The Fox in the Forest (21 page)

“No. Colonel Davidson took the Rover into Gloucester to take his aunts to the railway station.” There was a flash of animation from him on this, but it might have been merely relief that they had let him off so easily about his meeting with the Colonel’s wife.

“Except, of course, for the bicycle you keep in the old stable behind this cottage.” Lambert threw away the line like an actor knowing its impact, and was rewarded as he moved on by Comstock’s startled expression. “Colonel Davidson tells us that he was in Gloucester at the time when we think the murder of Ian Sharpe took place. I don’t suppose you can tell us anything to confirm that?”

They were standing now, ready to go; it was an old ploy of Lambert’s to throw a final thought in just as the subject relaxed vigilance in the belief that the interview was over. Comstock said, “No, I can’t help you, I’m afraid. He certainly wasn’t back here until late morning.”

The tactic had worked, as it had before. Comstock was scarcely aware that he had dropped his guard. But his satisfaction as he denied his employer an alibi was quite unmistakable.

2
9

The Old Vicarage was as warm and welcoming as its service cottage had been cold and unfriendly. Rachel Davidson received them in the big drawing-room. There was no sign of her husband, and Lambert wondered which of the pair had ensured his absence.

It was a gracious, civilized room, as far removed from a world where people blasted each other apart with shotguns as could be imagined. Hook wondered whether that was perhaps the effect intended: prolonged contact with serious criminals tends to make a man cynical. There were skilfully lit paintings of ancient cities on the walls, a bookcase with volumes which looked as though they were actually taken down and read, pieces of silverware gleaming on the surfaces of mahogany that had the patina which comes only from a century of polishing. A Steinway grand in the corner of the room accommodated an arrangement of winter flowers that contrived to be at once opulent and discreet. The scent of freesias emanated from tiny vases on each of the window-sills.

They had an appointment, and they came precisely as arranged, as their subject acknowledged with a small, composed smile. Effortlessly exotic and foreign, cosmopolitan and cultured, she could hardly have made a greater contrast to the taut, scarcely articulate man they had just left. Bert Hook found himself speculating again on the possibilities of a liaison between such an unlikely pair.

Rachel Davidson behaved like a hostess, rather than a key figure in a murder investigation. As they perched a little awkwardly on the edges of their velvet-covered Victorian armchairs, Mary Cox brought in a large tray, with gold-rimmed coffee cups and a plate of gingerbread slices. Watching the coffee pouring in a smooth dark stream from the Royal Worcester coffee pot, Bert Hook decided that there were perks after all in CID work, some of them more agreeable even than the boot allowance he had long ago relinquished.

If Rachel Davidson had been aiming at a deliberate effect, she did not carry it through into her own dress, which was as modern as the room was graciously period. She wore a black cotton top, which was slim-fitting enough to emphasize her small, shapely breasts. A slim gold chain was visible at her neck, but disappeared beneath the cotton, and her long fingers carried only engagement and wedding rings. The tight-fitting dark grey cord trousers emphasized how youthful her figure still was, as she moved lithely across the big room in her simple, low-heeled shoes.

It was as though she had dressed in deliberate contrast to the formality of the clothes she had worn at the funeral of Peter Barton. Yet as she subsided gracefully into a chair opposite the two large men, she was as effortlessly elegant as they were awkward. She crossed her legs and picked off the two tiny specks of mud she noticed on the dark corduroy. “I’ve been walking our springer spaniel,” she explained, as though claiming a peculiarly English habit. The smile on her wide, expressive mouth softened features which in repose looked perhaps a little too grave and serious.

Hook reminded himself conscientiously that the possession of a dog gave her an excuse to go regularly into the forest, and probably a knowledge of its intricacies. He had been ribbed too often about his vulnerability to female charms not to be a little wary. And his experience of wealthy ladies thirty years ago, when he was taking his first tentative steps into the great world outside Barnardo’s, made him still suspicious of the species.

Lambert took her quickly through the details she had given earlier of her whereabouts and those of others at the time of Barton’s death. It was all low-key, urbane; a necessary, even a boring, ritual on both sides. Then, after a tiny pause, he shot at her, “Who do you think killed your vicar, Mrs Davidson?”

