Vote at Toad Hall

by Eddie Saint

  Weasel knew it definitely was.

  ‘And, besides, I owe it to our voters to make sure this is a fair fight.’

  He stood and gestured to the folders.

  ‘Now, shall we begin?’

  IN THE END they had opened the roof. It was either that or wait until all the hundreds of balloons had popped in the heat of the lights.

  From his vantage point, pinned to the stage by a large, angry Porcupine, his view had actually been quite spectacular. The two white sections of roof had slowly slid apart right above him, releasing their coloured cargo into the blackness of space.

  ‘Say hello to the Universe for me!’

  Spike would have loved it.

  If the security team had let him.

  After the arena’s medical staff had cleaned him up Ivan had been allowed to leave. He hadn’t broken any laws, just had a small slip with big consequences. The fact that Spike had given him permission to go on stage, had even helped him up, meant he was pretty much in the clear.

  In his dreams he had floated gently through a balloon filled universe with Gemini holding his hand. That was all he could remember, and it had been blissful. He was trying to hold on to that thought now, and keep it front and centre, as he stood on Commander Reynard’s carpet and waited for the wall of silence to end.

  ‘I’m not sure which is your best look, Fairy,’ said the Commander, eventually.

  In the dorms they had a scale to help you work out just how angry the Commander was. Sarcasm was only one step short of pinning you down on all fours and ripping your uniform off with his teeth.

  Ivan kept his eyes pointing at the black spot on the wall.

  ‘Is it the one where you are standing alone on stage in your Army gym kit, or do you prefer your stoic expression in the one where the Porcupine is being hauled off you?’

  Wisely, Ivan gambled that he wasn’t being asked for a comment.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ continued Reynard, ‘what I am desperately keen to have illuminated for me, is quite what logical sequence of ideas led to the pictures of one of my operatives, one of my top secret operatives, being splashed all over social media while he was supposed to be undertaking covert surveillance!’

  Ivan had to conclude that, on balance, the wall of silence hadn’t been that bad. The sound of the Commander’s voice filled his head, but it was starting to blur, like a muffled soundtrack playing through someone else’s headphones. He kept his eyes on the black spot and, to shut out the freezing touch of imaginary snowflakes from the Far Northern Forest, he mentally ran a slow and careful inventory of his physical condition.

  Foot, left: still clubbed, but otherwise in normal condition; callipers still functioning as expected.

  Foot, right: deep pad lacerations from glass shards; needs a fresh bandage but feels better than yesterday.

  Paw, left: small but throbbing pain from puncture wound; might need investigating – maybe part of badge broken off?

  Paw, right: significant cuts, feels cold; fingers movable, just, but not currently useable; bandage needs renewing.

  Face, general: significant rash of pock marks from Porcupine spikes; seven puncture wounds, already scabbed over and healing; jaw stiff from being sat on.

  Eyes, left: swollen, half-closed, possibly from banging head on doorway of Rabbit/Skunk film. Not sure. Needs more ice.

  Eyes, right: perfect.

  Heart: broken…

  Heart: broken…

  Heart: broken…

  Although it was just above a whisper, the Commander’s voice slammed back into focus, from a distance of three inches to the right of Ivan’s ear.

  ‘Is that understood? Have I made myself crystal clear on the consequences of failure?’

  Ivan spooled back through the fuzzy soundtrack of the Commander’s last monologue, but couldn’t nail any of it down.

  Heart: broken…

  He became aware that the Commander was trying to put something in Ivan’s left paw. It was a folder of some sort. He risked moving his gaze from the black spot to get a better grip of the folder, and pinned it to his chest with his bandaged paw.

  ‘Sir, yes sir!’ said Ivan, hopeless and bereft. Not sure what he was agreeing to. Not caring what ultimatum the Commander was ushering him towards.

  Heart: broken…

  Keeping the folder tightly pinned he turned and saluted as best as he could manage, almost enjoying the pain it gave him, because it took his mind off the real pain. The Commander did not acknowledge the salute. He was already back at his desk, swiping on his tablet.

