Vote at Toad Hall

by Eddie Saint

  THE EMPTY SHADOWS down under the bridge, where he had spent so much of the morning, held no fear for Ivan. He was a Fox about to complete his mission.

  He limped and shuffled his way along the riverbank as fast as he could, keeping his eyes focused on the lock-ups ahead. His plan was simple. A Fox, even a wounded and bandaged one, should be able to overpower a Rabbit. His best remaining weapon was his teeth, so he planned to wait until the unsuspecting Rabbit was about to hand over the phone, then pull her towards him, grab the back of her neck in his jaws and scarper with her as fast as his legs would carry him.

  He rounded the corner of the lock-ups and made for the entrance to Traitor’s Walk. The alley was an obstacle course of bins, boxes and a dead pin-ball machine on its side. Trying to give the impression of confidence he stepped into the alley and the shadows engulfed him.

  It seemed empty. Even the shadows had a vacant feel to them. Had he arrived too late? Had the Otter given him wrong instructions? He paused a while to consider his options.

  He scanned his surroundings, and with that his hopes flagged. He was alone, with nothing but rubbish and a broken arcade machine for company.

  ‘Drat!’ he exclaimed. ‘Drat and… and… and Pish!’

  A CRASH FROM high up in the wall made us jump. The doors to the coal chute opened, and a shaft of light shone down into our basement making the dust shimmer. A head appeared through the opening.

  ‘Just a little heads up,’ said an upside-down Otter’s face.

  ‘Mother? Really?’

  ‘Hi there Jay,’ said Mother cheerfully. ‘Can’t stop, but I thought you might like to know there’s a Fox been sniffing around back home looking for you.’

  ‘How did you find me here?’ So much about what just happened didn’t make sense to me. By the look on his face, none of it made sense to Dug either.

  ‘Don’t look so surprised. You know I’m good at finding folks,’ she said.

  She told me about the Fox who’d been looking for me back home. I have to tell you, it was a real jolt to think a Fox had actually been sitting in Chandler’s. It meant they were right on my tail now.

  ‘Don’t you worry though. It’s all under control. I just thought you’d like to know.’

  And with that she left, as quickly as she had come, leaving a shaft of dusty light shining through the open coal doors. All that remained was her voice trailing away across the garden.

  ‘He’s not in my league,’ she sang cheerfully. ‘He’s not in my league. We have eyes all around you, he’s not in my league...’

  THE HORN FROM a passing water taxi woke Ivan up. The sun, high in the sky, shone through the clouds on both his unfamiliar park bench and the wide river, while the financial buildings opposite flashed red from their tops to warn wayward aircraft.

  Ivan tried to sit up, but something around his midriff hurt and told him he might be better lying down for a bit longer, so he did. He stared at the clouds high above him, and very slowly began to piece together what he could remember of his brief time in Traitor’s Walk.

  There had been a voice: not gruff, more high pitched, even effeminate. It had come from behind him. He could picture the paw, in a fist, aiming for his stomach as he turned. Not a Rabbit. Too big even for a Hare. But the same sort of shape in the shadows. The first blow had taken the wind out of him. The second lost him three of his teeth. There may have been more but his mind was blank from the moment his molars left his mouth.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘THERE’S STILL SOMEONE missing!’ Dug said, in a frustrated voice.

  Clearly I thought the poor boy was going mad.

  ‘Well, Hornworm, obviously!’ I said.

  Dug did have a fair point. We had Vulpine’s network pretty much mapped out. Ribbons and pictures showed a wide, powerful network, more than capable of rigging the odd election or swinging a trade deal.

  But none of that was enough to nearly get Mole killed.

  The real deadly force was Hornworm, and that was still nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Yeah, but apart from that…’

  We stared hard at the ribbon network. Vulpine had history with all the biggest players on the world stage. An election here, a trade deal there. His modus operandi was pretty clear. But there was one big absentee. And I had just realised who it was…

  ‘You are right, though. There is someone missing.’

