No Holds Barred (12 page)

Symmonds cast her an unreadable look.

‘An organized gang, then? Stealing to order?'

‘But then you'd expect them to be specific breeds – gundogs or lurchers. Some of these are just mongrels. And who'd pay for a stolen black-and-white cat? The rescues are stuffed with them.'

‘Ransom, then, perhaps. I don't know. Whoever it is, I just hope the police catch up with them soon.' Symmonds shook his head sadly.

At that moment, the street door opened and the vet's expression became stony. With a hasty goodbye to Daniel, he turned on his heel and went back into his consulting room.

Surprised, Daniel looked round and saw an overweight middle-aged man with a weather-beaten face, slicked-down black hair and luxuriant sideburns. He wore navy-blue overalls and a pair of heavy-duty working boots, and as he passed Daniel, he left the smell of sump oil hanging in the air.

He disappeared into the consulting room and Daniel heard the vet say testily, ‘I thought I told you to phone first!'

‘But I needed some stuff for tonight, and as I was passing  . . .'

‘Close the bloody door!' Symmonds hissed, and the altercation was cut off as the door banged shut.

The receptionist produced an embarrassed smile.

‘I'm sorry about that. He
will
turn up without an appointment.'

‘Who is he?' Daniel asked, though he was pretty sure of the answer.

‘Oh, don't you know?' The girl pulled a face. ‘That's Norman Boyd. Godfather of the Great Ditton Mafia!'

EIGHT

L
eaving the vet's and heading for his car, Daniel's eye was caught by a van parked half on the pavement, with the words
Ditton Vale Gazette
stencilled on the side and rear doors. He paused, looking up at the adjacent building. Just below one of the upper windows, the same words adorned a white board. Even though the day was bright, he could see a striplight on in the room behind the window and someone moving about.

At ground level, beside the door, were three nameplates and an intercom. Daniel pressed the buzzer and waited, and presently a rather impatient male voice informed him that the office was closed.

‘OK. Your loss,' Daniel told him. ‘I'm sure someone else will be interested.'

‘Look, wait! Hold on a minute. What's it about?'

‘You said you were closed  . . .'

‘I thought you were one of those bloody irritating people who want to put an advert in at the last minute. All right, look, the door's open. Come on up.'

True to his word, the door clicked and opened an inch or two, and, with Taz at his heels, Daniel accepted the invitation, finding himself at the foot of a steep flight of stairs with an arrow directing him up to the
DVG
office.

The owner of the grumpy voice turned out to be younger than Daniel expected; a lean, thin-faced individual in his early twenties, with an unhealthy pallor and a shock of frizzy, gingery hair. He was wearing faded jeans that hung on his bony hips and a T-shirt that advertised the 2005 UK tour of some rock group Daniel had never heard of.

‘Er, sorry about before,' he offered as he let Daniel into the brightly lit and chaotically untidy office. ‘Amy's supposed to be here – she does classifieds – but she's going to a hen do, so I let her off early, and sod's law when I do that, half a dozen people turn up at the last bloody minute with advertising forms clutched in their sticky little mitts, wanting insertion in Monday's paper – even though the deadline is Friday evening and it's now Saturday. William Faulkner, by the way. Editor.' He stuck out a long-fingered white hand.

‘Annoying,' Daniel agreed, briefly clasping the hand. ‘Daniel Whelan.'

‘And  . . . ?' He'd spotted the dog.

‘Taz,' Daniel supplied. ‘You don't mind, do you?'

‘No, not at all. I like dogs.' He raised his eyebrows expectantly. ‘So, what have you got for me?'

‘Ah. I didn't actually say I had anything for you. I just implied it and you joined up the dots. I actually wanted to ask you a couple of questions.'

‘Oh,' William frowned, adding with an oddly touching naivety, ‘That's not exactly playing fair, is it?'

‘No,' Daniel agreed candidly. ‘Are you
very
busy? The thing is, I need some info and I thought you might be just the man.'

‘Well, I am
pretty
busy. Actually, not so much busy as about to pack up for the day, really. What is it you want to know?'

‘A couple of things. Do you have a searchable archive?'

