Rat Poison

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘No!’

  ‘I distinctly remember a marine shoving a freezing-cold soaking-wet sponge into my knickers.’

  Patrick tut-tutted and went off.

  Was it irresponsible doing what we did with five young people to look after? I was sure it was. Nothing could change that. But from the moment Patrick, at the age of almost eighteen, had walked into my parents’ kitchen – our fathers had arranged that he helped me with my physics homework – seated himself and glowered at me, my life had been set on this path. Drawing a neat line under the words specific gravity I had known, instantly – and there are those who would sneer at such sentiments – that here was the man I wanted for ever and ever. There would be no halfway measures: you were either with him or you were not.

  My one and only claim to fame at school was that I had nabbed the head boy. Eventually we had married but by that time everything had changed. Patrick had joined the police on leaving school but left, finding it not exciting enough, and opted for the Devon and Dorset Regiment instead. Suddenly he had a life where there were places to visit, adventures to be had; the whole world at his feet. Despite this, he wanted children. I did not. We saw less and less of one another, and on his leaves there seemed only to be a newly arrogant and aggressive man with whom I had bitter rows. This culminated one night when I threw his classical guitar down the stairs, smashing it and then threw him out too: it was my cottage, bought with the royalties from my books and some money left to me by my father. Eventually, we divorced.

  Then, on secret operations in the Falklands, the second youngest major in the British army, there was an accident with a hand grenade, not of his doing, and he was horribly injured. Strangely, no one was more horrified about it than the perpetrator, an Argentine undercover soldier they had captured who Patrick interrogated and who had come to quite like and admire him. Initially terrified – an old pony had come in out of the rain into the shepherd’s hut they were hiding in, laid down and fallen so soundly asleep that Patrick was leaning back on it, using it as a sofa – and the man thought they had killed it to sit on. But the following morning, by which time the pony had gone, he had tried to warn his own side by grabbing a grenade and throwing it, only for it to bounce off a rock and explode inside the hut.

  What Patrick has revealed about it – not everything, I feel – still haunts me. He could not understand how his sergeant, who had been blown against a wall and was only suffering from a broken arm, could scream with his mouth closed. Then he realized that it was him. Carlos Savadra, the Argentinian, he remembers, knelt by his side weeping, praying and begging his forgiveness all at once while the others gave him first aid. The enemy did not notice that small bang in the hills above Port Stanley.

  Several operations and lengthy stays in hospital later he was offered a job with MI5, the only stipulation, as socializing was involved, being to find a female partner. It was reckoned that lone men, especially one with a bad limp and a somewhat saturnine demeanour, were conspicuous. The injuries having left him with a severe lack of self-confidence as far as the opposite sex was concerned, he asked the only woman on the planet he knew would not want to go to bed with him: me. How could I refuse to help the man I had once been deeply in love with, who was convinced he was crippled for life? He wasn’t. He was wrong and we sorted out the sex bit. A little later we had remarried. And now? Three children of our own and two adopted? Sometimes when the house is in uproar with them we just look at one another and laugh.

  I caught up with him in the armory where he was in receipt of his own Glock 17, handed in to be thoroughly checked over while we had got changed. The short-barrelled Smith and Wesson was still in the secret cubbybox in the Range Rover – it is always kept there – as I am not the slightest bit superstitious when it comes to using anything but my own, unlike Patrick – any one will do. They are not really standard issue any more but I am permitted to keep it as I am not called upon to use firearms very often. Not only that, but specialist training with a new weapon would also cost money and the Ministry of Defence budget was being sliced to the marrow.

  We would not know what kind of scenario we would be faced with until we actually arrived.

  ‘OK, as you’re together you have three lives between you,’ said a gimlet-eyed combats-clad man in an if-rhinos-could-speak voice. He gave me a thunderous frown that told me that a woman’s presence was about to seriously pollute his fantastic piece of theatre.