If she was ruffled for a moment, she recognized it as the tactic it was. Her face creased momentarily into that smile which lit up its whole surface; then she banished it, in acknowledgement of the seriousness of the matter. “If I knew that, Superintendent, I should have told you long ago.”

“I’m sure you would. But I said ‘think’, not ‘know’. You must realize from the fact that we haven’t made an arrest that we are not yet certain ourselves.” His slight, ironic smile and her answering one registered the understatement. “Frankly, I’m inviting you to speculate. We shall respect your confidence, of course, but you’ve been in this locality for some years and often —”

“The locality is more foreign to me than to you or your men.” For the first time, they could detect her Swiss accent, particularly on the word ‘locality’, in which she pronounced each syllable carefully and distinctly. Her vehemence must have shocked herself as much as it did them, for she stopped abruptly. Then she attempted to recover her more relaxed delivery as she said, “Remember that I am in a foreign country, and in a rural area of that country. In Woodford, many of the families have been here for a long time —for centuries in some cases. We Jewish people are not used to such permanence.” This time the smile was wry, even grave, but the white brow beneath the austerely controlled black hair lost its furrows just the same.

Lambert said, “I am sure you are a valuable addition to the local community, Mrs Davidson.” He meant it; he was thinking of the moment after the interment of Barton’s body on the previous day, when she had taken Clare Barton’s hand between hers. It would have been a sentimental intrusion more often than not; yesterday, it had been the most natural conclusion in the world, subsuming the widow’s personal grief into a wider sense of human tragedy as effectively as some great Renaissance
pietth
.

She looked at him to check whether this was a hollow reassurance he offered. Then she said stiffly, “I really have no idea who killed young Peter Barton. I presume from your question that you haven’t either.” She stared steadily out of the window. But in the pause he now allowed himself, he was surprised to catch her darting a quick glance at his face to check his reaction. He realized in that moment that she wanted to know whether they were contemplating an arrest. Was she anxious for herself, or on behalf of someone else?

“Mrs Davidson, you say you have only lived in this country for a few years. Since your marriage, in fact. Did you spend all your previous life in Switzerland?”

She looked him full in the face then, testing his inscrutability to the full. “No, Mr Lambert. Like many European Jews, our family felt it owed support, financial and otherwise, to the state of Israel. I was born in 1941. I cannot remember much of the War, nor of the holocaust, but my earliest memories are of the fear and the grief in my family. And I certainly remember as a child the enthusiasm all Jews felt for the new state in 1948. I spent six years in Israel as a young woman.”

“I see. And perhaps at that time you had some sort of training in the use of arms?”

“I undertook compulsory military service. I was proud to do so, just as I was proud to live in a kibbutz. Israel does not distinguish between its young men and its young women in the way the countries of Western Europe do.” This time the smile was proud, the head held high, the gaze trained on a point far out beyond the boundaries of the Old Vicarage. They had a momentary glimpse of that fervent religious nationalism which the nineteenth century found so admirable and the twentieth one finds so threatening as it moves towards its end.

Lambert said quietly, “So you are proficient in the use of weapons, Mrs Davidson.”

She turned back to him like one being recalled from a trance. “I am, as you say, ‘proficient’. Perhaps even a little more than that; in our dining-room, there are cups I won for rifle-shooting. A long time ago, now.” She looked down reminiscently at the fingers which seemed far too delicate for military ambitions.

“I think you also have some more recent trophies. For clay pigeon shooting, I believe.” Lambert’s inquiries around the village threw up some fascinating sidelights upon its occupants. The activities of the well-heeled were always of interest to the less fortunate, especially when an exotic foreign lady turned out to be better than the men in what they had thought of as one of their preserves.

“For clay pigeon shooting, yes.” She looked at Lambert steadily. “With a shotgun. You could simply have asked me whether I was experienced and proficient in the use of shotguns, Superintendent.” It was impossible to tell from her tone whether their researches had made her impressed, amused or furious.

Now it was Lambert who smiled. “I could have done that, I suppose. I find that when I lead people logically, they tell me fewer lies, which is less embarrassing for both sides. So you are used to handling a twelve-bore shotgun, and have done so recently.”

