The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  And it was here that Alice suddenly drew her little automatic from her velvet bodice, before levelling it at her husband’s back.

  ‘Don’t look round,’ she warned him. ‘Just go on walking.’

  Arthur was unaware of what had happened. Then he half-turned, saw the gun. She prodded the weapon into his back.

  ‘Go on!’ she said, like a cattle-drover. ‘Out the front, then left. Round to the back.’

  Clare was excited by this turn of events in our living theatre. I wasn’t. I had no idea of the script. Clare said ‘Good!’ in a considered voice, like a circumspect judge at a flower show. Then she repeated the commendation. ‘Good! Good!’

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see.’ Alice didn’t look at me, concentrating on her work.

  We walked out of the porch, down the wide front steps of the house and into the warm still airs that had come up with the night, no more than a strolling family group, it would have seemed – to the few people, chauffeurs and others, who were grouped around the cars parked everywhere about us, on the drive and over the lawn surround that gave out onto the dim parkland beyond. Our feet crunched on the crisp white gravel that lay faintly all about us, like a thin fall of snow in the half-light, and Alice trod the pebbles lightly, gun in hand, like an avenging angel in her long white Queen of Beauty costume, intent on retribution, pushing her husband forwards into the darkness.

  ‘I don’t know where you think this can get you, Alice,’ Arthur spoke lugubriously, as if he had quite lost interest in everything.

  ‘It’s getting you somewhere. Not me.’ Alice replied with tart efficiency. ‘I’ve really had too much of you interfering in my life. This is my life, my house. Not yours.’

  ‘I gave it you, though: your life and this house. You forget that. I thought this house, for example, when I bought it for you …’ Arthur hesitated and there seemed a touch of genuine sadness and regret in his voice when he spoke again. ‘I thought it might … cure you? If that was ever possible. All this Victorian craziness, that and all the other madness. Yes, a cure, if that was possible. Improve you at least.’

  ‘Improve me?’ Alice was angry again. ‘Like some reform school? But you’re my madness, you know that. Not me. You – with your … Well, every single stupid thing: possessiveness, meanness, bad temper, your ugliness. Was I to have nothing then before I got this house? Just a toy of yours? Cooped up like a –’ she couldn’t find the word, ‘like some fancy cake decoration, running your gracious social life out in the Hamptons or the Drake Hotel in Chicago or your New York apartment: just decorating your life, while the others worked. You gave them a life. But you took mine. You gave them everything that mattered. While I had to fight beyond fighting – that was my madness – just to get this house, to get away from you.’

  I couldn’t follow this conversation at all. Who were these ‘others’? I assumed Arthur must have been married before and these ‘others’ were earlier children of his. We had walked right round the house by now and were coming up the covered laurel path, the old tradesmen’s entrance, where the branches arched overhead, blocking out almost all the light which came from the few lighted windows above us.

  ‘I told you when we spoke last time here three months ago.’ Arthur’s voice was faint, absorbed by the thick foliage above him. But the righteous anger in it was still clear enough. ‘I told you that you’d never make it here on your own. Go from bad to worse; dressed up in all these circus outfits, playing Red Indians or a bit-part from Camelot, living in the past – some damfool golden age of yours, with all those old crocks and platters, those cockamamie Victorian things. And I was right, by God. Now you’ve got yourself hitched to a killer. But if you give me that gun, maybe we can still get you out of it.’

  ‘This man has already got me out of it. I am out of it. Free and sane. And you’re not going to put me back – anywhere. I’m going to put you away this time.’ Alice spoke with the relish of a child now, winning at last in some long-running nursery antagonism. I was holding Clare’s hand tightly, walking along behind, more than uneasy. ‘But what can you do?’ I asked Alice. ‘Mrs Pringle knows everything. She’s probably called the police already.’

  ‘She has,’ Arthur intoned ahead of us.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Alice said brightly, firmly.

  We’d come through the big stone gateway into the yard where the light from the tall back windows more clearly illuminated the enclosed space around us. We heard the trumpets spilling out from the great hall in front, some merry dance.

