles of dung they left as an inexpensive, natural means of ensuring the continuing good condition of the fairways. Surprisingly few people ever actually hit a sheep with a ball. The eye of the practised golfer makes its allowances subconsciously and avoids sending the ball towards anything that constitutes a blatant hazard. On the few occasions when a badly hit ball does strike a sheep, usually the only damage done is to the golfer’s score and temper, since the sting of any impact tends to be absorbed by the animal’s thick fleece. Barry Taylor’s shot, then, was simply unlucky, but its effect was devastating.
Barry, Andy McNeil, and Greg Pearson had been out on the course at Bellside as soon as it opened that day, on a perfect late-August Saturday morning more than halfway through the summer holidays. Their fourth player had been a no-show, and so they had been taking great care to draw as little attention to themselves as possible, because threesomes were discouraged on Scots golf courses in the 1950s: foursomes were the norm, pairs were acceptable, and single walkers were considered harmless, but threesomes, for some obscure reason, were perceived as being cumbersome, unpredictable, and verging upon outright illegality. Old Toby Finch, the head greenskeeper, offered no quarter to any boys who attracted his attention, but he was merciless to threesomes comprising boys. This particular trio had been surprised by how few people were out on the course on such a glorious morning, by the shortness of the time they had had to wait, and most of all by the hard-to-believe knowledge that Finch had failed to notice there were only three of them that day. The wait by the tee box had been nerve-wracking, but once they were off and away, Barry had won the first hole with a par and the second and third with bogeys, halving the fourth hole at bogey with Andy and feeling extremely pleased with himself. And then his drive from the fifth found a sheep in the middle distance and hit it unerringly, directly behind the ear, and the animal went down as though it had been shot, while its neighbours scattered. The three boys watched in awed silence as the animal staggered unsteadily back to its feet, then fell sideways again and rolled onto its back, its feet sticking straight up into the air.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Andy McNeil. “You killed it!”
Neither of the other boys spoke, as all three of them stared in horror at the motionless animal. Then Barry dropped his golf bag and took off running towards the sheep, closely followed by his friends, until they threw themselves to their knees beside the motionless beast.
“How can we check if it’s still alive?” Andy was breathing more heavily than the others; he had carried his golf bag with him.
“Take its pulse,” Greg Pearson suggested.
“Come on, Greg, this is serious!” There was the beginning of panic in Barry Taylor’s voice. “What are we going to do?”
“Jesus Christ,” said Andy again. “It’s stone dead.”
Barry turned on him. “Is that all you can say, for Christ’s sake? We know it’s dead. The question is what the hell are we going to do about it?”
“What d’ye mean, we?” Andy shot back. “You were the one that killed it. What are you going to do about it?”
Barry felt his temper flaring. “Andy, if you don’t shut your stupid head, I’ll lay you out here beside it.”
“Aye,” added Greg. “And if he can’t manage it on his own, I’ll help him!”
It was no time for bickering. The sheep was dead and the least that was going to happen was that someone was going to have to pay for it, since sheep were valuable animals, although none of the boys could have begun to guess what one was worth. It stood to reason, though, that somebody, undoubtedly some frowning man of power and prestige, was going to have to get paid. Barry could feel his stomach twisting and he had visions of having to forfeit all his pocket money for the next ten years.
Greg wrinkled his nose. “Whew! It doesn’t half stink!”
“It’s rottin’ already,” Andy said.
Barry ignored the rancid, slightly sweet smell. He was looking at a clump of bushes, scrubby and thick, in the long rough about twenty yards from where the boys were standing. “Quick,” he said. “Nobody’s seen us yet. We might be able to get away with it. We’ll drag it over behind those bushes. If anyone finds it, they won’t know who killed it.” His voice was filled with authority now. “Greg, take the hind legs,” he continued. “I’ll take the front. Andy, you go back up the fairway and keep an eye out for anybody coming. If there’s anybody up there, keep them out of sight until we’ve finished.”
“How will I do that?” Andy’s voice sounded plaintive.
“Do what?”
“Keep them out of the way. If there’s anyone coming.”
“Talk to them, you daft bastard, what d’you think?”
“What’ll I talk about?”
“Jesus Christ! Now he wants to get shy! Ask them what the jail sentence is for being an accomplice to cattle rustlers! How the hell do I know what you’re supposed to say? Just open your mouth and let your belly rumble. You’re good at that at any other time.”
Andy stood, his face expressionless, until Barry exploded. “For God’s sake, Andy! Will you get going before somebody catches us standing here like the Three Stooges? Whistle if you see anybody comin’, okay? One whistle if they’re not too close, two whistles if they’re closer, and three if they’re very close. Okay?”
Andy nodded, still looking dazed.
Barry bent to take hold of the sheep’s legs. “Okay, Greg, pull like a bastard.”
Andy took off then, running back up the fairway towards the tee, and Barry and Greg began to struggle with the dead weight of the sheep. They had managed to get it all the way across the fairway, into the edge of the long rough, before Andy’s whistle came. They stopped in mid-pull. He whistled again. Close, but not too close. They glanced at each other in relief and had just started to pull again when the third whistle sounded. Too damn close! They were about five yards from the bushes.
“Quick,” Barry panted. “One more hard pull!” They heaved together with all their strength and the carcass of the sheep tobogganed over the long grass towards the bushes just as Andy began to sound a long series of whistles like a skylark. The two boys had time only to drag the sheep beneath the hanging branches of the bushes at the rear edge of the clump and leave it there, with the slender bulk of the bush between the carcass and the tee box. After that, all they could do was pray that it wouldn’t be discovered until they were long departed.
They raced back to the fairway, trying to look innocent, and snatched up burdock leaves from the rough and tried to rub the stench of sheep from their hands. Andy was on the tee box with their golf bags lying close to him, and they could see the heads of two men approaching him over the top of the hillock behind it. Both boys stuffed their hands in their pockets, but Barry’s heart sank as he recognized the older of the two men now striding towards them. It was Sandy Baxter, the bad-tempered wealthy old man who lived in the huge house between Barry’s home and Greg’s. Baxter had no love for either boy, and he had once called the police just because he saw Barry running along the top of his garden wall, taking the shortcut to Greg’s house.
“What the hell are you young buggers doin’ out here on a Saturday? It’s no’ what it’s supposed to be, I’ll wager on that! If you’re out here at all you’re supposed to be playin’ at the golf, no’ skylarkin’ about like damned Indians and annoyin’ God-fearin’ decent folk that come out for a quiet game to get away from the likes o’ you!”
“Hello, Mr. Baxter,” Barry said. The other two boys flushed.
“Don’t ‘hello’ me! Just stand away from the box and let us play through. If you canna play well enough or fast enough to stay in front, then you’ll be good enough to stay behind us. Well behind us! We ha’e nae need to be bothered wi’ the likes of you breathin’ down our necks and upsettin’ our game. Bloody young hooligans . . .”
