The remains of Gulliver’s perfect stick lay bloodstained on the floor. His assiduous chewing had split the wood open, revealing the rusty rivets which held it together. It was one of those that had gashed the dog’s gum.
Within minutes Gulliver was sitting on a dirty rug on the backseat of Carole’s immaculate Renault on an emergency rush to the vet’s in Fedborough.
“He’ll have to have a general anaesthetic,” said Saira Sherjan.
“Oh dear, is it very serious?”
“No, Carole, it’s not very serious. Simply that dogs don’t like having their mouths fiddled about with. And while I could say to a human patient, ‘Now I’m just going to give you an injection of local anaesthetic so that you won’t feel a thing when I stitch up your gum’, it’s difficult to get a dog to take that information on board.”
“Yes, of course, I take your point,” said Carole, feeling rather stupid.
But the vet’s grin cheered her. “Simplest if we keep him in overnight. You could take him home later today, but he’ll be a bit woozy and we’d rather have a look at him in the morning, if that’s OK with you…?”
“Fine,” said Carole. She prided herself on not being one of those people who got sentimental about animals. But she was still surprised to feel a small pang at the thought of spending a night in High Tor without Gulliver.
“I’ll just give him an injection now to calm him down – not that he looks too much as if he needs calming down…Would you mind just holding him?”
Carole did as requested and Gulliver, docile as ever, submitted to the injection. Saira led him out of the surgery and returned a moment later. “By the way, do pass on my thanks to Jude for her party last week. I will get around to sending her a card, but you know how it is over Christmas.”
For a moment Carole was tempted to ask how Saira had come to meet her neighbour, but she decided that the question would be sheer nosiness. Instead, she enquired, “Have you been busy over the holiday?”
The vet’s fine eyebrows rose ruefully. “And how! I know human beings tend to have a lot of illness over Christmas, and I can understand that, because for many people it is a very stressful time, though how that anxiety communicates itself to animals I don’t know. But it does. It’s been emergency call after emergency call for the whole of the last week. And because I don’t have kids like most of the partners, guess who tends to get lumbered with most of those emergency calls? Rhetorical question.”
“So you haven’t had any problem in keeping to your no-alcohol routine?”
“No, I haven’t. I tell you, I’ve forgotten what alcohol smells like. And I’ve forgotten what my bed looks like too. So, Carole, tell me all the Fethering gossip.”
“I don’t think there is any, really.”
“Oh, come on. You must have heard some dirt. You’re one of the Fethering Beach dog-walkers, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I know for a fact that dog-walkers constitute one of the most efficient gossip grapevines in the world. Members of the Fethering Beach Dog-walking Mafia exchange all kinds of secrets on their early morning walks.”
Oh dear, thought Carole, something else I’m missing out on. The most she usually exchanged with another dog-walker was a curt ‘Fethering nod’. To avoid making herself sound completely anti-social (which, it occurred to her, perhaps she was), she told Saira Sherjan that the only topic of conversation in Fethering was still the tragedy at Gallimaufry. “But I expect you’ll have seen all about that on the news.”
“No. I’ve forgotten what my television looks like, as well as my bed.” She was unable to prevent a large yawn. “Sorry, Carole, but, God, it’s been insanely busy this last week. And actually, I don’t really mind, because I love the animals and I love the work, but…” she mimed propping her eyes open – “I’d be quite glad of an uninterrupted night’s sleep.”
“I remember,” said Carole, “you said you were going to be on duty the evening of Jude’s party. Was that a busy night?”
The question was random, merely a politeness, but by serendipity it had been exactly the right thing to ask. “That was one of the worst nights of the lot,” Saira replied. “At least with Gulliver you’ll never have the problem of puppies.”
“No, he’s the wrong gender, for a start, and then again whatever gender he might once have had has been surgically removed.” When Carole had decided on having a dog for her new life in Fethering, she’d done everything to ensure the minimum of complications.
“Well, most bitches whelp as easily as shelling peas. They know what to do, they follow their instincts, there’s really no need for a vet to be involved until you get to the point of injections for the puppies. But every now and then you get a really complicated birth, and the one I had that Sunday was the most difficult I’ve ever encountered. I was up all night that night.”
“What, here in the surgery?”
“God, no, you can’t move a whelping dog, particularly one who was in as bad a state as this one was.”
“Did she survive?”
“Yes, I’m glad to say she did. As did her six puppies. She’s now the proud mother of four dogs and two bitches. All doing well. But it was a long night.”
“Did you have to go far?”
“No, just outside Fedborough. It’s…You probably know them. Ricky was at Jude’s party.”
“Ricky Le Bonnier?”
“Right. It was their Dalmatian, Spotted Dick – which is a bloody stupid name for a bitch.”
“So you were actually at their place – Fedingham Court House – all through that Sunday night.”
“Yes, the call came in from Lola – that’s Ricky’s wife – around five-thirty. I was there within half an hour, and finally left just before eight the following morning.”
“And was Lola there all the time?”
“Yes. Poor girl, I felt so sorry for her, because she’d got the problem with the dog whelping, and then one of her kids had an ear infection…between the two of them, she didn’t get a wink of sleep.”
“And you were with her right through?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“She didn’t leave the house, didn’t go out anywhere?”
Saira Sherjan was starting to look at Carole rather curiously. Casual conversation seemed to be transforming into interrogation. “She didn’t leave the house all night,” she replied almost brusquely.
No power on earth could have stopped Carole from asking the next question. “And was Ricky there all the time as well?”
“No,” said Saira Sherjan. “He went out a few times.”
Twenty-Two
“But Saira had no reason to lie,” protested Carole, irritated to find Jude in one of her rare nit-picking devil’s advocate moods.
“No reason that we know of.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Simply that neither of us knows Saira that well. She may have history with the Le Bonniers about which we have no idea. She could have been another of Lola’s Cambridge contemporaries…or one of Ricky’s many flings with younger women.”
“Well, the way she talked about the birth of those Dalmatian puppies, I believed every word she said.”
Jude grinned. “You’re probably right.”
“I’m sure I am.” Carole was feeling irritable. Partly she was hungry. In the panic of Gulliver’s injury and the rush to the vet’s, she’d missed lunch and the sugar from the buttered teacake she was eating in the sitting room of High Tor hadn’t yet got into her system. Also, though she would never have admitted it even to Jude, she was uncomfortably aware of Gulliver’s absence. More than that, she was actually worried about him. However minor the operation, he was having a general anaesthetic. And anaesthetics could go wrong with dogs just as they could with humans. She couldn’t wait till ten o’clock tomorrow morning when she was due to go back into Fedborough to collect him.