The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

Overview

Driven from his home, a former spy disappears into the wilderness
After decades in the British Intelligence, Peter Marlow no longer has the heart for conflict. He retires to the countryside with his second wife, Laura, and her daughter, Clare, an eleven-year-old autistic girl who reminds Peter what he spent all those years fighting for. But Peter’s past is not through with him—a killer has come to seek revenge for a long-forgotten feud. His bullet misses Peter but strikes Laura, destroying in an instant what had taken Peter a lifetime to build. With Clare in tow, Peter disappears into the woods, going underground while he plans his revenge. Armed only with a bow, camouflage, and his knowledge of the surrounding woods, Peter prepares to confront his old enemy. Although he’s lost his appetite for espionage, he will risk everything to protect Clare.  The Valley of the Fox is the fourth book in the Peter Marlow Mystery series, which also includes The Private Sector and The Sixth Directorate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781480418745
Publisher:	MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Publication date:	07/09/2013
Series:	Peter Marlow Mysteries , #4
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	309
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Joseph Hone (b. 1937) is a British author of spy novels. Born in London, he was sent to Dublin in 1939, and spent most of the next two decades living in Ireland. His first novel, The Private Sector (1971), introduced the globetrotting spy Peter Marlow—the character for whom Hone would become best known. Set during the Six Day War, The Private Sector was well received by critics, who have compared it to the work of Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, and John le Carré. Hone published three more titles in the series—The Sixth Directorate (1975), The Flowers of the Forest (1980), and The Valley of the Fox (1982)—before moving on to other work. In addition to his espionage fiction, Hone has found success in travel writing. His most recent books include Wicked Little Joe (2009), a memoir, and Goodbye Again (2011).     
Joseph Hone (b. 1937) is a British author of spy novels. Born in London, he was sent to Dublin in 1939, and spent most of the next two decades living in Ireland. His first novel, The Private Sector (1971), introduced the globetrotting spy Peter Marlow—the character for whom Hone would become best known. Set during the Six Day War, The Private Sector was well received by critics, who have compared it to the work of Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, and John le Carré. Hone published three more titles in the series—The Sixth Directorate (1975), The Flowers of the Forest (1980), and The Valley of the Fox (1982)—before moving on to other work.
In addition to his espionage fiction, Hone has found success in travel writing. His most recent books include Wicked Little Joe (2009), a memoir, and Goodbye Again (2011). 

Read an Excerpt

The Valley of the Fox

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By Joseph Hone

Mysteriousprees.com

Copyright © 1982 Joseph Hone
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1874-5

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CHAPTER 1

'All gone again!' LAURA sang out in a tone of weary optimism, intent as always on putting a good face on things. We'd become used to the child's intermittent chaos in the cottage long before. But Clare had got so much better lately that this new mayhem, the explosion of moist soil all over the crisp linen Sunday tablecloth, surprised even us. Judy, the postmistress's elder daughter, was nearly in tears. She'd been looking after Clare while all of us had been out to the Easter Sunday service at the church just beyond my cottage.

'I was out in the kitchen, just for a minute—putting the roast in ...'

'It doesn't matter.' Laura comforted her, while Minty, our big, over-loving, wire-haired terrier, pranced around in a frenzy of foolish welcome, as though we'd been away for days and this disaster in the dining-room was a carefully contrived homecoming gift which he and Clare had been working on all morning for us.

George—George Benson, a Professor of Anthropology now at Oxford and out with his wife Annabelle from the town for the weekend—moved round the circular table, making odd archaeological surveys into the dirt, scraping it up with his hands, but only making it worse. The clayey soil was moist. Laura had watered the half dozen flowering hyacinths that same morning. And now the table was like a desecrated altar: the dark smudges of this grave soil from the end of our garden, just next the churchyard wall, set against the brilliant white linen cloth, with the conical blue and pink flowers, like little fir trees, smashed all over the place and Clare, still crouching on the table deep about her business, seemingly unaware of us, sorting the soil through, discovering the bulbs, inspecting them carefully, smelling them as a gourmet might ponder some exotic dish.