Baxter’s companion, a much younger man, winked at the boys as they hastily removed their golf bags from the tee and stood well out of the old man’s line of sight.
Baxter teed up his ball and prepared to address it, muttering under his breath. No one else spoke, and Baxter took his time, waggling his club head behind the ball and settling himself comfortably for his swing. But his backswing was much too fast, and his stroke no better than a hacking slash. The head of the club whipped the tee cleanly from underneath the ball, which went two feet up in the air and landed in the same spot where the tee had been.
The old man’s reflexes were superb, though. The ball had hardly even reached the top of its hop when he turned to his companion, saying, “Losh, Lord, man oh man, what am I thinking of? You won the last hole, did you not, Robert? It’s no’ my turn at all! I beg your pardon, son, the honour’s still yours.” He stepped back magnanimously to allow his partner the “first” shot.
Robert inclined his head politely and stepped forward to tee up his ball, only the slightest hint of a smile on his face. “Thank you,” he said, and all three boys knew that he must be aching to point out that old Baxter’s next shot would be two off the tee. The hole was a 370-yard par four with a downhill dogleg to the left and a small green almost completely hidden by trees and high-sided bunkers.
Barry was surprised to see that Robert, whoever he was, was holding a two-iron, but the tall young man unleashed a slow, clean, lazy-looking swing that hammered his ball a good two hundred yards out with a gentle, drifting hook that took it beautifully around the dogleg and kept it running like a hare long after it had hit.
“Lovely shot, mister,” Greg Pearson said. “Well away!” The other boys echoed him.
Robert winked at them. “Thanks, lads.”
Old man Baxter looked fit to be tied. “Aye,” he mumbled. “No’ bad, no’ bad.” He stepped forward again and teed up his ball, and then he seemed to take forever to line up his shot. When he swung this time, he hit a beauty. His ball took off as though it would fly forever, and all three boys followed it with their eyes in grudging admiration. Then, right at the top of its flight, Baxter’s ball began to fade to the right, slicing more and more rapidly, and with a sense of poetic justice, Barry Taylor knew exactly where it was going.
Sure enough, it landed right in the first bush in the long rough to the right of the fairway. Exactly where they had left the dead sheep.
Nobody uttered a sound during the entire flight of the ball, not even old Baxter, who stood as though carved from stone, his body twisted and his arms frozen at the top of his follow-through. He marked where the ball landed and then relaxed.
None of the boys dared look at the others, each of them horribly certain that the jig was up. The old man’s ball must be within arm’s reach of the dead sheep. They were all convinced that old Baxter would find the dead animal, put two and two together, and come up with three . . . them!
“I’ll come with you,” Robert said, “and help you look for it.”
“Thank ye, Robert, but that will no’ be necessary. I saw fine where it landed, and I’ll have nae trouble findin’ it, though it might gi’e me a wee bit o’ bother chippin’ it back out onto the fairway. Away ye go and see to your own shot.”
The boys watched numbly as the two men left the tee and walked off together down the fairway, the older man pulling his wheeled cart behind him. When they reached the point at which their paths separated, Robert to the left and old Baxter towards the dead sheep, the old man suddenly turned back and brandished his niblick at the three boys like a battle-axe as he shouted at the top of his voice, “Ye’ll mind, now, what I said, and just haud yourselves in patience till we’re away out in front. I dinna want any o’ your damn balls fleein’ about my ears!” His warning delivered, he strode away.
“Jesus Christ,” said Andy McNeil. “Now we’re really for it! They’ll put us in jail. I knew fine we should have reported it.”
Barry Taylor gave him a baleful scowl.
“What’re you lookin’ at me like that for?” Andy said. “It was an accident, wasn’t it. You didn’t aim at the fuckin’ sheep, did you. It wasna done wi’ malice aforethought, was it. The stupid thing just got in the way o’ the ball.” He glared from one to the other of his silent friends. “It was an accident. A sheer accident. We could’ve reported it and been fine.”
Old Baxter was approaching the point of no return.
“But oh no!” Andy pressed on. “We couldn’t do that! Not us! Mr. Big Al Ca-fuckin’-pone Taylor has to be smart and hide the evidence. ‘Nobody’ll know,’ he says. ‘How’s anybody gonnae know?’ An’ now the three o’ us are gonnae get arrested.”
Barry grasped Andy by the jacket and tried to wrestle him to the ground to shut him up. But Greg Pearson had been watching the old man all the time, and now he threw himself on his two friends.
“Lookit,” he cried, shaking both of them. “Look at this!”
They looked.
Baxter was stabbing around the base of the bush, looking for his ball, and the sheep, miraculously alive, was heading towards him from the rear, out of the old man’s sight. All three boys cheered at seeing the animal alive, and old Baxter, hearing them and thinking they were jeering him, shook his club angrily at them.
“It’s alive! Jesus Christ, it’s alive!” Andy was jumping up and down, yelling at the top of his voice. “It must’ve just been knocked out!”
Greg Pearson sobered all of them by saying, “Aye, it’s alive, all right, but look at the way it’s walking.”
The wretched animal looked as though it was drunk. It was staggering from side to side, teetering and tottering, unable to find its balance. Suddenly it went down on its knees, and the boys fell silent in mid-cheer. But it lurched back to its feet and began walking again, and still the old man had not noticed it. He had found his ball and was hacking wildly at the long grass and fibrous, wiry thistles that could hamper his next swing.
The boys watched silently as Baxter straightened, focused his concentration, and delivered his stroke. By that time, though, the sheep was only a few feet away from him. The old man must have caught sight of it just as he reached the top of his backswing, for he straightened up violently in mid-stroke, flubbed the shot badly, and sent his ball careering off into deep rough: dense gorse and long, coarse grass. The boys heard a scream of rage as he took another swing, this time over his head, at the unfortunate sheep, which promptly collapsed at his feet.
By the time they reached him, out of breath from the effort of running with their golf bags, Mr. Baxter had lost any thought of being rude. In response to their questions about what had happened, he merely shook his head in bewilderment and muttered that he didn’t know. The damned thing had frightened the life out of him, he said, and made him miss his stroke, after which he had taken a swipe at it and it had fallen down. He could hardly believe it, he mumbled, because he didn’t think he had swung that hard. His voice tailed away.
Andy was on his knees by the sheep. He pulled open one of its eyes the way he had seen such things done in films. “You should have missed this shot, too, Mr. Baxter,” he said. “It’s dead.”
This time there was absolutely no doubt about it. The sheep was irrefutably dead.
The man called Robert had been on his way back to help old Baxter when he saw the boys running, and now he came striding up, asking what was going on, and again it was Andy who got the first words out.
“Mr. Baxter killed a sheep. It made him miss his shot, so he clouted it wi’ a club and killed it stone dead.”
Robert’s eyebrows rose about an inch. “Is that right? Did you?”