  Alice was just ahead of me, Clare right behind, pushing forward, anxious not to miss the least development in this midnight charade.

  ‘We’ll lock him in here for the moment,’ Alice said, gesturing towards the old laundry, where the door was already half-open, blackness beyond. A moment later she had pushed her husband into the darkness and promptly locked the door on him, turning the heavy Victorian key with all the satisfied finality of a hanging judge.

  ‘We’ll find Mrs Pringle now,’ Alice said, ‘and do the same for her – the fat sneak.’ Again, the tone of Alice’s voice was high and childish. And the words, too, I felt, came straight out of some long-ago world of hers, from a childhood battle with her brothers perhaps, or from some Edwardian adventure book which she had read at the time, embarking even then on her golden age: a world of chivalry and derring-do. Alice, with the arrival of Arthur, seemed to have dispensed completely with all her new sanity and returned to a life of myth.

  ‘You mean – put her in with your husband?’ I asked.

  She turned and I could see the startling glints in her eyes, even in the half light. ‘My husband?’ she said incredulously. ‘My father. Yes – he’s my father! Don’t you see?’

  I hadn’t begun to digest this startling information before we heard the first thin scream coming from the old laundry a few yards behind us, more squeak than scream, like a rat’s first complaint in a trap. But it was Arthur’s voice, I realised, first this startled little whine, but suddenly rising then like some untuned wind instrument going wild until it reached the high strident pitch of a steam whistle. Then the shriek stopped, cut off in its prime only to start up again a few seconds later. But now the pitch was much lower, intermittent, as if someone was playing violently on an already broken instrument, punishing it, destroying it. There were scuffles after that and the sounds of heavy things falling about and being dragged along the floor inside. It was just as if Alice had unwittingly pushed the man into a cage where some wild animal had torn him to pieces and was now quietly devouring him.

  We ran back. I turned the key and opened the door.

  ‘There’s no electricity here!’ Alice called out as we both tried to push our way through the door at the same time. ‘Just an oil lamp on the shelf, to the side there.’ I cursed Alice’s meticulous Victorian re-creations then. But I found the lamp almost at once, on a shelf next the diamond glassed windows, and lit it.

  The old laundry was a longish, fairly narrow room, with the big copper boiler to the right, set slightly out from the wall, wooden draining-boards behind that and the huge Victorian linen-press running down the other side, its big wheel, handle and chain – which pulled the great coffin-like weight along the wooden rollers beneath – just visible in the dim light. But I could see nothing amiss anywhere. The room appeared quite empty, like a cave with its arched ceiling and heavy chocolate-brown paint, a cave or a freshly opened tomb filled with mysterious utensils, patent Victorian devices, strange grave gifts from a long-vanished civilisation which loomed up now, taking even stranger shape in the flickering shadows cast by the lamp.

  Then, moving towards the boiler, I saw a single smart brogue shoe sticking up in the lamplight, over the rim of the cauldron. Arthur was slumped inside, lying like a banana, curved out round the bottom, his head rising up the other slope. His business suit still clung to him neatly like something dumped in a laundry bin before its time. But Arthur’s head had gone all a
stray. It was badly twisted, turned ninety degrees to the side, so that while he gazed straight over one shoulder, the rest of his body faced resolutely forward. It was as if his head had been a bottle-top which someone had wrenched open far too violently. He was dead. Yet he could hardly have killed himself in such a manner, I thought.

  I lifted the lamp, searching out the other shadowy distances and corners in the room, looking for someone else. And as I did so, the wavering oil flames illuminating the spaces beyond, I saw the African – just for an instant – crouching beneath the draining board. It was certainly him. I saw the camouflage jacket, the long thin face a golden mahogany now in the lamplight, the ridges of scar tissue to one side, the eyes deeply inset, intent, vicious – exactly those of a trapped animal about to spring.

  And in the next instant he did so, releasing himself like a sprinter from his blocks, rushing towards me. Yet it wasn’t me that he wanted. Clare, curious as ever, had come right into the room behind me, and in the darkness I hadn’t noticed her. But the African had, and he grabbed her now before I could do anything to stop him.

