Tea and Dog Biscuits (14 page)

‘Yes – sorry – you'd taken my breath away.'

Luke was the newest recruit to the large successful London practice of which Mr Treadmore was the senior partner. Mr Treadmore had had a disagreement with his young assistant when Luke reported that Jess had been brought in for euthanasia.

‘This is the first time this has happened to me,' Luke told me. ‘Treadmore claims if we don't euthanise him somebody else will. And there's no point in me refusing – he will do it himself. He said in English law the dog was a piece of property and like any other piece of property the owner could destroy it if he wanted. He said if I wanted to destroy my pen I could. It was up to me, it was my property, and in that respect the dog was no different.'

It was Saturday teatime. Their surgery would be closing shortly. If they were open on Sunday I could go down to London the next day.

‘That's no good,' said Luke. ‘He can't stay here.'

‘You've only got to keep him there one night,' I said.

‘He can't stay here in case someone sees him. I told his owner and my boss that I'd done it. They think he's dead.'

‘Barrie,' Dorothy said, ‘I do sometimes think it's a definite disadvantage you having a law degree.'

‘What?'

‘You worry over things other people don't give a thought about.'

I gave a contemptuous snort. Still, it was true that in the three days since I had collected Jess, in the dark, from what should have been his place of execution, I had worried over the legalities of it all. The churning over in my mind about the legal implications and consequences had started on the drive back from London.

What was the definition of theft? As a law lecturer my special subject was the Law of Contract. My distaste for criminal law had kept me away from the subject since my student days. Going back in time I seemed to remember, ‘A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another.'

I never doubted for a second that what I had done was morally right. There was no valid reason to euthanise this young dog. And to do so as an act of vengeance was despicable. I sighed. I knew enough about the law to know that the law and what was morally right did not always coincide.

I went through the legal situation with Dorothy. ‘As so often with law,' I said, ‘the legal situation is very, very far from clear. The law takes the cold view that a dog is “property” but did this dog “belong to another”? As far as his owner was concerned Jess was dead, so can it be said Jess still belonged to him? Perhaps so, as Jess was still on earth. And that presents another worry: What if the man saw him one day? A cross, with probably some German Shepherd in there somewhere, but with floppy ears and tan all over, and one brown eye and one blue eye – he's rather distinctive. The man would think he was seeing a ghost. No, he would realise his vet had lied to him. So was Luke guilty of fraudulent deception?'

‘Barrie!'

‘What?'

‘I'm trying to get to sleep – it's half past one!'

I sniffed contemptuously. ‘It's all right for you,' I said. ‘It's not you that's going to prison for handling stolen goods… '

Never for one moment when I embarked upon dog rescue work could I possibly have dreamed that I would spend my Sunday afternoon cutting up the freshly dead insides of a pig.

It sat there on the kitchen table. A great mound of slimy, off-white and pinkish fatty pig innards.

I couldn't take my eyes off it.

Only hours ago each pig's pancreas had been part of a living animal. All eighty of them. It had been Dorothy's misfortune to arrive at the slaughterhouse as the last of the squealing creatures were offloaded and herded inside.

Now she was showering – trying to get the smell of blood off her, she said. That had been the deal: she would collect the pigs' pancreas from the abattoir if I would weigh it and divide it into daily portions. As dedicated vegetarians, we had decided to share the ghastly workload.

For some minutes I stood staring at the repugnant mound before me, but I couldn't put it off any longer: it had to go in the freezer. I picked out what I thought was a whole pancreas and grabbed it tightly in case it tried to get away from me. It felt like a squishy rubber sausage. I must have had only two or three fingers round it; it popped out between index finger and thumb, and plopped onto the floor.

I stared down at the solitary pancreas. This one had some blood spots on it and a streak of dark blood at one end. Putting off having to bend over and gather it up, I foolishly allowed myself to wonder about the pig from which it had come. A friend in a nearby village kept four pigs as a hobby, the old Large Black breed. Each had their own character. Molly was my favourite; she was so gentle for such a big girl, even when trying to steal a tasty morsel from my pocket. Gazing at the pancreas, I wondered if this pig had been a female. How old had she been?

I squatted down, scooped up the pancreas with both hands and dropped it on the scales. Melissa had told us to give Friend just a couple of ounces a day to begin with. The plump specimen before me had a length of stringy fat dangling off one end and weighed nearly three times what was needed for a daily portion. I took a knife from a drawer, grasped the pancreas tightly and began to saw a third of the way along it. To no avail. I went back to the drawer, rummaged through it and found a knife at the bottom with a serrated blade about a foot long, which tapered off to a sharp point – an evil-looking thing I never knew we had. I had just begun sawing when there was a knock at the front door.

Relieved to have an excuse for a break from my horrid task, I pulled open the front door to find myself facing a tall young policeman. I must have stared at him in surprise for some moments. I had not been expecting any caller, let alone a police officer.

‘Mr Hawkins?' he asked.

‘Er, yes.'

The policeman looked down at a clipboard he was holding. ‘Mr Barrie William Hawkins?'

‘Yes.'

The officer looked me up and down. I became conscious of the fact that I was wearing a wipe-clean vinyl apron that Dorothy had lent me, in a pretty floral design.

The officer was now eyeing the big serrated knife I still held.

‘Erm… I was just cutting up some… pancreas…' I said.

The officer nodded.

‘I'm making enquiries about a German Shepherd dog,' he said.

I caught my breath.

German Shepherd. Dorothy had laughed when I said I thought I was guilty of handling a stolen dog. And that I could go to prison. I'd told her repeatedly I couldn't see how it was a defence that Jess was supposed to be dead!

‘Do you have a German Shepherd dog here, sir?' was the next question.

