The Fox in the Forest

by Gregson, J. M.

  Perhaps Comstock picked that up, for when he said, “Very well, sir,” Rachel thought she caught the faintest ring of irony in the use of the title. But he went into the explanation he had plainly been anxious to give since he came into the room. “I was planning to do exactly as you instructed. But on the way to Ashbridge, the Reverend Barton got me talking about my plans for the rest of the day. I let out that I had been intending to pick my sister up in Cheltenham. You may recall that I had mentioned the arrangement to you earlier in the week: she’s staying with me for Christmas.” He looked to Rachel for confirmation, and she nodded an acknowledgement.

  “I wasn’t going to tell Reverend Barton at all, but somehow he managed to get me talking and it came out.” He looked at both of them in turn, as if in apology for the banality, but they nodded a confirmation that it was a quality the dead man had had. “I said my sister would just have to wait for a while at the bus station, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Told me I must meet her as planned, that he’d intended to walk both ways, so that the lift to Ashbridge was a bonus anyway. He said he’d explain to my employer that it was his idea to walk back, not mine, but I told him that that would not be necessary.”

  Rachel detected a curious truculence in the last phrase, as though Comstock were determined to assert his independence. Perhaps it was another nuance of class: the British seemed absurdly sensitive about service. As her husband said nothing, she said, “And of course it wasn’t. None of the blame for what has happened can attach to you, Arthur.”

  Harry Davidson accepted that view grudgingly. He said, as though offering it as a punishment, “The police will want to see you. They’ve already been here.”

  Comstock nodded coolly, a small smile touching the edges of his wide mouth for the first time since he had come into the room. “They’ve already been to the cottage, too. They took a preliminary statement about times, and said a more senior officer would probably want to interview me in due course. I expect they’ll want to talk to you, too. Apart from the three church people he met in Ashbridge, we’re the last people he saw.”

  He had somehow reversed the positions, for it was his employer who now looked discomforted by the thought. Harry Davidson dropped his eyes to the carpet and said, “It’s a bad business, Arthur. Barton was a fine young man.” Death conferred unreserved approbation upon a man; the fact that Davidson had found many of the young vicar’s liberal ideas misplaced could be forgotten now. He looked up at his listeners, but neither of the faces revealed any sign that they suspected him of hypocrisy.

  Comstock said, “I’m sure everyone would agree with that. I’m not a churchgoer, as you know, but everyone seems to have liked and respected the Reverend Barton.” He seemed now to be making a conscious effort to relax.

  Rachel Davidson said gently, with her faint accent edging the just too perfect English, “Have you heard any views in the village as to who might have done this thing, Arthur?”

  Comstock shook his head. “Not so far. But I’ve hardly spoken to anyone. I thought I might pop down to the Crown for a pint later on tonight.”

  Davidson said stiffly, “Pub talk won’t be reliable. That sort of conjecture is best left to the police.”

  “I agree, sir.” Again Rachel thought she detected the tinge of irony in the form of address. “But Peter Barton suggested I organize a collecting-box in the pub for his famine relief fund. It seems the least I can do, now.” He made his intention sound like a rebuke of his employer’s insensitivity.

  Davidson went back into the bay of the window when Comstock had gone. She watched him brush away an imaginary lock of hair from over his left eye, a gesture he always made when under stress. Perhaps long ago, before she had known him, a real tress had been prone to stray there. She suddenly found the empty, comic gesture very moving.

  Eventually he shook his head sharply and said, “I’m going out for a walk. Need a bit of fresh air.” For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her forehead, as he did when leaving for a whole day or longer. Then he recollected himself and moved briskly past her, as though anxious to be gone before his resolution could weaken.

  He took with him the springer spaniel which he usually left others to walk. He looked back at the house through the darkness as he went. Its orange lights seemed warm and beckoning as he turned into the raw night, but he turned resolutely towards the journey he had determined to make.

