Chapter Fifteen
The howl woke Holly.
“Doofus!” she said aloud in panic. He was supposed to be tied up in the porch: but the howl did not come from the porch. It came, she thought confusedly, from the other side of the village.
She jumped out of bed and ran downstairs. It wasn’t yet eleven o’clock, and Dad was still up. He had just opened the door to look outside for Doofus.
“Where’s that dratted dog gone?” he complained. “I thought I tied him quite securely to that bracket. Look, he’s actually broken it off the wall!” He turned round and saw Holly frantically trying to pull on her trainers without undoing the laces. “Oh, no!” he said firmly. “You’re not going out on your own.”
“But Doofus howled! I need to find him!”
“I’ll go and find him,” said Dad.
“Then I’m coming with you. That’s not on my own.” Holly finally squeezed her bare feet into her trainers, and flung her coat on over her pyjamas.
Dad hesitated, but only for a second. “Well, all right. But stay with me.”
Together they dived out into the dusk. Even this late, it was not completely dark: the year was edging towards midsummer. Above them, the sky was a luminous bowl of blue with a purple smoulder in the west, and the moon was rising.
They hurried across the main road in the direction the howl had come from. On this side of the village, old cottages huddled close together, linked by small twisting alleyways that led down to the river. As they came closer they could hear a man shouting.
“What’s he saying?” muttered Dad.
Holly couldn’t tell. She couldn’t see much either. There was no street lighting, and in the remnants of the dusk everything looked indistinct. Moonlight glimmered faintly on rooftops and gardens, and made great shadows slink between the walls, so that Holly got the jitters; but they saw nothing out of the ordinary until they ventured down one of the small alleyways, and came across a splintered fence.
It had been destroyed – knocked right over into the neighbouring garden, as if by an express train. And in the garden, amidst the bits of shattered fence, were two dogs. One, huge and black, stood over the smaller, paler dog, which lay twitching on the ground. A man was kneeling down beside it.
“Doofus,” said Holly, her voice no more than a croak.
“Oh no,” said Dad in horror. “Did our dog do this? Was it him?”
“He broke the fence down,” said the kneeling man. He did not look up from the stricken dog. Holly recognised Bill Barton’s voice, although there was a strange catch in it.
She hurried forward to grab Doofus’s collar, and her hands felt something wet and slightly sticky. Doofus did not resist her grasp, but stood motionless, looking into the darkness.
“What can we do?” asked Dad.
“There’s a torch in the kitchen,” said Bill hoarsely. “The door’s not locked.”
When Dad had found the torch and switched it on, she saw Bill Barton kneeling by his young retriever. Tears were trickling from his crinkled eyes.
“Poor old lad, poor old Joey, that’s a good boy,” he was saying. Dad shone the torch down at the dog, and then hastily away again.
In that instant, though, Holly could see that there was no hope. The dog took tiny, husky gasps of breath: its honey-coloured throat and chest were dark and sodden with what she knew must be blood, although in the torchlight it looked almost black.
Bill raised his head, tears glinting on his cheek. “Can you call the vet? The number’s inside, by the phone.”
Dad gave the torch to Holly and went inside. Holly shone the torch at Doofus, briefly. There was blood around his mouth: there was blood on her hands.
“What happened?” Her voice cracked. Surely Doofus could not be responsible for this?
“I don’t know,” said Bill, his voice cracking even worse than hers.
“Did Doofus – did he…?”
Bill did not answer, except to whisper, “Good boy, Joey. Such a good boy.”
The retriever’s panting grew thinner, fainter; and stopped. Then it started: and then stopped. And did not start.
Dad came out of the house again. “The vet’s on her way.”
“Aye. Too late now. But thank you,” said the old man quietly. He did not move.
After a moment, Dad asked what Holly had tried to. “I’m so sorry. Did our dog do this? Because if he did, we’ll see that he’s put down.”
“Dad!” breathed Holly, although she knew Dad had to say it.
Bill Barton said, “I don’t rightly know what happened.” He stood up stiffly and looked down at the body at his feet. “I was upstairs, just thinking about getting ready for bed, when I heard a great thump outside and Joey started barking like a mad thing. Well, I thought burglars or vandals, so I looked out of the window and next second I heard a terrible crash. Bits of wood flying all over the place, and your dog in the middle of it. I saw him quite clearly in the moonlight. But then…”
He cleared his throat and shook his head for a moment before going on.
“From my bedroom window I can’t see all the garden, only the far end. Your dog dashed towards the house, out of my sight, and I heard something snarling and yelping down below, and then a howl fit to freeze your blood: but I couldn’t see a thing. I ran downstairs and grabbed my stick. By the time I got the door unlocked, your dog had run off down the jitty.”
He pointed to the alley down the side of the house. “He came back here, though, a few minutes later. By then I’d found my Joey with his throat ripped out. I jumped up with my stick, wondering how I’d fight your dog off, but he just stood there, calm as you like. And then you arrived.”
Bill Barton did not sound angry. He sounded lost: bewildered.
“I’m so sorry,” said Dad again. “I don’t understand why our dog would attack yours. He’s normally docile for all he’s so big.”
