Vote at Toad Hall

by Eddie Saint

  ‘Tony has been poisoned, most likely with a nerve agent smeared on his doorknob. Looks like textbook Fox work, although that doesn’t mean it is Fox work. Could be a copy-cat. Either way, it seems he was lucky. He’s still breathing so he didn’t get a fatal dose. I’ve seen this MO before, and if it doesn’t finish you off almost instantly then you have a great chance of pulling through. A nasty couple of weeks in intensive care, but usually no lasting damage.’

  It was a lot to take in all at once. At least it explained the bag covering the door knob and the reason Mole was in the recovery position. What it didn’t clarify, in any way, was who this weirdly calm and efficient Badger was.

  ‘Now, I’ve rung for an ambulance. We should stay until we hear their sirens, and then we’ll have to make our escape… with this!’ She brandished the white memory stick.

  My mind was racing to catch up. As I’m sure you can imagine, I had a queue of questions, most of them short and starting with ‘W’. Melody helped me out.

  ‘Tony here took over your brother’s files after he went missing. He made some headway but got stumped by something called ‘HORNWORM’; told me he kept finding it in the most highly guarded areas. Obviously we ran all the checks but we came up with nothing. Not even a shadow of a thing. It was as if ‘HORNWORM’, whatever it is, or was, wasn’t just cloaked, it was ripped out altogether.’

  The mention of Dug gave me another jolt. As far as I knew he had vanished without trace three months ago. No news, no finger in the post, no ransom demands. Nothing.

  Realisation slowly dawned on me (although it annoyed me that it had split an infinitive so to do).

  ‘So you work for the Service?’

  ‘I was your brother’s boss, and Tony’s still one of mine.’

  ‘And you wanted to find me, to see if I knew what Hornworm was?’

  Melody bent down and checked again that Mole had a pulse. Still crouching, she looked up at me.

  ‘You are so hard to find!’ she whispered. ‘I mean that as a compliment, of course. You must tell me where you’ve been all this time.’

  There, in the middle of Mole’s living room, a dreadful thought occurred to me.

  ‘Does this mean I’ve been caught, ma’am?’

  Melody straightened up and looked me square in the eyes over her half-moon specs.

  ‘ ‘Ma’am’? ‘Mel’ will do,’ she said. ‘And I’m not high up enough in the Service to want to catch you,’ she added, with a wink.

  In the distance the bi-tonal wail of a siren drifted up the street and into Tony Mole’s living room.

  Mel took me by the arm.

  ‘Time we made our escape. Mind the glass on the way out. And keep your wits about you. It may have been a while since I worked out in the field, but if my senses are still good then I smell a Fox.’

  She turned back to Mole and said, ‘Good luck, Tony. Help is on its way.’

  With that we navigated the sharp debris on the kitchen floor and disappeared into the shadows of the back alleys behind the flats.

  CONSTABLE CRACKLING HADN’T seen a door knob with a bag on it before. However, he had been in the Force a long time and he put his longevity down partly to not being too curious about what was inside suspicious bags. Other folks got paid to risk looking inside bags. He was simply present to respond to a situation and decide which higher pay grades needed to come and take over.

  He and his partner eyed the front door with suspicion. His partner, being the junior member of the team, got the short straw. In this case that meant knocking on the door anyway. To be on the safe side she used the handle of her night stick.

  No answer.

  They had been alerted that there might be a caller in danger, so they had come with full blues and twos. No-one in the neighbourhood could have been unaware of their presence. Their hope was that whichever miscreant was causing bother to a member of the public would have been scared off by the lights and the siren, leaving a grateful victim and no one to arrest. In turn that usually meant a box of chocolates some days down the line and the bare minimum of paperwork. Win, win.

  They proceeded around to the rear of the property and gained entrance through the already open back door. An initial scan of the interior revealed much broken glass, a lot of blood in the bathroom and a body on the floor of the front room.

  Constable Crackling crouched and checked for a pulse.

  ‘He’s still alive, just,’ he said to his partner. ‘Call the paramedics.’