  He had gone no more than half a mile when he heard the car coming towards him from the edge of the woods. He moved to the narrow band of grass between road and hedge and stood back to allow the vehicle the full use of the narrow lane. Then a small motorbike came noisily from the other direction, the beam from its headlamp wobbling a little when its rider saw the car and slowed.

  The car stopped beside Davidson to allow the bike to pass, and he realized that the white saloon with its red banding along the wings was a police vehicle. Beside the policeman on the back seat of the car, he saw in the reflected light a dishevelled figure with a half-formed beard. It stared straight ahead without expression.

  Presumably this mysterious figure from the forest was being taken in for questioning. Harry Davidson was within a yard of a suspected murderer in the darkness. The prisoner in his cocoon of warmth could perhaps not see beyond the window to the man outside. Certainly he gave no sign of having noticed him as the car eased forward and drove on.

  Davidson stood for a long time in the darkness, pondering the implications of what he had seen.

  12

  Because he was planning to use him on Christmas Day, Lambert had sent Bert Hook home to a grateful wife and the boys upon whom he doted. When the patrol car brought in the tramp from the forest, he took Rushton with him into the interview room.

  It was a new room in a modern extension, but it had already acquired the characteristics of all police interview rooms. With its single small window, its harsh fluorescent ceiling light, its small floorspace and its gloss-painted walls, it had a claustrophobic atmosphere. But that was not the fault of the architect: these rooms, rightly or wrongly, were conceived as claustrophobic. It was one of the weapons considered legitimate to a police force who found that society charged them with upholding the law and then conspired to stack the odds against them in the execution of that duty.

  The two detectives stood for a moment and surveyed the figure who might provide them with instant success in a case that was bound to get lurid publicity. There was no hurry; the pressures were all upon the man who already sat on the hard, upright chair at the other side of the small table.

  At the moment, he did not seem unduly affected by them. The public has a romantic idea of what a tramp should look like. It is anything up to forty years out of date, and even in that historical context it owes as much to fiction as to hard fact. The ‘knight of the road’ was an urban conception; he was mainly rural, highly independent, nomadic and harmless. He was half-envied by townsfolk for his contact with nature and his independent spirit. Countrymen were always more suspicious of a figure they regarded as parasitic and unreliable.

  Whatever the realities of the various pictures, the rural tramp is a figure almost but not quite extinct. The overwhelming majority of those whom the police meet who have ‘no fixed abode’ are urban derelicts. They are often squatters, often guilty of various forms of petty and not so petty crime, often in physical or mental ill health. This is frequently self-induced, in that an ever-increasing number are brought low by drugs or drink. And as the end of the century approaches, they are often homeless as a result of their omissions and addictions, rather than by any independent decision on their part to cast off the burdens of regular home and employment.

  This was the context in which Lambert and his detective-inspector now estimated the man they had come here to question. It was quickly apparent to them that he was not one of the derelicts who came broken and confused into rooms like this. He watched them with wary brown eyes, refusing to be cowed by the room or the situation. He did not look unde
rnourished; he was squat and powerful. Five feet nine and over twelve stones, Rushton estimated, but not fat. The arms he now placed with deliberation on the table in front of him were thick and muscular. Without being asked, he had slipped his waterproof anorak off his broad shoulders and on to the back of the tubular steel chair he occupied.

  He had a week’s beard on his face, and a half-grown beard gives to the most innocent man an air of villainous licence. He had a small scar above his left cheekbone, which was partly hidden by the sideburns he had allowed to grow down in front of his ears. He had a broad nose and rounded, rather coarse features; altogether, Lambert decided, a face which would not be improved by a beard, even a fully-developed one.

  They looked at his feet beneath the table. They wore boots; not the Chaplinesque apologies for boots, with perforated soles and gaping toes, which popular imagination accorded to tramps, but serviceable leather boots with padded tops and commando soles. His thick woollen trousers looked as though they would keep out rain and cold for a long time; a single tear below the knee had been expertly repaired.

