The Fox in the Forest (23 page)

31

Mary Cox was right. When they pulled up at the village store, they saw Comstock’s bicycle leaning against the side of the stone house. It was half past one now; the door of the store was closed for lunch, and knocking brought no response. Either Farr was out or he did not care to have his lunch-hour disturbed.

Hook, who was braver about large dogs than Lambert, went to the rear of the building and called “Kelly?” Rather to his relief, there was no growl or bark to answer him. At a nod from Lambert, he went cautiously to the old wooden rear door and tried the latch. As he had expected, it was not locked; people with Dobermans were a little careless about these things, whatever the police advised about security precautions.

They looked inside the small rear scullery like thieves, poking their heads forward and bending their torsos to the right, as if by keeping their feet only on the borders of the property they respected the owner’s rights to privacy. They saw all they needed to see. The hook where Kelly’s lead hung was bare. So was the small niche beyond it where Farr kept his twelve-bore.

It did not take more than two minutes to drive the Vauxhall to the nearest entrance to the wood. It was long enough for Hook to contact Rushton, who detailed a police car to attend at the other side of the long tongue of forest they were entering.

As they left the sun and hurried under the long nave of arching trees, the cold hit them as suddenly as if they had walked into a butcher’s freezer room. Lambert hesitated a moment when they came to a choice of paths, then turned on to the larger of the two, which led towards the spot where Ian Sharpe had been killed. Their steps rang loud in the silence upon the frosted flints of the path. Then, as it narrowed and was submerged under an inch of decaying leaves, the sounds of their movements were deadened. At the same time, as though they were taking a cue from this, they slowed their pace and trod more warily, listening for any sound which would tell them of another presence in this frozen place.

They passed the spot where Sharpe had fallen. A short length of the cord which the Scene of Crime team had used to isolate the area of their detailed search lay still trapped at the base of a gorse bush. Beyond here, they moved into a stretch of tall evergreens, which shut out most of the little light they had enjoyed and turned a bright day outside the woods into a twilight world within them.

They almost missed Comstock. He was fifty yards ahead of them, with his back to them, moving warily along the edge of the path, wearing the navy anorak he had worn on the day of Peter Barton’s death. Hook remembered his bleak little statement, “I don’t have many clothes.”

And at that moment, things happened very fast, though the watchers experienced the slow-motion effect of a car accident. Harry Davidson appeared ten yards beyond Comstock. He had a twelve-bore tucked hard into his shoulder, trained upon Comstock’s breast. There was a harsh, urgent command from the woods on the left, and as Comstock threw himself sideways, a black force launched itself at Davidson’s throat, bowling him inexorably backwards.

For a moment, Hook thought it was some wild, nightmare creature of the forest. Then, as they ran forward, his brain as well as his senses reasserted themselves. By the time they reached Davidson, he was sitting up, watching the dog’s brown eyes fearfully from no more than eighteen inches. Tommy Farr kicked away the shotgun which had been levelled at Comstock. Farr’s own twelve-bore hung loose in his left hand, pointing at the ground. There was no need for that, with the dog there. “Easy, Kelly,” said Farr, as Davidson clutched his left elbow and a warning growl rumbled deep in the dog’s throat. Somewhere in front of them, they heard the sound of the police siren as the car stopped at the edge of the forest.

“Stay right where you are, Major Davidson,” said Lambert. The man on the ground had not even known they were there until he spoke, but it was the use of the rank which announced to him that all was lost. He remained motionless on the ground while Hook pronounced the words of the caution, then slipped a handcuff on to his right wrist. Hook had to help his prisoner to his feet; he looked dazedly at the steel, as though the wrist it encircled belonged to someone else.

Comstock had risen with him from the shallow ditch into which he had thrown himself at the sight of the shotgun. For a moment, the two men confronted each other, both breathing hard in great snorts of white vapour. The mutual hatred of employer and employee was manifest in their every movement.