‘Absolutely. I indexed it myself.' William moved with a slouching yet energetic stride to a workstation by the window, tapped a few keys and brought up a display on the monitor. ‘Pull up a pew,' he added with the wave of a hand.

Daniel gave a silent cheer. He'd struck lucky.

Whatever William's plans had been for the evening, he didn't leave the office until gone six, getting caught up in Daniel's quest for information so enthusiastically that it was Daniel himself who eventually drew the editor's attention to the lateness of the hour.

Although his visit to the
DVG
office had been completely unpremeditated, it had paid dividends. He'd arrived with a number of half-formed ideas buzzing around his head, and while it couldn't be said that he left with any definitive answers, the ideas had certainly taken a more perceptible shape.

The main thrust of his queries had been about animals reported missing in the area, but they had also gone on to search for cases of animal cruelty, which in turn led to three reports linked to dog fighting.

‘You don't think the pets are being stolen for fighting?' William had asked, his face showing concern. He'd already told Daniel that he had a cat at home that he was careful to keep in at night.

‘No. Not directly. The dogs used for fighting are bred specially for it – hence the name, pit bull terriers: bred for the fighting pit. Even though it's totally illegal, it's big business. Auntie Lily's Shih Tzu wouldn't be anywhere near tough enough – but they have been known to use pet dogs and cats as bait. Teasers – to raise the blood lust in the younger, untried fighting dogs. No doubt it gives the humans a cheap thrill, too. By the way – don't run any adverts for animals free to good homes in your paper. They might as well just deliver them straight to the pit bull owners.'

‘But that's awful! It's disgusting!' The
DVG
editor was genuinely shocked. ‘The authorities know this goes on but they can't put a stop to it?'

‘It's an ongoing battle. They know it's rife, but it's very difficult to catch them at it,' Daniel said sadly. ‘The dog-fighting community is a tight one and, as you might imagine, is a magnet for some really choice characters. Nobody talks lightly.'

‘How do you know all this?' William was all of a sudden wary, and Daniel fell back on a version of the truth.

‘I've got a mate who's a cop and he told me about it. So when I saw all the posters round here for missing pets, something started niggling in my suspicious little mind.'

‘You really think it's going on in this area? Have you told your mate about it?'

‘Not yet. He's on leave. But I will.'

‘So you think Maisie Cooper was actually on to something, then?'

Maisie Cooper had featured in one of the search results. She had complained that her spaniel had been attacked and seriously mauled on a local footpath by a dog she swore was a pit bull terrier. When interviewed, she had said she had warned the police and the RSPCA that there were fighting dogs in the area but said they hadn't believed her. It had been her stated opinion that it would take the death of a child to stir them to action.

‘I can't say for sure,' Daniel said. ‘But it might be worth having a word with this Maisie, though.'

‘Have a job – she's dead. Hit-and-run accident last year. Here, I'll find it for you.' William's long fingers sped over the keys and, within moments, the report of Maisie Cooper's tragic end was on the screen in front of them.

Daniel leaned forward. The article was brief, reporting her death in hospital following the accident and saying that it gave weight to local residents' calls for a speed limit on the roads around the village.

‘She was a bit of a gossip,' William said. ‘But kind at heart. Always there helping whenever there was a do in the village. There was a huge turnout at the funeral. They never caught the driver, though.'

Daniel's eyes narrowed thoughtfully, but a glance at the editor showed that he was taking the report at face value.

Another news item, in the
In Brief
column, had told of a joint RSPCA and police raid on a suspected dog-fighting venue that William said was about twenty miles away. Several dogs had been seized and put to sleep under the Dangerous Dogs Act, and two arrests had been made, it reported, but neither was a local man. The article was in an issue dated some eight weeks previously.

After leaving the
DVG
offices, Daniel drove to the garage for fuel and was surprised to see that the gates to the adjacent scrapyard stood wide and the swinging metal sign still showed it as open.

Mindful of the illegality of his smashed headlights, he paid for his diesel and turned the Merc's steering wheel in the direction of Boyd's Salvage Spares.

