Free Die Like a Dog by Gwen Moffat Page A

statements.
    They climbed the slope behind his cottage and came out close to where she had encountered the pine marten. The dog started along the contouring path, nose down and heading east, towards the village and the main valley. Miss Pink thought about shotguns and wondered if an expert could identify different models by the sound of their discharge – and she watched the dog, which was no longer interested in rabbits but in the path itself.
    After a few hundred yards it forked and the Alsatian bore left, climbing on a gentle diagonal. It disappeared round a bend. The morning was very quiet and when Evans called to the dog his voice held a note of panic in that green silence. They hurried on in single file and a dog started to bark.
    â€˜That’s him!’ Evans stopped, his eyes frenetic. The dog went on barking.
    â€˜Which one?’ Miss Pink asked.
    â€˜Brindle. Listen!’
    But Miss Pink was as accustomed to dogs as himself, considerably more so, and she knew that the Alsatian was stationary, that it was expressing urgency but not hostility.
    â€˜He’s at the ruin,’ Evans said, with smug excitement. ‘I knew he was making for it soon as he forked left.’
    They pushed on to where a ragged gable-end rose above a mass of briars. The ruin had been a two-roomed cottage but the roof had collapsed and the interior was a riot of nettles. The dog appeared to be round the back. It had stopped barking but they could hear it moving about on fallen slates.
    Behind the ruin was an ancient pigsty, its timbers rotting. The dog Brindle was nosing the rubble below the gaping roof. Evans nodded slowly.
    â€˜I should have brought a spade.’
    â€˜Don’t pigsties have concrete floors?’ Miss Pink asked.
    He ignored her and stooped to enter the sty where he started to scrape at the exposed floor with a slate. It was deep in sheep droppings but under those the slate grated on concrete. He emerged, his face red from exertion and frustration.
    â€˜All right then –’ he was belligerent, ‘– what’s the dog after?’ It was snuffling excitedly about the heap of stone and slate and mouldy wood.
    Miss Pink ignored the tone but she found the question interesting. She looked at the tiny yard of the sty where the nettles were crushed flat as if by the passage of several animals, and noted that there were no fresh sheep droppings. She left the little ruin and started to walk about the clearing. Evans joined her.
    â€˜Call the dog,’ she said.
    It refused to leave the sty. Evans went back, swearing, swinging the lead. Miss Pink continued to move through the thick grass that was still wet from the night’s dew. Evans emerged from the sty, the dog leashed. He started towards her but the dog hung back.
    â€˜Make him come,’ Miss Pink ordered. ‘He’s been here already; there are his tracks in the dew.’
    Evans glared, but as he hauled the dog towards her he could see nothing unusual, only soaked grass and a couple of foxgloves bowed with the weight of their own long spires of bloom. Then Miss Pink reached forward and lifted a foxglove out of the ground whole, with broken roots. She clutched a handful of grass and it came up in a massive sod, and the next, and the next. Then the Alsatian started to dig.
    â€˜You don’t need a spade,’ she observed.
    And he didn’t. Satan, the black Alsatian, was buried under about six inches of soil. In a short time they had the body out of the grave.
    â€˜Shot at close range,’ she said, regarding the mess that the pellets had made of the head.
    â€˜You know how it was done?’ Evans asked, but it was rhetorical and she said nothing. ‘A bitch,’ he went on. ‘A bitch were tied in that sty, then he waited for Satan and shot him soon as he showed. We’ll get along there now.’ He was smiling.
    â€˜ “He”? Along where?’
    â€˜Why –’ he feigned