Blood Hound (2 page)

Last, but definitely not least, we encountered Malcolm and Stanley, two exceedingly round and fluffy creamy-white dogs about the same size as Bertie. “Shit Sue,” Graham muttered under his breath.

Or that’s what I thought he said. “What?” I asked, astonished. Making rude personal remarks isn’t like Graham at all.

He looked at me narrowly and then said carefully, “Shit. Sue. Two separate words. Spelt S–H–I–H–T–Z–U. They’re a very popular breed of dog.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

Malcolm and Stanley appeared to be on friendly terms with Bertie. They all wagged tails and sniffed bottoms while Malcolm and Stanley’s large, rosy-cheeked owner made sympathetic noises about Mrs Biggs’s leg and hunted for her bag of doggy treats. When they were done sniffing and licking and exchanging other peculiar canine greetings (I didn’t like to watch too closely), the three dogs sat down and looked at the woman expectantly. This was clearly part of their daily ritual.

Malcolm and Stanley’s owner was the kind of person who speaks to dogs as if they’re exceedingly dim, slightly deaf, very small children. “Sweetie time,” she trilled. “Look what Mumsiewumsie’s got for you. Now then, boys, who’s going to be first? Who is? Who is? Who’s going to be first?”

Graham and I had to avoid each other’s eyes so we wouldn’t get the giggles, but I have to confess I took a certain pride in the way Bertie behaved. He wasn’t going to miss out on a treat, but he wasn’t going to compromise his dignity either. He didn’t wag his tail. He just sat and waited, and I swear that under all that hair he had one eyebrow raised. Malcolm and Stanley, on the other hand, were downright silly. They yapped and wagged and spun around in circles. Then Malcolm leapt for the proffered treat like an enthusiastic dolphin.

“Naughty boy,” said Mumsiewumsie sternly, wagging her finger at him. “Now if you can’t behave, Malcolm, you won’t be getting no sweeties, will you? I’ve told you over and over again, you’ve got to be nice.” She turned to her other dog. “You show him how it’s done, Stanley. You’ve got to be polite, haven’t you? Naughty boys don’t get no sweeties, do they?”

Well, Stanley didn’t perform much better than Malcolm, and after seeing the way he snatched his treat, I was kind of surprised that Mumsiewumsie had managed to retain all her fingers for so long. When she came to Bertie, he took his treat perfectly politely and then turned his back on her. Bertie didn’t do waggy-tailed enthusiasm and he didn’t do gratitude, either.

One dog owner who didn’t stop to talk to us was a young woman with amazing auburn hair, who sprinted past so quickly she almost mowed Bertie down. I felt quite indignant on his behalf but there was no point protesting: her headphones were rammed so far into her ears she wouldn’t have heard a thing. Plus she had a very big dog – whose coat was the same colour as her hair – literally running rings around her. Get in his way and you were likely to be flattened.

“Irish setter,” said Graham. “Commonly known as a red setter, for obvious reasons.”

We were watching the super-speedy runner and her dog disappear into the middle distance and didn’t notice the approaching toddler. Bertie had vanished into the undergrowth to do some more pruning. Graham and I had stopped, waiting patiently on the end of the extending lead for him to re-emerge into the sunshine.

Meanwhile, the toddler – a boy of what, two, three years old? – was pottering towards us. His mother was a couple of metres behind him, pushing another baby in a twin buggy.

The parks department had been out watering the flower-beds that day, and some of the water had run off and pooled in a dip at the edge of the path. The boy splashed happily into it and sat down.

He looked so funny sitting fully clothed in the middle of a puddle that his mum laughed and so did we, and everything was fine until Bertie decided to join in. He trotted out from under a bush, waded across the puddle and flopped down right next to the boy.

Now I’m not what you might call a dog enthusiast, and I have to admit that they sometimes frighten me. But at that moment Bertie looked like the least scary canine in the entire universe: there was absolutely nothing even remotely worrying, aggressive or terrifying about that big ball of fluff on very short legs.

And yet that little boy screamed. Screamed and screamed and screamed as if Bertie was about to tear him to pieces.

The small boy wasn’t the only one who had what Graham later described as “a somewhat disproportionate reaction to Bertie’s behaviour”. His previously happy, smiling mother swooped across the path, plucked her son from the water and then – to my utter horror – gave Bertie the kind of kick you usually only see in rugby internationals. The poor dog flew through the air and was only saved from a nasty injury by Graham catching him.

