"No."
The sergeant sighed. "It's bloody odd. What's his connection with this place? Why attack the Colonel's granddaughter? What's he after?"
Barker shrugged. "The best we can do is stake out the bus and wait for him to come back."
"Well, don't hold your breath, mate. At the moment I can't see there's anything for him to come back for."
Nancy lowered Wolfie to the floor and closed the door behind them. She gave him her hand. "You're too heavy," she told him apologetically. "My bones are beginning to creak."
"That's okay," he said. "My mum couldn't carry me neither." He looked nervously along the corridor. "Are we lost?"
"No. We just have to walk down here, and the stairs are round the corner at the end."
"There's a lot of doors, Nancy."
"It's a big house," she agreed. "But we're okay. I'm a soldier, remember, and soldiers can always find their way around." She gave his hand a small tug. "Come on. Best foot forward, eh?"
He held back.
"What's the matter?"
"I can see Fox," he said, as the corridor light went out.
Mark's phone rang again immediately with Nancy's message. He looked into the scullery. "I'm going upstairs," he told Bella. "Apparently Mrs. Dawson's upsetting Wolfie."
She dropped the freezer lid. "Then I'm coming with you, mate," she said forcefully. "This woman's getting on my tits something chronic. I've just watched a fucking rat poke its head out of the skirting board."
With every instinct urging "retreat," Nancy didn't bother to find out if Wolfie was right. She let go his hand and opened the door into the bedroom again, briefly flooding the corridor with light as she shoved him back inside. She didn't waste time looking behind her, instead she slammed the door and leaned her weight against it, feeling with her left hand for a key. Too late. Fox was stronger and heavier than she was, and all she could do was take the key to prevent him locking it against help.
"We're going to run into the far corner," she urged Wolfie. "Now!"
Vera hadn't moved from where Nancy had pushed her, but she did nothing to impede their dash. She even looked frightened when the door gave way and Fox erupted into the room, as if the sudden flurry of activity was alarming her. She drew back against the wall as he fell to his knees under the impetus of his forward momentum.
There was a brief hiatus when nothing happened except that Fox whipped out a fist to slam the door, then stared up at Nancy, breathing heavily, as she put herself between him and his son. It was a strange few seconds during which they were able to see and take stock of each other for the first time. She would never know what he saw, but she saw a man with blood on his hands who reminded her of the picture of Leo in the dining room. He smiled at the shock in her face, as if he'd been looking for it, then lumbered to his feet. "Give me the boy," he said.
She shook her head, mouth too dry to speak.
"Lock the door, Ma," he ordered Vera. "I don't want Wolfie making a run for it while I sort this bitch out." But Vera didn't move and he rounded on her angrily. "Do what you're told!"
Nancy took the moment to press the key into Wolfie's hand behind her back, hoping he'd have the sense to throw it out the window the minute he had the chance. At the same time she shuffled him toward a chest of drawers to their right that had some heavy bookends on it. It was the wrong side for her-she'd have to turn away from Fox in order to grab the nearest one-but it was a weapon of sorts. She had no illusions about her chances. In army terminology, she was fucked… unless a miracle happened.
"Go away," Vera cried, beating at the air in front of Fox with her fists. "You're not my baby. My baby's dead."
Fox slammed his fingers around her throat and pinned her to the wall. "Shut up, you stupid old fool. I don't have time for this. Are you going do what you're told or am I going to hurt you?"
Nancy felt Wolfie slip out behind her and reach for the bookend. "He's not my dad neither," he muttered fiercely, putting the heavy ornament into her good hand. "I reckon my dad was somebody else."
"Yes," said Nancy, turning the bookend against her thigh to give herself a better grip in fingers that were slippery with sweat. "Me, too, friend."
In the great scheme of things, it hardly ranked as heroism. There was no time for thought, no weighing of danger, merely a gut response to a stimulus. It wasn't even a sensible thing to do with a policeman downstairs, but it brought a glow to Mark's heart whenever he thought about it. Coming around the corner from the top of the stairs he and Bella saw a man silhouetted against a shaft of light from a bedroom before the door slammed and the corridor was plunged into darkness again. "What the hell-?" he exclaimed in surprise.
