The Spotted Dog Read online

  ‘Egg-and-bacon muffin,’ the soldier said hungrily. ‘Me mam used to make ’em. They smelt just like that.’

  ‘Give him one, Jason,’ I ordered. I rose from my knees, which creaked. That’s a hard floor. ‘Would you rather have tea than coffee?’ I offered, reminded by his burr that he was Scottish.

  ‘Tea,’ said Alasdair Sinclair. He seemed a bit bemused. He looked around the bakery, wiping his face with the back of a scarred hand.

  ‘Corinna Chapman,’ I introduced myself. ‘Jason, my apprentice. Heckle. Jekyll is presently sitting on your feet. She loves leather boots. It’s some kind of fetish.’

  Seeing us all watching him with interest, he started to redden. ‘I’m sorry to …’

  ‘Food,’ I suggested briskly.

  Jason watched with awe as Alasdair devoured an entire muffin in two bites. My Jason is a growing boy and could eat for Australia. Bets are taken on how fast he can demolish the Cafe Delicious trucker’s special, which is eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, mushrooms, tomatoes and hash browns or potato pancakes, depending on who is cooking that day. He holds the cafe record. But Alasdair looked like a worthy contender, or else he was very hungry.

  Fortunately, at this point nearly all the baking was either done or in the oven, and Jason could go out for his breakfast. He skittered off and I locked the door behind him, after first scanning the alley. There was no one present who shouldn’t have been.

  Daniel arrived, which was a bit of a relief. He took in the ordered state of the bakery, the soldier drinking tea as though it was nectar, and, of course, the smear of flour on Alasdair Sinclair’s face from resting his head on my shoulder. Hug a baker, you get floury. Daniel gave me a quick, affectionate look. There is no jealousy in him, partly because he knows there is no need for any, partly because he is an angel in tall, dark, gorgeous form. And he so firmly believes that I am beautiful that I have begun to believe it too. I cannot imagine what I did in a previous life to deserve Daniel. I must have saved a saint’s life or rescued a number of deserving children from a house fire.

  Daniel squeezed my hand then turned his attention to our visitor. ‘Alasdair, I’m Daniel. Let’s go upstairs and have some breakfast, and you can explain how I might help you.’

  ‘I would thank the lady first,’ Alasdair said, attempting a smile.

  I patted him briskly on the cheek in an aunt-like manner, managing to get most of the flour off. ‘My pleasure,’ I told him. ‘Now, off you go, I’ve got teacakes to make.’

  Alasdair went quietly. I sent another two egg-and-bacon muffins with him, since he seemed to like them. And then I got on with the teacakes.

  As I stirred, I wondered how such an obviously strong, capable man as Alasdair Sinclair had been reduced to a quivering, exhausted wreck. There were transverse scars on his wrist, I’d noticed. Not clean cuts, though; the edges were blurry. From a rope, perhaps? I frowned as I slid two trays of teacakes into the oven. I do not approve of wars.

  There was a rap at the bakery door, which was still locked. As I let Jason in I scanned the alley once more. Still no lurkers or assassins as far as I could see. And Alsadair had been alone when he arrived. There was no reason for me to feel nervous.

  But, unaccountably, I did. And it was time to open the shop.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST, ACT 2, SCENE 1

  Jason began to stack the bread into the trays for delivery. I left him flirting with the rickshaw driver, Megan – a short, plump redhead with spark and drive; a much better choice than his usual languid Nordic types – and went upstairs.

  Daniel and Alasdair were in close converse in the kitchen, the air redolent with fried bacon. I did not disturb them.

  I changed into respectable garments: a pair of loose blue cotton trousers and a shirt. I could at last remove my heavy boots and put on sandals. My feet sang little songs of gratitude all the way down the stairs.

  Goss, or possibly Kylie, was waiting at the door of the bakery when I opened it. The girls are the same height and weight – far too low – and change their hair and eye colour so often I once suggested they wear name tags. They refused, but agreed to announce their identity every morning. I like knowing to whom I am talking.