  In receipt of my weapon I beamed sunnily by way of a reply. It was all part of the process, together with giving us only three lives: moves designed to undermine self-confidence and give a little frisson of fear.

  Damn their professionalism.

  TEN

  It started before we had even reached the door at the end of the short, gloomy tunnel that led into the complex, a couple of dark figures springing from nowhere to grab Patrick and wrestle him to the floor. At least, that was the idea but he had anticipated something might happen and, like me, had both hands free, our weapons in shoulder harnesses. One went bowling head over heels back the way he had come; the other had his arm twisted up his back until he grunted his surrender. He was released and we proceeded and I was not worried about them at all for they were fit young servicemen who would laugh about it afterwards with a man twice their age.

  Any warm feelings I might be harbouring now were ruthlessly negated when suddenly I was seized, hauled backwards, feet trailing, and then slid head first down a chute of some kind. After an impossibly long descent with a few bends in it there was a heart-stopping drop on to what felt like damp cardboard boxes. They turned out to be exactly that, with a nice built-in smell of bad drains just for me. They do usually try to split up the pair of us at some stage in the proceedings but this simply was not cricket. I rolled off the stinking pile and crouched down, drew the Smith and Wesson and listened.

  My surroundings resembled a large sewer and as I was standing in around four inches of stinking liquid perhaps they had dug down and borrowed one from Thames Water. The only light, albeit dim, was coming from somewhere ahead in a tunnel and through a small round hole in the planking above my head. Some kind of continental-style urinal? Over to my left was a dark opening of some kind. The only sounds were the slow drip of water and a strange humming noise which I put down to the set-up’s running gear. I then thought of the time limit: no one had said what it was.

  I moved off and as soon as I did a target popped up in the tunnel ahead of me. Getting it comprehensively right in the heart, the shot oddly muffled by my surroundings, and knowing from past experience that it was in a dead end I headed for the dark opening, pausing at the entrance. It was absolutely pitch dark down there. I set off, dreading holes it was planned I should fall into.

  ‘Boo!’ someone whispered right behind me.

  ‘How did you get here?’ I hissed, having jumped out of my skin.

  ‘Down some stairs and through a door,’ Patrick answered, pushing past me. ‘Did you hit the target?’

  ‘Of course. How much time do we have?’

  ‘God knows. Don’t follow me too closely.’

  Fat chance, he had gone.

  There was no indication that anything nasty had happened to him so I set off in his wake, groping, aware he would be really, really mad with me if I walked into him at a crucial moment. But nothing happened and we emerged a few yards after rounding a right-angled bend into a dimly lit and slightly wider area with a tall set of steps in it that appeared to give access to an aperture in the ceiling above. I had learned never to take anything for granted in connection with this war games complex.

  ‘You go first,’ Patrick whispered. ‘Then if these damned things are designed to collapse I can catch you.’

  The steps were wobbly but I went up them and poked my head out through the opening and gazed around. There was not much to see, just a very small room with three corridors off. At least the lights were on.

  There was a slight click behind me, like an old-fashioned gun being c
ocked, but I knew what it was. I straightened my knees, spun round off-balance, and somehow got the target in the guts. Then got goosed from below by Patrick in a real hurry and jumped off the top of the steps still off-balance, tripped over my own feet and crashed on to the boarded floor. He dealt with another target, firing across me like a cowboy taking cover behind his dead horse.

  ‘I suppose that could have looked as though we meant it,’ he muttered.

  ‘It was your fault for tweaking me like that,’ I countered.

  ‘The bastards sent a few volts through the steps.’

  And we were, of course, being watched and overheard over most of the course courtesy of CCTV cameras and microphones.

  Two targets down, one corridor remaining. We went down it at a thoughtful speed – it pays to be cautious – arriving at a door. The handle was nice shiny metal and there was a distinct fizzing noise coming from the vicinity of it.

  ‘They’re not really trying to kill us,’ Patrick said, grasping it and opening the door. His hair did not stand on end so I reckoned we were safe.

