The Fox in the Forest (16 page)

22

The council house blue paint on the door within the small porch was in much better condition than the paintwork on the windows. It had been washed down quite recently. That was a surprising thing for a boy of Charlie Webb’s age to think of doing. They remembered the almost obsessive tidiness of his bedroom.

They had ample time to study the door, for they knocked upon it three times before there was any sound from within the house. Then Granny Webb’s voice called with surprising strength to ask who it was who hammered so vigorously. Most of her visitors, aware of her immobility, were accustomed to walk straight in after knocking.

Now Hook tried the door, found it unlocked, and opened it a cautious two inches. He called through the gap, “Please don’t be alarmed, Mrs Webb. We’re the police. It’s Superintendent Lambert and Sergeant Hook, come back to see you again!”

There was an immediate delighted cackle. “It’s the fuzz, Samuel. What yer been up to out there? Under age kittens, wos it?” Peals of broken laughter at the excellence of her wit rang round the room as they entered. The black and white cat sitting on her lap conducted an unhurried appraisal of the newcomers. Apparently it was not impressed; it jumped softly down, stretched in elastic slow motion, and stalked with dignity towards the kitchen and away from their view.

“Charlie not about?” said Hook unnecessarily.

“Be ‘ere any minute, if you want ‘im. Just gone round to Tommy Farr’s to get our shopping. Sit yourselves down, you’re hurting my neck up there.”

They did so. There was a stale odour about the room, more that of old age than old cat. Lambert said, “We knew Charlie wasn’t at work. We rang there, you see, before we came round here.”

“‘ere, what you want ‘im for? ‘e ain’t done nothing. ‘e’s a good boy, is Charlie. Good to ‘is old Gran, too.”

“I’m sure he is, Mrs Webb. We just need to ask him a few questions, that’s all.” Lambert wondered a little desperately how long it would be before the boy returned.

It was Hook who saw his absence as an opportunity. “He has a shotgun, hasn’t he, Mrs Webb? Does he use it much?”

She gave the question serious consideration. She liked being called Mrs Webb by these careful, polite strangers. Everyone around the village called her Gran, as though for them she only existed in Charlie’s shadow. ‘Mrs Webb’ took her back to the days when she had got around more, when she had sometimes gone into the clothes shops in Gloucester just to hear the assistants call her ‘Madam’.

She said, “‘Orrible dangerous, smelly thing. I don’t let him keep it in the house. He bangs away with it sometimes. Brings home the odd rabbit. Never a pheasant.” She leaned towards them confidentially. “My uncle used to breed pheasants, you know, in the old days. For the shooting, up behind the hall. All gone now. Never the same, after the war.” Her voice was a dirge for her lost youth and innocence.

Hook drew her gently back. “Fond of his gun, is he, Charlie?”

She was suddenly suspicious. “What you want to know about that for? Took his gun away, the fuzz did. Got it back though!” She chortled again, then nudged a non-existent companion in celebration of her cleverness, as though her cunning had outwitted the entire police force to secure the return of the weapon. Then, with another of her bewilderingly swift changes of mood, she glared at them and said aggressively, “What you picking on Charlie for? He’s a good boy, I told you.”

Hook grinned back at her, not at all abashed. “You told us when we saw you before that he enjoyed cleaning his shotgun.”

“Always at it, he is. Takes it to pieces on the kitchen table. Oils it and polishes it. I can’t be doing with it.” She was grumbling now, slipping as he had hoped she might into a familiar routine.

“These youngsters just don’t think about the mess. I expect he’s the same with his motorbike.

“Damned Japanese rubbish!” She produced the phrase triumphantly, as though it were the winning conclusion to a word game. “Norton’s the best. Always was. Or Triumph: ‘is Dad always ‘ad Triumph.” She rocked backwards and forwards on her chair with folded arms and considerable content.

“But he needs his bike to get to work, doesn’t he?”

“Not been speeding, ‘as ‘e? I told ‘im the fuzz would get ‘im if “

“Oh, nothing like that. He’s a good boy that way, as you say. All taxed and insured properly, not like some youngsters I could tell you about, Mrs Webb. We’d just like to know a bit more about the way he uses the bike, that’s all.”

