Deception

THREE

Moira Lawson hesitated in the hallway of her bungalow, debating whether or not to put on a jacket, and then decided against it. It wasn’t often possible to venture out of doors in the evening in Scotland without one so she thought that, for once, she would live dangerously and enjoy the experience. ‘I’m just taking Sam for his walk,’ she called out to her husband in the living room. A longhaired Labrador puppy scampered round her feet, tail wagging furiously, while she listened for a reply.

She took a distant grunt as ‘message received’ and collected Sam’s extending lead from the hall table to clip it to his collar, explaining to him, as she always did at this time, that it would be just until they got to the top of the road and then he could have his freedom. She didn’t want him bounding in and out of the neighbours’ gardens.

Sam strained at the lead all the way up the road, nose close to the ground, tail never still. When she stopped to speak to one of the neighbours near the top of the hill, he immediately investigated the halt to his progress by jumping up on the woman and offering his instant affection.

‘You’re a big soft sausage, aren’t you?’ laughed the neighbour, making a fuss of him. ‘They’re lovely at that age, aren’t they?’

‘Daft as a brush,’ smiled Moira. ‘All energy and no brains.’

‘Are you taking him up by the canal?’

‘Moira said that she was.’

‘You must have heard about the three kids along in Blackbridge?’

‘I certainly did, Weil’s disease; can be quite nasty apparently. Damages the liver. I was speaking to one of their mothers, coming back on the bus yesterday. She’d been in at the hospital. She was saying that they’ve all been through a bit of a bad time but at least, her boy was getting better. Unfortunately the same couldn’t be said for the laddie who’d been bitten.’

‘I heard about that. Which one of them got bitten?’

‘Mrs Ferguson’s son. He had to have an operation on his foot: it was torn quite badly apparently. I hear he’s still very ill; some complicating factors to do with the bite becoming infected, I think.’

‘Dirty things, rats, makes me shiver, just thinking about them. Mind you, who in their right mind would want to swim in the canal? It’s all green slime apart from anything else.’

‘What were we saying about all energy and no brains? I think it applies to young boys as well as young dogs.’

The neighbour laughed and conceded the point. Moira continued her walk. She joined the canal towpath and took off Sam’s lead. He was off like a rocket but a rocket with little or no sense of direction. He gave every indication of wanting to run in all directions at the same time. Moira introduced some purpose to it all by picking up a small stick and throwing it along the towpath. As she continued with the game it occurred to her that she was enjoying herself as much as Sam. The sun was low but still warm and the wind had dwindled away to nothing. The air was full of the smells of late summer, only marred a little by the smell of the algal bloom on the surface of the canal.

Sam paused in the game to do his business and Moira took the chance to look up at the sky, thinking to herself how much nicer it would be if Scotland had more of this kind of weather. There were so few occasions when proper clothing was not a major consideration. She was very glad that she had not bothered with a jacket. The cool of the evening on her bare arms was very pleasant. The insects hovering above the surface of the still water and the drifting ‘wishes’ from the willow herb made her think of Peter Pan and fairies.

Sam looked up at her expectantly and she launched the stick again. ‘Go on, then, you daft mutt,’ she encouraged. She tried to throw the stick further this time and lost direction a little. It landed in the water. Sam bounded along to the spot but Moira did not want him plunging into the stagnant water so she called out to him to stop. Sam paused unsurely at the edge, his basic instinct being challenged by his partial training.

‘Good boy,’ Moira called out as Sam settled with his rear end in the air and his nose pointing down at the water.

‘There’s a good boy. Just you wait there,’ said Moira as she walked towards him.

Suddenly Sam let out a yelp of pain and Moira saw him start to throw his head feverishly from side to side. She thought at first that he had something in his mouth — her first thought was that he had tried to pick up a hedgehog and was learning the lesson but as she got closer she could see that this was not the case at all. A small animal had attached itself to Sam’s face by sinking its teeth into Sam’s snout. Her blood ran cold when she saw that it was a rat.

