Chapter 6
Sally
Mark’s face is a mixture of impatience and confusion. “Who?” he says. “Which bitch?”
At first he assumed the Gavey bitch must be the mother, not the teenage daughter.
Yet it was Ree who said it, and Sally is the one who thinks Lesley Gavey is a crazy bitch; it’s Sally who theorizes, speculates, and invents scary scenarios around Lesley as if it’s her favorite hobby.
Whereas Ree hasn’t ever said much about Lesley and has said plenty about what a justifiably unpopular loser Tess Gavey is.
Tess is in Ree’s class at sixth-form college; they have two A-levels in common, English language and literature (combined) and sociology.
So Ree knows everything, thinks Sally; she heard what Detective Chantree said. In which case, why the hell didn’t she come downstairs straight away to check Sally was okay? Maybe because Ree’s not okay herself.
Has silent crying been happening on both floors of the Hayloft? Yes. Ree’s eyes are watery and red. She’s as imaginative as Sally is, perhaps more so: She too will have brought all the worst-case scenarios to vivid life in her mind.
Perhaps she hoped to stay and weep in her room for a while longer, but Sally scuppered that plan by maintaining her uninformative silence in the face of the quite reasonable questions that have been aimed at her.
“Ratted out for what?” says Tobes.
“Nothing! He didn’t do it!” Ree wails. “Right, Mum? I don’t get it: Why didn’t you tell the cop he didn’t do it? I mean…did he do it?” She bursts into tears, which she tries to scare away with a string of obscenities. “Please tell me he didn’t.”
“Of course he didn’t,” says Sally. Thank God Champ is completely, indisputably innocent. That’s something good she can hold on to. Gratitude is so important, even at a time like this.
“Then why the fuck didn’t you say that to the policeman?” demands Ree.
“Who didn’t do what?” Mark asks. “Could everyone please calm down?”
“Everyone is calm 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?
Ree falls to the floor, sobbing, and Sally feels awful.
She has never before allowed such an eruption of cruel thoughts about her daughter.
Somehow, that reached Ree through the ether and made her feel worse.
And it’s true, Sally didn’t defend Champ when she easily could have.
It’s not that she thinks Ree’s wrong; she just can’t understand why you’d ever allow yourself to say the most hurtful thing possible to someone you loved.
Now, if the worst happens, Sally will always have Ree’s words in her head…
But the worst won’t happen. She’ll do anything to stop it, whatever she has to. Ree would too, she thinks. In spite of her merciless outburst, Ree is Sally’s most likely ally if it turns out that something extreme needs to be done; Sally knows this beyond the slightest doubt.
“Dog bites don’t go to jury trials,” Toby says. “Do they, Dad?”
“Of course they don’t,” says Mark. “Can both of you girls stop acting like some kind of execution order’s been issued?
Look at me and Tobes—we’re not losing our minds, are we?
I’m sure we can sort this out. It might just take a bit of communication, a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with the official channels, but the fact is, if Champ didn’t do it and you were out walking him at the time—”
“You don’t know anything,” Sally says, talking over him. “You have no idea what could happen. Dogs that bite people get put down all the time. All it would take is for the police to believe Tess and not me. And they’ll use Furbert against us, his history.”
“Sal, there’s no ‘history.’” Mark makes air quotes with his fingers.
“You’re talking about Furbs like he was…
Harold Shipman or Myra Hindley or something.
He nipped a few people’s hands once or twice—that’s it.
As far as I can remember, he only drew blood once.
And none of the people he nipped ever made an issue of it.
The main problem was in your mind: your constant paranoia that one day something worse would happen. ”
And now it has. Yes, Champ is a different dog, an entirely soft and non-bitey one, but she was nevertheless right about something bad happening.
“The Gaveys know about Furbert’s…tendency,” she says. “Lesley will make sure the police know all about it too.”
“So what if she does?” says Mark. “There’s no such thing in British law as canine guilt by…belonging-to-the-same-family association.”
Is he being deliberately obtuse? Isn’t it obvious what Sally means? The police will wonder if the same woman, or family, who failed to stop one dog from biting people might also have failed to control their second dog in exactly the same way. That will strike them as quite likely, no doubt.
Sally has to stand up now, even if it means waking Champ; she has to get out of the house. “No, you stay here, Champy,” she says as he springs upright too, with a big yawn and a stretch, and automatically follows her as she goes over to the shoe rack.
Sally bends and strokes both sides of his head at the same time. “You wait here for a bit with Daddy and Ree and Tobes. Okay? I’ll be back soon.”
“Back? Where are you going?” Mark asks.
“Out,” says Sally. “I need to think.” She opens the front door and sees an imaginary semicircle of armed police, guns all pointed in her direction, in the unpopulated space between her house and the Barn opposite.