  His partner put her phone to her ear and, before she had a chance to say anything, the sound of an ambulance siren fired off outside. The two officers looked at each other and decided that whatever had just happened was above their pay grade.

  Constable Crackling went and opened the door for the medics, relieved to find that the door knob had no bag on it on the inside.

  Chapter Nine

  MEL’S CAR WAS parked two streets away, and by the time we got to it the damp river mist had begun to collect into heavy droplets again on our fur. We stood on opposite sides of the car and both did the full shake just as, through the mist, a second siren homed in on the flat we had just left.

  ‘Can’t the Service stretch to a staff car?’ I asked, casting my eye over Mel’s plain black, not-too-old, nowhere-near-new estate.

  ‘This is a staff car!’ she replied, indignantly.

  She unlocked the doors and we got in out of the damp. Both doors squeaked loudly on unoiled hinges.

  ‘I asked for ‘instantly forgettable’.’

  ‘Well then, it’s bang on the money.’

  I settled back in to the soft, padded seat and ran through the events of the last hour: the walk in the damp night with Tommy Roo; the time spent watching from the shadows; the bagged door knob; the broken glass; Mole; Mel…

  ‘So,’ I said, turning to my driver as the car pulled away. ‘You were looking for me. That’s quite a queue all of a sudden.’

  Mel eased out of the side road and into the sparse evening traffic on the main road heading up river.

  ‘My whiskers have been twitching ten to the dozen ever since Tony got stuck into this Hornworm thing. Of course, he kept it off the books, told me it was nothing and tried to keep me in the dark, but when I saw that e-mail he sent you...’

  Hornworm was starting to feel like a rogue moth, flitting about in every shadow and refusing to be pinned down.

  We sat in thoughtful silence as the car headed alongside the river and past Toad Hall. Boy did I have a lot of big questions after the night I was having! I barely knew where to start.

  ‘So, was Dug rummaging around with ‘Hornworm’ too? Before Mole, I mean?’

  Mel nodded her head, keeping her eyes on the road. ‘He must have had a sniff of it as far as I can tell, although he didn’t see fit to share it with me at the time. And maybe that is what led to his disappearance.’

  A chill hit the air between us.

  ‘Oh! Oh, I’m sorry. I…’

  ‘Ah, don’t sweat it, Mel. I haven’t given up hope, but I’m not going to fool myself.’

  You don’t get to share a bedroom with a guy for most of your life without him feeling able to talk to you, like really talk to you. He knew the risks, and he made sure I did too.

  ‘You know, Cottontail,’ said Mel, looking directly at me as we stopped at traffic lights. ‘This is dangerous business. Really dangerous. You’ve seen what happened to Tony.’

  We shared a silent moment, thinking of the very real dangers a Service agent must face every day. Tony Mole had known too. It still must have come as a shock to him though, as he slowly lost the feeling in his paw and then on up his arm…

  ‘And you know something else?’ Mel continued.

  I cocked my head: a silent question.

  Mel gave a little smile.

  ‘I’m short by one agent now, what with Tony taking an unauthorised absence.’

  She kept her eyes straight ahead, on the road, and left her last statement hanging in the air betwe
en us.

  I broke the silence first.

  ‘I’m not sure the Service would be glad to have me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got previous.’

  ‘Well, that’s OK,’ said Mel. ‘Like I said, Tony was working ‘Hornworm’ off the books. I guess if anyone with the right skill set were to pick up where he left off…’ She took the smooth white memory stick from her pocket and held it up between us ‘…then that would have to be off the books too.’

  ‘No pay, no perks, no backup?’

  ‘Some things we do for love, don’t we? I know I don’t do it for my bank balance and blood pressure.’

  She pulled the car over to a halt at the kerb, on the bank of the river. I realised immediately where we were: fifty yards short of the HQ building. I suppose I should have guessed where Mel would be steering me.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘the last time I went anywhere near your HQ the Hounds of Hell were released in my direction. I’m not sure I need that sort of jeopardy in my life. Not on top of ‘Buck Wildheart’, whoever the Fox he is.’

