They had read about the escaped snakes in the morning paper before leaving Brighton. On the way home they had listened to several bulletins on the car radio.
'Doubtless the media have blown it up out of all proportion.' Eversham was in the fast lane doing 95, watching his mirror in case a police car hove into view; they had experimented using helicopters to trap speeding motorists some time ago and he was on the alert for those also. With two endorsements already on his licence he could not risk a third. 'The devil of it all will be the crowds of sightseers that will converge on Stainforth. The bloody place will look like Butlin's on August Bank Holiday.'
'But there's no getting away from the fact that there are snakes on the loose around Stainforth.' Cynthia Eversham was tense, more so today than she usually was when sitting in the passenger seat alongside her husband. 'Couldn't we have stopped over in Brighton until next week?'
'Whilst the cat's away the mice will play,' he laughed. 'I don't like leaving my business interests in the care of other people longer than is absolutely necessary.'
You mean you're playing golf tomorrow, she smiled cynically to herself. She was at last beginning to understand the man she had married. Subtle, selfish, and above all ruthless.
They left the motorway, picked up a sign for Stainforth. 3 1/2 miles. Cynthia's mouth was dry, there was a churning in her stomach that was not wholly due to carsickness. If there was one thing that repelled her it was the thought of snakes. Ugh! She recalled that time when she was five and her parents had taken her to the zoo; she had not wanted to go into the reptile house but she'd had no choice. Those snakes, they all looked the same, slimy and squirmy, and when one slithered up to the glass of the case she was staring into she had gone hysterical. Adults didn't understand; her mother had grabbed her, slapped her and told her not to be so stupid. Stupid? Even now she sometimes had nightmares about those vipers, waking up in the middle of the night in cold fear, certain that there were cold slippery serpents wriggling about in the bed.
'Home, sweet home.' Peter slowed, had to take a wide sweep to negotiate their own drive entrance because a shabby old caravanette, hand-painted in a bilious orange colour, was parked on the verge by the stone pillars. Several more vehicles were lining the village street. 'The sightseers have arrived, I see. Hey, what's Doyle still doing here at this time? He finishes at five.'
'Maybe he had a late start,' she replied uninterestedly.
'And the garage shutters are down.' He was annoyed because he wanted to drive straight into the garage. 'As I said, you can't leave other people unsupervised for long.'
The Jaguar rolled to a halt in front of the garage. Eversham felt an urge to blast the horn, fetch that gardener on the run from whatever he was doing, ask him what the bloody hell was going on. Instead, he eased open the driver's door, began to swing himself out. And that was when he heard the banging on the inside of the garage door, the steel shutter vibrating. Somebody was shouting.
'Mr Eversham, Mr Eversham, don 'I get out of your car. There's a rattlesnake on the rockery!'
Peter Eversham froze, heard the words but their meaning did not sink in. He recognised Keith Doyle's voice but what the blazes was the stupid bugger doing inside the garage with the shutter down? And another thing . . .
What the fucking hell was wrong with the car? A noise as though the exhaust had suddenly come loose, was banging and rattling on the underside. But it couldn't, the car was stationary.
'Peter!' Cynthia Eversham screamed, panicked, and grabbed her husband's arm, overbalanced him back into the seat.
'What the . . .'
Even as he fell he saw the snake, a thing like a thick painted hosepipe darting out from beneath the Jag, its vicious strike missing him and pinging on the inside of the open door. Cynthia was yelling, shrieking hysterically, and then the car door obeyed the laws of gravity, swung softly shut on the slight incline. Clicked.
'Jesus God!'
'It was a snake, Peter. It tried to . . .'
'For Christ's sake, shut up,' he pushed her away, and in the same movement eased the handbrake off, felt the car begin to roll slowly backwards. And as it did so the occupants heard something happening beneath them, that frantic rattling sound again, interspersed with lashing noises as if a horse whip was flaying mercilessly on the underside of the car.
Still rolling backwards. Cynthia screamed, clutched at her seat, saw that vile light-coloured reptile with the black diamond markings thrashing frenziedly on the tarmac in front of them. It wriggled, tried to leap, fell back, squirmed and convulsed, turned its repulsive head towards them, as if mouthing insane reptilian curses. But something was wrong with it, even in her state of terror she saw its injury, the lower part of its body crushed and flattened like the hose that time when Doyle had washed the car for them and had left it lying on the drive and she had backed over it.
'Oh, my God!' she was going to be sick any second. 'Peter, you've run over it!'
He jerked the handbrake back on, halted the car, then started the engine, drove forward in a wide sweep that took him to the front of the house alongside Doyle's parked van. He killed the engine, glanced in his mirror. The rattler was thrashing fiercely from side to side, rattling and hissing its pain and fury but it wasn't going anywhere.
'Peter, don't get out!'
'Stay where you bloody well are.' He slammed the car door and ran for the porch, fumbling for his key.
Breathlessly he leapt up the stairs, on to the landing, into the bedroom. Fumbling under the bed, pulling out a dusty leg-o'-mutton leather gun case, his trembling fingers scarcely capable of undoing the straps. Metal clinked as he fitted barrels and stock together, slapped the wooden fore-end into place to hold them together, grabbed some orange-cased 12-bore cartridges out of a carton on top of the wardrobe, spilling the rest on to the carpet.
Back down the stairs, loading the gun as he went, almost slipping on the polished wooden blocks of the hall floor. Outside, seeing Cynthia still sitting in the car, hands pressed to her pallid face in fear and anguish, mouthing something at him. Shut up, you stupid bitch.
The diamondback was still very much alive. It was throwing itself from side to side, manoeuvring a course towards the front door, propelling its awesome body in spite of its terrible injuries, malevolently rattling its hate for the man who had done this to it. Only one thing was uppermost in its pain-crazed mindto kill!
Peter Eversham was trembling as he lifted the shotgun to his shoulder, a big-game hunter suddenly faced with a charging wounded water buffalo; its life or his, there would only be one survivor. He had his life in his hands.
Ten yards, maybe less. He tried to draw a bead on the head but it darted from one side to the other, dodged away from the shaking twin barrels as though it knew. Oh Christ, so different from driven grouse that couldn't fight back.
Five yards. He swung his sights on to the body, the lower damaged part that dragged behind the rest, took a trigger pressure. A deafening blast, and somewhere in the background he heard his wife screaming, saw the snake jerk and roll, seem to twist back on itself as though it was trying to view the damage.
At that range the concentrated shot charge was still strung together, had cut through skin and tissue, almost severed the lower body. A slimy pulp streaked the tarmac. And in that split second Peter Eversham finally got his bead on the head.
The left barrel, leaden death obliterating the rattlesnake's head, throwing it back into the morass behind, its nerves twitching. And then it was still.
It was dead.
Eversham lowered the smoking gun, opened the breech and the spent cartridge cases were ejected, bounced on the drive. He stood there, experienced a euphoria that was only just beginning to make its heady impact on him. A pose he was reluctant to relinquish, the hunter looking down on his trophy, awaiting the arrival of his bearers.