The Fox in the Forest (9 page)

“Only one man, all week. I keep myself to myself, you see, except when the Old Bill interfere with me.” He had sensed their interest; the aside was a deliberate postponement of the gem of information he had saved until the last. “But this chap’s dog came and found me. Ugly brute, like a police dog. Doberman, it was. But he had it under control, I’ll say that for him.”

“When was this?”

“Two days ago.” For once, the information came promptly. He gave them a description which was a surprisingly accurate depiction of Tommy Farr, from Woodford village stores. The time tallied with what Farr had told Lambert of the meeting: they concealed their disappointment behind a professional inscrutability.

They took him through an account of his movements at the time of the murder, but there was little for him to tell them. He had been in the forest, possibly cooking himself a meal: he had a tiny stove for emergencies, but he preferred a fire of dry sticks whenever it was possible. He had neither seen nor heard anything suspicious, he repeated.

For the moment, at least, they were going to get no further with their number one suspect. Rushton said eventually, “Well, we’ll be keeping you here over Christmas. You can see whether a police cell helps to jog your memory.”

“It can’t dig up what isn’t there.” Robertson stroked his embryo beard and afforded the Inspector a bland smile.

“You’re in trouble, Robbie, make no mistake about that. Do you want a lawyer?”

“What for? I haven’t done anything. You won’t be holding me here for long.” Again he gave the impression that he knew far more than a vagrant should about his rights. Rushton had already made a note to check criminal records, and not just under the name he had given them. Some young DC could have fun with hundreds of mug shots.

As if he read the thought, Robertson said, “I might even pass the time by shaving off these whiskers. I’m sure you could find me a razor.” His fingers played speculatively for a moment over the small scar beside his eye.

They took him down to the cells; he would with luck be the only occupant over the Bank Holiday, if the good sense counselled in the latest drink-driving campaign prevailed. Rushton ushered him within the painted brick walls with a little vindictive satisfaction: the man’s calmness irritated him more than he liked to admit. “Christmas Day in a cell. Not my idea of fun,” the DI said, as the uniformed constable prepared to slam the heavy door.

The man in front of him looked round the stark little room, with its barred window and narrow bunk. “Dry and warm after the forest. There are worse places to spend Christmas Day. Christ himself might have been glad of this.”

Rushton’s last image as the door shut was of Robertson smiling benignly at him, conscious that the captive had made the final small thrust in this bout with his captor.

13

When there are small children in the house, Christmas morning begins very early. If Lambert had forgotten that, it was brought to his attention by the cries of infant delight which woke him soon after six.

He lay for a while adjusting to this special day and the fact that another year of the allotted span had ticked away. He was still trying to adjust to being a grandfather. He qualified all right when the babies were there. He treated them as a father might, dandling them self-consciously upon his knee as though they were late and wholly delightful additions to his own family.

But he could not think of himself as a grandfather, even in those congenial moments when the grandchildren departed and he and Christine went back into a house grown magically quiet. The daughters whom he still thought of as vulnerable children were mothers themselves now, wiser and more responsible in the mysteries of parenthood than he would ever be himself.

He knew that Christine was awake beside him, alert with that primeval female instinct to the nocturnal whimperings of a small child. He lay motionless for several minutes, listening to the gurglings of infancy from beyond the walls and wondering if his wife was thinking as he was of the child they had lost a generation ago. Eighteen months old Sue had been, when she died: he would not have that ‘taken from them’ phrase which well-meaning fools still occasionally tried to use. She would have been twenty-five now, but for them she would be eternally a beaming infant with an infectious chuckle.

Like the child whose innocent awakening they listened to now. Perhaps that death had sealed a pact of reconciliation between the young Inspector and the wife who had hated and fought the force. It was around that time that they had almost broken up. But he refused to accept the bond brought by that death as being in any way part of a grander design. That would have put an awful burden upon them; and neither of them had been able to accept a God malignant enough to proceed by such means.

He went to the kitchen and made some tea, creeping back past the door of the room where Jacqui was talking gently to her daughter in the cot. Christine lay and watched him without moving as he poured the tea. She noted with the ruthless precision of her affection how he stooped a little now as he entered the room, as tall men will as the years advance, how he set down the tray and poured the tea with a little more care than he would once have used, guarding now against the accidents which morning stiffness might induce.

Whatever he was like at work, however much he chose to ignore the advance of the years there, he was a grandfather now to her, who saw him resolutely in the context of the family. For a moment, she thought she could see how he would be as a septuagenarian. Physically, that did not need any great projection; mentally, she remained unsure how well he would cope with growing old. To strangers, he deprecated his job and the demands of modern police work, and looked forward to retirement. To his intimates, of whom there were few, he was occasionally more revealing.

