The Fox in the Forest

by Gregson, J. M.

  Comstock had risen with him from the shallow ditch into which he had thrown himself at the sight of the shotgun. For a moment, the two men confronted each other, both breathing hard in great snorts of white vapour. The mutual hatred of employer and employee was manifest in their every movement.

  “I should have got you myself, in the first place,” said Davidson.

  “Instead of which, you killed a man who never hurt anyone!” Comstock’s contempt turned the words into a snarl.

  “Barton was too bloody good to be true. If you’d only done as I told you and left him with the car, it would have been you whom Sharpe killed in the woods. And he’d have been away that night, with no one any the wiser.”

  Lambert had an uncomfortable feeling that that might be true. He heard the cautious tread of large feet in the woods behind Davidson, and called the officer forward to take charge of the prisoner. He said as Hook passed over the manacle, “What happened to the radio telephone?”

  Davidson was the only one not surprised by the question. He said, “I took it away when I disposed of Sharpe. He’d hidden it after he’d killed Barton. He was a professional, you see; he knew you’d be taking him in and searching his camp.” He sounded as though he was explaining some military procedure to those without experience.

  Lambert, happy to get him talking while his senses still reeled, said “Why did you kill him?”

  Davidson shrugged; all moral sense had now departed him. “He was threatening to split on me if you got any closer. And he wanted more money, even though he hadn’t fulfilled his contract.”

  “You used Charlie Webb’s shotgun.”

  “It was used for both the killings, yes. But it was returned each time. I’d seen young Webb putting it away in the shed in the garden, and it seemed an obvious strategy, careless young beggar! Sharpe liked the idea: he knew the police would be searching for the murder weapon. It was easy enough to remove it under cover of darkness, and if anyone had seen me, remember I’m a JP, merely detecting a dangerous weapon improperly kept.”

  There was no sign of his stammer now. He smiled a little at the recollection of his own cleverness: for a moment, with the reference to strategy, he was twenty years back on Salisbury Plain, showing his initiative in the plans he made as a young platoon officer.

  “Take him away!” said Lambert abruptly. After a working lifetime of crime, he could still be revolted when a man guilty of the greatest one of all showed no sign of remorse.

  The officers who had appeared from the woods behind Davidson moved in and led him away. The young policeman among them, Bill Evans, was aghast to recognize as the prisoner in his charge the Chairman of the Parish Council, the magistrate who had been on the bench when he first appeared as a prosecution witness in court. Evans was young enough never to have been handcuffed to a prisoner before. He departed from their sight like a comic soldier, watching Harry Davidson’s feet and trying hard to get in step with him.

  Comstock watched the group until it disappeared before he said, as though he still could not quite believe it, “He would have killed me.”

  “Today he would, yes. You would have died on the 22nd December, if you hadn’t changed his arrangements. He brought in a professional to achieve just that. Why?”

  Comstock paused for a moment, as though he might deny all knowledge of the matter. Then he said, “Because I had a hold over him, I suppose.”

  “You knew he had never been a colonel, the rank he had used as he took his position in the local community.”

  “Oh, I knew that, yes.” Comstock brushed away the thought as if it were no more than a troublesome fly. “But I knew he’d never been in the Falklands, when he’d told people here he had. Even told his wife, when he was getting ready to marry her!” Comstock who had no wife himself now, spat the thought as though it were the ultimate marital deception.

  Lambert let the man’s anger run, and his next words explained his fury. “My brother-in-law was blown to bits in that war, which we’re now told need never have been fought. I saw men burned and maimed for life. And that sod claimed he’d been there, when he’d never seen active service, even once.” For the first time, the watchers saw how Davidson might have killed him, to suppress a knowledge which had seemed too trivial to warrant murder. Bitterness such as Comstock felt was never permanently silent, however expensively it was bought off.

  It was Hook who said, “His lies were useful enough to you. You made him give you a job.”

