Snakes

by Guy N Smith

  He went back downstairs, holding on to the stair-rail the whole way. Shaken, repulsed, he vomited outside on the drive. If Mrs Doyle was the victim then where was her son?

  The operational HQ had an atmosphere of confusion about it; groups of police and soldiers clustered outside around the vehicles; a meeting of some kind was being held in the small office. John recognised Burlington, Colonel Marks, Chief Inspector Watts and several others through the open window, caught a buzz oflow voices.

  'You can't go in there, sir.' A uniformed sergeant barred his path to the door.

  'I ... have to . . .'

  'I'm sorry, sir.'

  'There's been a ... killing. Another death.'

  The officer puffed his cheeks out, closed his eyes, opened them again. 'Who? Where?' His voice was low, tired.

  'The council houses .. . the Doyles ... I'm not sure which one, Mrs Doyle probably. It was the python.'

  'We'll get somebody up there right away.' The sergeant gave some instructions to another officer in the doorway, turned back to the zoologist. 'There's problems this morning. PC Aylott vanished during the night shift. We don't think it's the snakes, he just appears to have walked out. His nerve might have cracked, we don't know. Anyway, it's not up to me to say.'

  'Where are we going to search today?' John was still shaking from his experience; the last thing he wanted was another day in the burning sun bashing out thick undergrowth.

  'We'll be told soon,' the policeman replied. 'Until then you'll just have to hang around like everybody else.'

  It was another ten minutes before the superintendent emerged from the building, those lines in his features etched even deeper, his voice husky as though he had done a lot of talking and his vocal cords were on the verge of packing up.

  'There is the possibility that we have another snake casualty.' He addressed the crowded driveway, commanded an instant silence. The listeners felt the tension, the sudden change in those around them. 'We cannot be sure at the moment but it seems that way. Also we have one of our officers missing but again we do not know if that is directly linked to the current crisis. We must, therefore, for the safety of this community, assume that the snakes have not left the area. We have searched for them diligently, and for that I thank every one of you, but now the time has come when we must change our tactics. We shall not let up on the offensive but priority has to be given to the defence of this village. We must guard every house 24 hours a day, leaving just a small band to continue the search. No more lives must be lost. Let us hope that we can conclude this terrible business in as short a time as possible.'

  John Price moved away back out on to the road. They would not be needing him today, maybe not again. The searches over the last few days had yielded nothing, he had not come up with a magical formula for finding the serpents' hidden lair, so he had not been much use after all. They could dispense with him now. The authorities resented civilian help, you could sense it even if they did not put it into words. They used you just so long as you were useful to them.

  He had the rest of the day to kill somehow; the rest of the week, month, year. Except for Aunt Elsie's funeral tomorrow he had no plans. That was when being unemployed hit you; you had no plans, nobody had any for you. Just hang around, John Price. The game of eternal waiting, building up futile hopes.

  A police van passed him, It would be going up to the Doyles. He grimaced. He wondered again where Keith had gone. And Aylott. There were a lot of disquieting, unexplained mysteries right now.

  Something interrupted his thoughts, a movement breaking into his morbid reverie, a small creature darting across the road, long body, reddish brown fur, streamlined. A half-jar on his nerves, alarm bells starting to ring in his system and then cutting out because it was a false alarm. These days everything that moved had to be a snake until proved otherwise.

  He identified the animal just as it was disappearing into the overgrown verge on the opposite side of the road. A stoat, the fiercest of all British mammals for its size. A predator. A killer of...

  His brain was beginning to click, a human computer assimilating facts, processing data. A killer of snakes, certainly, but only small ones; grass snakes like die one that had caused his aunt to have a heart attack, adders .., not big ones like those that had escaped but . . .

  . . . family mustelidae, comprising stoats, weasels, otters, .pine martens, polecats and . . .

  His pulses were beginning to race, his computer was coming up with the answer, had already given it to him but he was barely able to accept it in his excitement. Family mustelidae, the ferret family, and the Big Daddy of them all—the mongoose.

