Fox Evil

10

Bella climbed the steps of her bus and pulled off her balaclava, running her thick fingers over her stubbly hair where her skin was beginning to itch. The army-surplus overcoats, balaclavas, and scarves had been handed out by Fox the day before at the rendezvous, with instructions to wear them every time they went outside. It hadn't been worth arguing about at the time, the cold alone made everyone grateful for them, but Bella was very curious now about why disguise was necessary. Fox knew this place too well, she thought.

A sound from her curtained kitchen area caught her attention. She assumed it was one of her daughters and reached out to pull the drape aside. "What's up, darlin'? I thought you were with Zadie's kids-" But it wasn't one of hers. It was a skinny little boy with shoulder-length blond hair, and she recognized him immediately as one of the "spares" who had been in Fox's bus at Barton Edge. "What the fuck are you doing?" she asked in surprise.

"It weren't me," muttered Wolfie, cringing away and waiting for the slap.

Bella stared at him for a moment before dropping onto the banquette seat beside her table and pulling a tin of snout from her coat pocket. "What weren't you?" she asked, prizing open the tin and removing a packet of Rizzlas.

"I didn't take nothing."

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him squash a piece of bread inside his fist. "Who did then?"

"I don't know," he said, mimicking Fox's classy speech, "but it wasn't me."

She eyed him curiously, wondering where his mother was and why he wasn't with her. "So what are you doing here?"

"Nothing."

Bella spread the Rizzla on the table and ran a thin line of tobacco down its center. "Are you hungry, kid?"

"No."

"You look it. Ain't your mum feeding you properly?"

He didn't answer.

"The bread's free," she said. "You can take as much as you like. All you have to do is say please." She rolled the Rizzla and ran her tongue along its edge. "You wanna eat with me and my girls? You want me to ask Fox if that's okay?"

The child stared at her as if she were a gorgon, then took to his heels and belted it out of the bus.

Mark lowered his head into his hands and massaged his tired eyes. He'd hardly slept at all in two nights and his energy reserves were at zero. "James is certainly the suspect in this case," he told Nancy, "though God knows why. As far as the police and coroner are concerned, there's no case to answer. It's a crazy situation. I keep asking him to challenge the rumors that are flying around but he says there's no point… they'll die down of their own accord."

"Perhaps he's right."

"I believed that at the beginning, but not anymore." He ran a worried hand through his hair. "He's been having nuisance calls and some of them are vicious. He's been recording them on an answerphone and they're all accusing him of killing Ailsa. It's destroying him… physically and mentally."

Nancy plucked at a blade of grass between her feet. "Why wasn't natural causes accepted? Why does suspicion remain?"

Mark didn't answer immediately and she turned her head to find him grinding his knuckles into his eyes in a way that suggested lack of sleep. She wondered how often the phone had rung the previous night. "Because at the time all the evidence seemed to suggest an unnatural death," he said wearily. "Even James assumed she'd been murdered. The fact that Ailsa went out in the middle of the night… the blood on the ground… her normally robust health. He was the one who whipped up the police to look for evidence of a burglar and, when they couldn't find any, they shifted their attention to him. It's standard procedure-husbands are always first in the firing line-but he got very angry about it. By the time I arrived he was accusing Leo of killing her…which didn't help." He fell silent.

"Why not?"

"Too many wild accusations. First a burglar, then his son. It smacked of desperation when he was the only one there. It only needed evidence of an altercation to make him look doubly guilty. He was put through the wringer about the nature of his and Ailsa's relationship. Did they get on? Was he in the habit of hitting her? The police accused him of locking her out in anger after a row, until he asked them why she wouldn't have broken a windowpane or gone to Vera and Bob for help. He was pretty shocked by the end of it."

"But that all happened in the police station presumably… so how does it explain the continuing suspicion?"

"Everyone knew he was being questioned. He was taken away in a police car for two days on the trot and you can't keep a thing like that secret. The police backed off when the postmortem findings came up negative and the blood on the ground was shown to be animal, but it didn't stop the rumor-mongers." He sighed. "If the pathologist had been more specific about cause… if his children hadn't cold-shouldered him at the funeral… if he and Ailsa had been more open about their family problems instead of pretending they didn't exist… if the blasted Weldon woman wasn't so puffed up with her own importance…" He broke off. "I keep likening it to chaos theory. A small uncertainty triggers a chain of events that results in chaos."

