The Doomsday Carrier

by Victor Canning

  Andrew sighed. “Well, you can believe it or not, it really happened. There was this chimp, staring right at me. Cor, I tell you it made me jump. I just ups and away, fast as I could go. But when I got to the stile I looked back and, you’ll never guess—” he debated with himself and succumbed to temptation, “—there was this old chimp sitting with my rod and quietly going on fishing. He looked all right and harmless so—”

  “You went back and gave him a few tips about the best baits.” Judy giggled.

  “I went back all right,” said Andrew firmly. “And what’s more I sat down with him and just as I did that, what do you think?” He had their attention now and loved it, and the temptation to improve reality by art was again too great. “He caught a fish. A nice grayling, it was. About three-quarters of a pound.”

  “How can you catch a grayling on a roach rod?” asked his sister innocently.

  “Oh, very funny!” Andrew made a mock gesture to hit her.

  “Enough of that, Andrew,” said his mother.

  His father shook his head. “It’s this heat. Goes to your head and makes you see things. All afternoon I’ve been seeing a bloody great pint of beer with a frothy head on it—and now I’m off to get it.” He stood up and winked at Andrew. “What did you do with old chimpy? Give him a lift back to Salisbury on your crossbar so that he could get a haircut and shave before going back to the zoo?”

  Andrew gave up. But a few minutes later left alone in the room with his mother, and helping her to clear the table, he said to her quietly, “It really happened, you know, mum. After a bit he just started to lark around and then went off into the bushes. He was quite nice really. He liked it when I scratched him. Sort of made blowy kind of noises at me.”

  Busy with her work Mrs Garvey said, “I’m sure it happened. But all in your mind, son. But that’s not a bad thing—” she pushed a strand of hair back from her eyes, her face flushed from the heat of the small room, “—so long as you don’t make too much of a habit of it.”

  Andrew said nothing. Sure, lots of things happened in his head and he told about them as though they were real. But then, in a way they were real, like stories in books were real as you read them because if they weren’t then they weren’t any cop as stories. But this. . . well it was real—except for catching the grayling, of course.

  * * * *

  After leaving Andrew Garvey Charlie had wandered idly up through a long pasture to a clump of poplars which dominated the rise. He had climbed one of the outside ones and some way up had made himself a rough nest by bending the smaller leafy branches over on one of the outspreading limbs. While the light slowly went from the summer sky, he lay contentedly, dozing sometimes, and at others watching the view which the tree commanded over the railway and then the road which lay between him and the intricate lacing of streams and carriers that marbled and veined the broad water meadows flanking the river Avon. Twice a jay perched nearby and screamed at him. At sunset a returning colony of rooks, which roosted in some elms on the far side of the clump, spotted him and flew around his tree calling and croaking at him for a while. As the dusk thickened two helicopters flew up the river valley below him, their navigation lights showing, and away to his right he could see the loom of town lights washing up from Salisbury and the still, solitary aircraft warning light that burned at the tip of the cathedral spire.

  Now, as the night began to cool a little, Charlie suddenly started to shiver. He huddled himself into a tight ball, drawing up his legs and clasping his arms around himself.

  His shivering increased, coming in spasms at irregular intervals. Occasionally he slept, only to be wakened by a bout of shivering. Not long after midnight, disturbed and unwell, he left his nest and dropped from branch to branch to the ground.

  He went down the hillside, over the railway and then through the large garden of a house—where a dog in a stable scented him and began to bark—to the roadway. A car came sweeping up the road, its headlights chalking the bordering foliage of trees and shrubs and for a moment spangling Charlie’s pelt with moving high points. Two or three more cars came along the road. A little frightened of them, Charlie chattered to himself and then, as the road for a while lay deserted and dark, he came down from the hedge and crossed it. He climbed through the hedge on the other side of the road and dropped down a steep grass bank to a meadow which flanked the run of the river Avon.