  There was one other unusual thing, which at first Lambert could not define for himself. He had been in the room for almost a minute before he realized what it was. There was no noticeable smell from this man. It might seem insulting to the homeless men and women the police had occasion to bring in, but it was a fact of life that many of them brought with them a pungent, unwashed odour. There was no such scent from this man or his clothes. If he had been living in the forest for some time, that was something of a feat.

  Rushton spoke into the recorder mike to indicate the time that the interview was beginning with Superintendent Lambert and DI Rushton. If the man was impressed by the top brass that was being brought to bear upon him, he gave no sign of it. Rushton asked him his name and he said, “Dougie Robertson. My friends call me Robbie.” It was not clear whether this constituted an invitation to policemen to do the same. He had an Edinburgh accent which was fainter than his name might have warranted.

  “Have you any documents which would give us proof of your identity?”

  He looked at them for a moment before replying, “No. Nothing.”

  Rushton said a little desperately, “Letters? Driving licence?”

  He gave them a sour smile, all the negative he thought the question needed.

  Lambert said, “How long had you been in the woods before our men brought you in?”

  He looked puzzled, ran a hand through his unkempt hair. “I’m not sure. About a week, I think. One day merges into another when time doesn’t matter.”

  It was true enough, Lambert supposed. Yet he suspected Robertson knew quite well how long he had been there; his gestures were those of a man playing a tramp rather than those of genuine confusion. Lambert said, “Mr Robertson, you must know why we have brought you in here. A serious crime has been committed in the forest.”

  He nodded, serious but apparently unconcerned. “A man was shot. Your uniformed men told me on the way in.”

  An interesting tramp, who distinguished between CID and other policemen like this. A man, perhaps, who had been in trouble with the police before. “A local vicar was shot, on his way home through the woods. Very close to the spot where you were found.”

  The brown eyes looked at them evenly from beneath the bushy brows, giving nothing away. Rushton said, “You could be in trouble, Robbie. Big trouble.”

  Robertson looked down at his thick fingers, seeming to approve the absence of grime as he turned them over. “For something I didn’t do?”

  Lambert spoke as though this man and not his questioners had been responsible for the leisurely, watchful pace of their interchanges thus far as he snapped, “Progress at last. You’re saying that you didn’t kill the Reverend Peter Barton. Can you offer us any opinions then on who did?”

  Now the stubby hands turned palm upwards. “Sorry. I heard nothing. I saw nothing.”

  “When?” The word came like a rifle shot.

  “Sorry?”

  “When did you hear nothing? We haven’t told you when this killing took place.”

  For the first time, Robertson looked confused. After a moment he said, “I assume it was last night. Anyway, whenever it was, I heard nothing.”

  Lambert caught and held his eye, looking for knowledge which should not have been there. “It was at about five o’clock in the evening, Mr Robertson. The day before yesterday. You should have heard the sound of shooting.”

  “Well, I didn’t. I might have been in my tent at the time. Or further away: I have traps for rabbits. Most of them live above ground during the winter now, you know.”

  It was possible he might not have heard the shotgun. His tent had been located about a mile from the scene of the crime; Lambert had exaggerated its proximity to put pressure on the man. He said, “Do you have a shotgun, Robbie?” He tried out the familiarity of the nickname, but it did not fall easily off his tongue; there was no genuine intimacy. It was rather a participation in a charade which the man on the other side of the table had initiated.

  “No…He was killed with a shotgun, then? That might explain why I didn’t hear anything. There’s plenty of those in the country. A lot of them are used around the edge of the woods. I hear them quite often; I might not even have registered the sound of a shotgun.” He looked from one to the other, challenging them to deny him. Whatever else he might be, this was certainly not a man broken down by drugs or meths.

  Rushton said, “How long have you been on the road, Mr Robertson?”

