The Fox in the Forest (13 page)

17

If Arthur Comstock was secretly glad to have his home back to himself, Rachel Davidson in the Old Vicarage itself was not.

She saw off her guests from the wide stone steps of the old house. Harry’s brothers had come in their own cars; they drove away now with their wives and children crowding the cars, uttering noisy thanks and valedictory injunctions to visit them in due course. Harry was delivering his two aunts to the station in Gloucester himself, rather than entrusting them to the less personal care of his chauffeur Comstock. He installed them solicitously into the back seat of the car, then watched them take a muted but affectionate farewell of their hostess.

Rachel watched the Rover until it disappeared between the two high wrought-iron gates, answering the genteel flutterings of the gloved hands with a more vigorous wave of her own. Then she went sadly back through the wide oak door to the silences of the big house.

Rachel had been brought up in a mansion in Switzerland that was continually full of people. They entertained her father’s business associates on long winter evenings when cut glass glinted in profusion on their big mahogany table. They entertained friends and their numerous relatives on the terrace in the summer, when the scarlet fire of the sunsets over the silver Alps seemed perpetual in her memories of childhood. The winter Cotswold landscape seemed by comparison drab and featureless, the silent expanse of the six-bedroomed Victorian house felt like an airless prison with the windows shut against the end of year cold.

She stood in the bay window and looked sadly at the leafless borders and grey-green lawns which stretched away in front of the house. The depression which had beset her since the death of Peter Barton surged softly back into the room with the departure of her guests. She had thought herself insulated against death after the awful years of her childhood and early youth, when half her race and the whole of the Austrian side of her family had perished in the holocaust. The postwar years had seemed to bring each week the details of the deaths of relatives who had disappeared years earlier into the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

Yet the sudden, violent death of the young vicar she had been so concerned to help seemed to bring the disturbing grief of those harrowing years vividly back to her when she thought she had exorcized it. Why had it happened? She asked herself the question anew. She wondered if evil that had no apparent motive was more disturbing to a Jewish woman than to others. Perhaps she should ring young Clare Barton; but she had no confidence yet that she could contain her own emotions, as she must when they met.

Hearing a movement in the house behind her, she was suddenly conscious of how little she wanted to be alone. She found her maid Mary, whom her husband called a ‘general purpose domestic’ and took her upstairs to begin stripping the beds the guests had occupied. The undemanding rhythms of the work, the folding of the linen and the re-making of the beds, helped to calm her physical restlessness. She asked Mary about her own Christmas in the village and found the girl anxious to talk. Her queries released a torrent of domestic trivia about the girl’s family and their occupations, which ensured that her side of the conversation needed to be little more than a series of promptings.

It was not enough to still her spinning mind, and when Mary took the sheets off to the washing machine below, she wandered irresolutely from room to room, arriving eventually as she knew she must at the room in the north corner of the house which her husband had converted to a study.

She scarcely ever came here, not because of any prohibition from her husband — that might well have been counter-productive for one of her temperament — but because her upbringing had included the belief that men needed time and space for their own concerns. These might be trivial, occasionally even ludicrous or risible, but it was better for women not to interfere with them. Rachel would have hotly disputed the principle involved, yet she applied it without even assessing her actions.

Harry Davidson’s study was indisputably a man’s room. The desk was tidy enough: only two or three letters, held together with a bulldog clip and presumably awaiting replies, broke its smooth, leather-blocked surface. There were school photographs on the wall. The picture of Harry’s passing-out group at Sandhurst looked scarcely more than another of these to the casual glance. There was a picture of a mess dinner night in 1981, when Harry was still a major, with the officers trying to look comfortable in their blues.

She looked at the pictures with affection, marvelling again at how Englishmen fulfilled the need to create clubs of some kind wherever they went. The Constable and Munnings prints seemed mere afterthoughts, gestures towards the convention of what a study should be. There was nothing from the last few years of Harry’s service, when he had had his own command at last. And nothing at all from the Falklands. But she did not find that curious: her parents had been at pains to wipe all traces of that earlier and greater conflict from the great house in Switzerland. Harry spoke less of the battle in the South Atlantic nowadays, and she understood his need to be rid of it.

Her husband was still to some extent an exciting stranger to her. They had married late, when his military career was behind him. Unlike many women, she found tales of life in the regular Army fascinating, an insight into a strange male world which could never be hers, a contact with a warrior psyche which was as foreign to her as though it belonged to a different species. She was secretly disappointed that Harry spoke less and less of the dangers he had endured, even when they were alone. But she understood his need to make a new life here.