  “Yes. In a recession, it was all I could get. I heard from Tommy here that the richest man in the area was a Colonel Davidson, who had fought in the Falklands. So I took myself round to his house, hoping for employment for old times’ sake. I quickly twigged he’d never been in the Falklands. Later I checked with a pal in his regiment and found out about his rank. I expect you wondered why a man who had only one car and had driven himself until I came needed a chauffeur.”

  His resentfulness seemed now to be directed against himself as much as the other figure in this bizarre charade. “We called it ‘chauffeur-handyman’, and I managed to find plenty to do about the place. I was quite sorry for his wife sometimes. She obviously didn’t know what I knew about the sod.”

  Lambert suppressed the thought that Davidson might also have been a thoughtful, even a loving husband. People played many roles in life, and murderers in his experience kept stricter divisions between them than most. He said gently, “Was that what Rachel Davidson came to see you about on the morning of Sharpe’s murder?”

  Comstock nodded. “She asked about the Falklands and her husband’s service there. She seemed to know already that he had only been a major. I tried to keep it from her, but I don’t think I convinced her.”

  That was almost certainly true. The taciturn, almost inarticulate ex-sergeant would be no match for the intelligent cross-examination of that subtle woman. Lambert said, “Why on earth didn’t you come to us earlier?”

  “I didn’t think I was in any danger. I was as puzzled as anyone else about poor Peter Barton’s death — I didn’t know it should have been me.”

  Lambert said, “Peter Barton was a generous man, as everyone knows. His last unselfish thought cost him his life. When he insisted on your going to collect your sister in the Rover, he took your place as a murder victim. He was wearing a similar navy anorak, and his killer had not seen either of you before. When Davidson contacted him on the radio telephone to tell him you would be walking home through the forest, he couldn’t have expected anyone else to arrive in the darkness — by that time his victim was already late.”

  Comstock nodded dolefully. “It wasn’t until after the second murder that Tommy and I began to work out what had happened. We presumed like everyone else that the same person had killed both people at first, especially with all the papers talking about serial killings and The Fox. Then Tommy saw Granny Webb in her garden and she said Davidson had been snooping around.”

  Farr glared at him from beneath black Welsh brows, recalling to them his earlier resolution to have no dealings with the police. He growled, “I didn’t think the old girl was in her right mind, see?” without looking at Lambert or Hook. “Arthur and I met in the forest to exchange notes about Davidson’s movements.”

  Farr was a natural vigilante, thought Lambert, looking at the Doberman by his side and the shotgun hanging loose in his hand. No doubt he had enjoyed a little cloak-and-dagger secrecy, even perhaps the frisson of danger. He had not killed Davidson just now, when many wild men would have done so rather than use the dog. But he would like to have brought in Davidson without police help, even when it meant risking injury to himself or Comstock.

  Lambert said, “Always listen to people like Granny Webb when you think they may not be in their right minds. They are less devious than many allegedly normal people — village storekeepers, for instance, who choose to withhold evidence. It was poor Johnny Pickering, you see, who told us that Davidson had been in the forest on the morning of the second shooting. He�
�d seen ‘the Sergeant’, he said. But he called everyone with a rank Sergeant, including me. Since Davidson was the only one around the village who had chosen to carry a military rank into later life, the likelihood was that he was the man whom Johnny had seen.”

  Farr said with reluctant admiration, “It was a pretty thin deduction to pin a murder on the man.”

  “Of course it was. Alone, it would have been useless. But our function is to put together various pieces of information until we see a pattern. There were other things, you see. Davidson lied to us about having to be in Tewkesbury at the time of Barton’s funeral: his chauffeur here was driving the Rover he said he was using at the time, so he couldn’t possibly have used it. My guess is that he couldn’t face acting a prominent part in the last rites for the man he had virtually executed. He also seemed to recognize Ian Sharpe’s name as soon as I mentioned it, even though it had never been made public. These are significant details, no more: a long way from a case which would stand up in court. But had you two not withheld your thoughts from us, the pattern might have been apparent earlier.”

