'Such a splendid display of flora,' he enthused.
Rupert Croydon-Smythe nodded vaguely. He'd stopped listening to the vicar's interminable ramblings ages ago. To take his mind off the boredom of having to escort the vicar around the estate, Rupert concentrated on the sun beating hotly against his back, and began counting his blessings.
Life was good, he thought. He had a vast country home, a whole fleet of fast and expensive cars, and a lifetime's supply of wealth in the bank.
All courtesy of Tabitha. Beautiful, elegant, mind-numbingly exasperating Tabitha.
'And the tulips!' exclaimed the vicar, waving a hand towards the colourful flowerbeds, 'Aren't they lovely!'
Rupert forced a smile onto his stiff lips, and wondered how long the vicar intended to stay. He had things to do - like getting pretty little Stella installed in the house. And he had plans to make - like where he should take a well-earned holiday to recuperate after all his recent efforts. Perhaps, he thought, as the vicar droned on about the magnificent geraniums, he should book a cruise, or maybe tour the world. He'd always quite fancied a safari in Africa but had never been able to afford it before. Now he could. He had enough money to do anything and go anywhere he wanted.
The vicar turned towards the orchards and was enthusing about the potentially good crop this year, but Rupert had had enough. He didn't have time to spend wandering around the estate, and Stella was waiting.
Impatient, he took hold of the vicar's arm, spun him round and aimed him back towards the house, claiming it was getting too chilly to stroll around the gardens any longer. The vicar seemed briefly surprised as he surveyed the heat-haze rising up off the ground, but meekly complied.
As Rupert marched him across the lawns, he turned up. Leopold. Tabitha's stupid fat labrador. The dog wobbled up the gravel driveway just ahead of the two men, and collapsed on his haunches outside the pillared doorway. He stared at Rupert with a look of anticipated glee in his brown eyes.
Normally, on such a hot day, Leopold would be panting wildly in the shade somewhere, passing the time until his next meal. But today he looked extraordinarily composed. He sat straight and alert directly between the men and the front door, with something in his mouth.
An unexpected gift for the master of the house.
Rupert's heart skipped a beat. He forgot how to breathe. For one awful, agonising moment, every nerve ending in his body stood up on end and screamed.
For what Leopold held in his mouth was a human hand.
Rupert quickly veered the vicar away from the front of the house and bustled him towards the back. The French windows were open in the sitting room, and Rupert pushed the vicar inside. A tray of tea had already been prepared and left for them on an antique coffee table by one of the servants. Rupert cursed their efficiency. He would never get rid of the vicar now.
Irritably, he bade the vicar to sit in a fireside chair that faced away from the garden. He was about to make his excuses and leave to seek out and shoot Leopold, when the dog plodded across the back lawn. The hand was still clenched in it's jaws.
Rupert's mouth fell open. He felt the animal was deliberately tormenting him, and his immediate instinct was to call the dog to heel and them bop him over the head with a coal brush.
'Where did you say Mrs Croydon-Smythe had gone?' the vicar asked, breaking into Rupert's thoughts.
'What? Oh, she's on holiday in California with her sister.' He watched as Leopold nonchalantly drifted out of sight.
'Any idea when she'll be back?'
Rupert turned his attention back to the white-collared man in the armchair. 'No,' he said, 'Why?'
'Oh, it's nothing important. Only she did offer to help with the Women's Union tea part next month.'
Rupert stared out of the French windows again. Leopold, he realised, had been heading towards the woods on the edge of the estate, perhaps to find more unwanted gifts.
'If you'll excuse me a moment, vicar,' he said. 'I have some unfinished business to attend to.'
'You go right ahead, my boy,' the vicar cheerfully told him, leaning forward to pick a biscuit off a china plate. 'Don't you worry about me. I'll be fine.'
Rupert stormed out of the room into the hallway, where he kept his wrack of hunting guns. As he unlocked the casement, he changed his mind. No good shooting the brute, he thought. The echoing crack of a gun out of hunting season might arouse suspicion, and the last thing he wanted was nosy neighbours tramping across his land.
Best to break the animal's neck or, better still, make him miss a meal and instantly starve him to death.
Rupert set off at a brisk pace towards the woods. He found Leopold right where he expected him to be, sniffing a mound of newly dug earth at the bottom of a steep ravine. The severed hand lay inches from his paws.
Rupert crept forward slowly, hoping to jump on the animal from behind and tie him up somewhere. But a twig snapped beneath his feet and Leopold looked up.
'Here, boy,' Rupert cooed sweetly. 'Come to daddy, there's a good monster.'
A rumbling growl rose from deep within Leopold's throat.
'Come on boy, come here, good doggy, nice doggy.'
The dog's lips quivered as he lowered his head and pushed his nose deep into the loose soil. Rupert bend low and took another step towards him, holding out his hand. If Leopold thought he had something tasty concealed within his fingers, he might just come to him - he was a greedy old bugger.
But Leopold wasn't fooled. With his head still lowered and his amber eyes raised suspiciously, he snatched up the hand and darted between Rupert's legs. Losing balance, Rupert fell face first into a muddy puddle. He sat up, cursing as he wiped the dirt from his eyes, and glimpsed Leopold galloping back towards the house.
Rupert prayed that the vicar wouldn't look out of the French windows and see him running - gasping, sweating and muddy - across the back lawn in hot pursuit of a labrador with his wife's hand in it's jaws.
He hoped the servants wouldn't see as he sprinted across the driveway and back towards the kitchens at the rear of the house, maniacally chasing after the dog.