  ‘Was that really the last time?’

  I guess that was a rhetorical question. She must have known I’d have needed a sneaky peak at some sort of private HQ information to track Mole down.

  We sat in the gently idling vehicle as the river mist caressed the car’s curves like a silk scarf. I was thinking hard. I had a kind of freedom and I’d got used to it. But then, if I didn’t take a risk maybe I would lose my best chance of working out what had happened to Dug. And now there was Mole too. I hadn’t asked him to drag me into this, but there were probably short odds on me being his last hope. And all the while a Fox had begun to sniff me out.

  No, the only way to guarantee my own safety now was to head for the hills and burrow deep, but in that case I may just as well be dead already.

  ‘OK,’ I said, more to the voice inside my head than to Mel. ‘But I’ll need access to Dug’s computer, and Mole’s.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Mel, in her calm way, as if she had always known what my response would be, ‘and thank you.’

  She put the car in gear and pulled onto the access road leading behind the main building and down into the car park.

  ‘Now, hop onto the back seat and cover yourself with that blanket.’

  IT WAS SUPPOSED to be good news. The target was neutralised, as ordered.

  Mission accomplished!

  It turned out that life was more complicated than that.

  Ivan stood before Commander Reynard’s desk and tried not to let the pain in his foot and paw show on his face. He had got back to base a little after midnight, cleaned his wounds as best he could, and was just settling down to try to get some sleep in his bunk when the call had come for him to report back to the Commander

  Didn’t that Fox ever sleep?

  He crept out of the dormitory, trying to keep his weight off his gashed and bruised foot, and gingerly made his way up the stairs, out of the basement, and in to the Commander’s office. Reynard had been waiting for Ivan, dressed in his usual military uniform, and Ivan couldn’t work out if the Commander was a very early riser or if he just hadn’t been to bed yet.

  ‘I am aware that Oak Leaf has been engaged, Fairy,’ said Reynard. ‘I gained that intelligence from a most unusual source…’ He paused to give himself time to get close to Ivan, standing right in front of him. ‘Do you know precisely which source I used?’

  Ivan stared at the black spot on the wall and said nothing. He was slowly getting better at recognising rhetorical questions.

  ‘I shall tell you, Fairy,’ Reynard continued. ‘It was the Wild Wood…Broadcasting…Corporation!’

  Ivan didn’t move in response to Reynard’s comment, but something about Oak Leaf being on the main news channel made him think that even now, barely two hours in, today was not going to be a happy day.

  ‘Let me just get this straight, for my own… understanding,’ said Reynard, in a tone that said the only reason Ivan was not currently being flogged down the stairs and all the way to the Far Northern Forests was the thin thread of sanctuary that came with being Vulpine’s nephew.

  ‘You went back to see Oak Leaf, a day after you had neutralised him. Is that correct?’

  ‘Sir, yes sir!’ replied Ivan, in full ‘I-know-I’m-in-trouble-now’ mode.

  ‘And while you were there you thought it might be wise to alert the police?’

  ‘Sir, yes sir!’ Put like that, Ivan could see how it didn’t show him in a good light.

  ‘The breakfast news bulletins will all, no doubt, be leading with the poisoning of a Mole in a manner that resembles Fox protocol. We will deny it of course but it seems such an avoidable nuisance. Have you any…explanation for your actions?’ Reynard’s tone was all the more menacing for being calm and reasonable.

  Ivan felt his grasp on remaining in the Special Force weaken. However, confessing he had only returned to the scene of his crime because he thought he might have made a mistake… well, that wasn’t going to help his cause at all. It was time to think on his cut or clubbed feet, to make a stand or go home.

  A line from Ivan the Whys came to him: ‘In your whole life there are only two days you cannot change: Yesterday and Tomorrow. So, do what you can Today.’ He took a deep breath and prepared to seize the new day.

  ‘I was following a suspect, sir,’ he lied. He knew hard labour in the Far Northern Forest would beckon him if he was caught lying to the Commander, but then his current alternative was to get caught messing up his first mission and getting sent there anyway. It was the lesser of two very unpalatable evils.