  He looked at me with an expression I don’t think I saw in all the time we were growing up together. I wasn’t just a handy head to sit on when his bottom burps were ripening anymore. I was an equal partner. Shame it had taken us both being on a Fox hit list to get there, but hey, whatever works.

  I told him what was on my mind.

  ‘Who has the fastest growing economy and is set to knock the Dogs off top spot?’

  Put that way it was bizarre that we hadn’t noticed their absence sooner. Especially since the Far Eastern plains of the Fox territory were right next door.

  ‘Tigers!’ said Dug, with dawning realisation. ‘There is nothing here about Tigers!’

  At that moment Mel’s feet appeared at the top of the steps in a shaft of afternoon light coming from the hallway.

  ‘I’m just off back to work now. I’ll see you two later. Call me if there is anything you need.’ She waved an old, push-button mobile phone around her ankles and placed it on the top step, where it sat like the brick it was. ‘Mine is the only number in it, and it’s too old to be traceable.’

  ‘A NEW HOSPITAL?’ ventured Stoat.

  Twenty minutes earlier, Weasel and Stoat had been in The Stump trying to work out how to get an angle on the day’s campaign topic: the money Wild Wood currently sent to the LEAF League.

  ‘Of course,’ said Stoat, who knew about very few things, but who could justifiably claim a certain expertise in finance, ‘we have to factor in the money they give back to us first.’

  Weasel was about to interrupt him, but Stoat held up a paw, whipped out his phone and rifled through the figures he had jotted down from the binders before they had been ‘tidied away’.

  ‘That’s… just a minute…’ he said, tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. ‘Er… taking into account the um…, yes, and of course there’s… oh.’

  He stopped tapping on his phone and looked, crestfallen, at the screen.

  He hit ‘clear’ and ran the numbers again. Weasel folded his arms and sat back, patiently, grinning.

  ‘No. no… still not quite… um…,’ said Stoat, looking at the number on the screen. Weasel put a paw over Stoat’s phone and gently slid it away.

  ‘Numbers, schmumbers,’ he said. ‘Let’s just focus on the outgoings, shall we?’

  ‘But… ,’ started Stoat.

  ‘Now I won’t hear another word on the subject,’ said Weasel genially. ‘We only have a day. Let’s not weigh anyone down with boring calculations.’

  Stoat found himself at a crossroads. He had to make a decision between the Weasel he followed like an Alpha, and his love of financial calculations. Put like that, his choice was easy.

  ‘Ok,’ he said. ‘Just the outgoings.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Weasel, and he handed Stoat his phone back. ‘So, let’s get back to the list.’

  Stoat picked up a pencil and they leaned in together over a blank piece of paper. He wrote down what they had so far: ‘Schools’ and ‘Army’. He sucked the end of his pencil, and Weasel cocked his head at the list, such as it was, willing it to be more… media friendly.

  ‘If I had to choose,’ he said, ‘I’d lead with the Army. It’s still not quite… I don’t know… it doesn’t quite…’

  He couldn’t pin it down, but when he thought of going in to battle on the last day of campaigning he wanted something he could really get his teeth into, and telling folks they could spend the money they saved on building a bigger army, well it just didn’t seem to ring the right bells.

  The following ten minutes had been a study in frustrated thought. They pac
ed, prowled, lay down, stood up… all the while trying to pin down an angle that would play well on TV.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ said Weasel, in a moment of epiphany.

  Stoat swivelled his head from the croissant he had been munching to help him think.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The Army doesn’t get everyone’s blood racing, I know, and schools…? Well, they’re a mixed bag. But ‘Death’? Now that’s something everyone can get their head around.’

  ‘Er… ‘Death’?’ said Stoat, showing his characteristic speed on the uptake (that speed being ‘glacial’).

  ‘Sure. The Grim Reaper comes for us all,’ said Weasel. ‘And even though most of us intend to be somewhere else when he does, he will find us, eventually.’

  ‘And this helps us how?’

  ‘Well, where do you go to cheat Death?’

  The penny in Stoat’s brain showed a particular lack of urgency to drop normally reserved for coins in a penny-falls arcade. He gave Weasel a blank stare and a shake of his head.

