Squelch (9 page)

Driving his new Range Rover through the night, Jeff Pringle felt reasonably pleased with life. Thanks to this
plague of voracious caterpillars his business showed signs of picking up at last. Unlike many larvae, they were not too choosy about their food but nibbled their way through practically anything; not only the usual cabbage or lettuce, but sprouting beans and even – recently – the fresh green leaves of fruit trees. The farmers were desperate.

As a result, his phone never stopped ringing. Already this week he had notched up more than twenty flying hours crop-spraying and there were plenty more bookings in the diary.

It was odd, though, they should be so dangerous where people were concerned, he mused. He changed down on approaching a corner. Once beyond it, he accelerated again and the Range Rover responded like a dream. Still, insects came in all varieties. He thought back to the time when he was flying passengers around West Africa. God, he’d met enough insects then. They’d fed on his blood, jabbed their poison into him, bitten him when they felt threatened and again when they didn’t, spread bacteria over his food and set ambushes in his slippers. Destroying crops or bringing a thousand-year-old tree crashing to the ground was nothing compared to what they might achieve if they set their collective mind to the task.

On this planet, insects outnumbered human beings by trillions.

Try slapping your hand over the mosquito on your neck, and you’d be lucky to kill more than one in fifty, if that. Squirt pesticide at them, and within five years they’ve developed a new strain able to resist it. Not the human beings, though: the poison lingered on the food crop and turned up at the greengrocers.

King Insect always wins.

He’d attempted to explain it earlier that evening to Cousin Jamie in hospital. Both arms in bandages, poor sod. Blood transfusion, antibiotics, the works. Still, his
temperature was down a bit and according to the doctor he was expected to be out in a couple of days. The two people with him at the pub were both in the morgue.

Looking like a ferret had been at them, he’d heard someone say. Some huntin’, shootin’ an’ fishin’ type.

‘Jamie Ferguson,’ he spoke aloud, still glorying in the feel of his new car, ‘you owe that publican a large drink, and I’m going to make sure you buy it for him, you mean bastard!’

His headlights, on full beam, picked out the wreck of a car on its side across the centre of the carriageway. No – as he approached he could see it more clearly. It was a van, one of those little Ford vans.

‘Maggie Thatcher, what a mess!’ he swore.

A girl’s head protruded through the smashed windscreen. Her shock of bright green hair and staring eyes gave her a grotesque, nightmarish appearance in death.

On the roadway the skid marks were clearly visible, smeared with green slime and caterpillar remains: evidence as to what must have happened. Then he realised that many of those caterpillars around the van were alive.

On applying his brakes, he felt the rear of his car suddenly gliding to the right like a temperamental woman kicking a long skirt aside, but they quickly gripped again and he came to a halt. Taking his torch, he opened the door to examine the ground. They were the first he’d seen; he whistled through his teeth in amazement at the sight of them. As big as anything he’d come across in Africa. Their long-haired bodies shone like shot silk as the light caught them, even those he had squashed to death when his tyres had crunched over them.

Someone in that van might be still alive, though with all those hungry caterpillars milling around he doubted it. Still, he’d better take a look, he thought reluctantly. He glanced down apprehensively at his shoes which left his
ankles unprotected and vulnerable. If only he’d brought riding boots in the car with him.

He touched the button which closed all the windows, cocooning him safely inside, and then called up Police Sergeant Roberts on the car phone. Briefly, he explained what he’d found.

‘There may be someone else in the van with her, I can’t be sure yet,’ he went on. ‘I’ll try to get closer but the road is crawling with these caterpillars. Your people had better bring their wellies.’

‘Hang on there, will you, Mr Pringle?’ the phone crackled in his ear. ‘An’ you’d best stay in your car till we arrive.’

He hung up again, feeling vaguely satisfied that at least the police would soon be on their way. At first, he’d been hesitant about installing a car phone in the Range Rover – the turnover in his business certainly didn’t justify the cost, not yet – but in the upper segment of the charter flying market which he was attempting to reach it was vital to be able to stay in touch. Not that he intended to give up crop-spraying, however successful his plans; it was good bread-and-butter work which he could fit in whatever else was happening.

Out on the road dozens of caterpillars were clearly visible in his headlights and more emerged out of the shadows. Some were still heading towards the van. What the others had in mind he couldn’t imagine. No food for them on that tarred surface, unless…

Leaning forward, he gazed around carefully on each side of the car, then lowered a window and shone the torch out once more. He had an uncomfortable feeling they were waiting for him. They were grouped together in platoons at every point of the compass.