"Fox," said Bella.
It was like a red rag to a bull. Ignoring Bella's restraining arm, Mark charged down the corridor and burst through the door.
Bella, with a stronger sense of self-preservation, paused long enough to yell down the stairs for help, then she, too, took off, exerting herself in a way she hadn't for years.
Mark was past Fox and into the room before he saw Nancy in the corner. "Here!" She threw the bookend toward him. "Behind you to your left."
He caught the heavy weight like a rugby ball and spun on his heel just as Fox abandoned Vera to face him. For Mark, too, the likeness to Leo was extraordinary, but it was a fleeting impression that vanished as soon as he looked into the man's eyes. As Bella's cry for help reverberated down the corridor, he raised the bookend in his left hand and advanced on the man.
"Do you want to try someone your own size?" he invited.
Fox shook his head, but kept a wary eye on the bookend. "You're not going to hit me with that, Mr. Ankerton," he said confidently, edging toward the door. "You'll break my skull."
He even sounded like Leo. "Self-defense," said Mark, moving to block his exit.
"I'm unarmed."
"I know," said Mark, feinting a clubbing blow with his left, while powering his right in a swinging uppercut to Fox's jaw. He danced away, grinning rather manically as the man's knees began to buckle. "You can thank my dad for this," he said, stepping in again to land a rabbit punch on the back of Fox's neck as he went down. "He said a gentleman should appreciate the art of boxing."
"Nice one, mate," said Bella breathlessly from the doorway. "Shall I sit on him? I could do with a bloody rest."
29
An hour later Fox was escorted downstairs in handcuffs. He dismissed any suggestion that he was suffering from concussion, but Monroe, who didn't like his pallor or the welts on his arms where Nancy had cut him with the razor, telephoned ahead for a secure room at the county hospital to have him checked. They lived in a compensation culture, he told Mark sourly, and he didn't plan to give Fox any room to sue the Dorset Constabulary. For the same reason, he offered Nancy a ride, but again she refused. She knew what the emergency room was like on bank holidays when the drunks started rolling in, she said, and she was damned if she'd give Fox the pleasure of seeing her wait in line while he took precedence.
A preliminary search had produced several items of interest in the capacious pockets of Fox's coat, notably a matching set of keys to those Vera held, a roll of twenty-pound notes, a mobile telephone with a distorter attachment, and, alarmingly for both Mark and Nancy, a sawn-off shotgun in a canvas lining under his left arm. Bella looked extremely thoughtful when Barker told them about it. "I thought he was wriggling a bit," she said. "Next time I'll sit on his head and make sure he doesn't come round."
From the evidence of the keys in Fox's possession, his presence in the house, and Nancy's report that Vera had claimed him as her son, it seemed likely that Fox had had a free run of Shenstead Manor for some time. As he refused to say anything, however, the issue of what he had been doing there was temporarily put on hold. James was asked to make a thorough check of the premises in advance of a police search the following morning, and a small team was sent down to check out Manor Lodge.
Mark took Monroe aside to ask him what had been in Fo
x's bus. He was particularly interested in the file on Nancy that Fox had taken from the Colonel's desk that afternoon. It contained privileged information, he said, which neither the Colonel nor Captain Smith wanted made public. Monroe shook his head. No such file had been found, he said. He in turn picked Mark's brains about the telephone calls, explaining that he had interviewed both Mrs. Weldon and Mrs. Bartlett.
"They both say the information came from the Colonel's daughter, Mr. Ankerton. Could there be a connection between her and this man?"
"I don't know," said Mark honestly.
Monroe eyed him thoughtfully. "The voice distorter certainly suggests it. Mrs. Bartlett claims she was told about the incest sometime in October when Leo introduced her to Elizabeth, but she denies any knowledge of the Darth Vader messages. And I believed her. So how is Fox involved?"
