He was startled. ‘Why?’
‘I like them. I like their colours.’
‘So do a lot of people,’ he replied drily. ‘Hurry up now.’
He dropped her off at the school gate, kissed her goodbye, then drove on to a Do-It-Yourself shop where he bought a length of wide-mesh metal gauze. ‘For a garden sieve,’ he explained.
The man shrugged, uninterested. ‘Just as cheap to buy one ready made.’
Back home he went down to the shed and dug out the butterfly-net someone had once given Jenny. He cut away the net and fitted a scoop of gauze in its place, threading wire through the edges to keep them together. How effective it would be he could only guess, but he put it in the car with a couple of ice-boxes and his usual gear.
Angus was expecting him at eleven o’clock, so he had still plenty of time before he must set out. Enough time to ring Fran. He sat on the stairs in the hall, looking at the phone, unable to make up his mind. It was a matter of business, he argued with himself; he needed to tell her the supply of skins was about to dry up and…
No, that wasn’t strictly true; it applied only to the sewer. There were still ditches, rivers, the Electricity Board’s pond. And if he kept the smaller worms, bred them up?
She’d be expecting a call, though. He picked up the receiver and started dialling the number. Halfway through, he stopped. Oh Christ, after last night… the whole thing with Helen had changed… only a shit could behave… But he’d started something with Fran he couldn’t easily drop. Didn’t really want to drop.
Upstairs he changed into his oldest clothes, ready for the sewers. ‘You are a shit,’ he told his image in the mirror. His reddish beard was still short but now it covered most of the scars. ‘A shit without a job.’
He went down to ring her — but left the house without doing so.
The following week, as Angus Hume stood watching the extermination squad at work in the sewers, he felt no regret that the worms were finally being flushed out and destroyed. Sure, he’d liked Matt well enough and the money for the skins had been useful, but it would be a relief not having to be constantly on his guard as he went about his daily work.
The squad, eight men dressed in heavy oilskins and gumboots, were emptying the traps they’d set the day before.
‘Good juicy meat in them things!’ the man in charge had explained cheerfully. He was a small, chirpy Cockney named Len Foster who set about his work with a minimum of fuss. ‘Soon get rid o’ your worms for you! ’Ere, ever tell your friends you got worms?’ Laugh.
Each trap, when opened, was found to be tightly packed with worms, mostly dead. It was easy to see what had happened. The first victim had been tempted in by the poisoned meat; it had died, and then itself become bait to attract more and more into the trap — all intent, as usual, on consuming their dead brother. As though they couldn’t tolerate the thought of any morsel of their own flesh falling into alien hands. It was a rum habit, and this time the exterminators had turned it against them.
A few feet away, a short, wheezy man was stooping to retrieve another trap from the effluent when four worms appeared from farther along the tunnel and homed in on him. He’d have been safe enough, Angus reckoned, if he hadn’t panicked; but he saw them coming and splashed about trying to climb out to safety. The slimy stonework was treacherous. His foot slipped and he lost his balance.
His shrieks echoed through the tunnels, setting nerves on edge. ‘Not me! Not me! Please!’
Unerringly, the worms made directly for the one exposed area of flesh — his face. They fastened on his ear, his nose, and the chubby meat of his chin.
Within seconds two of his mates had reached him, killed the predator worms and fished him out on to the side, but he was already unconscious and bleeding profusely. They carried him up to the office and applied first-aid dressings while Angus phoned for an ambulance.
Perhaps it was this incident which stimulated the worm population of the sewers into mass resistance. By the middle of the afternoon, hundreds of them filled the effluent, raising their heads to inspect the humans lined up along the sides of the tunnels, out-staring them with their hard little eyes.
‘I want every man out!’ Len Foster ordered briskly. ‘But move carefully now. Don’t go and slip into the shit.’
Cautiously, they filed out, and Angus was glad enough to go with them.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘Seems they’ve won this skirmish.’
‘Wait ’n’ see,’ Len Foster answered, making for the phone.
When the men returned to the tunnels about an hour later the worms had still not dispersed. They seemed to be standing guard, or patrolling up and down, determined not to allow any more traps to be set. Len Foster’s shouted commands bounced around the vaulted brickwork till the sounds were suddenly muffled by the roar of the half-dozen flame-throwers they’d brought down with them.
Angus watched them from the junction of three tunnels as the men walked slowly away from him, spraying the effluent with fire. The biggest of the worms was no more than two feet long, nothing like the giants Matt had described, but they shrivelled away to nothing as the flame licked them. The sickly smell of their scorched flesh mingled with the arid gases from the sewage.
‘You’ll set the whole o’ bloody London on fire, you idiots!’ Angus yelled after them, but they took no notice. He pulled on his breathing gear.
Some worms were diving beneath the surface in an attempt to escape the intense heat; some, perhaps, succeeded in escaping though most died. Angus felt no compassion for them, yet the sight of them burning triggered off deep loathing and disgust at this method of killing. Maybe it aroused in him an uneasy memory of the time he’d used a flame-thrower himself in a Kikuyu village during the Mau Mau uprising. It wasn’t a death he’d wish on anyone.
But it cleared the tunnels, no doubt about that. Len Foster came back the following week to inspect them, and there wasn’t a worm to be seen.
‘Means nothing,’ he announced with an air of authority. ‘Plenty o’ hidden corners in these sewers where they could be breeding a new generation. But this habit o’ theirs, eating their own dead — that’s where the answer lies! Think I know what to do.’
During the next few days the extermination squad released several hundred rats and mice into the sewers. Each one, Len Foster explained, carried a minute sachet of cyanide — enough to kill the worm that ate it and any others that joined in the feast.
‘These mice and rats can run into corners we can’t reach,’ he went on. ‘Even if they accidentally kill themselves licking the sachets, they’re still food for the worms. We’re lucky they’re not fussy about carrion, unlike snakes. I see you don’t believe me, Angus — but two weeks from tonight, I doubt if there’ll be a single worm left anywhere in Greater London.’
At that stage, no one realized how wrong he was.
‘Come on, you know you can’t stay there!’ Charlie looked up to see the constable staring down at him, not unkindly. ‘Move along now.’
Young enough to be me own grandson, Charlie thought as he sat up on the bench and slowly began to fold the newspapers he’d used to keep warm. P’raps he is me grandson, who can tell? What’s the point in havin’ children if they only turn out to be coppers? Much better not bother.
‘Seen you around, haven’t I?’ the young constable said. ‘Could get yourself a bed for the night, you know where to go.’
‘Can’t stand them places,’ Charlie mumbled. ‘An’ it’s a free country, ain’t it? ’Cept in them places.’
He shuffled off, glancing back every so often to check if the policeman was still standing there. The bench hadn’t been a good idea. Might have known he’d be moved. Best find that spot he’d discovered the other night.