‘Me? Nest door. Number 18.’
‘We can at least carry out a quick inspection, can’t we?’ she pleaded with the young man. Til sign your worksheet and take responsibility.’ i’ll have to ring the office first,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Do it from my house then,’ the worried tough told him, only slightly mollified. ‘But get a move on. Kids an’ the missus are over at her sister’s, but I’ll have to fetch’em any minute.’
With an apologetic glance in Guy’s direction Mary followed the two men into number 18.
The dead couple’s front door was still open, though the WPG had left to go into a huddle of consultation with two of her colleagues near a panda car. Guy seized the opportunity to slip inside. In the narrow hall the pungent smell of insecticide irritated his nostrils, making him sneeze. The carpets had been turned back and in several places sections of floorboards removed. In the kitchen — where the bodies had been discovered — the cupboards and all the floor-tiles had been ripped out to reveal the joists underneath. Even without stooping Guy identified the powdery frass around the flight holes.
Dead beetles lay near the bottoms of the walls, on the draining board, in the sink, around the fridge, on the window ledge…
‘Bit of a mess, don’t you think? Bit of a bloody mess?’ The detective-constable had come up behind him, walking lightly. Guy recognised him from the hospitaclass="underline" a thin, slightly angular face and a receding hairline.
‘Mr McNair, is it?’
‘That’s right, sir. I noticed you coming in here.’
When he returned to the street the pest-control men were preparing to start on number 18. Mary was chatting to the tough; he was eating out of her hand, Guy noticed. He pointed to Guy’s scars.
‘Do that, did they?’ came the inevitable question. ‘Can’t understand why something wasn’t done then, right away, instead o’ waiting all these weeks.’
The young foreman had armed himself with a crowbar. He would start, he informed them, by taking a general look at the woodwork in the kitchen and removing any skirting boards; meanwhile, everyone else should stand back to gi ve him and his assistant plenty of room.
‘This isn’t your ordinary woodworm, or your death-watch beetle,’ he warned them, undisguisedly nervous. ‘It’s a kind I’ve not come across before, but what they did to those two people next door doesn’t bear thinking of. All I hope is that they haven’t spread into this house.’
At first it seemed as though number 18 was free of them after all. Two of his men carried out the kitchen table and chairs, stacking them up in the garden. Then they moved the fridge out of the way to allow him to examine the full length of the wall at the point where it met the composition-tiled floor. Behind him stood his assistant with the spray, ready for action the moment they spotted anything moving.
Using the crowbar, he began to ease the skirting board away from the wall, but nothing came scurrying out. Not even a spider.
it could be your house is OK,’ he said, taking a breath, i don’t want to cause too much damage.’
Tuck the damage.’
The next wail was concealed behind a row of low cupboards with a sink unit set between them. They emptied out one cupboard chosen at random. Its contents were coloured plastic bowls, a couple of packets of detergent and cleaning materials, all of which they took outside. 'Flie foreman went down on his knees, bending low to peer inside, then glancing up with a confident smile as if to indicate that everything was in order. To make quite sure, he took the crowbar and gave the back of the cupboard a couple of smart taps with the curved end.
From the dull, yielding sound it made, everyone in the kitchen realised that the wood must be rotten through and through.
The crowbar fell from his hand with a clatter and he cried out — a strangled cry of fear and disgust — as he half-crawled, half-rolled away. Not quite fast enough, though. He was still on his hands and knees when the beetle appeared, its hard body gleaming regally against the dark flooring. Within a foot of the foreman’s knuckles it stopped, its claws flexing in anticipation, and there they faced each other, both briefly motionless.
It reminded Guy only too vividly of his own confrontation in the old school — how first one beetle, then a second, and a third, and a dozen more beetles came forward to observe him as a hunter might observe his prey before attacking. He could sense what the young foreman must be going through in those vital seconds; that paralysis of will that made it impossible to escape.
The man’s assistant was fumbling with the tap on the pesticide cylinder, but it was plain he was going to be too slow. At Guy’s elbow was an upturned mop, which he seized, slamming the hand-end down on the beetle’s back and grinding it against the floor till the juices squelched out of it.
‘Get to your feet, man! Quick! On your feet!’ he yelled at the foreman. He grabbed his arm to pull him up, at the same time shouting back to the assistant: ‘Start spraying, for Chrissake! What the hell are you waiting for?’
Already the poisonous acid fumes from the dead beetle were catching at his breathing. He struggled to help the dazed foreman out of the kitchen while the man with the spray directed a cloud of pesticide towards the cupboard.
‘Guy, watch your feet!’ Mary screamed the warning at him.
He glanced down in time to see a second beetle beginning to explore the edge of his shoe with its claws. His reaction was instinctive. Bringing his foot down on it with his full weight, he felt its hard shell crack under the pressure. Fresh waves of defensive odour rose from its squashed remains.
Coughing, his eyes watering, he managed to drag the young foreman out of the kitchen.
The tough was also coughing as he shoved past him. ‘Scared o’ beetles? What’s the matter with you lot?’ he was sneering as he struggled for breath. ‘Christ, what a pong! But that’s all they are — little fuckin’ beetles! Here, gimme that!’
Grabbing the spray-lance from the assistant’s hand, he stood defiantly in the middle of the kitchen directing pesticide at any beetle that ventured too near. They were emerging now on every side. Several came from the gap where the skirting board had been removed, others from behind the sink, or crawling out around the central-heating boiler, or even appearing — only God knew how— along the shelf among the pots and pans. Keeping clear of the floor, which by now was fairly soaked in pesticide, they began climbing over the walls, dropping off one by one as the fumes overcame them.
Guy left the foreman partially recovered and instructing his men to ‘get that madman out of here before he kills himselP. Mary was already outside where he found her insisting vehemently to the policewoman that the entire row should be evacuated immediately.
‘She’s right,’ Guy said. ‘If those other houses are as badly infested as these two, there could be several more people dead before morning. The question is whether the whole street shouldn’t be cleared.’
Mary frowned at him, annoyed at his interference.
‘I’m making this an official request,’ she informed the policewoman idly, ‘from the Public Health Department. Will you please call up your superintendent and tell him what’s happening here. I could go and search for a public callbox, but that would only waste precious time.’
The policewoman undipped her personal radio and went a step or two away while she contacted the station for instructions.
‘I’m not staying,’ Guy announced. ‘I’ve got an eleven-year-old daughter at home, probably alone in the house. I must make sure she’s all right.’ He paused, troubled. ‘It’s a whole new ball-game, isn’t it? Those two people in number 20, and now what we’ve just seen next door?’ ‘Beetles, Guy,’ she said with emphasis. ‘Not snakes, nor anything like them. The same this morning at the workshop — that was a tiny maggot we saw, however vicious. A grub. No snakes there either.’