But, old and fat as he was, Leopold somehow managed to elude capture. He trotted off across a bordering field with his tail fairly wagging with joy.
'I'll get you!' Rupert yelled after him. 'You won't get away with this, you mutt!'
Red-faced and filthy, Rupert barged into the sitting room for a much needed fist of whisky, completely forgetting that the vicar was ensconced in an armchair.
'My dear boy, what have you been doing?'
Startled, Rupert spun round from the drinks table so violently that the whisky emptied itself out of his glass and the still upturned bottle glugged its contents over his muddy shoes.
'J-just been playing with the dog,' he managed to splutter.
The vicar smiled and heaved himself out of the chair, saying, 'Well, my boy, I've taken up enough of your time. I really must be going.'
Rupert was just about to heave a huge sigh of relief when, at that precise moment, Leopold sidled onto the patio, sat down outside the open French windows, and dropped the hand to the ground. He looked at Rupert with his tongue flapping and his jowls grinning.
Rupert dropped the whisky bottle with a splintering clatter, raced across the room and shoved the vicar back into the armchair. Thrusting the empty whisky tumbler into the shocked man's hand, he barked, 'No, don't go, vicar. Stay. Here, have a drink.'
The vicar held the empty glass in his hands whilst, outside, Leopold slid down and lay with his head between his paws, nudging the severed hand with his nose. Rupert waved madly at him behind the vicar's chair, but the dog refused to move. He began to whine.
The vicar half turned to see what the noise was. Rupert threw himself across the arm of the chair to obscure his view, and frantically began to talk about the church services he had never attended.
As he spoke, Rupert reached behind him, picked a small bronze bust off a marble table, and blindly tossed it towards the open windows. There was a dull thud, a howl of pain, and the scurrying of uncut claws on the paving stones.
Rupert snatched the empty tumbler out of the vicar's hands, dragged him up out of the chair and heartily patted him out of the room.
'Always nice to see you, vicar,' he said. 'I won't keep you any longer.'
In the hallway, Rupert handed him his hat and coat off the Georgian stand in the hallway, and opened the front door.
There sat Leopold. On the doorstep. With the hand.
The vicar hardly had time to take a grip of his bearings when Rupert slammed the front door shut, snatched the coat and hat out of his arms, and hauled him into the library.
'There's a pristine first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover you simply must see before you leave,' Rupert spluttered.
Leaving the vicar flicking wide-eyed through the pages, Rupert set off in search of the dog.
Leopold had vacated the doorstep and was nowhere to be seen. But he'd left the hand behind. Rupert bent down and picked the offending object up between finger and thumb. Hearing the door to the library creaking open behind him, he quickly deposited the hand in a coat pocket for him to retrieve and dispose of later.
Along with the dog.
'Nice of you to drop in,' Rupert said, prising the book out of the vicar's hands and catapulting the man out of the house. 'Do feel free to make an appointment any time you want to visit.'
The vicar just had time to grab his hat and coat before he was shoved through the door.
The driveway, Rupert noticed, as he raced the vicar towards his car, was clear. The lawns were devoid of canine presence, and there was no sign of movement in the surrounding foliage. Rupert felt some of his anxiety fade away as he hurriedly bundled the vicar behind the wheel.
The car coughed and bounced off down the driveway. As it neared the iron gates, a yellow blur of fur suddenly shot out of a bush and chased after it, yellow head held high as it struggled to carry something in it's mouth.
A foot.
'LEO!' Rupert screamed.
The vicar, oblivious to the commotion going on behind him, turned the car into the lane and drove away. Leopold hesitantly stared after it, then calmly trotted back into the bushes and disappeared.
Rupert, rigid with anger and perspiring with raw fear, fetched a fresh bottle of whisky from the cellar and sat in the sitting room, trying to figure out what to do.
He sat and he drank and he thought for a long time. There was, it seemed, only one solution.
In the early hours of the morning, as the red sun rose majestically over the horizon, the booming crack of a rifle echoed over the countryside.
'Missed!' Rupert growled, walking passed a doubled-up sapling. He reloaded his gun, aimed, and fired again. A TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED sign hit the dust.
Another shot, and a stone cherub lost it's head.
After thirty rounds and some serious destruction of estate property, Rupert ran out of ammunition. There was more in the store-shed by the stables. He vowed to use every last cartridge to get that dog if he had to.
As Rupert emerged from the undergrowth and plodded up the driveway, he heard a car speeding up the lane behind him. With a screech of brakes, the vicar pulled up outside the gates and clambered out of his car. Following him in a mud-encrusted jeep, was a neighbouring farmer.
Rupert froze in mid-step, the shotgun drooped limply over his arm.
And then two policecars arrived, roaring up the lane with sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. The vicar suddenly looked sheepish, and thrust his hands into his coat pockets.
Rupert was aware that he was doing a very good imitation of a marble statue, but felt totally unable to move. Finally, when he heard one of the policemen ask the vicar if this was The Man, some semblance of sobriety returned to Rupert's mind.
'M-mad dog,' he blurted. 'I saw a mad dog, probably rabid, roaming the grounds.'
'Really?' said the farmer. 'I haven't seen one on my land.'
'It came up to the house yesterday,' Rupert continued, as the men slowly opened the gate and stealthily approached him. 'Foaming at the mouth it was, and it ... it ... ' A blinding flash of inspiration suddenly occurred to him. 'It bit my gardener's hand clean off,' he said, 'And savaged poor Leo to death.'
As the last word fell from his lips, Leopold emerged from the bushes.
The dog dropped Tabitha's severed head at the men's feet, and triumphantly wagged his tail.