Baxter’s face was ashy and he looked as though he might be sick any second. Barry felt desperately sorry for the man now, in spite of all the times in the past that Baxter had made his life miserable. The death-dealing club had fallen from his hands and now lay at his feet. Barry moved to pick it up.
“Mr. Baxter, for God’s sake!” Robert’s voice was urgent. “What happened?”
“I . . . I dinna ken, just rightly.” The old man’s voice was very low. “I was just about to play my shot when I saw this damned animal damn near runnin’ intae me. It was so close it scared me, ye ken, and my damn ba’ took a flee right off the toe o’ my club intae the gorse yonder. I was so mad, I took a skelp at the sheep wi’ my club. It didna even try to jouk—it just stood there, and then it fell doon. The laddies saw it. Aye, the laddies was watchin’. They saw it.”
The younger man looked at each of the three boys in turn. “Is that what you saw?”
All three nodded.
Robert went down on one knee beside the sheep and placed his hand on its neck, his thumb beneath the jawbone, and then he, too, lifted the eyelid. The eye was already glazed. “Dead as mutton,” he said. He looked up at Baxter. “Where did you hit it?”
“I . . . I’m no’ sure. I think I caught it o’er the shoulder. The left one.”
Robert ran his hand deftly from the animal’s left shoulder up to its ear, where he stopped. “Well,” he said, “there’s a lump here the size of a goose egg, right on the bone behind the ear. No wonder you killed it. If it had been an elephant you’d still have killed it. You must have given it one hell of a clout.”
“But I didna.” The old man’s voice was almost quavering. “I didna hit it that hard, Robert, I couldna. I’m no’ that strong.”
Robert smiled a little half smile. “Is that a fact? You’re as strong as a bull, Hector. I’ve been your doctor now for seven years, so I know. I told you that temper of yours would get you into trouble one day.” He shook his head. “You know, before I married your daughter, I used to worry in case she turned out to have your personality instead of her mother’s.” He stood up and placed his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Well, come on, then. We’d better go and report this. Whose sheep are these, anyway?”
It was Greg Pearson who answered him. “Gillespie’s.”
“Which Gillespie?” There were three Gillespie brothers, all farming contiguous plots of land.
“Angus.”
“Aye, well, we’d better go and have a talk with him, Father Baxter . . .” Robert’s voice faded away as he considered something, and then he went on. “I suppose we could finish our game first. It wouldn’t do much harm. But then, I suspect your heart wouldn’t be in it, would it? I know mine wouldn’t.”
“Will Mr. Baxter have to go to jail?”
Robert looked in surprise at Greg and laughed aloud.
“Good Lord, no! Whatever gave you that idea?” In spite of his laughter, or perhaps because of it, he slowly became aware of the concern on the faces of all three boys. “Look, lads,” he said, quietly and seriously. “Every farmer who grazes his sheep on a golf course accepts the risk of losing the occasional animal to a hard-hit ball, because the chances of it actually happening must be a million to one. But if it does happen, there’s nothing for the farmer to do but complain to the club executive, and he’ll get short shrift there, since he’s been benefiting from free grazing privileges.” He looked at each of the boys, weighing his next words. “This is simply an extension of that circumstance, except that Mr. Baxter hit the sheep with his club, not with his ball. Not much difference, though. The sheep’s still dead. Mr. Baxter, however, will accept the responsibility and pay Angus Gillespie a fair price for the dead animal. Isn’t that so, Mr. Baxter?”
The old man had been standing listening, a vacant expression on his face. Now he nodded and made a sound in his throat that everyone accepted as agreement.
Robert continued to eye the boys. “Is that all right with you three?”
Surprised that they should even be consulted, the boys nodded eagerly.
The younger man thanked them gravely, apologized for having interrupted their game, and then ensured their silence by borrowing his father-in-law’s wallet and bestowing a crisp new one-pound note—an unheard-of fortune—upon each of them, before leading the old man away towards the clubhouse.
The boys looked at each other and then at the pound notes they held in their hands. None of them had ever actually owned a pound note before. Now they were content for a few moments simply to look at their riches and dream.
It was Greg who broke the silence. “Hey, look,” he said. “We’ve been played through.”
They had, too. One foursome was already pitching onto the green at the bottom of the hill, and another foursome was approaching a clean quartet of tee shots that lay, all white and shiny, in the middle of the fairway opposite where the boys still stood in the long rough.
The boys decided they had had enough golf for that day, anyway, and set out for home. They crossed the golf course diagonally in front of the clubhouse, heading for the rhododendron bushes that marked the rim of the river gorge that meandered cross-country to pass within half a mile of their homes. It was a four-mile walk to where they lived, but they were used to it and had proved many times that by walking that route, they could get home as quickly as they could by taking the main road through town and waiting for the bus.
“Jeez,” Andy McNeil wondered aloud, “what d’ye do wi’ a whole pound?”
II
The voices were far away, but the first sound of them was enough to cause the flock of crows in the clearing to whirl up and away, squawking with alarm, in search of safety among the high branches that surrounded the open glade on three sides. Once there, safely settled and fortified with the security of height, they faced the approaching sounds. The two young people who came along the pathway on the hillside above, oblivious to everything except their love for each other, would never have seen them had the birds’ movements not caught the eye of the boy as they passed by at eye level. He had one arm around the girl, who walked close against him, her head resting on his shoulder so that he could smell the freshness of her hair beneath his cheek.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Don’t look now, but we’re being watched.”
The girl started away from him with a guilty leap, looking around her in fright. “What? Who’s there? Where?” Her voice was almost comical but her anxiety was very real, and the young man reached for her again and pulled her close.
“Hey, hey! It’s all right, I was only kidding, Annie, I’m sorry. There’s some crows watching us, that’s all.” He supported her chin with one hand and turned her head to follow as he aimed his finger at their silent, wary audience. “Look, in the trees there. See?” She looked, nervously, and then turned her face into the hollow of his shoulder, and he gentled the back of her head in his hand. “I’m sorry, Annie. Jeez, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Her voice came to him muffled by the material of his jacket. “You frightened the life out of me. I thought some dirty old man was spying on us.” Slowly she withdrew her head and looked back at the crows. “They are watching us, aren’t they?”
He laughed. “Sure they are. They’re lookin’ at you. I would be, too, if I was up there wi’ them. There’s nothin’ better to look at round this place. You know what they say, ‘A cat can look at a king.’ I suppose that means a crow can look at a beautiful lassie. But they really are ugly buggers, aren’t they?” The crows continued to stare, stark and disapproving and managing to look aggressive without even moving.
Annie shuddered. “I hate those things.”
“Hate them?” There was humour and surprise in the boy’s voice. “What for? They’re just birds.”
“No! They’re not just birds. They’re filthy things. Scavengers. My grandpa used to hate them, too. He used to shoot them. He said they used to eat the dead men in the trenches in the First World War. He used to call them ‘hoodies.’”
