It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.
I went through Mrs. Shears’ gate, closing it behind me. I walked onto her lawn and knelt beside the dog. I put my hand on the muzzle of the dog. It was still warm.
The dog was called Wellington. It belonged to Mrs. Shears who was our friend. She lived on the opposite side of the road, two houses to the left.
Wellington was a poodle. Not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles, but a big poodle. It had curly black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin underneath the fur was a very pale yellow, like chicken.
I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him, and why.
CLOSE READING WILL MOTIVATE YOU TO ASK THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:
1. The narrator of a story is also called the persona, the voice or the speaker.
So who is speaking to us here?
2. Whose voice are you hearing? (Repeating a question does help!)
3. How well informed are you by this speaker? (Don't you feel something quite strange about the way, for instance, time is being reported to you?)
4. What are some of the qualities you may infer about the speaker based on the narrative here?
5. What adjectives will you use to describe him?
6. What other impressions of the speaker do you have?
7. What further qualities can you make of him?
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