"Who's the Weldon woman?"

He nicked a thumb to the right. "Wife of this farmer over here. The one who claims she heard James and Ailsa arguing. It's the most damaging accusation against him. She said Ailsa accused him of destroying her life, so he called her a bitch and punched her. Now he's tarred as a wife beater along with everything else."

"Did Mrs. Weldon see them arguing?"

"No, which is why the police and the coroner rejected her evidence… but she's adamant about what she heard."

Nancy frowned. "She's been watching too many movies. You can't tell a punch by sound… or not against a person, anyway. Leather on leather… a hand clap… it could have been anything."

"James denies the argument ever took place."

"Why would Mrs. Weldon lie?"

Mark shrugged. "I've never met her but she certainly sounds like the type to invent or exaggerate a story to give herself some kudos. James says Ailsa was driven mad by her gossiping. Apparently she was always warning James to watch what he said around the woman because she'd use it against him at the first opportunity." He gave his jaw a troubled stroke. "And that's exactly what she's done. The more distance there is between herself and the event the more certain she becomes of who and what she heard."

"What do you think happened?"

He skated round the question and produced what sounded like a rehearsed answer. "James suffers from arthritis and he hadn't slept all that week. The doctor was able to confirm that he picked up a prescription for barbiturates the day of Ailsa's death and two were missing from the bottle. The traces were still in his system when he insisted the police take a blood sample to prove he was comatose at the time the argument is supposed to have happened. It didn't satisfy his doubters, of course-they say he took the pills after Ailsa was dead-but it satisfied the coroner." He fell into a brief silence that Nancy didn't break. "It wouldn't have done if there'd been proof she'd been murdered, but as there wasn't…" He didn't bother to finish.

"Your chaos theory sounds about right," she said sympathetically.

He gave a hollow laugh. "It's a hell of a mess, frankly. Even the fact that he armed himself with barbiturates is considered suspicious. Why that day? Why take two? Why insist the police take a blood sample? They keep saying he needed an alibi."

"Are these the phone calls you were talking about?"

"Mm. I've been going through the recordings… and it's getting worse rather than better. You asked if something happened between October and November… well, these calls certainly did. He'd had the odd one during the summer-nothing unpleasant, just long silences-but there was a step up in frequency in November to two or three a week." He paused, clearly wondering how much to tell her. "It's unbearable," he said abruptly. "It's five a night now and I don't think he's slept in weeks… which is maybe why he goes out to sit on the terrace. I suggested he change his number but he says he's damned if he'll be seen as a coward. He says malicious calls are a form of terrorism and he refuses to kowtow to it."

Nancy had some sympathy with that view. "Who's doing it?"

Another shrug. "We don't know. Most of them are from a number or numbers that have been withheld… probably because the caller dials 141 to block number recognition. James has managed to trace a few by dialing call-return on 1471, but not many. He's keeping a list, but the worst offender-" he paused-"or offenders-it's hard to know if it's always the same person-isn't stupid enough to advertise who he is."

"Does he speak? Don't you recognize the voice?"

"Oh, yes, he speaks all right," said Mark bitterly. "The longest call goes on for half an hour. I think it's one man-almost certainly Leo, because he knows so much about the family-but he uses a voice distorter which makes him sound like Darth Vader."

"I've seen those things. They work just as well for women."

"I know… which is most of the trouble. It would be fairly straightforward if we could say it was Leo… but it could be anyone."

"Isn't it illegal? Can't you ask BT to do something?"

"They can't act without police authority, and James won't have the police involved."

"Why not?"

Mark took to grinding his eye sockets again, and Nancy wondered what was so difficult about the question. "I think he's scared it'll make matters worse if the police hear what the Darth Vader voice is saying," he said finally. "There are details of events-" a long pause-"James denies them, of course, but when you hear them over and over again…" He lapsed into silence.

"They sound convincing," she finished for him.

"Mm. Some of it's certainly true. It starts to make you wonder about the rest."

Nancy recalled the Colonel's reference to Mark Ankerton being an "honorable exception" among the ranks of those rushing to condemn him, and she wondered if he knew that his lawyer had begun to waver. "Can I listen to these tapes?" she asked.

