The Fox in the Forest

by Gregson, J. M.

  She looked down over the leafless oaks and the stable block to the roof of the neat service cottage. Arthur Comstock was emptying his kitchen waste container carefully into the dustbin. He was in shirtsleeves, despite the cold. She saw the thinning of the hair about his pate which she had never noticed before; he was lean and upright still, though he must be almost as old as her husband. He stood and looked round for an instant, then glanced up at the sky, so suddenly that she shrank back hastily from the window, lest she might be detected and thought a spy.

  She brushed her dark hair back from her face, angry with herself that she should behave so guiltily without reason. It was a moment which made her realize quite how much on edge she was. It also crystallized a resolution. She went to the mirror on the landing and combed her hair; she was surprised how white her face was, accentuating the prominent nose, so that it looked to her much too large. She was glad the mohair sweater came high up her slim neck, so that she could not examine it for wrinkles. Then she went down the wide staircase with its mahogany banister, moving briskly before her resolution could falter.

  Arthur Comstock answered the door immediately; no part of the small cottage was very far from the front door. He was surprised to see her: Colonel Davidson came here quite often with the details of his requirements, but his wife, on the rare occasions when she needed his services, used the internal phone system.

  “May I come in for a moment, please?” she said. She was surprised at the tautness of her voice. He noticed her accent, more pronounced than he had ever heard it before.

  She followed him into the scrupulously tidy parlour; after the spaciousness of the Vicarage drawing-room, it seemed a tiny chamber. He did not know quite how to treat her. She had been invariably courteous and considerate towards him, but with an edge of reserve he had never attempted to challenge. It took him a moment too long to ask her to sit down.

  She perched on the edge of an upright chair. With her bright black eyes and strong nose, he thought she looked in profile like a bird which might take off at any moment.

  Then she told him what she had come to talk about and his face turned to stone.

  18

  Lambert had never thought he would be sad to see his house emptied of infants. Now he was, and it was disturbing. His daughters had driven away with his grandchildren; the house was suddenly silent. And he felt old.

  As usual, Christine divined his feelings without any word from him. For the second day in succession, he was presented with the bacon and egg breakfast he was nowadays not allowed. Then she stole softly away, lest he should see the smile she could not resist. She had always told him he would make a good grandfather, but it was nice to see it coming true.

  A better grandfather than father, he reflected ruefully as he pretended to read the paper. On Christmas Day and Boxing Day, he had been able to come home from a murder investigation which was obstinately retaining its secrets and switch himself immediately into family life. He had joked with his daughters and played delightedly with their babies. A generation ago, he had never been able to switch off and play with the girls like that. He had missed most of their childhood, had almost lost the wife everyone now said was the perfect partner for him.

  Today, he had even been prepared to delay his return to work until he had seen his daughters leave, on the grounds that he had been working on the case over Christmas. It was an indulgence he would once never have permitted to himself.

  If he mused on these things as he ate his very late breakfast, he was as single-minded as he had ever been once he left the house. Motoring through the quiet lanes to pick up Bert Hook, he scarcely noticed even the beauty of the frost-edged trees. His brain had room for nothing but this disturbing case which so obstinately refused to give up its secrets.

  Bert’s house had not emptied. His two boisterous boys overflowed its small modern confines exuberantly, but they were indubitably still in residence. One of them was lovingly inspecting the tyres of a gleaming Christmas bicycle; his smaller brother fenced with plastic sword and shield against a myriad imaginary foes on the driveway between house and fence.

  Bert’s rubicund countenance appeared behind him at the kitchen door. “The sword hasn’t slept in that little blighter’s hand since he unwrapped it!” he said as he eased his bulk into the old Vauxhall. “Though I doubt very much whether he intends to build a new Jerusalem.” He took a last affectionate look at the children, who were more precious because they had come to him when he was approaching forty. Then he said, “Sorry, I’ve been trying to catch up on my Blake assignment since early this morning.”

  He was studying for an Open University degree, much to the secret delight of a superintendent who pretended to be threatened by the development. Lambert scratched up a Blake quotation to keep up his end: ‘When the voices of children are

  heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill.’

  He took a last look at the clamorous boys as they drove away, thinking of his own children and how they had disappeared into women, resolving to enjoy his toddler grandchildren as they moved through childhood.

  “I thought we’d go and have another nose round Woodford,” he said. “Visit that surly Tommy Farr and see if we can prize any more out of him. Allow you to have a go at young Charlie Webb. Probe Colonel and Mrs Davidson a little more. Even go over Arthur Comstock’s story with him. And I want to see if the landlord of the Crown has noticed anything new over the last three days.”

  It all sounded a little desperate, and both of them knew that it was. Sometimes the only option was to go over old ground again, while the team around them spread the net of suspicion further and further. Each of the pair was so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he was startled when the radio crackled and blared into raucous life.

  Even through the distortion, they caught the excitement in Rushton’s voice. “Something’s come up, sir. Are you coming in to the station?”

