The Fox in the Forest

by Gregson, J. M.

  Hook said, “So there is no witness to your movements on the morning of 27th December, any more than there is to your husband’s.”

  She turned and looked at him coldly. “Probably not. I should have thought Mary could confirm that I was here for most of the morning, but no doubt you have already questioned her.”

  Lambert said, “We have already questioned everyone in the village, and about fifty other people from further afield, about that morning, Mrs Davidson. As Sergeant Hook implies, we have been able to eliminate most of them from the investigation.”

  Both of them wondered as they rose why she had not chosen to mention her visit to Arthur Comstock and the service cottage on the morning of Sharpe’s murder. That meeting would account for an important part of the morning for both of them. Assuming, that is, that it had actually taken place.

  Mary Cox came into the warm room as they were buttoning their coats. “There is an urgent phone call for Superintendent Lambert,” she said.

  It was Rushton, as he knew it must be. “We’ve got the full information in from military records,” he said. “There’s some interesting stuff about both Arthur Comstock and Harry Davidson.”

  30

  In the Murder Room at Oldford police station, Rushton had already added the information from Army Records to his burgeoning files. It did not seem to him particularly significant, but he was a natural bureaucrat, welcoming anything which made his files more complete. If the case was not solved in the next day or two, the Regional Crime Squad would be brought in. The senior officers involved would find Detective-Inspector Christopher Rushton’s records both comprehensive and beautifully presented.

  In the meantime, he had his summary of the faxes ready for Lambert. “Arthur Comstock began military life as a driver in the RASC. Drove all kinds of vehicles; served in various overseas stations; was in charge of an armoured vehicles unit in Northern Ireland from 1986 to 1988. Active Service Medal for the Falklands campaign — apparently he went because he had a Special Proficiency Certificate for amphibious vehicles. He held the substantive rank of sergeant for the last eight years of his service. He took a voluntary discharge after twenty-two years in 1989.”

  “Any blemishes on his record?” asked Lambert. Fallibility was always more interesting than virtue to those engaged in detection.

  “Not much, sir. He was busted from corporal to the ranks for a fight with another NCO in Germany in 1980. Made up again a year later. He was married, without children, but his marriage packed up many years ago. That conforms with what we got from him about his background in our own initial interviews. He seems to have been a hard man and a bit of a loner in his army days.” Rushton produced the last sentence with some diffidence: these were the very phrases one of the national dailies had come up with when they were encouraging local people to search out The Fox.

  Lambert did not react. “Any details of his service in the Falklands?”

  “No, sir. But there is one interesting sidelight. There’s a handwritten note on Arthur Comstock’s Army file to record the death of his brother-in-law in the Falklands. No more details, because he was in the Navy, not the Army. He was killed when HMS Sheffield went down in May 1982.”

  There was a little pause as they digested this, almost as though it was a tribute to a man they had not even known existed until now. Then Lambert asked “Have you found any connection between Comstock and Ian Sharpe?”

  “No, sir. They certainly didn’t serve together. But any other connection would be unlikely to show up in Army records, of course. Indeed, Sharpe seems never to have enlisted in the armed forces, as far as we know, though he was almost certainly a mercenary in the period after he was kicked out of the police. If they had contact, it would probably be after Comstock finished his Army service. According to what he told us himself, he didn’t find it easy to get employment, at first.”

  Hook said, “He must have been grateful to be taken on here by Colonel Davidson. I expect the ex-Army connection helped; they must have come out of the forces at about the same time.” Bert, who had had to make his way in life without such help, occasionally exaggerated the importance of ‘connections’ of this sort.

  Rushton said nothing, conscious that he had something curious to report in a few moments on Colonel Davidson. Lambert for his part was thinking about Comstock’s assumption that Sharpe had been more than a tramp; about his refusal to talk about his meeting with Rachel Davidson; about his satisfaction when he had been unable to alibi his employer for the murder of Sharpe. The chauffeur-handyman did not seem unduly burdened with gratitude for the employment he had been offered.

