The Fox in the Forest

by Gregson, J. M.

  Now that his army service was over and Molly was growing accustomed to her widowhood, they felt themselves closer than at any time since the days when she had watched over his boyhood from her lofty adolescence: she was the elder by eight years. Certainly the manner of her husband’s sudden, violent death had brought them closer together, the more so as Arthur had also been in the Falklands at the time. Sailors did die in wars, but no one had expected this one.

  They had already arranged their next meeting, which would be at her cosy Yorkshire home when the winter was over. He would be quite sorry to see her go on the morrow and would look forward to Easter. Yet he knew also that he would be relieved to have his cottage back to himself.

  Service habits die hard, and he had got used to his own domestic routine, his own small forms of tidiness. The wife who had left him years ago had seen his neatness as an obsession rather than a virtue, and he saw now that it could be irritating for a woman to live with. But he had come from a home which was always untidy, and the barrack-room rectitude instilled in him as a boy soldier had been a delight to him when it was a burden to others.

  Now, after years of travelling about the world at the Army’s dictate, he appreciated his own home and the opportunity to settle into it. The cottage might belong to Harry Davidson, but it was a permanent home as far as Arthur was concerned. He did not intend to vacate it until it suited him; he had no doubt that that would be many years hence.

  As his sister busied herself in the kitchen, he had to control his urge to follow her about and replace things exactly where he thought they should be. When she caught him re-positioning the teapot, her grimace was a mixture of irritation and affection, but he read it as a warning sign. “I think I’ll just go for a stroll into the village. I’ve been inside all day and I’m not used to it,” he said. “The Colonel usually keeps me pretty busy on normal days.” He used his employer’s rank self-consciously, testing out the idea of his new job on Molly. He had fallen on his feet here all right.

  He went out past the main house now. The Old Vicarage looked picturesque on that Boxing Day afternoon, with its holly wreath on the door and its brightly lit Christmas tree reaching almost to the ceiling of the high old drawing-room. Harry and Rachel Davidson had guests — his brothers and their families, Arthur believed — and there was animated conversation and laughter behind the bay windows of the drawing-room. No sounds emerged through the new double glazing, and the silence gave the scene a macabre touch, like the haunted house scenes Arthur had set moving with his pennies in the amusement arcades of the ‘fifties. There were no curtains drawn as yet, for none but he could observe the movements in the house.

  It was bitter cold as the evening dropped upon the valley; there would be hard frost as usual around the turn of the year. From the gates of the Old Vicarage, Arthur took a last look back at the glittering cameo in the drawing-room. From a hundred yards away, the small figures looked even more unreal, as though their lives might be switched off at the turn of a switch. He smiled in the dusk, then set off briskly towards the village.

  He was nearing the junction of the lanes by the village shop when he saw the figure coming towards him from the forest. It looked both taller and more sinister with the last of the light behind it, a silhouette which seemed to grow in size and menace as its outlines became more definite and it took on the shape of a man.

  It was within ten yards of him before he recognized it. “It’s you, Tommy!” he called. “Didn’t recognize you in this light.”

  “Nor I you, Arthur boy.” It pleased Tommy Farr to play up his Welshness when the whim took him. He watched the Doberman come loping up from behind at the sound of Comstock’s greeting, knowing the dog would not harm Arthur, enjoying the moment of apprehension he noticed in the man as the dark shape materialized from the hedge and moved to his side.

  It was characteristic of Farr to defy the small conventions of village life. Since the murder of their vicar three days earlier, no one in the village had cared to be seen abroad with a shotgun. Tommy carried his negligently now across his shoulder, though in fact he had not used it during his brisk walk along the edges of the forest. Kelly was not a gun-dog, and he rarely discharged the weapon when the dog was around.

  Nevertheless, in view of what had happened, it would not do for people to get the idea that he owned a shotgun he did not use for legitimate purposes. Although he would never have acknowledged it, least of all to himself, Tommy Farr had the beginnings of that troublesome paranoia which sometimes besets men who live along and fancy themselves to be at the centre of community gossip.

  Arthur, confident now that he would not be savaged, fondled the dog’s soft head and spoke gently to it in the darkness. Tommy, watching the two of them indulgently, recognized with a shaft of insight that was both ridiculous and disturbing that he and Comstock should have been fathers. There was a lot of talk about women deprived of children, but no one ever gave much attention to men and the brutalizing effect that deprivation might have upon them.

  The two fell into step and moved past Farr’s shop. Comstock called at the village shop for small purchases, no more than once a week. The two men did not meet regularly, or for very long. Yet the bond of their bachelor status, in a village dominated by the family and its periodic births and bereavements, was stronger than either of them cared to acknowledge. Both of them had had wives, and each of them had unburdened himself to the other about the circumstances of the departures of those wives, revelations they had denied to anyone else in this small, tight community.

  That knowledge united them in a half-humorous alliance against the intrusions of the villagers into the lives they had worked out for themselves. There was an unspoken assumption that women in particular needed to be kept at bay, that the less they were told about life in general and emotions in particular the better. It was a vague, often jocular stance, which they had never troubled to define, because their understanding meant they never had to do so. Perhaps it enabled them to give an element of drama to attentions which were no more than friendly and sympathetic.

