Foxe and the Path into Darkness

by William Savage

  ‘What can you tell me about Mayor Belton?’ Foxe asked. ‘I don’t know the man.’

  ‘Quite a lot, but at another time. I’m in too much of a hurry now. In summary, a fool; someone full of his own ideas and unwilling to discuss them with anybody else. I used to think he was lazy, as well as being something of a nonentity, but becoming mayor seems to have produced quite a change in him. Now he’s full of ideas, nearly all of them impractical if not actually dangerous. Since he is unwilling to listen to anybody else, no one can advise him on how to adapt them to be more acceptable. He entered into office apparently thinking the mayor was all-powerful and able to do as he wished. The other aldermen soon made it clear to him that this was not the case, mostly illegal and certainly not acceptable. After that, he made a few half-hearted attempts to win the others over, but his efforts were so maladroit that they often made things worse. Recently, he had retreated into himself and begun sulking. He’s changed from being a mayor who was too eager to do things into one who wishes to do nothing at all.’

  ‘Has he enemies? Most politicians have.’

  ‘I don’t think so. To have enemies, you need to be worth opposing. I think the general view of Belton before he became mayor was that he was a nonentity. Had he remained such, he would have done little harm and we would all be rid of him after a year. When he proved that view to be wrong, most of us decided to wait for better days and block him from doing anything foolish in the meantime.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s been kidnapped. Any demand for a ransom?’

  ‘No. Nothing as yet.’

  At that point, Foxe realised that Miss Lucy was still seated in her chair, keeping very quiet while listening avidly to all that was being said. He managed to catch her eye and nod slightly to indicate that he would not give her away. Once her uncle realised she was still present, he would undoubtedly send her from the room. In response, she mouthed a single word in his direction: “Business”.

  At least someone has some notion of what needs to be asked, Foxe told himself. Her mind is clear, it appears, even if mine is still barely functioning. What on earth has happened to me? I’ve never felt like this before.

  ‘What about the man’s business dealings?’ Foxe asked, grasping Miss Lucy’s suggestion at once. ‘Any problems you know of? I assume he’s a merchant, as most of you are. What does he do?’

  ‘He’s a master weaver and cloth merchant. His business, Belton’s Worsteds, was founded by his father and built up a reputation for producing worsted cloth of the very highest quality. Not in large amounts though. Belton’s father left that to others and concentrated instead on fine cloth enriched with complex patterns and rich colours. To do that took constant attention and a willingness to spend lavishly on raw materials. The son, Robert, our current mayor, has stuck rigidly to the mode of business he inherited. Belton’s will only purchase yarn of the highest quality, much of it containing a proportion of silk. Once they have the yarn, they send it only to certain dyers whom they know produce the richest colours. Their weavers are the best in the city and the business pays them accordingly. The result is cloth of a wonderful lustre, texture and fineness of weave, cloth that costs nearly double the amount asked for the purchase of normal Norfolk worsted. I believe they sell it via a small number of London dealers who are known and trusted by the kind of dressmakers whose list of customers include only those of considerable wealth and the most refined taste. You’d summarise Belton’s approach as preferring high profits to large sales.’

  ‘But no problems you know about? No embezzlement or the like?’

  ‘None that anyone has heard of so far,’ Halloran said. ‘These are difficult times for those of us in the cloth trade but most people would judge the mayor’s business to be one of the least affected by competition from the new, mechanised mills in Yorkshire, or the cotton fabrics being made in Lancashire. The output from such places will be much cheaper than Belton’s but quite unable to approach it in terms of quality.’

  ‘What about business enemies or rivals?’

  Halloran paused to consider this idea.

  ‘No ...’ he said eventually. ‘To be honest I can’t imagine why any should exist and I definitely don’t know of any. Belton’s is, in many ways, like its owner. It’s medium-sized, conservative, careful and unexciting. The son hasn’t sought to steal markets from anyone, hasn’t undercut anyone else’s prices, hasn’t even tried to grow his own business. It’s as if time has stood still since his father passed away. None of that is a likely way to make business enemies.’

