Fox Evil

21

Prue's sense of isolation was becoming unbearable. She was too ashamed to phone any of her friends, and there was no answer from her daughter. Loneliness led her to imagine that Jenny, too, had gone to Jack and Belinda's house, and her resentment against Eleanor grew. She pictured her at home with Julian, using her wiles to bind him to her, while Prue stared into an abyss of rejection and divorce.

The focus of her dislike was her so-called friend. Darth Vader existed only on the periphery of her thinking. Her mind was too trammeled in misery to give any thought to who he was or what sort of relationship he had with her friend. It was with a thrill of terror, then, that she looked up to see a man's face at the window. It was a momentary glimpse, a flash of white skin and dark eye sockets, but a scream rocketed from her mouth.

This time she did call the police. She was incoherent with fear, but managed to give her address. The police had been expecting trouble since the arrival of the travelers, and a car was dispatched immediately to investigate. Meanwhile, the female officer at the center kept Prue on the line to calm her. Could Mrs. Weldon give a description of this man? Had she recognized him? Prue delivered what sounded like a stereotypical description of a burglar or a mugger. "White face… staring eyes…" It wasn't James Lockyer-Fox or Mark Ankerton, she kept repeating.

The policewoman asked her why Colonel Lockyer-Fox and Mr. Ankerton should even be considered, and was rewarded with a garbled account of forced entry, intimidation, incest, nuisance calls, tape recordings, Darth Vader, the murder of a dog, and Prue's innocence of any wrongdoing. "It's Eleanor Bartlett at Shenstead House you should be talking to," Prue insisted, as if the police had called her and not the other way around. "She's the one who started all this."

The woman relayed the information to a colleague who had worked on the Ailsa Lockyer-Fox investigation. This might interest him, she said. A Mrs. Weldon was suggesting some bizarre skeletons in the Lockyer-Fox closet.

It was self-pity that persuaded Prue to talk so freely. She had been starved of kindness all day and the calming voice on the end of the phone, followed by the arrival of two solid-looking uniformed men to search the house and yard for an intruder, won her allegiance in a way that badgering never could. Tears bloomed in her eyes as one of the constables pressed a cup of tea into her hand and told her there was nothing to worry about. Whoever the Peeping Tom was, he was no longer there.

By the time Detective Sergeant Monroe arrived half an hour later she was falling over herself to assist the police in any way she could. Better informed since James and Mark's visit, she gave a rambling exposition of events, finishing with a description of the nuisance caller who used a voice distorter, the "murder" of James's dog, and Mark's mention of a burglary at the Manor.

Monroe frowned. "Who is this caller? Do you know?"

"No, but I'm sure Eleanor Bartlett does," she said eagerly. "I thought the information came from Elizabeth… that's what Eleanor told me, anyway… but Mr. Ankerton said Eleanor was reading from a script, and I think he's right. When you listen to both of them-her and the man-you notice how many repetitions there are."

"Meaning what exactly? That this man wrote the script?"

"Well, yes, I suppose so."

"So you're saying that Mrs. Bartlett's conspiring with him to blackmail Colonel Lockyer-Fox?"

Such an idea had never occurred to Prue. "Oh, no… it was to shame James into confessing."

"To what?"

"Ailsa's murder."

"Mrs. Lockyer-Fox died of natural causes."

Prue waved a despairing hand. "That was the coroner's verdict… but no one believed it."

It was a sweeping statement which the sergeant chose to discount. He flicked back through his notes. "And you're assuming the Colonel killed her because the day before her death Mrs. Lockyer-Fox was told by her daughter that the baby was his? Do you know for a fact that Mrs. Lockyer-Fox saw her daughter that day?"

"She went to London."

"London's a big place, Mrs. Weldon, and our information was that she attended a committee meeting of one of her charities. Also, both Elizabeth and Leo Lockyer-Fox said they hadn't seen their mother for six months. That doesn't square with what you're alleging."

"Not me," she said, "I've never alleged anything. I kept quiet in my calls."

Monroe's frown deepened. "But you knew your friend was alleging it, so who put the idea of the meeting into her mind?"

"It must have been Elizabeth," said Prue uncomfortably.

"Why would she do that if she told us she hadn't seen her mother in six months?"

"I don't know." She chewed her lip anxiously. "This is the first time I've heard that you even knew Ailsa had gone to London. Eleanor always says James never told you."

The sergeant smiled slightly. "You don't have a very high opinion of the Dorset police, do you?"

"Oh, no," she assured him, "I think you're wonderful."

His smile, a cynical one, vanished immediately. "Then why assume we wouldn't check Mrs. Lockyer-Fox's movements in the days prior to her death? There was a question mark over how she died until the pathologist delivered his postmortem findings. For two days we talked to everyone who might have been in contact with her."

