Charlie Chabot’s modest country home
Friday, January 27
Charlie Chabot’s home was twenty minutes south of his office in York and two minutes out of a village called South Milford, at least a minute of this being driveway. His humble estate was the size of a city suburb. There were, however, only three houses on it: a square brick Gate House, a brick Caretaker’s bungalow and Charlie’s house, otherwise known as Killing Hall, a less than subtle reference to the small slaughterhouse which had once occupied the site far less appealingly some three centuries ago.
The house itself was the largest bachelor pad I was ever likely to encounter, an enormous, grey columned museum-like structure far less welcoming than its only fulltime occupant. This house was set towards the rear of a flat, lushly green estate made up of formal walled gardens, award-winning rose gardens, a spectacular herbaceous border-lined grand walk shooting long and straight from the Manor steps like a mini le Champ de Mars parklands, and picture perfect white fenced fields dotted with oak trees and a few obscenely healthy looking sheep and cattle.
There had been hints as to Charlie Chabot’s ludicrous wealth – a Lamborghini Murcielago Roadster and Mercedes M-Class 4WD being among the more blatant – yet I was still completely unprepared for this.
Charlie Chabot was fifty-five. He had been at the helm of the rusty old tug that was Creative Solutions (in its various guises) for twenty years. In that time he had gone from skipper/deckhand to plain skipper of a forty strong operation. Decent enough, but not exactly Sir Alan Sugar. The key to Charlie’s success was not so much the success of Creative Solutions itself (and despite itself), but Charlie’s specialised ‘expertise’ and subsequent clients: real estate clients – developers and speculators – none of whom had the faintest idea what constituted good advertising, all of whom were happy so long as Charlie (somehow) got people buying apartments. Most of whom were Charlie’s best buddies; buddies who had for twenty years given him first bite at some very tasty residential property investment cherries. In keeping with his self-effacing, overly modest and highly apologetic nature, he refused to take credit for any of it – ‘When it comes to real estate purchases over the years, my hand has been held by some very nice people wearing very nice gold watches.’ Same when pressed as to the exact size of his property portfolio: ‘If you asked a child how many pieces of Lego he had…I have a credit card which continues to buy groceries, whisky and a nice meal. Sorry, but that’s all I really need to know.’
I parked my dirty brown Volvo next to Charlie’s sparkly red Mercedes 4WD on a bed of fine red scoria. Another car – a dirty and dated Saab, blue – was parked on the other side of the Mercedes. I smiled.
The front door of Killing Hall opened as I got out of the car. Out stepped Charlie Chabot in a pink sweater, cream slacks and an apron. Out immediately after him in a mad flurry of legs charged Danby the dog.
*****
I’ve talked about karma already. To be honest I was as clueless about karma as Charlie was about his property portfolio. All I knew was that if you were desperate enough – as we were when Chicken Colditz put up the shutters – and all rational avenues were exhausted, irrational avenues no matter how flaky become the only avenues.
I wanted to save Duncan and Archie for them. I also wanted to save them for me. For us. To redirect the energy flow and get some positive ‘You’ve done good, son’ vibes flowing through my veins, build some spiritual resolve. Duncan and Archie died miserable deaths and their bodies have long since been excreted out the other end of a multitude of carnivorous humans, but that’s beside the point. I’d tried to change the lives of two wretched animals. I’d failed, yet the intent remained. The karma remained. Which had only made me more determined to get it right next time; with Danby the dog, no matter how his liberty might further taint relations with Chicken Colditz HQ.
Karma ultimately provided the answer. Karma created by doing some¬thing honourable at a time I could have been forgiven for being dishonourable. Gabriel had just gone. I had no friends in England other than Kurt and Courtney. I was alone, ostracised and thousands of miles from home. I could have been excused an element of petulant despair.
Yet when Fergus Blaine announced via my message bank that he had cut ties with Charlie Chabot to focus on JAS 360, my natural thought – ‘Good. I’m rid of an indecent agency so I can focus on a decent one’ – was oddly tempered by a most un-advertising consideration for the plight of an also ran – ‘What’s Charlie going to do?’
I won’t say it was the most creatively stimulating night I will ever spend. I won’t be rushing to install the ideas generated in that dusk-to-dawn brainstorm in my portfolio. I will however be rushing to repeat the wave of humanity I felt doing a good deed for a fellow human being. A deed that saw Charlie out of a spot and all of us into a dog friendly shift workers bar at dawn.
And there was the karma. Had I not done the deed, we would never have ended up in that bar, tired but gratified, watching the sun come up over the York Minster and drinking far more than we should. I learnt an awful lot about the real Charlie Chabot that wonderfully drunken morning in York.
*****
Danby the dog was no slimmer than last I’d seen him. But then he’d only been resident at Killing Hall for three days. As he sped from the house in a blur of black paws, I knelt to receive him, to lap up any forthcoming doggy gratitude for the part I’d played in his liberation. He screamed straight past me and hared off down the garden-lined, finely mowed grand walk running straight as a die from the door of Killing Hall almost to the horizon, a grand walk long enough, straight enough and wide enough to land small, wingless aeroplanes.
I stood and watched Danby go.
‘How’s he been?’ I asked.
‘Quite mad in the main,’ Charlie said with what I took to be a tired chuckle.
‘You’re not regretting it, are you?’
‘Not at all! No! Sorry, I didn’t mean to convey that impression at all! No, he’s doing what one does after prolonged incarceration and he’s quite a lovely dog despite it all. He’s chewed a rather nice Persian rug beyond recognition, of course, but ahm…’
‘Bugger!’
