The Fox in the Forest

by Gregson, J. M.

  Rushton said, “He’d been living as a tramp. Do you think he was one, Dr Burgess?”

  The elegant shoulders shrugged beneath the dark worsted. “Who knows what a tramp is nowadays, Inspector? If he was a dropout, though, he was a remarkably fit one. Not much fat on him, despite his powerful, stocky build, and his muscle tissue was in excellent condition. Well above average for a man of his age. What was he? Late thirties?”

  Lambert said, “About that, yes,” and all of them thought wryly of the press’s picture of harmless ‘Old Dougie’ and the white-haired, helpless pensioner they had created as the second victim of The Fox. “He was a steelworker, a long time ago. Then a copper, for a while. After that, we’re not quite sure what. Probably a mercenary soldier, for a little while at least.”

  “A bent copper?” Burgess was delighted to air his knowledge of the vernacular. Lambert gave him a grim little smile.

  “Not in the manner you probably mean, Cyril. He seems to have been prepared to take short cuts to get convictions. To have been too fond of violence for his own or other people’s good. Contrary to popular opinion, that isn’t something we encourage. There wasn’t any evidence of his accepting bribes or other inducements. He was found unsuitable for further service as a police officer, but there was no prosecution.”

  He realized with a spurt of irritation that he was speaking not for Burgess or the meeting at large but for Rushton, proving to his deputy his credentials as a defender of the force. Had the two of them been alone, he would not have felt the need to say these things to Burgess. A little too hurriedly, he said, “Could you tell us about the forensic findings, Mr Johnson?”

  When invited to speak from his own area of expertise, Johnson was suddenly confident. “Shotguns,” he said with distaste, as though he were pronouncing a mild obscenity. “They’re the bane of our lives. Far too anonymous for anyone’s good. Both your men were killed with twelve-bore cartridges, probably fired from about four yards in each instance.” He looked interrogatively at Burgess, who nodded confirmation from his PM findings. “Unfortunately, as you probably know, we cannot pin down a particular weapon from the ammunition used when it’s a shotgun. It’s quite possible we’ve handled your murder weapon in the last day or two, but there’s no way in which we could be sure which gun it was.”

  Hook said, “Is there any chance that you could be certain that it was the same weapon that was used in each case?”

  Johnson shook his head mournfully. “The most we could say is that our findings indicate it would be probable. And you know that ‘probable’ is totally useless in court. The same sort of cartridge was used in both killings. But it’s the commonest type of ammunition, so it doesn’t mean a lot.”

  Rushton said, “Did your examination of the twelve-bores we brought in from the surrounding villages throw up anything that might be useful?” He turned to Burgess to explain, “We collected all the known twelve-bores from the district to see if they would reveal anything, because the murder weapon was not found anywhere during an extensive search of the forest.” Lambert thought with amusement that it sounded like an official press release, but Burgess was delighted as always to be involved in the machinery of an investigation. He retained a schoolboy’s enthusiasm for the processes of detection, despite all his contacts with corpses.

  Johnson said, “We haven’t come up with anything that seems particularly significant. Except…” He searched feverishly through the notes he had said were vital to his operations. “You gave us particulars of the owner’s statements about when the shotguns had last been fired. There was one of your villagers whose account did not seem to tally with what we found when we looked at his twelve-bore in the lab.”

  Lambert said carefully, “Which village?” trying to eliminate optimism and excitement from his voice. This business had been so obstinately retentive of its secrets that he distrusted hope.

  “Woodford.”

  “And which shotgun?”

  Johnson ran his index finger feverishly down the page until he located the name. “The gun from number four, Gladstone Terrace. Owned by a Mr Charles Webb.”

  “Charlie Webb,” breathed Hook softly. He was thinking not of that strange young man, but of his old grandmother, cheerfully mischievous and so obviously fond of her grandson, even as her mind wandered into decline.