“Aye, but they’re not. ‘Hoodies’ are hooded crows. Their grey feathers look like a hood and sometimes like a cape, too, but their wings are black and they’re very different from carrion crows. The carrion crows are the worst when it comes to scavenging, though—even their name tells you that—and they’re all dead black. But all crows are man-eaters if they find a corpse. Those things watching us now, though, they’re rooks—they’re scavengers, too, but rooks is their real name and they’re a completely different bird. They’ve got grey feathers round their heads too, though, so that makes them look like hoodies and gets them a bad name.”
“Carrion eaters are disgusting things.”
“Carrion eaters?” The boy grinned. “Carrion?”
“Aye, dead meat.”
“I know what it is, I just didn’t expect you to.”
Annie’s eyes flashed. “And why not? D’you think I’m styoopit?”
“No, I don’t, and that was a stupid thing to say, I’m sorry. But we eat dead meat too, Annie.”
“Not carrion!”
“Sure we do! Dead meat.”
“Och! You’re ridiculous, Eamonn McShane! Carrion, for your information, is dead meat that’s been left to rot where it fell, guts and all. There’s a big difference between that and meat that’s been slaughtered and butchered and cleaned for human consumption.”
“Consumption? The fellow who used to live next door to us has consumption. He’s in a sanatorium now, but they think he’ll probably get better. Is that right, you can get consumption from eating butcher meat? I thought it was from drinking unpasteurized milk.”
Annie swung a slap at his ear, laughing in exasperation. He ducked, and as he did so the watching birds stirred nervously, one of them seeming to rise on tiptoe, its wings spread, poised to take off. Eamonn straightened up slowly, watching it, and the bird settled down again.
The girl saw the expression in his eyes and her voice held a hint of concern when she asked, “What’s the matter?”
Eamonn nodded towards the watching birds. “I was just thinking that you’re right. They’re no’ very nice, are they? Kinda menacing . . . Scary. Have you ever read ‘The Twa Corbies’?”
She frowned slightly. “No. Who wrote it?”
“Nobody. It’s ancient, medieval. One of the old ballads. Do they not teach you anything at that school you go to?”
“Well certainly not about poems that write themselves! I never heard anything so daft. You mean it’s anonymous.”
“Aye, that’s what I said . . . anomalous.”
“Eamonn McShane, that’s another word altogether and you know it. Anyway, what’re corbies?”
“Crows. That’s the old Scotch word for them. It’s a poem—a song, really—about two crows that find a dead knight behind a wall. Nobody’s come looking for him, no one cares about burying him, and the crows talk about what happened to him, about how his hound’s run off hunting, his hawk’s gone back to the wild, and his wife’s already remarried, leaving him as food for the crows. Finally one says to the other, ‘You’ll sit on his white breastbone, and I’ll pick out his sweet blue een, an’ wi’ a lock of his golden hair we’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare.’”
The girl shuddered again in the warm sunlight and glanced back up at the birds on their branches. “That’s disgusting, but I can believe it. There’s not much separating civilization from savagery . . . Let’s go, Eamonn, I don’t like it here.”
“Aye, okay, but watch this!” He stooped quickly and pretended to snatch up a stone from the pathway, cocking his arm to throw as he rose, and the birds flung themselves into the air, swooping and soaring in all directions, their raucous cries shockingly loud in the stillness. “See that? Talk about reflexes! Crows ar’na daft. Point a gun or a stick, pick up a stone, and they’re away before you can aim, even when you think they’re no’ watching you. And when you do something like that, and the birds squawk in triple caws, that’s a sure sign that they’re corbies. Carrion crows, the real McCoy.” He smiled at her. “Come on, then, let’s keep going. It’s a grand day for a walk, now that the rain’s stopped.” Annie came back into the closeness of his arm and they walked on, oblivious of all but themselves.
As the young couple turned to go, the crows returned, one by one, to perch in the branches, their heads moving jerkily from one side to the other as they watched the intruders leave, and below in the clearing the day’s normal noises began to reassert themselves. Fat bumblebees buzzed lazily among the rioting rhododendron blossoms, and gnats and other winged insects busied themselves among the willow weed and foxgloves on the hillside. And in the marshy, waterlogged sedge surrounding the bog hole at the middle of the clearing, a weathered, discoloured human thigh bone thrust upward among the reeds.
***
The boys had decided to walk home from the golf course along the riverbank and through the old estate, carrying their clubs. They were in no hurry, and they walked through a glorious morning, in a silence broken only by birdsong and the chuckling gurgle of the river in its gorge below. The sound of their footsteps, even had they not been trying to walk like forest-wise Indians, would have been drowned by a years-thick carpet of dead leaves and pine needles. Everything else around them, except the bark of the tree boles, was bright, lush green. Great clumps of bracken fern grew in profusion alongside their path, and there were rhododendrons everywhere. The trunks of the trees were coated with thick, dank moss, and the stillness of the woods seemed tangible.
Their path led them past the tumbled, overgrown ruins of an old grey sandstone castle, the only part of it left standing being the outer walls of the high, almost windowless keep with the stepped gables that defined it as Scottish. Beyond that, the path, which had been covered at some time during the previous fifty to a hundred years with rust-red cinder clinker, swept steeply down towards the river in a series of swooping, ten- to fifteen-yard drops punctuated by man-made steps. At the bottom, mere yards above where the currents brawled among large boulders, the boys emerged onto a wide, hard-packed path that followed the bank of the river.
As they went down the last descending stretch, though, they sensed and heard movement below and ahead of them. Andy McNeil was the first to notice, and he stopped dead in his tracks, waving a stiff-armed warning to his friends behind him, who froze in place, wary and silent. They had done nothing wrong, but they were in “Tiger Country,” and they needed no lessons in being cautious.
The lands surrounding them, a massive tract of contiguous estates that had originally covered fifty to sixty square miles, had been owned for centuries by the regional aristocracy that the local peasantry called, not always fondly or subserviently, the gentry. There had never been any need of walls or gates there, since the owner-occupiers of the enclave were all known to one another and wandered freely afoot and on horseback from manor to manor, secure in their privileged privacy. The lower-class village peasantry from beyond their ornate iron gates were unequivocally excluded, save only for the staff required to keep the manor houses running and the kitchens functioning, the gardeners who tended the exteriors, and the small army of ground workers and gamekeepers who kept the inventory of game—deer, foxes, hares, pheasant, grouse, partridges, and fishing stocks of trout and bream—in plentiful supply.
