Fox Evil

by Minette Walters

  She caught his arm to hold him back. "Who are you going to phone?"

  "Dick," he said, shaking her off as abruptly as Mark had done earlier. "I want to know what the hell's been going on. Anyway, I said I'd call as soon as I got back."

  "He's not at the farm."

  "So?" He wedged his right heel into the bootjack to yank off his riding boot. "I'll call him on his mobile."

  She eased around him into the kitchen. "It's not our fight, sweetheart," she called gaily over her shoulder, taking a whisky tumbler from a cupboard and unscrewing the bottle to top up her own and pour him a generous slug. "I told you. Dick and Prue have already come to blows over it. Where's the sense in our getting caught in the middle?"

  The "sweethearts" were grating on his nerves, and he guessed it was her answer to Gemma. Did she think terms of endearment could win him back? Or perhaps she thought "sweetheart" was a word he used as a matter of course with mistresses? Had he used it with her when he was two-timing his first wife…? God knew. It was so long ago he couldn't remember. "Okay," he said, padding into the kitchen in stockinged feet. "I'll call James."

  Eleanor handed him the tumbler of whisky. "Oh, I don't think that's a good idea either," she said rather too hastily. "Not if he's got visitors. Why don't you wait till tomorrow? It'll probably have sorted itself by then. Have you eaten? I could make a turkey risotto or something? That would be nice, wouldn't it?"

  Julian took in her flushed face, the half-empty whisky bottle, and the signs of repaired makeup around her eyes, and wondered why she was so determined to stop him using the phone. He tipped the glass to her. "Sounds good, Ellie," he said with an artless smile. "Give me a call when it's ready. I'll be in the shower."

  Upstairs in his dressing room he opened his wardrobe door and looked at the neatly spaced suits and sports jackets that he'd left pushed to one side in order to remove his hunting jacket, and he asked himself why his wife had suddenly decided to search his things. She had always behaved as if looking after a husband was a form of slavery, and he had long since learned to pull his weight, particularly in the rooms he called his own. He even preferred it. Comfortable clutter was more in tune with his nature than the showy cleanliness in the rest of the house.

  He set the shower running, then pulled out his mobile and scrolled down the menu for Dick's number. When the phone was answered at the other end, he quietly closed his dressing room door.

  James and his two companions made no secret of their approach, although by mutual consent they didn't speak after they left the terrace and crossed the lawn to the ha-ha. There was no sign of the chainsaw gang, but Nancy pointed out the machine itself, which had been abandoned on a small pile of logs. They headed up to their right, skirting the thickly sprouting ash and hazel bushes which, once used for coppicing, created a natural sight screen between the Manor and the encampment.

  In light of James's questions about recognition, Nancy wondered how deliberate the positioning of the vehicles had been. Any farther inside the wood and they would have been visible through the skeletal trees as the Copse dipped into the valley. Certainly James could have kept an easy eye on them through binoculars from the drawing-room windows. She turned her head to catch sounds, but there was nothing to hear. Wherever the travelers were, they were keeping as quiet as their visitors.

  James guided them up to the path that led toward the entrance. Here the trees were thinner and they could see the encampment clearly. A couple of the buses were brightly colored. One in yellow and lime green, the other painted purple with "Bella" sprayed in pink along its side. By comparison, the rest were curiously drab-ex-coach-hire vehicles in grays and creams, with their logos obliterated.

  They were parked in a rough semicircle arcing out from the entrance, and even from a hundred yards away Nancy could see that each bus was linked by rope to its neighbors, with more "keep out" notices strung between the gaps. There was a beat-up Ford Cortina nosed in behind the lime green bus, and children's bicycles lying on the ground. Otherwise, the site appeared to be empty except for the fire in the middle and two distant hooded figures who sat on chairs at either end of the rope barrier facing the road. A couple of Alsatians lay tethered at their feet.

