Die Like a Dog

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Authors: Gwen Moffat
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since, of course.’
    Lloyd said nothing. Seale was grinning broadly.
    â€˜Where were you yesterday afternoon, Lloyd?’
    â€˜Oh no!’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘You’ve been watching so much telly you’ve got square eyes.’ His face hardened. ‘Did he send you here? I don’t believe it. Why wouldn’t he come himself?’
    â€˜Mr Judson,’ Evans said with dignity, ‘has business to attend to in Liverpool.’ Seale turned interested eyes on him. ‘He intimated that it was likely you knew more than had been divulged so far at this point in time.’
    Lloyd grimaced in disgust.
    â€˜So he said: “Go and lean on them”,’ Seale observed.
    â€˜He didn’t mean you,’ Evans said quickly, and handed her the shotgun. ‘Although this isn’t the first time you handled firearms, is it?’
    â€˜No.’ She studied him. ‘What are you going to make of that? Usually it’s rifles,’ she added when he didn’t reply. ‘“Lean on them"? Who’s “them”?’
    â€˜The local hooligans.’
    â€˜Good for you.’ She turned and went into the cottage.
    â€˜Right,’ Lloyd said. ‘Let’s see your dust. We’re leaving and I don’t want you skulking around this place while I’m away.’
    â€˜It’s our place,’ Evans pointed out with a thin smile.
    â€˜That’s immaterial. It’s my possessions inside. That’s why I don’t want you hanging around.’
    Seale looked out. ‘And that goes for my tent too. Just remember I’m under your master’s protection.’
    Evans stood for a moment, sucking his teeth, then he walked away. I’ll get him, he thought, I’ll get him if it’s the last thing I do – and that dirty little whore with him.
    â€˜I had heard rumours,’ Ted Roberts said, filling Miss Pink’s glass from the decanter. ‘But you know how people gossip, and one must admit that in these times, when a man has stuff worth stealing in his house, and he owns guard dogs, he’s not averse to spreading the story himself that they’re savage. Where’s the deterrent in a dog without teeth?’
    â€˜There is that.’
    They had met at a hotel on a lake below a stony pass. Thirty miles from the Bridge Hotel, Miss Pink had confessed to a sense of outrage as she explained why she was afraid to take a walk in the area she had chosen for a week’s holiday. Ted Roberts, retired solicitor, old friend and climbing partner, had listened with sympathy but not without objectivity.
    â€˜What are the rumours you’ve heard?’ she asked.
    His foxy face sharpened further as he hitched his chair closer and, their backs turned to the distant bar, they gazed through the open window to the boulder fields beyond the water. But neither was interested in the view.
    â€˜Not only dogs,’ he said. ‘Women.’
    She was disappointed. ‘That’s obvious. I’ve been there only two days and he’s chasing a new arrival while a lady who is either his last conquest or feels that she should have been, is beside herself with bad temper. His wife is Resignation on a monument.’
    â€˜It was Patience on the monument.’
    â€˜If Gladys Judson has anything to wait for, it will be useless to her by the time she gets it.’
    â€˜Meaning Judson?’
    â€˜Blood pressure if ever I saw it. Drinking heavily, riding hard, violent quarrels, frenetic sex.’
    â€˜You shock me. How do you know that?’
    â€˜He doesn’t choose placid women, with the exception of his wife. Anna Waring – you know her?’
    â€˜That’s ancient gossip.’
    â€˜Evidently that was what you were about to tell me. She’s violent, but the new girl, the one he’s chasing, is too much for him altogether: vital, confident, strong and, I would say, totally

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