Mad Dogs And Bagshaws

Chapter One: Lot Fifty-Three

The trouble with Ronald Bagshaw was not that he lacked judgement. It was that his judgement improved dramatically after two pints and then kept going, like a man cycling downhill with no brakes and an excellent view.

On the eleventh of April, 1976, four weeks and two days after Trescott Domestic Boilers of Croydon had thanked him for nineteen years of loyal service and given him an envelope, Ron drove to a country hotel outside Ludlow because the advertisement in the paper had used the words PROPERTY AUCTION and, in smaller print, LICENSED BAR.

He told his wife he was going to look at bungalows.

This was not entirely a lie. There was a bungalow in the catalogue. It was Lot Nineteen, a neat brick affair near Tenbury with a carport and a hedge, and Ron sat in the third row with the catalogue open on his knee and every intention of bidding for it. He had rehearsed the moment in the car. He had rehearsed his face.

Unfortunately Lot Nineteen came up at half past two, and by half past two Ron had made friends.

The friend's name was Vernon Hoad, and Vernon Hoad was not a bidder but a man who came to auctions the way other men went fishing. He had bought Ron a pint of mild and explained, in the confidential rumble of a man giving away state secrets, that bungalows were for the dying.

"A bungalow," said Vernon Hoad, "is a box you keep yourself in until you're needed elsewhere. What a man of your age wants is a going concern."

"I'm forty-four," said Ron.

"Exactly," said Vernon Hoad, in the tone of one whose case had been proved for him.

By the time Ron got back to the third row, damp about the collar and lit up inside like a shop window, Lot Nineteen had gone to a dentist from Kidderminster for four thousand two hundred pounds. Ron discovered he did not mind. He discovered, in fact, that he had become a different sort of man in the last forty minutes: a man of vision, a man who understood that the boiler trade had merely been a long corridor and here at last was a door.

The door was Lot Fifty-Three.

The auctioneer had a wet, carrying voice and a way of pronouncing the word *opportunity* that made it sound like a fanfare. THE LAURELS, LLANHOWELL, said the catalogue. ESTABLISHED BOARDING KENNELS, ELEVEN ACRES (approx.), FARMHOUSE, EXTENSIVE PURPOSE-BUILT ACCOMMODATION FOR 40+ ANIMALS, PADDOCK, OUTBUILDINGS, MAINS ELECTRICITY, PRIVATE WATER SUPPLY. GOING CONCERN. VACANT POSSESSION UPON COMPLETION. LATE OWNER DECEASED.

There were three photographs. Ron studied them the way a man studies a form guide. The first showed a long white house in sunshine with roses up the front of it. The second showed a row of kennel runs, empty and swept, photographed from an angle that made them look like a small barracks. The third showed a distant hillside with sheep on it, which was not, strictly speaking, part of the property, but which Ron's mind absorbed and quietly took possession of anyway.

"Now here's a thing," said the auctioneer. "Here is a thing that hasn't come up in this county in thirty years. A trading business with a house attached, ladies and gentlemen. A licensed kennels. Everybody in England has a dog and everybody in England goes on holiday, and while they're on holiday, where does the dog go? It goes," he said, and paused like a preacher, "to the man who owns the kennels."

Ron felt something happen in his chest. It was, he would say later, the exact sensation of a boiler catching light.

The bidding started at three thousand and immediately did the thing that should have warned him. It stopped. A farmer in the second row put a hand up, thought better of it, and used the hand to scratch his ear instead. A solicitor made two bids on behalf of somebody who wasn't there and then folded his notes with the crisp finality of a man who had been told a ceiling and meant it. There was a silence with a peculiar quality to it, the silence of a room in which a great many people knew something.

"Three thousand two hundred," said Ron.

All the heads turned. Ron enjoyed it enormously.

"Three thousand two hundred, and thank you, sir. Any advance on the gentleman in the good jacket?"

There was no advance. There was, if anything, a general settling back into chairs, as when a crowd at a bullring recognises that the interesting part is over.