  They walked to the Crown, without needing any agreement that they were going for a pint. The pub had only just opened. They moved to the table they had used before in the alcove between the inglenook and the small window. They sipped Welsh bitter appreciatively, interspersed terse dialogue with untroubled silences, and impressed the landlord with their air of deep, unhurried collusion.

  Peter Barton’s death overhung all other village discussion still, even on Boxing Day, when many families had visitors from outside. The collecting-box for the famine relief which he had organized as his last act was beside the publican on the bar: he remembered almost guiltily that it was Arthur Comstock who had come in to organize it, only hours before the vicar’s shattered body had been discovered. Kelly had draped himself invisibly behind his master’s heels; the shotgun, gleaming darkly in the low orange illumination of the shaded wall lights behind the two men, seemed more than usually ominous in this context.

  It would not have surprised the landlord to know that the two men were discussing the death which preoccupied his regulars. Tommy Farr said, “The police took in the chap I saw in the forest on the day before the murder. I’m not surprised at that. But I heard from Bill Evans that they’re going to have to let him go. He’s probably out again now.”

  There was a considerable silence, which neither of them felt any need to fill. Bill Evans was the uniformed constable who lived in the village, so the information would be reliable. Then Arthur Comstock said, “He didn’t do it, then.” He had a faith in the efficiency of the police, because he regarded them as the civil counterpart to the Army which had been his life for so long.

  Tommy Farr did not share his respect. “That don’t follow, boy. They have to let him go if they can’t pin it on him, see? If you ask me, they don’t know who done it.” The thought seemed to give him a perverse satisfaction. Comstock looked guiltily round the bar, but there was no one watching them. The
landlord had taken advantage of slack trade to watch the Boxing Day television programmes with his wife: they could hear the sounds of studio laughter through the open door behind the bar.

  Neither of them was a heavy drinker nowadays. Within twenty minutes, they were talking in quiet tones in the deserted car park. Arthur Comstock left Farr at the rear entry to the village stores. As Kelly nosed his way through the gate and up the familiar flagged path, the two men looked automatically towards the dark outline of the woods, scarcely three hundred yards away and clear beneath the first stars of a frosty night.

  They needed no words. Each knew the other was conjecturing upon the presence within that dark mass of the man the police had questioned and released.

  ***

  The man who called himself Robertson was there all right. But no one else went into the forest until the next morning.

  The temperature was still below freezing at ten o’clock when Charlie Webb walked there. He was on holiday, having taken the three days to bridge Christmas and New Year, as most of his fellow workers tried to do. Now he was wondering why. He came on foot, wishing as he had when a boy that he had a dog to run with. He did not know why he was drawn here, for he shivered as the bare twigs closed out the sky above his head, knowing that the cause was not just the bitter cold.

  He had wanted to bring the shotgun with him, but he had left it behind in the shed; he was still disturbed by the way the police had questioned him so closely about it. He had a vague notion of going to look at the spot where Peter Barton had fallen, but now he hesitated, then turned away at the junction of the tracks, so that his route took him away from the scene of the death and along a smaller path, running roughly parallel to the edge of the forest and emerging on the other side of the village.

  His movements were observed with curiosity and wry amusement by Robertson. He watched the slight figure in his bomber jacket and motorcycle gauntlets walking without rhythm down the undulating path. The youth moved as though when deprived of his motorcycle he had no confidence in his movements. Robertson observed him until he was out of sight. Then he went back to his tiny camp in the undergrowth, like a tortoise withdrawing its head after deciding it has seen enough of the world for the moment.

  He did not realize that Charlie Webb had seen him, had registered not only his presence here but its exact location. It was easy to underestimate that slender, uncoordinated figure. But Charlie was a country boy, born and bred round here. He had registered the smell of stale smoke which spoke of an extinguished fire before he turned the bend to follow the track past the place where Robertson had slept and breakfasted. When his youthful peripheral vision picked up the movement which was not quite behind him, he was astute enough not to register it. So the police had let this man go. He was disappointed about that.

  Behind him, the man who used the name of Robertson was also disappointed. Although he knew it was early, he had hoped this might be the walker he awaited. He had made the call under the cover of Boxing Day darkness, and he was confident no one had intercepted it. Secrecy had become a habit with him: he carried it like the other tools of his trade. He hid the radio telephone carefully beneath the brambles, where it had lain safely while he was in the police cell.

  The person he waited for would come: there was no question about that. It was time for a reckoning.

  17

  If Arthur Comstock was secretly glad to have his home back to himself, Rachel Davidson in the Old Vicarage itself was not.

  She saw off her guests from the wide stone steps of the old house. Harry’s brothers had come in their own cars; they drove away now with their wives and children crowding the cars, uttering noisy thanks and valedictory injunctions to visit them in due course. Harry was delivering his two aunts to the station in Gloucester himself, rather than entrusting them to the less personal care of his chauffeur Comstock. He installed them solicitously into the back seat of the car, then watched them take a muted but affectionate farewell of their hostess.