She said he went to work on it every day, used it indeed when he went anywhere outside the village, as might be expected. Hook teased so much out of her with a little more prompting. But they wanted to know whether he had gone out on the bike on the morning of Sharpe’s death, and that was hopeless. Granny Webb had no idea of whether things had happened yesterday or a month ago; pinning her to what had happened on the morning of 27th December at ten o’clock or thereabouts was quite impossible.

When confusion was at its height in the warm, airless room, Charlie returned. Lambert had left the Vauxhall in the car park at the Crown, so that he did not know as he came up to the gate that there were visitors in the house. But he heard the noise of voices as he came up the path, and hurried protectively into the house as he caught the old lady’s agitation.

He stopped dead in the doorway of the living-room when he saw who the visitors were. He was certainly disconcerted, but it was too dark where he stood for them to see whether he was frightened.

Lambert said, “We wanted to talk to you, Charlie, about a couple of things.” He felt guilty in his relief to be speaking to someone who was of sound and consistent mind. “First, your shotgun. You told the officer who asked you about it that you hadn’t used it since two days before the Reverend Barton was killed. Would you like to reconsider that information?”

Webb’s gaze flicked from one to the other, then round to the steadily nodding head of his grandmother, as if he might find somewhere among them a clue as to how he should answer. Seeing none, he said, “No. What I said when they took my shotgun away was correct. Why should it be important to you, anyway?”

Hook said quietly, “Because we now know for certain that that gun has been fired more recently than that. Fired, you see, at about the time when a second man was killed in the forest.”

Webb gulped and snatched at the back of a chair, pulling it out so that he could sit down on it and face them. He was certainly pale now; he looked as if he might have fainted if he had not found himself a seat. His white, scared face was totally unlined, so that he looked for the moment much younger than his years. Like a frightened child, Lambert thought. The first murderer he had ever arrested had looked like that, nearly thirty years ago, standing in a wet city street with a pistol still in his hand and looking down aghast at the policeman he had killed.

Webb’s voice cracked a little, then recovered, as he said, “I can’t explain that. I haven’t fired the gun.”

They waited to see if he would volunteer any suggestion as to how this might have happened. Even the excuses chosen by men driven into a corner could be significant. On this occasion, Webb offered them nothing.

Hook waited for a nod from his chief before he said, “Where were you on the morning of the 27th of December, Charlie?”

Webb looked at them as if they were closing upon him a trap which he had not seen or understood. His right hand shot suddenly upwards and across his spiky hair, as if it had a will of its own. He looked down upon it when it came to rest again across the top of his other hand in his lap, studying the long fingers and bitten nails for a moment as if this was someone else’s hand. Then he said, “I was on holiday. Not at work, I mean.”

“Yes. Where did you go, that morning?”

“I went for a walk.”

It was like prising information out of a guilty child, but Hook was patient. His tone of voice remained the same throughout the exchange. “What time was this, Charlie?”

“I — I’m not sure, exactly. About ten, I think. I remember I was at a bit of a loose end.”

“And where did you go on your walk?”

The room seemed stifling now. A coal on the heaped fire tumbled softly and sent a little cloud of white ash into the throat of the chimney. Granny Webb gave it a wide, almost toothless smile; not one of the other three in the room was certain whether she was listening to them or was in some quite different world of her own.

Charlie Webb’s long neck, poking from his polo-necked sweater towards the spots beneath his chin, made him seem vulnerable, even fragile, as if he might disintegrate with harsh treatment. It seemed a long time before he said, “I went into the forest.”

Hook’s voice held no note of triumph in the admission he had secured. He said, almost wearily, “But you told the constable who saw you about it that you had been nowhere near the woods on that day.”

“Yes. I was scared. I knew the man in the woods had been killed. It was all round the village.”

Something in the phrasing interested Hook. Webb had stared dully at the carpet through most of his questions; he waited until the youth looked into his face at last. Then he said, “Did you know there was a man there, Charlie? Before he was killed, I mean.”

“Yes. I saw him that very morning.” Webb looked as though confession had relieved his tension. His face was despairing, but relaxed.

“What time was this, Charlie?” Hook might have been a doctor, treating an accident victim whilst he was still in shock.

“About ten o’clock, I suppose. Perhaps a bit later.”

If Webb was telling the truth, the murderer must have been very close behind him. If he was not, he was putting himself in the dock. Hook kept the excitement scrupulously from his voice as he said, “Did you speak to him, Charlie?”

