The Constant Rabbit

Car & Custody

Ninety-seven per cent of all rabbit internet traffic was colony-to-colony. Within the warren and burrow, nearly all conversation and gossip were undertaken nose to nose, and a recent survey found that, given the levels to which rabbits like to gossip, news and views within the colony could travel faster than broadband, and were a lot more fun.

I came to my senses with a shocking headache, the taste of blood in my mouth and the smell of burning in my nostrils. The car had landed upright and was facing backwards at the bottom of a steep wooded slope. The burned-out Eldorado – much scavenged by tourists – remained in situ for a decade until removed for inclusion in the Event Museum at the repurposed MegaWarren Induction Centre. I visited this site a lot when I ran tours after the publication of my book, eight years after the Battle of May Hill.

The windscreen had vanished, the car’s bonnet had been folded up almost to the scuttle by the action of a large tree that had fared better than us in the altercation, and a wisp of smoke was rising from under the bonnet. I looked out of my window and could see that the car was resting in a cow pasture; three Friesian heifers stared at us with a look of extreme indifference while solemnly chewing the cud. Harvey was conscious and having trouble opening the car door, so he lay on his back on the front seat and gave the door an almighty kick with his powerful hind legs. The door was wrenched off its hinges and landed two dozen yards away.

‘What happened?’ I said, but Harvey just glanced at me and walked around to open the boot of the car.

‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘it’s time.’

He wasn’t speaking to me. He was speaking to another rabbit, who climbed out of the boot. He was identically dressed and, like Harvey, earless. But unlike Harvey, whose ears had recently been cropped – I could now see the stitches, which were of string – these were long-healed. It was Lugless.

‘Change of plan?’ said Lugless in a surprisingly meek tone. ‘That was never eight hours.’

‘There was an unforeseen hiccup,’ said Harvey, ‘but a deal’s a deal.’

Small tongues of flame were now visibly curling around the crumpled bonnet, but I think I was too confused by the turn of events to assess the sort of danger I was in. As I watched from the back seat, Lugless climbed into the car and placed himself behind the wheel.

‘You have them?’ he asked.

‘Here,’ said Harvey, and handed him what looked like two short and very withered scrolls tied up with red ribbon. Lugless took them with the greatest of reverence and held them tight to his body.

‘By the power vested in me by the Venerable Bunty,’ said Harvey, ‘and in deference to the indulgence bestowed upon you, I declare upon the name and spirit of Lago, the Grand Matriarch, that your mortal sins are expunged. You go to your maker as pure, and complete, as the circle of trust that binds us all, which took our saviour, and the unbreakable bond that joins all rabbits.54’

I saw Lugless take a deep breath, and bow his head, and Harvey made the sign of the circle on his forehead. The flames were quite high now, and Harvey bowed again, took a step back, coughed and looked at me.

‘Are you staying in there or what?’

I rapidly came to my senses and clambered out of the car, relieved to find I had no broken bones – just a twisted knee.

‘Is he staying in there?’ I asked.

‘He’s at peace,’ said Harvey, ‘and whole. I have to leave now, but you and I will meet again, at the place and time the Venerable Bunty completes the circle.’

‘How do you know I’ll be there?’ I asked.

‘Because Bunty has foreseen it. She foresees everything. When you feel the time is right, tell Pippa that what happened between us was real, and she knows where to find me if she can love a half-rabbit.’

And he then made the circle of trust on my forehead, smiled and vanished off across the fields in a series of rapid bounces, each covering a good twenty yards. I meant to ask him what the two dried scrolls were that he’d handed to Lugless, but I think it was fairly obvious. They were Lugless’s ears.

I turned back to the Eldorado, which was now well alight. Molten plastic dripped from the engine bay as little smoking raindrops of fire, and the heat was blistering the paint on the bonnet.

‘I always knew I’d eventually find a rabbit I couldn’t turn,’ Lugless said, staring straight ahead, ‘and there would always be one who would eventually turn me. But everything comes to an end.’

I put up one arm to shield the heat from my face and stepped forward, stretching out my other hand for him to take.

‘Join me out here,’ I said, ‘you don’t need to do this.’

He smiled as the flames started to lick around him, the smell of singed fur now in the air. Douglas AY-002 turned to me and gave a wry smile.

‘Humans,’ he said, ‘so little time – so much to know.’

He turned back towards the steering wheel and held his newly returned ears closer to him as the flames consumed him.

He didn’t make a single sound. Not a squeak not a whimper – nothing.

Help was not long in arriving owing to the telltale pall of black smoke and the gap in the fencing. I was still trembling when the ambulance took me to Hereford General, accompanied by a Taskforce officer whom I didn’t recognise. They kept me in overnight for observation given the clout on my head, but aside from a few cuts and bruises and the twisted knee, I was unhurt. I was supervised throughout, even my phone call to Pippa, who expressed concern and offered to come and visit, but I told her she shouldn’t.

No one had noticed that Harvey had been a Miffy, except me. As far as anyone was concerned, the earless rabbit who visited MegaWarren was the same one who had died transporting a compromised Taskforce employee back to base.

I was allowed a shower without supervision and driven the following morning to the Nigel Smethwick Centre and given some breakfast in the canteen, again supervised, then told to wait in one of the interview rooms. It didn’t occur to me until later that Connie would have been hauled in for questioning too, but she was.

