The Pale Dog

The animal was dead within a minute and a half of the last shot, and while Dr. Cray had her hands on Cole, Varley and I had our lamps on the dog, and what we saw has been photographed and presented in evidence and shown to a jury of twelve people, none of whom I think has ever entirely got it out of their heads.

It was an animal of a size that has no business being in a county. Lying on its side, it was the length of a small boat, and it was pale, so pale that in the lamplight the coat looked almost white, a heavy double coat of the sort that accumulates for ten months of a year, and its paws were the size of a man's two hands, and its head, which was enormous and blunt and broad, was the head of a thing bred for a thousand years to stand between a flock and a wolf, and it had a wolf's long flat cheek and a wolf's heavy jaw, and it was young — three years old at the outside, kept alive on work and on the dark until it looked older than it was — with two scars on its foreleg and its teeth worn down.

And along the front of it, from the throat down between the shoulders and out along both sides, there was a compound.

What Varley found has been published in the county's proceedings, and a man has a right to know what was done to his own dog, if this animal ever was anybody's.

The dog had been painted, by hand, with a mixture that the state laboratory in Sacramento later identified as a base of petroleum jelly and lanolin carrying two additives: a fluorescent tracer pigment of the kind wildlife biologists use to mark the coats of small mammals, and a second constituent that the laboratory could not name and could only describe by what it did: once the mixture had been charged by a lamp and the lamp taken away, it went on giving off a faint light for as long as it stayed damp, and in the dark, and only in the dark, which on that coast in October is a period of some hours. It had been applied, deliberately and with a degree of skill, to the throat, the chest, the shoulders and the front of each foreleg, and not to the back or the flanks, so that it was invisible except from the front.

Varley showed me the palms of his own hands, which were smeared with it where he had turned the animal over, and they glowed green-white in the beam of the lamp like something out of a hospital, and he put his hands out in front of him and looked at them for a while and then he said, quietly, "This is the whole trick, Simon. This is a hundred and forty years of the pale dog of the Vandermeers, and it was made in a workshop by a man with a good education and a laboratory permit." He wiped his hands on the grass and stood up. "Find me a tin of this. It is not a thing you buy at a hardware store, and a man who uses it does not throw away the pot, because a man who uses it has paperwork for it and will keep the pot because the pot has his name on it in a purchase order."

It was Ozer who found the name of the animal, quite literally, and that was the moment the case turned from a suspicion into a file, because although the dog had no collar it had, under the coat on the left shoulder, the standard microchip of a licensed animal, and Ozer read it with a scanner out of her own cruiser at a quarter to twelve on the path, and the number came back, in the state registry, to a breeding record for a dog whelped in the spring of 2021 at a kennel in the Sacramento Valley, and the kennel's register, which she had faxed to her at two in the morning and which I have on my desk as I write, lists that animal as having been placed, at nine weeks, with a purchaser who took the whole litter — one male and three females — and whose name was Emmett Scully.

At a quarter past one, Varley, Ozer, Dr. Cray and I went down to the field station in three vehicles with no lights on the last quarter of a mile, because Varley insisted on it, and we found the gate to the dog enclosure standing open, and one of the twenty animals in the main pen dead at the fence with its throat opened and a chain-trace in a wound on its neck, which told us something about a man who no longer trusted his own animals.

We found Wren Ashcombe in the little office at the front of the station, sitting on the floor with her back against the desk and her hands tied in front of her with forty feet of new galvanised chain, gagged with a strip of the same canvas webbing we had seen on the dog's muzzle, and a cut over her right eye, and she had been there for about three hours.

The first thing she said, when Ozer got the gag out of her mouth, was: "Where is he. Is the boy alive."

"Alive," said Varley. "And the animal is dead on the path at Harrow Reach."

She closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again, and when she spoke it was in a voice that was completely flat, the voice of a woman who has been carrying something for a long time and has just put it down.

"Then he's got nowhere to put the body and no way to move it," she said. "He's out there now. He went out at eight with the pump on the trailer, and he has had it planned since July, and he told me the whole of it in July, because he thought I would be pleased."

"Tell me what you told the marshal would be at the cutting," said Varley.

"Under the stonework where the crossing is, there's a drainage shaft going down into the clay, and it's three feet across and it goes down nine feet, and there's a pump down there that he put in four years ago for the survey, on a permit, and a line of hose coiled in the cut." She got herself up off the floor, using the desk, and stood with her hands still chained in front of her. "He said to me: 'The bog takes everything, and the family will never have a funeral, and the county will call it the curse and I will have the land.' That's what he said, in the workshop, in July, and I have been living in this building with that sentence for three months, and tonight he chained me to a desk for saying that I wouldn't do it. You want to know what he means to do with it. He means to open the shaft and pump the cut down until everything in it goes into the clay, and then shut the pump off and take it away, and leave nothing on the ground anywhere in this county with a Vandermeer's name on it."