  ‘Goss,’ said Goss, and handed me her phone. I have a strict no-phone-in-the-bakery rule, though I have relented enough to allow them to put the phone in a box on a shelf, on the condition that they only text when they are having morning tea. This is, of course, tyrannical of me, relic of the Jurassic as I am. But those girls text as though their life depended on transmitting the bad news about someone’s boyfriend from Kew to Hawthorn as urgently as possible, and it is not polite to the customers. It doesn’t stop the customers from doing it to us, but we are required to be civilised.

  ‘Today’s muffins are Oasis, and egg and bacon,’ I told her. ‘There are teacakes too, plus challah, bara brith and the usual sourdough, rye and so on.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said agreeably. ‘Meroe was asking who your visitor was.’

  I considered this. Meroe is Insula’s jobbing witch: a woman who might easily turn you into a toad but is careful of incurring insupportable karmic debts. She has her own shop, wherein many wondrous artefacts may be purchased if you’re that way inclined, which occasionally I am. ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Just as I came in,’ said Goss, presenting me with a small coarse cloth bag. It was strung on a long ribbon to be worn around the neck. ‘She said …’ Her brow furrowed with the effort of recalling our witch’s words exactly. ‘She said he’s been tortured and he needs to sleep. If he wears the charm, he will sleep without dreams.’

  ‘How did she know I had a visitor, much less one who might need a charm against nightmares?’ I asked, remembering those fathomless eyes full of present terror.

  ‘Well, duh, Corinna – she’s, like, a witch?’ said Goss, and slipped out of reach behind the cash register.

  Duh, indeed. I left Goss in charge of the shop and mounted the stairs to my own apartment again.

  Daniel and Alasdair were still in the kitchen. The soldier looked up as I entered. I dropped the ribbon over his head. His hand clutched the charm. His eyes widened.

  ‘Our resident witch says that if you wear her charm you will sleep without dreams,’ I announced, patted his cheek again, and went back to the bakery. Daniel would explain.

  The usual people came in and bought bread and traded money and news. Nine am brought Mistress Dread, wearing her full costume. This consisted of what are known as CFM heels (stiletto, scarlet), fishnets, and a boned and laced red French corset. Her black hair was piled atop her head and stuck with hatpins and she was carrying – of course – her monogrammed whip. She lives in 2B, Venus, and was no doubt on her way home from her dungeon.

  Habitual patrons are relatively immune to surprises in Earthly Delights, but I suppressed a giggle at the reaction of a very conventional-looking young man in a good suit, who had to hide behind his bag of bread rolls to preserve his countenance. Mistress Dread nailed him in a second and flicked him her card. He blushed. But he caught it.

  ‘Hard day’s night?’ I asked her.

  ‘Brutal,’ she said in her gravelly, sexy voice. ‘Had to bar the doors at midnight. Every man and his woofer wants to get flogged these days. I blame the internet. Loaf of sourdough, Corinna.’ She hauled up and rearranged her formidable bosom. ‘If I don’t get this corset off soon, I’m going to faint.’

  There was a whimper from the conventional young man. He would definitely be visiting the dungeon as soon as he could summon the nerve, with his heart (or other suitable organ) in his hand and his posterior bared for the kiss of the whip. He was eyeing said whip with fascination and his bread roll camouflage was becoming inadequate.

  Me, I dislike pain and do everything to avoid it, but as Grandma Chapman put it, ‘Each to his own, as the old wife said when she kissed the cow.’ Which now I come to think of it, is an odd thing f
or her to have said – both Grandma and the old wife.

  Cherie Holliday came in to buy sourdough, mentioning a picnic. When I raised an eyebrow, she told me it was to be held in our very own roof garden, where somehow the Temple of Ceres and the wisteria had been missed in the mad vandalism of the city during the sixties. Trudi keeps it alive with all the dedication of a Dutch person in a blue jumper who wants her very own linden tree and means to have it, even if she has to carry all the bathwater in the building to the roof by herself. It had been an overgrown wilderness when she came to Insula some years ago. Now the roof garden is like a little slice of paradise nine storeys up.

  Cherie’s family had imploded when she was very young, and though she’d been through some hard times she had done a good job of bringing herself up. She’d found a job and a place to live, and had avoided trouble, drugs and pregnancy. Her father Andy, meanwhile, had crawled into a bottle and stayed there until she had pulled him out. Cherie was studying textile design, and was discussing it with Therese Webb, the resident of 5A, Arachne.