"I don't know," said Mark again. "I'm almost as new to this as you are, Sergeant. The Colonel told me about the calls late on Christmas Eve, and I've been trying to make sense of them ever since. The allegations aren't true, of course, but we didn't learn until this evening that Elizabeth was the alleged informant."
"Have you spoken to her?"
Mark shook his head. "I've been trying to contact her for a couple of hours." He glanced toward the drawing room, where Vera was sitting. "The Colonel recorded the messages on tape, and they include details which were known only to the family. The obvious conclusion was that one or both of the Colonel's children were involved-which is why he didn't report it-but of course the other person who was privy to the family's secrets was Vera."
"According to Captain Smith, Mrs. Dawson said she locked Mrs. Lockyer-Fox out in the cold on her son's instructions. Does that sound likely to you?"
"God knows," said Mark with a sigh. "She's completely batty."
Vera couldn't help them at all. Questions about Fox were greeted with incomprehension and fear, and she sat in a pathetic huddle in the drawing room, whimpering to herself. James asked her where Bob was, suggesting the police should try to contact him, but that only seemed to unhinge her further. As yet, James had not seen Fox, who was under restraint in the bedroom. However, he was able to say categorically that Vera had never had a child. He believed Ailsa had mentioned a stillbirth on one occasion, which had devastated the poor woman, but unfortunately, being a man, he had not paid much attention.
For her part, Nancy repeated most of what Vera had said-the part she played in Ailsa's death, her mention of someone else being responsible for Henry's mutilation, the woman's obvious confusion about her relationship with Wolfie. "I don't think anything she said can be relied on," she told Monroe. "She repeats the same phrases over and over again, like a learned mantra, and it's difficult to know if any of it's true."
"What sort of phrases?"
"About being taken for granted… do this… do that… no one cares." Nancy shrugged. "She's very confused about children. She said she taught Wolfie manners when he was younger, and that he had brown curly hair. But he can't have done. Blond hair can darken as children get older but dark hair doesn't turn ash blond. I think she's mistaking him for another child."
"What other child?"
"I've no idea. One from the village, perhaps." She shook her head. "I'm not sure it matters. She's got holes in her brain. She remembers a dark-haired child from somewhere and she's persuaded herself that that was Wolfie."
"Or been persuaded by somebody else?"
"It wouldn't be difficult. Anyone who sympathized with her would get a hearing. She seems to feel the whole world's against her-" she pulled a cynical expression-"except her darling boy, of course."
She remained reticent about what the old woman had said on the subject of her parentage. She told herself she was protecting Wolfie, but it wasn't true. The child had agreed to go to the kitchen with Bella, and Nancy was free to speak as openly as she wanted. Instead, she remained tight-lipped, unwilling to tempt fate. The specter of Vera as a grandmother seemed to have been removed, but it gave her no confidence that Fox was out of the picture. Deep in her stomach was a continuous nutter of foreboding that, in that respect at least, Vera had been telling the truth. And she cursed herself for ever coming to this house.
It made her brusque and sharp-tongued in response to James's solicitous queries about her welfare. She was fine, she told him. In fact, she didn't even think her arm was broken, so she was planning to drive back to Bovington to have it looked at there. She wished everyone would stop fussing and leave her alone. James retired, crushed, but Mark, with an intuition learned through growing up with seven sisters, took himself off to the kitchen for a quiet word with Wolfie. With a little coaxing from Bella, and some filling in of gaps-"she said she didn't want Fox to be her dad or the nasty lady to be her gran"… "me and her both reckoned our dads were somebody else"-Mark guessed what the trouble was. And he, too, cursed himself for helping to unlock a biological history that Nancy had never wanted to know.
Monroe was interested enough in the vanishing file to send Barker back to Fox's bus. "The solicitor says it's bulky, so where the hell has he hidden it? Take another look and see if you can spot something I've missed." He handed over Fox's keys. "We can't move the damn thing while the Welshman's blocking the exit, but if you power it up you can run the lights inside. They might help."
"What am I looking for?"