  Ivan slowly limped back to the dormitory, fell back on his lonely bunk and opened the folder. A single sheet of paper fell out. It read:

  Jay J Cottontail

  In custody

  24 hours

  There was nothing else: no intelligence, no photographs, no leads. He didn’t need to have the ‘consequences of failure’ laid out for him. If he failed then he would be sent to the Far Northern Forest for sure, and then he would never see Gemini again.

  He needed a plan, and fast!

  WE TOOK OVER one wall of the basement for recording the evidence. It turned out that Dug was a little genius at following Money, and in no time he had pinned up a ring of Foxes who had got rich with the help of some shady Vulpine deals.

  ‘But every dirty banknote needs to get cleaned up,’ he said, and he set about making two new networks on the wall.

  ‘So, we have Shell Companies over here, doing their usual shady business. Then over here we have Foxes buying property, for cash, all over the place. I’d say there is about an eighty twenty split in favour of the shell companies, but even twenty per cent of a warehouse full of cash is still a big shed-load!’

  It was hard not to smile at Dug’s total enthusiasm for his work. I’m telling you, it felt great to have him back like that, just like the old times, when he used to come home from work and we’d hide ourselves away in the bedroom, and he’d teach me his coding secrets and how to track down baddies. Only now we were doing it for real.

  It struck me he might even be able to help with something else I had carried around with me for a few months. It was an old itch that I really needed to scratch, the sort of itch that might have lead a careless Rabbit to set off big alarms and become an Enemy of the State. Did Dug have the answer? I decided to try him out.

  ‘And, these property deals, where are they mostly concentrated?’

  ‘You, Miss Cottontail, have hit upon my specialist subject there,’ he said with a flourish, and did a little excited shuffle. His delight was infectious, and almost made me forget for a moment just how big the wall of terror was that we were rubbing up against.

  ‘There have been massive one-off property deals pretty much all over the place: vineyards; sports venues; whole Estates even. But then you come down to the second tier of cash purchases: mansions. That is when a pattern starts to emerge because there are more of them, and Wild Wood is most definitely a major player there.’

  ‘I knew it!’ I said. ‘And is that why you disappeared?’

  He shrugged, casually.

  ‘That and Hornworm. I like my insides on the inside,’ he said. ‘There’s some nasty creatures out there who just don’t like it when you dig around…’

  That sounded familiar! Like brother, like sister.

  When Dug had gone missing I’d done some digging of my own, trying to follow his tracks. I’d found traces of his investigation into that money launderette that ran through Wild Wood mansion deals. He must have seen just how much Fox money was rinsed clean that way. But how deep had his investigation burrowed? I had to find out.

  ‘And, for bonus points,’ I asked, ‘have you got any names for who in Wild Wood has been helping that to happen?’

  The list of Toads he came up with ran right through the heart of Toad Hall. At least that explained why he felt he had to go into hiding, and why they came on so heavy when they caught me snooping around.

  I stared at the
names, memorising the ones I didn’t already know. I figured that maybe, one day, when I felt safe enough, they should feature in one of my blog reports.

  We stood side by side, studying the patterns and shapes that Dug had woven onto the wall. The faces of politicians, business leaders, financiers and organised criminals stared back at us blankly: the movers and shakers who Vulpine had dealt with, going back years, helping to keep his small group of Foxes in the global ‘super rich’ bracket.

  ‘It’s dirty, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Filthy,’ replied Dug. ‘Still, it’s been around for, like, forever, so I don’t suppose we’ll be the ones to see them off.’

  I shrugged and punched him playfully on the arm. ‘That’s pretty good work though, for a run-away agent! Now budge over and let me add a few nuggets.’

  It was Dug’s turn to watch the web of ribbons evolve on the wall. Spearing horizontally out of Vulpine’s left ear I pinned a new ribbon and led it to a label called ‘Influence’. I’d made neat piles of labels and photographs on the desktop to my right, with spools of coloured ribbons, a pair of scissors and a dish of drawing pins.

  Confession Number Six: I could lose days in a stationery shop.

