Moggerhanger

Chapter Eighteen

Dismal’s big anxious eyes told me at five o’clock what he wanted, so I helped him into the bath and ordered him to do it there, me showering the flow down as it came out. I slept on till he licked my face with his curried tongue at half past seven, indicating he wanted to do something the bath hadn’t been designed to take away so easily, so I hurriedly dressed and led him downstairs, thinking him more trouble than in the days when I had a car full of kids.

As I sat down for breakfast my neighbours from hell came in, fresh faced and looking years younger, eager for life on the road. I’d never seen anyone eat such big breakfasts with one hand, each holding that of the other. Dismal reconnoitered his plate on the floor, and began with a slice of fried bread.

“It was so kind of you,” Edna said to me between mouthfuls, “to suggest we stay the night here.”

“It was.” George stuffed his mouth with shavings of black pudding. “I slept like a top. And so did you, didn’t you, dearest?”

I waited for blushes, but none came. “I’m so glad we decided to go away together, George.”

“It was the only thing we could do, darling. It was destiny, And we finally did it, after all our talking about it. I’m proud of you.”

She almost cried with gratitude at his romantic praise. “And I’m proud of you as well, my love. We’ve come through, haven’t we?”

“We have. It’s been hell for both of us, these last few weeks”—which I could well believe, after last night.

“Never mind, George, it’s over now, and our life together is just beginning.”

“I know it is, my own sweet pet.” He stopped her hand lifting a piece of bacon. “Things will never be the same for us again.”

“You’re right, George. I couldn’t bear going back to my previous life with Willy.”

“You won’t have to, darling. We’ll finish our breakfast, and then be off. It’ll be so good in Wales. The two of us can be really alone at last.”

I was facing the door, so noticed him first, and wondered how much he had heard of their sloppy badinage. He was short and stout, with thin black hair, glittery blue eyes, and lips that trembled slightly. The waistcoat of his navy blue suit had two top buttons undone, as if he had dressed in a hurry. Even someone as occasionally obtuse as me didn’t have to wonder who he was.

Edna was so shocked on spotting him that the scream wouldn’t come out of her open mouth. I didn’t think Willy (for it was none but he) had planned to find them here. At home he’d looked up clues as to where they might have scarpered and, deciding it must be to Wales (though from what evidence I knew not), he set out after them. No doubt he had been up all night, until certain vindictive shades of his intuition came clear. He then left, without breakfast, and on reaching Blackchapel thought food might be useful before any fatal encounter along the road. All I knew was that motoring atlases have a lot to answer for.

George stood, even more amazed than Edna, and the rubbery fried egg halfway out of his mouth was snapped neatly in two by an uppercut from Willy the human canonball.

It was the only blow he landed, because George, riled at losing half the egg from the jolt to his jaw, kicked Willy so decisively in the shins that he crumpled, and before reaching the floor George got him by the scruff, and dragged him into the backyard. The landlady came in to ask, perhaps, what it was about the breakfast that her guests didn’t like, and I gloated at her being in some way paid out for having billetted the pair next to me all night.

I left the rest of my breakfast to Dismal, and went outside, though didn’t suppose there would be much more fun before Willy was sent packing.

He was leaning against what had been a stable door, lip bleeding from where George had given him another, with his fist, for the loosening of a tooth from that first bang. He held him by the shoulder, and a smarter bit of barefaced lying I had never heard: “Stop being a bloody fool. I look on Edna as my sister. We had separate rooms last night, and it’ll go on like that. I’m taking her for a little holiday, and paying for it from five hundred I won on the lottery. I thought she’d earned it, working all day at that supermarket checkout. She’ll be back with you in a fortnight, so let’s have no more fuss.”

I admired his patter, but Willy cried: “I can’t believe that.”

“You’ve got no option. I can only promise she’ll be back soon enough.”

Having a fist as big as George’s in front of his nose, Willy would have to believe all that was said, but I detected something strange about his tone: “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure I’m sure.”

“That’s all right, then. I’ll just go home and wait.”

“Do, there’s a good lad.”

Willy walked out of the yard, while George went back to console Edna for the interruption, telling her they could now continue their travels without further interference.

I sensed, by the look on Willy’s smug phizzog, that he could be as sly as the next man, and could dissimulate as vividly as George who, like all first rate liars, was unable to imagine others could pull better ones, which fact I’d been aware of from early enough in my life.

When Willy didn’t return to the bar for breakfast, which seemed strange, I followed him onto the street, where George’s car was primed and ready to take off. From the doorway I saw Willy lift a stubby little black handled ex-army clasp knife from his coat pocket and, with a murderous grin, slowly pull out the spike, which was not on this occasion intended to winkle a stone from the shoe of a lame cavalry horse. Seeing him about to ram it into one of the tyres, I went across the pavement and knocked him aside. “If you do that I’ll call the cops.”

