The Constant Rabbit Page 28

  Doc’s voice sounded confident. I guess he’d faced dangers as great or greater than this in the armed forces. But I don’t think he’d seen the speed at which Mr Ffoxe could move. The fox could be across the room, snap both their necks and have them half buried behind the compost heap before they’d even realised he was through the door.

  I could feel Connie trembling as she moved closer in behind me and wrapped one arm around my waist. I could smell her earthy scent once again, her whiskers tickling the back of my neck.

  ‘Mr Smethwick says the whole ripping-to-pieces thing is bad PR,’ said Mr Ffoxe, still with only his snout showing through the kitchen door, ‘so I’m willing to forgo the good sport that is my right and simply give you a deal: I get to question Constance at my leisure, and you and the boy upstairs go free.’

  ‘I’ve a better deal,’ said Doc. ‘You take your mangy ginger butt out of our house right now, and we’ll forget this ever happened.’

  Mr Ffoxe gave out a raspy chuckle.

  ‘There’s only one deal on the table,’ he said. ‘Mr Knox, are you there?’

  ‘I’m here,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve been a fool, Mr Knox, but at least you’ve got to see rabbits for what they truly are: vermin, eager only to invade, dominate and then assimilate us all to their ways. I will spare you, Knox, but you should leave unless you’ve got a strong stomach, which I doubt.’

  ‘I’m staying,’ I said, not quite in the brave voice I’d intended.

  Mr Ffoxe’s snout sniffed the air again.

  ‘You were warned. When the orange mist comes down I rarely show restraint. Final offer, Doc: give up the wife or I’ll take out every last one of your friends and relatives. There’ll be no rabbit left alive who even knew you.’

  I looked at Doc, who was swaying on the spot, readying himself for the attack. He was the biggest and most powerful – Mr Ffoxe would kill him first. Connie was still behind me, holding on tight. I could feel the warmth of her body, her heart thumping rapidly beneath her soft fur.

  ‘You want to know my answer, Torquil?’ said Doc. ‘Here it is: your wife, mother, sister, aunt and grandmother … all mate out of season.’

  There was a shocked intake of breath from Connie.

  ‘Is that an insult?’ I whispered.

  ‘The worst,’ she whispered back.

  Several things then seemed to happen at once. The door was kicked open to reveal Mr Ffoxe, who seemed to have transformed. His eyes were large and bloodshot and his mouth was wide open, revealing sharply pointed teeth wet with saliva. He gave out a dark and forbidding noise from the back of his throat and with his hair rising stiffly on his neck looked about as terrifying as I had ever seen him before – and that included the time when he nearly took out my eye. That fear, I realised, was just a taster. A cold lump of bile rose in my throat, and Doc’s ears went flat on his back.

  There was a brief pause as Mr Ffoxe savoured the moment of our terror and then I saw Connie’s arm in front of me holding Doc’s lark-decorated duelling pistol in her gloved hand. I only had time to register this for a split second as there was a flash, a sharp detonation and Mr Ffoxe’s head vanished off his shoulders in an explosion of blood and fur. A fragmented part of his skull actually stuck to the wall opposite, just next to the light switch, and a single yellow eye bounced on the carpet before rolling to a stop near the coal scuttle. The fox then dropped to his knees but didn’t fall forward. Rigor mortis, unusually fast in anthropomorphised foxes, kept him on his knees, his arms still upright, making him look not threatening, but imploring – and without a head.

  ‘Sic semper tyrannis, you contemptible shit,’ said Connie.

  I stared blankly for a moment at Mr Ffoxe’s corpse, the blood bubbling weakly out of his severed neck and running on to his tweed jacket. Connie released her hold on me, and lowered the pistol.

  ‘That was seriously risky,’ said Doc. ‘You should never go for the head shot with only one up the spout.’

  ‘I hear you,’ said Connie, ‘but it was truly satisfying, and at that range I couldn’t really miss.’

  I took my first breath after the pistol was discharged and breathed in the sharp odour of cordite in the room. Doc, Connie and I stared at the headless body of Mr Ffoxe in silence until I found my voice.

