Like a premature autumn leaf, the fox was in the garden. It had jumped catlike over the wall, and now doglike it nosed about a tub of geraniums. Its tail had a white blaze. It was young and whole, vital and mysterious. Dominic went over to a child-sized chair and raised the seat. He took out a catapult and some small sharp stones.

"Mommy says," said Violet, "you musson have a cadapull."

"Be quiet or I'll kick you. I'm going to hit the fox."

"Hid it," said Violet. "Hid it in the eye."

She too came to the window. Violet and Dominic stood there, he in his Lilliputian trousers and shirt and she in her violet clothes, and the little boy took aim with his catapult, and the little girl squeaked excitedly, so he had to tell her again to be quiet.

The catapult was homemade from a strong twig and a strong elastic band. As the elastic tautened, Ruth leaned across and drew it further back, past the child's ear, so the band snapped. The whiplash caught Dominic on the cheek and he yelped with pain and amazement.

Violet screamed and Ruth slapped her face.

There was, finally, true silence.

And out on the lawn the fox, perhaps sensing some feral current more intense than poison and stones, sprang away over the fence and into the adjoining row of gardens.

"I'll tell Mommy," said Dominic, "what you did."

"And I'll tell my father," said Ruth, "about you. My father only comes out at night. He's tall and pale and his eyes glow in the dark. He's dead. He can do anything. He can walk up walls. He'll walk up this one. He'll break the window without a sound. He'll come in and drink your blood."

Both children stared now. Violet whimpered, and was motionless. Tremulously Dominic said, "You're a bloody old liar."

"Wait and see," said Ruth.

Dominic said nothing more.

A minute later, Ruth came out of the playroom and went down to the second floor. She could hear Pamela talking animatedly on the phone in the first floor hall.

Ruth went into the studio. She passed the gaudy, unmagical canvas of mountains and winged horse. She unerringly went to one of the tables where, bright as silver, a scalpel blade lay shining like a star.

Trevor Bellingham worried all the way home, about how Pamela would go on. He had forgotten to keep after the agency and probably that would mean another week without an au pair. They never stayed anyway, daunted by the stacks of boring domestic chores Pamela left them, the snack meals, the troublesome children…

Trevor worried all through the late-afternoon traffic, which presently became complicated by fire engines.

Then he reached his street and could not get through.

Standing irate by his car, he soon discovered that his chore-filled house, Pamela, Dominic and Violet, had all ceased to be a worry.

CHAPTER 14