“I should have got you myself, in the first place,” said Davidson.

“Instead of which, you killed a man who never hurt anyone!” Comstock’s contempt turned the words into a snarl.

“Barton was too bloody good to be true. If you’d only done as I told you and left him with the car, it would have been you whom Sharpe killed in the woods. And he’d have been away that night, with no one any the wiser.”

Lambert had an uncomfortable feeling that that might be true. He heard the cautious tread of large feet in the woods behind Davidson, and called the officer forward to take charge of the prisoner. He said as Hook passed over the manacle, “What happened to the radio telephone?”

Davidson was the only one not surprised by the question. He said, “I took it away when I disposed of Sharpe. He’d hidden it after he’d killed Barton. He was a professional, you see; he knew you’d be taking him in and searching his camp.” He sounded as though he was explaining some military procedure to those without experience.

Lambert, happy to get him talking while his senses still reeled, said “Why did you kill him?”

Davidson shrugged; all moral sense had now departed him. “He was threatening to split on me if you got any closer. And he wanted more money, even though he hadn’t fulfilled his contract.”

“You used Charlie Webb’s shotgun.”

“It was used for both the killings, yes. But it was returned each time. I’d seen young Webb putting it away in the shed in the garden, and it seemed an obvious strategy, careless young beggar! Sharpe liked the idea: he knew the police would be searching for the murder weapon. It was easy enough to remove it under cover of darkness, and if anyone had seen me, remember I’m a JP, merely detecting a dangerous weapon improperly kept.”

There was no sign of his stammer now. He smiled a little at the recollection of his own cleverness: for a moment, with the reference to strategy, he was twenty years back on Salisbury Plain, showing his initiative in the plans he made as a young platoon officer.

“Take him away!” said Lambert abruptly. After a working lifetime of crime, he could still be revolted when a man guilty of the greatest one of all showed no sign of remorse.

The officers who had appeared from the woods behind Davidson moved in and led him away. The young policeman among them, Bill Evans, was aghast to recognize as the prisoner in his charge the Chairman of the Parish Council, the magistrate who had been on the bench when he first appeared as a prosecution witness in court. Evans was young enough never to have been handcuffed to a prisoner before. He departed from their sight like a comic soldier, watching Harry Davidson’s feet and trying hard to get in step with him.

Comstock watched the group until it disappeared before he said, as though he still could not quite believe it, “He would have killed me.”

“Today he would, yes. You would have died on the 22nd December, if you hadn’t changed his arrangements. He brought in a professional to achieve just that. Why?”

Comstock paused for a moment, as though he might deny all knowledge of the matter. Then he said, “Because I had a hold over him, I suppose.”

“You knew he had never been a colonel, the rank he had used as he took his position in the local community.”

“Oh, I knew that, yes.” Comstock brushed away the thought as if it were no more than a troublesome fly. “But I knew he’d never been in the Falklands, when he’d told people here he had. Even told his wife, when he was getting ready to marry her!” Comstock who had no wife himself now, spat the thought as though it were the ultimate marital deception.

Lambert let the man’s anger run, and his next words explained his fury. “My brother-in-law was blown to bits in that war, which we’re now told need never have been fought. I saw men burned and maimed for life. And that sod claimed he’d been there, when he’d never seen active service, even once.” For the first time, the watchers saw how Davidson might have killed him, to suppress a knowledge which had seemed too trivial to warrant murder. Bitterness such as Comstock felt was never permanently silent, however expensively it was bought off.

It was Hook who said, “His lies were useful enough to you. You made him give you a job.”

“Yes. In a recession, it was all I could get. I heard from Tommy here that the richest man in the area was a Colonel Davidson, who had fought in the Falklands. So I took myself round to his house, hoping for employment for old times’ sake. I quickly twigged he’d never been in the Falklands. Later I checked with a pal in his regiment and found out about his rank. I expect you wondered why a man who had only one car and had driven himself until I came needed a chauffeur.”