“You should keep that thing under control,” the woman yelled at us, “and not let it go around scaring kids! I’ve a good mind to call the police and report it as a dangerous dog. It would be destroyed, you know!”

Graham and I looked at Bertie. No, he hadn’t suddenly morphed into a killer wolfhound. Our mouths opened and closed but nothing useful fell out. Her attack was so completely unexpected and so utterly undeserved that neither of us could think of anything to say. Cuddled up in Graham’s arms, Bertie looked the picture of wounded innocence. I wanted to cover his ears so he couldn’t hear the death threats.

What with her yelling and the boy screaming and the baby in the pushchair bawling there was quite a commotion going on, and everybody in the park seemed to be staring at us. Things only got worse when the next dog walker rounded the corner.

While Bertie was the least fearsome thing on four legs imaginable, this next dog was exactly the opposite.

“Mastiff,” said Graham automatically. “An attack dog. Used by the Spanish to conquer the Aztec Empire.”

“Oh?” I said. “How?”

Graham clutched Bertie a little more tightly, although whether that was for Bertie’s protection or his own was hard to say. “They tore the Aztecs’ throats out.”

I gulped nervously. But if Graham and I were alarmed at the sight of the slobbering animal dragging its owner towards us on a length of chain, the woman and her children were terrified. The toddler was so scared he stopped screaming. The baby stopped bawling. They both fell into a frozen silence while their mother went a ghastly shade of green, swaying slightly as if she might faint. She then rallied enough to swing the pushchair round so that both children were behind her, and she raised her hands, clenching them into fists as if preparing to defend her offspring to the death.

The young man on the end of the chain – close-cropped hair, black hoodie emblazoned with skull motifs – knew full well the effect his dog was having. A thoughtful owner might have changed direction, or at least given the kids as wide a berth as possible. But this guy wasn’t the thoughtful type. “Come on, Tyson,” he growled and walked past us, keeping so close that I could feel the dog’s hot breath on my bare legs. It paused to stare at Bertie and I could almost see a doggy thought bubble pop out of its head – “What the hell is
that
?” I thought we were done for, but luckily the creature shook its head in disbelief, spattering me with flecks of drool from the knee down, and then carried on with its walk. I didn’t complain about the spittle. The owner wasn’t the kind of person you made complaints to, not if you wanted to live.

But that young mother clearly had a death wish.

The hellish hound had gone about five metres when it suddenly squatted and deposited a foul-smelling pile in the middle of the path. When it had finished, dog and owner carried on walking. There was no attempt to scoop the poop.

The mother was incandescent. “Hey, you! Come back here and clear that up!” she yelled at the dog owner’s back. “That’s disgusting! It’s a health hazard! You can be prosecuted for that!”

Her voice was so loud it carried clean across the park. Everyone looked at her. Everyone, that is, but the young man. He didn’t turn. Didn’t react at all. Just carried on walking.

“If you don’t do something, I’ll pick it up myself and shove it through your letter box,” the mother screamed, purple with rage. “I can find out where you live. You lot are all the same. Dog owners! You think you own the park. You won’t get away with it!”

I shivered. It was a hot day, but the atmosphere had become positively Arctic.

Graham
and I didn’t stop to see what happened next. Bertie started to wriggle, but Graham didn’t dare set him down anywhere near the kids in case they started screaming again. We walked quickly in the opposite direction and only released Bertie when we were out of sight. But we soon realized that the path would carry us round in a big circle and we were likely to meet the horrible hoodie and his hellhound again. So we nipped out of the side gate near the shrubbery and cut down a back alley to the vet’s to collect Bertie’s eye-drops.

“That was all a bit weird, wasn’t it?” I said. The vet’s reception area was quite crowded, and as we stood in line waiting for our turn, I felt a bit shaky.

“It was rather odd,” agreed Graham quietly. “I suppose the children must suffer from some sort of phobia. They certainly appeared to have an irrational aversion to dogs. As did their mother.”

“Bertie’s not exactly threatening, is he? Mind you, I didn’t like the look of that mastiff thing.”

“Nor did I. And his owner is definitely someone to avoid.”

I was so distracted that the receptionist had to ask me twice to confirm Mrs Biggs’s address before she’d give me Bertie’s medication. Once I’d handed over the cash, we headed home.