  ‘You’ve done this before!’ said Dug, admiringly. ‘I knew we were right to bring you in on this.’

  I closed my eyes and held on to that moment. A compliment from Dug was a rare thing. But, time was against us, so I couldn’t dwell on his words. I tucked them away and hoped we could work our way through the Hornworm business to a safe place, some time in the future, when I could unpack that moment again and enjoy it.

  In the basement I picked up a label marked ‘Social Media’.

  ‘So, first up: we know the Foxes have a big factory of fake accounts astroturfing their way across various news stories. They also fund Think Tanks…’ On the wall I pinned a neat list with twenty names on it. ‘These are, I think, most of them, but you could waste your life tracking down all of them. Then there are the Academic influencers…’ I unrolled a small map of the world and pinned it up. It already had yellow dots stuck to it, with neat labels naming Universities, Professorships, Chairs, Study Programmes and more. Full disclosure: I do love a label. Dug came closer to take a look.

  ‘And you did all this just now?’ he asked, impressed.

  My blog is full of all this stuff, and I know he must have read it, or why else would he have called me in? I could get used to this new, friendlier Dug.

  ‘Well, it didn’t need much digging,’ I said. ‘And anyway, it’s nothing new. The Dogs are even worse for it, let’s face it.’

  I added a picture from a Dog site: some old timers crowding a grocery store. He took a closer look at the label that said ‘Sleeper Papers’ and shook his head, wide eyed and grinning.

  ‘Fair play to you, spotting that Fox link. It was one of Tony’s big finds,’ he said. ‘It’s the absolute definition of a long game. One crafty weapon to keep in your armoury.’

  The mention of weapons brought our mood down a little. We were all too aware that weapons didn’t need bullets any more. They came in new disguises: a newspaper; a Friend Request; a door knob.

  Building Vulpine’s network was fun, truly, but we couldn’t afford to lose track of time in the weaving of ribbons, linking Vulpine to a powerful global network of money and influence. He was no different to any other player on the global stage since the beginning of time. History was just a simple record of who pulled which power levers, and who else realised too late.

  The trouble was, Hornworm still seemed to be lurking out of sight, on the edge of History somewhere, ready to play. Dug had picked up on it. So had Tony. Things hadn’t gone well for either of them. Whoever or whatever Hornworm was, it was tied up with Vulpine, and it didn’t sound good.

  We turned to the ribbons on the wall and looked again for where Hornworm might be lurking.

  ‘IF YOU HAVE six hours to find a truffle in the woods, spend the first five looking for a truffle hog.’

  Ivan’s copy of Play to Win had been read so many times that it was beginning to fall apart. Much like his military career. But Uncle Vulpine must have known what he was doing when he gave a copy to each new recruit. There were pearls of wisdom in there for every occasion, and something about the truffle hog pulled Ivan out of his looming Black Dog of a mood.

  ‘If I am looking for Jay J Cottontail,’ he said to himself, ‘then who is my truffle hog?’

  Put like that the problem already seemed just a little closer to being solved. He sat up in his bunk and tried to think like a proper agent.

  The file he had been handed was slim. Ivan double checked on the floor to see if any papers had dropped out.

  ‘Ok,’ he reasoned, then added optimistically, ‘sometimes it’s good to start with a blank piece of paper.’

  He lay back down and tried to conjure up what he knew about Cottontail, beyond the fact that she didn’t respond to friend requests. For a start, Oak Leaf had contacted her about ‘Hornworm’, so she must be in the loop, somehow. She had close contact with the Manager, Melody Higgins, and yet she wasn’t on the books at Service HQ. Did that mean she was underground? Was she a really secret agent?

  Ivan started to feel excited. Was he actually working things out, like a proper spy?

  ‘So,’ he said to the wooden slats of the empty bunk above his head, ‘she’s still in the city, somewhere, because she’s been sniffing around with Higgins, but she’s not official or we’d see her on the staff role, and we’d pick her up on the spy chairs.’ He got up and started to prowl around the dorm, barely noticing the pain in his foot any more.

