Strange.
The speaker had never done that before.
Maybe there was going to be a thunderstorm?
But, come to think of it, it was more of a hiss than a sizzle. Wait…
He glimpsed a shadow on the path. Expectantly, he waited for a figure to appear, but the shadow receded again, almost as if whoever had cast it had retreated into the bushes.
Now this is odd, he told himself. Most odd indeed.
He still cocked his head to one side as that sizzling (or hissing) sound receded.
Wait a minute, he told himself. Now he did see a shape at the edge of the monitor screen that hadn’t been there before. Perhaps he was seeing a shoulder or part of a head in extreme close-up. Certainly an indistinct bulk.
He scratched his head. ‘Hello. This is Perseverance Farm Boarding Kennels. Can I help you at all, please?’
He leaned forward, holding the puppy close to his chest. Carefully, he studied the screen from a distance of a few inches.
Then a bizarre thing happened.
Shocked, he recoiled from the screen as an image suddenly filled it.
For a moment he stared at it. It didn’t make sense.
He blinked. He was looking at what appeared to be a nest full of blackbird chicks. He saw the open beaks, the fluffy bodies. All were chirping noisily as if agitated.
‘The cruel devils,’ Ben said at last, shocked. Not only cruel but deeply perverse.
He realised now what was happening. Someone had taken a bird’s nest that was full of chicks and had held it just inches from the security camera lens by the front door.
What on Earth were they playing at? The chicks would die within an hour or so of being disturbed like that.
Ben didn’t hesitate now. Still clutching the puppy, he hurried out of the living room, closing the door behind him; then he scuttled along the hallway to the front door.
‘Monstrous, monstrous,’ he muttered to himself, sweeping back the bolts.
As he turned the key he suddenly paused. He realised what else he’d seen on the monitor screen. Now that didn’t make sense at all. The clutch of chicks had filled the screen. But there had been something else. He fancied he’d seen a pair of eyes, too.
But these had been human eyes. As if they’d peered into the camera through holes in the nest.
But then another thought struck him, one that was quite macabre.
Or had a pair of eyes been put into the nest that had then been held up to the camera lens?
The puppy whimpered.
‘There, there, Toby. We’ll put a stop to all this.’
He swung open the door.
The security lamp’s brilliant light washed through the garden. He screwed up his eyes against the glare.
There was no-one there now.
But perhaps they’d dropped the nest full of chicks somewhere close by? He couldn’t leave them to die.
The sound of barking dogs echoed across the garden.
He stepped onto the path. There, a peculiar smell reached his nostrils. He sniffed the air. Now that’s peculiar, he told himself. Riding roughshod over the delicate perfume of the night-scented stock in the flower beds was the pungent odour of wet wool. The same kind of smell an old pullover left in the rain would make. Frowning, he peered into the bushes.
At that moment he heard the sizzling sound again. It was surprisingly loud. As if a whole stream of sand was cascading onto newspaper.
Suddenly the dogs’ barking became frenzied. Ben Middleton recognised the warning note that sharpened the sound, and that sent a whole wave of shivers running through his body.
To his left the bushes parted.
He turned in shock to look; his muscles snapped taut, making the puppy yelp in his arms.
And then, when Ben Middleton saw what would take his life, he screamed.
4
Within 48 hours of flying out of New York, Sam Baker found himself standing in a field somewhere in a northern part of England. The sun shone brilliantly.
He’d heard of Yorkshire pudding. Eaten it plenty, usually with roast beef, occasionally with syrup and smothered with cream aerosolled fresh from a can. (Who says that by the age of 26 bachelors haven’t already developed perverse eating habits?) Only he’d never realised there was an actual place called Yorkshire. This, then, his on-site PA had told him, was the biggest county in England. A population of four million, encompassing an area that comprised more acres than there were words in the Bible. He stood in the middle of green rolling pastures that went on rolling all the way down to a big, wide river.
In the middle of those pastures lay an old Roman amphitheatre – scooped from the living rock, no doubt, by the sweat of well-whipped slaves. And he, Sam Baker, had been assigned the job of televising, live, a midsummer rock concert and beaming it back to the States via satellite.
He’d done this a lot from sports stadiums. Well, televising sports events, anyway. The only problem was that, unlike the stadiums that were carefully designed and built with camera emplacements, commentators’ studios, microphones already embedded in pitches and the whole caboodle cabled up to satellite dishes, here in this green Yorkshire field that abutted a wide shining river on which ducks swam and boats bobbed, what he got was what he saw: turf and rock and water – and not so much as a single power point.
He’d have seven days to bring in what he needed. Sure, a local TV company was providing the outside-broadcast hardware – generators, cameras, mixing consoles, trailers and the like – but he’d have all the fun of making sure everything went in the right place and that the crew knew what they were doing. All to ensure that he’d be sitting in the director’s chair in the OB control vehicle (ubiquitously referred to as ‘the scanner’ by TV folk) when the red light went on, calmly telling his assistant sitting at the console beside him, ‘Run credits, go to camera one, go to camera two. Run VT.’ And so on, and so on, for the three hours they were going to be on air.
He turned to his PA, who was diligently annotating a plan he’d sketched that morning. She was probably a little younger than him, with long auburn hair woven into a plait that looked as strong and as thick as a ship’s cable. When she turned her head quickly (which was often: she crackled with energy) the plait slashed from side to side like a whip. Her eyes were a dark, solid brown that made him think of fresh chestnuts. She went by the name of Zita and made a formidable PA. Her tiger-skin leggings and raunchy studded tongue only added to her aura of barely contained energy (and he didn’t doubt she could be a ferocious wildcat, too, if riled).
He worked hard to keep up the air of directorial authority. ‘I think we’ve got this licked,’ he called across to her. ‘The site’s only running a slight incline down to the river. Ground’s solid. Weather’s perfect.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it.’ She pushed the pencil into her thick hair, using it as a pen-holder. ‘The weather’s unpredictable here. It might be raining cats and dogs by tonight, then this ground will be a mudbath. The OB trailers will bog down.’
‘Best ring round the local farmers, then. Have them on standby with their tractors just in case we need pulling out of the poop.’
‘They’ll want paying. And probably in whiskey, not cash.’
‘Another quaint local custom?’
‘No. Tax evasion, pure and simple.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He flashed her a smile. ‘I made sure I came away from the States with a copy of the budget in my pocket. There’s a sizeable amount included for contingencies. Shall we take a look at the amphitheatre?’