We had to walk Bertie twice daily, regular as clockwork, without fail. Graham hung around at my house in between our park trips: it was just too hot to go anywhere or do anything else. I lounged about in the garden reading trashy thrillers and sipping chilled smoothies while Graham sat hunched over Mum’s computer trying to figure out the precise connection between the current heatwave and long-term climate change.

Everything proceeded more or less smoothly for about a week. True, Bertie still wasn’t keen on the actual journey to and from the park. Every time Graham and I turned up he regarded us with Deep Suspicion. Graham ended up borrowing his neighbour’s skateboard and converting it into a kind of doggy go-kart so we could pull Bertie along instead of breaking our backs carrying him everywhere.

Everything was fine, if a little dull. Then, on Saturday morning, things suddenly got nasty.

The walk itself was fairly uneventful. Bertie greeted all of his mates politely. Admittedly he’d then stolen Sam – the obsessive collie’s – ball and made off with it under a bush. It had taken us nearly twenty minutes to persuade Bertie to come back out. Then we met Jessie, the golden retriever. She was accompanied by a fresh-faced, outdoorsy woman rather than the shaggy-haired surfer dude we’d met before. Jessie bounced around Bertie in great galumphing circles but he ignored her. Bertie had an important job to do: he was on a mission to rid the world of daisies. In an attempt to distract him, Jessie rolled over onto her back. It didn’t work. Her owner – the surfer guy’s wife, presumably – knelt down to scratch the dog’s stomach consolingly. “Won’t he play?” she laughed. “Poor Jessie!”

Just then the auburn-haired Super Speedy Sprinting Woman came pounding across the grass with her red setter. She was on a collision course with us, so I grabbed Bertie and we prepared to take evasive action.

However, when the runner saw Jessie she slowed down and plucked the headphones out of her ears. I thought that maybe she was going to stop and talk, but when she saw the retriever was being walked by someone different, she carried on running.

Interesting, I thought. She’d stopped for a long chat with Surfer Dude only the day before, and yet she’d completely ignored his wife…

I glanced at Mrs Surfer Dude but she hadn’t even noticed the sprinting woman. All of her attention was fixed on the back gate and her eyes had narrowed thoughtfully. Graham and I followed her gaze and saw that Mumsiewumsie had entered the park with Malcolm and Stanley.

Bertie didn’t rate Jessie as a doggy friend, but he was mates with the shih tzu. Graham and I had learned enough about Bertie’s habits by then to know that there would be no shifting him until he’d had a chance to sniff both dogs’ bottoms. Jessie, it seemed, wanted a piece of the action too. She was wagging her tail so hard we were getting bruised knees.

Mumsiewumsie greeted me and Graham with, “How’s Bertie’s mum?”

Assuming she was referring to Mrs Biggs rather than Bertie’s biological mother, I said, “She’s fine. Bearing up, you know.”

“Yes, I heard she’d had an accident,” Mrs Surfer Dude said, joining the conversation. “Awful. And in this heat, too! That plaster must be driving her mad. How long do they think she’ll be laid-up?”

“Not sure,” I said. To be honest, I hadn’t really listened to the medical details.

But Graham had. “At least six weeks,” he informed us. “Maybe longer, depending on how well the bone knits together.”

Mumsiewumsie had pulled her treat box from her handbag. Scenting food, all four dogs sat down.

“Not you, Jessie!” Mrs Surfer Dude clapped the golden retriever onto a lead. “I need to watch her weight,” she explained.

Bertie took his treat politely but Malcolm and Stanley snatched theirs as usual, despite another firm telling-off. “You’re very bad boys, and them as don’t behave won’t be getting their Sunday lunch, will they? It’s roast beef tomorrow. And you know how much you like my Yorkshire puddings, don’t you, boys?” Both dogs looked blank. You’d have thought they couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

“They love a roast,” Mumsiewumsie told us confidentially. “No potatoes, mind. I won’t give them those.”

“Too fattening?” I asked, observing the dogs’ complete lack of waistlines.

“No,” she replied. “Gives them terrible wind.”

Mrs Surfer Dude had been chewing her lip while Mumsiewumsie was talking. She looked as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words. “That’s a terrible diet!” she finally blurted out. “Really, it’s so unhealthy. You’ll make them ill.”