Hidden as it was behind a substantial fence of corrugated metal sheets topped with barbed wire, Daniel was unprepared for the scale of the site. As soon as he went through the gates, the rough gravel driveway passed between untidy banks of scrap metal fifteen or twenty feet high. It then continued across the centre of the vast plot with avenues branching off it on either side, before curving right-handed and culminating in a huge turning space in front of a forty-foot-long Portakabin, two large Nissen huts and a smaller shed.

Although a crudely painted sign said ‘Reception', the door to the cabin had a ‘Closed' sign and was locked when Daniel tried it, confirming what he'd half suspected: that the main gates had been left open by mistake. There were no signs of life, although he could hear the muffled barking of a number of dogs, which seemed to be coming from some way off. In his mind he heard Woodsmoke's voice again.
Didn't tell you about the other dogs, though, did she? The ones you can't see.

With the Rottweilers in mind, he'd left Taz in the car, and now he heard the dog grumbling as he moved to the window of the first Nissen hut and peered in. The state of the glass made it almost impossible to see anything, but as he was met with no frenzy of barking, he concluded that there were no dogs in residence. It appeared to be a storeroom for saleable spare parts.

As he moved on to the second hut, Taz began to bark fretfully in the car.

‘Can I 'elp you?' a voice enquired loudly, and Daniel spun round to see Norman Boyd approaching from a side alley leading two well-muscled dogs of medium height, one fawn, one black. They were both tailless but, clearly, neither was a Rottweiler.

‘Oh, hi. I was looking for some new headlights for the Merc,' Daniel replied, going towards the man. The dogs wriggled and wagged their docked stumps in delighted anticipation; their owner made no effort to appear similarly welcoming.

‘We're closed.'

‘I see that now, but the gates were open, so I just drove on in.'

‘Bloody Melody! Head in the bloody clouds!' the man muttered under his breath. Then, to Daniel, ‘We close at five thirty. My daughter was meant to lock up on her way out.'

‘Sorry,' Daniel said, but made no move to leave. ‘Nice dogs. What are they? Mastiffs?'

‘No. Labrador-cross-boxer.' Boyd said shortly. ‘Got their papers and everything. Look, you'll have to come back on Monday, I'm afraid.'

‘Yeah, I'm sorry. I thought it was odd you being open so late. Huge place you've got here. I expect you need good guard dogs.'

‘These aren't guard dogs. No, we've got a couple of Rottweilers out back. These are just pets. Soft as butter.'

‘I can see that,' Daniel agreed, rubbing the black dog behind its ears. Its companion pushed its head into his hand to receive the same fuss.

‘Look, I'm sorry, but you'll have to leave now. I'm a busy man and I need to get that gate shut before some other punter comes breezing in.'

‘Of course. Sorry about the mistake. I'll come back on Monday.'

With a final caress for the dogs, Daniel turned and went back to his car.

Outside the salvage yard gates, on the edge of the garage forecourt, he slowed to a halt and pondered his next move. It was at times like this that he most regretted the demise of his career in the police, and, more especially, the manner in which it had come about, leaving him
persona non grata
with nearly all his former colleagues.

Nearly all.

Absent-mindedly watching the progress of a woman with a pair of cocker spaniels along the pavement on the opposite side of the road, he remembered his own spaniel, Bella, a top drugs dog who'd been reallocated when he'd been pulled from the dog unit. He'd had nearly six years working with that dog. The memory brought a stab of bitterness that surprised him. He'd thought he was over it.

Resolutely, he forced himself to concentrate on the here and now. Bella had been reassigned to an Anglo-Japanese handler called Jo-Ji Matsuki – he of the martial arts skills – and commonly referred to by his peers as Joey Suzuki.

A man of few words, Joey had a reputation for level-headed reliability, and although Daniel hadn't known the man well, he had always found him pleasant. He also had a nice way with the dogs in his care, and in Daniel's opinion that counted for a lot. You could tell quite a bit about a person by the way they treated their animals. Joey might well be worth a try.

Sitting with the engine idling, Daniel searched the memory on his mobile without much optimism and was surprised to find a home number for the man. That was where his luck ran out for the time being, his call being fielded by an answering machine on which he left a brief message.