The onset of the First World War had marked the beginning of the end of that era. The old established order began to change rapidly with the ravaging scourge of wartime casualties—an entire generation of young leaders simply vanished in the Flanders mud—and with the postwar establishment of the earth-shaking age of socialism. The wealth that had sustained the old order for several centuries migrated invisibly into new endeavours and new enterprise. And the remnants of the formerly aristocratic families were increasingly reduced to insignificance, weakened to impotence by war and natural attrition, and impoverished by rapidly escalating costs that devoured their petty individual family “riches” and introduced them willy-nilly to the novel ideas of penury and ultimate obliteration during the quarter-century that followed the armistice of 1918. Their riches, their societal pretensions, and their entire upper-class world were all destroyed by unsustainable, socialist-driven property taxes and the new and intolerable death duties that were levied by hungry, increasingly socialist governments on the estates of everyone rich enough to die while still owning an estate.
And so, by the 1950s, the old estates, monuments to the aristocratic excesses of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society, had all fallen into disuse, disrepair, and ever-increasing bankruptcies. The last of them in that area of the country had vanished completely by the end of the Second World War, and their erstwhile leisure properties, close to sixty square miles of prime land in Lanarkshire alone, had been broken up and seized, mostly in forfeitures for unpaid taxes, by the governments of the surrounding municipalities.
Plans were in hand to subdivide the former estates for development, but government moves notoriously slowly and those abandoned lands were left open for the time being, a fantastical, otherworldly paradise for adventurous young boys, and as common land for anyone else who cared to go there. And that, unfortunately, included many people whose activities might be construed elsewhere as lawless, or at least as being inconsiderate of the public good. Plainly speaking, there was always a risk, no matter who you were or where you were within the maze of pathways, of encountering people or things about which you might have wanted to remain ignorant. Which was why some wag had named the place Tiger Country.
And so, alerted and on guard, the three boys pulled off into the waist-high growth beside the path, where they crouched, tense but unseen, behind a dense screen of bracken ferns and a giant old tree stump. And there they remained, unmoving, as the besotted young lovers called Eamonn and Annie meandered slowly by, deep in soul-baring conversation. The three boys waited until the last sounds of the couple’s quiet passage had disappeared, then returned to the path.
“Lucky bastard,” growled Andy McNeil. He moved on down the hillside, followed by the others, towards the bridle path that edged the river. The boys ambled along in comfortable silence for another three or four hundred yards, until they took a familiar narrow track that led back towards the river that had curved away from them. It was an old game trail, really, little more than a worn rut, but it would follow the river’s edge directly to the culvert beneath the main-road bridge, where they would emerge from the woods close to the edge of town and their homes on Fraser Street.
After a while, they crested the steep rise to where their trail became a five-foot-wide path again, its surface made of packed sand. They were familiar with the place and had their own little tradition there. Andy took an old golf ball from his bag, dropped it onto the path, and began to dribble it like a soccer ball. Concentrating on his footwork, and unconscious of the weight of the golf bag slung from his shoulder, he shuffled ahead, keeping the ball close between his feet until he turned and flicked it back to his friends. The three tapped it gently back and forth to one another a few times and then Andy lobbed a pass gently to Greg, who trapped it neatly beneath his foot, spun on his heel, and flicked the ball to Barry. It was slightly too far to the side, and although Barry hitched his bag up and went for the ball, he missed it. Chagrined, he followed it to where it ended up, tapped it lightly to where he wanted it, and then put his boot to it. It shot between Andy and Greg like a bullet, caromed off a tree, and disappeared down the steep bank towards the river.
Andy McNeil stood as though paralyzed, staring along the flight path of the vanished ball. “You daft bastard! What’d you do that for?”
Barry shrugged in what might have been an apology. “I didn’t mean to. It just happened. Sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Jesus Christ!”
“Come on, Andy,” Greg murmured. “It was only an old has-been tattie. It had a big smile in it.”
“Smile? Smile, my arse! That was a Dunlop 65. You know what they cost?” Andy always hated to lose a ball, no matter the circumstance.
Barry began to unzip his golf bag. “So what? Here, I’ll give you another one.”
“Stick it up your arse, Taylor! I don’t want a fuckinother one, I want that one. So you’d better get down there and start looking for it, or else.”
“Or else what?” Barry was half bent over, looking up at Andy from his crouch. This, too, was a familiar routine.
“Or else you know what.”
“No, I—” Barry stopped, suddenly deciding that this wasn’t worth arguing over. He laid his bag carefully on the path and set off into the long grass on the steep bank, knowing that he didn’t have a hope in hell of finding the ball but unwilling to prolong any unpleasantness for such a petty reason. Greg followed him, leaving Andy standing sulking on the pathway.
“You know we’re never going to find it, don’t you?”
Barry didn’t even bother to answer; his eyes scanned the ground. He moved off to the right. Greg shook his head and went left, and found the ball moments later, lying right in front of him on a tiny patch of open ground.
“Hey, Barry!” he shouted with surprise. “I’ve got it.”
“Never mind that,” Barry called. “Come and see what I’ve found.”
Greg slid across the steep slope, clutching at bushes and shrubs to keep his balance, and came to a stop. Barry was pointing to a bicycle, firmly anchored, upside down, in the topmost canopy of a high-climbing, hugely overgrown clump of wild bramble bushes. It was clean, brightly gleaming, new-looking.
“Jeez! That’s . . . Jeez. Whose is it?”
“How the hell would I know? Hey, Andy! Come down here!”
“Did you find my ball?”
“Aye, but come and see this.”
They heard the clatter of Andy’s golf bag joining the others on the ground, and then came the sliding of his boots as he tobogganed wildly down the hillside towards them to throw his arms around a sapling and stop himself, staring wide-eyed at the bike.
“It’s a bike.”
“Get away!”
A look of perplexity came over Andy’s face. As Greg and Barry had done before him, he looked all around as though expecting to see the owner close by. “Whose is it?” he asked. “An’ what’s it doin’ up there down here?”
“It’s down here,” Greg explained patiently, “because we were up there on the path above it and it’s up there ’cause we’re on the side o’ a hill and it’s a long way down to the bottom, where we’ll have to start if we want to reach it. What do you think, Barry?”
Barry Taylor shrugged. “Search me.”
“’Sa nice bike . . .” Andy was staring up at it with slitted, covetous eyes. “It’s even got a kickstand. That’s fancy.”
None of the three boys made any further move towards the bicycle until Greg said, “Somebody must’ve threw it in there.”
“Threw it?” Andy said. “What d’you mean?”
“He’s right,” Barry said. “Look where it is. The grass isn’t trampled between here and there, and the bramble stalks aren’t smashed up, except on the very top where the bike is. Somebody threw it in there.”
“Why would somebody throw a new bike away?” Greg asked.
“Stole it,” Andy said unambiguously. “Somebody stole it and threw it in here to hide it till the hue and cry dies down.”
“Okay,” Barry said, using the American expression that would have earned him a thick ear from any of his schoolteachers. “What do we do now?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Well, are we going to leave it here for the thief to come back for it, or are we going to take it to the police station and tell them where we found it?”
The three boys looked at each other in silence for a few seconds and then, as one, they moved forward to retrieve the bike from the bushes.