  Sam Johnson looked up a little petulantly, as if he did not like being interrupted when he had finally found his place. “According to the statement you collected from Mr Webb, he had not used the shotgun since December 18th. That is several days before the first of the shootings in the forest, that of the Reverend Barton. But our examination indicated that it had been fired within the last day or two before we saw it. It had not been cleaned, you see, so we could test the powder traces. They were quite fresh. Is Webb the sort of chap who would normally be careless about cleaning his shotgun?”

  Hook said quietly, “I wouldn’t know about that. He’s scarcely more than a boy.”

  Rushton said acidly, “That scarcely indicates whether or not he would be careless about cleaning a murder weapon.” He too was searching through his sheets of notes now. He had a much thicker sheaf of them than Johnson, for he had the task of co-ordinating the written reports of the sixty officers now engaged upon the inquiry as they arrived in the murder room. He tried not to reveal his excitement: that would not suit the image of himself he was anxious to create.

  Lambert said with a hint of irritation as he watched this search, “Do you have something to add to what Mr Johnson has said about the gun, Chris?”

  Rushton pulled out the relevant sheet with the relief of a conjuror who has not been quite precise enough with a trick. “It’s a report from the house-to-house team, sir. You remember that we were trying to get the names of anyone who was in the forest on the morning of the murder of Ian Sharpe. This came in last night: a Mrs Baker was in her garden on the edge of the village when she saw Charlie Webb going into the woods. Incidentally, he hadn’t told us that himself, when we questioned him about his movements.”

  “What time was he seen?” Lambert’s voice sounded perfectly calm: he had practised these things for much longer than Rushton.

  “About ten o’clock, the lady says.”

  Lambert looked at Burgess. But now that it had come to it, the pathologist did not care to pin down a suspect with his findings. It was left to the Superintendent to say, “So he was at or near the scene of the murder at exactly the time when you think Ian Sharpe was killed.”

  22

  The council house blue paint on the door within the small porch was in much better condition than the paintwork on the windows. It had been washed down quite recently. That was a surprising thing for a boy of Charlie Webb’s age to think of doing. They remembered the almost obsessive tidiness of his bedroom.

  They had ample time to study the door, for they knocked upon it three times before there was any sound from within the house. Then Granny Webb’s voice called with surprising strength to ask who it was who hammered so vigorously. Most of her visitors, aware of her immobility, were accustomed to walk straight in after knocking.

  Now Hook tried the door, found it unlocked, and opened it a cautious two inches. He called through the gap, “Please don’t be alarmed, Mrs Webb. We’re the police. It’s Superintendent Lambert and Sergeant Hook, come back to see you again!”

  There was an immediate delighted cackle. “It’s the fuzz, Samuel. What yer been up to out there? Under age kittens, wos it?” Peals of broken laughter at the excellence of her wit rang round the room as they entered. The black and white cat sitting on her lap conducted an unhurried appraisal of the newcomers. Apparently it was not impressed; it jumped softly down, stretched in elastic slow motion, and stalked with dignity towards the kitchen and away from their view.

  “Charlie not about?” said Hook unnecessarily.

  “Be ‘ere any minute, if you want ‘im. Just gone round to Tommy Farr’s to get our shopping. Sit yourselves down, you’re
hurting my neck up there.”

  They did so. There was a stale odour about the room, more that of old age than old cat. Lambert said, “We knew Charlie wasn’t at work. We rang there, you see, before we came round here.”

  “‘ere, what you want ‘im for? ‘e ain’t done nothing. ‘e’s a good boy, is Charlie. Good to ‘is old Gran, too.”

  “I’m sure he is, Mrs Webb. We just need to ask him a few questions, that’s all.” Lambert wondered a little desperately how long it would be before the boy returned.

  It was Hook who saw his absence as an opportunity. “He has a shotgun, hasn’t he, Mrs Webb? Does he use it much?”

  She gave the question serious consideration. She liked being called Mrs Webb by these careful, polite strangers. Everyone around the village called her Gran, as though for them she only existed in Charlie’s shadow. ‘Mrs Webb’ took her back to the days when she had got around more, when she had sometimes gone into the clothes shops in Gloucester just to hear the assistants call her ‘Madam’.

