Tea and Dog Biscuits by Barrie Hawkins

flags.’
    I looked at Dorothy again. Her mouth hung open.
    â€˜I’m not joking – when he goes out gardening, if he spots a poo he puts one of these little flags by it. Some days the garden’s covered in them.’
    Reluctant as I was to miss hearing about the idiosyncrasies of Cecilia’s husband, I heard the sound of wheels crunching on gravel, and went to investigate. On the driveway sat a police car. PC Charlie Morecambe had by now become quite a regular visitor. This dog handler without a dog seemed to have time on his hands. And as a devotee of German Shepherd dogs – something we had in common – our place was like a magnet for him. The first couple of times he called round it was on the pretext of walking a dog to help us but last visit he had come clean and admitted he was just popping in to see if we’d got anything new.
    â€˜I’ve brought you some doggy food,’ he said this time. I saw that cardboard boxes were stacked up to the roof on the car’s passenger seats. ‘There’s more in the boot.’
    â€˜Blimey, Charlie, we couldn’t afford this stuff.’ It was tins of premium brand food. Twenty-four tins to a box and there were boxes and boxes of them. Charlie was already stacking them up on the porch.
    â€˜This is great, Charlie,’ I said. ‘It must have cost you a fortune.’
    â€˜Nah.’ He took a break from carting the boxes. He unbuttoned the flap on his tunic’s top pocket. I knew what was coming next: the Golden Virginia.
    â€˜You’ve already paid for it,’ he said.
    I shook my head. What was he talking about?
    â€˜In your taxes.’ He coughed a few times then spread tobacco out on a cigarette paper. ‘Our dog unit hadn’t used up its budget for the year and if you don’t spend it the brass cut it next year, so we used up all the money left on dog food.’ He ran his tongue along the cigarette paper and went on to roll the slimmest cigarette I had ever seen. He wouldn’t take his doctor’s advice and give up cigarettes but had set himself a limit of making half an ounce of tobacco last a month.
    He puffed on his roll-up while I unloaded.
    â€˜We’ve got a new skipper,’ he said, halfway down the cigarette.
    â€˜Oh yeah. Any good?’
    â€˜How could he be any good?’ He flipped some ash away. ‘No one with anything about ‘em or any sort of ambition would let themselves get shoved off into a backwater like the dog unit.’
    I paused in my work. Our love and admiration for German Shepherds gave this policeman and me a common bond. Perhaps it was this that made him so astonishingly frank about life in the police force. Whatever the cause, his indiscreet revelations were very enjoyable for a member of the public.
    â€˜I think this one is going to be worse than the last. He hasn’t even got a doggy at home. Mind you, he does keep exotic fish. I expect that’s what the brass thought would qualify him to be in charge of the dog unit.’
    I shook my head in wonder.
    â€˜It’s thanks to him coming you’ve got this lot,’ he said, nodding towards the boxes of dog food stacked up. ‘A new skipper might notice all this dog food and wonder how every dog eats sixteen tins a day.’
    Now four of us were seated round the kitchen table, drinking tea and munching chocolate digestives. Charlie’s visit had been rewarded; there was a new dog for him to meet. ‘What a cracker!’ had been his opinion of the Lion-Maned Dog. And he repeated it now when Cecilia asked him what he thought.
    â€˜He’s a cracker!’ He turned to me and winked. ‘You sure he’s not nine months, Barrie? I’ll have him like a shot.’
    â€˜Don’t you think your new skipper would notice the grey on his muzzle?’ I said.
    Dorothy held out the plate of chocolate digestives. ‘Up to what age can you take dogs?’ she