Hartinger's Mouse (Commander Shaw Book 12)

by Philip McCutchan

  “Sure,” I agreed, “but at least I feel we’ve established that Fesse has something he doesn’t want anyone to know about. And for my money, he’s got that something with him in the Mercedes and won’t be bringing it back to Horsted Cottage. Part of it could consist of Hartinger’s waylaid mouse. I doubt if Horsted Cottage is going to be worth taking any more looks at, somehow. In the meantime, though, Fesse can’t be certain it was us who broke into that mouse stable. He’ll have ways of satisfying himself that you’re a genuine Home Office man and that I’m working with you. I doubt if he’ll be expecting civil servants to break into private property.”

  “Nor will the Home Secretary,” Jagger said waspishly. “Oh, don’t worry about a thing,” I told him. “I’ll be putting in a word on your behalf.”

  “Thanks very much. What’s the next move?”

  I said, “I haven’t the least idea. Except, of course, that we have to find Professor Fesse again. Or rather, for a start, find where he leads us. I don’t think it should be all that difficult.”

  “I do.”

  I smiled. “I took the number of the Mercedes,” I said. “Life has taught me to do things like that.”

  “That’s all very well, but he’s miles away by now!”

  “Not so far that he can’t be found, Jagger. I’m going to break a rule and go to the police.”

  Jagger looked surprised but he nodded and didn’t comment. In Cambridge I went straight to police headquarters and spoke to an inspector. I had quite a long talk with him and told him all I needed him to know, and he did some checking with London and became very co-operative. He was a family man and had been watching the spread of the skin-loss thing with growing apprehension. He fed the registration number of that Mercedes into the police machinery together with instructions that the Mercedes was on no account to be stopped but only watched, checked — not followed — along its route and reported. A Commander Shaw, attached Home Office, the Inspector said, would be on the car’s track and would check with the various forces at intervals. Full co-operation with him was requested.

  The first report came within half an hour. I was with the Inspector in the ops room when it was received. The Mercedes was travelling north on the A1. A few minutes later, I was heading that way myself with police authority to bust the speed limit whenever and wherever I wished. I hadn’t brought Jagger; this wasn’t really his show and he had his own work to do, and besides, there was that sister of his. I felt she needed him more than I did now.

  I hit the A1 north of Huntingdon and I was doing around 120 mph when I just about saw the police patrol waving me down ahead — they were stopped at the roadside. I slammed on the brakes and wound down my window and a policeman looked in. I started to say I had authority to speed when the man cut in. “You’re Commander Shaw?” he asked.

  I handed him my identity card from 6D2. “That’s all right, sir,” he said, and passed it back after a brief glance. “The car you want has been reported turning off along the A47 and apparently heading for the M1. That was ten minutes ago.”

  “Many thanks,” I said, and got going again. It seemed pretty certain that Fesse would be heading north, not south, so when I joined the motorway I, too, took the northbound lane and kept in the fast one until once again I was waved down by the police and had it confirmed that the Mercedes was ahead of me.

  Soon after what should have been breakfast time I crossed the border into Scotland. I stopped in Lanark to make personal contact with the police there and get another progress report on Fesse’s car. They gave me a welcome breakfast with several cups of hot, strong coffee and they also told me that the disease had come north from Yorkshire and had hit Edinburgh. The prognosis was bad. The schools had been closed already, following the example of Pinner and, by that morning, of several other southern areas as well. Talk of strikes had increased and in fact on the Tyne the shipyards were already almost at a standstill because most of the men had simply failed to report for work. Meanwhile, Fesse had last been noted crossing the Forth road bridge.

  After a half-hour’s stop in the Lanark nick I drove on again. On the way north I passed several hoardings where huge bills had been posted already, showing a mother comforting a crying child. I thought of Jagger’s sister and wondered how Claire was. The caption on that hoarding read, in big letters: WASH YOUR HANDS EVERY TIME YOU HAVE ANY PERSONAL CONTACT AND WHEN COMING IN OFF THE STREET. That was just about the sum total of what could be done — wash your hands. Well, it had worked all right in my case, certainly; but it was little comfort to the public, I thought. Keep on washing, and if you still got it, dab on boracic, take some penicillin, and listen to the doctor’s helplessness. Undoubtedly, there was going to be panic before much longer.

