by Joseph Hone
The Valley of the Fox
JOSEPH HONE
For Lucy and William
‘In the Valley of the fox
Gleams the barrel of a Gun.’
Doomsday Song W. H. AUDEN
‘There is a strange land yonder, a land of witchcraft and beautiful things; a land of brave people, and of trees, and streams, and snow peaks, and a great white road. I have heard of it. But what is the good of talking? It grows dark. Those who live to see will see.’
Umbopa in King Solomon’s Mines
H. RIDER HAGGARD
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface to the 2014 Edition
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
By Joseph Hone in Faber Finds
Copyright
Preface to the 2014 Edition
First published in 1982, The Valley of the Fox is the fourth and final book in a series by Joseph Hone, who I regard as one of the great spy novelists of the twentieth century. In the last few decades, Hone’s standing in the genre has been somewhat eclipsed by the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton, but in his day he was widely seen as their equal. In 1972 Newsweek called The Private Sector the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, while in 1984 the New York Times’ Anatole Broyard called The Sixth Directorate ‘one of the best suspense novels of the last ten years’.
The idiosyncrasies of public taste are often unfathomable, but I sometimes wonder if more people don’t know of Hone’s work simply because it was neither fish nor fowl in the genre – rather, a less easily marketed combination. Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: ‘Field’ and ‘Desk’. James Bond is a field agent – we follow his adventures, not those of his superior M. In John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, the focus tends to be on those back at headquarters – George Smiley is a senior officer at the Circus (he later, briefly, becomes head of it).
I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I’m reading were as deft at characterisation and prose style as it is at the suspense. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It’s all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder for ever? In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: my character Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by Hone, who combined both camps in a way that leaves me breathless – and sick with envy.
Before I was a published novelist I interviewed Mr Hone about his work, and afterwards he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I’m conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. But here were long reviews of Hone’s work from Time, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and other august publications, comparing him favourably with le Carré, Deighton, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Better still, the books live up to the praise.
Hone’s protagonist – ‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself – is British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, femmes fatales, high-octane action, Machiavellian villains – all the great spy stuff you’d want. But it’s wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterisation so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you’ve just read a great work of literature.
Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others’ lives, meddling where he shouldn’t, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He’s a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic – he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.
We first meet him in The Private Sector, where he is an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. In The Sixth Directorate, he gets mixed up with an African princess at the United Nations in New York, while in The Flowers of the Forest he travels to Belgium on the trail of a vanished spook. In The Valley of the Fox, Marlow has retired to the Cotswolds, where he is writing his memoirs. Then a man breaks into his home, and he is forced to go on the run. This is a classic chase thriller, in the tradition of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. Some passages pay explicit homage to that book, with Marlow surviving on his wits in the countryside.
It’s a tremendous end to a superb but all-too-short-lived run of spy novels, which also includes the standalone The Paris Trap. All of these novels have now been reissued as Faber Finds. I find it hard to pick a favourite among them, as all are packed with beautiful writing, astute psychological insight and pace: Hone never forgot he was writing thrillers. It’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that make Hone so special, and which I think makes him one of the greats.
Jeremy Duns
Jeremy Duns is the author of the Paul Dark novels Free Agent (2009), Free Country (a.k.a. Song of Treason, 2010) and The Moscow Option (2012), and also the non-fiction Dead Drop (2013).
Prologue
He’d trapped me. But had he intended to? Had he meant to drive me up against the old pumping shed by the far end of the lake? Or had I carelessly allowed him to do this, moving after him into this impasse where there was no soundless exit, either across the stream ahead or up the steep open slopes behind the ruined building. Either way I couldn’t move now. And since the laurel bush only partly hid me I knew that if he moved past the corner of the shed he must see me and I would have to kill him.
There was no doubt about that. I’d kill him just as I’d had to kill his dog. I wasn’t going to lose the safety of these huge woods, these three square miles of old oak and beech, with odd nooks and pits in the Cotswold limestone, the heavy undergrowth as well, and great drifts of leaf mould where a dead thing – beast or man – could easily disappear, or as soon decay.
I would kill him because I was angry, too – angry at my stupidity in letting him corner me thus. I thought, in the past weeks, I’d become fairly expert in living wild, in concealment and camouflage. Instead, after I’d first seen the man very early that morning, I’d lost my head and become civilised again – blind, impatient, nervous. And now I was trapped. I had a store of anger within me in any case. And I knew it wouldn’t be difficult, now that I was cornered, to let it all explode.