'Well? What happened?' Laura asked her daughter, not looking at her directly, no hint of annoyance in her voice. Clare didn't reply, though of course she could speak now, very reasonably when she wished. She was nearly eleven after all.

'I expect she wanted to be taken to church,' I said.

I was no great churchgoer. But Laura liked to go, and Clare too, if for different reasons. That was how I'd first met both of them the summer before, high up on one of Lisbon's windy hills, in the Anglican church of St George. We'd all become so much happier people since then, that perhaps Clare had come to identify churches with her new-found contentment, where all three of us were in such buildings together, and had felt excluded this morning—threatened—and had thus taken her revenge.

'But she said she didn't want to come,' Laura turned, admitting some of her anguish to me, at least. 'She'd sooner stay at home with Judy and help with the lunch, she said.'

'She wanted to be made to come then.'

I disliked hinting, even, at the dry world of psychology, the awful jargon of the child specialists, their arid theories of cause and effect that I knew had done so little for Clare over the years. But even so, we all of us had a need sometimes to be forcibly confirmed in our happiness, to be taken to bed by a woman, or rooted away from the fire by friends for a frosty winter walk.

'Perhaps,' Laura said. And then, more abruptly, 'Though God knows, she's growing up, isn't she? She has to learn what she wants, herself.'

'She wants that as well,' I said shortly. 'She wants it both ways. She wants everything.' I was more upset than Laura, perhaps.

Clare hadn't heard us. She was still totally absorbed in her gardening. Her fringe of blond hair moved into a shaft of sun just then which touched it like a halo. It was midday with the light at its height over the church roof, angled down straight onto the table by the window, and Clare's face beamed as she squelched the soil through her fingers. The room was filled with the smell of fresh earth and hyacinths and bathed with an intense spring light, the child a radiant harbinger of this muddy easier apocalypse. We stood there, the four of us round the table, unable to speak.

At last a log fell off the fire in the next room and I remembered the wine I had to open and set by the warmth before lunch. It wasn't the first time this sort of horticultural explosion had occurred, these wild scents all over the cottage. Clare had a recurrent obsession with nature, with growing things, a thirst for flowers: to touch, to crush, to eat them, a need which died out completely in her at times, like bulbs in winter, only to blaze up again without reason—or none we knew of. She was happy then, so totally involved and happy, all her vacancy gone, that one felt that, lacking appropriate human development, she had instead a perfect bond with nature, alert to all its secret smells and signs, like an animal.

Apart from the hyacinths, Laura always liked to keep a big bowl of lavender on the deep windowsill of the small drawing-room: just the dried stalks in winter, when one could crush their ears at odd moments, gazing at nothing in particular out of the window, kneading them with warm fingers, so that the deep summer smell would live again even on the greyest days. In summer itself the perfume needed no encouragement, the flowers picked fresh from the big clump by the front garden gate.

Clare, on the days when she stayed at home for some reason from the special school near Oxford, found these fresh or dry stalks an almost irresistible source of fascination. This quintessence of English floral life was something new to her, I suppose, something she had not known in London nor, before that, in the desert wadis of East Africa where she had spent the first years of her life.

Sometimes she would take just a single stalk from the bowl and sit with it on the sofa, gazing at it intently for an hour, picking its minute buds out one by one, sniffing it before pushing it up her nose the better to grasp its smell, or turning it round and using the end as a toothpick. Or else she would take the whole bunch out and place the stalks meticulously, lined up in regiments all over the drawing-room floor throughout a morning, before re-arranging them or suddenly stamping on them vigorously, so that even up in the attic study where I worked the odour would rise up the two floors to me, while the drawing-room itself, when I came down to lunch, smelt like an accident in a perfume factory.