  She said, “‘Orrible dangerous, smelly thing. I don’t let him keep it in the house. He bangs away with it sometimes. Brings home the odd rabbit. Never a pheasant.” She leaned towards them confidentially. “My uncle used to breed pheasants, you know, in the old days. For the shooting, up behind the hall. All gone now. Never the same, after the war.” Her voice was a dirge for her lost youth and innocence.

  Hook drew her gently back. “Fond of his gun, is he, Charlie?”

  She was suddenly suspicious. “What you want to know about that for? Took his gun away, the fuzz did. Got it back though!” She chortled again, then nudged a non-existent companion in celebration of her cleverness, as though her cunning had outwitted the entire police force to secure the return of the weapon. Then, with another of her bewilderingly swift changes of mood, she glared at them and said aggressively, “What you picking on Charlie for? He’s a good boy, I told you.”

  Hook grinned back at her, not at all abashed. “You told us when we saw you before that he enjoyed cleaning his shotgun.”

  “Always at it, he is. Takes it to pieces on the kitchen table. Oils it and polishes it. I can’t be doing with it.” She was grumbling now, slipping as he had hoped she might into a familiar routine.

  “These youngsters just don’t think about the mess. I expect he’s the same with his motorbike.

  “Damned Japanese rubbish!” She produced the phrase triumphantly, as though it were the winning conclusion to a word game. “Norton’s the best. Always was. Or Triumph: ‘is Dad always ‘ad Triumph.” She rocked backwards and forwards on her chair with folded arms and considerable content.

  “But he needs his bike to get to work, doesn’t he?”

  “Not been speeding, ‘as ‘e? I told ‘im the fuzz would get ‘im if “

  “Oh, nothing like that. He’s a good boy that way, as you say. All taxed and insured properly, not like some youngsters I could tell you about, Mrs Webb. We’d just like to know a bit more about the way he uses the bike, that’s all.”

  She said he went to work on it every day, used it indeed when he went anywhere outside the village, as might be expected. Hook teased so much out of her with a little more prompting. But they wanted to know whether he had gone out on the bike on the morning of Sharpe’s death, and that was hopeless. Granny Webb had no idea of whether things had happened yesterday or a month ago; pinning her to what had happened on the morning of 27th December at ten o’clock or thereabouts was quite impossible.

  When confusion was at its height in the warm, airless room, Charlie returned. Lambert had left the Vauxhall in the car park at the Crown, so that he did not know as he came up to the gate that there were visitors in the house. But he heard the noise of voices as he came up the path, and hurried protectively into the house as he caught the old lady’s agitation.

  He stopped dead in the doorway of the living-room when he saw who the visitors were. He was certainly disconcerted, but it was too dark where he stood for them to see whether he was frightened.

  Lambert said, “We wanted to talk to you, Charlie, about a couple of things.” He felt guilty in his relief to be speaking to someone who was of sound and consistent mind. “First, your shotgun. You told the officer who asked you about it that you hadn’t used it since two days before the Reverend Barton was killed. Would you like to reconsider that information?”

  Webb’s gaze flicked from one to the other, then round to the steadily nodding head of his grandmother, as if he might find somewhere among them a clue as to how he should answer. Seeing none, he said, “No. What I said when they took my shotgun away was correct. Why should it be important to you, anyway?”

  Hook said quietly, “Because we now know for certain that that gun has been fired more recently than that. Fired, you see, at about the time when a second man was killed in the forest.”

  Webb gulped and snatched at the back of a chair, pulling it out so that he could sit down on it and face them. He was certainly pale now; he looked as if he might have fainted if he had not found himself a seat. His white, scared face was totally unlined, so that he looked for the moment much younger than his years. Like a frightened child, Lambert thought. The first murderer he had ever arrested had looked like that, nearly thirty years ago, standing in a wet city street with a pistol still in his hand and looking down aghast at the policeman he had killed.