I moved back, out of fear that he would come for me, because his eyes said he would very much like to, in which case he wouldn’t have got off so lightly as he had with George. He stood a moment wondering what to do and then, closing the knife so that it took on the weight and bluntness of a knuckleduster, hit both headlamps so hard that plexiglass went showering over the tarmac. George won’t be doing any night driving for a while, I thought, which will please Edna at least.

He drove fast towards Wales in his Ford Escort, to lay I supposed so many ambushes as to drive George and Edna spinning off their trollies, at the last one making sure to off road their car and kill them. The mischief he must have had in mind didn’t bear thinking about.

George came out of the gateway with a suitcase. “Which way did the crazy bastard go?” The drama was too good to end, so I pointed the way, in the opposite direction. “Thank God for that. He’s a real bloody pest. Just because I’ve run off with his wife. Some men don’t know how lucky they are.”

“Do you do this sort of thing often?” I genuinely wanted to know.

He weighed the question. “Let’s say I don’t make a habit of it.”

“I’m a happily married man,” I said, “so I can’t entirely approve of such behaviour.”

He stowed his suitcase into the boot, moving a plastic bucket and spade for a better fit. “I’m married as well. Or I was until last night. The wife thinks I’ve gone to London to see a pal I knew in the army.”

“What foreigners can’t realise,” I said, “is that we English are the most romantic people in the world. All the same, your situation sounds a real how-do-you-do.”

He clapped the boot shut. “Oh, it is, in more ways than you might think. You wouldn’t believe half if I told you. But where would we be without that sort of thing?”

Going to the front of his car, he saw the smashed headlamps, his scream of distress even waking the Indian waiters across the road. “Look at what the spiteful fucker’s done to my lights!”

“At least I stopped him slashing the tyres. He’d have done the spare one as well if I hadn’t.”

“I’ll murder the short-arsed bastard.” He jumped up and down. “Which way did you say he went?”

“I’m not too sure. My sight isn’t at its best in the morning.”

His eyes began to spin, and I thought such uncertainty served him right. “I’ll kick him to death at least when I get hold of him, wherever he is.” Edna came onto the pavement, features distorted from crying. “I’ve settled the bill, George.”

He opened the car door. “Thank you, my darling. You can be sure I’ll pay you back to the last penny, as soon as my ship comes in.”

I could hardly stop my cheeks twitching every time one of them opened their mouth.

“I know you will, George. But I only hope they don’t find the money’s gone before you do.”

I’d had enough. She had robbed the till. I didn’t want to know anymore, and luckily didn’t have to as they ripped away north in their brand new Rover. If the purloined money had paid for that as well did they have sufficient cash left to get the headlamps mended?

Willy was bound to be waiting for them on a lonely and curving stretch of the road, where they wouldn’t expect him to be, so I thought of phoning Independent Television and putting them onto the best programme ever. They could send a van and crew after George and Edna, with a microphone and photography crow’s-nest to record their doings in sound and picture, in bed and out, intercut with sensational background material from their past, not to mention profiles of their families. Ratings would clock a hundred, all other companies swept off the air.

Dismal had finished everything on the plates and whatever was on the floor, which included the half egg uppercutted from George’s jaws. He now stood on hind legs at the table, more from principle than hunger, unrolling his large flexible tongue to have a go at the sugar.

I turned south from Oswestry, the green hills of Wales lit by the sun as on a land of paradise. With Dismal again riding shotgun, I kept the speed down, to observe and enjoy. The fields were speckled with sheep, and their spritely offspring put me in mind of a meal.

At a hotel in the middle of a market town I was served with a platter of roast lamb, and a pint of superb Welsh bitter. All but a spoonful of my sickly trifle went to Dismal. Half a dozen youngish men, heads shaved and with moustaches, gathered near the bar after their lunch at a long table. Perhaps they were salesmen, though Dismal sniffed around their turn ups as if they peddled drugs. A slightly older man, taking cigar smoke deeply in as he talked to the others, looked happier when I called Dismal away, as if he thought we might be coppers’ narks.

My last trip to Peppercorn Cottage had been in rain and darkness, piloting Moggerhanger’s Rolls, and only sustained navigational know-how had got me on target. Now it was daylight and good weather, yet the place still wasn’t easy to find, since I was approaching from a different direction.