She was amused, and sometimes secretly a little dismayed, by the importance to him of his standing in the local community. Sometimes also usually when she was depressed she felt she still knew very little of the world of men. A split-cane fishing rod, mounted high on the wall above the photographs, was more a remembrance of things past than a modern implement: Harry’s father had been a keen and skilful fly fisherman, but Harry had never really pursued the sport. Apart from the photographs, there were no obviously military memorabilia; the pair of antique pistols mounted on the wall over the fireplace scarcely qualified.

They were not the weapons that attracted Rachel’s attention. She walked over beyond the desk and studied the two shotguns which stood in the corner of the room. She was a better shot than Harry; better even than Arthur Comstock, who had won Army competitions in his time. Nowadays she never fired at live things.

The beautifully polished butts of the weapons glowed like antique furniture from the darkness near the floor. They would not be loaded, of course, but she could not bring herself to touch them. She opened the top drawer of the narrow chest beside the shotgun, registering the half-full box of cartridges before she slid it shut. It meant nothing, she knew. Why then did she cudgel her brain energetically and unsuccessfully to remember the last time that Harry had taken the shotgun out with him?

She looked down over the leafless oaks and the stable block to the roof of the neat service cottage. Arthur Comstock was emptying his kitchen waste container carefully into the dustbin. He was in shirtsleeves, despite the cold. She saw the thinning of the hair about his pate which she had never noticed before; he was lean and upright still, though he must be almost as old as her husband. He stood and looked round for an instant, then glanced up at the sky, so suddenly that she shrank back hastily from the window, lest she might be detected and thought a spy.

She brushed her dark hair back from her face, angry with herself that she should behave so guiltily without reason. It was a moment which made her realize quite how much on edge she was. It also crystallized a resolution. She went to the mirror on the landing and combed her hair; she was surprised how white her face was, accentuating the prominent nose, so that it looked to her much too large. She was glad the mohair sweater came high up her slim neck, so that she could not examine it for wrinkles. Then she went down the wide staircase with its mahogany banister, moving briskly before her resolution could falter.

Arthur Comstock answered the door immediately; no part of the small cottage was very far from the front door. He was surprised to see her: Colonel Davidson came here quite often with the details of his requirements, but his wife, on the rare occasions when she needed his services, used the internal phone system.

“May I come in for a moment, please?” she said. She was surprised at the tautness of her voice. He noticed her accent, more pronounced than he had ever heard it before.

She followed him into the scrupulously tidy parlour; after the spaciousness of the Vicarage drawing-room, it seemed a tiny chamber. He did not know quite how to treat her. She had been invariably courteous and considerate towards him, but with an edge of reserve he had never attempted to challenge. It took him a moment too long to ask her to sit down.

She perched on the edge of an upright chair. With her bright black eyes and strong nose, he thought she looked in profile like a bird which might take off at any moment.

Then she told him what she had come to talk about and his face turned to stone.

18

Lambert had never thought he would be sad to see his house emptied of infants. Now he was, and it was disturbing. His daughters had driven away with his grandchildren; the house was suddenly silent. And he felt old.

As usual, Christine divined his feelings without any word from him. For the second day in succession, he was presented with the bacon and egg breakfast he was nowadays not allowed. Then she stole softly away, lest he should see the smile she could not resist. She had always told him he would make a good grandfather, but it was nice to see it coming true.

A better grandfather than father, he reflected ruefully as he pretended to read the paper. On Christmas Day and Boxing Day, he had been able to come home from a murder investigation which was obstinately retaining its secrets and switch himself immediately into family life. He had joked with his daughters and played delightedly with their babies. A generation ago, he had never been able to switch off and play with the girls like that. He had missed most of their childhood, had almost lost the wife everyone now said was the perfect partner for him.

Today, he had even been prepared to delay his return to work until he had seen his daughters leave, on the grounds that he had been working on the case over Christmas. It was an indulgence he would once never have permitted to himself.

If he mused on these things as he ate his very late breakfast, he was as single-minded as he had ever been once he left the house. Motoring through the quiet lanes to pick up Bert Hook, he scarcely noticed even the beauty of the frost-edged trees. His brain had room for nothing but this disturbing case which so obstinately refused to give up its secrets.

Bert’s house had not emptied. His two boisterous boys overflowed its small modern confines exuberantly, but they were indubitably still in residence. One of them was lovingly inspecting the tyres of a gleaming Christmas bicycle; his smaller brother fenced with plastic sword and shield against a myriad imaginary foes on the driveway between house and fence.

