Free The Fox in the Forest by J. M. Gregson Page A

but for a moment she did not know where the sound came from. She had picked it up by the time Barbara reached the door, and she waved an airy acknowledgement that she would deal with this. It was a reassuring, even an amusing gesture to her sister, who took it as evidence of a return to something like normality. She shut the door carefully behind her when she saw that Clare was coping; eavesdropping had never been one of her faults.
    Clare listened for some time without speaking, not taking in all of what the voice on the other end of the line said. “So you see,” it concluded desperately, “it’s vital for both of us that you don’t say you were with me at that time. I’ve got too much to lose, you see.”
    “I see. Yes.”
    “And so have you, really, haven’t you?”
    “Yes, I suppose so.” She spoke like an automaton.
    “I’ll go now, then. Look after yourself. It will be better if we’re not in contact for a while. So make sure you don’t ring me. Leave it to me to get in touch in due course.”
    The line went dead. She stared at the mouthpiece dully for a moment before she put it carefully back in its holder. She felt cheated: she had wanted to tell him that he was never to ring again.
    ***
    A hundred yards away in the block of council houses, Charlie Webb was thinking also about a telephone call. In his case, it was a call he needed to make.
    They had no phone in the house, but it was not far to the public box near the Crown. He wanted an excuse to escape his gran’s watchful eye, and his store of invention was almost exhausted. It was his day off. It had seemed a good idea at the time to tack it on to Christmas Day, but now he would much rather have been at work. He ran his hand rather desperately through his thick dark hair.
    It was cut quite short at the front, in the current spiky fashion of the young. Old Mrs Webb, who was pretending to read her tabloid newspaper, said, “Mind you don’t scratch yourself on that hedgehog!” and cackled with satisfaction. She had made the joke many times before, but was delighted to catch her grandson in the gesture when he thought himself unobserved.
    “So who killed the vicar, then?” she said for the third time. She was fascinated by the violence of the killing, so that her unpredictable old mind kept coming back to it. She was almost housebound now; a dramatic event so close at hand brought a touch of sickly glamour into her home.
    Yet death in the village always worried her, reminding her as it did of the death of her son and the fragility of all life. It meant that even young Charlie had but a tenuous hold upon it, and he was the only one she had still to lose. She watched him now as he moved restlessly about the house, stooping to look for the twentieth time through the window of the living-room towards the centre of the village.
    Just when she thought he had ignored her question, he said with rough affection, “How the hell should I know who killed Reverend Barton? We never had anything to do with him, did we?”
    “No time for it,” she said promptly. The impersonal pronoun embraced all religions and their representatives. Her spiritual world had been demolished piece by piece with the death of her loved ones; since the death of her son ten years ago, she had reviled all clergymen as the representatives of an institution that had cheated and deceived her. Unable to venture out, forbidding entry to her house to Peter Barton, she had remained proof against the charm the young vicar seemed to have exercised over the rest of the village. She dismissed reports of his achievements as so much more evidence that the world was populated by credulous nincompoops.
    “The police will find who did it,” said Charlie. He had seen two large men going from church to pub earlier in the day; they had looked like plain clothes men to him. He was not sure, but he thought he had seen them leaving the village when he was in the back garden, walking with Tommy Farr and