  The Commander’s posture changed slightly. It didn’t soften as such, it just turned from malevolent to simply menacing.

  ‘A ‘suspect’ you say?’

  ‘Sir, yes sir!’

  ‘And you followed this ‘suspect’ to Oak Leaf’s house?’

  ‘Sir, yes sir!’

  Reynard turned from Ivan and paced the carpet, considering this new information, and then he appeared to make an internal decision. He sat down behind his desk and steepled his fingers.

  ‘Right, Fairy,’ he said, ‘give me your report.’

  Ivan knew how close to the Far Northern Forest he currently was. He could practically feel the snow on his whiskers.

  Deep breath, keep it simple, stare straight ahead…

  ‘Sir, I believed I had got a lead on the suspect Oak Leaf had sent his last message to. As you are aware I had failed with my online attempt to close in on the suspect, a ‘Jay J Cottontail’, and I know you assigned that target to another agent, but I wanted to make amends. I followed a hunch to stake out Oak Leaf’s flat in case Cottontail turned up there. I took a night pass and waited in the shadows.’

  So far so good, he thought. Now I just have to find a good reason for calling the police.

  ‘I encountered two unforeseen circumstances, Sir. First, when a suspect fitting Cottontail’s description entered the building I pursued her in order to make a better identification. However, she had booby trapped the perimeter of the property and I sustained significant injuries.’

  Don’t overplay the wounds, he’s seen plenty worse before, he thought. No harm in mentioning them in passing though.

  ‘I had just entered the building when a much larger second suspect, a Badger I think, who I overheard was called Melody Higgins, entered behind me. I was able to hide myself on the property but they had all the exits covered. I didn’t believe I had been seen entering the building or they would have looked for me. I did, however, believe it was only a matter of time before my hiding place was compromised so I took the gamble that, since the police would find the body eventually, I could use them to scare off the two suspects and allow me to make my getaway.’

  Ivan paused, and replayed the report in his head, checking for errors. The more he looked at it, the more he was convinced that he had covered all his tracks. He had caught a glimpse of the Rabbit and Badger heading down the hall past his hiding place at the first soun
d of sirens, and he had overheard their names. Calling the police was not ideal, but it was better than being captured by the enemy. He dared to relax, just a little.

  Commander Reynard leaned back in his chair and placed his paws, palms down, on the desk. He had an early morning meeting with Vulpine. Ivan’s incompetence was just a nuisance that had come across his desk as he was preparing to cross the landing. It mildly annoyed him, but it was nothing that couldn’t be cleaned up. It was time to bring the debrief to a close.

  ‘I…see,’ he said. ‘Well, that all seems to stack up. We are up against some adequate Wild Wood agents, I suppose, and it was your first mission. You will, of course, be following up on the activities of the Rabbit and Badger that you saw. Report to me when you have more intel on them.’

  Ivan stood to attention, not daring to believe that he had thought on his feet well enough to escape the Commander’s wrath. Mum would be so proud, if he was ever allowed to tell her.

  ‘You are dismissed,’ said Reynard.

  Ivan saluted with his cut paw, executed a parade turn as best he could with a club foot in a calliper and another one heavily bandaged to cover the cuts, and ‘marched’ to the door. He almost made it.

  ‘Just one thing,’ said Reynard, from behind his desk.

  Something about the tone of the Commander’s voice tugged at the flag of relief Ivan was mentally hoisting. He stiffened, turned, and stood to attention again, bringing the black spot back into focus.

  ‘Sir?’ he asked.

  Reynard stood and picked up a file, ready to take it to his meeting with Vulpine.

  ‘You said ‘body’, but news outlets are reporting a suspect has been taken to intensive care. Now, they may be feeding false information. That is the Game after all. Although… No matter. Perhaps we need to look at the strength of the poisons in our stores…’

  As Ivan hobbled down the stairs to try to catch a couple of hours sleep before the sun came up, Reynard snorted his disdain for Vulpine’s nephew then steeled himself for the short walk across the landing to the President’s quarters.