  *

  The last police report I got said that the Mercedes had been seen heading up into Sutherland and had been finally lost on reaching Strath of Kildonan. It could have gone on towards Lochside and the Achentoul Forest and up to Strath Halladale; or it could have turned towards Baddanloch where it could have taken either the track to Loch Choire or gone on towards Rimsdale and then Syre in Strath Naver.

  There were plenty of ifs and mights but only one fact: Fesse had vanished.

  Myself, I stopped off in the remote village of Balnachan. It was reasonably handy for all the ways Fesse could have taken, and it had a decent licensed hotel, currently pretty full of fishermen — the sporting variety, of course — but owing to a cancellation they were able to give me a room for a week. I had more than a suspicion the cancellation could have been due to the spreading disease and fully expected they would get more as time went on.

  By the time I got there, believe me, I was tired.

  *

  I slept till the following afternoon, when I woke feeling perfectly fresh but damned hungry. When I rang a healthy-looking girl wearing a neat little mini-skirt came in and told me she had come up with early-morning tea, but I had been dead asleep so she had left me, and hadn’t even bothered me with breakfast. I asked could they give me lunch in my room and would she bring me the day’s newspapers. She did that. I had a very good lunch and I read the Scottish Daily Express and The Scotsman. There was, of course, no mention of Professor Fesse — I hadn’t expected there would be, but was relieved to have this confirmed. I didn’t want Fesse to get any more wind up or to know he’d been tailed this far. Since I was certain the fenland mouse lab couldn’t be Fesse’s main base, I wanted to get my hands on more than just Fesse. The papers had a lot about the disease and my forecast of panic looked like coming true. There had been a large number of deaths throughout the country. The thing had gathered momentum fast. More industries were grinding to a halt — there weren’t any strikes, nor any more threats of them, they had been rendered unnecessary by the individual action of workers staying away en masse so that whole firms had simply shut down. There was a lot of raving from Downing Street about the effect on exports and the balance of payments, but I didn’t see the workers paying much attention to that, and indeed there was a curious underlying hopelessness in the official utterances which suggested that even they didn’t expect any results. All over, now, the schools were closing down — of course they would have broken up for the summer holidays soon anyway, but I didn’t think there would be much of a holiday spirit this year. The hospitals’ difficulties were increasing, the more so as doctors and nurses were going down. The G.P.s were working practically around the clock, coping with grotesquely large surgeries. In many areas there was virtually no public transport and even the main line rail services had been heavily cut. At London Airport, where those Customs Officers had been among the first to be hit, there was something like chaos. Foreign visitors, it seemed, hadn’t yet been put off by the reports and were still flocking in. There was a veiled suggestion that if the inflow didn’t reduce itself, and if there was no improvement in the situation as regards the spread of the disease, it might become advisable to shut the ports and airports and, in effect, declare the country in a st
ate of total quarantine. Frankly, I thought they ought to do that now, but perhaps they were shying off scare measures.

  Full of misgivings, I got up and shaved and washed — I’d bought some gear along the way — and went downstairs. From a public call-box I put through a call to the Home Office, but Jagger wasn’t there. April Goodhart told me he had gone out to Pinner, and I asked about Claire. April said, “I’m afraid she’s bad. Shall I get Jason to ring you?”

  “No,” I told her. “Better not. And remember I’m on an open line. I’d like you to ring through to my people and tell them I’m in Balnachan in Sutherland. Do you know when your boss is likely to be back?”

  “Not till tomorrow morning, anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try to ring again then.”

