THE SMELL OF dogs filled John Marvel’s nose, and their echoing barks made him wince.
‘This is it,’ he said and showed the photo of Mitzi to the perky girl in the peaky polo shirt. She had her name, Rachel, embroidered under the Battersea Dogs Home logo on the slope of her bra-less breast.
‘I don’t recognize her,’ she said. ‘But owners usually like to look at the dogs themselves anyway, to be absolutely sure.’
‘Surely you’d know if you had a ginger poodle in?’
‘I think it’s called apricot, not ginger.’
‘Apricot poodle.’
‘Well, dogs that come often don’t look like their pictures,’ said Rachel. ‘Specially if they’ve been gone for weeks or months or even years. Sometimes they’ve been stolen and when they’re found they’re unrecognizable.’
‘Why would nicking a dog make it unrecognizable?’
Rachel’s pretty brown eyes widened. ‘They might be fatter or thinner, or injured, or clipped to disguise them and be sold on, or mutilated.’
‘Mutilated?’
She nodded sombrely. ‘Some dogs are stolen for fighting.’
‘We’re talking about a ten-pound poodle.’
‘Or baiting,’ said Rachel. ‘To train bigger dogs to fight. Give them a taste for blood.’
‘You’re joking,’ said Marvel.
Rachel shrugged. ‘It happens,’ she said, then added hurriedly, ‘Not to your dog, I’m sure. All I’m saying is, when a dog’s been missing for more than a week or so, you have no idea how bad they can look and smell when they come in here. She may not even look like a poodle any more. So it’s best you check them all, really.’
Marvel finally conceded the point. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘How many do you have here?’
‘About five hundred.’
‘Five hundred dogs?’
‘Give or take.’
Marvel frowned. This case was turning into a huge pain in the arse. Plus, somebody had talked. Nobody had said anything, but somehow word must have got around the squad room about his new case.
First a toy dog had appeared on his desk. A blue puppy with a bone in its mouth.
Hilarious.
He’d made a free shot into the rubbish bin with it.
Then people had started barking at him. Not to his face, but behind his back. Small growls and whimpers – now and then a yap. It got so that even when nobody growled at him, he imagined it anyway. He snapped ‘Fuck off and die’ at the vending machine gurgling as he walked past, he turned furiously and glared at a small child making car noises in reception, and rounded on DI Averiss in the lift when he mentioned that he had no new leads in his case.
What the hell does that mean? No new leads? Are you trying to be funny?
If he wasn’t fast-tracked to superintendent after this, he’d put in an official complaint.
Rachel was unlocking a door with a small window in it.
Marvel sighed. ‘Just show me the small ones.’
Rachel laughed and swung open the door. The echoing noise and the smell increased tenfold and Marvel gagged. The corridor between the rows of steel kennels stretched off into the middle distance like something from a spaceship in a sci-fi film.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘How do you stand it?’
He meant the noise and the smell, but Rachel was made of kinder stuff. ‘I know,’ she said, making a sad face, ‘It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? A third of them will have to be put to sleep. I only wish I could take them all home with me.’
Marvel wished she could take them all home with her too, and save him the bother of trudging up and down the stinking passageways.
With a heavy sigh he set off down the first corridor, cursing Debbie and her good ideas.
Marvel looked at thousands of dogs. He was sure of it. Thousands of yipping, yapping, yowling dogs – every one of them on a tireless spring, and all stinking of shit and old sofas.
Marvel reckoned he’d spend ten minutes in the corridors and then go back to the office and tell Rachel some cock-and-bull story about being called out on a triple homicide. Dazzle her with murder.
But by the time he was halfway down the first corridor, he found he couldn’t stop. The next cage might contain Mitzi, and the next cage was only a few feet away. How could he not take those three more paces that could ensure him his promotion? It would be stupid not to. And at the end of the first corridor, how could he resist the second? And the third? And so on. Hundreds of kennels; thousands of dogs; three paces at a time, his hopes raised and shattered and raised again, every few seconds.
Every dog was so hopeful, so bright of eye and waggy of tail, and the noise and the smell were extreme. The whole thing was exhausting. By the end he was walking with his hands cupped over his ears to take the edge off the high notes, and after a while he went dog-blind, and started to think that almost any small dog might be Mitzi. None of them were, but it was lucky he had her photo with him to refer to, or he might have left the place with a red spaniel, a panting ginger Pom, or a tan mutt with a dick that almost touched the floor.
Instead he left with a scruffy terrier that looked like a dust-bunny with legs, and with an expression on its face that said that this was a shock to both of them.
He paid Rachel two hundred pounds for the dog – which was worth at least twenty – and bought a cage for another eighty in which to take it home. Fifteen more on two bowls, twenty-five on a collar and lead, and a tenner on a sack of food.
By the time he put his debit card into the machine he was so hysterical with altruism that he rounded the payment up to ￡350.
‘Oh, thank you!’ gushed Rachel. ‘Please let me know if there’s any other way we can help you, Chief Inspector.’
Marvel gave her a photo of Mitzi, which she promised to copy and give to all the dog wardens.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘What else do you suggest?’
‘You might want to offer a reward,’ she said. ‘No questions asked.’