  A large open space lay before us, a pitiless indoor landscape of sand, shingle, phoney boulders and rocks, some of which were huge, and a lot of dead branches with camouflage netting draped over them which could conceal anything. What looked like the entrance to a ‘cave’ was on the far side. The ‘roof’ was just a blackness with a few tiny lights like stars and some kind of hidden illumination that gave the impression of moonlight. I risked a glance high up into one corner and spotted one end of the control centre, a structure with a wide curving bulletproof glass window. I have been inside it and, to me, the instrument panel looks as complicated as the cockpit of a jumbo jet.

  ‘Is Ken still in charge here?’ I whispered when we paused momentarily in the comparative cover of an overhanging ‘rock’ after dashing across the first open space. Ken was difficult to forget: a fine marksman, the mind of a slightly sadistic genius, hair like a full-blown marigold. His and Patrick’s rivalry went back years.

  ‘No idea. Possibly,’ Patrick snapped, concentrating.

  A shot pinged off the metal underpinnings of our rock, scattering us with bits of what were probably fibreglass. Then the world went mad. A thunderflash went off seemingly right behind us and, regrettably, my instinctive and first reaction to this was to bolt. This was severely curtailed by my husband grabbing a handful of spare tracksuit material between my shoulder blades, hauling me to a standstill and then back.

  ‘Think!’ he bellowed right in my face through the smoke.

  ‘That was a grenade,’ a disembodied voice said silkily. ‘You’re both dead. Two lives left.’

  In the next moment there was another bright flash and deafening bang but we were already moving and travelling at speed to the left towards another rock. A shot kicked up the sand at out feet.

  Patrick carried on shouting. ‘He’s supposed to be firing high!’

  Another dead target later and we were making our way, bent low around the base of the rock which turned out to be the first in a group of three. The farthest was very large and had a tumbledown shack of sorts leaning up against it, constructed out of planks and what looked in the dim light like a piece of tarpaulin. It appeared to be a very safe way of reaching the cave entrance somewhere on the far side of it.

  Patrick picked up a small rock, real, and hefted it. It landed somewhere on top of the structure with a crash and the whole thing went down like a pack of cards in a cloud of dust and bits of rotten wood.

  ‘I demand lost lives back!’ Patrick yelled. ‘For breaking rule ten by making something likely to cause real injury.’

  No response.

  ‘Right,’ he muttered, getting another target in the head. ‘War.’

  Secretly, I thought he was getting a bit too exercised by everything but, after all, he had written the original set of rules.

  And with that we got the equivalent of a bathful of cold water tipped over us.

  The shock was enough to make me forget, for a moment, where I was and what I was supposed to be doing. My hand was grabbed and we went like hell, jumping and scrambling over and through the remains of the shack and then out across an open sandy and stone-strewn space towards the entrance to the cave. A target popped up in the entrance – how could a mere slab of cardboard, a SAPU, a Small Arms Pop-Up, engender such alarm? – which Patrick slew on the run and we carried on, crashing past the holed target into the dark space beyond.

  ‘It must be a dead end,’ I gasped. ‘It always is.’

  ‘Then goody we’ve gone the wrong way,’ Patrick responded.

  Someone jumped on him, a tall, broad someone who got him around the throat with a crooked arm. I did think this time, jumped out of the way so Patrick could work some rather dirty magic and when the man flew through the air and thumped down on to his back I sat on him hard enough to hear the rest of the breath leave his lungs.

  Lights suddenly blazed, dazzlingly, and there in the cave entrance was another target. From my seated position I got it at the second attempt and then scrambled up and ran to where I could see Patrick going down a passageway off to my right. As soon as I entered it the ceiling fell in on me. It was only made of large polystyrene blocks but that did not stop me from tripping over some of them and being buried by the rest. I fought my way out and, slipping and sliding over the squeaky and unstable pile, tried to carry on in the direction I wanted to go. It was hopeless. There was a much larger amount than one ceiling’s-worth: a small mountain of it.