  Mark jerked his chin toward the two figures, then pointed his forefingers at his ears to indicate headphones, and Nancy nodded as she watched one of the guardians mark time with his foot as he strummed an air guitar. She raised the binoculars to take a closer look. They weren't adults, she thought. Their immature shoulders were too narrow for their borrowed coats, and their skinny wrists and hands protruded from the bunched sleeves like tablespoons. Easy prey for anyone prepared to cut the rope and reclaim the Copse for the village.

  Too easy. The dogs were old and threadbare, but presumably their barks still worked. The parents and owners had to be within calling range.

  She scanned across the windows of the various vehicles, but they all had cardboard obscuring visibility from this side. It was interesting, she thought. None of the engines was running so the interiors must be lit by natural light-unless the travelers were crazy enough to use batteries alone-yet the strong sunlight from the south had been blocked out. Why? Because the Manor lay in that direction?

  She whispered her guesses into James's ear. "The kids on the barricade are vulnerable," she finished, "so at least one of the buses has to have adults in it. Do you want me to find out which one?"

  "Will it help?" he whispered back.

  She made a rocking motion with her hand. "It depends how aggressive they're likely to be and how many reinforcements they have. Bearding them in their den looks safer than being caught in the open."

  "It'll mean crossing one of the barriers between the coaches."

  "Mm," she agreed.

  "What about the dogs?"

  "They're old, and probably too far away to hear us as long as we move quietly. They'll bark if the occupants kick up a ruckus, but we'll be inside by then."

  His eyes gleamed with amusement as he glanced toward Mark. "You'll frighten our friend," he warned, tilting his head fractionally in the lawyer's direction. "I can't believe his rules of engagement allow for unlawful entry to other people's property."

  She grinned. "And yours? What do they allow?"

  "Action," he said without hesitation. "Find me a target and I'll follow your signal."

  She made a ring with her thumb and forefinger and slipped away among the trees.

  "I hope you know what you're doing," murmured Mark in his other ear.

  The old man chuckled. "Don't be such a killjoy," he said. "I haven't had such fun in months. She's so like Ailsa."

  "An hour ago you were saying she was like your mother."

  "I can see the two of them in her. It's the best of both worlds… she's got all the good genes, Mark, and none of the bad."

  Mark hoped he was right.

  There were raised voices inside "Bella," which became increasingly audible the closer Nancy came. She guessed the door was open on the other side for the sound to travel, but too many people were talking at once to follow the thread of individual arguments. It was all good. It meant the dogs were indifferent to altercation in the vehicles.

  She knelt on one knee beside the off-side front wheel, which was as near to the door as she could safely go, confident that the cardboard blinds made her as invisible to those inside as they were to her. As she listened, she unhitched the rope barrier at "Bella's" end and let it fall to the ground with the "keep out" notice facedown, then she searched the trees to the south and west for movement. The argument seemed to be about who should be in control of the enterprise, but the reasoning was largely negative.

  "Nobody else knows anything about the law…" "Only his word that he does…" "He's a fucking psycho…" "Sh-sh, the kids are listening…" "Okay, okay, but I'm not taking any more of his crap…" "Wolfie says he carries a razor…"

  She raised her eyes to search for chinks at the base of the cardboard blinds, hoping to get a glimpse of the in
terior and a rough count of heads. From the number of different voices, she suspected the whole encampment was in there, minus the one who was under discussion. The psycho. She would have been happier knowing where he was, but the absolute stillness beyond the buses meant he was either very patient or he wasn't there.

  The last window she examined was the one above her head, and her heart missed a beat as she locked eyes with someone looking down at her through a tweaked-back edge of the cardboard. The eyes were too round and the nose too small to be anything but a child's, and, instinctively, she smiled and raised a finger to her lips. There was no reaction, just a quiet withdrawal as the board was pressed back into place. After two or three minutes, during which the rumble of conversation continued undisturbed, she stole back among the trees and signaled to James and Mark to join her.

  Wolfie had sneaked into the driving seat of Bella's bus, which was partitioned off by a piece of curtain. He didn't want to be noticed, frightened that someone would say he should be with his father. He had curled into a ball on the floor between the dashboard and the seat, hiding as much from Fox on the outside as from Bella and the others inside. After half an hour, when the cold of the floor set his teeth chattering, he crawled onto the seat and peered over the steering wheel to see if he could spot Fox.