It turned out to be far easier said than done. The bottom of the giant bramble clump was at least twenty feet below where they were standing on the steeply sloping hillside, and the bicycle was well and truly lodged more than ten feet up from the ground, upside down in the sunlit centre of a massive tangle of long, flexible branches armed with vicious, bloodthirsty thorns.
They reached the bottom of the clump and scanned the daunting tangle of briars facing them.
“Fuck this,” Andy McNeil snarled. “You’d need a machete to get in there, like they use in the Tarzan pictures. Failin’ that, we’re gonnae need some Jeezusly big sticks.”
He dug into his pocket and produced a big, heavy First World War British Army pocket knife, prising it open to display a blade worn almost to a sickle shape by constant sharpening. His grandfather had carried it throughout two world wars and had given it to him the previous year, warning him, unnecessarily, that it was wickedly sharp. Now, within minutes of opening it, he and Barry each had a long, heavy club-like stick made from a hazel sapling. Greg Pearson retrieved his rusty, trusty old niblick from his golf bag, and all three began to beat at the bushes between them and the prize that dangled over their heads.
Each of them fell several times on the slippery incline, damaging themselves—faces, legs, arms, and hands—and their clothing on the bramble thorns. They were determined, though, and after a struggle that lasted more than half an hour, accompanied by increasingly breathless curses that would have scandalized their mothers, they finally managed to dislodge the bicycle from its high perch, only to discover, immediately, that several spokes on each wheel had sprung loose and were sticking out wildly on either side. All three boys looked disgustedly at this evidence of vandalism. None of them owned a bicycle anywhere near as fine as this one, and the thought of anyone simply throwing such a beautiful machine away, and damaging it in so doing, was more than they could comprehend.
Barry Taylor dropped to one knee and began to twist the broken spokes around their neighbours, so there would be sufficient clearance for the wheels to turn unhampered. “We’d better take this right to the cop shop,” he said, “so let’s get moving, before the ignorant bastard that stole it comes back and catches us.”
Ten minutes later, having awkwardly wrestled the bike all the way up the steep, slick slope, they collected their bags and looked around them carefully, making sure that no one was watching them from the surrounding bushes. And then they set out for the police station, feeling measurably more confident.
They were all familiar with the outside of the police station, for they passed it multiple times every day on their way to and from their homes, but today they were wondering separately what the grim sandstone building would be like inside, because none of them had ever been inside its massive wooden doors. It was, after all, a police station, a detention centre, and its dark, permanently closed doors were an all too visible reminder of the weight and significance of what faced anyone unfortunate enough to incur, or stupid enough to flout, the duly vested enforcement power of the law.
III
“Checkmate in three moves.”
“My arse!” The desk sergeant, Buckley, sat gnawing a rough edge of skin at the base of his thumbnail as he studied the board with an air of great and worried concentration. He was in trouble, and angry at himself for letting his young opponent trick him into sacrificing his queen—like a bloody schoolboy, was his thought.
The telephone rang, its shrillness echoing from the tiled floor and painted walls.
“Get that, will you?” Buckley muttered.
Harry Fletcher put down his sandwich and went to the counter, swallowing as he went. Buckley picked up his mug of tea and took a large swig, his eyes never leaving the chess board.
“Police station, Detective Fletcher speaking.”
Buckley snorted to himself. Detective Fletcher! Not just Constable Fletcher. Christ, no. Detective C.I. bloody D. Fletcher.
“Yes, madam. Can I have your name, please? . . . Thank you. And your address? . . . Thank you. You say it’s a nice one? No collar, but well trained . . . Your daughter? Fine. Can you bring it down here? Thank you, Mrs. Richardson. Goodbye.”
Fletcher returned to the desk. Buckley still hadn’t made his move. Fletcher smiled.
“What was all that about?”
“Hmmm?” Fletcher was already absorbed in the strategy of the board again.
“The phone,” Buckley grunted. “What was it?”
“Oh, just some woman whose wee lassie brought home a stray dog. Says it just followed her home. Big one, though, an Alsatian. No collar. The mother thinks it’s from a good home. Says it’s clean and well groomed and apparently well trained. She’s bringing it around.”
“Mmm.” Sergeant Buckley placed his fingertip tentatively on his one remaining bishop, his lips pursed.
“Not going to help, Sarge . . .”
“Damn it, I havena moved it yet! I’m still considering my options. Just you play your game and leave me to play mine.”
“Just passing a comment,” Fletcher murmured, smiling to himself.
“Well, I don’t need your comments, thank ye!” The sergeant folded his arms on the desktop and plucked at his pursed lips, his brow creased. He had assumed the air of a man about to make a momentous decision when there came a clatter at the door and both men looked up to see three boys with golf bags over their shoulders, struggling through the double doors with a bicycle.
“Now what the hell,” said Buckley, his voice rising rapidly. “Get that thing out o’ here! Leave it outside. What d’ye think this place is, a garage?”
One of the boys looked at him in surprise. “But we found it! We’re bringing it in to report it.”
“Somebody must’ve stole it,” said another. “It was hid in raspberries.”
“Brambles,” said the third boy. “They were brambles.”
Sergeant Buckley threw a glance of sheer exasperation at Constable Fletcher, who was smiling slightly as he looked at the boys.
“And did it not occur to youse,” the sergeant said, “that somebody might’ve hid it in there so that people like you couldn’t find it and maybe steal it while he was goin’ about his lawful business somewhere else?”
“No, Sergeant Buckley,” said the first boy. “It was hidden all right, but it wasn’t the owner who hid it. It was hangin’ upside down, on the very top o’ a big clump of bushes on the back road from the golf course, miles from anywhere. We think somebody stole it and threw it in there.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Buckley cocked his head. “How do you know my name? Do I know you? Och, are you not the Taylor boy from down the lane there? Your father has the factory?”
The boy nodded. “Yes, Sergeant.”
“Aye. What’s your name?”
“Barry, Sergeant.”
“Barry Taylor, aye. And who are these two?”
“Greg Pearson and Andy McNeil.”
“Aye, right enough, I know all three of you now. Ye’re all from the same street. Well, let’s have a look at this stolen bicycle, then. Bring it over here. Constable Fletcher, do we have any reports of stolen bicycles?”
“Don’t think so, Sergeant, but I’ll check.”
“Aye, do that, Constable, do that.” Buckley rose ponderously from the desk. “Now, let’s see. It’s a fine-looking machine, isn’t it? Nearly new, I’d say. Where did you say you found it? Out by the golf course? Aye . . . Well, tell me again.”
All three boys started speaking at the same time.
“All right, all right! Too many cooks. Young Taylor, you tell me. What happened?”
Barry related the whole story, and when he was finished, Buckley sat chewing on the end of his pencil. “Aye,” he said finally. “You maybe did the right thing, at that.”
Fletcher came back into the hallway. “Nothing on report, Sarge.”
