“Who didn’t do what?” Mark asks. “Could everyone please calm down?”
“Everyoneiscalm apart from me, and no, I can’t,” says Ree. “That bitch Tess Gavey is trying to get Champ killed. Lying about him so he’ll be taken away and put down.”
“What the fuck?” says Tobes.
“Can everyone stop swearing, please? Champ?” Mark asks Sally. “Champ is the one who’s been accused? Not Toby?”
“’Bout time someone shared the load of unjust accusations,” Tobes mutters.
“Don’t joke about it,” Ree snaps at him. “Champ’s life is literally under threat.”
“No, it’s not.” Tobes looks at Sally. “It’s not, is it, Mum?”
Every cell in her body begs to be allowed to say, “No, of course it’s not,” to bring a smile of relief to her son’s face, but she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t want to dish out false hope. And what little she does know is all bad.
Champ, meanwhile, looks perfectly serene in this, the worst of all moments. He’s still asleep, stretched across Sally’s lap. Maybe, on some higher plane of consciousness that only dogs can reach, Champ knows all will be well in the end. Even the swearing and shouting didn’t disturb him.
But this isn’t a fairy tale, and the world is chock-full of people who say, in a regretful tone, “Once a dog’s bitten someone, you have to put it down, just to be on the safe side,” as if they care and are sad for the dog in question, when they quite plainly don’t and aren’t. Sally has nodded countless times as people have said this to her, while privately thinking, “That’s simply not true of Furbert.” Or, after he died: “That wasn’t true of Furbert. If you’d known and loved him, you’d understand. Not all bitey dogs are the same or equally dangerous.”
Champ isn’t a bitey dog, though. Not even a lovely but anxious one, who would occasionally nip you but never without mitigating circumstances. Just not at all. Champ has never harmed anyone in any way, and would never.
Sally tries to recall what happened with Pepper, her mother’s chiropodist’s daughter’s flat-coated retriever. That was a terrible story that ended—this is the only part Sally remembers for certain—with Pepper being issued with the dog equivalent of an antisocial behavior order, and she hadn’t even done anything wrong.Pepper’s experience, like what was happening to Champ now, was an example of a nasty person causing trouble for a lovely, innocent pup.
Ree has started to tell Mark and Toby about the policeman and what he said, so Sally has to hear all those disgusting words again. She gets through it by pretending she’s made of super-shiny steel that nothing can permeate. It will be over soon: the telling, if not the ordeal. There’s not that much information that needs to be relayed, only the few facts that are known: Tess Gavey is claiming that Champ bit her. As bites go, it’s a bad one. Deep and serious. Likely to leave a big scar. That’s why the Gaveys felt they had to go to the police, especially because they knew that the Lamberts’ first Welsh terrier, Furbert, was also a biter.
When did this happen? Mark wants to know.
“It didn’t,” says Sally.
“Yesterday is what the Gaveys are saying, the lying douchebags,” Ree says. “Four fifteen yesterday. Mum, where was Champ then?”
“Out with me.”
“Where?”
“On a walk. By the lode.”
“You’re sure that’s where he was at exactly four fifteen? It couldn’t have been earlier, or later?” Ree puts her face right in front of Sally’s, like an interrogator determined to break her down.
Sally nods. She’s sure. What she doesn’t know is if anyone noticed her and Champ on their afternoon walk. There were a couple of people walking their dogs along the path on the other side of the lode, but no one on Sally’s side and no one she recognized from the village, no one she knew. People came from Newmarket,Cambridge, Burwell, Reach, the other Swaffhams, and everywhere else to walk along Swaffham Tilney’s lode path. How would the police be able to find the right ones, the witnesses who saw Sally and Champ there at the relevant time?
Then it dawns on Sally: They won’t even try, of course. Wasn’t she always hearing that the police were understaffed and under-resourced and really up against it, like all the other essential services in the country? It was another of Mark’s rant-liloquy subjects (“I went to Cambridge the other day, right? Two youngsters walked past me smoking joints. I nearly got high just passing them on the street. Sickening! Nothing’s illegal these days, it seems. Smoke cannabis in broad daylight in the middle of the city, burgle a house, vandalize a lamppost—no one’s going to arrest you, not in this pathetic excuse for a country that we’re turning into. We basically don’t have law enforcement in England anymore. The police aren’t more than a fancy dress party at this point.”)
“Then why didn’t you tell Detective Ugly-Boy?” Ree asks Sally. “Why didn’t you say Champ couldn’t have bitten Tess Gavey at four fifteen because he was with you? Imagine a jury hearing that you didn’t even say that and only mentioned it later—like, suspiciously later!”
“Ree, don’t yell at Mum,” says Mark.
“I—I was in shock. I didn’t think of it then.” And Detective Chantree hadn’t asked. He’d arrived at the front door of the Hayloft in the manner of Someone Who Knew and told Sally what Champ had been doing at 4:15 p.m. yesterday: biting Tess Gavey’s arm. “I found it hard to say anything at all,” Sally remembers dimly, as if it happened years ago.
“Yeah, I could tell,” says Ree. “I get that you were freaked out, but what if you missed a chance we’ll never get back?”
Sally considers mentioning Pepper the flat-coated retriever, who, according to Sally’s mother, is only alive today because her parents (human parents/owners/however they thought of themselves; all Sally knows is that she is her dogs’ mum and nothing else) cooperated with the police and didn’t make a single argument in Pepper’s defense. If they’d challenged anything the accuser was alleging, Pepper could well have ended up being put down.
If it came down to Sally’s word against Tess Gavey’s, who would the authorities believe?
“You not sticking up for him doesn’t make Champ look very innocent, does it?” Ree’s voice shakes. “What if he gets taken away from us and put to sleep because you didn’t mention that he’s got an alibi?”
“I’ll mention it. I’ll… I will. I’ll get in touch and tell them,” Sally mumbles.While we’re what-iffing, what if I’m tired of accepting you lashing out at me angrily whenever you’re feeling miserable? What if I decide to stop cooking you breakfast and dinner every day and giving you a generous allowance so that you can buy makeup and clothes? What if I work out what’s the most upsetting thing I could say to you next time you’re in bits, and then say it?
