Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

The Pest by Penny Hancock

Penny Hancock’s three suspense thrillers, Tideline, The Darkening Hour, and A Trick of the Mind, were published to rave reviews, earning her comparison to “a young Daphne du Maurier” by the Daily Mail, with the Guardian saying of Tideline: “... reminiscent of John Fowles’s The Collector but with the genders reversed.”

The woman was complaining of a flea infestation in her house.

“Pets?” Bob asked, idly sketching a wasp on the pad he kept by the phone.

“None. I’ve only been here a few weeks, perhaps the previous owners had some — there was a smell of cat when I moved in. When can you come?”

Her voice was familiar. It had a lilt of privilege. A tone of entitlement.

Robert Brown, a.k.a. Bob, had grown up here and had stayed long after most of his peer group had left. He knew the area better than most, its crevices, its drains, its gutters. He was a powerhouse of knowledge about vermin. He knew the routes rats took into people’s houses (sewers, mains pipes, U-bends). He knew the gestation period of mice, could identify the mating call of foxes. He knew the life cycle of fleas, recognized the crannies where wasps liked to build their nests, the most likely habitats of cockroaches. He had destroyed thousands of ants’ nests and exterminated millions of silver-fish. He could rid a house of bedbugs.

He had a new name too — a business name — which gave him clout.

He’d coined it using the diminutive of Robert and adding his middle name “Rapper” because it rhymed with Zapper. Now the words “Bob Rapper, Pest Zapper” were emblazoned on his van.

He liked it, it had a cool ring to it.

And yet still people spoke down to him!

“Name? Address?”

“Karen Mayhew, three Heath Drive. How soon can you come?”

Karen Mayhew. A name he had heard during roll call every single morning back at secondary school, fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago.

Karen Mayhew had been clever, but not as mouthy or as sassy as the rest of the popular crowd. She was a quiet girl. Pretty, but unaware of it. Shy.

While he had given up on some of the others who rebuffed him, he had persisted with Karen Mayhew.

Karen was lucky that Robert had been interested in her and continued to be so even after she left home. He had loitered outside her house when she had come back in the university holidays. If he didn’t give up, she would give in, he had figured. He had been as determined as some of the pests he now dealt with. And yet... it had got him nowhere!

Now, standing by his telephone in the small house he rented, Robert... Bob... remembered how he had, in the end, become enraged by Karen’s refusal to pay him proper attention. The last time he had rung her bell to ask her out he had offered to buy her a drink. And still she had shut the door in his face! He wasn’t going to leave after that. He remained outside her door, and when her cat slunk past him, he had stamped hard on its tail. If you can’t punish the person, punish something they love, he’d thought. The cat, instead of running away, had yowled, jumped up, stapled itself with its claws to his arm, then slithered to the pavement leaving red rivulets in his skin. He still had the scars. To add insult to injury, it also deposited a flea that had bitten him and driven him mad itching for days afterwards.

On the phone to Karen Mayhew now, years later, he realized their roles were, at last, reversed. Once he had thought he needed her. Now she was the one who needed him.

Once she had left him upset and rejected. Now she was the one in distress.

Bob took his time dealing with her call. He wasn’t going to rush to help Karen Mayhew after the way she had rejected him in his youth. It might have been years ago, but it felt like yesterday now he heard her wheedling, pleading voice.

“I’ll see if there’s a space in my diary next week,” he said casually.

“Next week? But I’m going crazy, I’m being bitten,” she bleated. “I have a dinner party at the weekend. I can’t invite friends to a flea-infested house. The things will jump all over them. They’re already driving me mad.”

It was the phrase “driving me mad” that sparked an idea in him.

Later that day Bob drew up in his van outside number 3 Heath Drive.

A very nice address.

Karen Mayhew had done well for herself.

Would she recognize him?