Moira desperately wanted to help Sam — wanted to free him of the vile vermin that was causing him such pain, but she found herself unable to through her fear and loathing of rats. Her arms moved like the sails of an uncertain windmill as she tried to approach but was forced to draw back through sheer revulsion. The nightmare moved up a gear when a second rat scampered up on to the bank and attached itself to one of Sam’s front paws. Moira screamed but the sound that came out sounded totally alien, a mixture of terror and anger that she’d seldom — if ever, felt before.

She could see that Sam was starting to lose the battle. It looked as if he was beginning to tire and might fall over at any moment. When a third rat appeared on the path, Moira’s concern for the puppy overcame her dread of rats. She moved in, swinging her feet at them and screaming abuse at the top of her voice as a way of neutralising her fear. When her foot connected with the third rat and sent it flying, she yelled out in pleasure and tried stamping on the one attached to Sam’s paw. Frustration started to play a role when she found that just wasn’t quick enough to keep up with Sam’s twists and turns. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ she screamed. ‘Get off him, you filth! Leave him alone!’

Help appeared in the form of a cyclist coming along the towpath. He’d seen the woman ahead of him with what appeared to be a dog scampering round her feet and had rung his bell as an early warning of his approach.

‘Help me!’ screamed Moira. ‘Please help me! Get them off him!’

The cyclist, a tall man wearing dungarees and working boots got off his bike and snatched the tyre pump from the frame. He lashed out at the rat on Sam’s paw and made good enough contact to make it release its grip. To deal with the other one he had to wrestle Sam to the ground and hold him still while he beat at the rat on his snout with the barrel of the pump. Sam was finally freed of his tormentors and whimpered pitifully as Moira examined his wounds. He was bleeding profusely. ‘My poor baby,’ she cooed, cradling him in her arms.

‘What the hell happened?’ asked the cyclist.

Moira shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she gasped. ‘He was looking down at the water. The next thing I knew one of these vile things was on his face.’

‘He must have stumbled on their nest,’ said the man. ‘They can be bloody vicious when they feel threatened.’ He walked over to the edge of the bank and examined the area. ‘No sign of any rat holes, mind you.’ He pushed down the reeds around the area with the pump he still held in his hand but without finding anything. ‘Strange,’ he muttered. ‘A laddie got bitten along in Blackbridge by the buggers the other week there: mind you, he was swimming in the bloody canal. Talk about shit for brains.'

Moira wasn’t really interested in why it had happened. She felt weak and cold and anxious. The front of her blouse was covered in Sam’s blood and she was becoming increasingly angry with this man who seemed to be ignoring her and Sam in favour of conducting some kind of forensic investigation. She had to remind herself that he had also been the one to come to their rescue and if he hadn’t come along, at that particular time, God alone knew what might have happened. ‘Could you possibly give me a hand?’ she asked, trying to get to her feet, still cradling Sam in her arms.

‘Nae hassle,’ said the man. He took Sam from her and asked, ‘Where are we going?’

‘My house is about half a mile away.’

‘If you wheel ma bike for me, I’ll take care o’ the dug. He needs help. What are you going to do about him?’

‘There’s a vet over in Blackbridge. My husband will drive us over.’

The man looked at his watch. ‘It’s after nine,’ he said. ‘If he’s no there, there’s a vet wi’ a twenty-four hour call out in Edinburgh. You’ll find it in Yellow Pages.’

‘Thanks, we’ll try Blackbridge first,’ said Moira.

The pair of them attracted quite a bit of attention when they left the towpath and started to walk down the road to Moira’s house, the man beginning to weave a bit under Sam’s weight and Moira, shocked, dejected, the front of her blouse covered in Sam’s blood. Several neighbours came out to ask what was wrong but Moira couldn’t face telling them the story. She had to look past them. She was close to mental exhaustion. She propped up the man’s bicycle on the garden wall and opened her front door to call out, ‘Andrew!’

Andrew, her husband, hearing the note of anxiety in her voice came to the door, newspaper in hand, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Good God, what on earth’s happened?’

‘Sam’s hurt bad. We have to get him to a vet.’

Moira’s husband went to get his jacket and she turned to the man holding Sam. ‘Mr?… ’

‘McDougal. Lawrie McDougal.’

