Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

‘You know what?’ said Mr Ffoxe. ‘I’m finding you curiously appealing.’

‘The feeling’s not mutual,’ said Connie.

The fox’s eyes flickered dangerously and several drops of saliva fell from the tip of his canines and dripped on to the tablecloth. I knew I had to say something. Foxes never backed down, and Connie, well, I think she was made of pretty stern stuff too – and had a flick-knife. Foxes don’t like blades any more than they like foxhounds and shouts of ‘tally ho!’.

‘Well, this has been fun,’ I said in a trembling voice, clapping my hands together loudly. ‘I must get back to work, and Mrs Rabbit – weren’t you going to meet Diane at the cathedral to show her the Mappa Mundi?’

I think they were both relieved at my intervention. Connie slowly withdrew the knife and folded it up without taking her eyes off Mr Ffoxe, then gathered up her bags and mobile phone.

‘Another time, Fox,’ she said.

‘Oh, for sure,’ he replied. ‘We’ll meet again – and what’s more, you’ll beg me to make it quick. Your defiance will make the chase that much more enjoyable, the struggle so much more alluring, the defiling and death that much sweeter.’

Connie stared at him with cold defiance, then walked to the door with a slow, confident stride. She’d not blinked in the presence of a fox, and I couldn’t help but feel there was a sense of the warrior about her. I’d seen it before, years ago – her unyielding strength of purpose – but never quite been able to articulate what I’d felt.

The café, for its part, breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to whatever it was doing. Coffee, I think, and banal chit-chat not quite so banal as before.

‘We’ll talk about this later, Knox,’ said Mr Ffoxe, glaring at me. ‘No rabbit is going to call me mangy and get away with it – unless,’ he said, having a sudden thought, ‘she had amorous intentions. You know what they say, how every rabbit secretly wants a fox?’

‘It was probably more to do with you leaking her husband’s name to the 2LG and murdering her niece.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said reflectively, ‘that might make her a little miffed, mightn’t it?’

‘I think so. Why didn’t you kill her?’

‘Oh, I will,’ he said airily, ‘as sure as night follows day. But there’s a time and a place for everything – and while All Saints would probably tolerate a killing, the dismembering I had planned might not go down too well, and having one without the other is like a Spice Girls reunion without Posh. Besides, I’ve just had this suit dry-cleaned.’

He smiled and gave me a wink.

‘Oh, and thanks for your intervention, old chum. Well timed.’

He picked up his copy of Fox and Friends and went to get another coffee.

‘Nice friends you have,’ said the couple next to me.

‘At least I have some,’ I replied, failing utterly to think of a suitably sarcastic retort.

‘The only safe fast breeder is a nuclear reactor,’ said a young man on another table, parroting a favourite slogan of Hominid Supremacists – an intellectual step up from the usual rallying cry of ‘Where dat pesky wabbit?’

I was still trembling when I got back to the office. I found Lugless in the kitchenette, where he’d just made a cup of Ovaltine and was adding a slug of Jack Daniels. He didn’t hear me at the door – owing to the lack of ears, I guess – and I heard him muttering to himself: ‘Keep it together, Douglas, keep it together.’ I stopped, then very carefully moved away, just in case he reacted badly to me catching him in a state that presumably he did not wish to be found. I returned to my desk in the office and he rejoined me soon after, speaking on his mobile.

‘The suspect was working as a researcher for that turd Finkle over at RabSAg, Group Leader,’ he said, ‘but had something to impart: the Bunty is definitely in Colony One. Yes,’ he said, after a pause, ‘I will keep on trying, but the ones with good intel rarely come off-colony. We need to do a crime sweep, or simply pull them out during the Rehoming process … I will, sir. Thank you, sir.’

He hung up, glared at me, then started to write out a report. If the Venerable Bunty was confirmed as being in Colony One, then that would be a matter of considerable interest. With her in custody, the Rehoming could go very smoothly indeed.

‘How was lunch?’ asked Lugless. ‘My therapist says I need to engage socially whether I like it or not.’

‘Eventful,’ I replied.

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘Bad.’

I wasn’t kidding. Of all the thoughts churning around inside me – from having seen a rabbit momentarily better a fox, to Connie revealing that I was one of the only humans she ever liked and Mr Ffoxe’s admission that he routinely murdered rabbits or leaked their details to TwoLegsGood – there was another, more relevant fact dominating my concerns: Doc and Connie might be wondering who their next-door neighbour actually was, and just why, precisely , a Senior Group Leader knew me by name. Discovering my part in Dylan Rabbit’s death would surely not be far behind, and I didn’t think Connie would take kindly to me being complicit in her second husband’s death. Worse, Mr Ffoxe’s run-in with Connie and his request for me to keep them under observation indicated that Connie and Doc were rabbits of interest. If I’d been a rabbit, I’d work hard to ensure I wasn’t remotely interesting to a fox – especially one like Ffoxe.

‘Gregors’, ‘Greggs’ or ‘The Maccy-Gs’ are all rabbit slang for law enforcement agents, named after Mr McGregor, the villain in the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit books . In the dubbed-into-Rabbity version of Star Wars , Darth Vader is literally translated as ‘Mr McGregor’.

The Rabbits’ Dodge Monaco wasn’t in their drive when I got home, and Hemlock Towers looked empty. I let myself into my house, made a cup of tea and put the washing on the line. When I walked back indoors, Sally had dropped Pippa off and she was on the phone to Vodafone Customer Support.

‘Hey, Dad,’ she said once she was done, ‘how was work?’

She said it in a semi-sarcastic tone that I didn’t much like, but understood.

‘There’s something you need to know,’ I said, getting straight to the point, ‘about Harvey.’

I sat down at the kitchen table and I told her everything I knew. That I’d been on Ops and seen him work as a courier, and while he was as yet unidentified as a rabbit of interest, that probably wouldn’t last for long. I told her I’d seen his record, and his movements around the country coupled with the sighting in Ross suggested that he was heavily connected with the Underground.

‘His politics would indicate the same,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t change anything. He and I just … connected in a way that’s difficult to describe. We talked about, well, everything, and he listened and responded and made me think about stuff, and I then made observations that he’d not thought of, and he liked that. Welcomed it. I really want to see him again.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘and I’m going to quit the Taskforce.’

She smiled, took my hand and squeezed it.

‘What will you do for a job? We need money, Dad. I’m training, but there’s no guarantee I’ll be selected for a job at the end of it. It’s better out there, but it’ll never be a level playing field.’

‘I’ve got it all figured out,’ I said, in the way people do when they’ve not really figured anything out at all, not even a little bit. ‘I’ll just make more and more mistakes until I’m deemed unreliable and they’ll have to let me go. I’ve been there a while, so I may even get a payoff.’