I sat there for maybe an hour, conscious of not only my predicament here, but also that the clock was ticking – the Mallett brothers had given Pippa, myself and the Rabbits until this evening at ten to leave Much Hemlock – and they’d probably worked out none of us were playing ball. Tonight would be the night I made a stand – and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

The spartan interview room was clean and warm but otherwise unremarkable. The table was bolted to the floor, but the plastic chairs could be moved. In the centre of the table was a large brass ring for potential restraint, but it seemed little used. When it came down to it, rabbits just weren’t violent unless pushed into a corner, and even then were far more likely to use reasoned debate than tooth and claw.

The door opened at a little after eleven, and Whizelle walked in accompanied by Flemming. They sat down opposite me and placed a mug of coffee on the table. It was the good stuff, not RabCoT canteen or chain muck. I was being schmoozed.

‘How are you feeling, Peter?’ asked Flemming.

‘Bruised, but OK, thanks.’

‘We’re glad of that,’ said Whizelle. ‘The loss of Douglas AY-002 is a serious annoyance as he was one of only three rabbits the Taskforce implicitly trusted, and “tragic car accidents” always need to be viewed with a degree of suspicion, especially on clear roads, in good weather.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘We think it might have been a hit,’ said Flemming, ‘on him, you – or both of you. Following on from Toby Mallett’s unexpected resignation and utter failure to give a plausible account of why he did, we’re inclined to think that the Spotters’ office here in Hereford has been targeted by either rabbits, rabbit sympathisers or rabbit sympathiser-sympathisers.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘So before we even begin to talk about the allegations regarding you and your next-door neighbour, tell us about the accident.’

I told them everything I knew, and tried to stick as much to the truth as I could. I’d be questioned about this again, and if I was inconsistent over my story, I’d be more stuffed than I was already. I told them Lugless steered purposely off the road, no other car was involved, and that I scrambled out of the burning car when I came to. Lugless, I told them, was either dead in the crash or unconscious. Either way, I couldn’t get to him.

‘So you have no idea why he swerved off the road?’ asked Whizelle.

‘None. One moment we’re driving along the road, the next I’m waking up in a blazing car.’

Whizelle looked at Flemming, who nodded, and the weasel opened a file and placed a picture of a white rabbit on the table. Now I’d seen him up close, I could recognise him better and the name on the picture confirmed it – he was Harvey Augustus McButtercup, aged twenty-six, a RabCab driver, resident in Colony One. I also knew he was now earless, a prominent member of the Rabbit Underground, had successfully infiltrated the Taskforce – and was in love with, and loved by, my daughter.

‘Have you seen this rabbit before?’ he asked.

‘No. Spotting isn’t an exact science. Who is he?’

‘We think he’s Flopsy 7770,’ said Whizelle. ‘Lugless looked him up on the Rabbit Employment Database before he died. But he didn’t tell anyone. You and he were in the office alone that morning – did he share with you?’

‘Lugless shared little with me,’ I said, now extremely glad I had searched for Harvey’s details on Lugless’s computer, but realising that I had led them directly to Harvey’s identity. I thought momentarily of asking whether I was detained and requesting a solicitor, but I got the feeling that this would only increase suspicions, not allay them.

They moved on to the allegations I had been suspended about, and the mood in the room seemed to darken. Flemming and Whizelle had been work colleagues for many years and we’d got on OK, but right now that counted for nothing. There followed a long and very detailed account of what ‘four plausible witnesses’ had seen outside my house the night before last. Unlike the Harvey/Lugless issue, where I had to lie convincingly several times, this was a testimony I could actually give from start to finish fairly truthfully – from when the Rabbits moved in, to the incident in All Saints with Mr Ffoxe, and then to the evening when we ran through her lines, the farcical hiding in the cupboards with the Dumas novel, and Connie and Doc’s argument in the hallway.

‘Nothing happened,’ I said.

‘Let me spell this out for you,’ said Whizelle in a more serious voice. ‘Right now we can charge you and Constance Rabbit with offences contrary to the Unnatural Associations Section of the Anthropomorphised Animals Limited Rights Act of 1996.’

I didn’t know the act word for word, but knew that the law was tactically enforced by the authorities as they saw fit. In the current climate, it seemed that they wanted it enforced. Friendship with rabbits, as far as the Rehoming was concerned, was to be discouraged.

‘With four eyewitnesses all happy to testify,’ he continued, ‘you both go to the clink – not a lot, two years, out in one, but with that on your files, I’d like to think that life will never quite be the same. Y’know how everyone believes they’re broad-minded and open? Well, spoiler alert: they’re not. And,’ he added, ‘along with your criminal record and time served, your pension can be cancelled on the grounds of “gross professional misconduct”.’

‘You can do that?’

‘We can do that,’ said Flemming. ‘All we want, Peter, is a teensy-weensy little confession implicating Constance Rabbit in intimate entrapment. You can say it was an accident or a dare or you were beguiled or were drunk or something. You’ll still lose your job but you’ll keep your pension and there’s nothing on your record. Back to Much Hemlock and your uneventful life.’

‘What will happen to Constance?’

‘We’ll plea-bargain it down to surrender of her off-colony status on grounds of “demonstrable moral turpitude”. She’ll be back in the colonies by next week, and probably a great deal happier for it. She wasn’t really what we’d call trustworthy off-colony material.’

‘Best of all,’ added Whizelle, ‘it will send a clear message to female rabbits everywhere that beguiling humans into depravity can and will have dire consequences.’

I stared down at the table in silence.

‘So what do you say?’ asked Whizelle.

‘I—’

But I didn’t get to answer. The door opened, and in walked Mr Ffoxe.