‘Mr McDougal, I can’t begin to thank you for all you’ve done. I just don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along.’

The man shuffled uncomfortably under the weight of praise and handed over the dog to her. ‘Don’t mention it. I just hope your dug’s going to be all right, missus.’

Moira smiled and waved to him as he cycled off and her husband appeared with the car keys in his hand. Moira sat with Sam on her knee as they drove along to Blackbridge less than two miles away. ‘Let’s hope he hasn’t gone out for the evening,’ said Andrew.

‘If he has, Mr McDougal said there’s a vet in Edinburgh with a round the clock call-out service.’ said Moira.

They drew up outside the vet’s house in Blackbridge, an old sandstone building in a street running parallel to the main one. The vet, James Binnie, worked from home, his surgery being a low concrete extension tacked on to the back of the house. As most of his work was concerned with farm animals, this sufficed for the few domestic pets he had to deal with.

Andrew knocked on the front door, cradling the dog in his arms. Moira stood by his side, still wearing her bloodstained blouse. The door was opened by Binnie himself, a small man in his early forties slipping into the bespectacled, bald anonymity of middle age. He was wearing slippers and had a glass of something in his hand. ‘What the dickens…’ he exclaimed at the sight that met him.

‘It’s my dog, Sam,’ said Moira, speaking in the flat monotone that shock had induced in her. ‘Rats went for him.’

‘You’d better come round,’ said Binnie, pausing to put his glass down on some surface behind the door and lifting his jacket from a hook there. He led the way round the back of the house, squeezing between a wall and a mud-spattered Volvo estate that was parked there. Andrew followed, lifting Sam up to clear the Volvo’s door mirror. Moira brought up the rear.

The fluorescent lights of the surgery stuttered up to full illumination and Sam was laid gently down on Binnie’s examination table. Moira patted his flank reassuringly while Binnie started to take a look at his injuries.

‘You’ve certainly been in the wars, wee man,’ he said, examining Sam’s snout and getting a whimper of protest from the puppy. ‘We’re going to have to stitch these cuts, I’m afraid. He moved on to Sam’s paw, getting louder protests this time as he sought to establish any bone damage. ‘Well, I think you’ve been lucky there, wee man. Nothing broken but we may have to send you into the vet school to have these tendons properly seen to. In the meantime we’ll get you cleaned up, stitched and I’ll give you a couple of jabs against infection.’

Moira breathed a sigh of relief at what the vet was saying. It all translated into a simple truth. Sam was going to be all right.

‘I think you better sit down, said Binnie to her as he noticed her wobble slightly and clutch the side of the table.

‘I think maybe you’re right,’ agreed Moira, now smiling for the first time. She sat down beside Andrew who was leaning forward, elbows on his knees as he watched the proceedings.

‘I take it, he went for the rats,’ said Binnie as he cleaned Sam’s wounds.

‘I don’t know. I’m not absolutely sure,’ said Moira. ‘I threw a stick for him and it went into the canal. One minute he was standing at the edge, looking at it, the next thing I knew, one of the things was biting his face.’

‘The canal?’ said Binnie. ‘They were water rats?’

‘Yes, we were walking along the towpath.’

‘I didn’t realise that. I sort of assumed that he must have cornered some rats in a barn. I guess he must have found their hole in the bank.’

‘That’s what the man who helped me thought,’ said Moira. ‘He had a look afterwards but he didn’t see anything.’

Binnie looked at her. ‘Where was this exactly?’

Moira thought for a moment before replying, ‘The far side of Mossgiel, near the boundary with Peat Ridge Farm.’

Binnie looked at her again as if he was about to make some comment. Instead, he asked. ‘This man who helped you, did he kill any of the rats?’

‘Both,’ replied Moira. ‘He hit them with his bicycle pump.’

‘You’re sure they were dead?’

‘I’m not sure about the one I kicked away but the two Mr McDougal hit with the pump looked dead enough.’

‘Good, said the vet.’ He offered no further explanation but went on to complete dressing Sam’s injuries. ‘There we are, my wee man’ he announced. ‘I don’t think you’ll be chasing any rats for a while but you’ll live to fight another day.’