He had changed a lot since she’d last seen him. He had gone straight from lanky boy to maturity, missing out on the phase other men got stuck in — vainly working out and pathetically grooming their facial hair. Not that he hadn’t taken plenty of time to wash and shave and apply a good-smelling aftershave for today’s visit. His hair was receding, giving his forehead height, like the carapace of a cockroach. His eyes were large and wide and slightly protuberant, like those of a housefly. He looked more like a forty-five-year-old than someone in his early thirties. He was pleased with how he looked. Women liked mature men.

Bob rang Karen Mayhew’s shiny brass doorbell. The sweet scent of hyacinths drifted from her front garden. Winter jasmine crept up her latticed porch. She was the kind of woman who enabled things to flower even in midwinter, he thought.

“Bob Rapper,” he introduced himself when she opened the door. “Pest Zapper.”

She was still slim, blonder now than he remembered her. She barely looked at him — the kind of self-absorbed woman who doesn’t give you a second glance. She had no idea who he was! He was still nobody in her eyes!

She showed him around her house, bare polished floorboards and a kitchen overlooking a small but perfectly groomed back garden. A tidy house, nothing out of place. Uncluttered. Minimalist. Barely any soft furnishings. Not a great habitat for fleas.

“They are worst in the bathroom,” she said. “That’s where they seem to bite me, on my way to or from my bath.”

Bob took his time inspecting the house. He examined Karen’s bedroom with its double bed and silky Indian-looking cover. Everything spoke of privilege. Of success. And of taste. A free-standing bath in her small bathroom, spotlights, candles. Bottles of perfume.

At last he went back downstairs, where he found her making coffee in a shiny, chrome, top-of-the-range espresso machine.

“Well?” she said.

She didn’t offer him a cup.

“There are no fleas,” he said. “I’ve inspected thoroughly.”

“They hide,” she said. “They aren’t there all the time, but then, suddenly, they’re everywhere. It’s usually when I put the heating on. Their eggs lie dormant and then, when it gets warm, they hatch and start jumping.”

“That’s true.” Bob Rapper was irritated by the way she assumed superior knowledge about his subject. “But fleas leave marks, minuscule feces that I identify with my magnifying glass. I’ve checked and there’s absolutely nothing. Zero,” he added for emphasis. “Zilch.”

“That’s odd,” she said. “I’ve seen them. Would you spray the house anyway?”

“There’s nothing to spray,” he said, “but I’ll do it if you want. You’ll need to go out. It’s toxic stuff. Needs a few hours to work.”

When Bob got home that night he was satisfied. He had done a good day’s work.

The call, as he expected, came from Karen the following week.

“More fleas hatched,” she wailed, “they’re biting again. You’ll need to have another go with the treatment.”

Again Bob went to her house. Again he asked her to leave it while he sprayed.

She rang again the following week, begging him to treat the house once more. She swore she was still being bitten.

“I’m not being funny or anything,” Bob said as she opened the door to him for the third or fourth time, “but my treatment should have destroyed every last flea by now. That’s if there were any to start with.”

“Of course there were fleas to start with.”

“I can spray again. I can spray a hundred times, but it won’t make any difference because there’s nothing to spray. Never was.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Not to be disrespectful, but I’ve seen this before.”

She stared at him, mouth open in a silent question mark.

“The feeling that something’s biting you,” he went on. “The belief that there are insects crawling over or even under your skin. There’s a name for it — it’s one of them things — a syndrome.”

“You’re telling me I’m imagining the fleas.”

“Not telling you. Suggesting it. It’s a possibility.”

“What do I do?” Her voice had an edge of desperation to it. She was begging him to help.

He liked it this way round.

“You could see a doctor.”

“A doctor?”

“Yeah, sort of... maybe sort of a head doctor.”

She looked as though she might cry. It felt good.

“What... what do you think is wrong with me?” she asked.

“Delusional parasitosis. According to Google,” he said. “It’s like when someone gets obsessed that something’s biting them when there’s nothing there.”

Panic and despair contorted Karen’s face.

