The Fox in the Forest (12 page)

“And you didn’t find any motive among those who were with him that afternoon? They were, as far as we can tell the only people who knew he was going to go home through the forest at that time.”

“No. The meeting at Ashbridge was with three pillars of the church there. They didn’t know he would be walking home through the woods until he told them at the meeting. I suppose it’s conceivable that one of them could have cut through the woods at a faster pace than the vicar and waited to ambush him, but all of them are over sixty and two of them are ladies.”

They allowed themselves a brief smile at the picture of these worthy elders bent on such unlikely violence. Then Lambert said, “What about the Davidsons, back in Woodford? They must have known his plans.”

Rushton shook his head. “Not entirely. The only person at that earlier meeting who knew Barton would be in the woods is Comstock, and as we said, that wasn’t until almost the moment when he dropped Barton off in Ashbridge. Colonel Davidson arranged that Barton would drive back in the Rover at his leisure. It was Barton himself who changed the arrangements.”

“And none of them saw anything in the vicar’s behaviour which now seems significant?”

“No. He was organizing a village fund for the famine in Ethiopia, and was delighted to get their cooperation. Rachel Davidson said he looked tired and strained, but she put that down to his wife’s behaviour.”

“From what I heard when I interviewed Clare Barton, she was probably right.” Lambert came back to the issue which worried them both. “Are we any nearer to establishing why anyone should want to kill Peter Barton?”

“No. On the contrary, it’s been difficult to find anyone to say a word against him. Even among the people who never go to church — a majority nowadays, even in the country — everyone is full of praise for what he was trying to do and the way he behaved. He seems to have been a man without enemies.” Rushton smiled apologetically, not for the cliché but for the detectives’ nightmare it presented. Almost always a murder victim had men or women who hated him. If there was one in particular, the investigation was easy and short. Where, as often, there were many, it took longer, but the lines of inquiry were marked out for them to follow.

The sudden dispatch of a man whom everyone seemed to like, whose death seemed to have benefited no one, was a CID nightmare. Rushton voiced the thought which neither of them wished to contemplate. “We may have to face the fact that it might have been a nutter, sir.”

Lambert nodded reluctantly. In a lower rank, he would have dismissed the idea without ceremony as defeatist; in a conscientious and experienced officer like Rushton, it might be no more than realism. It was what every investigating officer feared. Motiveless murders by unbalanced men — such crimes by women are virtually unknown — are difficult to pin down, since the murderer is often unacquainted with his victim. They both excite and terrify the public, so that they bring accusations of police incompetence and demands for success which are often unreasonable.

Worst of all, such killings rarely come singly.

16

Arthur Comstock had enjoyed his Christmas. It had been nice to have a woman about the house, taking over his kitchen, spoiling him with richer and more elaborate fare than he bothered to prepare for himself. He and his sister had always got along easily enough, though there had been long periods when they scarcely saw each other.

Now that his army service was over and Molly was growing accustomed to her widowhood, they felt themselves closer than at any time since the days when she had watched over his boyhood from her lofty adolescence: she was the elder by eight years. Certainly the manner of her husband’s sudden, violent death had brought them closer together, the more so as Arthur had also been in the Falklands at the time. Sailors did die in wars, but no one had expected this one.

They had already arranged their next meeting, which would be at her cosy Yorkshire home when the winter was over. He would be quite sorry to see her go on the morrow and would look forward to Easter. Yet he knew also that he would be relieved to have his cottage back to himself.

Service habits die hard, and he had got used to his own domestic routine, his own small forms of tidiness. The wife who had left him years ago had seen his neatness as an obsession rather than a virtue, and he saw now that it could be irritating for a woman to live with. But he had come from a home which was always untidy, and the barrack-room rectitude instilled in him as a boy soldier had been a delight to him when it was a burden to others.

Now, after years of travelling about the world at the Army’s dictate, he appreciated his own home and the opportunity to settle into it. The cottage might belong to Harry Davidson, but it was a permanent home as far as Arthur was concerned. He did not intend to vacate it until it suited him; he had no doubt that that would be many years hence.