Webb said, “No. He didn’t think I’d seen him, see. He came out behind me for a moment on the track, then went back to his camp. He didn’t make much noise, but I knew he was there. I’d smelt his fire, see, although he’d put it out by then.” There was a little flash of pride in his country boy’s skills, the first he had shown since he came into the room.

Lambert, knowing Hook had come to the end, said in a different, harsher voice, “You went into the forest with your shotgun that morning, didn’t you, Charlie? And you didn’t just see the man, but shot him. We know he died at around the time you were there.”

“I didn’t! I was there, just as I’ve told you. I lied before because I was scared, but I’ve told you the truth now.” Webb did not shout, as from experience they would have expected him to. His voice rose, but he retained control over it, as he had had difficulty in doing at the beginning of their interrogation.

As they went through the tiny porch, Granny Webb flung after them, “Come again soon. Always glad to see the fuzz.” Lambert wondered if a mind wandering like hers was capable of irony. Perhaps it was a genuine invitation; she had so few visitors now to bring breaths of excitement into the confusion of her old age.

Hook was silent in the car, even after they had driven out of the village. He did not want the lad to be guilty, though the policeman in him longed for the quickest possible arrest. Webb was too like the youth he had once been, when he scrambled towards manhood in the years after he had left the home. Lambert knew his man well enough now to divine most of this. He glanced sideways at his sergeant’s troubled profile and smiled.

Then he said gnomically, “The crucial question about Webb is the one Sam Johnson from forensic asked.”

23

The tabloids moved into a new year with their Parliamentary comedians still in recess. So they homed in on Woodford.

Margaret Parkin, who had helped out behind the bar of the Crown on New Year’s Eve, became ‘attractive fun-loving barmaid Meg Parkin’. For a small consideration, she informed a reporter that: “Every woman in the village is frightened to open her door. We go in terror of The Fox. Our fear grows every day as we wait for him to strike again. The police may be trying their best, but they can’t protect us: we’ve already seen that, haven’t we?”

These observations from the voluble Ms Parkin were received in the area with a mixture of derision and outrage. In the Crown and the Women’s Institute, those twin centres of village enlightenment, she was rumoured to have been in more beds than ground elder. Perhaps the deaths in the forest had indeed cut down her nocturnal activities. But even the most charitable were driven to compute that she must now be at least sixty-two.

The photographers had to go to the primary school in Ashbridge on the day when the schools re-opened, because Woodfood’s tiny village school had been closed for twenty years. They got their pictures of anxious mothers meeting their children and hurrying them home, conveniently ignoring the fact that the Woodford children now without exception travelled on the school bus.

When invention flagged, there was always the ritual pillorying of the baffled police. THE FOX IS FOOLING WITH PC PLOD! the tabloids decided, while even the serious papers ran articles on previous serial killers and the omissions of the authorities. The press now got hold of the news that the second victim had been held by police for thirty-six hours, then released to be gunned down in the forest. HOW WRONG CAN YOU GET? roared the next day’s headlines.

Lambert was glad that his Chief Constable was enjoying a well-earned rest on a Caribbean cruise.

***

On a bitter grey January afternoon, almost everyone in the village attended the funeral of Peter Barton.

Behind the coffin, three people wept steadily, losing not a shred of dignity as they did so. Barton’s parents had come down from Newcastle to a country world which they did not understand. They felt the warmth of the sympathy around them, but on this bitter day no heat would have been enough to burn away their outrage at the senseless obliteration of the boy who had promised to achieve so much.

In front of them and immediately behind the coffin as it made its short, slow journey down the aisle of the packed church, Clare Barton walked as though in a trance. The crowded pews of the little church brought home what she had always known but not cared to acknowledge, the hold that Peter had taken upon the affections of his flock in four short years. Four years, she thought, when he had worked unremittingly, with only the most sporadic and ineffective support from the wife who should have been at his side.

The bishop spoke over the coffin of the man who had been such a thorn in his side. And because that is the way of these things, he spoke movingly and well. Whatever the frustrations of the Anglican Church in the final quarter of the century, it had offered him thirty years of practice in the art of oratory. He had honed his skills, until he was effective now in almost any situation. He said generous things about the young man’s ministry. And, to be fair to the bishop, he meant them, even if they came a little too late. He was not insensitive to tragedy, and he felt it here, suffusing the very air of this village church above the multitude of bowed and weeping heads.

