Fox Evil

4

SHENSTEAD-21 DECEMBER 2001

Bob Dawson leaned on his spade and watched his wife pick her way across the frost-covered vegetable garden to the back door of Shenstead Manor, her mouth turned down in bitter resentment against a world that had defeated her. Small and bent, her old face creased with wrinkles, she muttered to herself continuously. Bob could predict exactly what she was saying because she repeated it over and over again, day after day, in an unending stream that made him want to kill her.

It wasn't right for a woman of her age to be working still… She'd been a skivvy and a slave all her life… A seventy-year-old should be allowed her rest… What did Bob ever do except sit on a lawn mower in the summer…? How dare he keep ordering her up to the Manor… It wasn't safe to be in the house with the Colonel… Everyone knew that… Did Bob care…? Of course not… "You keep your mouth shut," he'd say, "or you'll feel the back of my hand… Do you want us to lose the roof over our heads…?"

Insight had faded a long time ago, leaving Vera's head full of martyred resentment. She had no understanding that she and Bob paid nothing for their house because Mrs. Lockyer-Fox had promised it to them for life. All she understood was that the Colonel paid her wages in return for cleaning, and her aim in life was to keep those wages from her husband. Bob was a bully and tyrant, and she squirreled away her earnings in forgotten hiding places. She liked secrets, always had done, and Shenstead Manor had more than most. She had cleaned for the Lockyer-Foxes for forty years, and for forty years they had taken advantage of her, with the help of her husband.

A clinical psychologist would have said that dementia had released the frustrated personality she had repressed since she married at twenty to improve herself and chose the wrong man. Bob's ambition had been satisfied by a rent-free tied cottage in return for lowly paid gardening and cleaning duties at Shenstead Manor. Vera's ambitions had been to own a house, raise a family, and select her customers herself.

The few close neighbors they'd had had long since moved away, and the new ones avoided her, unable to cope with her obsessional loops. Bob might be a taciturn man who eschewed company, but at least he still had his marbles and patiently tolerated her attacks on him in public. What he did in private was his own concern, but the way Vera smacked him whenever he contradicted her suggested they were no strangers to physical conflict. Nevertheless, sympathy tended to be with Bob. No one blamed him for pushing her out of the house to work up at the Manor. A man would go mad with Vera for company all day.

Bob watched her feet drag as she looked toward the southwest corner of the Manor. Sometimes she talked about seeing Mrs. Lockyer-Fox's body on the terrace… shut out in the cold night and left to freeze to death with next to nothing on. Vera knew about cold. She was cold all the time, and she was ten years younger than Mrs. Lockyer-Fox.

Bob threatened her with the back of his hand if she repeated in public the stuff about the door being locked, but it didn't stop the muttering. Her affection for the dead woman had grown exponentially since Ailsa's death, all recriminations forgotten in sentimental remembrance of the many kindnesses Ailsa had shown her. She wouldn't have insisted on a poor old woman working beyond her time. She would have said the time had come for Vera to rest.

The police had paid her no attention, of course-not after Bob had screwed his finger into his forehead and told them she was gaga. They smiled politely and said the Colonel had been cleared of any involvement in his wife's death. Never mind that he'd been alone in the house… and the French windows onto the terrace could only be locked and bolted from the inside. Vera's sense of injustice remained strong but Bob cursed her roundly if she expressed it.

It was a can of worms that shouldn't be opened. Did she think the Colonel would take her accusations lying down? Did she think he wouldn't mention her thieving or how angry he'd been to find his mother's rings gone? You don't bite the hand that feeds you, he warned her, even if the same hand had been raised in anger when the Colonel found her rifling through his desk drawers.

Occasionally, when she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, Bob wondered if she was more lucid than she pretended. It worried him. It meant there were thoughts inside her head that he couldn't control…

Vera opened the gate into Mrs. Lockyer-Fox's Italian courtyard and scurried past the withered plants in the huge terra-cotta pots. She fished in her pocket for the key to the scullery door, and smiled to herself when she saw the fox's brush pinned to the jamb beside the lock. It was an old one-probably from the summer-and she plucked it down and stroked the fur against her cheek before concealing it in her coat pocket. In this matter, at least, there had never been any confusion. The brush was a calling card that she never failed to remember or recognize.

Out of sight of her husband the muttering had taken a different direction. Bloody old bugger… she'd show him… he wasn't a real man and never had been… a real man would have given her babies…