  They were at a T-junction with the main road. Lambert flicked down his indicator and swung the car abruptly in the opposite direction from the one he had intended ten seconds previously. “We are now, Chris. We’ll be with you in five minutes.”

  Rushton could not control his excitement when they arrived in the CID section. “It looks as though you were right about chummy in the forest, sir! He was an ex-copper.” He might once have been resentful that Lambert and not he had thought of the possibility, but now his instinct to catch a villain rode fiercely over such unworthy considerations.

  They went quickly through to the Murder Room and he passed over the teletext message. One Ian Sharpe had been discharged from the force in Leicester eight years previously, when holding the rank of sergeant. He had been guilty of brutal treatment of prisoners in custody and trying to extract confessions by unlawful means.

  Lambert’s face hardened as he read the phrases and translated the shorthand. A bully, or worse, who had brought his violence to work. The worst kind of bad apple in the force’s barrel. The one in a hundred — Lambert still preferred the statistics of his youth who brought contumely upon his colleagues and justified the hostility of the louts who obstructed their work at every turn. Lambert, although he had long trained himself in impassivity as part of his professional equipment, hated such men. He said in a level voice, “What has he been doing since?”

  Rushton picked up the scrap of paper with the notes he had made during a telephone conversation concluded only minutes earlier. “The people in Leicester kept tabs as long as they were able to. As far as we can gather, he had a period as a mercenary soldier in Africa after he was kicked out of the police. No one seems to have heard of him in the last four years.”

  The three of them were silent with conjecture for a moment. Hook said, reluctantly allowing the possibility, “It might just be that he has genuinely taken to the road in the way he tried to sell to us.”

  They considered the notion; none of them saw that hard, confident man as the dropout who made the typical modern vagrant, but the
y knew enough to be aware of the danger of generalizations. Rushton answered the key question before it was even voiced. “We haven’t found any connection with Peter Barton yet. Except that Barton seems to have worked in a hostel for derelicts in Leicester for a short period before he was actually ordained as an Anglican priest. Sharpe must have been in the police there at that time.”

  Lambert said grimly, “Let’s go and get him.”

  ***

  The forest seemed unnaturally quiet. There was not a breath of air, and the cold was clamped hard upon it.

  No bird sang, and those small mammals who were not in hibernation had more sense than to be active on days like this, when no food was available. And since the death of Peter Barton, most of the dog-walkers and horse-riders had chosen other places for their exercise.

  The CID were not naïve. The law had forced them to release the man who called himself Robertson, but they had put a tail upon him when he left them without volunteering an address. They knew exactly where he had made camp in the woods, and Rushton had a note of it.

  It did not take them long to reach the place. Lambert’s quick march became almost a run in its last stages, so anxious was he to come to grips again with the man they now knew as Ian Sharpe. He was already planning the lines of the vigorous interrogation he intended. Rushton wondered if they should have come here armed; their quarry had a history of violence and he must surely realize now that the game was up.

  They heard nothing and smelt nothing that prepared them for the scene they found. Sharpe had struck camp; his tent was tightly rolled and fastened to the framed rucksack containing his spare clothes and cooking tins. The man himself lay beyond the small paraphernalia of his mysterious life, with his arms and legs thrown wide and spattered with red.

  His head was blown almost completely away.

  19

  A serial killer was at work. The press, not the police, decided that. From the point of view of the CID, this dead time of year between Christmas and New Year is the worst possible time for brutal murders to occur. International wranglings take their only break of the year at this season; Parliament is not in session; even the incessant din of political exchange is blessedly stilled.

  So the tabloids fell upon the forest deaths like famished hounds upon a succulent quarry. They transformed kind Peter Barton into a modern Francis of Assisi, ‘beloved by the birds and animals of the countryside he loved to walk’. The mysterious tramp who had been the second victim became ‘Old Dougie’, a harmless recluse, living at peace with the wild creatures of the forest, until his pastoral idyll was so brutally terminated by a twelve-bore cartridge.

  The police, of course, were baffled, anxious, or looking desperately for any kind of lead, as tradition again demanded. As the inquiry’s net spread wider and more and more men had leave cancelled to join the inquiry, the papers began to talk of police complacency in the face of the danger to innocent citizens.

  The columns told of woods eerily deserted, of villages blanketed in fear, where every family locked its doors at dusk and the elderly were too fearful to venture forth at all. Pictures of parents collecting their children from Christmas parties were used as illustrations of the terror gripping the heart of every mother in the Forest of Fear.

  Once the crime reporters had decided a maniac was in the woods, they had to give him a name. An animal was favourite, but most of the best ones —the panthers and the leopards —had already been used for previous psychopaths. There were badger setts in plenty around the places where the victims had fallen, but the badger has an appearance and a folk-tale history which is too unthreatening for the purpose. The beast of the woods became The Fox of the Forest: within three days of its first, tentative appearance all the nationals had adopted the name.