I notched the arrow, eased three fingers behind the cord, drawing it back slowly as I lifted the bow. There was a space of dappled shade fifteen feet from me, by the back corner of the ruined pumping shed. If Detective-Inspector Ross was doing more than just following a hunch – if he actually knew of my existence now in these woods, had seen me at some point that morning and was really following me – then he would surely move into that bright space and he would die for his mistake, not mine.
The sharpened aluminium tip came slowly back towards the knuckles of my bow hand. The long shaft trembled minutely as I made the draw. Then I held the arrow, almost at full stretch, anchored firmly against my shou
lder muscles, the aim steady, all movement gone. Ross was the only one who had to move now.
2
I’d come down for my swim from the top of the great oak tree the usual way first thing that morning – moving across, squirrel-fashion, onto the middle branches of a neighbouring copper beech, set further back against the steep slope of the hill, where one of its great limbs, leaning right over against the bank, made a swaying gangway down to earth. From beneath, at their base, where this line of trees leant over the small lake, it would have been impossible to climb any of them. There were no footholds, no stubble on the trunk of my huge oak until a first ruff of leaves blossomed out in a crown of small branches twenty feet up – while of course the beech trunks were smooth as ice for the same distance.
The only access to my tree-house was via this errant branch. The wood was too old, the trees too high for any other ready climbing. Though there was another branch offering safety, in a tree further along, a few hundred yards away at the south end of the valley – a smaller springy beech branch, which leant across like a parallel bar straight out over the stream just before it ran out of the lake. This was how I’d hidden myself to begin with, on that first evening running from the school, finding the stream and walking down the middle of it, so that the dogs that I expected behind would have no scent to follow.
This other limb over the water had saved me then, when I’d pulled myself on to it, exhausted, barely able to lift the bow and backpack up after me, before climbing higher up, deep into its heart, hidden then by the thick canopy of leaves. For the dogs had come soon afterwards, that same night, led by police with lights, spearing the undergrowth, splashing across the stream. That night and most of the following day they’d ranged back and forth through the wood while I lay up, secure in the leafy sunshine high above them.
It was then that I’d thought of building a tree-house – of how these vast branches and impenetrable summer leaves could save me more permanently. That was almost two weeks ago, passed in growing safety. Since then only one other person had ventured into the steep dell with its small lake, hidden in the forest, which I had made my own. But now Ross had come, a first snake in this Eden.
When I swam I took only the bow with me, two arrows strapped to its belly. I left my clothes behind. It was high summer, a long spell of hot weather, and prudery had no place anyway in this great emptiness. I’d re-discovered the childhood pleasure of swimming naked, pushing gently out into the mist-topped pool just before sun up, the water with just a touch of ice in it after the night, creeping up over my skin like chilled mercury.
It was the best part of my day, this early morning or late evening swim, for I couldn’t risk it at any other time. Even though the pool was partly concealed at the bottom of the lake, overhung with willow and cornered off on one side by a fallen tree-trunk, the ripples might have eddied out into the calm central water, attracting some trespassing hiker or fisherman.
As it was, even first or last thing in the day, I had to be careful. There were colonies of moorhen and at least a pair of mallard who had their homes along the margins of the water, in the reeds and by the water-lilies. And careful though I was they never failed to make a fuss when I came down to swim. There were a few deer as well – down to drink now and then, very early or late, strayed from the herd that roamed the great parkland of the estate above the valley. I’d surprised a big antlered buck on my path down to the water two mornings before: it had crashed away through the undergrowth like a lorry. There were pheasants too, much more common in the surrounding bushes: wily, richly coloured old birds who never seemed to fly, patrolling secret pathways instead, beaks to the ground – who, unless you nearly stepped on them, said nothing.
It was one of these splendid cocks who probably saved me that morning. The moorhens had batted away as usual on my arrival, skating nervously across the water, while the mallard, getting used to me I suppose, had swum with more dignity up to the north end of the lake. But everything was finally still as I lolled in the water then, just out of my depth, treading ground, the liquid swirling in chilly spirals round my legs. The early mist smoked about my face as I swam out towards the fallen trunk. But I could see upwards into the morning now, through the ring of great trees that circled the lake – see the growing shafts of gold pushing the night away and the blue that was coming, pale blue now with last stars in it, that would soon form a leaden dome over the hot day. I rested against the moist trunk, digging my fingers deep into the thick moss. There was a sudden damp smell of old ruined gardens as I scratched at it, some memory of contentment.
Then the pheasant sang out, a shriek of outrage across the water, its surprise filling the air with danger in an instant. At first – dead still, with my nose just above the tree-trunk – I heard nothing more and thought it a false alarm. But when the bird cried again and got up in a great flurry of wingbeats and headed out over the lake towards me, I knew someone must have driven it from cover.
