The Walking Dead

'If her mother's Marigold, she should be Daisy.'

'Marigold and Daisy, good names. I'm not arguing with that, Xavier.'

They cleared the bog and reached the field of cropped grass. Their sheep and goats stampeded towards them. In Ardchiavaig, where the winter of the last months had been brutal in the intensity of the storms — as it was every year Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale, both with their sixtieth birthdays behind them, would have been thought of as somewhere on a scale between lunacy and eccentricity. But none of the community they lived among would have cared. They were accepted for what they were — for what they were thought to be. They brought home the heifer calf, Daisy, and Boniface laid out fresh straw on the byre's floor of stone slabs while Clydesdale went to the store shed for a precious bale of hay for the cow, Marigold. It was the best straw they had and the best hay. When it was done, when the cow suckled her calf — only then — when the wind blew the sunlight against the stout walls of the croft, when the incoming tide thrust the whitecaps on to the beach, when the rough beauty of the place had settled on Ardchiavaig, they went inside to check the answer phone recording. The second call had not come.

The knowledge of Xavier Boniface and Donald Clydesdale concerned the thresholds of pain, carefully regulated as an arm of interrogation. The inflicting of pain, enough to make a prisoner spit out truths but not enough to win a babble of lies, was the prized expertise of these two elderly men and it came from their distant past, when they had first worked with Mr Naylor. They drank tea and made toast, the sunlight lit their room, and they gloried in what they had achieved that morning. They were usually called to action, where the thresholds they knew of were involved, when a target made a mistake, then paid for it in pain.

* * *

The handler, with seventeen years' experience behind him, knew well enough the value of luck, but it came sparsely.

He worked with spaniels that were trained to sniff and find, then to address the target, sitting on their haunches and barking, till he came to investigate. His last dog had been a drugs sniffer, and life had been exciting and busy. That little treasure had had a score of convictions to her name, and a dozen commendations for finding heroin, cocaine and amphetamines.. But Smack had been retired now for three years: she lived at home, with a basket in the kitchen, and was the ageing playmate of his children.

The new dog was Midge, a pedigree bred from Welsh stock; as a working dog she had a kennel and pen out at the back. She was faster to boredom but had energy and intelligence. Boredom afflicted her because she was explosives-trained, and explosives were rare in the East Midlands. With her handler she did preparatory search work whenever royalty or a prominent politician was visiting the county, and was called out when a resident reported a 'suspicious' object at the railway or bus station; she had never found a 'live' cache of dynamite — not even a hidden sack of Second World War ammunition underneath an allotment shed. Razor sharp on exercises, Midge seemed to her handler to recognize that the 'real thing' had eluded her.

Another day done. They had been out on loan to the airport at Castle Donington, where he'd taken her through Baggage Reclaim and let her scramble over the trolleys before the bags and cases went on to the carousel — showing the flag, really. After that, he'd had her alongside the check-in queues and she'd sniffed at the bags and cases stacked with holidaywear. The handler and his dog were as much a part of the reassurance-to-the-public policy as the officers who patrolled with machine pistols hooked on to their chests. But his duty day was completed…Every late afternoon, when they were finished, he'd leave the van in the driveway, shed his uniform, and walk the spaniel up on to Rose Hill, on the edge of the Normanton district of the cathedral city of Derby, and let her run free. There, kids played with her and she was everybody's friend.

It did not matter to the handler whether it rained, sleeted, or if the sun baked him. He would be on Rose Hill at the finish of his shift — and tomorrow, because he had a nine o'clock start, before his shift began — and Midge would be charging and careering among the other walkers, the mums with their prams and the vagrants on the benches. Twice, Smack had identified kids with heroin wraps on Rose Hill, and that was luck, and the handler had made arrests. Never, of course, had Midge identified an ounce, not even five grams' worth of military or commercial explosive in the park, but the little beggar wasn't one to stop trying: she sniffed at everything and everyone — just never had the opportunity to bark raucously and have a 'real thing' moment.

He whistled; she came.

He gave her a reward, a half-biscuit, tousled the hair on her collar, fastened the leash and started out for home.