"What about the other times?"
The boy gripped the back of a chair because his knees were trembling with fright. This was further than he wanted to go-with words he couldn't pronounce and ideas that would make Fox angry. "There was some stuff about cancer-" he took a deep breath-"'n' dybeets 'n' arthrytes that can make it happen." He rushed on before his father turned nasty again. "Mum and me reckon you should see a doctor, because if you is ill it won't get no better by pretending it ain't there. It's no big deal to sign on at a surgery. The law says travelers got the same rights to care as everyone else."
"Did the bitch say I was ill?"
Wolfie's alarm showed in his face. "N-n-no. She don't n-n-never talk about you."
Fox stabbed the razor into the wooden washboard. "You're lying," he snarled, turning around. "Tell me what she said or I'll have your fucking guts."
"Your father's sick in the head… your father's evil…" "Nothing," Wolfie managed. "She don't never say nothing."
Fox searched his son's terrified eyes. "You'd better be telling the truth, Wolfie, or it's your mother's innards that'll be on the floor. Try again. What did she say about me?"
The child's nerve broke and he made a dash for the rear exit, diving beneath the bus and burying his face in his hands. He couldn't do anything right. His father would kill his mother, and the do-gooders would find his bruises. He would have prayed to God if he knew how, but God was a nebulous entity that he didn't understand. One time his mother had said, if God was a woman she'd help us. Another time: God's a policeman. If you obey the rules he's nice, if you don't he sends you to hell.
The only absolute truth that Wolfie understood was that there was no escape from the misery of his life.
Fox fascinated Bella Preston in a way that few other men had. He was older than he looked, she guessed, putting him somewhere in his forties, with a peculiarly inexpressive face that suggested a tight rein on his emotions. He spoke little, preferring to cloak himself in silence, but when he did his speech betrayed his class and education.
It wasn't unheard of for a "toff' to take to the road-it had happened down the centuries when a black sheep was kicked out of the family fold-but she would have expected Fox to have an expensive habit. Crackheads were the black sheep of the twenty-first century, never mind what class they were born into. This guy wouldn't even take a spliff, and that was weird.
A woman with less confidence might have asked herself why he kept singling her out for attention. Big and fat with cropped peroxided hair, Bella wasn't an obvious choice for this lean, charismatic man with pale eyes and shaven tracks across his skull. He never answered questions. Who he was, where he came from, and why he hadn't been seen on the circuit before were no one's business but his own. Bella, who had witnessed it all before, took his right to a hidden past for granted-didn't they all have secrets?-and allowed him to haunt her bus with the same freedom that everyone else did.
Bella hadn't traveled the country with three young daughters and an H-addict husband, now dead, without learning to keep her eyes open. She knew there were a woman and two children in Fox's bus, but he never acknowledged them. They looked like spares, chucked out along the way by someone else and taken on board in a moment of charity, but Bella saw how the two kids cowered behind their mother's skirts whenever Fox drew near. It told her something about the man. However attractive he might be to strangers-and he was attractive-Bella would bet her last cent that he showed a different character behind closed doors.
It didn't surprise her. What man wouldn't be bored by a spaced-out zombie and her by-blows? But it made her wary.
The children were timid little clones of their mother, blond and blue-eyed, who sat in the dirt under Fox's bus and watched while she wandered aimlessly from vehicle to vehicle, hand held out for anything that would put her to sleep. Bella wondered how often she gave happy pills to the kids to keep them quiet. Too often, she suspected. Their lethargy wasn't normal.
Of course she felt sorry for them. She dubbed herself a "social worker" because she and her daughters attracted waifs wherever they camped. Their battery-operated television had something to do with it, also Bella's generous nature, which made her a comfortable person to be around. But when she sent her girls to make friends with the two boys, they slithered under Fox's bus and ran away.
She made an attempt to engage the woman in conversation by offering to share a smoke with her, but it was a fruitless exercise. All questions were greeted with silence or incomprehension, except for wistful agreement when Bella said the hardest part about being on the road was educating the kids. "Wolfie likes libraries," the skinny creature said, as if Bella should know what she was talking about.
"Which one's Wolfie?" asked Bella.
"The one that takes after his father… the clever one," she said, before wandering away to look for more handouts.
The subject of education came up again on the Monday night when prone bodies littered the ground in front of Bella's purple and pink bus. "I'd chuck it all in tomorrow," she said dreamily, staring at the star-studded sky and the moon across the water. "All I need is for someone to give me a house with a garden that ain't on a fucking estate in the middle of a fucking city full of fucking delinquents. Somewhere round here would do… a decent place where my kids can go to school 'n' not get their heads fucked by wannabe jail meat… that's all I'm asking."
'They're pretty girlies, Bella," said a dreamy voice. "They'll get more 'n' their heads fucked the minute you turn your back."
"Yeah, and don't I know it. I'll chop the dick off the first man who tries."
There was a low laugh from the corner of the bus where Fox was standing in shadow. "It'll be too late by then," he murmured. "You need to take action now. Prevention is always better than cure."
"Like what?"
He detached himself from the shadows and loomed over Bella, straddling her with his feet, his tall figure blotting out the moon. "Claim some free land through adverse possession and build your own house."
She squinted up at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"
His teeth flashed in a brief grin. "Winning the jackpot," he said.
3
LOWER CROFT, COOMB FARM,
HEREFORDSHIRE-28 AUGUST 2001
Unusually for twenty-eight years ago, Nancy Smith had been delivered in her mother's bedroom, but not because her mother had avant-garde views on a woman's right to home birthing. A wild and disturbed teenager, Elizabeth Lockyer-Fox had starved herself for the first six months of her pregnancy and, when that failed to kill the incubus inside her, ran away from boarding school and demanded her mother rescue her from it. Who would marry her if she was saddled with a child?
The question seemed relevant at the time-Elizabeth was just seventeen-and her family closed ranks to protect her reputation. The Lockyer-Foxes were an old military family with distinguished war service from the Crimea to the standoff in Korea on the 38th parallel. With abortion out of the question because Elizabeth had left it too late, adoption was the only option if the stigmas of single motherhood and illegitimacy were to be avoided. Naively perhaps, and even in 1973 with the women's movement well under way, a "good" marriage was the Lockyer-Foxes' only solution to their daughter's uncontrollable behavior. Once settled down, they hoped, she would learn responsibility.
The agreed story was that Elizabeth was suffering from glandular fever, and there was muted sympathy among her parents' friends and acquaintances-none of whom had much affection for the Lockyer-Fox children-when it became clear that the fever was debilitating and contagious enough to keep her quarantined for three months. For the rest, the tenant farmers and workers on the Lockyer-Fox estate, Elizabeth remained her usual wild self, slipping her mother's leash at night to drink and shag herself stupid, unrepentant about the damage it might do to her fetus. If it wasn't going to be hers, why should she care? All she wanted was rid of it, and the rougher the sex the more likely that was.