  Shivering now and again and feeling unwell, Charlie moved down the river southwards away from Salisbury, following a fisherman’s path. To his left cattle grazed in the warm night and he could hear the sound of their slow breath and the rasp of torn grass as they fed. Once or twice a soft-winged barn owl came drifting along the fringe of river reeds searching for water-voles. A heron got up a few yards ahead of him, screamed in fright, and flapped awkwardly into erratic flight, long legs trailing. Charlie, alarmed by the sudden appearance of the bird, called waa-waa angrily.

  An hour later the thin crescent of the moon almost at the end of its last quarter rose clear of the fine drift of mist which now coiled high above the river and the water meadows, and Charlie came to a point where the river divided into two arms around a long island matted with rank rush and low alder growths. The branch of the river on Charlie’s side was narrow and shallow and he waded into it and stopped in midstream to drink avidly against the thirst which was rising in him. On the far side he found a path trodden through the high growths and followed it to the end of the island. Here the river arms joining spread out into wide shallows of faster running water that swept around two smaller tree-studded islands which lay off the end of the first island. Charlie, shivering still, splashed across to the larger of the two islands and screamed as he disturbed a handful of feeding mallard ducks which got up from the weed beds with an outburst of alarm calls, their threshing wings and webbed feet creaming the water.

  As the birds disappeared Charlie was suddenly sick, crouching to the ground his body shaking and heaving. The spasms passed quickly and he moved away from the smell of his own vomit. He trampled his way across a patch of wild musk into the trees, and began to climb up the trunk of an ancient ash tree. Ivy spread a thick mantle over its trunk and many of its lower branches, slowly killing it. Its top branches were already bare, grey limbs. He found a wide branch crotch close to the main trunk in a tangle of ivy creepers just below the first of the dead branches. He bent and trampled the thick ivy spread and young ash branches over and made himself a bed. He lay down curled into a ball, his arms clasped tightly round himself, and shivered now and again.

  * * * *

  Redthorn House was a small, red-bricked eighteenth-century manor house standing in its own grounds of six acres, most of it walled, on the bank of the river Avon some miles above Salisbury and not far from Amesbury. The terraced front of the house faced the river and the gardens, parterres and walks ran down to it. It was staffed by the army for visiting VIPs—home and foreign generals, admirals and airforce commanders, government heads and politicians who came from time to time on visits to the army installations on and around Salisbury Plain. It was comfortably, though not quite luxuriously, furnished, the service was discreet, intelligent and efficient, the food of a high order and the wine cellar notable. Its security was unobtrusive but highly efficient. Jean and Rimster had bedrooms on the top floor—rank or prestige was subtly marked by the rooms you were given, the higher the room the lower the ranking.

  Rimster lay in bed after midnight, the room unlit, the window curtains pulled back to show the thin wash of moonlight on the field slopes across the river valley. On his bedside table was a telephone with a direct line to his London office, also to the operations centre at the Army School of Aviation.

  So far there had been no sighting reported of Charlie. This would be his second night of freedom. He was into his third day, the twenty-third of June. By all the odds, he felt there was no possible chance of Charlie staying free until the end of his earliest incubatory term, the tenth of July—unless a miracle
happened, as Jean had put it when they had been talking over their coffee after dinner. However, he had no belief in miracles. Time and chance now . . . they were birds of a different feather. Charlie was not, however, particularly likely to shun the presence of human beings. Time and chance would have to dance a fine fandango to keep him on the loose. But—if they did—it could turn into a dance of death. Melodramatic? Possibly. Not a chance. Night thoughts were always grey. Christ, what people did. Men like Armstrong and Boyson . . . family men driving up to Fadledean each morning and putting on their sterilized blinkers to shut out the world. The girl, too. And John Rimster, Esquire. . .

  A bat went erratically across the window space. Time had been when his ears could catch their notes. But not now. He was a man; not a boy lying in bed of a summer night in the top bedroom of an old rectory, his elder brothers marked in age for the Army and then the Navy, and himself for the Church, the old Rimster family pattern. What had happened that the angels had missed him and the Devil had got him? Anyway (and he had to confess, regretfully) it was all coming to a close now. He had reached his limit of full usefulness. That’s why he was here. Burnt out, but still useful. No more missions that set the adrenalin being pumped out. . .

