Pete came up with the camera. Matt quickly explained the shot. ‘You operate,’ he said. ‘I’ll feed the buggers to attract them.’
He tossed more offal into the water, a bigger piece this time, and several worms homed in on it hungrily.
Jacqui was crouching in the long grass covering the steep bank of the ditch. ‘They’re ruthless,’ she was saying. ‘Quite ruthless and vicious.’ The sunlight caught an auburn streak in her dark brown hair tumbled about her bent head. Her checked shirt had parted from the top of her jeans, revealing an expanse of white skin and the knobbles of her spine.
‘Jacqui, be careful!’ he warned her, with a sudden premonition. ‘Don’t get too close.’
‘I’m all right.’
He could hear the faint whirr of the Arri BL’s motor as Peter filmed the worms. Just to encourage them he threw in more offal. To take a couple with him he’d need a container, he thought. He looked around. There must be something among all the rubbish. An old tin, perhaps.
But the local journalist had the same idea. Before anyone could stop him, he blundered in front of Jacqui, fell to his knees right at the edge of the water and snatched at one of the worms with his bare hand. A gasp from the two kids who stood higher up the bank, watching. A curse from Pete at having his shot ruined.
Yet the idiot had succeeded. Half-lying on the bank he held the worm up triumphantly, his fingers grasping it just below the head. His laugh was a high-pitched whinny, ‘Ha! Used to tickle trout when I was a boy. The hand hath not lost its ancient cunning!’ He dropped the worm into a rusting paint can he’d placed nearby.
Jacqui lay sprawled on the grass. His sudden move had knocked her off balance; she was lucky not to have slipped down into the water. ‘You bloody fool,’ she told him, ‘charging about like that.’ She spoke quietly and intensely; her face drained of all its colour.
He ignored her, intent on fishing out a second worm. Jacqui, still on her back and still furious, flexed her leg. It was patently obvious what she was about to do. One gentle nudge with her foot would be sufficient to topple Rodney Smith into the stream among the worms.
Matt touched her arm. ‘No,’ he told her softly.
She ganced at him and he witnessed the anger melting from her face. Her expression became mischievous; her eyes twinkled, exploring his.
‘Chuck some more meat in, will you?’ Rodney Smith called over his shoulder. ‘Bit nearer the edge.’
‘If you’d only get out of the bloody way — you’re ruining the shot!’ Pete snapped at him.
‘Never mind.’ Matt tossed a handful of offal into the water. The worms were in turmoil in their eagerness to get at it. ‘Can you take him fishing the things out?’
Pete widened his shot. Again the motor whirred as Rodney Smith bent over the narrow stream at the foot of the ditch. Then he grunted, a quick sharp grunt, and pulled back.
‘U-uh, u-uh,’ he moaned in a mixture of fear and pain.
This time the worms had won. One had bitten deeply into the ball of flesh where his thumb joined his hand.
‘One all,’ came Jacqui’s voice calmly.
9
When he got home Matt found a note from Fran saying she was coming up to London to see him. Business was flourishing and she’d already received more orders than she could handle. It seemed everyone in the fashion world was fascinated by the luminous quality of the worm skins and their subtle changes of colour triggered off by variations in the light. But it was time, she suggested, they drew up a more formal agreement. She’d already had a word with a solicitor.
Helen stiffened defensively when she saw who the note was from. She read it without comment, then handed it back to him. ‘You’d better meet her,’ she said drily.
‘Come with me?’ he coaxed her. ‘Darling, this could be the opening we’ve been waiting for. We’ll be able to afford things for the cottage, and take Jenny to France, and…’
‘You go by yourself,’ Helen told him wearily. ‘She’s your partner. Your … business associate.’
‘That’s all she is!’ he replied warmly.
Helen looked at him, her eyes puckering into an expression of doubt. But she said nothing.
They met at the solicitor’s office near Wigmore Street. He was her cousin, it seemed: a fair young man, very formally dressed, with blue eyes and a slightly turned-up nose. After a few preliminaries he read out a draft agreement he’d drawn up. Fran was a tough negotiator. She hammered away at every clause, not giving an inch of ground until forced to. Matt tried to control his rising irritation. Without his worms, he reminded her, she’d get nowhere. Then she’d smile her sudden acceptance of the point, her nose would wrinkle and the tip of her tongue would appear for a split second between her lips.
In the end, when all the details were settled, she invited him to lunch in a nearby restaurant while the agreement was being typed. She’d already booked a table, she said.
‘Champagne? To celebrate?’ She turned over the pages of the wine-list. ‘Matt, our business is really taking off, do you realize that? And so far we’ve no competitors.’
She began to tell him about some of the people she’d met from the top fashion houses. Then, when the sole meunière came and she tasted it, she launched into an enthusiastic account of how she always bought fish straight off the boat at Westport, how she prepared it, and the fish parties she sometimes gave.
‘I’m glad you like fish too.’ Her eyes seemed to be exploring his face. ‘My husband didn’t. But then he was a shit.’
Matt refilled her glass, not knowing what to say.
‘I’ve a lot of faith in you, Matt. You really seem to understand about sewer worms.’ She reached out and touched his mutilated hand, then bit her lip with a quick frown and laughed. ‘If only we’d a better name for them.’
‘The kids called them “biters”.’
‘What kids?’
He told her about it; she listened, interested.
‘You talk as though they’ve some kind of intelligence,’ she commented uneasily. ‘As though they could read our minds. That local journalist — you really think they planned to bite his hand, don’t you?’
‘I imagine…’ He hesitated. ‘You can surprise them once but not twice,’ he said at last. ‘Which makes them that much more difficult to hunt.’
She shivered, and fingered the worm-skin belt she was wearing with her simple brown dress. ‘What if one day they take it into their heads to start skinning us?’
He took her hand and moved his thumb gently across her palm. ‘It won’t happen,’ he tried to reassure her.
At Television Hall later that afternoon he heard that Annie was missing. It seemed the police had been around to question the two children about the worms in the swimming pool; naturally they’d denied all knowledge, but next morning Annie had set out for school and never arrived there.
‘But kids are always running off somewhere,’ Jimmy remonstrated with him when he tried to discuss it. ‘ ’Specially when they think they’re in trouble. She’ll be picked up somewhere. Not our worry, thank God. We’ve enough on our plates.’
He paused to light a second cigarette from the stub of his first, drawing the smoke deeply into his lungs. Killing himself, Matt thought. His fists were massive, for he’d been something of a boxer in his early days, but now even the short flight of stairs up to the bar left him breathless.