  Rushton said, “There does seem from our own surveillance of the village to be some connection between Arthur Comstock and Tommy Farr. Maybe no more than friendship, of course. Two men who have been deserted by their wives; two hard men who are happiest in their own company. But they’ve been seen together quite a lot in the last week. By Charlie Webb, among others.”

  Lambert said sharply, “Your man did check that Webb had got that gun secure in the house now?”

  “Yes, sir. In his bedroom. Much to Granny Webb’s disgust, apparently.”

  Lambert smiled. “Charlie should be grateful to his grandmother, for all kinds of reasons. Not least that she helped to convince Bert and me that Charlie hadn’t killed Sharpe, when we knew his shotgun had been fired at about the right time.”

  Bert, who had been in this situation before, put on what he thought of as his suitably knowing look. To the others in the Murder Room, he looked ineffably smug. It was left to Rushton to say glumly, “You’ve eliminated Webb from our suspects, then?” He had rather fancied Webb as their murderer since the early days of the investigation, and when Webb’s neighbour, Mrs Baker, had seen Charlie going into the woods on the morning of Sharpe’s death, he had thought they had their man.

  Lambert said, “What is the first thing you would do, Chris, if you shot a man?”

  Rushton said promptly, “Get rid of the weapon. In the deepest piece of water that was convenient, I should think.”

  Lambert grinned ruefully at this departure from his script. “All right. You’re an experienced CID man, so you know how often we get a conviction by following up the weapon. But suppose the weapon was a prized possession, and you wanted to keep it. Perhaps you even knew that shotguns, unlike rifles, couldn’t easily be pinned to a particular shooting. Perhaps you realized, indeed, that even the absence of a weapon people knew you should have would itself be suspicious.”

  Rushton thought hard, then shook his head in puzzlement. “I don’t know. I suppose I’d clean it up in the normal way. After that, no one would be able to prove that it was my shotgun that had discharged the murder cartridges.”

  “Precisely. Sam Johnson from forensic asked us exactly the right question when he brought us his report on the shotguns: ‘Is Webb the sort of chap who would normally be careless about cleaning his shotgun?’ That is one of the key things Bert and I had to sort out when we went to see Charlie and his grandmother. Mrs Webb’s mind is not as steady as it used to be. But minds which are off balance are sometimes more reliable than sound ones: they do not normally set out to deceive, for one thing.”

  Bert Hook, who had been wrestling that morning with an abstruse article on the Fool in Shakespeare for his Open University studies, found this practical demonstration easier to follow than the convoluted theory he had fought with on paper. He saw as he turned to his notebook the point of the words he had recorded when the old lady used them. He said, “Old Mrs Webb told us that she didn’t let Charlie keep his shotgun in the house.”

  “Precisely. So the twelve-bore was in the shed at the bottom of their garden. Which was unlocked, and not five yards from the footpath running behind the houses. And whence the gun could be easily removed by those with malice aforethought. But we asked Mrs Webb about whether Charlie cleaned the shotgun regularly, as Sam Johnson had indicated we should.”

  Bert had the answer ready. “She sai
d, ‘Always at it, he is. Takes it to pieces on the kitchen table. Oils it and polishes it’”

  Lambert smiled. “Not a lad who would leave a shotgun uncleaned after use in ordinary circumstances, Charlie. Still less, then, when he had killed a man with it. Someone else used that gun, not Charlie Webb. The most we could charge Charlie with is not keeping a shotgun under lock and key.”

  Rushton nodded, accepting the logic and reluctantly discarding his candidate. He said, “We have the information from Army records on Harry Davidson, as well, sir.”

  “Let’s have it, Chris. Cut the routine stuff and let us know about any discrepancies.”

  Rushton, who had been planning to build to the interesting information through a scaffolding of routine entries, said with a grin, “All right, sir. He had what I take to be a normal career for an infantry officer in peacetime. Commissioned after the normal selection boards and training at Sandhurst. Full Lieutenant two years later, acting Captain, then substantive Captain, then Major. Where he seems to have stuck.”