“He liked Joey,” said Holly, her voice shaking. “They were friends.” They weren’t enemies, at least, she thought. Doofus had no friends; except, perhaps, wolves. “Could there have been a wolf in your garden?”
“You mean, one of them that was on the news? They said they were all dead, but perhaps one escaped. Perhaps so. That howl…”
“That was Doofus,” Dad said. “He howls.”
“I don’t know then,” said Bill sadly. “Like I say, I couldn’t see.”
“I’ll make a cup of tea,” said Dad, “while we wait for the vet.”
They all went inside except for Doofus. Holly tied him to a tree, although she thought that would probably not hold him if he wanted to leave. But he showed no sign of wanting to leave. He was standing sentry, smeared with blood.
Inside, the dead dog’s corpse looked even worse when it was laid out upon the kitchen table. Holly did not know what to say to Bill. She knew exactly how he felt, because she had felt it with Pancake: the stunned emptiness, the knowledge that the world had changed forever, for the worse, and would not change back no matter how she willed it. Dad made a cup of tea which nobody drank. Luckily the vet arrived soon after. It was Clive’s favourite vet, Lucinda, who was neat and calm and self-contained. But she lost some of her composure when she set eyes on Joey’s corpse.
“Dear God,” she said. “What did this?”
Bill Barton explained.
“Doofus?” said Lucinda, her gaze sharpening. “That big black dog? Where is he?”
“Tied up outside. He’s perfectly quiet,” said Holly miserably.
Lucinda raised her eyebrows. “He’s never struck me as the vicious type. He’s always been quite placid when I’ve given him his injections. But if he did this–”
“We don’t know that he did,” said Bill.
Lucinda bent over Joey, gently parting the blood-stained fur. “Extraordinary,” she muttered. “Twice in one week.”
“What is it?”
“Similar bite pattern to the one I found on a dead wolf the other day.” She straightened up. “Let me see
Doofus.”
Holly led the vet outside, and held Doofus’s collar while Lucinda cautiously prised open his jaws. Shining the torch into his mouth, she examined his teeth and measured them with a pencil.
“Something there,” she said, and taking a pair of tweezers from her bag, she used them to extract an object from his teeth. Doofus waited stoically, without snapping, until she was done.
Holly followed Lucinda back into the kitchen, where the vet opened her hand to show what she had found in Doofus’s mouth.
It was a tuft of bloody, sandy-coloured fur.
Dad groaned. “That’s off your dog,” he said to Bill.
“Not necessarily,” Lucinda said. “The colour’s similar, but I’m not sure if it’s a match. I’d need a microscope to be sure.” She put the fur into a plastic bag and labelled it. “One thing that is definitely not a match, though,” she went on, “is Doofus’s bite. His mouth’s not the right size to have made that wound in your dog’s throat.”
“What was it, then? A wolf?” exclaimed Dad. “Does that mean there’s one still on the loose?”
A frown creased Lucinda’s brows. “Possibly,” she said. “I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation – though I admit I’d be surprised. It’d be a bold wolf that prowled around the village on its own. They’re braver in a pack.”
“Let’s hope it’s the only one, then!” said Dad.
“I’d like to close that ruddy wildlife park,” said Bill, with unexpected vehemence. It was the first sign he’d shown of being angry.
“Actually, the wolves weren’t theirs,” Lucinda said. “They were telling the truth about that.”
“How can you be sure? I know that’s what they said, but maybe they just weren’t owning up.”
“No. The DNA test results came back. According to the lab, those wolves weren’t any species currently known in Europe.”
“American?” said Dad.
But the vet shook her head. “The lab said it was such an archaic strain that it was hard to pinpoint its origin. Mitochondrial DNA showed a throwback species type more indicative of the Early Upper Paleolithic. Which makes no sense at all.” She seemed to be talking to herself. She looked at Dad and shrugged. “I’ve advised them to re-run the tests.”
Dad looked a bit blank. “So do you think a wolf did this or not?”
Lucinda sighed. “I really couldn’t say for sure. It could be another large and vicious dog, I suppose. I’d like to take Joey with me, if I may, Bill. Do you want to report this to the police? You’re within your rights to do so.”
Holly held her breath. She knew what that could mean: Doofus being labelled as a dangerous dog, and being put down.
But Bill slowly shook his head. “No. I know that black dog, and I don’t think he did this. I think that something else did, if what you say about the bite is true. I think that black dog tried to come to Joey’s rescue, and chased something else away.”
“Very well,” Lucinda said. She looked at Dad. “I’ll be in touch. Meanwhile, I would advise you to keep your dog at all times under your control, and in your sight.”
“Yes, of course,” said Dad meekly.
Holly went outside to untie Doofus. She needed the torch to do so. It shone past him to the flowerbed, where broken, mangled flowers drooped in its wan light.
There were some footprints there, against the wall. Holly squatted down to study them.
Although they were not clear to see, they were certainly animal prints; perhaps a dog’s or wolf’s. But there was one print in particular that she was sure did not belong to Doofus…
For it was far too big.