  Jesus Christ Almighty, why hadn't he thought of it before, the one creature that was the nemesis of all snakes, at one time imported from India to Latin America to control a plague of reptiles. Rikki-tikki-tavi, the mongoose hero invented by Rudyard Kipling, the creature that fought and overcame a cobra and a krait.

  It was the answer, the only solution to the crisis in Stainforth, Juvenile excitement took him over, almost had him sprinting back to the station. Superintendent, I've hit on the answer, all we need is a pair of mongooses. They'd find the snakes, kill 'em too. The whole thing could be over in an hour or two. You're crazy, laddie. We can't go loosing more wild animals into the countryside, contravening the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981. Look what happened when a few mink escaped and bred, the scourge of domestic animals, poultry, rivers. And we've never got rid of the rat-like grey squirrel since some bloody idiot thought it would be great to have a few of them in the suburban parks and gardens. It wouldn't work, we wouldn't allow it.

  You wouldn't allow it but it would work as far as the snakes are concerned. Isn't human life more important than ducks and geese and trout in the rivers? It was a matter of conscience, not a decision to be taken at a desk somewhere far removed from the danger. His decision.

  He stood beneath the shade of a leafy oak tree, rolled a cigarette with unsteady fingers. He needed a few minutes to calm himself, to think clearly. If you jump in, do it with both feet, no half measures. In other words, don't fuck it up. Go the whole hog and be prepared to take the consequences.

  His tidy mind began to put everything in order, formulate a hypothetical plan of action. If it was to be mongooses then they had to be brought here secretly and released under the cover of darkness. Point number two, where in hell do you find a mongoose?

  Bill Arkwright might still have one! John Price's pulses pounded again. Bill had been at university with him, had got his degree and gone back to Scotland to work on snakebite serums, had his own private collection of reptiles, had had the necessary licence to keep dangerous animals granted on research grounds. Arkwright had kept a pair of mongooses as pets; John remembered that rumpus with the RSPCA when some busybody had written and claimed that Bill was organising mongoose-snake fights and was taking bets on the outcome. The case was disproved and it had all died down.

  John wondered if Bill still had his place up in Edinburgh, if he still had those mongooses, and if he would be prepared to help. All bloody ifs again, but there was only one way to find out.

  Aunt Elsie really should have had a telephone installed. She might have been alive now if she had had some means of summoning help. And John Price would have been able to sit down in comfort and privacy and attempt to track down Bill Arkwright. As it was he found himself in the oven-like telephone box on the Green, keeping the door propped open with one foot whilst he tried to persuade a Directory Enquiries operator to locate a Mr W. Arkwright in Edinburgh. No, I'm afraid I don't know his address but I can't tell you how urgent it is. Normally we don't look for numbers without an address, sir, but on this occasion ...

  He hoped three pounds' worth of ten-pence pieces would be enough—another few hours and it would have been a lot cheaper. There was a saying that time was money; it was also lives.

  'Arkwright speaking.'

  'Bill, this is John Price.'

  'Who?'

  'B
leep . . . bleep . . . bleep . . .

  It took him another ten pence to establish his identity.

  'Why, John, of course. How are you? Look, old boy, let me ring you back or we'll never put two words together without that bloody thing interrupting.'

  Briefly John told Arkwright the story, most of which the other had read in the newspapers anyway; his own involvement, the death of his aunt.

  'What you need is a bloody mongoose to hunt 'em out.' John's hopes soared as Bill came back at him with his own theory. 'Soon sort the buggers out.'

  'That's what I'm ringing you about, Bill.'

  'You mean have I still got Rick and Tick and can you borrow them? Sure I have, and if you take the responsibility and fetch 'em you're welcome to 'em. I still get the ruddy RSPCA poking round from time to time to check that I'm not snake-fighting with them. You'll have to fetch 'em, though, and if you get caught with 'em they're not mine.'

  'Oh sure.' John did some mental calculations, a round trip of something like four hundred miles. Twelve hours in the Mini if she didn't play up. Back in Stainforth before dark.