  Then, putting the lamp aside, the three of us were on the floor, struggling beside the boiler, with Alice standing helplessly above us, flourishing the gun. But she could do nothing with it.

  ‘Don’t!’ I managed to shout up to her, as I tried to pin the African down. And she didn’t. The man, holding Clare with one hand, could only fight me with the other – while fear and vast anger gave me a second small advantage. Yes, just as I had when I’d shot Ross’s dog in the valley and battered the lamb to death afterwards, I found a fierce strength then, a strange, vicious physical supremacy. I had the African by the neck, with two hands round his sinewy throat. I think I would have squeezed the life out of him, as we twisted and turned, if he had not decided to cut his losses and struggle free. He pushed me away, his fingers driving fiercely up into my nostrils so that the pain became unbearable. Then he was on his feet, dragging Clare with him into the dark recesses of the room.

  I picked up the lamp again. Alice had come right next to me now and together we stared into the gloom. Clare was crying. I could hear her, somewhere in the darkness ahead of me. I handed Alice the lamp.

  ‘Here! Hold it – up high – and follow me.’

  I took the automatic from her and walked forward. We saw the African then as we both moved to the end of the room. With his back to the wall he was holding Clare, like a shield, high up, right in front of his chest, so that she covered almost all his torso. I couldn’t use the gun. I noticed how near he was to the end of the great oak linen press, the half-ton wooden coffin filled with stone, which faced his thighs and midriff, while he held Clare at a level above it. He obviously had no idea what the machine was for, or how its great weight could be made to slide towards him. Yet I couldn’t use it against him in this manner unless I was sure that, while I did so, he would keep Clare out of the way.

  He answered the problem for me. Since Alice and I were now to one side of him and thus only the press blocked his escape towards the door, he let Clare go and stepped up onto it, before starting to walk over the top of the machine.

  I had my chance then. I rushed for the handle as he towered above us. Grasping it with both hands I turned it viciously, so that the great box began to move, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing momentum.

  The African, feeling the machine slide beneath him, lost balance, stumbled, righted himself – and then as the rollers began to spin faster, he found himself walking a treadmill, a journey he couldn’t sustain, being pushed back inexorably on the great box towards the wall. He panicked then, jumping off the moving press as it sped towards the wall, springing off the end of it, as from a diving board.

  But the great weighted box was running like a battering-ram now, the handle at the side spinning round unaided. The African, landing on the flagstones, was immediately caught in the gap between the end of the press and the wall. And when the vice closed on him, it went on closing, without resistance, ramming into his back, first gathering all his bones together in a fierce grip, before squeezing them brutally like a car in a metal-compacter, driving the breath out of him. In the end he had no wind left to scream and all we heard were his ribs cracking, the vertebrae in his neck breaking, so that his head, now the only part of his body above the level of the butt end of the press, nodded first and then keeled over suddenly, unanchored now, like a dark fruit released from its branch.

  I stood there horrified for several seconds. The man seemed to have been dispatched by some elemental force, a fly crushed on a windowpane. Yet I, in fact, had dispatched him – and I was horrified at the result: this death’s-head now caught in the flaring oil light, lying on its side at the end of the press, as after some violent beheading.

  Nor was this the only madness of the evening. There was Arthur lying behind me. Arthur: husband or father? And it suddenly seemed to me more than likely, given his age and that touch of the old mid-West in his voice, that this man was her father, the rough tycoon and Chicago meat-baron, Arthur Troy, creator of the family fortunes. And I saw then how Alice had gained no sanity with me at all in the past months. She had come to tell the truth perhaps, here and there. But she had lied all the time about the real things. She had never been married to any New York attorney, never had a son by a previous marriage. There had never been the ‘real thing’ for Alice, and all this reality she had told me about was sheer invention, fictional replacements for life, dreams of living.

  Long ago, something must have led her to think of this man, whom latterly she had come to despise, as her husband. Long ago, for some agonising reason, she had turned her father into a husband: and so, before this present hatred, she must have loved him once. Loved him to distraction? Perhaps. It was certainly madness. Anyway, father or father-figure – it hardly mattered any more. She had destroyed them both.

