Sherlock Hogg in ‘Fowl Deeds on the Moors’
On the second floor of the great grey monster that was Hartley Castle House – at the end of a long newly carpeted corridor past the cavernous master bedroom and the cavernous ensuite bathroom – there was an arched black door. Made from a hundred weight of wood, painted black and three hundred years older than ‘occupied’ Australia, the door was set into a stone wall. This wall was the back wall of the house. It was where the house ended and the castle began. The door had a heavy brass ring for a door knob, which when unlatched with effort and a loud, echoing clunk, led into the only part of Hartley Castle still standing – the West Tower.
Here all nods to the 21st century (aside from electricity) ceased. Gone were the newly laid, pure wool beige carpets, sleek pastel walls, dimmer switches and radiators. Gone was the lingering smell of fresh paint. In its place was a grimy stone cave of a corridor that looked and smelt like it hadn’t had any TLC since 10BC. It was reek upon three hundred year old reek – ancient dust and sweat and blood, and, no doubt, small animals long dead and decayed in crumbling crevices.
I loved it. The length of a tennis court, it had the obligatory floor and walls laid in a mismatch of roughly hewn rocks, an inch of disintegrating cement around each; the obligatory concave white plaster ceiling; and the obligatory heavily recessed, coin slot windows casting the obligatory ghostly light.
Two arched black doors led off to the right…
***
And so, the two doors on the right.
The first of these led into a Jury Room; all oak panelled walls and long wooden table where fates were decided. It was a small spartan room and would remain so as I could see no use for it, unless we locked the Hoggs in there until they found me innocent.
The second black door led into a much larger and entirely more interesting room: the Court Room. I loved this room for all its inherent eighteenth century creepiness. It was the sort of room you could well imagine some poor potato thief being pigheadedly and irreversibly sentenced to death in by a drooling judge while old hags knitted and cackled from the pews. It was the sort of room that should have had a chute beneath the peasant’s chair which dropped him three stories into a dungeon where he could limp about in shackles and wait for the executioner. With its distinctive dinginess, creaking old wood panelled judge’s stand, coin slot windows, blackened fireplace topped with medieval coats of arms – Neville, Le Latimer and Hartley – and a liberal smattering of black wrought iron rings of candles suspended by heavy black chains, this was a real room. The best room in the house. From the moment I set foot in it, smelt the air and spied the judge’s stand, my Kiwi mind kicked into gear. The judge’s stand, a deathly dark wooden booth with a bench seat – like some sort of medieval bus stop – was bolted to the wall at the door end of the long rectangular room. I noted its proximity to the fireplace. More to the point, I noted its wide, wooden eave and its long, narrow front counter complete with gavel.
I had just the job for the Hartley Castle Court Room…
***
Gabriel sat on a bar stool, deep in thought, watching me press a double vodka from a pub-style nip pourer and bracket mounted on the judge’s stand eave.
‘I believe you, monkey,’ she said. ‘But, if it’s not you, who is it?’
I lifted my bum off the judge’s bench long enough to extract, lime, soda and a Boddington’s from the Stella Artois branded beer fridge at my feet. The offending letter lay on the stand’s front counter between two John Smiths beer mats, a three hundred year old gavel making a more than adequate paperweight. ‘If it’s not me,’ I said cutting a thick slice of lime, ‘that just leaves everybody else. It could be anyone. You seem to be ignoring the fact that this might have absolutely nothing to do with me, Gabriel. It might just be coincidence.’
‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Dad runs the farm for forty-five years? His father for about thirty before that? Not one threat? Not even a protester? You’re in the country a month…?’
The ice was in the kitchen fridge on the ground floor. I was about to go down and get it. I plonked her drink in front of her. ‘Sorry. No ice.’
‘Is it possible one of the web sites that published your article knows you’re here? Like, someone who did it to coincide with your arrival?’
‘Negative!’ I tore open my Boddingtons, poured it into a tall pint glass.
‘Are you sure? You tell them you’re coming here? To marry into a battery hen farming family? They don’t like it?’
