He snuffled around, looking for anything that might give him a clue as to where they might have gone, but found nothing and, disappointed, accepted defeat. Humans were not supposed to win the game of chase and bite. They never had before, so as he trudged back the way he had come, he promised himself that if he ever got another chance at the same human, he wouldn’t fail again.
Hold on though: where am I? The thought surprised Rex as if it snuck up and jumped out on him. He was in a strange city, on a strange street and even following his nose wouldn’t work because all the smells were unfamiliar.
Perplexed, he sat for a moment, lifting his nose to the sky to sample the air. His human was around here somewhere, he hadn’t gone that far chasing the moped, surely.
Back at the scene of the attack, Albert was beginning to become annoyed. ‘You say you lost your dog?’ the police officer attempted to confirm.
‘He chased the attacker. I already explained this. I am going to look for him.’ Albert had attempted to leave Rosie and Alan the moment the police arrived. He would return once he had Rex, but an officer blocked his path, insisting they needed to speak with him before he went anywhere. The officer, a man in his early thirties with a trim beard and watery eyes, did not look ready to let Albert go anywhere. Seeing that he was about to argue again, Albert leaned into his face. ‘Arrest me if you wish. Otherwise get out of my way. I’m going to find my dog.’
‘For goodness sake, go with him, Yates,’ snapped the other officer, a woman who had to be most of a decade younger than her partner. She was of Asian descent, middle eastern, Albert believed, and unwilling to discuss the subject. Before Yates could argue, she followed up her comment. ‘He wants to find his dog. Help him and then we can ask questions.’ She nodded her head toward the road where another police car had just stopped, its roof lights flashing as the two men inside got out. ‘I’ve got all the help I need.’
Biting down an angry retort for his younger colleague, Yates levelled his eyes at Albert. ‘Which way did you say the dog went, sir?’
Albert didn’t particularly want the help, but he wasn’t going to argue either. He nodded his head down the street. ‘This way.’ There was no need for conversation and neither man spoke until they reached the junction almost a hundred yards ahead. There, yet more cops were arriving to deal with the multiple accidents the moped caused, and Albert could hear the chatter on PC Yates’s radio as they tried to sort out the mess and get traffic flowing again.
Traffic was at a standstill in every direction, making it easy to cross the road. Rex would have been able to safely return, but there was no sign of the dog.
‘You said it is a large German Shepherd?’ Yates tried to confirm even though Albert had been unambiguous in his description.
Albert stared down the road, frowning with worry, and didn’t bother to answer the police officer who clearly wasn’t interested in helping to look for Rex. With hands cupped around his mouth, Albert called for his dog and made whistling noises.
‘Do you know which way he went, sir?’ Yates asked.
Albert’s frown deepened when Rex failed to appear and he didn’t turn his head when he answered, ‘This way. He chased the moped with the assailants clear across the junction. I lost sight of him as he dipped below the horizon.’
Yates leaned his head toward his radio, pressing the send switch before telling anyone who might be listening about the missing dog. Albert wasn’t happy about abandoning the search, not that he could really call it a search when all they had done was walk to the junction and look down one street, but Rex could be anywhere.
By the time they got back to Rosie and Alan’s location, an ambulance with paramedics had arrived. Alan was giving a statement to a sergeant but making it clear that he needed to move on and couldn’t tell them much. ‘He tried to hit me with the baton,’ Albert heard him say. ‘His face was covered by a balaclava and he wore gloves. What I could see of him was Caucasian, I think, but the only bit of skin visible was round his eyes, so he might have been mixed race, or Mediterranean. I would judge his age to be late teens or early twenties, but I must admit I am basing that on his shape and clothing.’
Albert acknowledged that the description was accurate. However, Alan was avoiding mention of the money in his briefcase. The attacker must have known about it – he went straight for it. Alan gave a decent description of the attacker’s clothing, even getting the designer labels right which surprised Albert – few people were ever that observant, especially in the heat of the moment.
They asked Albert what he saw, which allowed Albert to corroborate the same details. He knew it gave the police almost nothing to go on: if the assailant had the slightest trace of sense, he would ditch the clothing and burn it. No one managed to record the number plate on the moped, or even got a good enough look at it to determine make and model.
‘He was after the man’s briefcase,’ Albert said. ‘I saw him grab it. My dog interrupted the theft, or he would have made off with it, I’m sure.’
PC Yates noted his comment, but in a big city it was a small crime and there were