  'I'll see you early afternoon then.' He replaced the receiver, stepped gratefully outside into the hot sunshine.

  Twelve hours' driving in this bloody heat! Twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six—he'd do it if it meant death to the killer snakes. And tomorrow afternoon as he sat head bowed in the cool of the church at Aunt Elsie's funeral he would have the secret satisfaction of knowing that he had made the snakes pay for their killings. He would never have believed during those long years of studying for his degree that he would ever come to hate reptiles the way he did now.

  Twenty minutes later he was in the old Mini, both windows wound down in the hope of a cool breeze, driving out of Stainforth; down past the church, past the track leading to the old disused quarry where he used to play on his visits here as a boy. He wondered if it was still there. Probably partly filled in by its own avalanches and overgrown with vegetation. He would not have any regrets about that, remembered the time when he had gone there after butterflies for his collection, had scaled one of the steep sand walls in an attempt to catch a Red Admiral and had fallen fifteen feet. Fortunately the soft sand in the bottom had broken his fall otherwise he might have broken a leg, or worse.

  It used to be a damned dangerous place.

  His thoughts returned to Keith Doyle. Somehow he did not believe that the gardener had left Stainforth and that made it all the more worrying. Because PC Aylott had vanished into thin air also.

  John Price filtered on to the motorway, moved into the middle lane and jammed his foot down on the accelerator as far as it would go. Suddenly he was aware that he did not have that 'unemployed feeling' any more.

  Chapter 15

  'WE'RE BALING that sandpit field today no matter what the army, the police or any other bugger says,' Jack Jervis informed his son when he came in to breakfast after doing the early morning round of the stock field. 'You can't waste bloody weather like this and I won't be happy till all that hay is under cover.'

  'Blimey, Dad,' said Sam Jervis, splashing milk on to his cereals, knowing that his earlier suspicions were correct and that the old man was in one of his moods. 'It ain't goin' to rain for weeks, if it ever rains again.' Not just a bad mood, a very bad mood.

  'We can't chance it.' Jervis senior chewed noisily, took a swallow of tea to help the stringy bacon down. 'We can't just sit around doin' now't, this bloody nonsense could go on for weeks.'

  'I don't like the idea o' you and Sam goin' up there.' Dora Jervis shuffled across the room, deposited a plate of toast on the table. 'Them snakes are dangerous.'

  Silence, just a smacking of greasy lips as the Jervis family meditated on the perils of snakes.

  Jack and Dora had rented their scattered smallholding for the past twenty years, a kind of 'getting-away-from-lorry-driving' move. It had been a messy venture, made all the more disorganised by the fact that their rented land was scattered around Stainforth; fifteen acres of meadowland that Phil Burton was only too pleased to find a tenant for, rough tussocks of unpalatable grazing, two more tracts of eleven and nine acres, and finally the 'sandpit field' leased from the council. All run from their existing tumbledown dwelling and the few acres that they actually owned.

  In the beginning Jack had had to rely on casual farm work to make ends meet. Rumour had it that his 'capital investment' had come from equipment stolen from his various employers; nothing serious enough to warrant police investigation, a roll or two of sheep-netting from one place, a few stakes and staples from another. Jack's mechanical knowledge from his haulage days came in handy, enabled him to keep their old 1962 Ferguson tractor going, and, with some very untidy improvisations, they managed to scrape a meagre living. Sam was an accident, set them back a bit, but they got by in their own slovenly fashion. Their shortcomings were many but all were agreed that the one thing they did not shirk was work.

  Sam was not at all keen on the idea of lugging the bales off the sandpit field, but if the old man said that that was what they were going to do today then that was what they would do. He had learned many years ago not to argue with his father.

