The Constant Rabbit

Connie said nothing and instead picked up Mr Ffoxe’s cappuccino and then, slowly and deliberately, poured it out on to the floor next to us. The entire café was staring at us in horrified silence by now, and the expectation of sudden violence seemed to fill the air like a damp fog. When she was done, Connie placed the cup gently back on the saucer and stared at Mr Ffoxe defiantly.

‘Happy?’ he asked.

‘No, but it’ll do for now. Say, is that a little bit of mange on your neck?’

The café, which I thought had already taken about as sharp an intake of breath as possible over the spilled coffee, took another. It was a grossly inflammatory comment, and one that I had not thought that anyone would ever dare make. The thing was, Mr Ffoxe did have a patch of mange on his neck, half covered by his silk cravat. We’d known about it in the office for a while, but foxes, notoriously sensitive over their orange fur and oddly small paws, usually took badly to anyone raising the subject. This time was no exception, and he lunged forward, mouth open, teeth bared. In my eagerness to get away I instinctively pushed away from the table and went sailing over backwards to land entangled with my chair in a painful heap on the floor. I struggled to my feet, expecting to find Connie’s neck limp and broken, but instead she’d produced a large pearl-handled flick-knife and had it pressed against Mr Ffoxe’s throat.

While this was an interesting impasse and doubtless not seen before in All Saints, Mr Ffoxe had the legal upper hand. He could kill her now using the ‘natural prey’ defence and just go and order another cappuccino. On the other hand, Connie would have to cope with serious reprisals if she harmed him. She’d certainly be dead – and probably tortured⁴⁷ first – and after that, not the usual hundred rabbits would lose their lives, but ten times that given his seniority. It would be friends and relatives and certainly include Doc, Kent, Bobby and any rabbit whom she knew particularly well. Violent reprisal was a strategy that worked well; not a single rabbit had killed a fox for nearly twenty-five years. Foxes were bad news and rabbits hoped them dead – but not at any price. You couldn’t, once again, outfox the fox. But oddly, there was a factor in Connie’s favour: most foxes were loath to kill a rabbit if there wasn’t a fee involved. ‘It would be like Tom Jones singing in the shower,’ quipped one fox, ‘a waste of money.’

‘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.