Khan saw his chance and launched himself at Steven who was now half-trapped in the small space between the door jamb and Gus’s body. It was the fact that the fork was almost vertical in his hand in preparation for slipping outside that saved him from death. As Khan’s jaws opened and reached for his throat he brought the fork smartly up to impale the animal’s lower jaw on one of the outer prongs. Khan yelped and writhed as Steven struggled to keep the fork upright and keep the dog on the end of it. If he lowered the fork — and the weight of the dog was insisting that he must — Khan would be free and his own fate would be sealed.
Still holding the dog on the end of the fork, Steven staggered back from the door so that he had more room to move inside the shed. He started to swing the dog around so that centrifugal force moved the animal outwards and upwards. With the supreme effort of an Olympic athlete about to release a hammer, he accelerated the animal round in two final fast circles and then brought the fork down to the horizontal to ram it into the wall of the hut. Khan was trapped. Steven let go of the fork and picked up the shovel that Gus had dropped to begin raining down blow after rib-cracking blow at the still writhing Khan. He kept this up until all movement had ceased and the nightmare was finally over.
Steven staggered outside and fell to his knees in complete exhaustion, taking time to recover his breathing before crawling over to check on Gus who was starting to come round.
‘What happened?’ murmured Gus.
‘You missed an episode of Animal Magic,’ muttered Steven as he started to improvise a dressing for Gus’s shoulder.
‘That bloody dog was always the hound from hell,’ said Gus. ‘But Jesus, that was something else. People kept telling Tom to waste it but he wouldn’t listen and now he’s dead, poor bugger.’
‘It’s just a shame he had to take James Binnie with him, said Steven bitterly.
‘Right,’ murmured Gus.
They heard a car come into the yard and Steven looked up to see Childs and Leadbetter get out and walk towards them. ‘What’s going on?’ asked Childs.
‘Tom Rafferty and James Binnie are dead,’ said Steven. ‘Khan turned on them. Call an ambulance for Gus, will you?’
‘Good God almighty,’ exclaimed Childs, seeing the blood on Gus’s clothes. Leadbetter called for an ambulance and the police on his mobile phone and then joined Childs in going into the shed to survey the aftermath.
Steven watched the two men as he worked on Gus’s shoulder. They seemed genuinely shocked and upset but in his own mind he was thinking about the small flat stone that the shed door had jammed on when Gus had first tried to open it. Gus had kicked it away without a second thought but Steven saw that that had not been an option for the two men inside. The stone could not have been there when they went in or they wouldn’t have got the door open, so where had it come from? Apart from that, the two men wouldn’t have gone in if the lights had not been working. This suggested that the stone had materialised and the lights had failed after both men had gone inside, leaving them trapped in the dark with Khan. Steven shuddered at the thought.
The police and an ambulance arrived and the process of clearing up began. The bodies of Tom Rafferty and James Binnie were loaded into the back of a small black van after cursory examination by the duty police surgeon and were taken away to the city mortuary for a more detailed post mortem. Somewhere inside the house the phone rang and Steven remembered just why he had come here in the first place. He would have to break the news to Ann Binnie that her husband was dead. He was thinking about this when Chief Inspector Brewer came up and stood beside him. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Steven nodded. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t suppose it was rabies, do you? That would be all we need round here.’
‘It wasn’t rabies,’ said Steven.
‘Then what?’
‘I guess you get psychopathic dogs just like you get psychopathic humans.’
‘So the dog just went for them?’
‘That’s what it looks like,’ said Steven.
‘Poor buggers,’ said Brewer. ‘What a way to go.’
SEVENTEEN
Steven drove back to Edinburgh feeling low after telling Ann Binnie of her husband’s death and the circumstances surrounding it. It had been a harrowing experience and although Brewer had been prepared to do it — seeing it as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job — Steven had insisted, saying that he wanted to complete what he had set out to do on Ann’s behalf — find her husband.
Brewer had however, sent along a policewoman to accompany him and he had been glad of her support: he didn’t know Ann well and women in general were better at offering emotional support than men, whatever the politically correct might have to say about that. Ann and James had obviously been very close but they had had no children so there was no immediate family for her to turn to. The policewoman had managed to elicit from Ann the names of a couple of women in the village that she was friendly with and they were now offering her comfort and support.
Steven reflected that one small flat stone and a loose fuse holder were telling him that the stakes had been raised dramatically by Sigma 5 but it was hard to see why. He had the unnerving feeling that he was still missing something important in all of this. If Sigma 5 were prepared to commit murder in order to keep the secret of the rats why weren’t they doing anything effective about the problem itself? True, they had instigated the rat cull but that fell more into the public relations or grand gesture category than anything really positive.
Steven concluded reluctantly that Sigma 5 must be working to some alternative set of priorities but right now, he couldn’t see what they were. One conclusion he could reach however, was that, if Rafferty and James Binnie had been murdered as he strongly suspected they had, then the music box in his car had been no idle threat. He might well be the next serious target. He would have to be even more careful in future. The thought made him subconsciously check on the presence of the gun under his left arm. It felt cold, hard and, although he was loathe to admit it, reassuring.
But Steven could see that he wasn’t the only one at risk. He had already identified the Raffertys as the weak link in the Sigma 5 operation, the one that he and Jamie Brown were planning to concentrate on. Thomas was now dead but Trish was still alive. She would currently be hearing of her husband’s death from a police officer knocking on her door. Steven wondered if this would make it more or less likely that she might spill the beans about what had been going on in Blackbridge. He felt guilty about even thinking it but this might be a very good time for Eve to appear on the scene to offer sympathy and a shoulder to cry on to Trish Rafferty. It might also be a very good idea if he were to ask DCI Brewer to mount a discreet police guard on Trish, who was now the sole owner of Crawhill Farm. Considering that Childs and Leadbetter were the opposition, a discreet, armed guard might be even better.
Steven correctly anticipated that Eve would be at home: he remembered that she had afternoons off from the hotel — the gap between lunch and dinner. He called her to tell her what had happened but she already knew. ‘It’s all around the village,’ she said. ‘And poor James Binnie too, he was such a nice man. It’s so unfair. Everyone knew that Khan should have been put down ages ago. Poor Ann, I don’t know what she’ll do without him. They were everything to each other.’