Bert’s rubicund countenance appeared behind him at the kitchen door. “The sword hasn’t slept in that little blighter’s hand since he unwrapped it!” he said as he eased his bulk into the old Vauxhall. “Though I doubt very much whether he intends to build a new Jerusalem.” He took a last affectionate look at the children, who were more precious because they had come to him when he was approaching forty. Then he said, “Sorry, I’ve been trying to catch up on my Blake assignment since early this morning.”

He was studying for an Open University degree, much to the secret delight of a superintendent who pretended to be threatened by the development. Lambert scratched up a Blake quotation to keep up his end: ‘When the voices of children are

heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill.’

He took a last look at the clamorous boys as they drove away, thinking of his own children and how they had disappeared into women, resolving to enjoy his toddler grandchildren as they moved through childhood.

“I thought we’d go and have another nose round Woodford,” he said. “Visit that surly Tommy Farr and see if we can prize any more out of him. Allow you to have a go at young Charlie Webb. Probe Colonel and Mrs Davidson a little more. Even go over Arthur Comstock’s story with him. And I want to see if the landlord of the Crown has noticed anything new over the last three days.”

It all sounded a little desperate, and both of them knew that it was. Sometimes the only option was to go over old ground again, while the team around them spread the net of suspicion further and further. Each of the pair was so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he was startled when the radio crackled and blared into raucous life.

Even through the distortion, they caught the excitement in Rushton’s voice. “Something’s come up, sir. Are you coming in to the station?”

They were at a T-junction with the main road. Lambert flicked down his indicator and swung the car abruptly in the opposite direction from the one he had intended ten seconds previously. “We are now, Chris. We’ll be with you in five minutes.”

Rushton could not control his excitement when they arrived in the CID section. “It looks as though you were right about chummy in the forest, sir! He was an ex-copper.” He might once have been resentful that Lambert and not he had thought of the possibility, but now his instinct to catch a villain rode fiercely over such unworthy considerations.

They went quickly through to the Murder Room and he passed over the teletext message. One Ian Sharpe had been discharged from the force in Leicester eight years previously, when holding the rank of sergeant. He had been guilty of brutal treatment of prisoners in custody and trying to extract confessions by unlawful means.

Lambert’s face hardened as he read the phrases and translated the shorthand. A bully, or worse, who had brought his violence to work. The worst kind of bad apple in the force’s barrel. The one in a hundred — Lambert still preferred the statistics of his youth who brought contumely upon his colleagues and justified the hostility of the louts who obstructed their work at every turn. Lambert, although he had long trained himself in impassivity as part of his professional equipment, hated such men. He said in a level voice, “What has he been doing since?”

Rushton picked up the scrap of paper with the notes he had made during a telephone conversation concluded only minutes earlier. “The people in Leicester kept tabs as long as they were able to. As far as we can gather, he had a period as a mercenary soldier in Africa after he was kicked out of the police. No one seems to have heard of him in the last four years.”

The three of them were silent with conjecture for a moment. Hook said, reluctantly allowing the possibility, “It might just be that he has genuinely taken to the road in the way he tried to sell to us.”

They considered the notion; none of them saw that hard, confident man as the dropout who made the typical modern vagrant, but they knew enough to be aware of the danger of generalizations. Rushton answered the key question before it was even voiced. “We haven’t found any connection with Peter Barton yet. Except that Barton seems to have worked in a hostel for derelicts in Leicester for a short period before he was actually ordained as an Anglican priest. Sharpe must have been in the police there at that time.”

Lambert said grimly, “Let’s go and get him.”

***

The forest seemed unnaturally quiet. There was not a breath of air, and the cold was clamped hard upon it.

No bird sang, and those small mammals who were not in hibernation had more sense than to be active on days like this, when no food was available. And since the death of Peter Barton, most of the dog-walkers and horse-riders had chosen other places for their exercise.

The CID were not naïve. The law had forced them to release the man who called himself Robertson, but they had put a tail upon him when he left them without volunteering an address. They knew exactly where he had made camp in the woods, and Rushton had a note of it.

It did not take them long to reach the place. Lambert’s quick march became almost a run in its last stages, so anxious was he to come to grips again with the man they now knew as Ian Sharpe. He was already planning the lines of the vigorous interrogation he intended. Rushton wondered if they should have come here armed; their quarry had a history of violence and he must surely realize now that the game was up.

They heard nothing and smelt nothing that prepared them for the scene they found. Sharpe had struck camp; his tent was tightly rolled and fastened to the framed rucksack containing his spare clothes and cooking tins. The man himself lay beyond the small paraphernalia of his mysterious life, with his arms and legs thrown wide and spattered with red.

His head was blown almost completely away.