  It had not the fierce, flesh-tearing associations of more exotic foreign predators, but at least the ideas of random wanton killing, of carnage spread ruthlessly merely for the pleasure it afforded the killer, could now be exploited.

  And foxes, of course, were cunning; everyone knew that. As the days drifted by, the headlines became more scornful about PC Plod and the way The Fox was so much more subtle, ingenious and successful than those engaged in his pursuit. Soon, if he was not unmasked, the killer would acquire the charnel-house glamour of the mass murderer. And sick young men in different parts of the country would begin books of cuttings about his progress.

  Lambert had been through it before. He was irritated and sometimes more than that, but he had to pretend to the team he led that he was unruffled, that the kind of publicity their work was getting was no more than a routine accompaniment to murder. He spoke to journalists at a press conference on New Year’s Eve — television had for the moment left the murders alone, except for a routine report and a few pictures of the area. Presumably camera crews like many others had used holiday allocations to bridge Christmas and New Year into a ten-day break.

  He fed the reporters enough detail of the vigour with which the case was being investigated, of the murder, of officers engaged and the number of people being questioned about their movements, to allay rumours of police complacency, but even as he spoke he could see that the hardened men in front of him were not interested in such detail They had already published their routine pictures of men fanning out in a ground-search for evidence around the place where Robertson had fallen, and they were not here to act as public relations officers for the police.

  Lambert said rather desperately that he was not yet convinced they were dealing with a maniac. It might be difficult to see reasons for the killing of the Reverend Peter Barton, but the CID thought the second killing was clearly motivated. But when he refused to be drawn on what the motive was, or to release any detail of the direction their inquiries were taking, he could feel the cynicism abroad in the room. He pointed out a little desperately that two killings scarcely constituted a series. Then he offered the thought that he had not yet ruled out the possibility of a woman as killer, either directly or as an agent.

  But the gentlemen of the press — there were no ladies yet to leaven this male monopoly — refused to take the carrot. Sex was always an attractive angle, but the whiff of it which Lambert had offered them was too faint to divert them from the beast they had created. The Fox held sway still in their columns, moving quietly about the forest, patiently awaiting the chance to savage his next innocent victim in what they were now pleased to call the valley of fear.

  ***

  When the pressmen had disappeared, Lambert journeyed thirty miles to a suburb of Bristol to interview Clare Barton’s lover. He took DI Rushton with him; Bert Hook was on a four-day break in Cornwall between his Open University courses. Lambert, knowing the University year began in January and that Bert had not been away from home for two years, was reluctant to recall him. He was scarcely prepared to acknowledge to himself the memory of those years long ago when his own marriage had nearly foundered on the rocks of his commitment to his work before all else. Bert Hook was a different, in some ways a sounder, man. But there was no need to test how far his wife could take the strain.

  Michael Crawley met them in his office at a deserted factory, at his own request. “We’ve closed down until January 2nd,” he said. “It’s not worth running the machinery, you see, for what we could produce with a skeleton staff.” His nervousness, like that of many others before him, took refuge in irrelevant explanations, and for a moment or two they let it run its course without comment.

  Crawley stood and looked down into the car park, with its sixty spaces marked off by stark white lines. Only his own Jaguar and Lambert’s old Vauxhall were there today: the bleak expanses of tarmac made him feel very lonely. He said, “I’m sure I could rustle up some coffee and biscuits, if you could give me a few minutes.” He looked uncertainly towards the deserted outer office; like many male executives, he was helpless in a working environment without his secretary.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Lambert. His sternness made it sound as though C
rawley had offered an improper suggestion. He looked round the office, and was pleased to find it so characterless: that suited his purpose. It had a swivel chair behind the broad teak-topped desk, two armchairs where the detectives now disposed themselves, an empty wastepaper basket, a small cupboard by the single window which probably contained drinks for those deemed to merit them. The only picture on the wall was a print of the ramshackle shed which had been the firm’s original works.

  This office was not so very different from the interview room where Rushton and he had spent many an hour of interrogation. It was bigger, admittedly, and sumptuously carpeted. And it had not the stark grey-green walls which induced useful feelings of claustrophobia, even panic, in those assisting police with their inquiries. But the room was almost as characterless as those small cubicles which were deliberately devised to be so.

  They pulled the armchairs close to the desk, so that although Crawley in his swivel chair sat slightly above them, their faces were not far from his. From behind them, the wan sunlight of late December fell upon the anxious features of the man they had come here to question.

  Crawley said, “My wife thinks I’ve come in here today to attend to business matters. It won’t be necessary for her to know anything about our meeting, will it?”

  Rushton said, “We can give you no guarantees, Mr Crawley.”

  “But I understood —”

  “Then you understood wrong. This is a murder inquiry.” His voice cut like a whip across Crawley’s uncertainty. He had smelled fear on the man, and fear was weakness. And weakness was there to be exploited. Lambert, recognizing the situation, decided to give the younger man his head. Good CID men were always intelligent opportunists. He saw some of himself in Rushton now, even if he did not much like it.