  So be it. I had one shot left and I had not been given any more ammunition. Patrick had started off with seventeen.

  Squeezing past the ‘dead’ targets in the entrance I gazed around outside. No one was in sight. Soaked through and shivering, my hair plastered to my head, I trotted off to the right, moving along a mock rock-face in what I hoped was a roughly parallel course to the one Patrick had taken. The ‘moonlight’ was even dimmer now and, yes, I really was thinking. When I had fired my last shot and in order not to lose any more lives by not being able to shoot at targets I would have to catch up with him. I had wasted one shot already.

  Incongruously, I came to a door. No fizz, no electric shock either. Just locked. I shoulder-charged it and someone opened it just as I got there leaving me staggering in another dark space, finally crashing into the door opener who wasn’t Patrick as he was not wet and anyway smelt of very cheap, handy for drains, aftershave. I got a bit cross with him, took a wild swing in the dark and smacked him hard around the face, which startled him sufficiently enough to call me a bitch.

  ‘I can get a lot bitchier than that!’ I yelled at him. ‘This is supposed to be target practice, not dungeons and effin’ dragons!’

  Gut feelings told me that the effin’ dragon was about to try something else so I ran back to the opening and when he followed me outside tripped him so he bellyflopped with a loud ‘Ooof!’, hopefully getting a mouthful of sand. Only a little twerp after all. I dashed back through the door, slammed it behind me and then made for a corner from which faint light was emanating. This proved to be yet another tunnel and when I was around ten yards inside it a target slid into place at the end of it. I got it in the head, turned right into a side passage I had not previously noticed but quickly came to a dead end. I was now out of ammo.

  There were then three shots in quick succession, not all from the same weapon, impossible to tell exactly from which direction but not alarmingly close by. I decided that the first had been fired by a Glock and ran back and out through the door into the Lawrence of Arabia scenario, which I was beginning to loathe. No, hang on, I’d loathed it right from the start.

  There was another shot, seemingly from above and a ricochet whanged off something. Half-crouching I scurried along the mock rock-face which curved away and then sloped steeply upwards. Damning all men I raced, slithering, up the sand and gravel with which it was surfaced and emerged at last and on all fours on a flat wooden platform just above a roof of sorts over the maze, tu
nnels and cave complex. Again, it was very dim and the platform rocked and swayed, appearing to be suspended on ropes. Crawling, I started to make my way along it.

  ‘I’m here,’ said a voice somewhere to the rear of me.

  As soon as he had spoken a target jumped up in the darkness ahead. I flattened myself, pronto, and there was a shot which made such a good job of it that the SAPU actually fell over, something in the mechanism smashed. I wriggled backwards for quite a distance from the point where I had reached the platform.

  ‘It is Ken,’ Patrick said, stretching out a hand to touch me in order to further inform me that I had arrived. I turned around to see that he was sitting down, very still.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, seeing the expression on his face.

  He handed me the Glock. ‘You must be out of ammo.’

  ‘Patrick, what’s wrong?’

  ‘He seems to be taking it a bit too seriously.’

  ‘Are you hit?’

  ‘He’s wrecked my right ankle joint. Firing low, utterly forbidden.’

  ‘Then let’s stop this!’

  ‘I think Ken’s finally lost it.’

  Memories returned. The computer geek with the wild ginger hair, the obsessive whose brainchild this set-up had partly been and whose mental state some years ago Patrick had been very, very worried about.

  A voice boomed out. ‘You’re getting seriously close to the time limit. One minute left.’

  ‘That’s not Ken’s voice,’ I said.

  ‘No, I spotted him out on the upper gantry by the control room – he’s only supposed to be firing safe but disconcerting shots at us.’

  ‘It might have been an accident.’

  ‘It wasn’t. He’s just about the finest shot in the country and we’re talking about a deliberate attempt to cripple.’

  ‘Are you sure it was him?’