Nevertheless, instinct took over, and on a narrow road south of the town I picked up recognisable landmarks, a grey stone farmhouse, a wood, a phone box, and a steep dip over a stream. At the top of a hill I forked onto a bridleway, two strips of concrete, tall fresh grass in between brushing the bottom of the car. Space by an uninhabited house was large enough for me to point the snout back to the paved road, necessary because driving to the door of Peppercorn Cottage could get me stuck in a muddy patch by the stream.

Ordering Dismal to stay close, I opened the gate across the lane, clattered it shut behind and, luger in one hand and air pistol primed in the other, I walked by the hedgerow so as to be invisible to anyone keeping a lookout.

During our walk down the more or less straight lane for about a kilometre, grey clouds let fall drops of water, as if to repeat the foul weather of my first visit. Dismal, hating wetness of any sort, looked forlornly back to the all-round comfort of the car, but I gave a stern gaze and waved him on. A slug from my air pistol missed a fat wood pigeon that lifted in front as we came to the stream, the shower pattering its flowing surface which provided drinking water for cooking and cleaning.

The house, if such it could be called, was built from local stone, and weathered by several hundred years of rain, not to mention rotting autumn leaves that never dried. It was so concealed against a bank just off the lane that even a happy hiker trudging along the bridlepath would pass without knowing it was there. I’d used the place and its glum surroundings in the novel I had dashed off for Blaskin that won him the Windrush Prize.

A whiff of smoke came out of the chimney, and between house and stream was a collapsed deckchair with torn canvas, bits of dinner plate, and a couple of rusty tins. Bending low under the windows to reach the door unobserved, I took the key from my pocket, only to find the lock already hanging from its screws, telling that somebody was in the house.

My boot hit the wood, and Dismal’s leap reminded me he’d once worked for the police. Moggerhanger’s daughter Polly had gone out with a detective so that her father could get gen on attitudes to drugs in the Force, and to sound him out for collaboration, and on her cooing over Dismal and patting him on the arse, the tec made her a present of him, saying he was useless anyway. Polly had soon tired of my favourite dog, and by a chain of circumstances he had come down to me.

No one was in the kitchen-living room which, since my last stay, looked as if Moggerhanger had spent a bit to make it more habitable, on the assumption I supposed that no matter how fearless his minions were on the streets of London they couldn’t be expected to put up with a solitude that reminded them too much of durance vile.

Whoever had been there lately couldn’t have been very tidy, because several fag ends were littered around the fireplace. A pair of smouldering socks with the toes burnt away hung from a piece of stick.

The main improvement to the house was that electricity had been put in, a welcome change to storm lamps and candles. The walls of the room had been plastered and painted white, giving a more civilised aspect as opposed to the previous raw surface, and a butane gas bottle for cooking stood by the sink. Also a telephone had been installed, and I wondered whether whoever had snapped off the lock had passed a long day making calls to his seven brothers in different sheep-shagging stations of the Australian Outback, in which case Moggerhanger would have kittens when it came to paying the bill.

Flicking the light switch, necessary even on a sunny day, a prime and corpulent rat gleamed at me contemptuously before pattering upstairs. Such feral tenants, smart as they were, could hardly have forced the lock, or made a fire still alive in the grate. More likely the house had been broken into by the crew of the black hatchback, either last night or this morning and, looking in, they had seen I wasn’t there, so went to search somewhere else.

I walked up the lane to the car, soaked by rain, in spite of my three hundred quid Burberry, and drove it down to the side of the house for unloading supplies. I noticed the waterbutt overflowing, so jagged a length of stick up the pipe, till liberated water gushed over the slimy cobbles into the stream where it belonged.

All stores stowed, Dismal’s tongue hung out at the sight of three spoons going into the pot. I made tea and, on throwing him a couple of cakes, heard a long human yawn from upstairs, and the thump of somebody’s feet as he got out of bed. I had been careless in not searching every room, but the house had felt empty, and no car had been parked nearby.

Signalling Dismal for silence, I stood with the air pistol pointing at the wooden stairs. More mumbled words reminded me that the definition of a cottage was that you can hear sounds from every nook and cranny between its four walls. Whoever he was hadn’t realised it was the whistling kettle that woke him from a dream about childhood holidays on a steam train.

“Oh dear,” I heard. “Oh dear me.” He stretched, and shuffled across the room above, sounding weak and sleepy, though I was taking no chances. Neither was Dismal, who lay like a giant spring, a twitch now and again riding across his back.

The door at the top of the stairs opened, and he came down with hands to his eyes, a tallish well set man who I hoped didn’t have a weak heart, because at the bottom step the Hound of the Baskervilles roared across the room, knocking him arse over tit to the floor. His gurgling cry signified that a dream had turned into his worst nightmare. I kept the pistol levelled. “Dismal, come off him. You’ve eaten enough today already.”