  ‘What I need to do is get inside her head. What is it like being an underground, top secret agent?’

  ‘Walk a mile in her shoes.’ That was the advice Ivan the Whys offered him. Well, the very thought of putting his battered feet into unfamiliar shoes gave him shivers, and anyway, it just wasn’t practical to get them back to her afterwards, from a mile away. No, this one was going to have to be solved by Ivan the Fairy.

  ‘Where would I go, if I was a top secret agent?’

  The thought ran around his cavernous mind like an imposter, and other thoughts shifted in the shadows and taunted it:

  - you’ll never be a top secret agent…

  - you’re fooling no one…

  - wet-the-den…

  - Vixen’s boy…

  - big foot…

  And then a beautiful, white boot stamped in the centre of his mind, and all the cruel shadows shrank away.

  ‘Where would you go,’ said Gemini softly, ‘if you were a top secret agent?’

  In the soothing light that glowed from Gemini he pictured himself standing on the street outside the Wild Wood Security Service HQ. He had just been promoted to ‘Top Secret’ Agent. He couldn’t go to the office any more. He needed to find a place to lie low, to disappear. A place where no one would ask questions. But close enough to make secret meetings with his boss…

  With a renewed sense of confidence pumping through his veins, he headed to the Library and burst, confidently, through the double doors.

  The librarian slowly looked up from his ledger and raised an eyebrow. Recoiling with shame and guilt, Ivan stared back at the double doors as if to say, ‘Was that really me?’

  ‘You bet your sweet tail it was you!’ said Gemini in his head.

  Emboldened by her words he limped up to the counter and said to the librarian in a clear, loud voice,

  ‘I need a map! A map of this city!’

  In the air between the two animals an epic battle played out, of wills and Power, caught in the beams of their eyes. Ivan held the other creature’s gaze and felt a confidence he had never known before. For the first time in his life he was NOT GOING TO BACK DOWN FIRST.

  ‘That’s my Scoots!’ said Gemini.

  ‘It’s Ivan! MY NAME IS IVAN!’

  The librarian blinked first. He had never been shouted at before. Not in his own domain, and certainly
not by such a battle-hardened looking recruit as the one before him now. With his tail tucked dutifully between his legs he came out from behind the counter, cowered carefully around the new Alpha Fox, and led him to the dimly lit side-room where, beyond the locked door, he led Ivan to a padded seat, handed him a touch-screen tablet and fired up the projector.

  ‘Will there be anything else?’ he asked, obsequiously.

  But Ivan was already tapping away with his one, relatively good paw.

  The librarian retreated and closed the door quietly as he left.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ’I DON’T MIND telling you, princess, I thought my goose was cooked!’

  Stoat, who was tucking into his third croissant of the morning, sat back in his chair, put his feet up on the new red ‘MONEY’ binders and took a large glug of coffee.

  ‘It sounds like he doesn’t have a clue,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, and on top of that, because he’s sacked his staff he’ll have less time to campaign. Fan-bloomin’-tastic!’

  Weasel waved his coffee cup in the direction of the bar.

  ‘Me too please, Jeff,’ called Stoat cheerfully.

  ‘Now, just let me send a Crypto to Vulpine and then we can plan our day,’ said Weasel, whipping out his phone and typing a one fingered message. ‘In fact, why don’t you run those binders over to Pincer A-sap then the rest of the day is our own?’

  Energized by the thought of seeing Pincer again Stoat leapt to his feet and gathered up the binders. Immediately, a posse of journalists stirred and lenses started to focus. It was the last day of campaigning which also meant it was the last day when they could report on it before the media blackout. The pack was hungry for scraps.

  The first snap of a shutter jolted Weasel away from composing his message. He looked around and took in the scene as if in slow motion: Stoat, the second in command of the Leave campaign, was carrying the coloured binders that the press now recognised as being from Toad Hall, and they were hungry for a story. Instantly Weasel realised that Stoat mustn’t be allowed to leave The Stump with those binders. Someone would surely follow him and then who knows what conclusions would be drawn, once the colourful clientele of Tufty Tail Street were brought into the mix?