  They had been walking slowly to the edge of the forest as they spoke. Now they left it, and Farr and Comstock quickened their pace, moving towards the village store as though it were a haven from interrogation. If Lambert suspected they had kept silent because they hoped to wring money or other concessions from Davidson at the meeting which had nearly cost a life, he held his peace. There was little chance now of such revelations.

  Lambert and Hook, each busy with his own thoughts, exchanged not a word as they drove slowly through the village. There was a furniture van outside the red brick of the New Vicarage. Clare Barton was moving out. There would be a new vicar soon in the old church: he would have much to live up to if he was to emulate the much-loved Peter Barton. Behind the high wrought-iron gates of the Old Vicarage, Rachel Davidson had yet to learn the details of this new horror in her life. No doubt she too would move out, leaving the country as well as the house where her new life had been so abruptly shattered.

  Both the New Vicarage and the Old would be shadowed by these events for generations. Only the forest would shrug off these human tragedies quickly, absorbing them alongside the thousands of smaller deaths it accepted each year.

  If you enjoyed reading The Fox in the Forest, you might be interested in Stranglehold by J M Gregson, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Stranglehold by J M Gregson

  Chapter 1

  The light shone into the man’s face, white and unrelenting. The room was hot and airless. On its stark and functional furniture, there was no room for dust to gather. But there was a faint odour of stale sweat within these bleak and narrow walls.

  It was almost two in the morning, but in the airless and windowless interview room it might have been any time.

  Only the fatigue of the three men who fought each other with words within this place gave any clue that this might be an hour when the remainder of the world was at rest.

  Lambert watched the cassette which turned almost silently beside him, recording each syllable of this so far pointless performance. He hoped the tension was building within the figure opposite him, but he suspected the man had been through these sessions too often to panic now. He resisted the feeling of hopelessness within himself; it troubled him more and more these days, whenever he approached the point of exhaustion.

  ‘You might as well admit it, Tommy. You were in Union Street at the time. You were seen. We can document it, if we have to. You – ’

  ‘I was at home.’ Tommy Clinton repeated the statement for the seventh time that night, as though he were making the response in some bizarre secular litany.

  ‘And who says so?’

  ‘I’ve told you. My mother. But she was asleep at the time you’re talking about. Like a decent old lady should be.’

  Lambert smiled sourly. An old lady, nodding a little with Parkinson’s disease, who had lied before for her son, who would bring herself to believe her own lies by the time they had prepared a case. Whom he could never put in court for cross-examination, in any case. They both knew the score.

  He drove himself on to what he knew he must do. He was helped by the irritation he felt that this man should best him. Tommy Clinton was a pathetic figure. His frayed shirt was grubby about the neck: it had been worn at least two days too long. His grey hair was greasy, untidy now from the four hours he had been at the station. His grey eyes were carefully blank; that came from his experience of petty crime, of hours of questioning like this.

  He was only here because of his grubby past, and that held no more than minor, even comic crimes, the kind even the police laughed at when he was gone. Tommy was no threat. But here he was, outsmarting the CID.

  ‘You’re a flasher, Tommy. Tried and convicted.’

  ‘I’ve given up all that, Mr Lambert. I’ve told you.’

  He had, several times. No doubt he would go on doing so. Unless they could frighten him.

  ‘Flashers go on to bigger things, sometimes. You know that, Tommy, and so do we.’ It wasn’t true, it was a rarity. But not unknown. And Tommy didn’t know the statistics: for the first time, he looked a little scared.

  ‘I haven’t done nothing. I told you.’ He kept his hands on the table between them, with the dirty fingernails turned towards the two men opposite him. But for the first time in twenty minutes, the hands became mobile. The fingers did not tremble, but they began to massage each other a little. All three men watched them in silence, like deaf men trying to interpret a new sign language.