The man’s face, not very clean, turned pale from fright. Even without Dismal his pathetic expression might have been normal, his face long in more ways than one. I placed him in his fifties, though shaving off the grey stubble could have marked him as younger. “Who the fuck are you?” I snapped.

He began to cry, which so disturbed me in a grown man I wanted to give him a punch in the head so that he would have something to cry for. “I’m the caretaker.”

“You lying pillock. There’s no such person. Show me your permit.”

He stood. “Will you hold that dog back?”

“Not unless you show proof of who you are, otherwise I’ll tell him to eat you, though I’m not sure he’d enjoy it. What are you doing here?”

He wiped his eyes with a piece of rag, and stopped blubbing, as good a piece of acting as I’d ever seen. “I’m a bloke on the tramp,” he said. “I stumbled across this place last night on my way north. I was done in, and thought I’d have a day or two’s rest.”

“So you broke the lock to get in? I’ll have the police on you, for trespassing and criminal damage.”

“It wasn’t me,” he whined. “I found it like that.”

He had no provincial accent, so could have been educated, unless he’d taught himself by listening to the BBC, though you could hardly rely on that these days. I lowered the gun. “I stand no nonsense. If you don’t give me any aggro you might be all right.” I was angry at reacting so violently to a harmless down and out. “Sit down, and tell me about yourself.”

With every bone shaking he lowered himself into a chair. Rain flailed at the window, chilling the room. I lit paper and wood in the fireplace but the homely blaze didn’t cure the damp. He looked uneasily at the worsening weather. “You aren’t going to throw me out in that, are you?”

I poured tea for him. “No, I’ll wait till there’s two feet of snow.”

This brought a smile, from a long way down in his body. “At least you have a sense of humour.”

“Don’t bank on that.” I sometimes thought a sense of humour was my worst failing, but I let him eat a cake, and drink his tea. Dismal growled as if the man was scoffing what was rightfully his. “You’d better start by telling me your name.”

From across the hearth he put a hand forward to be shaken. His nails were in mourning, but the grip was firm, his gesture friendly. I was ready nevertheless with fist and boot should he make a dodgy move, but I gave him a cigar, as if about to interrogate a prisoner of war, deciding that the kinder he was treated the sooner I’d get the truth.

“You’re very hospitable,” he said, “and I appreciate that. My name’s Peter Crimple.” He picked a twig from the fire to light up. “Five years ago I was an engineering supervisor, and was made redundant. Don’t ask what job that is. I hardly knew myself, and in any case it would be too complicated to explain, which I’ve forgotten how to do, anyway. The firm gave me a fairly golden handshake, which was nice of them, because I read it went bust six months later. I handed the money to my wife, though the house was already paid for, and our two girls married. I didn’t want to stay married. Well, I wouldn’t, would I? What man would? I’d had more than enough, so told my wife I was going out one morning to buy cigarettes, and didn’t go back. I haven’t seen her since. Two years ago I picked up a Big Issue on a bus and saw my photo. Underneath was a message from her begging me to get in touch, but I didn’t. Being on the road was punishment enough for doing what I’d done. At least it gives me nothing to feel guilty about, but I’ll never settle down again. I like walking about the country with a rucksack, because it’s amazing how kind people can be to a middle-aged chap like me. Mind you, I try not to look the hippy sort. Many’s the time I’ve been dropped a pound or two, after getting into conversation, or I’ve been invited into a café for a cup of tea. Sometimes I’ll call at a farm and ask if they’ve got any casual work, but they never have. I’ve often been given the leftovers from a meal and invited to sleep in a barn, though. Maybe people think that there for the Grace of God go I. My health’s improved a lot since I started on my travels. I used to have all sorts of aches and pains at work, and many a time I was so tired my head would droop on the desk and I would go half to sleep. That doesn’t happen anymore. Oh, I know you caught me having a nap upstairs, but no man’s perfect. Who could resist the sight of a bed? But it was too damp and cold to be comfortable.”

“So that’s your story?” I said, after he’d kept schtum for a couple of minutes. I didn’t believe a word of his rigmarole, and knew it was going to be difficult to get the truth out of a bloke who had been provided with such a good script. It would be hard enough to get the truth out of myself if ever I wanted to, in which case how can you trust somebody to tell the truth to you? Yet not being able to trust yourself might mean you could trust yourself absolutely, since you didn’t believe — or admit to believing — that there was anything to trust in you. All I knew was that every case was different, so who better than yourself therefore to know exactly where your untrustworthiness lay? It didn’t matter whether or not you knew yourself in the end if you knew that.