  ‘Think of the reprisals,’ I said. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I haven’t done anything,’ said Connie, and she handed me the duelling pistol. ‘It’s a crime of passion. We were having an affair and you defended me against an aggressor. Your prints are on the weapon, and you’re covered in gunshot residue and bits of fox. My husband, eternally grateful, forgives us both.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said Doc, ‘so you were having an affair?’

  Constance stared at him for a moment.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I get it now. I’m to pretend you were having an affair.’

  And that was when the penny dropped.

  ‘Wait, this is the intervention?’ I asked. ‘This is how I make good?’

  ‘As I told you,’ replied Constance, ‘everyone’s repairable. One bad act shouldn’t define a person for life, if there is an opportunity to find absolution.’

  She smiled.

  ‘And I’m so in love with you right now, Pete. If you get out of this jam you can make a play for me.’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Doc triumphantly, ‘we do get to duel.’

  ‘If I get out of it,’ I said.

  ‘True,’ said Connie, and she opened her flick-knife, stepped forward and cut off one of Mr Ffoxe’s claws. ‘Torquil Ffoxe was the true architect of the Rehoming plan, and with him gone, we may have bought some renegotiation time. The Taskforce will be here presently,’ she added, threading the fox-claw on to a leather lanyard, ‘so the next part of this is really up to you.’

  In my short time with the Rabbits I think I understood in the tiniest fashion what a real taste of oppression means. The decision was a no-brainer: a thousand or more rabbits torn limb from limb, or me doing some time for murder.

  ‘You outfoxed the fox,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Connie, ‘we outfoxed the fox,’ and she placed the leather lanyard with the fox-claw around my neck, and tucked it beneath my shirt.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘you’ll never have to buy a round of dandelion brandy ever again. Kent? Bring in the owl.’

  There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and Kent appeared with the owl – the same one that Finkle had delivered to my house.

  ‘Why is the owl here?’ I asked.

  ‘You brought it with you,’ said Connie. ‘Repeat it so you understand that.’

  ‘I brought the owl with me.’

  ‘All right, then. Good luck.’

  There was a screech of tyres outside the house, car doors slamming and the sound of footsteps. Doc, Connie and Kent were suddenly on the ground, three terrified balls of brown fur, sobbing uncontrollably, hearts thumping wildly, ears flat on their backs.

  Whizelle was first through the door. He found me standing there, still holding the duelling pistol, Senior Group Leader Torquil Ffoxe dead on his knees, arms still up in the air, a pool of blood slowly congealing beneath him. I didn’t notice it at the time, but I had one of Mr Ffoxe’s ears stuck to my jacket.

  ‘Oh, Peter,’ said the weasel, surveying the scene with a sad shake of his head, ‘you silly, silly bastard.’

  Flemming ran in the door and stopped when she saw what remained of the Senior Group Leader.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, ‘oh … shit.’ She glared at me. ‘Knox? What in hell’s name are you playing at?’

  ‘I brought the owl,’ I blurted out, stupidly.

  ‘Good for you,’ said Whizelle. ‘Flemming? Search the house.’

  Flemming, still staring at Mr Ffoxe’s body, issued a curt message on her radio and more Taskforce officers entered, then, upon her direction, vanished to all points around the house – upstairs, into the cellar, living room, kitchen, snooker room. My hands were cuffed
and the pistol dropped into an evidence bag. In an unusual move – I would find out why soon enough – a photographer was on hand to make a rapid and comprehensive survey of the crime scene while the Rabbits looked dumb and sheepish and forlorn, their ears drooped, their shoulders hunched. It was an impressive performance.

  ‘All clear,’ said Flemming as the agents concluded their search and were then ordered to depart, taking all the Rabbits’ mobile phones and laptops with them. Agent Whizelle then told Flemming to escort me to the car and hold me there, adding that ‘I needed to learn that actions have consequences’. I was moved out of the building as Whizelle and another agent started to take statements from the Rabbits.

  ‘Mind your head,’ said Flemming as she helped me into the back of the Range Rover.

  ‘What was that about actions and consequences?’ I asked once she’d climbed in herself.

