"It'll mean crossing one of the barriers between the coaches."
"Mm," she agreed.
"What about the dogs?"
"They're old, and probably too far away to hear us as long as we move quietly. They'll bark if the occupants kick up a ruckus, but we'll be inside by then."
His eyes gleamed with amusement as he glanced toward Mark. "You'll frighten our friend," he warned, tilting his head fractionally in the lawyer's direction. "I can't believe his rules of engagement allow for unlawful entry to other people's property."
She grinned. "And yours? What do they allow?"
"Action," he said without hesitation. "Find me a target and I'll follow your signal."
She made a ring with her thumb and forefinger and slipped away among the trees.
"I hope you know what you're doing," murmured Mark in his other ear.
The old man chuckled. "Don't be such a killjoy," he said. "I haven't had such fun in months. She's so like Ailsa."
"An hour ago you were saying she was like your mother."
"I can see the two of them in her. It's the best of both worlds… she's got all the good genes, Mark, and none of the bad."
Mark hoped he was right.
There were raised voices inside "Bella," which became increasingly audible the closer Nancy came. She guessed the door was open on the other side for the sound to travel, but too many people were talking at once to follow the thread of individual arguments. It was all good. It meant the dogs were indifferent to altercation in the vehicles.
She knelt on one knee beside the off-side front wheel, which was as near to the door as she could safely go, confident that the cardboard blinds made her as invisible to those inside as they were to her. As she listened, she unhitched the rope barrier at "Bella's" end and let it fall to the ground with the "keep out" notice facedown, then she searched the trees to the south and west for movement. The argument seemed to be about who should be in control of the enterprise, but the reasoning was largely negative.
"Nobody else knows anything about the law…" "Only his word that he does…" "He's a fucking psycho…" "Sh-sh, the kids are listening…" "Okay, okay, but I'm not taking any more of his crap…" "Wolfie says he carries a razor…"
She raised her eyes to search for chinks at the base of the cardboard blinds, hoping to get a glimpse of the interior and a rough count of heads. From the number of different voices, she suspected the whole encampment was in there, minus the one who was under discussion. The psycho. She would have been happier knowing where he was, but the absolute stillness beyond the buses meant he was either very patient or he wasn't there.
The last window she examined was the one above her head, and her heart missed a beat as she locked eyes with someone looking down at her through a tweaked-back edge of the cardboard. The eyes were too round and the nose too small to be anything but a child's, and, instinctively, she smiled and raised a finger to her lips. There was no reaction, just a quiet withdrawal as the board was pressed back into place. After two or three minutes, during which the rumble of conversation continued undisturbed, she stole back among the trees and signaled to James and Mark to join her.
Wolfie had sneaked into the driving seat of Bella's bus, which was partitioned off by a piece of curtain. He didn't want to be noticed, frightened that someone would say he should be with his father. He had curled into a ball on the floor between the dashboard and the seat, hiding as much from Fox on the outside as from Bella and the others inside. After half an hour, when the cold of the floor set his teeth chattering, he crawled onto the seat and peered over the steering wheel to see if he could spot Fox.
He was more frightened now than he'd ever been. If Cub wasn't Fox's, then perhaps that was why his mother had taken him away and left Wolfie behind. Perhaps Wolfie didn't belong to Vixen at all, but only to Fox. The thought terrified him. It meant Fox could do what he liked, whenever he liked, and there'd be no one to stop him. At the back of his mind, he knew it didn't make any difference. His mother had never been able to keep Fox from acting crazy, just holler and cry and say she wouldn't be bad again. He had never understood what the badness was, though he was beginning to wonder if the sleeps she made him and Cub take had something to do with it. A tiny knot of anger-a first understanding of material betrayal-wound like a noose about his heart.
He heard Bella say that if Fox was telling the truth about working the fairgrounds, it would explain why none of them had come across him on the circuit, and he wanted to call out: but he isn't telling the truth. There wasn't a single time that Wolfie could remember when the bus had been parked near other people except in the summer when the rave had happened. Most of the time Fox left them in the middle of nowhere, then vanished for days on end. Sometimes Wolfie followed to see where Fox went, but he was always picked up by a black car and driven away.
When his mother had been brave enough she'd walked him and Cub along the roads till they came to a town, but most of the time she was curled on the bed. He had believed it was because she was worried about do-gooders, but now he wondered if it had more to do with how much she slept. Perhaps it hadn't been bravery at all, but just a need to find whatever it was that made her feel better.
Wolfie tried to remember the time when Fox wasn't there. Sometimes it came to him in his dreams, memories of a house and a proper bedroom. He was sure it was real and not just a piece of fantasy engendered by movies… but he didn't know when it had happened. It was very confusing. Why was Fox his father and not Cub's? He wished he knew more about parents. His entire knowledge of them was based on the American flicks he'd seen-where moms said "love you," the kids were called "pumpkin," and telephone codes were 555-and all of it was as fake as Wolfie's John Wayne walk.
He stared hard at Fox's bus, but he could tell from the way the handle was tilted that it had been locked from the outside. Wolfie wondered where Fox had gone and tweaked the edge of the cardboard in the side window to search the woodland toward the murderer's house. He saw Nancy long before she saw him, watched her slip out of the wood to crouch beside the wheel below where he was sitting, saw the rope barrier fall to the ground. He thought about calling out a warning to Bella, but Nancy raised her face and put a finger to her lips. He decided that her eyes were full of soul, so he pressed the cardboard back and dropped down between the seat and the dashboard again. He would like to have warned her that Fox was probably watching her, too, but his habit of self-protection was too ingrained to draw attention to himself.
Instead, he sucked on his thumb and closed his eyes, and pretended he hadn't seen her. He'd done it before-closed his eyes and pretended he couldn't see-but he didn't remember why… and didn't want to…
The ringing of the telephone made Vera jump. It was a rare occurrence at the Lodge. She looked furtively toward the kitchen, where Bob was listening to the radio, then picked up the receiver. A smile lit her faded eyes as she heard the voice at the other end. "Of course I understand," she said, stroking the fox's brush in her pocket. "It's Bob who's stupid… not Vera." As she replaced the receiver, something stirred in her mind. A fleeting recollection that someone had wanted to talk to her husband. Her mouth sucked and strained as she tried to remember who it was, but the effort was too great. Only her long-term memory worked these days and even that was full of holes…
16
This time keys were unnecessary. Fox knew the Colonel's habits of old. He was obsessive about barring his front and back doors, but rarely remembered to lock the French windows when he left the house via the terrace. It was the work of seconds to sprint across the grass, after James and his visitors had disappeared into the wood, to let himself into the drawing room. He stood for a moment, listening to the heavy silence of the house, but the heat from the log fire was too intense after the cold outside, and he flung back his hood and loosened the scarf around his mouth as he felt himself start to burn up.