So I did know that all he had told me had been written specially for him, and he’d rehearsed it over and over again, probably in front of a full-length mirror. The question was, who had put him up to it? If he was an out-of-work actor who could blame him for taking on the role? Someone I knew who was acquainted with quite a few actors used them to flesh out the more sensational parts of his documentaries, and I wanted Mr so-called Peter Crimple to come out with the name before I rammed it in one piece down his throat.

“And you,” he said hopefully, “what’s your story?”

“I don’t have one, at least not for you. Since you’re in my house it’s up to you to tell me one, and you have, but I don’t believe any of it.”

He looked into his empty tea cup, hoping I would refill it. I didn’t. “During all my married life,” he said, his tone saddened by my neglect, “I was a devil to my children, and a demon to my wife. Is that the sort of truth you want?”

“How come she sent your mugshot to the Big Issue, then?”

“She wanted me back. You always miss whatever you’ve got used to. No matter how bad things were, as time goes on it gets to seem they weren’t all that bad.”

He really had been given a good script, though I would have expected no less from Wayland Smith, or Margery Doldrum. “This cottage is part of Lord Moggerhanger’s estate,” I said, “and I’m his steward, checking up on his properties around the country. If he walked in now and assumed it was you who broke the door lock he would hold your head under the water in the stream till even the minnows had to dart away at the horrified look on your face as you were dying. In other words, he’d drown you without a thought, just for a laugh.” Dismal’s tail thumped the floor, sensing my impatience. “All I know is you’re giving me the runaround, and I like it less and less.”

From looking obstinate and mardy he turned sarcastic: “I just don’t see how it can be that you and I have acquaintances in common.”

I put more wood on the fire. “You wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. You couldn’t have stumbled on this place by accident. Moggerhanger told me that if I found anyone here they had to be from the Green Toe Gang, and I was to all but kill whoever it was.” I looked into his shifting eyes. “You’ve just eaten your execution breakfast, even though it’s teatime.”

He stood up, and ran to the stairfoot, followed by Dismal. “No, please. I don’t belong to them.”

“But you know about such a mob?”

“Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I honed my voice to razor sharp: “Sic him!”

Dismal pushed him down, sat on his legs, and stared him in the eye. “He really is partial to human beings,” I said, “and he hasn’t had a tin of dog food for a couple of hours, though I don’t suppose your flesh would taste like the finest canine caviar.”

Dismal farted so close to his face it was assumed I’d given him the nod, a slur on my eternally good nature, though I was amused at his twisted lips, as if about to throw up. “I’d be only too glad to tell you what you want to know, if I knew what it was you wanted to know.”

He had been sent on a recce to Peppercorn Cottage by someone who had been here before, and that was Wayland Smith, when he was held prisoner for a few days because Percy Blemish, the temporary caretaker, had caught him sniffing around for evidence of Moggerhanger’s drug dealings. “Listen, Sunshine, I’m losing patience. If you don’t tell me sharpish who sent you I’ll do something I won’t tell you about first. But you won’t have many teeth left by the time I’m finished.” I was silent, idled the poker in the fire and, when the tip glowed, lit another cigar. “Are you ready to talk?”

I called Dismal off, who then did what he liked best, sloping out his length before the fire. “Come back and sit down,” I said to the interloper, “but no more nonsense. Tell me what I want to know.”

I felt like floorclothing the smile off his mug when he said: “I was sent up here by a friend of mine called Wayland Smith. He’d heard of a merger between Lord Moggerhanger and the Green Toe Gang, who deal mostly with the drug routes of the Continent. Moggerhanger wants to get in on it.”

This was no surprise. “When did you hear that?”

“A few weeks ago. Wayland told me.”

It was before I set out on my errand to Greece, Moggerhanger wanting to find out how the Green Toe Gang would deal with me. Maybe he now considered them so incompetent in their endeavours that he would be less likely to seek a merger, no matter what Wayland Smith assumed. “So he sent you up here to look for evidence? There isn’t any. Tell him that. And tell him as well that he’s a right prick, with his investigative journalism, as he calls it. He’s a little boy with a toy he can’t let go of, only it’s not a toy, and if he doesn’t take his snipe nose out of things it’ll blow up in his smarmy mug. If I was you I wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He only wants everybody off drugs so’s he can feed them the opium of communism. But you can tell him from me that the only place he’ll get the gen on the Green Toe Gang will be in Amsterdam. As for Moggerhanger, tell him to try his luck at Spleen Manor in Yorkshire. I’m not sure he knows about that place, but I don’t mind if you put him in the picture, because if he goes there he’ll come away with his head on back to front. Now get out of this cottage, before I do you in.”