“Not recently enough for your purposes, Mr Lambert. I haven’t touched a shotgun in the last month. But for your records, you will probably want to confirm that I am quite efficient with a twelve-bore. I should certainly have hit a man’s heart at five paces, had I had occasion to do so.”

There was no doubt this time that she was exasperated. The colour had risen in her sallow face, her lips had tightened, her delivery had become ominously precise. And perhaps emotion had led her into an indiscretion, as often happened.

Lambert said, “Five paces? You seem to have an extremely accurate knowledge of the distance from which the fatal cartridges were fired, Mrs Davidson. I don’t think there has been any discussion of such distances in the press. And we have certainly never released that information.”

She was physically totally calm. Even the hands which she felt had just been accused remained folded on her lap. There was perhaps a little tenseness about her shoulders and the slim neck which rose above the cotton shirt, but that had probably been there all through their exchanges. Only her eyes, narrowed and darkly glittering, gave away the anger which burned behind them.

There was no doubt now that she had to struggle for the control of her voice as she said in measured tones, “I am not sure where I gathered the information, Superintendent. Perhaps I heard it around the village; the children who discovered Peter’s body lived locally, you know. Perhaps I deduced it from what we have heard about the wounds. Perhaps I know how close a person would have to be to the victim to discharge a shotgun with the certainty of killing a man: it is not the most accurate of weapons from any great distance, as you are no doubt aware.”

Lambert acknowledged her thoughts with a little bow of his grizzled head. It was a rational enough explanation, but he was not going to let her know whether or not it convinced him. He said, “May I ask how long you have been married, Mrs Davidson?”

Perhaps she was relieved to have him leave the questioning about shotguns. She said tersely, “Five years. Is it relevant?”

“It might be. It is very difficult to say what is relevant to an inquiry like this. To put it bluntly, a woman who has been married for thirty years generally knows more about her husband’s past than one who has been married for five. And he about hers, of course. I should not like to give the impression that we were interested exclusively in your husband.”

She looked at him evenly, trying to calculate what was in his mind. He had played these games for far too long for her to discover anything. “I intended at one time to settle in Israel, Superintendent. The man I was planning to marry was an army officer. He was killed during the Six Day War in 1967. I left Israel shortly afterwards and lived in Switzerland until my marriage to Harry five years ago. I met him while I was on a long visit to my sister in Buckinghamshire. He was on his demobilization leave at the end of his service at the time.”

She delivered the information in a monotone which was itself a protest, but Lambert was too professional to let that ruffle him. “I believe your husband served with distinction in the Falklands War.”

“Yes, I believe so. It was before I knew him, and he is not a boastful man. If you wish to know about something which can have no bearing on this case, no doubt you will ask him about it.” She made as if to rise, but the two men did not cooperate. They had not finished yet.

She saw no sign pass between them, but it was Hook who now said, “Probably you have discussed the time of the second murder with your husband. You are no doubt aware that he says he was shopping in Gloucester at the time of the killing. We have not been able to find anyone so far to confirm that. Can you offer us anything, or suggest anyone who might be able to substantiate his story? I should emphasize that we are merely trying to eliminate him from our inquiries, as we have been able to eliminate several others.”

She looked at him for a moment, which seemed to Bert very long and very quiet. “What possible reason could my husband have to kill a tramp in the forest, Sergeant Hook?” Through his discomfiture, Bert was still flattered that she had remembered his name from the formalities of Lambert’s introduction: most people remembered the chief, but forgot the details of his side-kick straight away.

Lambert said, “It appears he was not simply a tramp, Mrs Davidson. He may well have been a professional killer.”

Her dark eyes widened now. He wished they were the cornflower blue of Clare Barton’s; that seemed to him to be a much more revealing colour. She might have been acting surprise, of course: detectives had always to be aware of that. She might have been shocked at the notion. What he thought he had seen was a flash of fear, but he could not be certain. She said, “And what was he doing here?”

“If we knew that, Mrs Davidson, we might be close to an arrest. Have
you
any idea why such a man might be in the area? Unless he was just hiding in the woods, you see, it is probable that someone had paid him to come here.”