  He looked cautious, even evasive. Perhaps he realized that this was not a situation in which he could refuse to answer. It was a moment before he said. “A few years now, off and on. I was made redundant from the steel works in Corby in Northamptonshire. One of the last to go when it closed.”

  Lambert could see him working in a foundry; and a lot of Scots had come down to Corby and found themselves redundant. But that was many years back now. He said slowly, “A long time ago, Robbie. A long time to be on the road. A long time to keep yourself together as well as you seem to have.” He looked him up and down, taking in his warm, functional clothing, his serviceable boots, his obvious good health.

  “Oh, I’ve worked a bit, here and there. Never more than a few weeks, mind.”

  “No insurance stamp, and no records for us to trace, you mean?”

  He shrugged. “The Lump isna’ my fault. If the employers won’t offer you anything else, you have to take it.”

  It was true enough: the fringes of the building industry were a jungle which provided trouble for the police as well as the hospitals and social services. Lambert said, “Are you married, Mr Robertson?”

  “No. I’m not dodging the maintenance. And I’ve no family.” For a moment, the sturdy figure was like an insolent small boy, delighted to be unhelpful to them. Then he said, in a more conciliatory tone, “I don’t draw the dole. I don’t get in anyone’s way. I don’t mug old ladies.”

  It was probably all true. It would have been more winning if it had not emerged as a prepared speech. Lambert had again the impression of a man playing a part he had devised for himself. He said rather desperately, “Have you camped in the same place in the woods for the week you’ve been there?”

  Robertson paused before replying, as if he was estimating the possibilities of incriminating himself. “No. I’ve moved around a bit.”

  “Why here?”

  “I worked for a while on a building site in Gloucester. They laid us off at the end of November, when the winter set in.” There was no note of complaint: he seemed to accept such things as facts of life. A hard man, this.

  “If you’ve been in the forest for about a week, you must have seen other people in the forest. Tell us about them.”

  “I’m not going to fit you up with a suspect. You can do your own —”

  “Look, we’re talking about murder, not shoplifting, Robertson. At the moment, you’re in the frame yourself. You’re the only person so fa
r who’s admitted he was in the area at the time of a brutal killing. I should remember that. And forget all that stuff about innocent until proved guilty. That’s for the courts. We’re conducting a police investigation.”

  Robertson looked at them sullenly, but without fear. He seemed almost relieved by the aggression suddenly turned upon him. After a moment, he nodded his willingness to cooperate.

  Rushton said, “You must have seen other people in the forest during the days before the murder. Tell us about them, please.” He had a clean sheet of paper in front of him, its blank whiteness a challenge to the goodwill of the man on the other side of the table.

  “I haven’t seen many. A couple of forest workers: they were cutting up trees which had fallen in the gales. I kept away from them. Kids, of course, I’ve seen since the schools broke up for Christmas.”

  Lambert said, “For a man who claims not to know quite how long he’s been in the forest, you are very precise about such things.”

  Robertson grinned. This time, he felt, he had caught out this tall man who watched him so hard. “It doesn’t need great powers of deduction. You hear kids in the woods during the day. They’re either wagging it, or they’re on holiday.”

  Lambert smiled briefly in acknowledgement. Policemen, too, were always aware for a variety of reasons when the school holidays began. More empty buildings to protect, and, as the number of working mothers grew inexorably, more young, unsupervised minds which idleness might lead into mischief. He said, “Who else did you see? Who else would know the woods well enough to be there at night, waiting for a man on his way home?”

  Robertson said, “The tracks are quite wide: you wouldn’t need detailed knowledge of the forest to have done this. And your killer might not have waited there, you know. It might have been a chance meeting.” He was almost teaching them their job now, and perhaps he caught Rushton’s resentment, for he went on hastily, “One or two people came through there fairly regularly. It’s a short cut, you know — probably the clergyman who was shot was treating it as that.” He paused, as if overcome for a moment by the immensity of the part played by chance in life and in death. “There’s a lad who comes through regularly on a little motorbike.”