He looked suitably appalled: “I’ll tell Wayland what you said. But I can’t go out in this rain, can I? It’s getting dark as well.”

“I didn’t suppose you came without an umbrella and an overcoat, so get your gear from upstairs, and be out in five minutes. Tell Wayland Smith I don’t reckon much of the script he made you learn. I could have written a much better one myself. And tell him as well I’ll punch his commissar clock next time I see him in The Hair of the Dog.”

He trod downstairs clad for the weather, and I watched him out of the door, Dismal’s tail wagging with pleasure to see him go. But he came back half a minute later because the rain was belting down: “Can I call a taxi? I have the number.”

“So that was how you got here? All right, but have him meet you at the paved road,” I said as he dialled. “You’ll be just in time if you leave now.” I couldn’t wait to get shot of the fool, all but pushing him out this time, sorry to see the rain lessening slightly as I closed the door after him. A rat had come out of its hole, maybe to see him off, and the shot from my air pistol that sent it squeaking away fetched a neat hole in the plaster.

As I prepared a supper of sausages, bacon, beans and fried bread, Dismal nuzzled my ankles, and salivated at smells that cottages were built for. The rain sluiced down, and though increasing the water supply — as if I needed it — it would suitably soak daft Peter on his traipse to the taxi. Better still, I thought, if he disappeared without trace crossing the bog at the bottom of the lane.

I put a bowl of tea on the floor for Dismal, and half a dozen chocolate biscuits as his aperitif. Though he hadn’t so far saved my life he had sometimes guarded my sanity, so had to be rewarded with the best treatment. After our feed I went upstairs, and didn’t much like finding both beds covered with multicoloured rags as if half a ton of Smarties had been poured from an invisible chute in the ceiling. I heaped them into a corner, deciding to bed down by the fire, and not even look into the smaller room that the shepherd’s eight children must have slept in a hundred years ago.

The noise of the telephone was a shock, and I let it ring, assuming it couldn’t have anything to do with me. But who was whoever it was trying to get in touch with? I worried for a moment, to think anyone imagined there could be anyone here to speak to. I would answer if it went three times, but it didn’t, so I sat by the fire with Dismal, satisfying my intellectual requirements with a Sidney Blood called The Morbid Cellar, recognising the pen of Gilbert Blaskin in the first chapter, others interspersed by less literate ramblings from Bill Straw, and a few parts written by myself. Neither Kenny Dukes, nor any other Sidney Blood aficionado would spot the different styles as they lapped it up. I threw the rubbishy tome into the fire, which almost put it out.

Then I took up one which I could tell had been scribed by Ronald Delphick, and had to read the first chapter twice before getting the drift of his prose, plain in one way, till I sensed a hidden meaning or message and, pulling a sheet of paper from the shelf, and taking out a fancy ballpoint that Frances had given me as a birthday present, I toyed with the first letter of every second word, stringing them out in such a way that they began to make sense. They told me something about Delphick which he must have thought no one would ever be able to fathom but which I, my head thrown back for a big laugh, would one day be able to use against him.

I was shocked out of my intellectual effort by the phone ringing again, Dismal’s big intimidating eyes asking me to answer it in case whoever called might give notice of a hamper to be delivered tomorrow from Harrod’s, but I threw him a biscuit and told him it was no concern of his.

When I suggested another fry up he almost knocked my chair over in a hurry to get at the pan. It was nearly midnight, but we glutted ourselves, the room dim with the homely miasma of bacon and toast. I wondered how long I’d be in residence, thought it could even be weeks, in which case I’d be dragging logs in for the fire, and having the gas bottle changed, though in summer the place would still be damp, set as it was between hillsides and a stream outside the door.

Yet the Robinson Crusoe life felt so congenial at the moment I might never want to leave. The thumping rain made a comforting note against the running of the stream. I killed the first of the summer flies (on the white wall) that was big enough to be the last of the previous summer’s. Everything in order, I thought we’d better bed down, in preparation for what tomorrow might bring. There was no toilet in the place, so I stood on the doorstep with the torch, and pushed Dismal into the murk for the same purpose.

I put down two mattresses, laid out so that should any marauder burst in I would have the loaded air pistol close by, or the threatening luger at the ready. With the drumming of rain and the rush of water from the stream there was little hope of hearing anyone approaching the house, which I considered a black mark to Moggerhanger. Vulnerability made it sensible to be on guard, even if only against the rats, who always came out at night. I told Dismal to settle down, which he did, by taking the place closest to the fire.