  ‘Might any other firm have tried to buy it and been turned down recently?’

  ‘Why would they? It’s stable—as far as I know—and probably makes a modest profit, but it hasn’t had a new design or any new ideas since Robert Belton took over. If they wanted to, any of the larger weaving businesses could probably drive it out of business in a matter of months. They don’t because there would be no particular benefit in taking the trouble to do so.’

  ‘You aren’t giving me much in the way of directions to follow,’ Foxe said ruefully. He snatched another look at Miss Lucy in the hope of new inspiration. “Gambling” she mouthed. “Women. Expensive mistresses”. A lift of one eyebrow added an unreadable comment to the last phrase. Foxe felt his face blushing.

  ‘Do you know whether he had expensive habits, Halloran?’ Foxe asked. ‘Women? An expensive and demanding mistress could have pressed him hard to give her all that she wanted. Then there’s gambling, of course. That’s a good way to hurry down the road to bankruptcy. He wouldn’t be the first man to run away rather than pay his debts and the public shame and derision that would arise from welching on them.’

  The alderman stared at Foxe for a long moment, incredulity plain in his face. Then he burst out laughing.

  ‘Imagining Robert Belton in the company of dissolute rakes gambling for high stakes, is like calling up an image of the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding at a Witches’ Sabbath,’ he managed to blurt out at last. ‘Certainly not gambling. He was far too cautious as well as being too boringly respectable. Expensive mistresses? I doubt it very much, but I suspect you know more about that kind of thing than I do. How can I explain it you? For years the man appeared to be a timid, boring grey mouse, about as attractive to a glamorous woman as bad teeth or a dose of the clap. Only when he became mayor did the man change. Why, I have no idea. He simply went overnight from being dull and inoffensive to offending almost everyone and trying to force his own wild notions on our city.’

  ‘And no inkling of why this change occurred?’

  ‘None. Look, Foxe, I’ve told you all I can. Now I really must get back to the guildhall and you’d best get on with finding the mayor. That must be your first priority.’ He walked over to the bell-pull and summoned a footman. ‘Barnes. Fetch Mr Foxe his coat and hat. He’ll be waiting in the hall.’ Then, without looking round, which was fortunate or he could hardly have missed Miss Lucy sitting still and upright in the chair, ‘I saw you have your carriage, Foxe. Give me a moment to reassure my wife that the world isn’t coming to an end and I’ll walk outside with you. If you don’t mind, I’d be very grateful if you could take me back to the guildhall on your way home.’

  Foxe had very much wanted to try to catch another word with Miss Lucy, if only to thank her for her help, but he could hardly refuse this request. Besides, the footman was already waiting outside the library door with Foxe’s coat and hat. It might even be for the best anyway. He’d only be tempted to burst into pleas for forgiveness, which might very well do more harm than good. The best he could manage was a brief glance back at the chair in the hope of exchanging a smile but Miss Lucy appeared to be wrapped in thought and he could not catch her eye.

  What Lucy was thinking would certainly have surprised Foxe, if he had possessed the ability to read her mind. Her thoughts were all of him and the way he had reacted to her, but they produced feelings of confusion, even fear, rather than pleasure. Naturally, she couldn’t help feelin
g gratified by the effect she had produced on one of Norwich’s best-known connoisseurs of feminine beauty. However, the way he had looked at her once or twice—as if he could gobble her up whole—left her feeling unnerved. She might be a grown woman physically but she was still the same underneath as she had always been, confident in her ability and strength of character, but very unsure of how to deal with such an obvious display of desire as Mr Foxe had shown.

  It was this confusion, mixed with fear, which had made her behave towards him so coldly. Given time and suitable encouragement she would forgive his neglect of her while she was in France. She knew that for certain. What she would find far harder to pardon would be any signs that his regard was now based only on her beauty, her fashionable clothes and the poise she had worked so hard to achieve.