‘Right, my beauties!’ he murmured aloud, stung into action by their obvious threat. ‘On behalf of Cousin Jamie!’

He touched the starter. The engine purred and he eased the clutch, letting the car roll forward; then, slipping into reverse, he repeated the process, leaving a trail of dead where his heavy tyres had driven over them.

But simple genocide was not his purpose, however rewarding that might have been in itself. He swung the Range Rover around, manoeuvring until he could stop alongside the dented roof of the van, leaving just enough space to be able to open his own door. Before he risked getting out, he unclipped his fire extinguisher and sprayed the area between the two vehicles.

It seemed to have an effect, temporarily at least. Two or three of the caterpillars managed to get away, but the rest curled up, twitched convulsively, then lay still. Carefully Jeff opened the car door and, with one hand on the van, tried to look inside.

He was right. Someone else
was
in there: a young man in a black leather jacket. Obviously dead.

Jeff jumped down on to the road and went around to shine his torch through the jagged hole in the windscreen, but immediately wished that he hadn’t.

‘Urgh! My God!’

The dead green-haired girl, her head through the glass, was half-kneeling on the man’s body. On both of them, wherever there was exposed flesh, caterpillars were feeding. In several places they had eaten through his shirt, and bitten into her legs through her tights. A dozen or more horned green rumps wriggled busily as the hideous insects gorged their fill.

Turning away, the bile rising in his throat, Jeff was on the point of being sick when he noticed another caterpillar on the ground rapidly approaching his shoe. The shock brought him back to his senses. Once it reached him, he knew it would go directly for his ankle. He stamped on it – not once, but several times in a
mounting fury, determined to squash the life juice out of it.

When at last its fat body broke under the hammering he gave it, he saw that the green slime oozing out of it was streaked with red.

Blood, he realised dully, his temper subsiding.

Blood which earlier today had been pulsing through some poor sod’s veins.

He got back into the car, tore a page out of his log book and cleaned up his shoe as best he could before slamming the door shut. Gripping the steering wheel, he stared out at the wrecked van, his heart thumping violently in his chest as he tried to come to terms with what he’d seen.

A slight fluttering sound behind him was the first evidence he had that something was in the car with him. Then he felt a tickling sensation on the back of his neck. He raised his head, hearing another movement, this time seeming to be immediately behind his ear.

No more than a vague
whoosh
of air, like a lightly blown curtain.

And that tickling again.

Cautiously he reached up, his whole body tense at the thought that somehow a caterpillar must have got on to his clothes, creeping over the sleeve of his tweed jacket, then on to his collar… He braced himself for the inevitable stab of pain, remembering all Jamie had told him in hospital.

But he was bitter, too. Christ, had he survived that 707 crash for this? To be killed by – what? A caterpillar?

Whatever it was, he grabbed it. Instead of pain, he experienced the strange sensation of palpitating wings against his cupped hand, like a small bird’s panic at being trapped. Instinctively he released it and switched on the interior light. In the car was a large moth wheeling desperately this way and that in the confined space, from
time to time flying head-on against the window glass in its attempts to escape.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Jeff laughed, so relieved that it was not a caterpillar after all that it made him feel light-headed. ‘Here, let’s have a look at you!’

For a moment the moth settled on the head-rest of the passenger seat beside him, its wings still spread. It was a giant specimen, as big as any he’d ever seen in the tropical rain forests of West Africa; in fact, larger than most. Its wings seemed to contain every imaginable shade of brown, with purple and red markings like eyes. He bent closer to examine it in more detail but it took off again, flying past his head, then around, uttering a little squeaking noise like a mouse.

Finally, returning from the opposite direction – and when he least expected any attack from it – it spat at him.

Only just in time he managed to jerk his head aside. Had his reflexes been any slower the saliva – if that’s what it was – would have gone straight into his eyes. But it missed him, landing on the shoulder of his jacket.

‘Bloody hell!’ he bellowed at it. ‘There was no cause for that!’

A defence mechanism, obviously – but he wasn’t even attacking the thing!

Furiously he tried to snatch at the moth but it evaded him easily, swooping down between the front and rear seats, eventually fluttering in vain against the back window. Then he felt sorry for it. After all, what wouldn’t a man give to be able to fly like that? He touched the button which opened all the Range Rover’s windows and allowed the moth to escape.

The next morning he regretted it. He should have found some way of trapping that moth. Its size alone made it worth a closer look. As for those caterpillars – well, he was a pilot, not a scientist.

He had already made a statement to the police the previous night but that had been concerned only with the bare events. Taking a pot of coffee into his study, he spent the next couple of hours tapping a more detailed version into his home word processor.