‘Well. I didn’t like the thing anyway. It was too…Persian. He starts proper temperament training on Monday morning, which will do him no end of good. We have a nice person in York who specialises in that kind of thing. None of this electric collar business so popular with the quick fix majority. A few good hours of treats and positive reinforcement and he’ll start to think the world’s a better place.’
‘I’m sure he already does. How’s he getting on with your other dogs?’
‘Ah, badly mostly. Brutus ignores him and Sam snaps if he gets a bit boisterous. Honestly, he’s doing fine. You can’t expect him to have any good habits. He’s nine years old and he hasn’t done anything.’
‘He’s doing it now!’ I said as Danby hared back and charged into my arms, wriggling and writhing like a live trout.
‘Hi B-Bailey,’ said a voice from right behind me at the foot of the Killing Hall steps.
I stood, turned and smiled. The long, gaunt, eagle features of Simon Hogg smiled self-consciously back and I hugged him like a brother.
*****
‘If I was going to nit pick, Simon, I’d have to say the timing could have been better.’
Tea in the Killing Hall conservatory as pale sunlight did its darndest to breath warmth into the icy room while an old three bar heater fared decidedly better. Four assorted dogs lay strewn about the floor in every patch of light, while a fifth lay ten years of bone idleness to rest amid wild circuits of the Killing Hall estate.
Simon placed an ornate fine china tea cup and saucer gingerly back on a white wrought iron table with shaky hands. ‘’I-I’m s-sorry, Bailey. T-they never left the house! It was the only time—’
‘I know, I know. It’s fine. It’s done and it’s fine.’
It wasn’t fine. Simon had liberated Danby himself and delivered him to the dog sanctuary. That was fine. That was the plan. Something we had discussed during a rare Austin-free evening at the Pig in Muck Inn many blue moons ago. What wasn’t fine was the timing – the night of the winter barbecue. The night he had snuck off early. The night half of Skipton-le-Beans went up in flames. The night Chicken Colditz was all but empty save for a lowly paid, barely interested night time chicken-watching type person. The night a full quota of Family Hogg (Devil Monkey Baby accepted) were all away at a winter barbecue I had arranged on the North York Moors. Yes, the timing could have been better.
Danby the dog, whilst freed of one prison, then languished in another – a less than brilliant dog ‘sanctuary’ hidden away on the edge of the moors, a sanctuary comprising small wire cages with concrete runs and constantly barking dogs waiting for a home. The owners were under strict instructions not to adopt him out without consulting me first. I was trying to find him a good home, visiting him and walking him when I could. I’d have taken him in were it not for the distinct possibility I would soon be homeless myself. Seeking less rural rental accommodation, accommodation hard enough to find with two dogs, let alone three. I had no idea where Danby’s home would materialise from. Even less idea I would find it drinking in the early hours of the morning with Charlie Chabot.
‘How’s Gabriel?’ I asked her half brother.
‘W-we haven’t seen her,’ he said.
‘You know we split up?’
He nodded sadly. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Thanks. It’s not your fault.’
‘S-so, what are you going to do?’
I stared off into the frosty middle distance as a black mass of fur flashed by. ‘Dunno.’ I laughed darkly. ‘Beg Gabriel to come back?’
‘S-she’s not coming back, Bailey. Mum said.’
‘I know.’ I looked at my hands, turned them over. ‘I know.’ I looked up to avert introspection. ‘Just got to get on with it really. If Dave Land will let us go, we’ll get somewhere smaller, more urban. But, in the meantime, I’m going to hang around. Unfinished business, you see?’
He nodded as if he knew what I meant. He didn’t. I asked him how things were on the farm and his sallow eyes went to the floor.
‘Pretty bad. D-dad’s not very well. Mum thinks he’s d-dying.’ He wrung his hands like the palms were itchy and turned his head away. I assumed he was crying.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Simon. I really am.’ I meant it. I knew how much Simon loved his father despite it all. Despite his enslavement into an industry he deeply detested. ‘I hate h-hurting the hens,’ he’d said to me that night in the Pig in Muck. ‘I hate seeing them all so s-sad. I h-hate the way D-Dad beats the sick ones with a s-stick. I h-hate him when he d-does that.’ And he’d cried on my shoulder. That was when it started – this odd bond of ours. A bond that had led to talk of Danby the dog, ‘what ifs?’, plans and schemes.
As for the fingerprints on the letter? Well, there weren’t any because there was no letter. Simon, in a wonderfully timed explosion of pent up emotions – anxiety, frustration, confusion and more than a little panic – burnt it on the steps of Chicken Colditz before the police could get near it. An act of innocent ire saved me from what would surely have been more concerted persecution and more than offset his impulsive discharge of Danby.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Charlie Chabot peeking round the conservatory door. ‘I’m preparing a little celebratory feast. Bailey, are we still off the meat?’
I smiled. ‘We are.’
‘Good for you! Fish all right?’
I nodded.
‘Then fish it is. The other thing is this video of yours. Do we wish to view it before or after lunch? If we still want to view it at all.’
He was referring to the Killing for Kicks video, not the snuff video – that was not for public exhibition. The video Charlie wanted me to watch was the video that had made Gabriel cup her face in her hands and cry ‘Oh, my God.’ A video I had avoided like the bucolic plague.
But then, I’d seen so much now. How could one more grizzly video possibly get any deeper under my skin? I took a deep breath, held it a moment, released it with a slap of my thighs. ‘Before lunch,’ I said.
‘Now?’ Charlie said.
I gave him a long, lingering look. He nodded. I nodded back.
‘Now,’ I said.
