A huge, dripping canopy of ants wafted across the treetops, along nets attached to the highest branches projecting beneath. As if at a signal, they cascaded down the tree trunks all round the vehicle and hung in living chains and curtains across the track. Several of these smacked into the windscreen and dissolved into thousands of scurrying ants at each flail. Apthorpe couldn't see where he was going. He drove ahead, the wheel spun under his shaking hands and he jolted across a shallow ditch and up against a tree. Steam rose from the buckled bonnet. It was journey's end for the Land Rover.
If Apthorpe hadn't flailed about wildly he might have left the vehicle and propelled himself towards the boundary moat. As it was, he lost consciousness just at the moment of realisation that they had got into his trousers and were beginning to tear away at the folds of fat on his huge paunch.
Graver emerged from his observation chamber in time to witness the last groups of ants skirmishing round the feast. Morsels of brain were being sawn off by the workers and dropped from the well-cleaned skull. A dozen of the small workers clamped their mandibles into each juicy fragment and struggled to carry it away. The gruesome feast was nearly finished.
Chapter 44
At Chris's home, the phone was ringing. She lay in the bath, waiting for it to stop. It went on and on, stopped, then started again. Eventually, she levered herself out, wiped her feet on the bathmat, gave herself a quick rub with the bath towel, threw on a bathrobe and padded to the phone.
'Hullo?'
'Chris? This is Tom.'
'I know.' She sighed. 'I thought we’d agreed. No more calls.'
'It's not any old call. I'm outside. Are you going to let me in?'
'You stupid man.'
'I understand.'
'I don't mean that. Wait while I find the key.'
She scrabbled around with a hairbrush to make her hair decent and checked her face quickly in a mirror. She let him in and gave him a quick peck on the cheek.
'I have to say this. That other life we were discussing three months ago. I thought I should let you know, there's been a change. I think it's beginning.'
'That's good, Tom, very, very good.'
'There is – there can be a future for people like us, Chris.'
'Lots of things can be, for people like us.'
'You know what I mean.'
'I know what you mean.'
'Can we keep in touch?'
She took a deep breath. 'Perhaps. I think you should go now. Here's my card.'
'Au revoir, ma cherie.'
'I'll write and keep you posted.'
She watched him as he turned and walked away. The phone was ringing. She closed the door and picked up the receiver.
'DCI Winchester here. Right, yes. I'll be there in less than an hour.'
She walked into the bedroom and reached across the dressing table for a tissue to wipe her eyes. It was time to get ready for work.
The End
Acknowledgements
This book owes everything to my obsession with ants over more than half a century. The killing power of ants has fascinated me for many years. If we extend the idea of killing other beings to include the rest of the human and non-human living beings in the world – ants not least among them. We all have the potential in us to become killers. I wanted to explore in this book how ants can be used as murder weapons.
I've lived with the two antmen in this book – Fortius and Graver – for more than fifty years. Fortius has grown out of me. Hopefully, whatever is grotesque and monstrous belongs exclusively to Graver. The dark side of the vast majority of us will never reach the extremes portrayed in this book. But we dip into that dark world from time and return with relief to the light.
I also wish to acknowledge my debt to the following:
my late parents and other household members, for putting up with the permanent presence of ants in the 'ant shed', in the garden, as well as in the bedroom;
my biology teacher Mr E G Jones, at Farnborough Grammar School, for being patient with my childhood obsession with keeping ants, for turning over the school biology laboratory to them at one point and for introducing me to the Schools Natural History Society, which made it possible in my mid-teens to trek to London and exhibit my observation colonies at the Burlington House premises of the Linnaean Society, Piccadilly, London;
the distinguished myrmecologist and author Derek Wragge Morley, whom I met as a young teenager and who had a great impact on my preoccupation with the longitudinal study of ant societies;
many colleagues who have tried to be patient with my no doubt irritating tendency to engage them in unscientific, but fascinating debates, beyond behaviourism and socio-biology, about how ants communicate.
RVA
Antman Page 43