“To be fair, it’s not uncommon, in women,” Bob said. “The patient becomes convinced there are insects crawling over their skin. The patient becomes obsessed with inspecting their home for evidence but there’s nothing there.”

He watched her grow pale and felt a rising sense of intense excitement at his newfound power.

“Occasionally the patient believes they can see insects that aren’t there.” He got into his stride. “They drive themselves insane, picking at their skin to try and fish out the creatures crawling beneath it.”

Over the next few days Bob enjoyed sitting in his van, parked discreetly just out of sight of Karen’s house in a side road, waiting for her to leave or return. She had grown even thinner, and haunted-looking. He felt triumphant when she stopped to scratch at her ankles, to pick at her skin. He could see how this syndrome he’d told her about was eating away at her mind, at her sense of sanity.

Bob went to bed that night full of a sense of triumph. He felt more elated than he would have done had he actually seduced Karen Mayhew! This was a more enduring sensation, of triumph, of achievement, of pride in his quick-wittedness and of proving his worth to the people who had belittled him in the past. It made him quite giddy with pleasure to think of Karen Mayhew’s contorted face. Her tortured mind.

He pulled the covers up over his naked body.

He began to fall into a shallow sleep and then he jerked awake.

His shins were itching.

No, not just his shins. His thighs, his buttocks. There were things crawling all over him, he could feel them.

It was impossible; he was a pest controller He would never allow fleas in his house, he would never, ever, have bedbugs. He was scrupulous.

Bob had never had pets, not since Karen Mayhew’s cat scratched him all those years ago — that had put him off for life. He was careful about cleaning, used every repellent he had ever advised his clients to invest in.

He got up, threw back the bedclothes, inspected the sheets for bugs. There was nothing. No sign of an infestation. No insects. No fleas. But something was biting him. And over the following days whatever it was continued to bite him. He itched like a crazy person. He inspected his sheets, he vacuumed, he boiled his bedclothes, he sprayed flea spray, he used bedbug powder.

Nothing worked.

He was in despair.

Bob Rapper, Pest Zapper began to miss work appointments in order to inspect his own floor with his magnifying glass for evidence of the fleas that were jumping all over him, biting him, making him itch frenetically. He dug at his skin with his fingernails, trying to unearth the parasites he knew were eating away at him. He grew pale and exhausted. His nights were disrupted by the itching. He made welts in his own skin, picking at it relentlessly.

A horrible realization dawned on him.

He had caught delusional parasitosis from Karen Mayhew. And it was as bad as really being bitten.

Worse!

It was impossible. You didn’t catch a psychosomatic illness. And anyway, she had never had it.

Her fleas had been real, visible, jumping. They were everywhere. And he had never treated them. When he had asked her to leave the house he had taken the opportunity to rummage through her drawers, watch the fleas jump all over the slick, expensive clothes. He had not, not once, used spray on them.

But in his house there really were no fleas, no bedbugs, no vermin; there was nothing.

Over on the other side of the neighbourhood Karen Mayhew put away the tin of flea spray she’d bought at the vet’s and used herself. The fleas had gone the minute she decided to take matters into her own hands. She’d recognized the scars on the pest controller’s arms the fourth time he’d come, when he’d rolled up his sleeves to “spray” her house. Thin raised lines her cat had made all those years ago. That was when she knew he was Robert Brown. The boy — now man — who had pestered her relentlessly, threatening her, frightening her for refusing to go out with him. Driving her into such a state of terror she almost stopped leaving her home.

It all fell into place.

She coolly got into her little shiny Fiat. Drove down to the “joke shop” she had gone to as a child with her friends, where they sold fake cigarets and whoopee cushions and ink sweets. She bought a tin of itching powder. She crept into Robert’s garden (she remembered where he lived) through a hole in his hedge, where his washing hung limply on his washing line. She sprinkled the powder liberally over his pajamas, his sheets, his saggy underpants, his graying white T-shirts.

And then she settled back in her flea-free home to observe how imaginary pests could drive a real pest out of his mind.

© 2017 by Penny Hancock