Lunch: thinking of our own meals, or those larger weekend occasions with friends: Clare, at ten and a half, nearly two years after her father's death, had learnt to eat properly again at last. The graft had largely taken between her and the new family created around her. To begin with, when we'd first all come down to the Oxfordshire cottage, and before that when I'd first met Clare with her grandparents out in Cascais, she had eaten, when she ate at all, like a savage four-year-old, punishing the food, grinding it into floor or table; or, on her feet then, treating it like mudballs, clenching it up in her fine hands and slinging it all over the kitchen (or the tiled bathroom where she sometimes had to eat) with unerring accuracy. Like most autistic children she had a superbly developed motor system, the physical coordination of a circus juggler: she could almost spin a soup plate on an index finger, while hitting you in the eye with a boiled potato across the whole width of a room was child's play to her.

George's wife spoke to her now. How unlike her Christian name she was, the sun-tanned Annabelle, a tall, angular, very plain woman with long bronzed tennis-playing limbs, though I doubt she ever played any game. There was a remote, glazed quality about her, of someone always focusing on a matter far away or deep inside her. 'Well,' she said awkwardly to the child. 'You have made a splendid mess!'

Clare responded at last. 'Yes.' She spoke without concern, smiling brightly up at us before leaving the table. She said no more. Clare at such times, having expressed some unknown desire or hurt in this dramatic manner, had no memory of the immediate past, or—for hours or even days afterwards—of any time further back. Her life seemed to start afresh on such occasions. She was continually re-born thus, yet one could never quite decide if this was a tragedy or a miracle.

George came with me into the drawing-room as I tended the fire and opened the bottle.

'It doesn't get any easier,' he said sympathetically.

'Oh, I don't know.' I pulled the cork. 'It has recently. She's been a lot better.'

'There's no constancy, though, in the improvement. That must be disheartening. Up, up, and then right back again.'

'Is that surprising? Isn't that very much the evolutionary process?'

George—a palaeontologist, as Clare's famous father, Willy Kindersley, had been—had a haunted face shaped like a large wedge: a long thick flush of greying hair ran sideways across his scalp above a broad forehead. But then the skull narrowed dramatically, down a long nose to a very pointed chin. His eyes were grey too. But they were strangely alert, as if the man was still looking for some vital hominid evidence in the desert.

He and Annabelle had no children of their own. They appeared to be colleagues rather than a married couple, a pair devoted exclusively, it seemed, to man's past; for Annabelle, an ethnologist by profession, worked in almost the same line of country as her husband. Yet George had a longing for a more present life, I felt, where the bones were clothed with flesh, and Clare for him was a living mystery, a deviant hominid species more strange than any skeleton he had found while delving through millions of years in the sub-soil of East Africa.

He saw Clare—as we all did, for it was so obvious—as someone physically supreme: a beautiful, blue-eyed child, peach-skinned, ideally proportioned with marvellous coordination, balance, grasp—a body where human development, over aeons, had culminated in a sensational perfection: yet a form where there was some great flaw hidden in the perfect matrix, black holes in the girl's mind that defied all rational explanation. George regarded Clare with awe, his scientific mind touched, even, with fear. Indeed, I sometimes wondered if, with his evolutionary obsessions, he looked on her as evidence of some new and awful development in humanity; if he saw Clare and the increasingly numerous children like her as precursors of a future race who, though perfectly built, would look into the world with totally vacant eyes.

George had been a colleague of Willy Kindersley's before his death, and before George had settled down in Oxford. They had worked together three years before, long months beside the dry streams running into Lake Turkana in northern Kenya and before that on other prehistoric fossil sites further afield in the Northern Frontier District and on the Uganda border. For many years out there they had sought man's origins, found small vital bones casually unearthed by the spring rains, a piece of some early hominid jaw or cranium, picking them out of the petrified old river beds with dental probes, Laura had told me, dusting them with fine paintbrushes before setting these part-men in patterns, jigsaws that gradually displayed proof of some earlier Eden by the lake shore, earlier than a nose bone found near me same site the previous season: earlier by a million years.

Theirs was a job with the long view, pushing back man's past before first vaguest speech into a time of signs, and before that to a moment when these small, hairy quadrupeds, down from the trees, had first stood up, erect, on two feet. It had been their ambition to date more exactly this miraculous change, this moment between animal and human life, when one had finally given way to the other and man had first set out on his long trail of upright destruction.

