Put on by Cunning Read Online Free PDF

‘But I daren’t leave her alone, she howls all the time. My neighbours complained when I had to leave her this morning.’
    ‘She was Sir Manuel’s dog,’ Sheila explained.
    A master-leaver and a fugitive, Wexford reflected, eyeing the Alsatian who had abandoned Camargue to his fate. Or gone to fetch help? That, of course, was a possible explanation of the curious behaviour of the dog in the night.
    Dinah Sternhold said, ‘It’s Manuel she howls for, you see. I can only hope she won’t take too long to – to forget him. I hope she’ll get over it.’
    Was she speaking of the dog or of herself? His answer could have applied to either. ‘She will. She’s young.’
    ‘He often said he wanted me to have her if – if anything happened to him. I think he was afraid of her going to someone who might not be kind to her.’
    Presumably she meant the daughter. Wexford sought about in his mind for some suitable words of condolence, but finding none that sounded neither mawkish nor pompous, he kept quiet. Sheila, anyway, could always be relied on to make conversation. While she was telling some rather inapposite Alsatian anecdote, he studied Dinah Sternhold. Her little round sallow face was pinched with a kind of bewildered woe. One might almost believe she had loved the old man and not merely been in it for the money. But that was a little too much to swallow, distinguished and reputedly kind and charming as he had been. The facts were that he had been seventy-eight and she was certainly fifty years less than that.
    Gold-digger, however, she was not. She appeared to have extorted little in the way of pre-marital largesse out of Camargue. Her brown tweed coat had seen better days, she wore no jewellery but an engagement ring, in which the ruby was small and the diamonds pinheads.
    He wondered how long she intended to sit there, her hand grasping the dog’s collar, her head bowed as if she were struggling to conquer tears or at least conceal them. But suddenly she jumped up.
    ‘I must go.’ Her voice became intense, ragged, charged with a sincerity that was almost fierce. ‘It was so kind of you to come to me, Sheila. You don’t know how grateful I am.’
    ‘No need,’ Sheila said lightly. ‘I wanted to come. It was kind of you to drive me home. I had a hire car, Pop, because I was scared to drive in the snow but Dinah wasn’t a bit scared to bring me back in the snow and the dark.’
    They saw Dinah Sternhold out to her car. Ice was already forming on the windscreen. She pushed the dog on to the back seat and got to work competently on the windows with a de-icing spray. Wexford was rather surprised that he felt no compunction about letting her drive away, but her confidence seemed absolute, you could trust her somehow to look after herself and perhaps others too. Was it this quality about her that Camargue had needed and had loved? He closed the gate, rubbed his hands. Sheila, shivering, ran back into the house.
    ‘Where’s your mother?’
    ‘Round at Syl’s. She ought to be back any minute. Isn’t Dinah nice? I felt so sorry for her, I went straight over to Forby as soon as the inquest was over. We talked and talked. I think maybe I did her a bit of good.’
    ‘Hmm,’ said Wexford.
    The phone started to ring. Andrew, punctual to the minute. ‘Oh, darling,’ Wexford heard Sheila say, ‘do you remember my telling you about someone I know who was going to marry . . .’ He began picking Alsatian hairs off the upholstery.
    Father and daughter is not the perfect relationship. According to Freud, that distinction belongs to mother and son. But Wexford, looking back, could have said that he had been happy with his daughters and they with him, he had never actually quarrelled with either of them, there had never been any sort of breach. And if Sheila was his favourite he hoped this was so close a secret that no one but himself, not even Dora, could know it.
    Any father of daughters, even today, must look