  He turned over, away from the moonlight-pale window and was asleep in ten minutes.

  Not far away Jean, wrapped in a dressing gown, sat by her open window smoking one of her rare cigarettes. The room light was out. High over the limes that fringed the bottom of the garden the thin slip of moon threw its broken reflection on the moving waters of the river. Somewhere out there, too, the moon’s light probably touched Charlie. Instinct and memories of his early years had probably sent him up a tree, maybe to make himself a clumsy nest. If their estimate of the clinical developments from his injection was right he should about now be entering on a first phase of shivering and vomiting. If he survived that period then there was no doubt that at the end of his time he would be a self-immune carrier. . . they had already established the sequences with rats, a dog and a marmoset, a silvery Amazonian marmoset with pink face and ears and a black tail contrasting with its whitish body fur called Igor, engaging and affectionate . . . all of them long killed and incinerated. Charlie was the first of the primates and after him would come some human volunteer . . .

  She heard herself saying, You begin to paddle in the water and then you find one day you’re right out of your depth. Those dry-looking, slate-coloured eyes on her showing no emotion. What emotion would her father have shown had he known? Retired now from doctoring, living in the Channel Islands, a round of golf each day and a greenhouse full of orchids and a long life behind him full of service to humanity. Shrug his shoulders and say ‘We make our own lives. God gives us a bundle of choices and then turns away to leave us on our own’? Familiar phrase. She smiled in the darkness of the room. Well, when this was all over and she was free of Fadledean maybe she would follow his profession, make it an act of contrition. Obtruding, unbidden, she suddenly wondered what George would have said. Security had long prevented her from telling anyone outside what she did. One answered vaguely and after a time one’s friends asked no questions. Idly in her mind she put George alongside Rimster . . . George, unreliable in his appetites, but bursting with vigour and enthusiasm and chasing his dreams of the future with buoyant and ever-flowing optimism, George making love to her as no one else had ever done . . . and the other, neat, hard, slate and granite and even his touches of kindness and humour calculated precisely for his own purposes. She fancied, even while she shunned the picture, herself in bed with him and her skin prickled with a chill of disgust.

  At three o’clock that night Charlie, half in sleep, vomited, voiding the spew over his legs, hardly aware of what was happening and then dropped back into a fitful, shiver-touched sleep. A pipestrelle bat flew around him momentarily and then dipped to the riverside and went upstream hawking for moths over the flags and mace reeds. A moorhen in midstream rooted among the current-drawn lengths of water crowfoot and bitter-cress, and a hen salmon, four months in from the sea, threw herself into the air with a great curving leap and smashed down on her side, spray spouting into the moonlight like the sudden blooming of a silver flower.

  Andrew Garvey, lying in his bed sleeping, suddenly twitched and mumbled something aloud in his dreams. And not far away, just outside Salisbury, the motor-cyclist who had crashed woke, dazed and confused in hospital and wondered where he was.

  * * * *

  George Freemantle’s alarm woke him at five o’clock. He got out of bed and shaved, bathed and dressed quickly. Somewhere overhead he heard the distant sound of a helicopter passing.

  He walked quickly to his car parked in the forecourt, a large, fleshily built, strong-bodied man, moving briskly, full of confidence in himself and his own power. George Freemantle, successful and his own boss, all the way up from primary school, keeping an eye on the main chance, using his brains and his guile and seldom letting his good-nature be ruffled, astonishing his jobbing-gardener father and timid mother, both now comfortably pensioned off by him.

  He drove across the city and let himself into Jean’s flat with his own key. They both had keys to each other’s flats. Trust, he thought, as he opened the door quietly and stood listening. But sometimes trust could undo you, and it was no good then trying to explain the difference between someone you loved, really loved and wanted, and a woman you took after a few lunchtime gins and a bottle of wine because she was there and was willing. But he meant to try. Jean was what he wanted. He’d been here twice before, night and day, and no sign of her, and no damned good phoning that bloody Fadledean place where all you got was Pm sorry, but Miss Blackwell isn’t available or Miss Blackwell isn’t here. Can I take a message? Oh, sure, tell her I love her and won’t do it again or, if I do, I’ll take damned care she never knows. The flesh is weak, but I want a wife and kids and all the trimmings otherwise what am I burning my ass off for making a success of things in a country which takes most of what you earn to give away to a set of idle scroungers who think honest work is some kind of disease?