And here Willy Kindersley had apparently succeeded, his career among old bones in East Africa ending in great celebrity. For it was he who, nearly three years before, way up near the Kenya-Uganda border, had discovered the sensational bones of 'Thomas', as the part skeleton had been named: the fossilized remains, nearly four million years old, of a young man who not only walked on two feet but had used the sharpened animal bones found along with him to hunt and kill.

An irony never mentioned more than once (when Laura had first told me all about it) was that Willy, the victim of a hit-and- run accident, had been killed by a direct descendant of these men whose haphazard graves he had so painstakingly disturbed, by a Kenyan, an African (the man had never been traced), who had run over Willy, his car mounting the pavement out of control apparently, just as Willy had left a news conference at the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi two years before.

Though I'd never met Willy, I always felt very much as if I had: as though, through my subsequent close association with his friends and with his wife, the informal name they used for him belonged to me as much as them. Willy was always Willy, alive or dead: a small dark-haired man, as I'd seen from photographs, verging on the plump; a good deal of the professorial in him, by all accounts (he'd held a chair at London University), arcane depths which were decorated, though, with many surface conceits. He had a sharp wit, I'd been told, which often strayed over into the practical: as when he'd successfully offered his students an early hominid skull and jawbones, elaborately mounted on some snapping mechanism, a research project intended, as he explained, to pinpoint man's first sense of the comic in life—for here, with micrometers, carbon dating and suchlike, they would at last isolate that initial earth-shaking guffaw ...

Of course such academic drolleries can fall very flat for those outside the magic circles. And Willy, these scholastic jokes matched only by his intellectual depths, was perhaps an unlikely person to have married the more balanced, outgoing Laura who shared few if any of his professional concerns. But then she shared few of mine, and our marriage subsequently had been as happy as theirs had apparently been.

Willy was greatly missed of course. But his memory was never oppressive about the house. Laura and I, or their old friends down for weekends, would talk of him, when we did, almost in the present tense, as if he were upstairs and would come down in a moment to correct or comment on some opinion we had ascribed to him.

He wouldn't, of course, ever come down or drop by in any shape or form now. But we didn't mention this. Clare had ready ears everywhere about the house, and it had been enough of a business, Laura told me, explaining Willy's death originally to the child, who had then relapsed for months into fearful outraged traumas. She had almost recovered since, we had thought, in the ease and security of our Cotswold cottage. But she had not yet come to see me as she had her father: as the miracle man, digging up old bones all over the splendid wilds of East Africa.

I was a duller thing by far: a schoolmaster of sorts, taking junior English at a pretentious minor public school five miles away. It's true Clare had once paid me really startled attention: when she'd come round to the school one afternoon with Laura and found me involved with the archery club there, which Spinks, the games master, ran with some senior boys.

Spinks was absent that day, I remember: he sometimes was, suffering dire after-effects of the bottle. I was in charge, in any case, and Clare had watched the sport intently, eyes out on stalks, as the arrows thumped into their straw targets away on the far side of the games fields, where the fields gave out onto a rise with a beech coppice on top, only the empty Oxfordshire farmland beyond.

Clare had stared at me then, as I let off half a dozen shafts on the 40-metre range, as though the modern recurve bow in my hand had some profound old magic for her.

As indeed it had. Laura told me when I'd finished shooting. 'In the Northern Frontier District once, in the very wilds on the Sudanese border we were on a fossil search, looking for some dried-out stream up there—and we came on this tribe, a lot of nomadic woolly-haired people with thin cattle, and butter in their hair, and some of the men had these old smoke-black bows with them, small bent things, like toys really. But with poisoned arrows, Willy said. Clare remembers, even though she was hardly four. One of the old men showed her how to hold it!'

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Valley of the Fox by Joseph Hone. Copyright © 1982 Joseph Hone. Excerpted by permission of Mysteriousprees.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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