  She didn’t want a Mr Foxe fixated on her looks. She wanted the old Mr Foxe, the one she had known before. The one who had always singled her out for particular attention, and the one who brought her gifts no one else would have imagined would please her as much as they did. The Mr Foxe she could chafe and who would reply in kind. The kind, considerate, amusing and warm-hearted Mr Foxe with a special twinkle in his eye just for her. It would be a tragedy if that Mr Foxe had been lost forever, because of the fashionable polish she had so painfully acquired in Paris.

  With that unsettling thought, Lucy returned to her dressing room and the book on the movement of the planets and other heavenly bodies that she had set down when she heard the commotion in the hallway below.

  The problem of Mr Foxe would have to wait.

  4

  While Foxe was tormenting himself with thoughts of his own stupidity, Alderman Halloran at least was busy. First, he attended a meeting of all the aldermen, together with the most senior members of the Common Council. They decided to ask a group of three senior aldermen to take over the mayor’s duty, in rotation, until such time as he reappeared. They also appointed a second group to act as a sub-committee, charged with making every effort to track down the errant mayor and discover his intentions for the future. Was he abandoning his post or was he the victim of violence or kidnapping? Until things were clearer, future action seemed impossible.

  The meeting ended with Halloran being asked to act as the convenor of the sub-committee and its point of contact with Foxe, who would, by now, be thoroughly involved in his investigation into the mayor’s disappearance—or so they imagined.

  That settled, Halloran managed to speak privately with six or seven of the most active and senior aldermen. What he wanted to discover was all they knew about Robert Belton. Maybe, somewhere in their recollections, he might find a signpost to help point Foxe in the right direction.

  It proved to be a disappointing task. Everyone agreed that Belton was totally unsuitable to hold the office of mayor. He had only been chosen because of the long-standing tradition of the post going to the next most senior alderman, who had never been mayor before. Had they had a free choice, he would have been last on their list of potential candidates.

  ‘Why do you think him so unsuitable?’ Halloran asked each one.

  ‘At the start,’ one replied, ‘I considered he had neither the energy nor the good sense for the task. Of course, he soon proved me wrong about his energy. The trouble was that it was directed in the wrong ways. He came up with idea after idea for change, each one as impracticable as the last. At least that proved I was right about his lack of sense and judgement, so I was partly correct in my initial assessment of the man.’

  ‘His thoughts on changes for the city weren’t all bad,’ another suggested. ‘One or two might well have proved beneficial, if he had only gone about introducing them in the right way. He seemed to see the office of mayor as giving him a free hand to do whatever he wished, without either consulting or persuading anyone to support him. How he could have got such an idea I cannot tell. He had served under several mayors before and none of them had acted in such a way.’

  ‘We should have taken more notice of his business before appointing him as an alderman,’ the third complained. ‘He inherited a perfectly sound purveyor of fine Norwich stuffs and slowly let it decay. Of recent years, it has been producing nothing but old-fashioned designs that must have become increasingly difficult to sell. That should have warned us that he lacked common sense, enterprise and determination. I gather that, every so often, he would come up with some wild idea to revive the fortunes of Belton’s Worsteds, only to see it fail within weeks or months, as all had done before. The man’s a menace.’

  As he walked home late that afternoon, Halloran reflected sadly that what few things he had learned amounted to little more than he knew already. Hopefully, Foxe had discovered more than he had by now.

  On settling into his favourite chair in his library to relax before dinner, he was surprised when Lucy came in, eager to discover more about Mayor Belton’s disappearance.

  ‘There isn’t much more to tell you,’ he said to her. ‘The simple fact is that Belton has always been something of an enigma. On the surface he seemed dull and conventional to the extreme, always voting with what looked to be the winning side in any argument and hardly ever expressing his own opinion on whatever topic was under discussion. The moment he became mayor, something came over him that changed him totally. He became aggressive and dictatorial in his manner and possessed of more crazy ideas than a dog has fleas. To say that the office went to his head is literally true. It is as if he became maddened by what he saw as the chance to stamp his personal mark on this city.’

  ‘Then he disappeared without a trace,’ Lucy said, ‘and his chief clerk along with him.’