Prue fanned herself as a hot flush spread up her neck. "Eleanor said you were all Freemasons… and so was the pathologist."

Monroe eyed her thoughtfully. "Your friend is either misinformed, malicious, or ignorant," he said, before consulting his notes again. "You claim you were convinced the story of the meeting was true because of this row you overheard when Mrs. Lockyer-Fox accused her husband of destroying Elizabeth's life…"

"It seemed so logical…"

He ignored her. "…but now you're not sure if it was the Colonel she was talking to. Also, you think you may have put the events in the wrong sequence, and that Mr. Ankerton was right when he said the subsequent killing of the Colonel's dog was connected in some way with the sound of the punch you heard. He believes Mrs. Lockyer-Fox may have witnessed the deliberate mutilation of a fox."

"It was so long ago. At the time I really didn't think… it was all very shocking, particularly as Ailsa was dead the next morning… I couldn't see who else it could have been except James."

He didn't speak for a moment, but mulled over some bullet points he'd made. "The Colonel reported a mutilated fox on his terrace at the beginning of the summer," he said suddenly. "Did you know about that one? Or if there've been any others since?"

She shook her head.

"Could your friend Mrs. Bartlett have been responsible?"

"God, no!" she protested, deeply shocked. "Eleanor likes animals."

"But eats them for lunch, presumably?"

"That's not fair."

"Very little is, I find," Monroe said dispassionately. "Let me put this another way. It's quite a catalogue of brutality that's been aimed at Colonel Lockyer-Fox in the wake of his wife's death. You keep telling me the nuisance campaign was your friend's idea, so why balk at the suggestion that she was prepared to kill his dog?"

"Because she's afraid of dogs," she said lamely, "particularly Henry. He was a Great Dane." She shook her head in bewilderment, as much in the dark as he was. "It's so cruel… I can't bear to think about it."

"But you don't think it's cruel to accuse an old man of incest?"

"Ellie said he'd come out fighting if none of it was true, but he's never said a word… just stayed in his house and pretended it wasn't happening."

Monroe was unimpressed. "Would you have believed him if he'd said he hadn't done it? In the absence of the child, it was his word against his daughter's and you and your friend had already made up your minds that the daughter was telling the truth."

"Why would she lie about it?"

"Have you met her?"

Prue shook her head.

"Well, I have, Mrs. Weldon, and the only reason I accepted her statement that her mother did not visit her the day before she died was because I double-checked with her neighbors who deal with her on a daily basis. Did your friend do that?"

"I don't know."

"No," he agreed. "For a self-styled judge you really are remarkably ignorant… and frighteningly willing to change your viewpoint when someone challenges it. You said earlier that you told Mrs. Bartlett you didn't believe the child could be the Colonel's, yet you tamely went along with the hate campaign. Why? Did Mrs. Bartlett promise you money if you conspired to destroy the Colonel? Will she benefit if he's driven from his home?"

Prue's hands flew to her blazing cheeks. "Of course not," she cried. "That's an outrageous suggestion."

"Why?"

The bluntness of the question sent her grasping miserably at straws. "It all seems so obvious now… but it wasn't at the time. Eleanor was so convinced… and I had heard that awful row. Ailsa did say Elizabeth's life was destroyed, and I know I'm remembering that correctly."

The sergeant gave a disbelieving smile. He'd sat through too many trials to believe that memory was accurate. "Then why did none of your friends go along with it? You told me you were shocked to find you were the only one who'd signed up. You felt you'd been conned." He paused and, when she didn't say anything, went on: "Assuming Mrs. Bartlett is as gullible as you-which I doubt-then the instigator is this man with the Darth Vader voice. So who is he?"

Prue showed the same anxiety that she'd shown when asked the same question by Mark. "I've no idea," she muttered wretchedly. "I didn't even know he existed until this evening. Eleanor never mentioned him, just said it was the girls who were phoning-" She stopped abruptly as her mind groped through the fog of confused shame that had been clouding it since James's visit. "How stupid of me," she said with sudden clarity. "She's been lying about everything."

A police car drew up in front of the rope barrier and two burly constables climbed out, leaving the headlights on full beam to illuminate the camp. Blinded, Bella eased Wolfie off her lap and stood up, sheltering him inside the flap of her coat. "Good evening, gents," she said, pulling her scarf over her mouth. "Can I help you?"

"A lady up the road reported an intruder on her property," said the younger of the two, pulling on his cap as he approached. He gestured to his right. "Has anyone from here set off in that direction in the last hour or two?"