His resentfulness seemed now to be directed against himself as much as the other figure in this bizarre charade. “We called it ‘chauffeur-handyman’, and I managed to find plenty to do about the place. I was quite sorry for his wife sometimes. She obviously didn’t know what I knew about the sod.”

Lambert suppressed the thought that Davidson might also have been a thoughtful, even a loving husband. People played many roles in life, and murderers in his experience kept stricter divisions between them than most. He said gently, “Was that what Rachel Davidson came to see you about on the morning of Sharpe’s murder?”

Comstock nodded. “She asked about the Falklands and her husband’s service there. She seemed to know already that he had only been a major. I tried to keep it from her, but I don’t think I convinced her.”

That was almost certainly true. The taciturn, almost inarticulate ex-sergeant would be no match for the intelligent cross-examination of that subtle woman. Lambert said, “Why on earth didn’t you come to us earlier?”

“I didn’t think I was in any danger. I was as puzzled as anyone else about poor Peter Barton’s death — I didn’t know it should have been me.”

Lambert said, “Peter Barton was a generous man, as everyone knows. His last unselfish thought cost him his life. When he insisted on your going to collect your sister in the Rover, he took your place as a murder victim. He was wearing a similar navy anorak, and his killer had not seen either of you before. When Davidson contacted him on the radio telephone to tell him you would be walking home through the forest, he couldn’t have expected anyone else to arrive in the darkness — by that time his victim was already late.”

Comstock nodded dolefully. “It wasn’t until after the second murder that Tommy and I began to work out what had happened. We presumed like everyone else that the same person had killed both people at first, especially with all the papers talking about serial killings and The Fox. Then Tommy saw Granny Webb in her garden and she said Davidson had been snooping around.”

Farr glared at him from beneath black Welsh brows, recalling to them his earlier resolution to have no dealings with the police. He growled, “I didn’t think the old girl was in her right mind, see?” without looking at Lambert or Hook. “Arthur and I met in the forest to exchange notes about Davidson’s movements.”

Farr was a natural vigilante, thought Lambert, looking at the Doberman by his side and the shotgun hanging loose in his hand. No doubt he had enjoyed a little cloak-and-dagger secrecy, even perhaps the frisson of danger. He had not killed Davidson just now, when many wild men would have done so rather than use the dog. But he would like to have brought in Davidson without police help, even when it meant risking injury to himself or Comstock.

Lambert said, “Always listen to people like Granny Webb when you think they may not be in their right minds. They are less devious than many allegedly normal people — village storekeepers, for instance, who choose to withhold evidence. It was poor Johnny Pickering, you see, who told us that Davidson had been in the forest on the morning of the second shooting. He’d seen ‘the Sergeant’, he said. But he called everyone with a rank Sergeant, including me. Since Davidson was the only one around the village who had chosen to carry a military rank into later life, the likelihood was that he was the man whom Johnny had seen.”

Farr said with reluctant admiration, “It was a pretty thin deduction to pin a murder on the man.”

“Of course it was. Alone, it would have been useless. But our function is to put together various pieces of information until we see a pattern. There were other things, you see. Davidson lied to us about having to be in Tewkesbury at the time of Barton’s funeral: his chauffeur here was driving the Rover he said he was using at the time, so he couldn’t possibly have used it. My guess is that he couldn’t face acting a prominent part in the last rites for the man he had virtually executed. He also seemed to recognize Ian Sharpe’s name as soon as I mentioned it, even though it had never been made public. These are significant details, no more: a long way from a case which would stand up in court. But had you two not withheld your thoughts from us, the pattern might have been apparent earlier.”

They had been walking slowly to the edge of the forest as they spoke. Now they left it, and Farr and Comstock quickened their pace, moving towards the village store as though it were a haven from interrogation. If Lambert suspected they had kept silent because they hoped to wring money or other concessions from Davidson at the meeting which had nearly cost a life, he held his peace. There was little chance now of such revelations.