murdered, to find out how they were feeling about the deaths. Nothing on God’s earth was going to make him let go. Wilfred was obviously of the same opinion. He’d got that ankle and he meant to keep it. He shook Butcher’s leg, he worried it, he sank his teeth even deeper into it and took not a blind bit of notice of the suede shoe on Butcher’s other foot that kept kicking him on the side of the head. Wilfred rather liked being kicked so gently. Mr Rottecombe had once in a moment of intense irritation kicked him a damned sight harder and Wilfred hadn’t minded that either. Butcher’s kicks merely tickled him.
Having provided evidence that the reporters had trespassed by climbing over the locked gate, Mrs Rottecombe returned from the road. Even she could see it was time to call the bull terriers off before Wilfred removed Butcher Cassidy’s foot or the other wretch was savaged to death on the ground.
‘That’s enough of that,’ she commanded, hurrying across to the oak. Wilfred ignored her. He was enjoying that ankle too much. Mrs Rottecombe resorted to sterner measures. She knew her bull terriers. There was no point in clobbering them over the head; the backside was far more vulnerable and in Wilfred’s case more accessible. Seizing the dog’s scrotum with both hands she applied the nutcracker method with the utmost force. For a moment Wilfred merely grunted but the pain was too much even for him. He opened his mouth to voice a proper protest and was promptly dragged to the ground.
‘Naughty dog, naughty dog,’ Mrs Rottecombe scolded him. ‘You are a very naughty doggie.’
To Butcher, now on top of the branch and scrambling on to an even higher one, there was something insane about those words. Naughty that fucking dog wasn’t. It was a canine crocodile, a four-legged mantrap, and he was going to see the brute was put down fast and, he hoped, painfully.
Mrs Rottecombe turned her attention to Pickles who, being a bitch, lacked a scrotum. Instead she seized the nearest weapon, a plant label which announced that the roses were Crimson Glory. Carefully wiping the horse manure and earth off the plastic (she didn’t want dear little Pickles to get tetanus or any more terminal lockjaw than she was already displaying), she lifted the bull terriers tail and jabbed. If anything, Pickles’s reaction was more immediate than that of Wilfred. She let go of the Flashgun Kid and shot across the rose bed into the deepest shrubbery to lick her wound. Mrs Rottecombe replaced the metal label and turned her attention to the savaged cameraman.
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ she demanded with a haughty lack of concern for his injuries that would have taken Flashgun’s breath away if he had had any to spare. Flashgun didn’t think, he knew what he was doing there. Dying. He looked up at the ghastly woman and managed to speak.
‘Help me, help me,’ he whimpered. ‘I’m bleeding to death.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Rottecombe. ‘You’re trespassing. If you choose to trespass on private property, it’s your own fault if you get bitten. There’s a sign by the gate. It says quite clearly ‘BEWARE OF THE DOG’. You must have seen it. You ignored it and trespassed and attacked a perfectly harmless family pet and then you are surprised when it defends itself. You are a criminal. And what is that other fellow doing up in my tree?’
Jones’s eyes rolled in his head. A woman who could call the murderous brute which had been on the point of gnawing his leg off ‘a harmless family pet’ had to be clean off her fucking head.
‘For Christ’s sake…’ he began but Mrs Rottecombe brushed his prayer aside.
‘Name and address,’ she snapped. ‘Both your names and addresses.’ Then realising she
