Free Grave Matters by Margaret Yorke Page B

she comes back. Have you got a sack or a tarpaulin or something?’
    ‘What? Oh, yes. There’ll be something in the cellar,’ David said.
    He went off towards the house and down a flight of steps outside the back door.
    ‘We’ll cope with this. Don’t you come, Ellen,’ said Patrick.
    ‘I don’t want to stay here by myself,’ said Ellen. ‘Carol might come back and I’d have to explain.’
    ‘Funk sticks, eh?’ said Patrick, in a gentle voice.
    She nodded. He longed to touch her, to make some sort of physical contact, but his hands were damp from touching the dead, wet dog.
    ‘Why not go back to the cottage, then? I’ll come along as soon as we’ve finished here.’
    ‘Perhaps that would be best,’ she said. She looked sheepish. ‘Sorry to be feeble. After all, it’s just a dog, not a person.’
    ‘Well, he’s a big dog. That somehow makes it more shocking,’ Patrick said. And more difficult to account for, he thought. ‘Make that tea we were going to have.’
    ‘All right. I’ll have another look for the Cicero too.’
    ‘You do that,’ Patrick said. ‘We shouldn’t be too long. I’ll have to help Bruce see to things.’
    She knew he meant bury the dog.
    ‘I understand. I’ll be off, then.’
    She left, and David Bruce emerged from the cellar carrying a sack as she passed the head of the stairs. Patrick saw him look at her, but she went unsmiling past, without a word.
    ‘Ellen’s a bit shaken, so she’s gone home,’ said Patrick shortly. ‘The poor brute does look very pathetic. Where shall we bury him?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said David. ‘I’ll think of somewhere while we fetch him.’ Patrick forbore to point out that he owned at least four acres of land, much of it wild orchard. A suitable grave should not be difficult to find.
    ‘That sack won’t be big enough,’ he said. ‘Have you a knife or something? If we slit it, we could sling the dog in it and carry it between us. I could have brought him back myself but I thought it would upset Ellen.’
    ‘You were quite right. Anyway I’d like to see where it happened. I can’t understand it,’ David said. ‘He was my wife’s dog, but he spent most of his time with me. I was fond of him.’ And indeed he looked almost as shaken as Ellen had.
    He went into the house and returned with a large kitchen knife which he used to slit the sack so that it made a sheet. Then he went back into the house with the knife. A tidy man, Patrick thought.
    They walked together to the stream.
    ‘Was he an old dog? He doesn’t look it,’ Patrick asked.
    ‘No, he was only five,’ David said. ‘I got him as a puppy.’
    Heart failure was unlikely, then, as the cause of death.
    ‘Wasn’t it difficult, having him in London? Isn’t that where you lived?’ Ellen had told Patrick that the Bruces had lived in London. ‘A big dog like that must need a lot of exercise.’
    ‘We lived in Putney. I used to take him on the heath. And Carol gets about a good bit in her work. She took him with her sometimes. But it was better for him here, he loved it, running in the fields.’
    They could see the pale blob of the dog’s body on the bank of the stream long before they reached it.
    ‘My God! You poor old fellow,’ said David, bending over it. As Patrick had done, he turned it, lifting the limbs, searching for any mark.
    ‘Boys? Hooligans?’ Patrick asked, thinking of adolescents who cut tails off cats.
    ‘Very unlikely. Meldsmead isn’t like that,’ David said.
    ‘He couldn’t have just tumbled in,’ said Patrick. ‘Will you get the vet?’
    ‘I’d like to know what happened, but I think it would be very upsetting,’ David said. Patrick wanted to know too, but even if there was an autopsy it would be difficult for him to learn the results. Ellen might tell him, perhaps.
    They spread the sack on the ground and lifted the dog on to it. A smell of wet hair rose from him. They wrapped the sack around him and lifted it by the ends, but