  ‘We go to the hospital, of course,’ said Weasel, with a smug grin, knowing he had just found the perfect way in to the day’s news cycle. ‘So, we just need to link healthcare to the money we send to the LEAF League, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  They were both on their feet now, pacing around the Snug, hunting the perfect link between money and medicine. There had to be something that would play well on the campaign trail…

  ‘A new hospital?’ ventured Stoat.

  ‘Not ‘wow!’ enough,’ replied Weasel.

  ‘A new hospital every month?’

  ‘Every week!’

  With high fives all round Weasel called in the first of the day’s interviewers, and spent the next hour pushing his new line.

  ‘Now I know I’m not a money expert,’ said Weasel’s honest face on the lunchtime news, ‘but I reckon it’s straightforward enough. The money we hand over to the LEAF League could pay for a new hospital every week, and I know where I would rather see my money spent.’

  And so the wheels of news turned…

  Once she had gone we set about looking for any links between Vulpine and the Tigers, but we drew a complete blank.

  ‘That is just really, really odd, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘Too right,’ said Dug, ‘for a Fox who’s usually boasting about whose table he’s eating at.’

  The absence was so obvious once you saw it.

  It wasn’t hard to see how busy the Tigers had become in recent years, supplying goods to the Monkeys, building a big dam for the Minks, buying raw materials from the Anteaters. Those Tigers were active everywhere. Even right here in Wild Wood, with the new national computer network that Toad was so proud of.

  And yet nothing, not a sniff, about any deals with Foxes.

  My whiskers were twitching like crazy!

  ‘Ok, Dug,’ I said. ‘Strap in. It’s time we did some digging…’

  IVAN LAY WEARILY on his bench, eyes closed, and listened as a set of footsteps passed close by him. Another set followed some minutes later, then a third. Shiny leather, clicking heels, a tinkle of metal.

  Wait. What?

  Ivan looked down at the pavement, where a shiny gold coin had just come to rest. He picked it up with the intention of handing it back to the owner of the heels who had just dropped it, but none of his limbs were ready for co-ordinated action. Instead, he sat with the coin in his unbandaged paw and considered its significance.

  Ever the optimist, he took it as an omen.

  The morning might have been a disaster, but since that coin had arrived in his paws the afternoon was already on the up. Maybe this was when his fortunes finally turned, when he took on life and won! The voice of Ivan the Whys came drifting into his mind: ‘Through adversity to the stars’.

  That’s right! And who will I find in the stars?

  He stared at the coin in his paw but his mind turned to Gemini. Her glowing white body now shone brightly again for him, banishing the shadows.

  Tinkle.

  A second coin landed at his feet, and bounced up on to his fur.

  Is this you, Gemini? Are you looking out for me?

  He added the second coin to the first, cupped them between his wounded paws, and shook them so they tinkled. The sound was like magic. He closed his eyes and made a wish.

  ‘Great Father Fox, let today be a happy day!’ he said.

  Tinkle.

  The third coin confirmed it for him. Was this the pay-back he had earned by giving his brownie to that artist at Comic Con? Had the Universe really been watching?

  The thought put enough spring in his stiff limbs that he was able to get to his feet. At the corner of the street was a coffee stall, and he limped up to it and dropped his coins on the counter.

  ‘You are new around here.’

  The Bobcat barista turned from her till and looked Ivan up and down.

  ‘And I’m guessing you have felt better.’

  Ivan rested his better paw on the counter and tried to smile, but his recent unexpected dental work meant that the effort made him wince.

  ‘It’s ok,’ said the Bobcat. ‘Don’t try to talk. Let me fix you something to get you going first. You look like you need it.’

  Ivan hadn’t realised quite how painful his ribs were. He felt, gingerly, where the Kangaroo had hit him. There seemed to be a gap, or a dent, where there shouldn’t be, and every time he tried to take anything more than a shallow breath a sharp pain told him he shouldn’t.