‘Ah, excuse me, Sherlock. It was five years ago. I had a fleeting association with a guy I worked with, but hardly knew, wrote him an article, gave him the article. The end. To be honest, I wouldn’t even know where he is or who he works for now. In fact, I can’t even remember his name.’
‘He did work for an animal rights group in Queensland though, didn’t he?’
‘I don’t know who he worked for,’ I said tetchily, Gabriel’s determination to implicate me, no matter how vaguely, a source of annoyance and, I dare say, disappointment. I shut my eyes to foster calm. ‘He was a guy I used to have a smoke with outside the building from time to time. That’s all. He needed a writer to tidy up an article about factory farmed hens. I was opposed to factory farming, so I helped him out.’ I looked at her and shrugged. ‘Where’s the crime?’
‘Did you ask him where the article was going?’
‘He said it was going on a local animal welfare site.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Yes!’
‘And did it go on a local site?’
‘Yes! The fact that it ended up on a dozen other sites, that’s not my fault! Somebody just thought it was a good article. If I’d known, I’d have syndicated it and made a few bucks!’
‘You can’t syndicate charity work, monkey.’
‘Is that so? Gabriel, think it through – why would some guy in little Old Brisbane be the least bit interested in some factory farm in the back blocks of North Yorkshire way up the other end of the world? He’d only be interested in tidying up his own backyard, surely.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Gabriel slipped off her stool – the visual equivalent of a child falling out of a tree – and went walkabout, drink in one hand, Silk Cut menthol (the same brand as her mother) in the other, pensively pacing the room like a pint-sized private detective. She stopped by the fire and gazed down at the two animals basking in its glow. ‘If he was affiliated with the ALF,’ she said, ‘he’d be interested in any animal cruelty, no matter where.’
I scoffed. ‘How would he be affiliated with the ALF?’
‘Anyone’s affiliated with the ALF if they want to be, monkey, because there is no affiliation.’ She giggled. ‘Activists don’t sign up, you know. It’s not a gym. There’s no membership, no record of members. It’s really loose like that, deliberately loose to protect identities. The ALF’s just a press office.’ She sat cross-legged behind Kurt’s head, drink at her hip and fiddled delicately with his ears. ‘Animal people form their own little clandestine groups all over the place, go out and do whatever it is they do – blow things up, steal battery hens and monkeys, calves, guinea pigs, whatever. Like you and I could go out now, bomb some medical research facility and the first the ALF would know about was in the news!’
‘They must have a function.’
‘Their function is after the event. Like, we blow up a lab somewhere, disappear into the night, the ALF website takes it from there, justifies our actions, saying why using animals for medical research is morally fucked up. Effectively they claim responsibility in an IRA, Al Qaeda sort of way, but they’re immune to prosecution because they can honestly say they haven’t a clue who did it.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ I said, tone more accusatory than intended.
She thought about this, head lolled to one side, fingers gently caressing Kurt’s head and snout. ‘You tend to coming from a long line of paranoid chicken murderers.’
This last comment necessitated the draining of her drink. She arrived at the bar seeking more and I set about pouring it. ‘Fact is, monkey, it could be anyone who chooses to operate under the ALF banner.’ She wandered off again. ‘It could be someone Dad fell out with. It could be your smoking buddy in Australia. Or it could just be our turn. As you say, coincidence.’’
‘With this suspiciously abundant knowledge of yours, it could be you,’ I said.
She giggled. ‘Mmm, and I’d have got away with it too if it wasn’t for that pesky Harland kid.’
I laughed. ‘Well, look at it from my perspective!’
‘Okay.’ She marched round the bar, climbed on my knee and peered around. ‘Let’s see…Fiancé stands to inherit fortune. Fiancé blows cover by showing underworld knowledge. Verdict: Fiancé obviously a terrorist. Trying to shoot herself in the foot, lose inheritance.’ She leapt down, marched off.
‘Okay, so your motive’s a bit counterproductive.’