  Rachel watched the Rover until it disappeared between the two high wrought-iron gates, answering the genteel flutterings of the gloved hands with a more vigorous wave of her own. Then she went sadly back through the wide oak door to the silences of the big house.

  Rachel had been brought up in a mansion in Switzerland that was continually full of people. They entertained her father’s business associates on long winter evenings when cut glass glinted in profusion on their big mahogany table. They entertained friends and their numerous relatives on the terrace in the summer, when the scarlet fire of the sunsets over the silver Alps seemed perpetual in her memories of childhood. The winter Cotswold landscape seemed by comparison drab and featureless, the silent expanse of the six-bedroomed Victorian house felt like an airless prison with the windows shut against the end of year cold.

  She stood in the bay window and looked sadly at the leafless borders and grey-green lawns which stretched away in front of the house. The depression which had beset her since the death of Peter Barton surged softly back into the room with the departure of her guests. She had thought herself insulated against death after the awful years of her childhood and early youth, when half her race and the whole of the Austrian side of her family had perished in the holocaust. The postwar years had seemed to bring each week the details of the deaths of relatives who had disappeared years earlier into the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

  Yet the sudden, violent death of the young vicar she had been so concerned to help seemed to bring the disturbing grief of those harrowing years vividly back to her when she thought she had exorcized it. Why had it happened? She asked herself the question anew. She wondered if evil that had no apparent motive was more disturbing to a Jewish woman than to others. Perhaps she should ring young Clare Barton; but she had no confidence yet that she could contain her own emotions, as she must when they met.

  Hearing a movement in the house behind her, she was suddenly conscious of how little she wanted to be alone. She found her maid Mary, whom her husband called a ‘general purpose domestic’ and took her upstairs to begin stripping the beds the guests had occupied. The undemanding rhythms of the work, the folding of the linen and the re-making of the beds, helped to calm her physical restlessness. She asked Mary about her own Christmas in the village and found the girl anxious to talk. Her queries released a torrent of domestic trivia about the girl’s family and their occupations, which ensured that her side of the conversation needed to be little more than a series of promptings.

  It was not enough to still her spinning mind, and when Mary took the sheets off to the washing machine below, she wandered irresolutely from room to room, arriving eventually as she knew she must at the room in the north corner of the house which her husband had converted to a study.

  She scarcely ever came here, not because of any prohibition from her husband — that might well have been counter-productive for one of her temperament — but because her upbringing had included the belief that men needed time and space for their own concerns. These might be trivial, occasionally even ludicrous or risible, but it was better for women not to interfere with them. Rachel would have hotly disputed the principle involved, yet she applied it without even assessing her actions.

  Harry Davidson’s study was indisputably a man’s room. The desk was tidy enough: only two or three letters, held together with a bulldog clip and presumably awaiting replies, broke its smooth, leather-blocked surface. There were school photographs on the wall. The picture of Harry’s passing-out group at Sandhurst looked scarcely more than another of these to the casual glance. There was a picture of a mess dinner night in 1981, when Harry was still a major, with the officers trying to look comfortable in their blues.

  She looked at the pictures with affection, marvelling again at how Englishmen fulfilled the need to create clubs of some kind wherever they went. The Constable and Munnings prints seemed mere afterthoughts, gestures towards the convention of what a study should be. There was nothing from the last
few years of Harry’s service, when he had had his own command at last. And nothing at all from the Falklands. But she did not find that curious: her parents had been at pains to wipe all traces of that earlier and greater conflict from the great house in Switzerland. Harry spoke less of the battle in the South Atlantic nowadays, and she understood his need to be rid of it.

  Her husband was still to some extent an exciting stranger to her. They had married late, when his military career was behind him. Unlike many women, she found tales of life in the regular Army fascinating, an insight into a strange male world which could never be hers, a contact with a warrior psyche which was as foreign to her as though it belonged to a different species. She was secretly disappointed that Harry spoke less and less of the dangers he had endured, even when they were alone. But she understood his need to make a new life here.

  She was amused, and sometimes secretly a little dismayed, by the importance to him of his standing in the local community. Sometimes also usually when she was depressed she felt she still knew very little of the world of men. A split-cane fishing rod, mounted high on the wall above the photographs, was more a remembrance of things past than a modern implement: Harry’s father had been a keen and skilful fly fisherman, but Harry had never really pursued the sport. Apart from the photographs, there were no obviously military memorabilia; the pair of antique pistols mounted on the wall over the fireplace scarcely qualified.

  They were not the weapons that attracted Rachel’s attention. She walked over beyond the desk and studied the two shotguns which stood in the corner of the room. She was a better shot than Harry; better even than Arthur Comstock, who had won Army competitions in his time. Nowadays she never fired at live things.

  The beautifully polished butts of the weapons glowed like antique furniture from the darkness near the floor. They would not be loaded, of course, but she could not bring herself to touch them. She opened the top drawer of the narrow chest beside the shotgun, registering the half-full box of cartridges before she slid it shut. It meant nothing, she knew. Why then did she cudgel her brain energetically and unsuccessfully to remember the last time that Harry had taken the shotgun out with him?