“The title is Sergeant, Constable, I’ll thank ye to remember that. No report. I see . . . Not yet, anyway. Well, we’d better get a description of the thing wrote down on paper. First thing, though, I’ll need the names and addresses of the finders.”
“What for, Sergeant?” asked one of the boys.
“In case there’s a reward for finding it. It would be a fine to-do if there was a reward and no address to send it to, wouldn’t it?”
The boys, each aware of a whole pound note smouldering in his pocket, agreed that it would, and he wrote down the names and addresses of all three of them, after which he added the important details of their story and then turned his attention to the bicycle.
“Let’s see here, it’s a Raleigh, four-speed gears, with lights front and back, dynamo driven, caliper brakes, chain guard, kickstand, saddlebag—was there anything in it, by the way? In the saddlebag? No. I thought not. There should be a serial number on the frame, Constable Fletcher. Would you read it out to me?”
Fletcher did so, and then the sergeant read the entire report back to the boys. “Would you say that’s right now, gentlemen? Have I missed anything out?”
Young Taylor spoke up. “Sergeant?”
“Yes, lad?”
“Just one thing.”
“Aye? And what’s that?”
“It’s a lady’s bike, Sergeant. There’s no crossbar.”
The sergeant’s eyebrows shot up. “By the Lord Harry, you’re right! Fancy me missing that.” He added a note to the report, thanked the boys courteously, and sent them on their way. As they left, lugging their canvas golf bags, the last of them held the door open for a woman holding the hand of a small girl who, in turn, led a large Alsatian tethered by a length of string. The sergeant and the detective constable watched in silence as the woman approached the counter, where she addressed the sergeant.
“Are you Detective Fletcher?”
Buckley almost choked. Fletcher turned his head away. When the sergeant regained his voice, it was frigid. “No, madam, I am Sergeant Buckley.” He emphasized the word by tapping his forefinger on the three stripes on his sleeve. “This,” he went on, nodding towards Fletcher, “is Detective Constable Fletcher. Detectives are plainclothes police. They don’t wear uniforms. Now what can we do for you?”
He knew very well what he could do for her, but his dignity was offended and so he let her tell the whole story as though he were hearing it for the first time. When the woman had finished, Buckley turned to the little girl. She was about six years old and looked very unhappy at the prospect of losing her newfound friend, who sat quietly by her side.
“Now, Jenny,” he began. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Jenny?”
The little girl nodded.
“Well, Jenny, can you tell me exactly where you met the doggy?”
The little girl nodded.
“Aye.” Buckley tried to keep his voice gentle. “Was it near here? Near where you live?”
The little girl nodded again.
“That’s good, Jenny, that’s good. Where was it, exactly? Can you remember that?”
Another nod.
“Where, then? You can tell me. It’s all right. I’m a policeman.”
“Tell the nice sergeant, Jenny,” said her mother.
“Outside.” It was the barest of whispers.
“Where? I didn’t hear, dear.”
“Outside.”
Oh, Christ, that’s just great, Buckley thought. “Outside where, Jenny?”
“Round the back.”
He took a deep breath and reminded himself that this was a very young girl. He kept his voice very patient. “Round the back of where, Jenny?”
“Here.”
“Hmm?”
“Here.”
“Here? You— you mean round the back of the police station?”
The girl nodded.
“Can you show me where? Will you take me and show me?”
She nodded again.
Buckley straightened up and turned to Fletcher. “Keep an eye on things, Constable. I’m going for a wee walk with this young lady.” He took her by the hand and, with mother and doggy in tow, they left by the front doors.
The child led them along the side of the sandstone building and came to a halt, pointing to where another wall, this one made of bricks, stretched out at right angles to the main one. It was the cellblock, with a row of narrow, barred windows high up under the eaves.
“There,” Jenny said.
“What?”
The girl threw Buckley a look of purest scorn and pointed to the fourth barred window along. “He came through there.”
“Oh, my Christ!” Buckley turned quickly to the child’s mother. “Excuse me, Mrs. Richardson, I forgot myself.”
***
Harry Fletcher had tagged the bike and wheeled it into the lost property department, and on his way back he met his relief in the hallway. Charlie Suckle—known to his colleagues as Honey—was three years Harry’s senior in the force, but they were the same age and had grown up as friends and neighbours.
“Ah, Constable Suckle. It’s about time you got here.”
“Hi, Harry. What’s cookin’? Anything dire and dirty threatening the safety o’ the realm? Is there any tea ready?”
“Aye, I just made a fresh pot before we wis interrupted. Buckley’s away wi’ a wee lassie to see where she found a dog.”
“What?” Suckle stopped in astonishment. “He left the desk? Are you kiddin’ me?”
“No, honest to God! He went to see where she found the dog. She said it was right here.” He paused. “Maybe I’ll have a cuppa wi’ you before I go home. Jeez, it’s been quiet, though, except for the last half hour.”
They went into the off-duty room that was little more than a cupboard with some kitchen chairs, a stained sink, and a small counter with a gas ring for boiling water.
Suckle poured himself a mug and stirred his tea, staring into his mug. “You made this?”
“Aye,” Fletcher said. “What’s wrong wi’ it?”
“Too strong. I had to dig my spoon into it.”
Fletcher picked up the big metal teapot with both hands and poured another mug for himself. It came out thick and almost black. “Aye, I suppose it is a wee bit stewed.” He added two large spoons of sugar and some Nestlé’s condensed milk from an open can. “Never mind, it’ll put hair on your chest.” He took a swig and sighed in deep appreciation. “Ahh! The lifeblood of the empire!”
“How come the woman brought the dog here?” Suckle asked. “Did she think we were the RSPCA?”
“I told her to. She lives right close by, and she’s a widow woman. It’ll save her traipsin’ all over the country lookin’ for its owner. ’S a nice dog, right enough. Somebody’s worryin’ about it right now, I’ll bet you.” He cocked his head, hearing a noise from the hallway. “That’ll be Buckley back.” Fletcher put down his mug and tilted his chair back so he could peer round the corner of the doorway, but then he scrambled upright and stepped into the hall. “What’s up, Sergeant?”
The sergeant was alone with the dog and decidedly out of countenance. “What’s up? What’s up? I’ll tell ye what’s bloody up. Sit!” This last was to the dog, which promptly sat. The sergeant crossed to the phone on the counter and dialed a number. Fletcher leaned against the wall, wondering what had upset him. Charlie Suckle emerged from the off-duty room and nodded to Buckley.
“Evenin’, Sergeant.”