I was disturbed at two o’clock by him shaking a rat and throwing it disgustedly across the room. When one ran over my chest a shot from the pistol plugged another hole in the wall. At half past seven, after little sleep, I dressed and cooked breakfast. Rain still drummed down, so it was hard to know what day it was, or the date, and I regretted not having an Old Moore’s Almanack for a clue.

Dismal ate more of everything than I did, indicating there would soon be a need for reforagement. He was well enough to work a treadmill pumping water up from the stream, but I had to make do with him as an interested spectator while I washed the kitchen table, took the flocky mattresses back upstairs, swept the floor, and got sufficient grime off the windows to see outside. Finding a tool box, I mended the door lock, so that only my key could open it. As recompense for all my domestic work the rain stopped, and though the sun came out not much of it penetrated the cottage, the wooded bank across the stream being too steep to let it. When I pulled in a few logs to dry by the fire the place steamed up so much we were driven outside, and I noticed a small khaki coloured van parked at the top of the lane. Through my binoculars I made out a tubby little man walking down the track with a blue plastic bucket which, when he came up to me, I saw was brimming with green crystals. He put it down, and took off his cap: “I should have been here three days ago, but we’ve been so rushed. The little devils really get going in the spring. So many houses are infested.”

I looped a hand around Dismal’s collar, his deep throated bark signalling that he didn’t want anyone coming into the house to eat our food. “Who are you?”

“I’m the rodent eliminator, from the council. Somebody phoned from London a week ago and booked me to come and do Peppercorn Cottage.”

Maybe Kenny Dukes had complained, and Moggerhanger had decided to do something about it, so I didn’t want to put him off. “You’re none too soon. Come inside, and look around.”

“I smell ’em,” he said in the kitchen. “It fair blocks my nose. Wicked pong. Always gets me going.” His piggy little eyes stared at places I’d never thought of looking at. He went upstairs and downstairs, to every cranny and corner, bent double at times to set little heaps of green crystals that I supposed he didn’t want to carry back up the hill. I warned Dismal away in case he thought to give them a lick. Twenty minutes of hard work brought blobs of sweat from the man’s bald head. I asked if he would like a cup of coffee.

“If you’ve got sugar to go with it. The last place I went to didn’t have any, so I had to say no. Too posh, I suppose.”

I came from the stream with a full kettle, and lit the gas. “You’ve done a good job.”

“Have to, don’t I? I hate rats. Anyway, it’s my life’s work.”

I offered a cigarette. He’d earned it. “You wouldn’t have a job if there weren’t any, though, would you?”

“That’s why I hate ’em. I kill all I can, but there’s always more. If I killed every last one I could take early retirement, but the more I kill the more there are. I kill thousands and thousands of the little swine, though some aren’t so little. I once saw one as big as a tomcat, and had to club it to death. It was so fat it couldn’t run. I often wonder if somebody isn’t breeding them and feeding them just to make my life harder. I was told at the office this morning that six more houses had phoned yesterday. It’s a losing battle, but I’ve got to keep on keeping on, haven’t I?”

I stirred six spoons of sugar into his coffee. “But if you left them alone maybe they would die anyway.”

“Then I’d be out of employment, wouldn’t I?”

His entertaining chat could only stop me going mad in such an isolated place, but I wondered whether the green crystals weren’t another form of Dolly Mixtures, and that the rats would breed like multiplication tables on eating them after he had gone. “Are you sure these crystals will kill them?”

He reached for more sugar. “In agony. In three days they’ll all be dead. Mark my words.”

“What am I supposed to do with the corpses?”

He showed his sense of humour. “A lot of people ask that. You could sling them in the dustbin, but if you feel sorry for them you can lay out a cemetery of little white crosses in your garden.” He winked. “Look very fine, it will.”

“I’ll have to think about that.”

“You won’t have much time. Once they nibble the crystals they won’t stand a chance. As you see, I’ve put ample portions down.” He gave a wicked laugh. “They’ll die right enough.”

“But what if those who aren’t dying see the corpses of those who have gone before, and put two and two together, and think it might be a good thing not to touch the crystals with the rat equivalent of a barge pole? For example, what if one of those watching with its beady little eyes is a comely lady rat about to give birth to another ten little prettily whiskered baby rats? I do hear that rats are particularly intelligent creatures, as well as prolific in matters of reproduction.”

He sighed. “There you have me. That might be the answer. I wonder myself sometimes. But most do die. They must, mustn’t they? Poison mows the bleeder down a bit, don’t it?”