Then I saw the man, a hundred yards away, emerging from the undergrowth just above my oak tree. He stood for a moment at the edge of the water by the old boathouse, a big Alsatian dog inquisitively beside him, a shotgun loosely crooked in his arm, looking straight at me it seemed as he followed the bird’s path right over my head. At that distance I didn’t know it was Ross; the man was dressed like a caricature of an old-fashioned gamekeeper, in plus fours, tweed jacket and cap. He took up the shotgun then, making a pass with it in the air before levelling it straight in my direction.
I saw the brief flash of light, a shaft of crystal morning sun on the barrel, before I ducked behind the fallen trunk, the water suddenly cold all over my body. But when I looked up again after half a minute the man was gone and I glided quickly back under the willow trees and onto the shore. I had my bow and two sharp arrows. But I couldn’t get home. The keeper was obviously coming down the lake shore towards me, was already between me and my tree-house. I couldn’t get back to the beech branch that leant over the hill halfway up the valley – nor could I risk making for the other smaller branch that would lift me to safety, thirty yards to my left above the stream, for to get over there would be to risk crossing right in his path.
The only escape was off round through the wood on the other side of the lake, making for the old pumping shed – an area which had as much intermittent cover as my own side of the water but where the trees, I knew, had no saving lower branches at all. In any case trees were no real use to me now. There was the dog, who might very soon pick up my scent and then track me to any hidden cover. I had to keep moving and hope to drop the tail somehow as I went along.
For the first ten minutes after I’d made off round the other side of the lake, I thought I’d lost them. The woods were calm behind me, a vast summer-morning calm. The sun had risen in a great arc of gold high above me, the top leaves of the great copper beeches already a deep bronze colour. But among the rabbit paths and undergrowth right at the bottom of the valley, which I kept to, there were still odd patches of mist in dank places. I moved forward, in and out of these swirling blobs of cotton wool very carefully, my skin almost the same colour as the air, a naked ghost.
My plan was to move north up the valley, to the head of the lake and then, to kill my trail, walk down the middle of the stream which ran into it, before doubling back to my tree-house on the far side. The beech forest ran in a thick line here, for nearly a mile along and above the valley, the trees and undergrowth hugging the steep slopes and giving adequate cover before the land opened out at the end of the defile, into rough pasture, dotted with clumps of bramble and gorse. Two or three miles away, beyond these scrubby edges to the manor’s home farm lay the northern boundary to the estate, a small by-road that led to the local market town five miles away. But even though there were no farm buildings up there – just a flock of rarely tended sheep – all this open space was out of bounds in daylight to me. The woods I’d come to know intimately; I felt I controlled them. Beyond was the world, a place I’d loved, but
a plague-land to me now.
I’d stopped and was crouching right down, my ear almost to the ground, in the middle of a thick clump of old elder bushes. I’d learnt to walk the leaf mould, along hidden paths, almost soundlessly in my bare feet 1uring the past weeks. Surely the man, in his heavy boots, would be unable to move as quietly? I listened to all the natural sounds of early morning that I’d become accustomed to: a blackbird chirruped suddenly and ran away somewhere behind me. Something else moved high above me, scratching the bark of a tree in a small flurry: a squirrel was going up into the light. But the rest was silence.
I was just turning, about to move away, when I saw him. He was standing, absolutely still, hardly more than twenty yards away, just his head visible, as if disembodied, poking out above a patch of mist. He stared at me – straight at me, it seemed – with his deep-set eyes like holes in a Halloween turnip. He must have seen me, I thought. Or had he? He had the air of a dreamer, of something malign and unreal just emerged from the dying mist. It was Ross, I saw then – the grave-faced dirty tricks man from the Special Branch, sometimes attached to our section: doubtful-eyed, the lids rarely blinking, someone I’d known vaguely in London years before, when I was in Mid-East Intelligence and he’d looked at me over a desk, as he seemed to do now out of the white air, with the same fathomless expression, waiting for you to make the error: the slight lantern jaw, swarthy, the permanent five o’clock shadow: it was certainly Ross, like some more skilled animal, who had caught up with me – Ross, playing the countryman, the man who never gave up. Ross, the hit-man now, who must have been the immediate cause of all my anguish a fortnight before. I’d have tried to kill him there and then except that I’d more to do before I left these woods, a lot more. Besides it was Marcus – his and my old boss – that I really wanted: it was Marcus, after all, who must have sent Ross out into my life to ruin it.