  Rushton delivered his little bombshell effectively enough. There was a small, shocked silence around the table. Then Lambert said, “He wasn’t made up to Colonel and then reduced because he blotted his copybook?”

  “No trace of that on his Army file, sir. And he certainly left the Army as a Major. The details of his pension are recorded.”

  “No record of his having held even the acting rank for a period? In the Falklands, perhaps?”

  “No, sir. In fact, that’s the other thing. There’s no trace that he was ever in the Falklands. He seems to have spent the campaign at the Regimental Depot in England. Mind you, it’s difficult to see any connection between that and two murders ten years later.”

  “Except that that kind of lie can be more important to the man who used it than to anyone else.” Lambert became suddenly urgent. He was on his feet by the time he said to Hook, “Let’s go and see Harry Davidson.”

  ***

  It was a cold, crisp day, rising above freezing point only for a few hours around noon, and that in the sun. That sun was shining on the long windows of the Old Vicarage as they drove up the wide gravel drive in Lambert’s old Vauxhall. For an instant, its reflection was a red disc of fire in the glass, belying the temperature around the house.

  Mary Cox opened the door to them, but her mistress was immediately visible in the hall behind her. Her dark hair was as impeccably groomed as ever, held straight and severe above her forehead by a single wide slide. Her face was white and strained as she came forward to speak to them; perhaps some of Lambert’s gravity had communicated itself to her.

  “Harry isn’t here,” she said in response to Hook’s inquiry.

  “Where is he, Mrs Davidson?” asked Lambert. His tone was a warning against deception or prevarication.

  “He went out. On foot, about half an hour ago, I think.” It was as though she divined their questions without their being asked.

  “Mrs Davidson, can you tell us anything about his service in the Falklands?”

  She controlled herself well. Only the tightening of her hand on the curved back of a chair showed that the query had struck home. She said in a low voice, “I can’t tell you because he wasn’t there, Superintendent. I presume from your question you know that.”

  He said harshly, “Who else knows?” She looked down at the seat of the chair, refusing to meet his eyes. He had to say, “Please, Mrs Davidson, it’s vital that we know.”

  “Only Arthur Comstock.” She stared miserably at the carpet, as though she had betrayed someone by her replies. Whether it was Harry Davidson or Arthur Comstock was not clear.

  “Have you any idea where your husband might have gone?”

  “No.” Now at last her wide black eyes rose to meet Lambert’s. They filled with sudden apprehension in the face of his gravity. “Is it important?”

  “It could be. If he comes in, please phone Detective Inspector Rushton at Oldford immediately, and keep him here until we arrive. Do you know if Mr Comstock is in his cottage?”

  “I should think so. He certainly wasn’t driving Harry today.”

  The cottage was only eighty yards from the house, though it was almost hidden by the leafless winter tracery of the large oaks. They had rapped twice at the door when they saw Mary Cox hurrying across the cobbled yard from the house, looking anxiously over her shoulder to see if she was observed.

  “He’s out,” she said breathlessly. “Arthur, I mean. He left about ten minutes ago. You’d have seen him if you’d come from the village.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  She shook her head. Her young eyes were wide, inquisitive, intelligent. With her head inclined a little to one side, she looked to Hook like an alert young dog which was anxious to be involved in its master’s business. As if she were loath to detach herself from what she sensed must be dramatic events, she said, “He was on his bicycle. He might have gone to the village store. His bike has a basket on, see, so he can carry —”

  But Lambert was already out of earshot, racing on long, rather stiff legs towards the old Vauxhall. It threw up a little spray of gravel as it swung round and headed off down the drive, such was the unwonted urgency of his driving. Mary stood and watched it go without resentment, stirred to be involved even on the periphery of happenings that would be retailed in the village for half a century and more.