  ‘I’d forgotten about the clerk,’ her uncle said. ‘Of course, we don’t know the two disappearances are linked simply because they happened at about the same time.’

  ‘What was the clerk like, Uncle?’

  ‘You know, I have no idea. No one at the guildhall has even mentioned him throughout this day’s business. Do you think discovering more about him might be important?’

  ‘It might,’ Lucy replied. ‘Then again, the clerk may be irrelevant to the mayor’s disappearance.’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Foxe will find out all about him. He’s remarkably thorough, you know, as well as being as quick and cunning as his animal namesake. Still, I’ll maybe mention the clerk to him when I see him next.’

  It seemed as if that topic was exhausted but Lucy made no move to leave her uncle in peace.

  ‘While I was away in France,’ she began, ‘what was Mr Foxe doing?’

  ‘Doing? What he usually does. He solved two quite mysterious murders and rounded up a gang of counterfeiters.’

  ‘Tell me about them,’ Lucy asked. ‘You know I love a good mystery.’

  ‘You’d best ask Mr Foxe himself,’ her uncle said. ‘That is if he’s forgiven you for being so rude to him.’

  ‘I was not rude,’ Lucy cried angrily. ‘I simply asked him a question in a forceful way, mostly because he seemed lost in some kind of dream.’

  ‘That’s not how your aunt explained it to me. She said you were cold and imperious. You quite embarrassed her. It won’t do, Lucy. Mr Foxe is an old and highly valued friend. I won’t have him treated in such a way. I thought you liked him.’

  ‘I thought I did too,’ Lucy said sadly, ‘and that he liked me. Then he ignored me completely while I was in Paris.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on him,’ her uncle said sternly. ‘I already told you he was wrapped up in solving two most complex mysteries while you were away. Then there was that unfortunate business with Lady Cockerton.’

  ‘What business?’ Lucy asked at once. ‘Who is Lady Cockerton?’

  ‘From time to time, Foxe has an unfortunate gift for getting involved with a clearly unsuitable woman. I know he has a well-deserved reputation as a ladies’ man but, so far as I know, none of his lady friends have ever complained of his attentions or criticised him in any way. Indeed, a majority of the mothers in Norwich spend a good deal o
f their time trying to find ways to interest him in their marriageable daughters. Mr Foxe is prime husband material you know. He’s rich, kind and handsome. What more could they ask?’

  ‘Let’s get back to Lady Cockerton,’ Lucy said crossly. ‘The plotting of mothers to marry off their daughters is of no interest to me.’

  ‘Lady Cockerton,’ her uncle said. ‘What can I tell you? Foxe squired her around for a while, though it was plain she wasn’t his type. Beautiful, yes. Very beautiful. But also demanding and with something of a reputation for using people. She was supposed to have a husband somewhere but he never appeared, and she acted as if she was single.’

  ‘What is Mr Foxe’s type?’

  ‘Foxe likes beautiful women, there’s no doubt of that. But I would guess he wants much more than that. Take Gracie Catt. She was much more his type than Lady Cockerton. Came from a good family but pursued her own ideas regardless, even to the extent of choosing a most unsuitable way of earning a living. Unconventional, then, and independent. But also very intelligent, I believe, and confident in herself. She was definitely Foxe’s type. You know he took her and her sister, the comic actress, to the Mayor’s Ball one year. Caused quite a stir.’

  ‘I had heard about that,’ Lucy said, ‘but to get back to Lady Cockerton. Is Mr Foxe still involved with her?’

  ‘She’s gone abroad, I believe. Treated Foxe very badly at the end, according to the gossip. Maybe that’s why he seems so wary of women at present. Been hurt too badly. Won’t last, of course. But why this sudden interest in Mr Foxe’s activities?’

  ‘Just curiosity,’ Lucy said airily. ‘Nothing more.’

  DESPITE THE ALDERMAN’S injunction to “get on” with finding the mayor and making it his “first priority”, Foxe hadn’t given the problem of Mayor Robert Belton’s disappearance a single moment’s thought that day.