Moira and Andrew thanked Binnie profusely and offered to pay there and then but Binnie said that he would send a bill. His wife dealt with the paperwork and she was over at her sister’s tonight. He personally didn’t know where to find anything. Andrew and Moira drove off and Binnie clicked off the lights of the surgery to return to the main house. He felt a little troubled. This was the second case of rat bite he’d had to deal with in the past week and then there was that young boy who’d been swimming in the canal and got himself bitten. He knew from recent reports that there had been a general increase in the rat population all over the country but he was beginning to find the current situation alarming. He drained his glass and decided to take a walk along the towpath.

He knew that if he walked west along the back of, Peat Ridge Farm, he must come to the place where Sam had been attacked. Unless nature had beaten him to it, he would come across the bodies of the rats that the cyclist had killed. His idea was to send one up to Vet. Pathology at the university and ask them to carry out a general forensic examination of it. He left a note for his wife, saying where he’d gone in case she returned in his absence, collected a torch from a drawer in the kitchen and put on his Barbour jacket against a chill in the night air.

It took him just under fifteen minutes to reach the spot where Peat Ridge Farm ended and Mossgiel began. The sky was clear and the stars were out but the moon wasn’t up yet so he had to use the torch in a slow, sweeping search for the bodies of the rats. He would have preferred to do this in the morning but the chances of the bodies still being there after a night on the towpath would be remote. He wasn’t afraid of the dark — at least, he didn’t think he was, but he did find himself feeling distinctly uneasy. He reminded himself that noises that would be ignored or taken for granted during daylight hours seemed to assume a greater significance after dark. The hedgerows by the side of the canal seemed to be alive with the rustling feet and claws of the night.

Binnie gasped and paused as the torch beam picked out a rat running across the towpath a few feet in front of him. It was quickly followed by another. ‘What the?…’ he exclaimed as he watched yet another join the procession. He looked to the north, the direction from which the rats were coming and found himself looking at the gently waving silhouettes of the oilseed rape crop on Peat Ridge Farm.

A distant unearthly howl was carried to him on the night air and Binnie recognised it as Tom Rafferty’s dog, Khan, over on Crawhill Farm. A shiver of apprehension rippled down his spine at the sound. Please God, the animal was securely tethered and wouldn’t be roaming the banks. He’d had to deal with Khan before in his professional capacity and was therefore no stranger to the dog, but he wouldn’t like his safety to depend on such a tenuous acquaintance. Khan was one bad-tempered beast by any criterion. What was it about big dogs and inadequate people? he wondered, thinking about Khan’s owner, Tom Rafferty. Was it a simple mathematical relationship? The weaker the human character, the fiercer the dog? He continued further along the towpath, continuing his search for the bodies of the rats, although he no longer thought this such a good idea.

He was almost on the point of giving up when he saw them. The first one had been badly gnawed at — presumably by its fellows, but the second corpse seemed to be in better condition. He took out the plastic bag he’d brought with him for the purposes of transporting it and made to pick the animal up by the tail. He let out an involuntary yell when it suddenly turned its head and bit him on the finger. He snatched his hand away, wisely resisting — but only at the last moment — the temptation to put his finger in his mouth. Rat bite fever he could do without.

Instead, he forced the wound to bleed, allowing the blood to clean it out. At least he now understood why this rat was in better condition than the other: it was still alive!

In the torch beam he could now see that the animal’s back had been broken by blows from the bicycle pump but it was still breathing, although unable to move anything save its head. He didn’t want to cause any further physical damage to it, mainly because it might interfere with pathological examination he was going to request, so he resolved to put it out of its misery by asphyxiation. He unwrapped the handkerchief that he’d put round his finger and used it to cut off air to the animal’s mouth and nose until it was dead. It was a very unpleasant few minutes and Binnie felt nauseous throughout. When the rat was dead, he held it up by the tail and dropped it into the plastic bag before starting back for home. By now, he was wishing that he’d never set out on this course at all. He could have been sitting at home, watching television with a whisky in his hand.