  Webb’s voice cracked a little, then recovered, as he said, “I can’t explain that. I haven’t fired the gun.”

  They waited to see if he would volunteer any suggestion as to how this might have happened. Even the excuses chosen by men driven into a corner could be significant. On this occasion, Webb offered them nothing.

  Hook waited for a nod from his chief before he said, “Where were you on the morning of the 27th of December, Charlie?”

  Webb looked at them as if they were closing upon him a trap which he had not seen or understood. His right hand shot suddenly upwards and across his spiky hair, as if it had a will of its own. He looked down upon it when it came to rest again across the top of his other hand in his lap, studying the long fingers and bitten nails for a moment as if this was someone else’s hand. Then he said, “I was on holiday. Not at work, I mean.”

  “Yes. Where did you go, that morning?”

  “I went for a walk.”

  It was like prising information out of a guilty child, but Hook was patient. His tone of voice remained the same throughout the exchange. “What time was this, Charlie?”

  “I — I’m not sure, exactly. About ten, I think. I remember I was at a bit of a loose end.”

  “And where did you go on your walk?”

  The room seemed stifling now. A coal on the heaped fire tumbled softly and sent a little cloud of white ash into the throat of the chimney. Granny Webb gave it a wide, almost toothless smile; not one of the other three in the room was certain whether she was listening to them or was in some quite different world of her own.

  Charlie Webb’s long neck, poking from his polo-necked sweater towards the spots beneath his chin, made him seem vulnerable, even fragile, as if he might disintegrate with harsh treatment. It seemed a long time before he said, “I went into the forest.”

  Hook’s voice held no note of triumph in the admission he had secured. He said, almost wearily, “But you told the constable who saw you about it that you had been nowhere near the woods on that day.”

  “Yes. I was scared. I knew the man in the woods had been killed. It was all round the village.”

  Something in the phrasing interested Hook. Webb had stared dully at the carpet through most of his questions; he waited until the youth looked into his face at last. Then he said, “Did you know there was a man there, Charlie? Before he was killed, I mean.”

  “Yes. I saw him that very morning.” Webb looked as though confession had relieved his tension. His face was despairing, but relaxed.

  “What time was this, Charlie?” Hook might have been a doctor, treating an accident victim w
hilst he was still in shock.

  “About ten o’clock, I suppose. Perhaps a bit later.”

  If Webb was telling the truth, the murderer must have been very close behind him. If he was not, he was putting himself in the dock. Hook kept the excitement scrupulously from his voice as he said, “Did you speak to him, Charlie?”

  Webb said, “No. He didn’t think I’d seen him, see. He came out behind me for a moment on the track, then went back to his camp. He didn’t make much noise, but I knew he was there. I’d smelt his fire, see, although he’d put it out by then.” There was a little flash of pride in his country boy’s skills, the first he had shown since he came into the room.

  Lambert, knowing Hook had come to the end, said in a different, harsher voice, “You went into the forest with your shotgun that morning, didn’t you, Charlie? And you didn’t just see the man, but shot him. We know he died at around the time you were there.”

  “I didn’t! I was there, just as I’ve told you. I lied before because I was scared, but I’ve told you the truth now.” Webb did not shout, as from experience they would have expected him to. His voice rose, but he retained control over it, as he had had difficulty in doing at the beginning of their interrogation.

  As they went through the tiny porch, Granny Webb flung after them, “Come again soon. Always glad to see the fuzz.” Lambert wondered if a mind wandering like hers was capable of irony. Perhaps it was a genuine invitation; she had so few visitors now to bring breaths of excitement into the confusion of her old age.

  Hook was silent in the car, even after they had driven out of the village. He did not want the lad to be guilty, though the policeman in him longed for the quickest possible arrest. Webb was too like the youth he had once been, when he scrambled towards manhood in the years after he had left the home. Lambert knew his man well enough now to divine most of this. He glanced sideways at his sergeant’s troubled profile and smiled.