"A compartment of some sort. There has to be one, Martin. Otherwise we'd have found the file."
Mark took himself into the garden with his mobile telephone. "I'll make you a promise," he told Leo, well out of earshot of anyone in the house. "Deal with me straight over the next five minutes, and I'll try to persuade your father to reinstate you. Interested?"
"Maybe," said the other with amusement. "Is this about the granddaughter?"
"Just answer the questions," said Mark grimly. "Do you know a man who calls himself Fox Evil?"
"No. Good name, though… I might adopt it myself. Who is he? What's he done?"
"Vera claims he's her son and that she helped him murder your mother. But she's gone off the rails completely, so it may not be true."
"Good God!" said Leo in genuine surprise. There was a short pause. "Look, it can't be true, Mark. She's obviously confused. I know she saw Ma's body on the terrace, and was pretty shaken by it, because I rang her after the funeral to say I was sorry I hadn't spoken to her. She kept telling me how cold Ma must have been. She's probably convinced herself it was her fault."
"What about this man being her son?"
"It's rubbish. She doesn't have a son. Dad knows that. I was her blue-eyed boy. She'd have jumped over the moon if I'd asked her to."
Mark stared toward the house, brow furrowed in thought. "Okay, well, Fox Evil's just been arrested for breaking into the Manor, and he had a voice distorter in his possession. Did your father tell you that most of the incest allegations were made by someone who spoke like Darth Vader?"
"I thought he was barking," said Leo sourly.
"Far from it. This guy's a psychopath. He's already attacked your niece with a hammer, and when he was arrested he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun."
"Shit! Is she okay?"
It sounded genuine. "Broken arm and broken rib, but still alive. The trouble is, you and Lizzie are implicated through the voice distorter. Mrs. Bartlett has told the police that it was you who contacted her some time in October so that Lizzie could give her chapter and verse on your father's abuse. As Darth Vader's been saying identical things to Mrs. Bartlett, the obvious conclusion-which the police are already drawing-is that you and Lizzie set this bastard on your father."
"That's ridiculous," said Leo angrily. "The obvious conclusion is that the Bartlett woman's behind it."
"Why?"
"What do you mean, why? She's lying through her teeth."
"What does she have to gain by it? You and Lizzie are the only ones with a motive for destroying your father and Lizzie's child."
"Jesus!" said Leo disgustedly. "You're as bad as the old man
. Give a dog a bad name and every sod on the planet can have a go at hanging him. That's what Becky's up to in case you're interested… and I'm hacked off with it."
For the second time that evening, Mark ignored the rant. "What about Lizzie? Could she have been persuaded to get involved in something like this without your knowledge?"
"Don't be an idiot."
"What's so idiotic about it? If Lizzie's as shot as Becky says, it's conceivable a con artist persuaded her to go along with it… though I don't understand why, unless he can get access to the money when she inherits." He mentally crossed his fingers. "You said she never got over her first love. Perhaps he came back for another go?"
"No chance. He was a craven little sod. Took the money and ran. That was half the problem. If he'd come back, she'd have seen him for what he was, instead of remembering him as an Irish charmer."
"What did he look like?"
"I don't know. I never saw him. He was gone by the time I got back from France."
"How well did your mother know him? Would she have recognized him again?"
"I've no idea."
"I thought you said Ailsa took his education in hand."
"He wasn't one of the children, you jerk. He'd fathered most of them. That's why Ma went ballistic. This bozo knew more about sex than Don Juan, which is why Lizzie fell for him so heavily."
"Are you sure about that?"
"It's what Lizzie told me."
"Then there's only a fifty-fifty chance it was the truth," said Mark sarcastically.
Perhaps Leo agreed because, for once, he didn't react. "Look, for what it's worth, I can prove Mrs. Bartlett never spoke to Lizzie… not in October anyway. Or, if she did, she'd have been talking to her in the Intensive Care Unit at St. Thomas's hospital. Did this woman mention drips and monitors to the police? Did she say Lizzie's in such a bad way she can't even stand up anymore?"
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