Bella felt Wolfie tremble. "I didn't see anyone, darlin'," she told the policeman cheerfully, "but I've been facin' toward the road… so I wouldn't, would I?" She was cursing Fox roundly inside her head. Why make a rule that no one should leave the site after dark, then break it himself? Unless, of course, the only reason for the rule was to give himself free run of the village. The idea that he was a common thief appealed to her. It brought him down to a manageable size in a way that Wolfie's constant references to the cutthroat razor did not.

The other officer chuckled as he moved into the light. "That has to be Bella Preston," he said. "It'd take more than a scarf and a bulky coat to disguise that shape and voice. What are you up to this time, girl? Not organizing another rave, I hope. We're still recovering from the last one."

Bella recognized him immediately as a police negotiator from the Barton Edge rave. Martin Barker. One of the good guys. Tall, brown-eyed, forty-plus, and a heart pleaser. She lowered the scarf with a smile. "Nn-nn. It's all aboveboard and legal, Mr. Barker. This land don't belong to anyone, so we're claiming it through adverse possession."

Another chuckle. "You've been reading too much fiction, Bella."

"Maybe, but we're planning to stay until someone produces deeds, proving it's theirs. We're entitled to have a go-anyone's entitled-we just happened to think of it first."

"No chance, darlin'," he said, aping her manner of speech. "If you're lucky you'll get a delay on the usual seven days' notice, but if you're still here in two weeks I'll eat my hat. How's that for an offer?"

"Should be amusing. Why so confident?"

"What makes you think this land isn't owned?"

"It's not on anyone's deeds."

"How do you know?"

It was a good question, thought Bella. They'd taken Fox's word for it, just as they'd taken his word on everything else. "Put it this way," she answered, "it don't look like anyone in the village wants to take us on. A couple of them have blustered a bit and threatened us with lawyers, but the only lawyer that's turned up wasn't interested in talking about squatters on his client's doorstep."

"I wouldn't pin your hopes on it," Martin Barker warned kindly. "They'll get round to it as soon as the holiday's over. There's too much money invested in this place to let travelers bring down the price of the houses. You know the rules as well as I do, Bella. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and there's damn all the likes of you and me can do about it." He put his hand on the rope. "Are you going to let us in? It would be useful to confirm that no one here was involved."

Bella jerked her head in invitation. They would come in whatever she said-on suspicion of breach of peace if nothing else-but she appreciated Martin's courtesy in asking. "Sure. We didn't come here to cause trouble, so the sooner you count us out the better." She was prepared to play "keeper" to Fox's son but not to Fox himself. Let the bastard make his own explanations, she thought, as she eased Wolfie from under her coat. "This is Wolfie. He's stopping with me 'n' the girls while his mum's away."

Wolfie shook with alarm as he stared at the constables' faces, his trust in Bella running like sawdust from his knees. Hadn't he told her Fox wasn't there? What would these men do when they found the bus empty? Bella should never have let them in… should never have mentioned his mother… they'd search for bruises and take him away…

Martin saw the fear in his face and squatted on his haunches to bring himself to the child's level. "Hi, Wolfie. Do you want to hear a joke?"

Wolfie shrank against Bella's legs.

"What do you call two rows of cabbages?"

No response.

"A dual cabbageway." Martin studied Wolfie's unsmiling face. "Heard it before, eh?"

The child shook his head.

"You don't think it's funny?"

A tiny nod.

Martin held his gaze for a moment, then dropped him a wink and stood up. The boy's fear was palpable, although whether he was afraid of policemen per se or of what a search of the camp might find, it was difficult to say. One thing was certain. If Bella had been looking after him for any length of time, he wouldn't be dressed in such inadequate clothing for a winter's night and he wouldn't be looking half-starved.

"Right," he said, "do you want to introduce us to your friends, Bella? My colleague here is PC Sean Wyatt, and you might like to make it clear that we're not interested in anything except the intruder at Shenstead Farm."

She nodded, taking Wolfie's hand firmly in hers. "Far as I know, there's nothing to find, Mr. Barker," she said with as much conviction as she could muster. "We're all families and we started this project the way we mean to go on… doing it by the book so the people round about wouldn't have nothing to complain about. There's the odd bit of dope stashed away, but nothing worse."

He stood aside for her to lead the way, noticing that she chose to start with the bus to the right of the semicircle-the most distant-where light leaked from cracks around the window blinds. He, of course, was more interested in the bus to the left, which drew Wolfie's eyes like magnets and appeared to be in total darkness.

DS Monroe passed the campsite on his way to Shenstead House and saw figures milling in front of the buses, thrown into relief by the headlamps of his colleagues' parked car. It was a reasonable assumption that the face at the window belonged to a newly arrived traveler, but he intended to exploit Mrs. Weldon's insistence that her friend had turned "peculiar" since she visited the site. It was an excuse of sorts to interview Mrs. Bartlett because there was nothing else to investigate. No complaint had been made against her, and the file on Mrs. Lockyer-Fox had been closed for months.