  I got rather lost when they talked about methods of making patterns but was able to inform them that onion skins made the light golden brown shade of dye they were looking for.

  ‘So you make soup with the insides and dye cloth with the outsides,’ Cherie observed.

  ‘Nothing as all round useful as an onion,’ I informed her. ‘How about a few cakes for your picnic? There are still a couple of Oasis muffins left – or would you rather some teacakes?’

  ‘Both,’ said Cherie greedily. I applaud greed. Gluttony is such a reliable sin. And you get to keep your clothes on.

  ‘And for me,’ said Therese. ‘My friend Anwyn’s coming to stay from Adelaide, and I’ve just invited another friend, Philomela, too. She was in an accident, and I’ve been visiting her as often as I can, though it’s such a long way to go. She’s in a bad way, the poor thing, but she can still sew, so I’ve asked her to come and stay with me to help out with my Project.’ The capital ‘P’ was audible. ‘We’re doing a large embroidery for Innilgard’s anniversary. We’ve decided we want to do Anglo-Saxon, because it was English embroiderers who made the Bayeux Tapestry, which I might remind you was also an embroidery. We’re doing The Battle of Maldon. And Anwyn’s bringing Bellamy.’

  ‘Her husband? Her child?’ I guessed.

  ‘Her cat,’ said Therese. ‘I am sure that he and Carolus will be friends.’

  Carolus was an immaculately coloured, very imperious King Charles spaniel. I wondered. Carolus was rather accustomed to having his human to himself. So was Bellamy, probably. Though his name was propitious. Bel ami. Beautiful friend.

  ‘Sister Mary’s got everyone looking for a dog,’ chimed in Cherie. ‘I met some of her homeless in the street. They were looking for a smallish sort of border collie.’

  ‘I hope they find him,’ I said.

  ‘If he’s in the city, they’ll find him,’ Cherie assured me. ‘They go everywhere. No one notices the homeless; people’s eyes slide right over them, as though being homeless is catching.’ The edge of bitterness was understandable; Cherie had been homeless herself for a period. It can’t have been anything but difficult. It might even have been devastating. I didn’t know. I had never asked.

  ‘Oasis muffins and teacakes,’ said Goss, putting the desired items into paper bags. Goss was good at these sorts of interruptions, even when she was speaking, not texting. They were the spoken equivalent of KTHXBAI. ‘Have a nice picnic!’

  ‘We’re nearly sold out,’ I commented, looking around at the denuded shelves. I always knew we were sold out when I could see the whole of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, a print of which is hung on the side wall. The strange fleshly fountain was spurting. I wondered about that Hieronymus sometimes.

  ‘I can do the banking and close up,’ offered Goss, ‘if you want to slip upstairs and see if everything’s all right.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘But what leads you to believe that it mightn’t be?’

  ‘Jason said you had a zombie.’

  ‘At the beginning,’ I agreed. ‘He’s looks much better now.’

  ‘They do that to fool you so they can eat out your brains,’ Goss told me solemnly. ‘You be careful!’

  I promised I would.

  I do not know whether anyone has explained the concept of fiction to Goss, or if she would believe them if they did. As far as she was concerned, zombies existed. Well, anything that tried to eat my brains was going to find themselves flattened with a skillet. I had just the pan, made of cast iron and long-handled, for a good swing. Zombies, indeed.

  I took a sourdough loaf I had reserved for myself and the remaining muffins and went upstairs.

  There were two men sitting at the kitchen table but no zombies.

  ‘I come bearing muffins,’ I announced. ‘More tea?’

  ‘That would be kind,’ said the soldier. ‘You’re a verra guid baker!’

  ‘Thank you.’ I put on the kettle and looked at Daniel for a cue.

  He put his phone back in his pocket and frowned. ‘Alasdair has lost his dog, Geordie,’ he said gravely. ‘A sort of spotted border collie.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said. And it was, but it hardly seemed like a matter of life and death.