Buckley swung around to the two detectives. “She said it was well trained! Well, I’ll tell you the whore’s well trained! He’s one o’ ours, that’s how well bloody trained he is! And the whore’s runnin’ loose, followin’ wee lassies home! Jesus Christ!” He threw a venomous look at the dog, which yawned massively and lay down with his head upon his paws. “Well trained! Do you have any idea what could’ve happened? If that bloody dog had— Hello! Gibson? Is that you? I hope you’re enjoying your new television, but I’m afraid I’ve a wee bit o’ bad news for you. One o’ your admirably trained dogs got out this afternoon. Aye, that’s right, out! Wriggled out between the bars o’ a cell window, probably lookin’ for somebody to practise its chewin’ on. But it followed a wee lassie home, instead!” He listened for about half a second and exploded again. “Jesus Christ! Am I sure? I’ve got the whore sitting right here in front of me! No, no’ the lassie, the dog! . . . How the hell would I know which one it is? You’re the bloody trainer! Get your arse in here, Gibson—smartish!”
He hung up, slumped into a chair, and pushed his fingers through his hair. “He says am I sure it’s one o’ ours? I felt like a right idiot when the wee lassie points right up to the cell window an’—”
He was silenced by a loud scream as the entrance doors crashed open and a woman half-fell, half-ran inside. She was dishevelled and wide-eyed with terror as she attempted to wrest herself free from the grip of the obviously drunk man who pursued her and had now seized her arm.
The dog was already up and crouched facing the newcomers, snarling, hackles bristling. Buckley jumped to his feet with an oath, sending the chair clattering to the floor, and the dog half turned to face him, ears flattened, snarling loudly, looking from the disturbance at the door to the new threat from the sergeant.
“Fletcher,” Buckley snapped, his eyes on the tableau by the door. “Get that animal out of here. Take it to the cells. You there! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get your hands off that woman!”
The man had the woman by the shoulder and was trying to drag her backwards through the doorway. She was struggling, keening in a high, hysterical whine, and the dog sprang forward and crouched in front of them, fangs bared. The drunk sobered up very quickly and backed into the corner by the door, shielding himself behind the woman, who continued to keen in that high, terrified voice.
The dog still had the length of string around its neck, and Fletcher slowly approached the animal, reaching out to catch the end of the string, but the dog flashed its teeth at him with a vicious growl.
Buckley, his face set in a mask of determination, stepped out from behind his desk and made for the dog as though his sergeant’s stripes would intimidate it, but the animal spun and darted towards him, fangs flashing. Buckley froze, and the dog backed away, tail down, and positioned itself so that it could see all five of them: the couple in the corner, the two detectives, and Buckley. Saliva drooled from its mouth.
“That dog’s scared worse than we are.” This was Charlie Suckle. “We’ll never get near it.”
Buckley stood stock-still and tried to speak in a calm voice. “It’s responding to our panic. It’s no’ fully trained yet. That’s why it was in the cells and not in the kennels. It’s confused as well. Everything happened here just a wee bit too quickly. If we just stay where we are, wi’oot moving, and concentrate on relaxing, it might just relax the dog, too. Okay now,” he said levelly, holding his voice to a friendly, conversational level. “Just relax, everybody. That’s it. Relax. Missus, will you please stop makin’ that noise? It’s upsetting the animal. Please . . . Be quiet. You needna be afraid any more. You’re in the police station, and you’re safe, and we’ll get your situation settled as soon as the dog calms down. But in the meantime, please stay quiet . . .”
The woman became subdued, though she still cringed from the man beside her, and for a long three minutes there was silence in the hallway. The late-afternoon sun shone down through the windows set high up in the walls and illumined the five motionless people watching the dog. And soon the dog stopped growling and slavering, though it remained wary and vigilant.
When Constable Gibson stepped in through the front doorway the dog spun to face him, and as Gibson said, “In the name o’—” Buckley snapped, “Gibson, curb that dog!”
“Tarka! Heel!” The dog rose instantly and ran straight to Gibson to sit by his left heel. Gibson reached down and fondled his ears.
“Gibson, get that thing back to the cells now and put it in a cage. And lock the cage.” Buckley turned his attention to the couple in the corner. “You,” he snapped, pointing at the man, who still held the woman in front of him. “Let go of her and sit over there. On that bench. Move, now, or I’ll move you!”
The man did as he was told. Buckley went to the woman and took her gently by the elbow, then led her over to the chair by his desk. The man on the bench leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and put his face in his hands.
Buckley seated the woman and went behind his desk, righting his own chair and sitting down. “Now, missus,” he said gently, “what’s going on here? What happened?”
She started to cry, quietly this time. “He was trying to take my money. My handbag.”
Buckley looked across at the man, his eyes cold. “Do you know the man? Have you ever seen him before?”
“Aye, he’s my man . . . My husband.”
Sergeant Buckley took a deep breath and squeezed his fingertips into the corners of his eyes as though rubbing the sleep out of them. His sigh was loud and eloquent. “I see . . .” He reached for a pencil. “Well, you’d better start at the beginning and tell me what happened right up to the minute when the two o’ you came charging in here. Take your time, now. There’s no rush.” His voice was infinitely patient, infinitely weary. The man on the bench did not move.
The woman sobbed and then began to speak in a shaky, timid voice. “Well, ye see, Sergeant, he came home drunk. He’d been down at the pub since opening an’ he ran out o’ money. The boy told him I’d went to the store an’ he followed me. But I need my money to buy food for the weans.”
Buckley began making notes, and Fletcher and Suckle moved away towards the off-duty room.
Suckle checked his mug. “Bloody stone cold. Well, that was a right stewpot, wasn’t it? I’m helluva glad Gibson arrived when he did, or we’d all still be out there!”
Before Fletcher could say anything, Gibson walked in. “What’s goin’ on in this place? What happened?”
Fletcher looked at his watch. “Sorry, Gibs, haven’t got time to tell you. I promised Agnes I’d be home in time to get changed for the pictures and I’m late already. Charlie’ll tell you.”
“What you goin’ to see?” asked Suckle.
“Haven’t a clue, son. I just hope it’s no’ The Hound o’ the Baskervilles. See yese all next time.” Fletcher rinsed out his mug, took his coat from the hook behind the door, and made his way through the office. He didn’t bother saying goodnight to Buckley, who was still writing up the domestic dispute, but he did notice one thing.
He turned on his heel and went right back to the off-duty room, shaking his head.
The other two looked at him in surprise. “You forget somethin’?” Gibson asked him.
“He hid the bloody board,” Harry said. “The auld bugger hid the bloody chessboard! An’ I had ’im right up against the wall. I mean it was checkmate in three moves. He was stymied! Down and out for the count! An’ then a bunch o’ laddies came in wi’ a bike they found, and then that woman came in wi’ the dog, an’ right after that, like bingo, bango, bongo, the drunk man came in chasin’ his wife, and the fly old bugger got out o’ it again and quietly hid the bloody board! And now it’s time for me to go home an’ he’s away tae England for a weddin’ as soon as he gets off shift, and we’ll never get to finish the game! When he gets back next week, he’ll have conveniently forgot we even played, never mind that I had him beat.”
“Christ Almighty,” Suckle said, laughing at his friend’s indignation. “You and your bloody chess!”