Minette Walters - Fox Evil

He tapped his foot on the carpet while he waited. A second or two later he held the phone away from his ear as Dick's voice roared down the line. He made one or two attempts to halt the angry tirade, but it was only when Dick ran out of steam that he was able to jump in. "Thank you, Mr. Weldon. I think I got the gist all right… no, I'd rather you told your wife yourself. Do you want to speak to her now? Right… goodbye." He touched end and dropped the mobile into his pocket. "Dear, dear, dear! You seem to have upset everyone, Mrs. Weldon. There's not much support there, I'm afraid!"

"It's none of your business."

"Apparently Mrs. Bartlett's husband is equally angry… neither of them knew what the pair of you were up to. If they had, they'd have stopped it."

Prue didn't say anything.

"James guessed as much, which is why he hasn't taken any action to date… he didn't want to embarrass Dick or Julian. He hoped if he didn't react you'd lose interest or your husbands would start questioning what you were doing. It's gone too far for that now, though. The threats in these calls are too dangerous to be ignored any longer."

"I've never made any threats," she protested. "I've never said anything. It's Eleanor you should be talking to. She's the one who started it."

"So it was Mrs. Bartlett's idea?"

Prue stared at her hands. After all, what loyalty did she owe her friend? She'd called Shenstead House twice in the last hour and each time Julian had told her that Ellie was "unavailable." The word alone implied that the woman was there and refusing to speak to her, but the amused tone of Julian's voice confirmed it. Prue had excused her on the grounds that she didn't want to speak in front of Julian, but she suspected now that Ellie was busy blaming her in order to keep in his good books.

Prue's resentment against everyone grew. She was the least at fault yet she was the most accused. "It certainly wasn't my idea," she muttered. "I'm not the type to make abusive calls… which is why I never said anything."

"Why make them at all then?"

"Eleanor called it natural justice," she said, refusing to look at either man. "No one seemed interested in how Ailsa died except us."

"I see," said Mark sarcastically. "So despite a police investigation, a postmortem, and a coroner's inquest, you decided no one was interested. That's a very bizarre conclusion, Mrs. Weldon. How did you reach it, exactly?"

"I heard James and Ailsa arguing. You can't just put a thing like that out of your mind."

Mark watched her for a moment. "That's it?" he asked in disbelief. "You appointed yourself judge, jury, and executioner on the basis of a single argument between two people you couldn't see or even hear properly? There was no other evidence?"

She wriggled her shoulders uncomfortably. How could she possibly repeat in front of James what Eleanor knew? "I know what I heard," she said, falling back on the only argument she'd ever really had. Stubborn certainty.

"I doubt that very much." Mark propped his briefcase on his knee and brought out the tape recorder. "I want you to listen to these messages, Mrs. Weldon." He located a socket beside the armchair in which James was sitting and plugged in the machine, handing it to James to operate. "At the end I'd like you to tell me what you think you've heard."

There was nothing in the allegations of child abuse to shock Prue-she knew them all-but the relentless repetition did shock her. She felt dirty just listening to the continuously stated details of child rape, as if she were a willing party to their telling. She argued to herself that the calls hadn't come en bloc like this, but the cumulative effect was disturbing. She wanted to say, stop, I've heard enough, but she knew what the reaction would be. James hadn't been given that choice.

Every so often Eleanor's high-pitched rants and Darth Vader's distorted monologues were punctuated by periods of silence in which the sound of stealthy breathing- her breathing-was audible on the tape. She could hear the pauses as she turned away from the mouthpiece, afraid that Dick had woken up and come downstairs to discover what she was doing. She could hear her trembling excitement as fear of exposure and a sense of power collided in her chest to produce sibilant little hisses on inhalation.

She tried to persuade herself that Eleanor's strident hectoring was worse but she didn't succeed. Speech-whatever it said-had the merit of honesty; breathing- heavy breathing, the coward's furtive choice-sounded lewd. Prue should have spoken. Why hadn't she?

Because she hadn't believed what Eleanor had told her…

She remembered whispers of gossip from Vera Dawson about how Ailsa had had to return early from a two-year posting in Africa when Elizabeth contracted glandular fever at school. Of course no one was fooled. The girl was known to be wild, and she truanted too often-particularly at night-for a swollen belly to be anything but an unwanted pregnancy. Rumor had it that James didn't learn about the baby until he returned at the end of the posting, several months after it had been adopted, and his fury that Ailsa had allowed Elizabeth to sweep another mistake under the carpet had been intense.

Eleanor said it proved nothing except that James was capable of anger. A foreign posting allowed for holidays just like any other job, and if Elizabeth said he was in England at the time the baby was conceived then that was good enough for her. Elizabeth was the most damaged woman she'd ever met, she told Prue forcefully, and that sort of personality disorder didn't happen by accident. Whoever forced the adoption had pushed an already vulnerable girl into a spiral of depression and, if anyone doubted it, they should speak to Elizabeth. As Eleanor had done.

The dreadful procession of messages clicked through with one of Prue's to every two of Eleanor's and five of Darth Vader's, and it dawned on Prue that she'd been conned. Everyone was doing it, Eleanor had told her. People were livid that James had got away with murder. The "girls" were making at least one call a day, preferably at night to wake him. It was the only way Ailsa would ever receive justice.

Prue raised her head as James pressed the stop button and silence fell in the room. It was a long time since she'd looked the Colonel in the face, and a flush of shame spread up her neck. He had aged so much, she thought. She remembered him as an upright, handsome man with weather-beaten cheeks and clear eyes. Now he was stooped and gaunt, and his clothes were too big for him.

"Well?" asked Mark.

She chewed at her lip. "There were only three people. Eleanor, myself, and the man. Are there any other tapes?"

"Several," he said, nodding to his open briefcase on the floor, "but they're all just you, Mrs. Bartlett, and our friend who's too frightened to use his real voice. You started to flag recently, but you were calling in regular as clockwork every night for the first four weeks. Do you want me to prove it? Choose any tape you like and we'll play it for you."

She shook her head but didn't say anything.

"You don't seem very interested in the content of the messages," said Mark after a moment. "Does a catalogue of child rape and incest not disturb you? I've listened to these tapes for hours and I'm appalled by them. I'm appalled that a child's pain should be so callously exploited in this way. I'm appalled that I've had to listen to the details. Was that the intention? To humiliate the listener?"

She ran a nervous tongue around her mouth. "I… er… Eleanor wanted James to know we knew."

"Knew what? And please don't refer to Colonel Lockyer-Fox by his Christian name again, Mrs. Weldon. If you ever had the right to use it, you forfeited that the first time you picked up the telephone in menace."