As his sister busied herself in the kitchen, he had to control his urge to follow her about and replace things exactly where he thought they should be. When she caught him re-positioning the teapot, her grimace was a mixture of irritation and affection, but he read it as a warning sign. “I think I’ll just go for a stroll into the village. I’ve been inside all day and I’m not used to it,” he said. “The Colonel usually keeps me pretty busy on normal days.” He used his employer’s rank self-consciously, testing out the idea of his new job on Molly. He had fallen on his feet here all right.

He went out past the main house now. The Old Vicarage looked picturesque on that Boxing Day afternoon, with its holly wreath on the door and its brightly lit Christmas tree reaching almost to the ceiling of the high old drawing-room. Harry and Rachel Davidson had guests — his brothers and their families, Arthur believed — and there was animated conversation and laughter behind the bay windows of the drawing-room. No sounds emerged through the new double glazing, and the silence gave the scene a macabre touch, like the haunted house scenes Arthur had set moving with his pennies in the amusement arcades of the ‘fifties. There were no curtains drawn as yet, for none but he could observe the movements in the house.

It was bitter cold as the evening dropped upon the valley; there would be hard frost as usual around the turn of the year. From the gates of the Old Vicarage, Arthur took a last look back at the glittering cameo in the drawing-room. From a hundred yards away, the small figures looked even more unreal, as though their lives might be switched off at the turn of a switch. He smiled in the dusk, then set off briskly towards the village.

He was nearing the junction of the lanes by the village shop when he saw the figure coming towards him from the forest. It looked both taller and more sinister with the last of the light behind it, a silhouette which seemed to grow in size and menace as its outlines became more definite and it took on the shape of a man.

It was within ten yards of him before he recognized it. “It’s you, Tommy!” he called. “Didn’t recognize you in this light.”

“Nor I you, Arthur boy.” It pleased Tommy Farr to play up his Welshness when the whim took him. He watched the Doberman come loping up from behind at the sound of Comstock’s greeting, knowing the dog would not harm Arthur, enjoying the moment of apprehension he noticed in the man as the dark shape materialized from the hedge and moved to his side.

It was characteristic of Farr to defy the small conventions of village life. Since the murder of their vicar three days earlier, no one in the village had cared to be seen abroad with a shotgun. Tommy carried his negligently now across his shoulder, though in fact he had not used it during his brisk walk along the edges of the forest. Kelly was not a gun-dog, and he rarely discharged the weapon when the dog was around.

Nevertheless, in view of what had happened, it would not do for people to get the idea that he owned a shotgun he did not use for legitimate purposes. Although he would never have acknowledged it, least of all to himself, Tommy Farr had the beginnings of that troublesome paranoia which sometimes besets men who live along and fancy themselves to be at the centre of community gossip.

Arthur, confident now that he would not be savaged, fondled the dog’s soft head and spoke gently to it in the darkness. Tommy, watching the two of them indulgently, recognized with a shaft of insight that was both ridiculous and disturbing that he and Comstock should have been fathers. There was a lot of talk about women deprived of children, but no one ever gave much attention to men and the brutalizing effect that deprivation might have upon them.

The two fell into step and moved past Farr’s shop. Comstock called at the village shop for small purchases, no more than once a week. The two men did not meet regularly, or for very long. Yet the bond of their bachelor status, in a village dominated by the family and its periodic births and bereavements, was stronger than either of them cared to acknowledge. Both of them had had wives, and each of them had unburdened himself to the other about the circumstances of the departures of those wives, revelations they had denied to anyone else in this small, tight community.

That knowledge united them in a half-humorous alliance against the intrusions of the villagers into the lives they had worked out for themselves. There was an unspoken assumption that women in particular needed to be kept at bay, that the less they were told about life in general and emotions in particular the better. It was a vague, often jocular stance, which they had never troubled to define, because their understanding meant they never had to do so. Perhaps it enabled them to give an element of drama to attentions which were no more than friendly and sympathetic.

They walked to the Crown, without needing any agreement that they were going for a pint. The pub had only just opened. They moved to the table they had used before in the alcove between the inglenook and the small window. They sipped Welsh bitter appreciatively, interspersed terse dialogue with untroubled silences, and impressed the landlord with their air of deep, unhurried collusion.

