He didn’t know what to do. With his head tilted, he could see the coil.
Foxy didn’t seem to move, but his voice was clear, soft, conversationaclass="underline" ‘Is this, young ’un, what you’re looking for?’
His hand came out and was close to Badger’s. His hips rolled and his arse shifted. His legs twisted inside the suit and his body tipped. Badger tried to stop him, to arrest the movement, and hissed for him not to move, but was ignored. Foxy rolled onto the snake. His weight pitched onto it.
‘Is this, young ’un, what you needed to find?’
Chapter 10
There was a low chuckle, no humour.
The clenched hand, three or four inches in front of Badger’s face, obliterated his view of the house. He couldn’t speak. He waited, in that moment, for Foxy’s backside to heave up in the air, the gillie suit to convulse, a scream, and then for the body to heave away and the snake’s- The chuckle became laughter.
The fist, under his eyes, opened.
The dirt was caked in the palm. Badger realised that what bound the mud, stopped it disintegrating as dust, was old blood. He thought the head was an inch long, the neck a further inch.
He couldn’t have said how long it had been since the snake was decapitated – might have been an hour or done in the night, the carcass kept for the joke to be played. The lustre had gone from the wound at the neck and the tissue had whitened. He saw, protruding from the snake’s mouth, open in death, the right fang. It would have been attempting to defend itself when it had died, and it was frozen in that last act of attempted survival. He tried to drag his face away from it, but the headset’s cable trapped him.
Foxy, deliberately, let it slip.
The snake’s head came to rest on Badger’s hands where they held the binoculars, and he felt his temper go into free-fall.
Foxy said, ‘You see, young ’un, you’re so full of cock that you needed pegging down a notch, maybe four or five. I meet too many kids who reckon they’re special and have achieved fuck-all that impresses me. I reckon then that it’s as good a time as any to peg them.’
He had never hit a man, or a child when he was at school. In the police, in the years before he had gone into surveillance, he had never operated in a public-order environment when the order was given to display the batons and break up a crowd. People in the section house, and those on the team, would have called it ‘red-mist time’, but he’d despised that type of violence. If the psychiatrist who had an overview of them and saw the croppies once a year had known he was liable to the mist, the fast breathing and the burn in his brain then, likely, he would have been pulled out of the job and sent home. Might have been told to find a dark room, lie down and stay there till his head went cold.
‘You were right for pegging, young ’un, because you have bullshit coming out of your mouth, ears and nose. When I get back I’m going to tell my Ellie about you, and we’ll have a good laugh. Her, me and a bottle. I’ll tell her what I did for a guy who thought he knew every answer to every question. Would you have wet your pants or shat in them? I’d like to know so I can tell my Ellie. You went into the reeds, down to the waterline, and I could see your boot treads when I went, where you squatted and where you washed. Some of the time you were about a yard away from where this creature was. It was asleep, and I’ll bet big money you never saw it.’
They did unarmed combat training in the team, and there was talk that they might – soon – be issued with Glock pistols. Arming them was a divisive issue among the croppies, but there was anxiety that a jihadist, in search of the key to Paradise and the beauty pageant of virgins awaiting him, might get a strop if he realised he was under observation, come after the officer and put him – the image fitted – in the orange jumpsuit, then do the video. If there was a chance to go for suicide and the virgins, or the Central Criminal Court and thirty years banged up in Belmarsh or Long Lartin, it was likely he’d go for short-term freedom at the expense of the officer’s life… But Daniel ‘Badger’ Baxter was not classified as violent, knew little about self-defence and was more likely to back off, sneak away. He felt it come to boiling point. He had about forgotten what he was there for and the purpose of the headset on his scalp.
‘It was there – where you bloody nearly stepped on it, and that’s from footmarks – and I had my old man out and was about to pee when I saw it. I took the knife out of my pocket, made sure my shadow didn’t fall on it and did it first time. I can tell you it was one hell of a strike. The little fellow never knew what hit him. One minute he’s dreaming of eating a rat and the next he’s short of a head. One stab, straight down, a bit of sawing and the head’s off. You didn’t tell me whether you wet your trousers or shat them. I’ve a good mind, young ’un, an innovative one, and I reckoned the atmosphere in our little love nest was a bit too solemn, needed lightening up.’
They said that the two basics of managing building anger were to count to ten – or fifty or a hundred – and breathe in slowly. His fist was clenched. He was not certain what sort of blow he could land in the confined space. More of a gesture, but a good one. Worth it.
‘So get off your high horse, young ’un, and stay off it. Hang around me and learn, think yourself lucky and-’
Something of a right jab. The punch only had some nine inches to travel. It would have been, if it had landed square on the cheek or on the forehead, little more than a slap, but it caught the end of Foxy’s nose, and had enough force in it to make the older man jolt. There was a moment of shock in his eyes.
The blood came, not much, a run from the left nostril through the moustache, now ragged and untrimmed, to the upper lip.
Nothing was said.
He didn’t know what he could have said.
Badger’s father sold second-hand cars… not top-of-the-range but the sort that boys bought when they had their first job and that girls shelled out for when they worked at the Royal Berkshire Hospital and there was no bus route to bring them in. Paul Baxter did tight margins, bought cheap and sold cheap, was nearly honest and kept a couple of good mechanics working for him in the repair shop round the back of the show room. There was a warranty of sorts but difficult to enforce. Most of the cars stayed on the road long enough for his father not to be embarrassed by the sale, but a few did not. He never apologised and never explained – never said how sorry he was that the carburettor had blown up on the motorway, and never explained that a nine-year-old carburettor in that model of Fiat was a driving disaster.
Like father, like son. Badger didn’t apologise for hitting Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes across the nose and making it bleed, and didn’t explain that the heat and the dehydration were wrecking him, destroying him and that snakes were bad news for him.
He had his binoculars up.
If they had been in England, and it had been witnessed, there would have been a disciplinary hearing and a kangaroo court. Foxy would have been censured for the jape with the snake and Badger would have been suspended on full pay, pending further inquiries, for striking a fellow officer. It was, actually, quite a good joke with the snake.
They settled and the silence nestled on them. A good joke, yes, but he wouldn’t say so, and Foxy wouldn’t tell him he was ‘sorry, and out of order, no offence meant’.
There would be another flashpoint. Badger did not gamble, but he rated it as a banker that they would explode again. No voices were on the headset and the thirst scratched his throat. They wouldn’t allow themselves another drink for an hour, minimum. The sweat took more moisture from his body, and the house seemed to sway in the binocular lenses. The lagoon shimmered, and his eyes hurt. He had to grind his fingernails into his palm to hold some, any, concentration.