  From the high windows of the drawing-room, Rachel Davidson also watched the policemen’s departure. She felt the terror and the pity of life, as she had felt it in her childhood when her parents wept over the loss of the relatives she had never seen; as she had felt it in her young womanhood when the man she was to marry was killed in a successful war, leaving her in tears while those around her rejoiced.

  The fear she thought she had defeated for ever confronted her now like an old enemy come for a reckoning.

  31

  Mary Cox was right. When they pulled up at the village store, they saw Comstock’s bicycle leaning against the side of the stone house. It was half past one now; the door of the store was closed for lunch, and knocking brought no response. Either Farr was out or he did not care to have his lunch-hour disturbed.

  Hook, who was braver about large dogs than Lambert, went to the rear of the building and called “Kelly?” Rather to his relief, there was no growl or bark to answer him. At a nod from Lambert, he went cautiously to the old wooden rear door and tried the latch. As he had expected, it was not locked; people with Dobermans were a little careless about these things, whatever the police advised about security precautions.

  They looked inside the small rear scullery like thieves, poking their heads forward and bending their torsos to the right, as if by keeping their feet only on the borders of the property they respected the owner’s rights to privacy. They saw all they needed to see. The hook where Kelly’s lead hung was bare. So was the small niche beyond it where Farr kept his twelve-bore.

  It did not take more than two minutes to drive the Vauxhall to the nearest entrance to the wood. It was long enough for Hook to contact Rushton, who detailed a police car to attend at the other side of the long tongue of forest they were entering.

  As they left the sun and hurried under the long nave of arching trees, the cold hit them as suddenly as if they had walked into a butcher’s freezer room. Lambert hesitated a moment when they came to a choice of paths, then turned on to the larger of the two, which led towards the spot where Ian Sharpe had been killed. Their steps rang loud in the silence upon the frosted flints of the path. Then, as it narrowed and was submerged under an inch of decaying leaves, the sounds of their movements were deadened. At the same time, as though they were taking a cue from this, they slowed their pace and trod more warily, listening for any sound which would tell them of another presence in this frozen place.

  They passed the spot where Sharpe had fallen. A short length of the cord which the Scene of Crime team had used to isolate the area of their detailed search lay still trapped at th
e base of a gorse bush. Beyond here, they moved into a stretch of tall evergreens, which shut out most of the little light they had enjoyed and turned a bright day outside the woods into a twilight world within them.

  They almost missed Comstock. He was fifty yards ahead of them, with his back to them, moving warily along the edge of the path, wearing the navy anorak he had worn on the day of Peter Barton’s death. Hook remembered his bleak little statement, “I don’t have many clothes.”

  And at that moment, things happened very fast, though the watchers experienced the slow-motion effect of a car accident. Harry Davidson appeared ten yards beyond Comstock. He had a twelve-bore tucked hard into his shoulder, trained upon Comstock’s breast. There was a harsh, urgent command from the woods on the left, and as Comstock threw himself sideways, a black force launched itself at Davidson’s throat, bowling him inexorably backwards.

  For a moment, Hook thought it was some wild, nightmare creature of the forest. Then, as they ran forward, his brain as well as his senses reasserted themselves. By the time they reached Davidson, he was sitting up, watching the dog’s brown eyes fearfully from no more than eighteen inches. Tommy Farr kicked away the shotgun which had been levelled at Comstock. Farr’s own twelve-bore hung loose in his left hand, pointing at the ground. There was no need for that, with the dog there. “Easy, Kelly,” said Farr, as Davidson clutched his left elbow and a warning growl rumbled deep in the dog’s throat. Somewhere in front of them, they heard the sound of the police siren as the car stopped at the edge of the forest.

  “Stay right where you are, Major Davidson,” said Lambert. The man on the ground had not even known they were there until he spoke, but it was the use of the rank which announced to him that all was lost. He remained motionless on the ground while Hook pronounced the words of the caution, then slipped a handcuff on to his right wrist. Hook had to help his prisoner to his feet; he looked dazedly at the steel, as though the wrist it encircled belonged to someone else.