by Peter Laws
‘Yeah, yeah. I know,’ he said, still looking at his outstretched hand.
‘I think she’ll be good soil. For the seed, I mean.’
‘The seed?’ Stephen guffawed. ‘There you go again.’
‘You know I mean the Gospel.’ For the first time tonight he laughed too. ‘I think heaven’s calling her.’
Stephen smiled softly. ‘So do I.’
‘Then come on, let’s go home. We could pray some more.’
They pushed through the corn and ran again, back to the dark silent road and then up the hill toward the vast night sky where the fat moon hung and space was black and the stars seemed pleased with all they could see.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Twenty minutes later, at almost 4 a.m. Wren spotted the flash of blue lights in the trees outside, pulsing the branches like a weird folksy disco. By now Matt was dressed so he creaked down the stairs and peeked out of the lounge window, just to make sure it was definitely a policeman walking up the path and not some monk in a hood with a flashing blue light in one hand, butcher’s knife in the other.
It was PC Taylor, in fact. The Chris Kelly fan. There was no one else.
Matt opened the door before Taylor got to it.
‘Hi, Professor Hunter.’
‘Look, just call me Matt.’
‘Uh-huh. So … the drama continues … you’ve had a disturbance here tonight?’
‘That’s right.’
‘A prowler?’
‘Seems to be, yes.’
‘And have you had a good look around? Seen anything out of the ordinary?’
‘I haven’t had a proper look yet. I wanted to wait for you.’ Some macho quadrant in his brain made him feel like a six-year-old, saying that. Adding my wife would have been angry if I’d gone outside probably wouldn’t have helped.
The tiniest hint of a smirk flashed on Taylor’s face. ‘I suppose it is pretty creepy out here, this time of night. Especially if you’re used to the city. Are you ready to brave it now, sir?’
‘Yep.’ Matt grabbed his jacket from the peg and locked the door behind him.
The woods were chilly, no doubt about it. But it was nowhere near as icy as before, when he stood alone in the doorway earlier. The breeze still fizzed in the branches, swelling into subtle crescendos.
Taylor switched on the heftiest torch on the planet and Matt led them round to the back of the cottage. He spotted his own meagre Maglite, still shining on the grass. He quickly picked it up and shone it towards the hedge where he’d spotted the hood earlier.
Taylor’s torch was amazingly bright, like a spotlight from an old warship. He heard voices from behind him and quickly shone the brilliant beam up the side of the cottage. A perfect circle of harsh light fixed the three girls in a full moon, as they gathered up at Amelia’s open window.
Amelia looked more relaxed now. She squinted, covered her eyes and waved. Both Matt and Taylor waved back.
‘I’ll show you where I spotted him.’ Matt opened up the back garden gate that led through the hedge and into the forest itself. They swung their torch beams from left to right and he half expected to suddenly see some guy in a hood, glaring at him with bloodshot Dracula eyes. But there was, of course, nothing.
‘So do have you any idea who it was?’ Taylor flipped open a notebook and pulled out a little pencil with IKEA written on it. He licked its lead point, which was something Matt had never seen anyone actually do in real life, and started scribbling.
‘It was too dark to tell for sure. But he was wearing some sort of hood. It was brown. All I saw was the tip of it.’
‘You saw the tip?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of something brown?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You saw the tip of something brown. In the woods.’
‘Yes.’
‘Not much to go on now, is it, Professor—’
‘Listen,’ Matt locked his eyes on Taylor’s, ‘it wasn’t a tree or a leaf or the ear of an owl. I saw the tip of a brown hood. Just over an inch of it. Made of soft material. It dropped out of sight when the light fell on it and whoever it was ran off. My daughter and I clearly heard the branches snapping.’
Taylor was starting to yawn so he twisted his face in an attempt to stifle it. It looked like he was having a mild stroke. ‘So … brown hood … got it. You mean like a monk would wear?’
‘Yeah. I guess. Or it could have just been a hoodie.’
‘And did you see anything else? Hair colour, face?’
‘No, just the tip.’
‘Just the tip.’ He gave the lead another lick before writing that down. ‘And you say he was standing right here?’ Taylor swung his torch onto the floor. Twigs, dirt and leaves were scattered everywhere. It was too dry for anybody to have left footprints.
‘I know it doesn’t look like much but,’ he said, ‘but … I really—’
Matt froze.
That sound again.
Crying from somewhere deep in the woods. One quick moan and then it stopped, leaving silence again.
‘Daddy,’ Amelia shouted down from the window. ‘They’re back. The children.’
Taylor gave him a confused look, ‘The what?’
‘I was going to get to this. My daughter said she heard children, crying in the woods.’
Taylor’s eyebrows shot straight up at that. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Didn’t you just hear—’
Another long and distant scream of what sounded like a little child, a girl maybe, flung itself through the wood. But the little chuckle coming from Taylor’s face did something to the sound. That distant wailing became less and less like a child and more and more like something else.
A sudden sense of idiocy started to fill Matt’s body, from the feet up.
Oh, dear.
‘You haven’t lived in the country much, have you, Matt?’
He shook his head, as the mocking little cry went on. ‘It’s an animal, isn’t it?’