‘Er. yes.'

The officer nodded again. ‘May I come in, sir, rather than talk out here?'

I led him into the kitchen. I noticed that he kept a wary eye on that ugly looking knife and slowly placed it on the kitchen table. The officer stared at the huge pile of raw pancreas. Then he gave me an enquiring look.

‘You do some butchering, do you, sir?'

‘Er, no – it's medicine.'

The officer's face gave no indication as to what he thought of that reply.

Come on, Hawkins, I thought, you've got a law degree, man. What are you going to do to get yourself out of this mess? Think what it would look like in the local paper: LAW LECTURER PLEADS GUILTY TO DOG THEFT. Would I lose my job?

The officer interrupted my thoughts. ‘We've had a report of you having been seen with a German Shepherd dog, sir. You were seen in a car park with the dog?'

In a car park? I went and got Jess in the dark and I haven't dared walk him anywhere people could see us since. I take him down onto the droves where there is nobody about.

‘We've had a report, you see, sir, that this dog is in very emaciated condition.'

Emaciated condition? Jess is in good condition -what's he talking about?

‘In particular, the dog's hip bones are protruding and his ribs are clearly visible.'

Dorothy says that sometimes I can be a bit slow on the uptake – finally, the penny was now beginning to drop.

‘We're not thinking about the same dog,' I said, speaking my thoughts out loud.

The officer looked at me blankly.

He's not talking about Jess, I thought. Someone must have seen me with one of the other dogs. Probably poor old Friend when I was taking him to the vet.

I let out a deep sigh of relief and gave the officer a broad smile.

His eyes narrowed. ‘You don't deny having a very thin dog then, sir?'

‘Oh no,' I said. ‘I've got more than one.'

There was a long pause.

The officer reached into the top pocket of his tunic and withdrew his notebook and pencil.

‘I must warn you, sir, that anything you say will be taken down—'

I interrupted him. ‘Would you like to see them?' I asked.

‘I'm going to,' the officer said.

It had taken a little while before the second penny had dropped and I had realised that the officer thought Friend was my own neglected pet.

I opened the door of Friend's quarters, the utility room, and he had strength enough now to pad out, slowly, into the kitchen. The young policeman was unable to disguise the look of disgust on his face, which had been rapidly followed by a look of frozen anger.

It occurred to me that I needed proof to back up my story of rescuing dogs, including this one. The stack of bills from the vet almost did it, then I picked up the telephone and invited the officer to ring Melissa to confirm my evidence. That convinced him I was an innocent man.

The mound of raw pigs' pancreas still puzzled him; my explanation that it was ‘medicine' must have sounded unlikely. I explained that our vet tried to keep costs down for us by suggesting alternatives to conventional drugs, and that in this case she hoped that the pig pancreas in Friend's food might perform the function of his own deficient pancreas – which, in the course of time, it did.

The young policeman and I left behind the mound of pancreas in the kitchen and adjourned to the living room for a cup of coffee. He was fascinated by what we were trying to do. He loved dogs, especially big dogs, and hoped one day to become a dog handler. It was because he really liked dogs that his inspector had given him this enquiry to follow up. Had I got time for him to meet the other dogs we had?

He went on to tell me how he'd recently married and how his new wife was a dog-lover as well. She would be envious of his having been here today. When he lived with his parents he had always wanted a dog but couldn't have one as his aunt, who lived with them, was allergic to hairs. Gone was the suspicious, authoritarian policeman and in his place was a relaxed young man, named Tim.

He was chatting away when I took him into the barn to see our beautiful, gentle, white Pearl. He stopped talking, put his hands on his hips and stood gazing at her. As the seconds passed I became slightly uneasy. Had he become a policeman again? Still he didn't speak. Was Pearl a missing dog? I wondered.

‘Barrie!' At last the policeman broke his silence. ‘You didn't tell me you had a white one!'

‘Er… no.'

‘Oh, she's gorgeous.' Tim managed at last to take his eyes off her and looked at me. ‘What's she like?'

‘Oh… she's lovely outside and inside,' I said.

‘Are you going to let her out?'

I slipped the bolt and, instead of bounding up to me in her usual way, she ran up to Tim. He bobbed down and she sat down beside him. The pair just gazed at one another.

Eventually Tim spoke. ‘Of course, it's what she's like that matters,
who
she is. But a white German Shepherd… ‘ his voice trailed away.

‘Like the white ones, do you?'

He smiled. ‘I love all German Shepherds, Barrie – but a white one…' His wistful tone said it all.

As he spoke to me, Pearl suddenly nudged him with her nose, violently, and the big policeman nearly toppled over backwards. So she wasn't always gentle!

‘Now that the wife and I have our own place, we could have a dog.'

Ah. I knew where this was leading.

‘I know Annette would love to meet her. Can I come back later with Annette when I've finished my shift?'

‘Tim, I know you're a policeman but you still have to pass our vetting system.'

He nodded his head enthusiastically. ‘I'd expect no less.'

Tim and Annette came and walked Pearl three or four times before they adopted her.

And that was how it came about that our Orphan Number Two had been found a home. Not by our advert on the board in the next village, although I reflected afterwards that was ironic. Tim lived in that village, got his newspapers from the shop, and often scanned the board, but had managed to miss our notice seeking homes for our orphans. And how ironic it also was that Dorothy and I had been suspected of cruelty and neglect. Like so many others who perpetrate these wrongs, the person or persons who so neglected Friend were never apprehended and prosecuted, but those who had helped him became objects of suspicion and were investigated and questioned. Later though, I was to take some comfort from that. I was pleased that someone who had seen me with the dog in that state had taken the trouble to report us to the police and that they had taken the trouble to investigate.