A television camera crew waited outside the church, but its operations were carefully, almost apologetically, low-key. Some of the mourners did not even know the cameramen were there until they saw the brief sequence of the coffin and the grieving widow and parents on the regional evening news bulletins.

Although there was only the lightest of breezes in the churchyard, it blew from the icy north-east. This congregation had supported Peter Barton only sporadically in his efforts during life. Yet only the most elderly and infirm among them failed to move to his graveside for the final rites of his death. Ashes returned to ashes, dust to dust, in the bishop’s high, clear tones. The coffin was lowered into the grave from the frozen fingers of the bearers, and the crowd broke up into small groups for the final, conventional regrets. There were no floral tributes: such monies had gone, as Peter would have wished, to famine relief. In half an hour, a rectangular mound of yellow earth would be all there was left to see of a man who had worked so hard for the people who mourned him.

Lambert and Hook watched things from the edge of the crowd. They were more interested to see who was absent than to count those in attendance: the theory that the murderer likes to see his victim finally interred has long been dismissed by the CID as a romantic fiction. Charlie Webb was there, despite his grandmother’s robust dismissal of all things religious. Arthur Comstock, ramrod straight and looking even taller as a result, stood quietly at the back of the church, looking over the heads of everyone to the austerely decorated stone altar, speaking to no one during the ceremony in the churchyard.

Tommy Farr was not present, though there could have been little custom in his village shop. More surprisingly, Harry Davidson, JP, that pillar of the local community, was neither in the church nor at the graveside. His wife, handsome and upright in the black which suited her, had an empty seat left beside her which made his absence conspicuous, for the villagers had obviously expected that he would have come. Rachel went over and said a few words to Clare Barton as they moved away from the grave, taking the small hand for a moment between both of hers.

Clare’s face was very white, throwing the intense blue of her tear-washed eyes into vivid relief. A little of her golden hair had pushed itself obstinately out from beneath the tight black veil; she brushed it away from her small, perfect nose with her free hand. Rachel Davidson was a generation older than Clare, but an infinity of experience seemed in this moment to stretch between them. With her strong nose, her dark eyes and tightly bound black hair, Rachel stood erect and proudly Jewish in an ancient English churchyard. And she seemed to carry with her some of the suffering of her race, as though she were here to set this domestic English tragedy within the context of the millions in this century of savagery who had perished as Peter had, violently and without cause.

***

As the crowds drifted away from the church, Lambert said, “Let’s go to see Tommy Farr.”

They walked swiftly towards the village store; vigorous movement was a relief after the enforced stillness of the grave-yard in temperatures below freezing.

Hook, whose only contact with the case during his four days in Cornwall had been the newspapers, said suddenly, “Do you believe in The Fox?”

Lambert did not bite his head off, as he had half-expected. After a few seconds, he said, “No. If there were another killing of the same kind, I might be forced to. I’m almost afraid to voice that thought, in case it ushers in more blood. Not a proper quality in a detective, superstition.”

Hook said, “What I can’t find is any connection between the two murders. Both of them in their different ways seem quite senseless.”

“Hence the press’s creation of The Fox,” said Lambert. “Motiveless killings are always the work of a maniac. What our journalistic friends don’t wish to realize is that very few murders are motiveless, but occasionally the motives are not immediately obvious.” He was rehearsing the things he would like to say to the press, which he would probably never see translated into print. Perhaps there was something after all to be said for those television news conferences which made him so uneasy: at least you couldn’t be misquoted when you delivered your own answers to the camera.

Hook said, “Very few of the men we’ve regarded as close to the killings have wives.”

“Sexual frustration turning a man into a maniac? You’re beginning to think in tabloid terms, Bert, and I’m not sure I like it. In any case, someone as unbalanced as that kills women, not men, in my experience.”

“Unless, of course, the unbalanced psyche is that of a woman — she might kill men.” Bert Hook produced the idea triumphantly. Was it not Lambert who had told the press that he hadn’t ruled out the idea of a woman killer?

“I’m going to put in an official complaint to that Open University, if it encourages detective-sergeants towards lateral thinking. I’m not sure that official police policy allows sergeants to think at all. All right, let’s have your thoughts about our deprived men.”