“I have to work today. That killing in the forest, over at Woodford.” He was still reluctant to bring the word murder into the house, as though the very thought of that oldest and darkest of crimes could contaminate the place.

At one time she would have been resentful, not of him so much as of the job, which took him away without forewarning whenever it chose to assert its demands. Now she accepted it as a part of him: perhaps the most vital part. She sipped her tea, listened to the gathering sounds of the crowded house awakening, and said with a smile, “You’ll be glad to get out. Away from all these women!” She often wondered how much he missed having a son; he had always professed himself perfectly contented with their daughters.

He grinned down at her as he sat on the side of the bed. “Away from the noise, perhaps,” he admitted. “But I’ll be back for the meal. About three o’clock, we said, didn’t we?” It was always a minor triumph when he remembered domestic arrangements of this kind. Once, when she had been tied at home with small children and the running of the house was her only challenge, she had resented his forgetfulness about such things. Now, many years into a highly successful resumed career as a teacher, she saw them in almost the same light as he did: necessary maybe, but essentially trivial, compared with the greater concerns they were both fortunate enough to deal with in their work.

By the time he had shaved and dressed, the whole household was busy. Caroline, his elder daughter, had already fed her four-month-old girl and eaten her own small breakfast. She had made Lambert the bacon and eggs which Christine nowadays forbade him except on special occasions. Father and daughter sat like conspirators at the round pine table as he ate them. He was reminded of the days when she used to bring her baking home from school and sit with wide and anxious eyes as he sampled it and gave his verdict.

Jacqui and her daughter came in as he moved on to toast and marmalade. The child he had heard mouthing experimentally an hour ago was twenty months old, able to walk rapidly around the kitchen and explore regions which had been inaccessible to her on her previous visits. His sons-in-law, waiting patiently for their allotted spans in the bathroom in this female household, would no doubt appear in due course.

By the time he was ready to go out at eight-thirty, they had returned in tracksuits from their morning jog, and the house was full of noisy self-congratulations and banter. The children, anxious to maintain their centrality in the attentions of this gathering, asserted themselves excitedly, and female voices rose in shrill approval of their efforts. Lambert, easing himself into the driver’s seat of the big old Vauxhall and directing the car towards Bert Hook’s home, was quite glad that he had an occasion to depart.

***

Clare Barton’s Christmas morning was very different.

The two pills the doctor had left for her had cast her quickly into a deep sleep. But she woke unrefreshed. Lying alone in the bed which seemed now much too large, she had to remind herself again of what had happened on the previous day. Of what had happened to the man who had shared this bed with her on every previous night when she had slept in it. She lay waiting for the light to creep into the square room with the chintzy furnishings she had once thought so important, bitter in heart and mind that this should be Christmas Day.

She listened to Barbara ringing home, trying to help a harassed husband to cope with the children by the advice she offered from a distance. “I can’t leave here yet,” she ended in a low, urgent voice: Clare could see her casting anxious glances up the stairs towards this sister who must be handled like wafer-thin glass. “I may have to bring her with me when I do come…Oh, come on, Dennis, it’s not her fault this has happened.”

So she was a package that had to be carried around, until it could be abandoned without embarrassment. Was what had happened indeed not her fault? What she had done must be in some way connected with Peter’s death. This was divine retribution for her own behaviour, surely. For a moment, her mind moved out of her body and she stood at the foot of the bed, studying her own small form lying motionless as a mummy beneath the spotless white counterpane.

Perhaps wives should be burned on a pyre when their husbands died, as she heard they still were in parts of the East. If their functions stopped as abruptly as this with the death of a husband, the counterpane might as well be a shroud. She lay absolutely still in the centre of the bed, trying to feel her heartbeats slowing as she had done when she was a child, seeking the trance which might dispel the desolation she felt.

When Barbara crept tentatively into the room and studied her, she was scarcely conscious of her. Then her sister said, “You’re awake, then,” in such a tentative tone that she was stirred by the very banality of it.

Clare sat up, took the cup of tea, and fought hard not to let her face register the distaste at its sweetness. It was her first small step outside herself and back towards the normal world of consideration for others. “I’ll get up now,” she said.

Barbara did not try to dissuade her. “Those detectives are coming here this morning,” she said. “They said it’s standard practice in cases of sudden death. I — I suppose they’re like doctors, in a way. They have to get used to horrible things like this, I mean.”