Peter Barton’s death overhung all other village discussion still, even on Boxing Day, when many families had visitors from outside. The collecting-box for the famine relief which he had organized as his last act was beside the publican on the bar: he remembered almost guiltily that it was Arthur Comstock who had come in to organize it, only hours before the vicar’s shattered body had been discovered. Kelly had draped himself invisibly behind his master’s heels; the shotgun, gleaming darkly in the low orange illumination of the shaded wall lights behind the two men, seemed more than usually ominous in this context.

It would not have surprised the landlord to know that the two men were discussing the death which preoccupied his regulars. Tommy Farr said, “The police took in the chap I saw in the forest on the day before the murder. I’m not surprised at that. But I heard from Bill Evans that they’re going to have to let him go. He’s probably out again now.”

There was a considerable silence, which neither of them felt any need to fill. Bill Evans was the uniformed constable who lived in the village, so the information would be reliable. Then Arthur Comstock said, “He didn’t do it, then.” He had a faith in the efficiency of the police, because he regarded them as the civil counterpart to the Army which had been his life for so long.

Tommy Farr did not share his respect. “That don’t follow, boy. They have to let him go if they can’t pin it on him, see? If you ask me, they don’t know who done it.” The thought seemed to give him a perverse satisfaction. Comstock looked guiltily round the bar, but there was no one watching them. The landlord had taken advantage of slack trade to watch the Boxing Day television programmes with his wife: they could hear the sounds of studio laughter through the open door behind the bar.

Neither of them was a heavy drinker nowadays. Within twenty minutes, they were talking in quiet tones in the deserted car park. Arthur Comstock left Farr at the rear entry to the village stores. As Kelly nosed his way through the gate and up the familiar flagged path, the two men looked automatically towards the dark outline of the woods, scarcely three hundred yards away and clear beneath the first stars of a frosty night.

They needed no words. Each knew the other was conjecturing upon the presence within that dark mass of the man the police had questioned and released.

***

The man who called himself Robertson was there all right. But no one else went into the forest until the next morning.

The temperature was still below freezing at ten o’clock when Charlie Webb walked there. He was on holiday, having taken the three days to bridge Christmas and New Year, as most of his fellow workers tried to do. Now he was wondering why. He came on foot, wishing as he had when a boy that he had a dog to run with. He did not know why he was drawn here, for he shivered as the bare twigs closed out the sky above his head, knowing that the cause was not just the bitter cold.

He had wanted to bring the shotgun with him, but he had left it behind in the shed; he was still disturbed by the way the police had questioned him so closely about it. He had a vague notion of going to look at the spot where Peter Barton had fallen, but now he hesitated, then turned away at the junction of the tracks, so that his route took him away from the scene of the death and along a smaller path, running roughly parallel to the edge of the forest and emerging on the other side of the village.

His movements were observed with curiosity and wry amusement by Robertson. He watched the slight figure in his bomber jacket and motorcycle gauntlets walking without rhythm down the undulating path. The youth moved as though when deprived of his motorcycle he had no confidence in his movements. Robertson observed him until he was out of sight. Then he went back to his tiny camp in the undergrowth, like a tortoise withdrawing its head after deciding it has seen enough of the world for the moment.

He did not realize that Charlie Webb had seen him, had registered not only his presence here but its exact location. It was easy to underestimate that slender, uncoordinated figure. But Charlie was a country boy, born and bred round here. He had registered the smell of stale smoke which spoke of an extinguished fire before he turned the bend to follow the track past the place where Robertson had slept and breakfasted. When his youthful peripheral vision picked up the movement which was not quite behind him, he was astute enough not to register it. So the police had let this man go. He was disappointed about that.

Behind him, the man who used the name of Robertson was also disappointed. Although he knew it was early, he had hoped this might be the walker he awaited. He had made the call under the cover of Boxing Day darkness, and he was confident no one had intercepted it. Secrecy had become a habit with him: he carried it like the other tools of his trade. He hid the radio telephone carefully beneath the brambles, where it had lain safely while he was in the police cell.

The person he waited for would come: there was no question about that. It was time for a reckoning.