“Well, there’s Tommy Farr to start with. His wife left him years ago. Arthur Comstock’s wife apparently left him earlier still long before he came out of the Army. Both of them are divorced now. Charlie Webb has no wife yet. Even Ian Sharpe didn’t have a woman in tow, as far as we’ve been able to tell.”

“And Peter Barton’s wife was perhaps on the way to leaving him. Well, Holmes, what do you deduce from all this celibacy, enforced or otherwise?”

Hook was ready for the question. “Nothing, really. I was just throwing up the idea. In case a superintendent could make more of it than a sergeant!” Bert stared straight ahead with the slightest of smiles. It was the smile he had once allowed himself on the area’s village green when he clean bowled a public schoolboy.

Lambert grinned. Rushton would neither have understood nor approved this exchange. Well, he might be tomorrow’s man, but he could wait a while yet. “Our only husband and wife who have endured are Colonel and Mrs Harry Davidson.”

“Not exactly endured. They only married five years ago, when Davidson was finished with the Army.”

“True enough. But they appear to be pillars of the local community.” Both of them were silent for a moment then, thinking of the Rachel Davidson they had just seen, that cosmic tragic profile as she consoled the vulnerable, venal Clare Barton. Because they were detectives, the impressive cameo suggested to them among other things that Mrs Davidson was a woman with the nerve and intelligence for this sort of murder, if she thought it justified.

“Why wasn’t Colonel Davidson at the funeral?” said Hook.

“I’ve no idea. I’m surprised he wasn’t there, though. In his role as leader of the local community and Chairman of the Parish Council, it was almost obligatory. Particularly as I rather think he enjoys that role. No doubt there was some good reason. We might ask him what it was, later. Tactfully, of course.”

They were at the door of the village stores now. Lambert paused only momentarily before they went in. “Let’s give Farr a hard time first, though.”

***

The man didn’t look as though he would be easily intimidated. He lounged behind the old-fashioned counter inside his shop with his bottom supported by a high stool. Perhaps it was his broken nose that twisted his small smile of welcome into something nearer to a sneer, but Hook did not think so. Farr said, “Found your Fox yet then, PC Plodders?”

Lambert looked him coolly up and down with a mirthless smile. “Do
you
think our man is a maniac, Mr Farr?”

“Asking Tommy Farr for his opinion now, is it? God, you must be as baffled as they all say you are!” His voice was deep, even musical, taking the edge off the insult he intended, suggesting the male voice choir in which he had long ago held his corner against the Welsh tenors.

“You didn’t answer me, though, did you, Tommy?”

Farr glared at them aggressively for a moment, as though they had accused him of something. “I don’t have to, do I? But no, I don’t think you’ve got a maniac to catch, if you really want to know.”

“I don’t suppose you’d be so eager to go into the forest if you did, would you, Tommy?” said Hook.

Farr whirled to confront him. He had been concentrating his contempt upon Lambert, not expecting any rejoinders from the stolid presence which had been examining the bank of cereals away to his right. For a moment, his features were twisted with the suspicion and hostility he did not trouble to conceal. Bert thought his pugilistic nickname was appropriate, even if it was obvious: Farr would not have been the man to take on in a pub brawl.

The shopkeeper forced himself to relax: they could see the physical processes of it. “Keep your spies out, do you, Lambert? Bloody police state we’re living in now.” It was delivered sullenly, without passion, being no more than a ritual hostile response.

“A double murder inquiry is in progress, Tommy. You must expect us to keep our eye on Woodford, and other villages in the area as well.” Hook was probing for a significant reaction, but he did not get one.

“Fat lot of good it’s done you, so far.”

Farr gave his sneer free rein but his words sounded a rather hollow note of defiance. He was wary of committing himself to more, wondering furiously how much they knew of his comings and goings. It was hardly news that he went daily into the woods still with Kelly: he would have expected so much to be observed by the more nosy among his customers, as well as by any more official presence. But did they know of his meetings in the wood?

Lambert was smiling at him, baiting him a little even as on the face of it Farr was taunting him. He let the silence stretch now, surveying the broad wooden counter, the old-fashioned cash register, the neatly priced packets of flour and dried fruits. “It’s your duty to help us, not obstruct us, you know, Mr Farr,” he said without rancour. “You go just as freely into the woods as you did before these things happened. Some people would think that in itself suspicious. After two brutal murders, you seem to have no fear that you might become a third victim of The Fox, you see.”