“I’ll see them. I want to do everything I can to help them find who did that to Peter.”

To her elder sister, she looked childlike in the middle of the big double bed, like a painting of a Victorian waif victimized by a malignant fate. “I’ll stay with you when they come, if you want me to.” Her sheltered life had allowed her no experience of policemen.

She half-expected the worst strain of TV aggression in their questioning.

***

When she opened the door an hour and a half later, she saw two men in dark grey suits, with apologetic faces. The taller one said, “I’m Superintendent Lambert, and this is Detective-Sergeant Hook. He spoke to you last night, I think, to arrange this. I’m terribly sorry that we have to intrude at such a time, and on such a day, but I’m afraid we do need to see Mrs Barton.”

Clare Barton was sitting very upright in her armchair when they were ushered into the lounge. She acknowledged the arrival of the two large men as if she were a monarch granting an audience. The high-backed chair seemed too large for her; even the crown of her fair hair did not reach the top of it. With her youth, her fair skin and her gravity, she reminded Bert Hook of the picture of Alice in Wonderland he had just left behind him.

“Do come and sit down,” she said.

Her voice had the evenness of a child delivering a rehearsed line. “We shall be all right now,” she said to her sister, who was lingering protectively by the door.

Barbara hovered for a moment, then said, “I’ll make some tea. If you want me, Clare, I shall only be in the kitchen.” She had no idea what her rights were in this matter, and plainly neither of the policemen was going to tell her.

Clare estimated the CID men with a calmness deriving from the mixture of shock and sedatives. It is a volatile cocktail, and she might at any moment switch moods if the balance of the two altered. For the present, she felt she saw everything with more clarity than she could ever remember. It was not a sensation she retained for very long.

She listened carefully as the tall man introduced himself and his sergeant. He had plentiful, frizzy hair, which must once have been very black but which was now liberally flecked with grey. His eyes too were grey, but dark enough indoors to seem almost black. They watched her steadily and without apology, as if they hoped to pick up information more important than what might come from her tongue. There was kindness in the eyes, she thought, as though he understood her situation and would alleviate it if he could: but perhaps that was a part of his technique.

The other man, rather shorter and broader, was trying to encourage her with his slow, awkward smile. He sat on the edge of the chair, as if he had no right to be there at all. He was a big, genial man, she decided; with a few white whiskers and the all-enveloping red robe, he would have made a wonderful Father Christmas. Perhaps she would tell him so, when the time came for him to go.

She watched Superintendent Lambert’s broad, humorous mouth as he began to speak, as if it were divorced from the words it pronounced, as if she were studying the movements of a lizard in a terrarium. Although she saw his lips with this abnormal, dispassionate clarity, his words seemed at first to come to her from the other side of a glass screen, so that her reaction to them was delayed. But by the time he had introduced the two of them and said a little about police procedures, she was beginning to follow him almost normally. She was pleased with herself for that. He was telling her that Peter had died instantly, that he hadn’t suffered, or even known much about it. He seemed to be offering her that as consolation, so she agreed that it was good.

Then Lambert was saying, “It was quite some time — at least twenty hours, we think — before your husband’s body was discovered. No one reported to us that he was missing, you see.” He waited for a reaction from her, so she nodded sagely to show that she understood. He said gently, “You weren’t here yourself at the time, Mrs Barton?”

She thought he would have known that. Perhaps there had been a breakdown in communications somewhere: no doubt that wasn’t his fault. She said, “No, I was away.” He seemed to be waiting for her to go on. Perhaps he wanted her to tell him where she had been. But she couldn’t do that, could she? Michael had asked her not to.

Lambert smiled at her, explaining himself like a patient uncle feeling his way with a niece he seldom saw. “We need to know where you were in those eighteen hours, you see. And in the day before that.”

She smiled at him like a cheerful, slightly mischievous child, who does not see the need to cooperate. It was a relief to him when her sister came in with a tray of tea. He said, “please sit down and stay with us, Mrs McLean. There is certainly no objection to your presence here from us.” He would be glad of it, indeed: people in shock sometimes reported things quite eccentrically to their relations when the police had gone.

Barbara poured the tea and went to sit at the other end of the hearth from her sister. It was Clare who then said calmly, “I would rather do this on my own, Sis, if you don’t mind.” It was years since she has used the diminutive; Barbara could not remember hearing it since Clare had got married. She looked at her, then picked up her cup of tea and went back to the kitchen. There was something compelling in her sister’s calm obstinacy.