‘Just a bit. I read, monkey, that’s all. It’s amazing the way these people work.’
‘I’m sure. What about your ex-boyfriend?’
Gabriel was now by the long wooden table in the middle of the room where potato thieves would have sat white knuckled waiting their fate. She was staring at my Sony Vaio laptop and my sketchpads and reference books, all lovingly set out ready for whatever freelance work came my way; all doing nothing but gather dust.
‘I haven’t heard from him for weeks,’ she said.
‘Funny that. We haven’t got email yet. Unless he’s got your mobile number.’
‘Of course he has. He’s a friend.’
He was also a dirty old man who took advantage of a sweet, innocent sixteen year old girl lost and alone in London. It wasn’t so much that she’d shacked up with him for two years. More, she’d lost all manner of things to him, the least important of these being her clock radio.
‘Well, he’s no friend of mine and, as far as I’m concerned, he’s top of my list of suspects.’
She smiled. ‘Reason?’
I slapped a fresh vodka down in front of her. ‘Because he’s a wanker.’
She giggled, toasted me. ‘My dear Watson. I think you’ve solved the case!’
***
‘Monkey?’
It was midnight in the Court Room. Gabriel, after a long, pensive, alcohol and harsh reality-fuelled silence, the latest in a series of long, pensive, alcohol and harsh reality-fuelled silences, had just had a thought, a thought I’d watched her processing amidst much frowning and fidgeting, a thought she now found it necessary to articulate: ‘If this carries on like the Newchurch guinea pig thing, Windy Dale Eggs will be worth nothing. Dad will be worth nothing.’ She sipped her drink, shivered.
‘What’s the Newchurch guinea pig thing?’
‘You don’t know about the Newchurch guinea pig thing?’
I shook my head.
‘Have you been living in a cave? The Newchurch guinea pig thing was only the landmark case in English animal activism in the last five years!’
‘It rings a vague bell. Enlighten me.’
‘There was a farm in Newchurch which bred guinea pigs for medical research. Well, when I say medical, most of that research amounted to sticking shampoo in guinea pigs eyes to see if they went blind. Apparently all the activists did was picket the guinea pig farm, threaten anything that moved and, ultimately, dig up someone’s long dead grandmother and take them hostage.’
‘They stole someone’s corpse?’
She did a drunken sweep of a nod. ‘Coffin and all. ‘
I thought about this. ‘That’s a little over-enthusiastic.’
‘It’s disgusting. It ultimately helped to close down a guinea pig farm, which was its objective and, in my opinion, a good thing. But in the process it helped rebrand the whole animal rights movement in the worst possible way.’
‘Mmm, I’m sure. Not wanting to feign abundant knowledge here, but there seems to be a serious lack of sophistication in animal rights.’
She laughed, nodded. ‘Rabid men living with their rabid mothers spitting on anyone who doesn’t agree with their views.’
‘All passion and no poise.’
‘And mindless acts that alienate people rather than win their sympathy.’
Amid much nodding and sipping, we lapsed into a long, pensive, alcohol and harsh reality-fuelled silence punctuated by much frowning and fidgeting: Gabriel had had another thought.
‘You’re not pro-activism, are you, monkey?’
‘Are you asking or fishing?’
‘Asking.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You love animals more than the average person.’
‘A lot more than the average person. You don’t have to run around blowing things up and digging up dead grandmothers to prove you love animals, Gabriel.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘No, I fucking don’t! Please, for God’s sake cut me some slack here! I swear on my mother’s life I have never ever been involved in any kind of animal activism! I don’t know the first thing about it! Check my receipts, if you don’t believe me – I’ve never even owned a balaclava!’
She laughed.
‘Come on, man,’ I said. ‘I need a bit of solidarity right now.’
She looked at me long and hard, one jet black scythe blade of an eyebrow raised. Then her face softened. She smiled and poked her tongue out.
‘Can I take that as a yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re still a team?’
‘We’re still a team.’
‘Thank Christ for that!’
Little did I know how hopeless Gabriel would turn out to be at mixed doubles.