"Three thousand two hundred," said the auctioneer, and brought the hammer down with what Ron, in the years to come, would insist was unseemly haste. "Name, sir?"

"Bagshaw," said Ron. "Ronald. Of Croydon."

"Not any more," said somebody behind him, and several people laughed.

It is important to understand what Ron did next, because it explains everything that follows. He did not go home and confess. He went to the bar, bought a whisky, and *believed*. He believed for three and a half hours, on a bar stool, with the catalogue open at the three photographs, and he built the place in his head: the roses, the barracks-clean runs, the sunshine, a hand-painted sign, a diary full of bookings, Jean in a straw hat, himself in a tweed cap, saying *good morning* to grateful holidaymakers. He worked out the profit on forty dogs at ninety pence a night. It came to a figure so agreeable that he wrote it on the back of the catalogue, underlined it twice, and bought a whisky for Vernon Hoad, who accepted it as his due.

"Llanhowell," said Vernon Hoad reflectively. "That'll be old Cudlipp's place."

"Captain Cudlipp," said Ron, tapping the catalogue. "Deceased."

"Oh, deceased," agreed Vernon Hoad. "Very deceased. He was a character, the Captain."

"Good," said Ron. "I like a place with character."

Vernon Hoad looked into his whisky, and what he saw there he kept to himself, which was probably a kindness and was certainly cheaper than telling the truth.

Ron arrived home in Croydon at twenty past nine. Jean had kept his tea warm over a pan and was watching the television with her feet up on a pouffe, and their eldest, Marlene, was on the telephone in the hall winding the flex around her wrist and saying "no, but *listen*" to somebody called Jacqueline. Clive was upstairs doing something to a radio. Rosie was at the kitchen table with a library book about fingerprints, taking notes.

"Well?" said Jean.

"Interesting day," said Ron.

Jean Bagshaw had been married to him for twenty years and could read the man like a gas meter. She put down her knitting.

"Ronald."

"Now before you say anything —"

"That's not a bungalow face," said Jean. "I know a bungalow face. That's the face you had when you came home with the caravan."

"The caravan was sound."

"The caravan was a shed on wheels and it went into a ditch at Rye."

Ron laid the catalogue on the arm of her chair, open at Lot Fifty-Three, with the reverence of a man producing the deeds to a kingdom. Then he stood back and did the thing he was best at in all the world, which was talk.

He talked for eleven minutes. He talked about fresh air and being your own governor. He talked about the boiler trade and where it had got him, which was an envelope. He talked about eleven acres, and how you couldn't buy eleven acres in Croydon for eleven thousand pounds, and how a man who owned land owned something no company could take back off him at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon. He talked about the countryside, which he had visited on two occasions. He talked about Rosie's chest and how the doctor had said sea air, or air of some sort, and he made this stand in for a medical opinion he had entirely invented.

And then, because it was the only card he had, he said: "It's done, love. It's bought. The deposit's paid."

There was a silence. Marlene had stopped saying "no, but *listen*" and was standing in the doorway with the receiver still in her hand and Jacqueline still on the other end of it.

"How much of it?" said Jean.

"How much of what?"

"How much of the envelope, Ronald."

Ron adjusted his cuffs.

"All of it," he said. "And a bit of the Post Office book. Which," he added quickly, "is an investment, not a spend. There's a difference and I'd be glad to explain it."

Jean picked up the catalogue and held it at arm's length, because she was too vain for her reading glasses, and looked for a long time at the three photographs.

Rosie, in the doorway behind Marlene, had already got her notebook out. It was the notebook she had bought with birthday money for the purpose of solving crimes, of which Croydon had produced disappointingly few. She had written EVIDENCE on the front in felt tip and underlined it, and until this evening the only entry inside it concerned the disappearance of a bicycle pump.

She wrote: *11 April. Dad has bought a kennels in Wales. Mum has gone a colour I have not seen before.*

It is one of the very few things anybody in that family ever wrote down accurately on the first attempt.