  Lambert saw the first stirring of apprehension and went for it, like a fencer seeing an opening in his opponent’s defence. No, nothing so subtle, he thought wryly: like a boxer seeing the chance to put in a bludgeoning blow. Not a knockout, merely something that might weaken the adversary a little, score him an extra point with the non-existent judges.

  ‘This is big, you see, Tommy. Big and nasty. The girl was killed. And before she was killed, she was sexually assaulted. That’s what it will say in the papers. You and I know what that means. Clothes torn off; fist rammed in her mouth; face bashed until it bled; legs forced apart; tights – ’

  ‘It’s not my sort of crime, Mr Lambert.’ Clinton was desperate to stop the flow of detail, and Lambert scarcely less desperate to be interrupted. Both of them breathed hard as they stared at each other. ‘I’ve never been one for violence. I – I’ve had my little weaknesses with women, God knows, but I’ve never been charged with hitting them.’

  It was probably true, but Lambert was too weary to care. He smelt the fear on the man, and he went for it. ‘And when the man had finished with her, he killed her. Brutally, with his bare hands. Just to stop her talking. Or to give himself more pleasure. You tell us which, Tommy.’

  The police usually kept the facts from men like Clinton, hoping to make them uneasy by keeping them in ignorance of what the investigation was about, collecting bits of information which men like him often revealed when they jumped to false conclusions.

  This sudden revelation when he least expected it threw Clinton off balance. ‘You’re not setting me up for the Julie Salmon killing?’ His voice was almost a shout, bouncing off the walls at them, shocking in its alarm after his earlier calm. They smelt his stale breath, gusting at them now across the table as he struggled to control it.

  ‘You’re in the frame, Clinton. And you’re not helping yourself.’ Lambert sat back, recoiling a little from that awful stench, estimating the state of his man from a few inches further away. The little man knew the name of the victim; Lambert cudgelled his tired brain to decide whether there could be any significance in that. ‘We have a witness who saw you that night, not far from where the body was found. And at about the right time. There you are: I’ve levelled with you now. It’s about time you did the same with us.’

  The man was still frightened. The fingers twined and untwined rapidly, as if with a life of their own. Clinton watched them as though
they were someone else’s, making no attempt to stop them moving. He was scared, but after the first shock, his fear took on the unthinking sullenness of a panic-ridden child. ‘I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do any-thing like that. You can’t pin this on me.’

  His voice carried no conviction. In his world, the creed was that the pigs could pin most things on you if they had a mind to.

  Lambert, recognizing the doors being closed behind that blank, sullen face, eased his chair back a fraction. The man beside him knew the way he worked so well that no glance was needed between them to indicate what was required. Instead, there was the briefest of pauses. Then Bert Hook, who had not spoken for half an hour, took up the questioning, his voice unexpectedly restrained, even friendly, in that room which was designed to be unfriendly to men like Clinton.

  ‘You see, Tommy, we’d like to help you. To help you to help yourself.’ Hook felt unhurriedly through his pockets, watching the face opposite him, looking for the first hint of cooperation. The man had not asked for a lawyer, but that did not mean he felt he had nothing to fear. The petty fringe of the underworld in which men like Clinton lived did not deal with lawyers. Only, later on, with legal aid.

  Hook found the packet and shoved it on to his edge of the table. ‘Want a fag, Tommy?’

  Clinton’s hands moved a couple of inches towards the cigarettes, then drew back. ‘No. Keep your snout.’ His lips had betrayed him into the prison word before he could control them.

  But it was his hands which had given away his need for nicotine, as they had earlier given away his apprehension. Hook pushed the packet across the small square table between them, then struck a match as Clinton fumbled out a cigarette from it. The smoke smelt strong in the tiny, overheated room, the more so as both the policemen were reformed smokers themselves. Both of them found themselves with their eyes on the packet; Clinton’s had been only the second tube extracted from it. It was at the ends of days like this that they missed the relief of tobacco most.