  He was more frightened now than he'd ever been. If Cub wasn't Fox's, then perhaps that was why his mother had taken him away and left Wolfie behind. Perhaps Wolfie didn't belong to Vixen at all, but only to Fox. The thought terrified him. It meant Fox could do what he liked, whenever he liked, and there'd be no one to stop him. At the back of his mind, he knew it didn't make any difference. His mother had never been able to keep Fox from acting crazy, just holler and cry and say she wouldn't be bad again. He had never understood what the badness was, though he was beginning to wonder if the sleeps she made him and Cub take had something to do with it. A tiny knot of anger-a first understanding of material betrayal-wound like a noose about his heart.

  He heard Bella say that if Fox was telling the truth about working the fairgrounds, it would explain why none of them had come across him on the circuit, and he wanted to call out: but he isn't telling the truth. There wasn't a single time that Wolfie could remember when the bus had been parked near other people except in the summer when the rave had happened. Most of the time Fox left them in the middle of nowhere, then vanished for days on end. Sometimes Wolfie followed to see where Fox went, but he was always picked up by a black car and driven away.

  When his mother had been brave enough she'd walked him and Cub along the roads till they came to a town, but most of the time she was curled on the bed. He had believed it was because she was worried about do-gooders, but now he wondered if it had more to do with how much she slept. Perhaps it hadn't been bravery at all, but just a need to find whatever it was that made her feel better.

  Wolfie tried to remember the time when Fox wasn't there. Sometimes it came to him in his dreams, memories of a house and a proper bedroom. He was sure it was real and not just a piece of fantasy engendered by movies… but he didn't know when it had happened. It was very confusing. Why was Fox his father and not Cub's? He wished he knew more about parents. His entire knowledge of them was based on the American flicks he'd seen-where moms said "love you," the kids were called "pumpkin," and telephone codes were 555-and all of it was as fake as Wolfie's John Wayne walk.

  He stared hard at Fox's bus, but he could tell from the way the handle was tilted that it had been locked from the outside. Wolfie wondered where Fox had gone and tweaked the edge of the cardboard in the side window to search the woodland toward the murderer's house. He saw Nancy long before she saw him, watched her slip out of the wood to crouch beside the wheel below where he was sitting, saw the rope barrier fall to the ground. He thought about calling out a warning to Bella, but Nancy raised her face and put a finger to her lips. He decided that her eyes were full of soul, so he pressed the cardboard back and dropped down between the seat and the dashboard again. He would like to have warned her that Fox was probably watching her, too, but his habit of self-protection was too ingrained to draw attention to himself.

  Instead, he sucked on his thumb and closed his eyes, and pretended he hadn't seen her. He'd done it before-closed his eyes and pretended he couldn't see-but he didn't remember why… and didn't want to…

  The ringing of the telephone made Vera jump. It was a rare occurrence at the Lodge. She looked furtively toward the kitchen, where Bob was listening to the radio, then picked up the receiver. A smile lit her faded eyes as she heard the voice at the other end. "Of course I understand," she said, stroking the fox's brush in her pocket. "It's Bob who's stupid… not Vera." As she replaced the receiver, something stirred in her mind. A fleeting recollection that someone had wanted to talk to her husband. Her mouth sucked and strained as she tried to remember who it was, but the effort was too great. Only her long-term memory worked these days and even that was full of holes…

  16

  This time keys were unnecessary. Fox knew the Colonel's habits of old. He was obsessive about barring his front and back doors, but rarely remembered to lock the French windows when he left the house via the terrace. It was the work of seconds to sprint across the grass, after James and his visitors had disappeared into the wood, to let himself into the drawing room. He stood for a moment, listening to the heavy silence of the house, but the heat from the log fire was too intense after the cold outside, and he flung back his hood and loosened the scarf around his mouth as he felt himself start to burn up.