  ‘Search me,’ she said. ‘This is the weasel’s show. Why did you do it, Peter? I mean, I can understand how you could be so easily bunnytrapped, but from there to taking a gun to a fox? And the Senior Group Leader to boot? That takes a lot more cojones than I’d ever credit you with.’

  ‘Is that a compliment?’

  She stared at me in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘It’s an observation.’

  I sighed and gazed at Hemlock Towers. I’d lived in the house next door my entire life and seen the Towers almost every day for the past half-century. Been inside it about two dozen times under various ownerships, but the visit that ended with a dead fox would be my last.

  ‘He said what he was going to do with her before he killed her,’ I said simply. ‘I couldn’t let that happen.’

  ‘You should have walked the other way,’ said Flemming, unimpressed by my reasoning. ‘Mr Ffoxe was a vital kingpin. You’ll be lucky to get out of the clink this side of your seventieth birthday.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quietly, ‘and it will be justice.’

  We stayed parked outside for about three hours, and watched as various Taskforce personnel came and went. The fox was carried out in a lumpy body bag after one hour and forty-five minutes, and I half expected Mr Smethwick to make an appearance to view for himself where his loyal engineer of the Rehoming was killed, but he didn’t. Finally, after much activity, the remainder of the Taskforce staff filed out and departed. Last of all came Whizelle, and I briefly caught a glimpse of Connie as she closed the door behind him. There was a brief pause, and then the door opened again and Doc placed the owl on the doorstep; it looked around for a moment, blinked, then flew off.

  Whizelle took out his mobile and spoke for a couple of seconds, then climbed into the car. Flemming made to start the engine, but he stopped her with a wave of his paw.

  ‘Are we waiting for something?’ I asked.

  The weasel didn’t reply, and instead just sat silently in the passenger seat, his rear paws on the dash, claws scratching the vinyl annoyingly. After about twenty minutes, cars began to arrive. The sort of cars sensible people own. Passats, Corollas, a few Audis, people carriers – some even with child seats in the back and nuclear disarmament stickers on the bumper. The cars stopped, parked up and the people climbed out. Their faces were obscured by the pig masks of TwoLegsGood and they positioned themselves around Hemlock Towers in a slow and deliberate fashion.

  ‘I don’t mind rabbits coming to grief,’ said Flemming as soon as she realised what was going on, ‘but when we start letting thugs do our dirty wo—’

  ‘Just relax,’ said the weasel, ‘it’s what he would have wanted.’

  He patted her arm in a soothing manner, his meaning clear. He wasn’t just going to allow this, he had engineered it. There weren’t going to be any reprisals, but the Rabbits weren’t going to be given the benefit of the doubt, either. He turned and fixed me with his small black eyes.

  ‘These are the consequences of your actions, Knox,’ he said. ‘This one’s on you.’

  He then nodded to Flemming, who shook her head again, started the car and drove out past the growing throngs of pig-masked Hominid Supremacists carrying glass bottles with rags stuffed in the top. I think I even saw Victor Mallett, who looked pretty much the same with a pig mask as without.

  ‘You’re making a big mistake,’ I said as the car, once away from the small crowd, picked up speed.

  ‘You’re the one who made the big mistake,’ he said, ‘you and the Rabbits.’

  He lapsed into silence, but he had mistaken the meaning of my comment. The mistake he made was taking on someone like Constance Rabbit. If they hadn’t already escaped through Kent’s tunnel – likely temporarily hidden by the stacked bricks in the basement – then they would do soon enough. If Connie could outfox a fox, outweaselling a weasel would be child’s play.

  Lapin Flambé & HMP Leominster

  TV Prison Trope incarceration was a natural progression from the pioneering Seventies Sitcom Hospitals, where the patients never seemed that ill and the nurses were all ridiculously buxom and spoke only in double entendres. They were, in turn, all romantically involved with the doctors, who were unfailingly handsome, witty, urbane and charming. And male.

  I was taken to the Hereford Police Department’s central station. Whizelle left it up to Flemming to oversee my processing, probably because the weasel was not well liked by the local police as he was arrested quite often for being drunk, and managed to be offensively obnoxious to all and sundry when he was.

