“Well, in that case, that’s a job for a different unit.”
“But if we worked together. If we sent a small team on secondment.”
“Jackie, I’m not sure we’ve got the budget for secondments.”
Jackie steadies herself. “Absolutely, sir. It’s just, I can’t help but feel frustrated when we encounter the case files of all these people who’ve gone missing, who could have been helped. Who could still be helped.”
Michael Warbeck nods sympathetically. “It’s a difficult one,” he says. “It’s one of the most difficult things we have to come to terms with as police officers. It’s very easy to become emotionally involved in our case work.”
“It’s not that, sir. It’s a case of productivity.”
“Jackie,” he says again, getting up from his chair. “I’ll tell you what, we can reconvene later. I’m afraid I’ve got meetings at Whitehall I should be preparing for. I’ll tell you what though, I’ll have a read of your report, and there might be something in it that I can raise with the Minister. How about that?” He holds out his hand for the papers.
Jackie understands that she’s being dismissed. She collates some of the key documents along with her summary and longer report, and hands the bundle to her commanding officer, certain that they will have very little further contact until her next quarterly review.
Hunting
Agatha takes the dog out early to avoid the kinds of people who walk their dogs after 9 a.m. She would like to avoid all other dog walkers but, in London, this is impossible, and she read that puppies need to be socialized, so it’s a good idea to allow Fedor to meet others of his kind. If he is to encounter dogs, she must encounter dog walkers. In her experience, the ones who emerge before 9 a.m. are preferable to the ones who emerge after 9 a.m. The former are the kinds of people who get up early and get on with their days, and have things to do—jobs, etc. They’re hard-working, disciplined people and their approach to their dogs is similar. People who walk their dogs after 9 a.m. are slovenly. They’re not likely to have jobs or commitments, and they’re likewise lax in their approach to their animals. Whenever Fedor gets into scraps with other dogs, it is after 9 a.m. Agatha has decided this is no coincidence.
This morning she slept in and is out later than she intended. She holds Fedor’s lead while Roster follows, carrying the dog’s coat—in case the weather changes—and other items of dog-walking paraphernalia.
“What’s that one?” Agatha asks Roster. She points to a dog in the distance, running between trees and sniffing the leaf litter.
“A pointer,” Roster replies.
“Wrong,” says Agatha. “It’s a Vizsla.”
“A Vizsla is a type of pointer.”
“From Hungary, yes. But you can’t just say pointer. If you say pointer without any qualification then I’ll think you just mean a standard pointer, not a Vizsla. Imagine if you pointed at a Clumber spaniel and just said spaniel.”
“Imagine,” says Roster.
They continue to walk along a gravel path beneath a canopy of trees. Beech masts are strewn across the grass with the first fall of umber leaves. Fedor strains at his harness. Agatha looks around for hazards, then leans down and unclips the lead.
He has grown significantly in the last three months. He has now reached his full, adult height, although his torso hasn’t yet filled out—his growth has been channeled through length rather than weight. His shoulders jut out and his spine is visible through his fur, from neck to hip. Each connected vertebra is distinct, undulating like cursive handwriting on a page.
Fedor speeds away and buries his long dart of a nose in the lively aroma. Agatha is struck by the extent to which dogs use their noses to navigate the world, and how their experiences of the world must be so different from those of humans, led by their eyes. Dogs scoop from the air the fabric of the earth. When Fedor presses his face into the leaf litter, he breathes morsels of the rotting leaves, and particles of fungi from the soil beneath. He breathes the urine and the faeces of mice and voles, or he might detect the owl that flew overhead the night before, swooping silently to capture its supper. Through its nose, a dog deals with history.
Agatha’s senses only decipher the present. To access the past, she must rely on the testimony of others.
She was the sixth daughter of Donald Howard. He fathered no sons. The first pregnancy occurred unexpectedly. In 1934, aged fourteen, Donald knocked up a girl from his village. Marry her, everyone said. He didn’t marry her. He fled. He moved to the capital and found work as a butcher’s apprentice in its East End, near the marshes. He sectioned hogs and swept their blood and excrement from the slaughterhouse floor. He became a skilled handler of sharp blades.
His second daughter was also the granddaughter of the butcher, his employer. When the pregnancy was discovered, the butcher came at him with a cleaver but Donald was faster and ducked and swayed and caught the old man in the belly with a carving knife. He swept up the butcher’s blood and dumped him in the canal with a dumbbell fastened to his ankle. Local gangs, everyone said. It was known the butcher had failed to comply with the demands of the hard men who ran the neighborhood. Donald went along with the story, and this time he did marry the girl. Together they became figureheads for the backlash against these gangs, and the result was a new gang, with Donald at the helm. The gang was built upon the premise of seeking revenge for the slaughtered butcher but it became more violent and detached from its original purpose. Donald rallied local lads