  A hammer throbbed in his temple and he reached out a hand to steady himself against the old man's chair as sweat poured out of him. A sickness of the mind, the bitch had called it, but maybe the kid was right. Maybe the alopecia and the shakes had a physical cause. Whatever it was, it was getting worse. He gripped the leather chair, waiting for the faintness to pass. He was afraid of no man, but fear of cancer writhed like a snake through his gut.

  Dick Weldon was in no mood to protect his wife. Plied with wine by his son-something he rarely drank-his belligerence had come to the fore, particularly after Belinda relayed the bullet points of her telephone conversation with Prue while Jack cooked lunch.

  "I'm sorry, Dick," she told him in genuine apology. "I shouldn't have lost my rag, but it drives me mad when she accuses me of keeping Jack away from her. He's the one who doesn't want to see her. All I ever do is try to keep the peace… not very successfully." She sighed. "Look, I know this isn't something you want to hear, but the honest-to-God truth is that Prue and I loathe each other. It's a personality clash in spades. I can't stand her Lady-Muck routine, and she can't stand my everyone's-equal attitude. She wanted a daughter-in-law she could be proud of… not a country bumpkin who can't even make babies."

  Dick saw the glint of tears along her lashes and his anger with his wife intensified. "It's only a matter of time," he said gruffly, taking Belinda's hand in both of his and patting it clumsily. "I had a couple of cows once when I was still doing the dairy lark. They took an age to do the business but they got there in the end. Told the vet he wasn't shoving the gizmo up far enough… worked a treat when he went in up to his elbow."

  Belinda gave a half-laugh, half-sob. "Maybe that's where we're going wrong. Maybe Jack's been using the wrong gizmo."

  He gave a grunt of amusement. "I always said the bull would have done it better. Nature has a way of getting things right… it's the shortcuts that cause the problems." He pulled her into a hug. "If it's worth anything, pet, no one's prouder of you than I am. You've made more of our lad than we ever managed. I'd trust him with my life these days… and that's something I never thought I'd say. Did he tell you he burned the barn down once because he took his friends in there for a smoke? I marched him up to the nick and made them give him a caution." He chuckled. "It didn't do much good but it made me feel better. Trust me, Lindy, he's come a long way since he married you. I wouldn't swap you for the world."

  She wept her heart out
for half an hour and by the time Julian called, several glasses later, Dick was in no mood to keep dirty laundry under wraps. "Don't believe anything Ellie tells you," he said drunkenly. "She's even more of an idiot than Prue is. Thick as two short planks, the pair of them, and vicious with it. I don't know why I married mine… skinny little thing with no tits thirty years ago… fat as a bloody carthorse now. Never liked her. Nag… nag… nag. That's all she knows. I'll tell you this for nothing… if she thinks I'm paying the damn legal bills when she's done for slander and malicious phone calls then she's got another think coming. She can pay for them herself out of the divorce settlement." There was a small hiatus as he knocked over his glass. "If you've any sense you'll tell that bit of scrag-end you married the same bloody thing. According to Prue, she's been smoking James out."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I'm buggered if I know," said Dick with unconscious humor, "but I bet James didn't enjoy it."

  In the library, Fox's curiosity led him to press play on the tape recorder. A woman's voice came to life in the amplifier. He recognized it immediately as Eleanor Bartlett's. High pitched. Strident. Telltale vowels, exaggerated by electronics, which suggested a different background from the one she was claiming.

  "…I've met your daughter… seen for myself what your abuse has done to her. You disgusting man. I suppose you thought you'd got away with it… that no one would ever know because Elizabeth kept the secret for so long… Who would believe her, anyway? Was that your thinking? Well, they did, didn't they…?Poor Ailsa. What a shock it must have been to find out that she wasn't your only victim… no wonder she called you mad… I hope you're frightened now. Who's going to believe you didn't kill her when the truth comes out? It can all be proved through the child… Is that why you demanded Elizabeth be aborted? Is that why you were so angry when the doctor said it was too late? It all made sense to Ailsa when she remembered the rows… how she must have hated you…"