‘Indeed it is,’ he actually tittered, then shouted up to Amelia. ‘It’s alright, princess. It’s just a fox.’ He turned back to Matt. ‘They always make that sound at certain times of the night. And don’t be embarrassed. They sound like little kids screaming. Freaks a lot of people out who don’t know any better.’
‘Daddy?’ Amelia shouted down. ‘Do you think it could be the fox that we killed?’
Even from here, he could spot Wren had nudged the kid to shut up.
Taylor looked suddenly wide awake. ‘You killed a fox?’
‘Well … yes.’
‘You know that’s illegal, don’t you?’
‘Well obviously I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t hunt it. We hit it with the car.’ He saw no need to go into the extra detail.
Taylor started to shake his head.
‘You know … an accident. We accidentally hit a fox with a car. It happens. We buried it out in the woods.’
‘Who did?’
‘Us … the family.’
Taylor looked rather disturbed by that. Killing and burying animals probably wasn’t how he spent his family time. ‘You know what? Round here, killing a fox means bad luck. Unless you’re hunting it, of course. Then it’s good luck. But then you can’t do that any more because that’s illegal. So killing a fox with a car? Bad luck, that.’
‘I thought Christians didn’t believe in bad luck.’
‘Well, maybe they don’t. But put it this way. I’m bloody glad I didn’t kill it.’
The animal moan grew a little louder, more desperate and shrill and Matt thought of that Edgar Allen Poe story, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Only this time, it wasn’t a heart under the floorboards. It was a fox in a bin bag that was crying out from under the soil, Officer, that man didn’t just hit me with a car. He stamped his fake Italian shoe into my adorable little throat!
‘Well, let’s have a little look around to see if there’s anything amiss, shall we?’ Taylor said, clearly enjoying this.
Did he imagine it? Was the tip of the hood a leaf dropping from a tree that just happened to catch the light? The crack of twigs just a fox scampering across the floor when they saw the torch?
He felt suddenly weary beyond anything he expected.
‘Well, I’d better call it a night,’ Taylor said.
‘Thanks for coming out. I do appreciate it. I’m surprised you’re working so late.’
‘Actually, I need the overtime … I’m saving for a big trip.’ He took his hat off and held it across his belly, pushing up on the balls of his feet to prompt the logical follow-up question.
Matt smiled, ‘So where are you going to?’
He ran his hand across the air. ‘Israel. The Holy Land. Me and my wife are going to walk where Jesus walked. Every single step. I’m going to do everything he did.’
‘Apart from get crucified, I take it.’
Taylor was looking up at the stars, flickering over the forest. ‘It’s going to be amazing. Life-changing, I reckon.’
Matt watched the officer, at a guess in his mid twenties, bouncing at the prospect of going to the Middle East (a trait disproportionately common among evangelicals). Watching the flash of his eyes made Matt wonder if Taylor might be a prime candidate for Jerusalem Syndrome. He ran a seminar on it at the university. Where religious devotees build the Holy Land up to be so significant that they suffer a sort of mental breakdown when they actually get there. Their brains are unable to cope with Jesus’s land being more like Jesusland, a theological amusement park with a tourist soul, political rumblings and multiple birth sites of Christ.
‘Well, try not to build it up so much,’ Matt said softly. ‘Then you won’t be disappointed.’
‘You wha’?’ Taylor looked baffled. ‘How could any true believer be disappointed with that? His home?’
‘Well, I hope you and your wife have a wonderful time,’ Matt pushed his hand out. ‘Listen, thanks again for coming out.’
Taylor had to blink hard to snap himself back into England. ‘No worries. I’ll log the incident and we’ll see if anything else comes up.’
Which really meant that unless the hooded guy turned up at the house again and stabbed Matt directly in the chest, this was where this investigation ended.
‘Oh,’ Taylor said, ‘and how about I forget about the fox that you killed.’
Matt fought the urge to go and grab the dictionary off the shelf, look up the word accident and press it directly into Taylor’s face.
Instead he stood on the doorstep, watching the young officer climb back into the car. The headlights flicked on. No flashing blue this time. He watched the car move off and the white beam creep down the dirt road, lighting the underside of the branches like a ball of light drifting down a tunnel. Then the lights flicked off and the forest was as it wanted to be. Its preferred state. Bedded in shadows.
He wished like hell that he’d run out of that door when he’d had the chance to see who it was.
Because he was almost certain it was someone watching their house at midnight, picking (he couldn’t fail to notice) the side of the cottage with the kids on it. And the more he played it over in his mind the more he remembered how loud those cracking twigs were. Whoever ran off was a decent size.
The thought of someone watching Amelia’s window would normally make him angry. Furious, in fact. But that wasn’t the emotion he was feeling. Not right now. Not here in the deepest ditch of the night as the wind whistled and the dry leaves scattered. As the ice crept back into the air and the distant, unseen waterfall rumbled somewhere in his ears.
As he stood there, rubbing his arms with the cold he wasn’t angry. Instead he felt unsafe. Feeling how tiny the Hunter family was in a cottage that was little more than a fragile glass bauble dangling amongst the branches of a million ancient trees.