  I was handed over to the custody sergeant, who confirmed with me that I was Peter Knox; that I wasn’t drunk or deranged; that I could be reasonably believed to be wanted in questioning with a crime; that I understood what was being said to me; that the crime required me to be held in custody; that I was unlikely to harm myself.

  Pictures, fingerprints, details, then all my clothes were placed in a large evidence bag, signed and sealed. I was given some freshly laundered clothes to wear – a pair of jogging trousers, a T-shirt and a sweat top. On the whole, the officers were considerate and polite, but then I wasn’t causing any trouble and I was human, like them. They even offered me something to eat, but I declined. I wasn’t hungry. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I did, and quite well.

  After a breakfast of cereal and tea, I was taken upstairs to meet the lawyer who had been allocated to my case.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ the custody sergeant told me, ‘Spenlow & Jorkins have agreed to supply counsel.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, as the law firm were well known, not just in Hereford, but Shropshire and Gloucestershire, too. On numerous occasions they had defended defendants who had clearly been guilty, and while not always getting their clients acquitted, they had certainly managed to achieve a reduction in sentence.

  It was a surprise when I met my lawyer, but thinking about it afterwards, I should not have been surprised at the surprise. A small Petstock rabbit dressed in a suit and tie was waiting for me, nervously clutching a briefcase and peering at me owlishly through round, steel-rimmed spectacles. He was white and brown, and his left ear was missing the top third.

  ‘Hello!’ he said cheerfully, clasping my hand in his two. ‘Lance deBlackberry of Spenlow & Jorkins.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said, noting that his missing ear ended in the sort of pattern perforations make once torn. ‘What happened to your ear?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said in a friendly tone, ‘that’s easily explained: never duel with automatic weapons. Now: Mr Jorkins specifically allocated me to your case as he thought I might be able to offer a unique insight.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘and can you?’

  ‘Can I what?’

  ‘Offer a unique insight into my case?’

  ‘Frankly, no,’ he admitted, ‘this is my first case.’

  ‘First murder case?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I mean my first criminal case. I graduated only last week from Stanford Law School.’

  ‘Stanford? That’s impressive,’ I said, feeling relieved despite his lack of experience. ‘How did you get to tra
vel to the States to attend?’

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ he said apologetically, ‘not the Stanford Law School, but an online law school based out of Stanford, a small village in Bedfordshire. The course was easier than I expected. It didn’t really require much study at all.’

  ‘How long and how much?’

  ‘Two weeks and two hundred pounds. Look.’

  And from his briefcase he withdrew a framed certificate that seemed quite badly spelled.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ I said, ‘but I think I might need a more experienced lawyer.’

  ‘Not possible. The Attorney General herself asked for a rabbit lawyer to defend you. Said it would be fitting and just given the circumstances and would also give rabbits in the legal profession a “chance to shine”.’

  I sighed inwardly. The establishment was taking no chances on ensuring I was banged up for this, and as a bonus feature would be able to discredit rabbit lawyers at the same time.

  ‘OK, then,’ I said, ‘where do we go from here?’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was hoping you might be able to give me a few pointers. Have you ever been arrested in connection with murder before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he said, somewhat crestfallen, ‘as it might have helped us figure out procedure. But never mind,’ he added, ‘this is only the interview process, and I’ve seen a couple of episodes of 24hrs in Police Custody and Banged Up Abroad, so I think you should be saying “no comment” a lot and figuring out who to bribe.’

  ‘I’m not handing out bribes, Mr deBlackberry.’

  ‘It’s Lancelot,’ he said, ‘but you can call me Lance.’

  I was interviewed by a non-Taskforce officer, a friendly detective inspector named Stanton, and, ignoring Lance’s advice, I denied nothing, and admitted everything. Yes, I had been having an affair with Mrs Rabbit, whom I had known for many years, yes, I did know there was a gun in the house, yes, Doc had earlier shown me where he kept the powder and ball and percussion caps, and yes, I pulled the trigger when Mr Ffoxe threatened to kill Constance.