Nevertheless, Monroe was curious. Ailsa's death continued to play on his mind, despite the coroner's verdict. He had been the first on the scene and the impact of the sad little body, propped against the sundial, wearing a thin nightdress, a man's threadbare dressing-gown, and a pair of Wellington boots had been powerful. Whatever the final conclusion, it had always felt like murder to Monroe. The bloodstains a yard from the body, the incongruity of insubstantial nightclothes and solid Wellingtons, the inevitable conclusion that something had disturbed her sleep and she had ventured outside to investigate.

He had played down Prue's hysterical conclusion that Eleanor's "peculiarity" meant the face at the window was Darth Vader's-"You have a habit of putting two and two together and making five, Mrs. Weldon"-but he was interested in the coincidence of the travelers' arrival and the falling-out between the women. He was too experienced to assume a connection without evidence, but the possibility that one existed remained at the back of his mind.

He drew to a halt at the entrance to Shenstead Manor, still undecided about whether to talk to Colonel Lockyer-Fox before he spoke to Mrs. Bartlett. It would help to know exactly what the woman had been saying, but if the Colonel refused to cooperate then Monroe's already limited excuses for questioning the woman would vanish. He needed an official complaint, a fact that the Colonel's solicitor would certainly point out, assuming he was the one advising reticence.

It was this reticence that really intrigued Monroe. The idea that lodged in his mind-strengthened both by the need for a voice distorter and the lawyer's remark to Mrs. Weldon that her friend's knowledge of the family was very detailed-was that Darth Vader was closely related to the Colonel.

And he kept remembering that, in the hours following his wife's death, the Colonel had accused his son of murdering her…

It was julian who answered the bell. He looked at Monroe's warrant, listened to his request for an interview with Mrs. Bartlett, then shrugged and pulled the door wide. "She's in here." He ushered him into a sitting room. "The police want to talk to you," he said indifferently. "I'm going to my study."

Monroe saw the alarm on the woman's face change rapidly to relief as her husband announced his intention of leaving. He moved to bar Julian's exit. "I'd rather you didn't, sir. What I have to say involves everyone in this house."

"Not me it doesn't," Julian retorted coolly.

"How do you know, sir?"

"Because I only learned about these damn phone calls this afternoon." He stared at the sergeant's unresponsive face. "That's why you're here, isn't it?"

Monroe glanced at Eleanor. "Not precisely, no. Mrs. Weldon reported an intruder at Shenstead Farm and she seems to think your wife knows who it might have been. It happened shortly after Colonel Lockyer-Fox and his solicitor played some tapes to her of Mrs. Bartlett and a man making identical allegations against the Colonel, and Mrs. Weldon believes that this man was her intruder. I'm hoping Mrs. Bartlett can throw some light on the situation."

Eleanor looked as if she'd been sandbagged. "I don't know what you're talking about," she managed.

"I'm sorry. I obviously didn't explain myself very well. Mrs. Weldon believes her intruder to be the man who's behind a hate campaign against Colonel Lockyer-Fox. She further believes him to be one of the travelers camped in the wood above the village… and says you must have spoken to him this morning as you've been acting very strangely ever since. He uses a voice distorter to disguise his voice, but she says you know who he is."

Eleanor's mouth turned down in an unattractive horseshoe. "That's ridiculous," she snapped. "Prue's a fantasist… always has been. Personally, I think you should question whether an intruder ever existed because she's not above inventing one to get a little attention. I suppose you know she's had a row with her husband and he's talking about divorcing her?"

Monroe didn't, but he wasn't about to admit it. "She's frightened," he said. "According to her, this man mutilated the Colonel's dog and left him outside for the Colonel to find."

Her eyes darted nervously toward her husband. "I don't know anything about that."

"You knew the dog was dead, Mrs. Bartlett. Mrs. Weldon says you were pleased about it-" he paused for emphasis- "something to do with chickens coming home to roost."

"That's not true."

Julian's reaction was to throw her to the wolves. "It sounds like you," he said. "You never liked poor old Henry." He turned to Monroe. "Sit down, Sergeant," he invited, pointing to an armchair and taking another for himself. "I hadn't realized there was any more to this-" he made a gesture of distaste-"humiliating story than my wife and Prue Weldon making phone calls. It seems I was wrong. What exactly has been going on?"

Monroe watched Eleanor's face as he took the other chair. She was a different animal from her plump friend-stronger and tougher-but catastrophe was showing in her eyes just as clearly as it had been in Prue's.