Gentleman's Relish by Patrick Gale

‘I think you’ll all agree,’ Chris went on, ‘it’s only right we should have a minute’s silence to think about Janice.’ He looked around. Everyone was hanging their heads. One of the children was even dutifully mouthing what could have been a prayer. He hung his head too, so that Toffee looked up at him and produced one of his curious cries of uncertainty and impatience that was half yawn, half whimper.
    He wanted to crouch down and give him a hug only Chris was always telling off the men in the class for leaning over their dogs too much. He supposed it was love he felt for him. Because of the lack of speech, love for animals was an odd affair, doomed to frustration. You couldn’t hug themas hard as you wanted or they’d be frightened. What you really wanted, he supposed, was to become them. You wanted to see out of their eyes and have them see out of yours. There was a bit of particularly soft fur, just behind Toffee’s huge black ears, that gave out a marvellous scent, a warm, brown biscuity smell, a bit like horse sweat, which brought on this feeling in a rush. He had heard Val talk with friends about babies often enough, heard, with an alien’s fascination, how often women were filled with a hot desire to eat them, had once even seen a woman thrust one of her baby’s feet entirely into her mouth and suck it. Perhaps this love of dogs and love of babies were not so dissimilar?
    â€˜So long, Janice,’ Chris said at last. ‘We’ll miss you, girl.’ Someone blew their nose. ‘Now,’ Chris went on, having cleared her throat. ‘The police have asked if they can have a brief word with each of us afterwards. Don’t worry if you’ll be in a hurry. The sergeant can just take your details and pay a house call tomorrow or whatever. Otherwise they’ll want statements tonight.’
    â€˜But I thought she was on holiday,’ one of the elderly fleece ladies said.
    â€˜Were we the last to see her alive, then?’ asked her friend.
    â€˜Looks like it.’
    The greyhound yodelled again, breaking the gloomy spell.
    â€˜Right,’ said Chris. ‘Dogs are getting bored. Let’s practise our downs. In a big circle now. That’s it. You first, Bessie. Off you go. Not too slow. That’s it. I’ll tell you when. Now.’
    â€˜Down!’ said Bessie’s owner and Bessie dropped from her trot to flatten herself most impressively in the sawdust. It looked impressive but somehow insincere and you sensed she’d never do it so well without an audience.
    So Janice was dead. Unthinkable. Janice Thomas. Haulage princess. The Broccoli Tsarina they had called her in The Cornishman once. Her father had begun the business in a small way, running three lorries that collected produce from the farms and took it to a wholesaler in the east. But Janice, hard-faced Janice, who nobody liked much in school, had been away to business college and made some changes when she came home. She wasn’t proud. She drove one of the lorries herself for a while until she got to know all the growers, however small. Then she used her knowledge of them to persuade them to sell through her instead of merely using her as haulier, so Proveg was born, sprawling across an industrial estate outside Camborne. She was no fool. She chose the site because there was high unemployment thanks to all the closed mines and retrenching china-clay works and labour was cheap. Soon everyone had a son or daughter or wife who had done time on the packing lines or in the qualitycontrol shed. The pay wasn’t brilliant but she was still regarded as something of a saviour. ‘She doesn’t have to do it,’ people said. ‘She could have worked anywhere. She could have worked in London for big money.’
    Then she began to show her sharper side, bailing out farmers and truck owners in trouble so that she seemed their rescuer until their fortunes took