“I suppose it would be a shame if they weren’t attracted to so many pyramids of delicious looking crystals. But what I’d like to know is, how did you land a job like this? I mean, how does one become a rodent officer? Do you have to sit a City and Guilds exam?” I pushed the pot forward. “Have some more coffee.”

“I bloody nearly had to. It wasn’t easy to qualify, though it’s funny you ask, because you’re the first one as ever did, so I appreciate your curiosity. Yes, I will have another coffee. The thing is I’ve always hated rats, ever since I got bitten in the pram when I was two. My screams were so loud they stopped it moving, so my father had time to kill it with the hard end of a sweeping brush. I suppose if a kid got bitten by a rat these days a social worker would be told to give the little mite some counselling. But not then they didn’t. Them days was different. Life was hard. Not like now, when everybody has it soft. They sent children out to work at fifteen in those days. When I left school I didn’t know what I wanted to be. Like most kids of fifteen I didn’t want to do anything. Schooldays were finished, so I just expected to put my feet up, didn’t I?”

I invited him to sit down. “We all did. We still do.”

“I wanted to go around with my mates, because they didn’t want to work either, not for a few measly quid a week, anyway. I was sitting in front of the telly one evening when the old man came in all sweating from the factory, and things took a nasty turn when I said I didn’t want to go to work. He pulled me to my feet, and punched me right in the face, just like that, a real blinder, no messing. ‘If you haven’t got a job by tomorrow’, he said, ‘you’ll get two of them.’

“So I got a job, didn’t I? It was stacking boxes in a warehouse. I hated it for months, till I started going out with a girl, then I didn’t care. I changed jobs often, but at least I was bringing in money, which satisfied the old man. You have to learn the hard way, don’t you? I know I did, though in the end it didn’t do me any harm. Now I’ve got two lads of my own, both at university.”

I was surprised. “University?”

He smiled. “I don’t know why you say it like that. They’re doing art and sociology. Well, I don’t want them to work like I have to work, do I? I encouraged them to stay at school, which took some doing, let me tell you, because they just wanted to get out and scrounge some money. My father, the worst rat I know, by the way, thought I was daft, letting them go to university, but I didn’t want to force my kids out to work at fifteen, did I? I wanted my sons to get on in the world, so that they’ll have cushy jobs when they qualify.”

“They’ll be set up forever,” I put in.

“And so they should be. But you asked me how I got into rats. When I was twenty I met the girl of my life. Well, it would have to start like that, wouldn’t it? We got married, so I had to find a steady job. I got one with the council, and never looked back. It was slow promotion through the sanitation department, mind you, but one day the supervisor asked if I’d like to transfer to pest control. I wanted to know what sort of pests he had in mind, and when he told me it was rats I nearly fainted, right there in front of him, because the time when I’d been bitten by one as a kid came rushing back, the first time it ever had, and from the feeling of hatred I knew that the job was for me, so I had the presence of mind to tell him that rats was right up my street. You might not believe this, but from that moment I never looked back. I even went out and bought a new cap, a peaked one, with braid around the front. The chap who’d already done rats for ten years took me under his wing and told me all I ought to know, though I learned more on my own after he retired, because he hadn’t gone into the psychological aspect at all. Now there’s a can of worms for you — though I shan’t go into it. I’ll keep to the physical, and tell you that if I kill a hundred rats at every house, taking that as a fair average, I calculate in this little notebook”—I shivered as he tapped his coat pocket — “up to this morning the total comes to getting on for four million.”

Even Dismal turned away from his sinister laugh. I couldn’t but think that his tally must err somewhat on the high side, though as long as his trade kept him from working the same mischief on human beings there wasn’t much harm in it. “That’s not a bad revenge,” I said, “for the brute that nipped you when you were a kid. It couldn’t have known what massacres it was setting off, but fair’s fair, I suppose. Would you like more coffee? I’ve got plenty of sugar.”

He put his ornate cap on, and picked up the bucket. “I can’t stay here talking all day, much as I might like to. There’s another house I’ve got to look into. The woman sounded desperate when she phoned this morning. I like to keep things in strict rotation but, all the same, it wouldn’t do to keep her waiting.”

No sooner was he out of the door than the biggest rat I’d ever seen sniffed at a mound of the deadly crystals. Hardly daring to breath, I noted the suspicion in its eyes, which changed to joy before it bounded off to tell the rest of the rat community that the toffee man had been.

I cooked a stew for lunch, throwing in all the meat and vegetables to make it last at least two days, but Dismal, the starving orphan, proved irresistible to my soft heart, and got one helping after another till every scrap had gone. It was no easy work, therefore, to make him follow me up the hill. When we came back he stood by the stream watching the water flow by, while I went inside to answer the telephone.