  ‘We were together in Afghanistan,’ explained the soldier in his quiet, broad Scots. ‘He’s a trained sniffer. Bombs, drugs. He go’ a medal. Then when … when I was taken oot, they let me take Geordie with me. We were discharged from the army in Townsville. I wasn’t gonny risk him in a plane, because they don’t pressurise cargo holds. Ah’ve been drivin’ doon here for weeks. Nice and slowly, gettin’ used to bein’ … no’ a soldier.’

  ‘Go on,’ I encouraged.

  ‘So, I go’ to the city, we’re bidin’ in a hostel in King Street. I was just takin’ him for his evening walk when I were beltit from behind. I fell, an’ Geordie …’

  ‘Ran away?’ I suggested.

  His eyes flashed, his fists clenched. ‘He wudn’t run away. He stayed with me through aw of it, the explosions and the gunfire. He was taken. He was taken from me!’ His voice was rising. Daniel put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Of course he didn’t run away,’ he said in a soothing rumble. ‘Now, you need to rest. Everyone is out looking for Geordie.’

  ‘I walked aw night,’ whispered Alasdair. ‘Callin’ him. He only knows the Gaelic words. That’s why they retired him wi’ me.’

  ‘You walked all night and you had a blow to the head,’ confirmed my adored one. ‘Now you’re going to lie down in the spare room and rest. Meroe’s given you a charm. You won’t dream.’

  ‘I won’t?’ he asked, very quietly.

  ‘You won’t,’ I assured him. ‘She’s the most powerful witch in these parts. When she bespells something, it stays bespelled.’

  He clutched the charm. ‘It smells like thyme,’ he said, which had such an exquisitely painful double meaning that I turned around to look out the window while Daniel found Alasdair an old tracksuit and made up the spare bed.

  When he was done the soldier rose and made his way to the guest room, then paused with his hand on the door. ‘You’ll call me …’

  ‘The very second I know something,’ said Daniel.

  The door shut. We heard a weary sigh, followed by a creak as he climbed into the bed. A comfortable one. Of all creatures, Jekyll, who must have followed me upstairs, pawed at the door. She probably wanted to sleep on his boots.

  ‘All right, fetish kitty,’ I told her, and opened it enough for her to slip inside.

  ‘Did you say muffins?’ asked Daniel.

  We took our tea and muffins into the parlour, so that Alasdair could sleep in peace.

  ‘All right, tell me what’s going on,’ I demanded.

  ‘Lost dog,’ he replied, straight-faced.

  I gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘Why is this dog so important?’

  ‘I’m waiting for a bit more info from a few friends, bu
t Alasdair bears all the marks of a man who was tortured. At a guess, he was hung by the wrists with his toes just touching the ground – the Pathan like that one. You can relieve the pain in your arms only by increasing the pain in your feet. After a few hours, the patient suffocates. The diaphragm cannot relax.’

  ‘Like crucifixion,’ I said. I had read a book about an archaeological investigation into crucifixion and I really wished I hadn’t. If you’re nailed to the cross and hanging up, you have a choice between taking the weight off your feet and hanging by your hands, or easing the pain in your arms and hands and having your feet in excruciating agony. But the suffering lasts longer than the Pathan method. That’s why Pilate was surprised when the messengers came to him to say that Christ was dead. His first response was ‘What, already?’

  Daniel looked blank. Of course. Being a Jew, he only knew the first bit of the Bible.

  ‘Never mind.’ I waved a discussion of theology away. ‘So he was captured and tortured. But clearly he was either rescued, or released, or he escaped, because here he is.’

  Daniel scrubbed both hands through his dark hair. ‘I suspect he was invalided out of the service with PTSD.’

  ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Nightmares, flashbacks, hyperawareness, delusions. High risk of suicide. The only thing he loves enough to live for is his dog.’

  ‘You mean without Geordie he’s not likely to survive?’ I was aghast.

  ‘That’s right,’ Daniel confirmed. He took my hand. ‘He might be suffering from some sort of brain trauma too, if he’s had a close encounter with an improvised explosive device. He could have a contrecoup injury. The brain bounces around in the skull, leading to fugue states, pain, despair.’ He made a very Jewish gesture, spreading out his hands.

  ‘Poor Alasdair,’ I said, then gave myself a mental shake. My pity wouldn’t help Alasdair. He needed action. ‘Right, then let’s get down to it. Do you think Geordie ran or was he stolen deliberately?’