  Clare was quite unhurt when I picked her up, while the trumpets from the great hall, with the attendant hum of excited talk and laughter, had obviously prevented anyone in the house from hearing our battles down in the old laundry. The yard was still empty when we looked outside.

  Alice had regained most of her icy control, at least, if not her sanity. She took her little automatic back, then locked the door on the two corpses with nerveless competence, hiding the key.

  ‘That’s that,’ she said easily, as though completing some tiresome shopping expedition. ‘They won’t find them in there for quite a while.’

  I was angry suddenly at what I felt to be her sheer callousness in the matter.

  ‘My God, Alice, you just told me he was your father. You can’t leave him in there like that. Is he your father?’

  ‘We’ve not the time,’ she called back tartly over her shoulder. ‘And yes, he is.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She didn’t reply. I was carrying Clare in my arms, as we threaded our way between the parked cars towards the kitchen entrance to the house.

  ‘No time?’ I whispered back angrily. ‘No time? For your father?’

  ‘Later. Afterwards!’ She dismissed her father as curtly in death as she had in life. ‘We need Mrs Pringle now,’ she went on.

  Suddenly, longing to be away from all this mayhem, I said, ‘She must have told the police already. Why don’t Clare and I just try and make a run for it now – in your car?’

  Alice stopped in her tracks. ‘No. I’ll come, too.’

  ‘Why? You’ve done nothing. Let us go alone. We can get to Tewkesbury and wait there.’

  Alice was looking at me closely. I could see her face quite clearly in the light from the big windows above us. And now, just beneath the veneer of calm and control in her expression, I saw a great fear, fear for what we had just done, perhaps, of what we had both witnessed. I’m not sure. But I knew I couldn’t leave her then. She needed my help now as badly as I had needed hers, months back, when she had first surprised me naked in the valley. I couldn’t leave her then, someone I loved – and so
I was perfectly willing to give ourselves up to the police. I was ashamed at my idea of leaving her.

  I said, ‘We’ll stay. Of course we’ll stay. And wait for the police. Mrs Pringle is bound to have called them.’ It seemed an end at last.

  But Alice, her faith renewed by my change of heart, now had other ideas. ‘She may not have told them,’ she said brightly, suddenly decisive again. ‘Let’s find out.’

  We surprised Mrs Pringle a few moments later in the old kitchen as we came through. She was sitting at the long pine table, her back towards us, a huge tin of fancy biscuits open in front of her, nibbling at them furiously, nervously, like a great mouse. Her husband, Arthur’s chauffeur, a small ferret-like creature whom I’d not met before, was with her. They had a bottle of Ruby Port between them – unopened, though. Obviously, knowing my real identity now as a wife-killer, and that I was roaming about somewhere in the house at that very moment, the party mood had not blossomed in either of them. Recognising me, even in my guise as a fierce Albanian, Mr Pringle stood up in some alarm. His wife turned then, a chocolate biscuit stalled halfway into her great jaws.

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ Alice said gently. ‘Go ahead, Anna – it’s hundreds of extra calories, but go right ahead, relax. You needn’t worry at all. It’s all over. My father’s gone out. He’s gone to get the police.’

  Mrs Pringle looked greatly relieved. ‘Oh,’ she said nervously. ‘He … he needn’t have bothered. He asked me to call them myself. We wondered where you –’

  Alice interrupted her graciously. ‘We were just talking together, outside. And now we’ll wait upstairs, I think.’

  She had already begun to shepherd Clare and me forward, through into the main house. The Pringles stood aside, letting us pass without a word. But just as we reached the doorway of the kitchen, Alice suddenly turned back. I never saw her reach for her little automatic – only saw the gun itself as she levelled it at Mrs Pringle: and heard the shots. She could hardly have missed the woman with her great bulk, standing by the kitchen table. And she didn’t. The bullets whipped into her like little darts, puncturing, burying themselves in the meat of her body. Not one bullet, but two, three. I couldn’t stop her, though I tried.