  After that I went to my car and did something to its inside that wouldn’t look deliberate but would need the attention of the garage that I’d already checked Balnachan possessed. I went along to this garage and asked the man to collect my car, and negotiated the hire of another, an Austin Maxi, for use while they worked on mine. Thus anonymously equipped — I had to assume Fesse would have taken my registration number like I had taken his — I went out on a snooping expedition on the off-chance of picking up some leads to Fesse. Needless to say, I didn’t find a thing. I went a long, long way through wonderful country, ideal for an away-from-it-all holiday, but I didn’t achieve anything beyond a useful probe into the geography of the area so that at least I would have my bearings if anything should happen. In the bar that night I listened to fishermen’s talk in the hopes of hearing something useful — Fesse and his Mercedes might stand out a little around here — but I didn’t. Again it was a blank.

  Next morning at 1030 hours I rang Jagger but once more he was absent. I felt cold run up my spine, because I had a feeling I knew what must have happened, and I was not surprised when April Goodhart said, “The little girl died late last night.”

  I said, “Oh, my God. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Yes, it’s really dreadful.” There was a catch in April’s usually cool voice. “The little boy’s gone down with it, too.”

  I didn’t know what to say. But I knew that whatever happened along the way, if Fesse was involved in this thing — and I was quite certain he was — I was going to get him and once I had got the facts, and the antidote if any, out of him, I would if necessary kill him with my own hands.

  7

  I WROTE a report for Focal House, in which I stressed that I didn’t want any assistance at this stage. This was far from an act of cocksureness; it was simply that I didn’t want Fesse to feel pressured. I wanted him to feel free to go right ahead with whatever he was doing. It was highly unlikely that he was acting on his own and I wanted to get as many of his confederates as possible in the bag when I found where he was in hiding. I didn’t think he could have skipped the country — say, by way of Thurso and the ferry to Kirkwall and then a boat out to Norway or somewhere — because I believe he would have been picked up doing that. I had given a very detailed description of him to that police inspector down in Cambridge, and this would have been circulated with an emphasis on the north and its exits, and if he’d used the Mercedes, of course, he would have been spotted right away. The police were keeping very much on the ball — I’d checked with Kinbrace on that, and with Helmsdale too, just to make my mark nice and deep. But I did have to face the fact that it was possible I was chasing the wrong man from the word go, and that was not a happy thought at all. Fesse was a respected professional man … but that alone made it odd that he should have nipped off from his Cambridge job so suddenly and with such total vanishment. (I rang the Cambridge police from Helmsdale and talked to the inspector who had been so helpful to me; I didn’t say much, and neither did he, but he conveyed to me that the University authorities hadn’t yet reported any missing professors and he promised to let me know as soon as they did.) And honest professors didn’t hire gunmen to protect their fenland cottages, and there had been that smell of mouse, and the visit to Houston, and the Houston mouse that hadn’t grown …

  No. I felt I was on the right track — or had been, till I’d lost it. I did a lot of thinking about Fesse, trying to produce some watertight theories for myself on what the German could be aiming at if he was the prime disease-producer. I couldn’t see any daylight at all. It all seemed totally pointless, really. Why spread it to humans, why not stick to mice? Or had one got away, and started the ball rolling? But in that case surely Fesse would have come forward … or hadn’t he got the antidote, and was just plain scared of the reprisals?

  Even that failed to check with the gunmen.

  Also, the yellow rain-deposits didn’t check. They didn’t check with anything I had discovered so far. And, strictly speaking, this whole thing depended on the yellow dust — that is to say, it was the yellow dust that had started it off. Or was it? Was that just a red — or yellow — herring, something quite unconnected? No — I’d got the itch myself from the yellow dust in York. But then, my itch had gone. There was another point, too: the Houston mice had increased in size, the sores had appeared subsidiary to the growth. No humans had grown into giants.

  I just went round and round in circles.

  That night the bar was buzzing with a rumour that the skin-loss, still travelling north, had hit Dundee and a little place called Flichity below Strath Nairn. I began to toy with the idea of going down to Flichity to have a word with the sufferers in an attempt — I was feeling fairly desperate by this time — to trace the thing back to some place where I could get a fresh lead on Fesse — hopeless, of course, but better than sitting around on my bottom — but this I did not do. I didn’t need to, because next day it hit Balnachan. I didn’t know this until I got back late in the evening from another fruitless chase around the highlands looking for signs of Fesse’s habitation, and then the girl in the hotel bar told me when I went in there for a drink.