  Moving into the sitting room he saw that she had been back. There was a lipstick-marked cigarette end in a tray by an armchair and another, unmarked, in the tray on a table at the end of the settee. They hadn’t been there yesterday lunchtime.

  He went through to the bedroom and opened the door quietly. The bed was still made up, untouched, but a blue linen dress and a pair of tights lay across the end of it. Methodically he went through her wardrobe, the chest of drawers and the low cupboard under the window where she kept her shoes. The expensive light-weight suitcase he had given her was gone from under the bed. He knew exactly what she had taken because he knew her wardrobe and outfits. Wherever she had gone it was for more than a night.

  He went through to the kitchen, found a bottle of milk in the refrigerator and drank it. Two empty lager cans stood on the draining board. Who was the man, he wondered? Armstrong or Boyson or one of the other boffins with acid-stained fingers?

  Outside in his car he debated for a moment driving up to Fadledean, and then rejected it. No pass, no entry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Big deal, they were all busy putting together another Frankenstein or inventing some pill that would keep a man alive for ever or kill him if he as much as looked at it. For God’s sake, in four months’ time he was to have put her across his saddle and ridden off with her. That’s what she wanted, though she’d never put it in so many words—to be rescued. He could read her like a book. St George. Well, no one could tell him that there weren’t saints who’d had a bit on the side now and then. But love was the thing—and marriage.

  He drove off to his factory, grinning to himself. The boys would jump at his early arrival. They’d jump higher later when lack of breakfast began to touch up his temper.

  Going down the river valley along the Ringwood road to his factory at the village of Downton, he saw three helicopters, widely spaced and flying low, come up the broad reaches of the river meadows. Buzzin
g around like a lot of bloody wasps, burning up fuel at God-knows-how-much-a-gallon for which he paid out of his income tax.

  * * * *

  Charlie, from his ivy bower, saw the helicopters go over. When they had gone he went on rubbing at the vomit-matted fur on his legs with handfuls of ivy leaves. Charlie hated to be unclean or unkempt. Although he lacked the company of his own kind to take part in mutual grooming, he rubbed away at his legs, removing most of the mess and then turned to finger-combing the pelt of his arms and chest. On his travels he had picked up a sheep tick in the long grass and two or three fleas from his first night in the open barn. He picked off the bloated body of the tick, leaving its head still buried in his skin, and caught two fleas which he nipped to death between his front teeth and spat away. Now and again his body shook with an uncontrollable spasm of shivering. When it did so he whimpered and drew his large lips back over his teeth in a wide grin of resentment. He was not hungry but a strong thirst rose slowly in him.

  After a while he dropped hand to hand through the tree branches and waddled half upright to the water. Wading into the shallows on the fringe of the island he crouched over and drank. When he had satisfied his thirst he climbed back up the tree and, rejecting his broken and vomit-smelling bed, swung round the bulky trunk and made himself another a little lower down. It took him some time before he was satisfied with it. When he eventually settled down he found that he could look through a gap in the island’s tree foliage straight down the river. Two or three hundred yards away a stone bridge carried a private estate road over the Avon to Longford Castle. Two swans with a brood of cygnets foraged slowly upstream. A Landrover crossed the bridge and a little later a tradesman’s van. The shadows of the trees and shrubs in the castle grounds slowly grew shorter and the coolness of the morning was shredded away by the power of the rising sun. Distantly Charlie could hear the hum of the traffic on the Ringwood road, and nearer the sound of a motor mower working in the castle gardens. Charlie lay still in his bed, not wanting to move, the intervals between his shivering fits gradually lengthening. Once or twice he fell asleep, and once he woke and lay unmoving as a tree-creeper worked its mouse-like way up and around a dead branch above his head and then flew off as Charlie shook his head to ward off the flies which were beginning to buzz around him.