He looked appalled. "No way. James would have a fit if he thought you'd heard them. They're pretty damn awful. If I was on the receiving end of them, I'd have changed my number and gone ex-directory immediately. The bloody Weldon woman doesn't even have the guts to speak… just phones in the middle of the night to wake him… then sits and pants for five minutes."

"Why does he answer?"

"He doesn't… but the phone still rings, he still wakes up, and the tape records her silence."

"Why doesn't he disconnect at night?"

"He's collecting evidence… but won't use it."

"How far away is the Weldons' farmhouse?"

"Half a mile up the road toward Dorchester."

"Then why don't you go and read the riot act to her? She sounds like a lump of jelly to me. If she doesn't even have the courage to speak, then she'll probably faint if his solicitor turns up."

"It's not that easy." He blew on his hands to bring back some warmth. "I had a go at her husband this morning over the phone, told him there was a case against his wife for slander. James came in in the middle and gave me hell for even suggesting it. He refuses to consider injunctions… calls them white flags… says they smack of surrender. To be honest, I don't understand his reasoning at all. He uses siege metaphors all the time as if he's content to wage a war of attrition instead of doing what I want him to do, which is take the fight to the enemy. I know he's worried that legal action might put the story back on the pages of the newspapers-something he doesn't want-but I also think he's genuinely afraid of renewed police interest in Ailsa's death."

Nancy pulled off her hat and tucked it over his hands. "That doesn't make him guilty," she said. "I imagine it's far more frightening to be innocent of a crime, and unable to prove it, than guilty and covering your tracks all the time. The one's a passive state, the other's proactive, and he's a man who's used to action."

"Then why won't he take my advice and start attacking these bastards?"

She stood up. "For the reasons you've already given. Look, I can hear your teeth chattering. Put your coat back on and let's start walking again." She waited while he re-donned the Dryzabone then purposefully retraced their steps toward the Japanese garden. "There's no point him putting his head above the parapet if it's likely to be blown off," she pointed out. "Maybe you should suggest guerrilla warfare instead of formal troop deployment in the shape of injunctions and police involvement. It's a perfectly honorable course of action to send out a sniper to pick off an enemy in a dugout."

"My God!" he said with a groan, surreptitiously tucking her hat into his pocket, very conscious that it was a DNA gold mine. If she forgot it, the problem could be solved. "You're as bad as he is. Do you want to put that into English?"

"Take out the people you can identify, like the Weldon woman, then concentrate on Darth Vader. He'll be easier to neutralize once you've isolated him." She smiled at his expression. "It's bog-standard tactics."

"I'm sure it is," he said sourly. "Now tell me how to do it without injunctions."

"Divide and rule. You've made a start on Mrs. Weldon's husband. How did he react?"

"Angrily. He didn't know she'd been making calls."

"That's good. Who else has 1471 identified?"

"Eleanor Bartlett… lives in Shenstead House, about fifty yards down the road. She and Prue Weldon are close friends."

"Then that'll be the strongest axis against James. You need to split them."

He bared his teeth in a sarcastic grimace. "And how do I do that?"

"Start believing in the cause you're fighting for," she said dispassionately. "It's no use being halfhearted about it. If Mrs. Weldon's version of events is true, then James is lying. If James is telling the truth then it's Mrs. Weldon who's lying. There are no gray areas. Even if Mrs. Weldon believes she's telling the truth-but it isn't the truth-then it's a lie." She bared her teeth back at him. "Pick a side."

To Mark, for whom the entire issue was a confusing collage of grays, this was an extraordinarily simplistic argument and he wondered what she'd read at Oxford. Something with defined parameters; engineering, he guessed, where torque and thrust had defined limits and mathematical equations produced conclusive results. In fairness, she hadn't heard the tapes, but even so… "Reality is never so black and white," he protested. "What if both sides are lying? What if they're being honest about one thing and lying about another? What if the event they're disputing has no bearing on the alleged crime?" He jabbed a finger at her. "What do you do then… assuming you have a conscience and you don't want to shoot the wrong person?"

"Resign your commission," Nancy said bluntly. "Become a pacifist. Desert. All you do by listening to enemy propaganda is compromise your morale and the morale of your troops. It's bog-standard tactics." She jabbed a finger back at him to stress the words. "Propaganda is a powerful weapon. Every tyrant in history has demonstrated that."