He had almost reached the clearing where he would leave the towpath to rejoin the road when he suddenly had the unpleasant feeling that he was not alone. At first it was only a feeling, although it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, but then he heard rustling sounds coming from the hedgerow on the far side of the clearing. He kept moving, and then he was sure he heard someone say, ‘Ssh!’

In a way it was a relief to hear it. It told him that he was not the target of muggers or whoever was hiding there. They seemed to be waiting for him to pass, hoping to remain undetected. As he walked past and left the clearing to rejoin the road he caught a whiff of… something in the air. What was it? Something ordinary, an everyday substance that he couldn’t put a name to because it was out of context, then he realised what it was. It was petrol!

In an instant he knew what was going on. The people hiding in the hedgerow were lurking at the eastern edge of Peat Ridge Farm. It was obviously their intention to set fire to the GM crop growing there. He hurried down the road to his house and called the police before he did anything else. His wife, Ann, came out into the hall and looked at him as if her were mad. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘It’s been quite an evening all in all,’ he replied, putting down the phone and trying to affect a smile. ‘I’ll have to dress this,’ he said, holding up the finger with the bloodstained hankie round it. ‘There’s going to be an attack on Ronald Lane’s place. There are some people hiding in a ditch up by the canal. They’ve got petrol with them.’

‘Looks like you came to blows with them.’

‘No, a rat did this,’ said Binnie. ‘This one.’ He held up the plastic bag containing the dead rat. ‘Pop it in the fridge, will you? There’s a love.’

‘My God, it was never like this on, All Creatures Great and Small,’ said his wife.

‘Whatever happened to cuddly kittens and robins with broken wings?’

‘Maybe I should give Ronald Lane a call as well,’ said Binnie as an afterthought. ‘The police might not get there in time. As if to prove him wrong, the sound of a police siren reached them from the distance. ‘I’ll do it anyway’ said Binnie. ‘Lane should be aware of what’s going on. How was your sister, by the way?’

‘Fine,’ replied Binnie’s bemused wife, as she watched him disappear out the door into the hall again. ‘She turned green and burst into flames last Thursday.’

‘Good,’ came the reply from the hall as a preoccupied Binnie picked up the phone and dialled Lane’s number. He had no sooner passed on the warning to Lane than he thought he’d better tell Tom Rafferty as well. He would be wondering what all the commotion was about.

The male voice that answered did not belong to Rafferty. ‘Who wants him?’

‘James Binnie, the vet.’

Rafferty came on the line and Binnie told him what was happening. ‘I think the police are going to get there on time,’ he said.

‘Pity,’ said Rafferty.

‘It’s about time you two resolved your differences,’ lectured Binnie. ‘The pair of you have split the village.’

‘I was going to call you in the morning,’ said Rafferty ignoring what Binnie had said. ‘Khan’s not very well. I’d like you to take a look at him.’

‘What’s the matter with him this time?’

‘His behaviour’s getting worse,’ replied Rafferty. ‘He’s getting really vicious, even to me, if you know what I mean. He damn nearly took my hand off when I put down his food bowl this morning.’

Binnie smiled. ‘Khan has never exactly been Lassie, has he Tom?’ he said.

‘I know he’s always been a bit of a handful, like,’ admitted Rafferty, ‘but Rotweilers aren’t meant to be lapdogs, are they? And it’s different now. He’s getting worse, I know he is.’

‘He’s probably getting old and crotchety like the rest of us Tom. But no matter, I’ll pop over and take a look at him tomorrow. Good night.’

A man’s voice said something in the background that Binnie couldn’t quite make out — something about having had long enough, he thought — and the phone clattered down and went dead. Binnie looked at the receiver in his hand and said, ‘And good night to you, sweet prince.’

Binnie returned to the living room and was about to start explaining to his wife what had been going on when an explosion rent the air. They both rushed outside and saw an orange glow to the southwest. ‘There goes the petrol,’ said Binnie. ‘They must be destroying the evidence: they’ve not had time to pour it on Lane’s crop.’

I just hope no one got hurt,’ said Ann Binnie.

‘Amen to that,’ said Binnie.