He clicked his torch one more time and shone it across the drive.
His body jerked with fright.
A mean little pair of green eyes had punctured the darkness, in the light of his beam. And they were staring at him.
Who is that? he thought, before good sense corrected him. What is that?
Then after a few, creeping seconds, he figured out the obvious. He whispered over in the fox’s direction, way over by the oak tree, ‘Yeah, get lost, you little shit. Thanks for making me look like a moron.’
The cretin was defiant. Didn’t even blink.
He reached down and grabbed a handful of gravel and tossed it in the animal’s direction. ‘I said, get lost!’
The two green fluorescent circles, swamped in black shadow, remained utterly still.
He frowned, felt his heart starting to pulse.
He checked behind him to make sure the front door was still closed and grabbed the poker he’d left propped up by the wood store. Hoping he could just scare this one off, rather than make a habit of killing them. He squinted, pushing his insipid little torch beam toward the lights and walked on. Crunch, crunch, under his feet. Sounding horribly loud in the night. The cottage shrinking behind him. His eyes kept flicking to the right and the left looking out for someone in a hood racing between the trunks.
Gradually, as he got closer, the beam finally picked up the autumn-orange brown of the fox’s fur. Its eyes constantly open. A few more steps and it lay in full view, by the side of the dirt road.
‘My God,’ he whispered, quite involuntarily. Then his arms rippled instantly with gooseflesh. It took all of his willpower not to run straight back into the cottage and bolt the door.
The dead fox lay on its side. Head propped towards the cottage like it was slyly looking at it. Folded ears, peeled gums, misshapen neck. The unmistakeable, long gash down its belly was now thick with hard, brown blood. And snagged around its ankle and strewn across the dirt track – like it had dragged itself all the way here – was the ragged torn bin bag he and Wren had buried it in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Now that it was morning and the lights of the forest were switched on, the kids seemed surprisingly upbeat.
What once were murdered children hidden in the woods were now just vocal, grumpy foxes. And even the scary house-watcher was a possible (to chill people out Matt and Wren were suggesting probable) trick on the eyes. But of course neither of them had dared mention to the kids the one little detail that would have sent them squealing back to London. That their beloved dead fox was back.
Taylor was less than impressed when Matt had called him straight back out in the middle of the night. And even when he turned up – yawning and rubbing at his eyes – he still shrugged when he actually saw the fox’s body, suggesting there could be a natural explanation.
‘How do you know it’s your bin bag? How do you know it’s your fox?’
Your fox. Matt had bristled at that. ‘And how come you didn’t spot it, when you drove off?’
Taylor had shrugged and simply reminded Matt how early in the morning it was.
When Matt suggested that he and Taylor go out and check the grave to see if it was empty Taylor just shook his head. ‘Not at this time, you don’t. You’re liable to break your neck walking in these woods at night. Someone’ll come up to you in the morning. And if it makes you feel better, I’ll stick around up here for the rest of my shift. It’ll be like a stakeout. Like in that film … what was it called again …’
‘Stakeout?’
‘Yeah. That.’
Now that the morning had come, Matt was up and leaning out of the bathroom window. He noticed that Taylor’s police car had already gone. What puzzled him, though, was that the fox was missing too. They’d left it there, exactly where he’d found it, on the side of the dirt road. But now the road was empty. He might have wondered whether it had all just been a dream but he knew it wasn’t. He’d
shown Wren the body just after Taylor left.
Taylor must have taken it. Evidence, he supposed.
So despite the sun and the laughing kids, the sense of tension was ticking in the background like his granny’s old clock. Whenever he visited her as a kid that noise was always there, behind every conversation, every TV show, every tray of tea and pink wafer biscuits.
Matt had breakfast, rinsed his Weetabix bowl in the kitchen sink and set it to the side. It wasn’t fully clean but as long as he got the big bits off he’d thank himself later. That stuff dried like concrete. He yawned as he checked his watch, 8.12 a.m., and wondered what time the police would come, so they could check on the empty grave.
He popped his head into the study to see if Wren was there, but she wasn’t at her desk like he thought she’d be. There was a half-finished sketch of the church foyer lying flat and the pencil she’d used to draw it was lying next to a steaming, half-filled cup of coffee.
He was about to turn so he could see where she’d gone when he saw a movement through the French doors.
Her red hair suddenly popped up from behind the hedge. He walked across the room and pushed both doors open.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Hang on.’ She came back through the gate still in her pyjamas. She was wearing her Kermit the Frog slippers. Each bare foot was thrust deep into Kermit’s gaping mouth, who stared, goggle-eyed, up each leg. Odd that such a design looked cute rather than barbaric. ‘I thought maybe in the daylight, there might be footprints. Or some sort of trail.’
‘And?’
‘I couldn’t find anything.’
‘Me neither. I checked before breakfast.’
She sighed and leant against the cottage wall, splaying her hand on the rough painted stone. ‘Do you really think it might have been Billy coming back? Maybe he was angry with how I spoke to him.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘But how would he know we buried the fox?’ She bent over to pick the leaves and twigs from Kermit’s cheeks.