  She said, “It’s old Tam McFee.”

  “Tam McFee?”

  “Aye, the tinker. Like a gipsy he is, in a caravan by the loch.” The loch was Loch Druim a Chliabhain.

  I said, “I think I’ve seen the caravan.”

  “Aye, you would’ve, it’s well visible from the road. Poor old Tam. He lives all by himself and seldom comes into the village, except maybe once a fortnight to get his provisions and a wee bit tobacco for his pipe when he can afford it.” She ran a cloth along the polished wood of the bar counter.

  I could see the fear in that girl’s eyes, and the fervent hope that poor old Tam wouldn’t venture into Balnachan while he had the sickness on him. I asked, “How come he picks it up when he doesn’t have any human contact more than once a fortnight?”

  She shrugged. “Och, I wouldn’t be knowing that. I didn’t say he never had any contact, though. He hates strangers but sometimes the cars stop and people walk down to the lochside, you know, thinking old Tam’s caravan looks picturesque and romantic.” She made a face. “If they did but see inside!”

  “You have?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, “but my uncle has. He’s the policeman from Croughan, and he stands in for Constable Mackie when Mackie’s away on leave.”

  I said, “Is that a fact.” I wanted to have a word with Tam McFee, because I still found it odd that he should come out with this thing, so suddenly and so far north of all other known infection, when he lived alone and remote by Druim a Chliabhain. But, much as I wanted to, I decided not to ask this girl to approach her uncle on my behalf for an introduction. For a certainty I would be cast from the hotel if I went anywhere near the seat of the plague. At least, if I were known to have done.

  So that night I went for a walk by myself and the walk took me down to Loch Druim a Chliabhain.

  *

  It was a very beautiful loch and it was a nice night too, with a moon shining on the still, silent water of Druim a Chliabhain and the dark of the forest behind. I saw the loom of Tam McFee’s caravan against that moonligh
t as I went down to the loch. It was certainly romantic, but it was also thoroughly eerie and there was more than a hint of ghosties and bogles and whatever, and I felt Scotland’s history, her warlike past, very strong around me so that I could imagine the sound of long-still pipes across the water and a gathering of dead kilted clansmen, ghosts from out of that stirring past come to protect McFee from the Sassenach’s curiosity. There was no light showing from that lonely caravan, but I knew McFee would be there, because I had asked the Croughan policeman’s niece in the hotel, casually enough, and she had told me the district nurse was attending to him until he could be moved to hospital in some unpronounceable place, and that couldn’t be arranged until next day if then — the doctors might say the old tinker was better off where he was. I could see objections to their saying that: hospitals had more obvious methods of isolation and disinfection than had the district nurse, and the good ladies of Balnachan and its vicinity would fear to have the nurse’s hands on their bodies, and their bairns’ bodies, when she was fresh from Tam McFee.

  They wouldn’t have that worry, however, as it happened, because Tam McFee died not long after I opened the door of his caravan and went into the filthiest smell of unwashed body that I had ever met. It was like a physical force, but I battled against it and shone my torch around. The caravan was absolutely filthy and so was McFee, who was just a bundle of rags lying on a sagging bunk. My torch lit up the horrible sight of eyes totally bloodshot in the whites, a haggard whiskery face, and the terrible sores where the skin had been eaten away by the disease. I stared; undoubtedly this was a stronger strain. The angry red showed through every gap in the old man’s clothing and I think it was all over him, though I didn’t touch him to find out. I couldn’t have brought myself to touch that flesh; it was too much. But I did move closer and in the beam of the torch I could see a very, very faint movement — like very tiny maggots wriggling, though in fact it was not the movement of maggots. It was the disease spreading … spreading even as I stood there and watched in dreadful fascination. It was moving up his arms to his shoulders and up his raw neck to climb the point of his chin beneath the beard.