  ‘I bet there is a story to tell…’ said the Bobcat, and she left a conversational door open for Ivan to walk through. After the week he was having he didn’t need to be invited twice.

  ‘There is, there IS!’ he began, but then he stopped himself. ‘Only, I don’t think I can tell you.’

  ‘Ah, no problem. I’m not going to pry. I see all sorts around here.’

  Two minutes later the barista said:

  ‘So you need to find an Agent who works for Higgins, but you don’t have a lead about where she is?’

  Ivan hadn’t meant to tell her everything. There was just something about the way she looked at him, patiently, as if eternity was all the time she had. He had told her every last detail about his week, even the bit about Gemini, and he’d shown her all his wounds. He’d even let her bandage his ribs, and now they felt a little better. He could at least breathe more freely.

  He didn’t worry what the Commander would say about him telling his orders to a stranger; he had already made up his mind. He would either go back with Cottontail in custody, in which case all would be forgiven, or he would never go back again.

  ‘You know what your next move is, right?’ said the barista, cheerfully, as she move across to serve a new customer.

  At that moment Ivan had no idea what he would do next. The trail was as cold as the pavement and the clock was ticking.

  ‘Just head down to HQ. Wait for the Badger to come out and see where she goes.’ She winked at Ivan and flashed him a smile, before turning to make a fresh coffee.

  As plans go it was beautifully simple. He could have kissed her. Only he was saving himself…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘BIG COUNTRY DOES Bad Thing’ is not really a story though, eh? It’s more the status quo,’ said Dug. ‘And, it doesn’t seem serious enough to land Mole in hospital.’

  We had been piecing together the Tigers’ more recent moves, and two things were obvious. First, they seemed to work with everyone except Foxes; and second, they won most of the government computer contracts around the world. There were whispers that the networks they installed might be used for spying, but no news ever made it beyond small blogs onto the major platforms.

  Dug did finally find one Fox link, because that’s what he does best. He traced the funding for a big road project in Fox territory and, via a very odd route, it turned out to be Tiger money all the way. Just very well hidden.

  ‘So he has been getting a helping hand from the Tigers but just not
letting the news get out?’

  ‘That’s bang on,’ Dug replied.

  Tigers were splashing the cash all over the place, but when it came to Fox projects they were being very careful not to be seen. Just as the first scent of something rotten lingered in the air between us (and this time it wasn’t Dug up to his old pungent tricks) the brick rang and Dug answered it.

  ‘Hi…, yeah…. ok, ok, yeah. Yeah… well… no rush. We’ll see you when you get back… Yes, I’ll tell her. Ok… ok, bye. Bye.’

  He took the phone from his ear and stared at it for a while, before working out which button ended the call.

  ‘Mel,’ said Dug, waggling the brick. ‘Says she’ll get someone to come and fix the chute doors. Oh, and she wants a coffee in half an hour.’

  We leaned back on a desk and looked at the ribbon network. Somewhere on the wall before us Hornworm hid, and now it seemed it might also have a Tiger’s stripes.

  IVAN PROPPED HIMSELF up on a bench along the river bank, where a broad grass square put sufficient distance between him and the main entrance to the Wild Wood Security Service HQ. It was the second time that week that he had been on the look out for Melody Higgins. At least this time he didn’t have to bother with periscope vision.

  He kept his eyes focussed on the double doors, but his mind was tempted to wander. Gemini had spread a carpet of grass and forest flowers in his mind, and she lay there in the warm sun with no other purpose than to be with him. She didn’t need him to say anything, accomplish anything or, in fact, do anything at all. She made no demands. He just had to lie there with her, on the soft forest floor, and breathe in the flowers and her scent…

  Tinkle.

  He woke with a start to find more money at his feet. Someone was certainly smiling on him today!

  He did worry that he might have dropped off, just for a moment, and missed his quarry. That would never do, not now he was so close, so he rubbed his good eye, slapped his good cheek and rearranged himself on the bench. Banishing thoughts of the delightful Gemini from his mind he set his nose back towards the HQ doorway and waited.

  The patient Fox always eats, eventually…