  Dora watched the two of them file out of the room, and sighed loudly. Jack worked the boy too hard, never gave him any time off. Sam was a hired labourer on a pittance of a wage, not a son. The boy was bright enough, would in all probability have done well at school if Jack had not persistently kept him at home to help with the harvest, the lambing, every seasonal job as it came round. 'Tell, 'em you've 'ad the 'eadache, boy,' he would say at every period of absenteeism from school. Sometimes it was "the bellyache' just to ring the changes. Sam might have gone on to sixth-form college if his school attendances had not been so inconsistent, but Jack Jervis wouldn't have stood for that. 'Work is what you do with yer 'ands, boy, not sittin' at a desk thinkin' about it.'

  She began to clear the table, Sam would end up an ignorant pig, just like his father. She couldn't change either of them so she might as well go along with them. They would still be scratching for a living in another twenty years' time.

  Work was a way of life to Sam Jervis. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, he did not expect anything else. On a holding like this one you did every job yourselves, spent as little money as possible; a cycle that you began again as soon as the old one ended.

  This bloody heat was a bit much, though. He wondered how the old man could stand not just a shirt on but a woollen waistcoat worn over it. Trousers and heavy boots, too. All Sam was wearing was a pair of denim shorts, hacked from his old working jeans when the lower legs became threadbare, and a pair of scuffed pumps.

  The routine was always the same. Dad drove the tractor and trailer, Sam rode on the back. Then between them they loaded the trailer with bales, stacked high and precariously, and trundled back home where they unloaded them into the barn. They managed three loads before lunch and estimated that there were probably another five left. They would finish around teatime—a late tea.

  The upright exhaust belched black fumes as they drove past the church. Sam glanced idly at the track leading into the quarry. The old sandpit was technically theirs, its acreage included in the rent they paid the council each quarter for the field. Now that was a bloody waste, a piece of ground that you could not plough up, would not hold stock. He wondered if there was any way of filling it in, levelling it up to the field that surrounded it.

  The Ferguson struggled up the steep incline, shuddered to a halt by the first stack of eight bales. Jack Jervis leapt down, shouted at Sam to hurry. 'We ain't got all bloody day, boy.'

  Eight bales loaded, drawing up to the next pile; another eight layered on top of those. Now it was Sam's job to clamber up on to them, take the bales from his father as the old man hoisted them up to him on the prongs of a pitchfork. Jesus, the old man would have a heart attack if he didn't slow up, working in a near-frenzy in this bloody heat. It had to be ninety in the shade today. One day the silly old fucker would drop in his t
racks, just like that. And I'll bloody well load him up on top of the hay and take him down home. And it won't spoil our tea, either.

  Hay bales were coming up on to the trailer as though they were on a mechanical conveyor belt. Ease up, you daft bat.

  Suddenly Sam Jervis stopped, ignored the bale that had just bounced against those he was trying to stack, toppling them in a heap. Above the drone of pollen-hunting bees he detected the sound of a human voice, a muffled cry. He listened hard and it came again. 'Help!'

  It was difficult to discern just where the shout had come from. Either it was muffled or else it was a long way away, even as far as the village. It could, on the other hand, be as close as the sandpit a few hundred yards down at the bottom of this sloping field.

  'What the bloody hell's happening up there? You bloody well fallen asleep?' Another bale flew up, bounced off the fallen pile and rolled off the trailer, thudded on to the ground ten feet below.

  'Listen,' Sam snapped back, 'just shut up and listen for a second.'

  'What the hell are you on about, boy?'

  'Just listen a minute, will you, Dad.'

  ''Help.'' The cry came again, weaker this time as though the caller was growing tired. But it definitely came from the sandpit.

  'There you are, you heard that didn't you, Dad?' Sam peered anxiously over the bales, saw his father retrieving the fallen one, spearing it with the pikle, lifting it up to throw it back up again. 'Don't tell me you didn't hear that.'

  'I heard bloody nothin',' Sam Jervis grunted, his red face perspiring freely. 'You're paid to work not to sit about listening for things.'

  'I tell you, Dad, somebody's in trouble and it sounds like they're in the . . .' Sam broke off as the flying bale hit him, caught him off balance and sent him staggering back to sprawl amongst the pile of bales. 'You silly old bastard! There's something happened to somebody . . .'