When he had finished and read it through once more, he hunted in the desk drawer for his old address book, remembering something Sophie Greenberg had told him last time they met. Eight months ago that must have been at least: some work she was doing which involved caterpillars. She’d be interested, he was sure.

He found her number, only to get a stranger’s voice at the other end. Dr Greenberg had been in the United States since the autumn and it was not known when – or even if – she would return. No address, not over the phone, sorry. Dropping the receiver back on to its cradle he turned to the work he should have been doing. An African agency wanted to fly a clapped-out passenger jet back to Britain for overhaul: could he find a qualified crew?

7

The news of these latest deaths caused Ginny to telephone the literary agent in London and put off their appointment for another week.

While Lesley was still in hospital it would be irresponsible to be too far away. Even the short trip into Lingford to visit her sister meant leaving Phuong on her own to look after three lively small girls. It was hardly fair on her, however competent she was proving herself to be. They refused to play indoors all day – naturally, considering the warm weather – but at least with Phuong’s
backing Ginny managed to persuade them to stay in the centre of the lawn, well away from any of the plants likely to attract caterpillars. Phuong spread a groundsheet on the short grass and invented several new games to keep them occupied.

‘When’s Mummy coming home?’ Wendy would ask gravely from time to time. ‘Is she coming home at tea-time?’

‘Soon,’ Ginny always promised.

And then – what?

For long hours every night Ginny lay awake turning it all over in her mind. Nothing had happened between her and Bernie despite them sleeping in the same house, their bedroom doors hardly a yard apart. Only once had they properly kissed – with a lovers’ kiss, that is – for that first occasion after dinner at the hotel was not repeated.

Because there had been no need to repeat it. They had both recognised what was happening. She glimpsed a look in his eyes – oh, a dozen times a day! She would turn around suddenly and a quick signal of understanding would pass between them. A bond which surprised and delighted her, yet at the same time filled her with dismay. She could see Lesley’s face, pale against those white hospital pillows, and hated this betrayal which she was unable to control.

Which she didn’t want to control. They could each have their part of him, couldn’t they? She’d not ask for more than that.

Of course, it had been building up through the past winter, she could see that now, though at the time neither of them would have been honest enough to admit it. Unwittingly, she’d even encouraged him by being always ready with a welcome when he’d dropped in for a quiet moment or two before returning home to the warmhearted chaos of Lesley and the girls. Not that she
regretted it. No, she was much too deeply in love with him to regret it.

Her heart beat faster with a rush of mixed emotions when she heard that Lesley was about to be discharged from hospital. She was genuinely overjoyed for Lesley’s sake; impulsively, she ran out to gather the children around her and give them the news, only to be brought up short when Wendy said in her two-year-old innocence:

‘Did she get a divorce in hospital?’

It was like a cold slap in the face. Even when Frankie screamed with laughter and with all the wisdom of her six years made fun of her sister for not knowing what a divorce was, even then Ginny still felt humiliated. Had the children noticed already?

But they had kept deliberately apart, she and Bernie: an unspoken agreement between them that nothing must happen –
nothing
– while Lesley was still in hospital. Occasionally his hand had brushed against her arm accidentally and she’d seen from his face how he too experienced that strange, disturbing thrill of desire and apprehension at their touch. The knowledge that Lesley was at a disadvantage acted as a protective barrier for both of them. Now that she was coming out – however much they wanted her home and longed to see her well again – they felt the rules were changing.

He’s just as scared as I am, Ginny thought as she gazed up at his face. She loved him even more for it.

They were standing on the driveway in front of the house and he was about to get into his gleaming white Rover 3500 which he’d washed and polished in celebration of the homecoming. Instead, they lingered for a few moments longer. This would probably be their last moment alone together for some days at least.

‘I’ll have a meal ready when she gets here,’ Ginny was saying. ‘Something light. Then after we’ve eaten I think
I’ll go back to the cottage.’

‘No need to move out, love. Not tonight, anyway.’

‘Oh yes, there is!’ she retorted uncompromisingly. ‘I’m a working girl, remember? I’ve been neglecting things.’

‘I wish you
would
stay, at least till tomorrow. Move back in when it’s light. Insects have some sense that tells them when a house is empty. You come back and discover they’ve taken over.’

‘Nobody’s seen any caterpillars for a week.’

‘There’ve been no more reports,’ he agreed. His hand rested on her wrist as he spoke, his thumb caressing her. ‘That could mean they’ve entered the chrysalis stage.’

‘All of them? Simultaneously?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But there’s no point in taking unnecessary risks. As caterpillars they’re obviously at their most vicious because that’s when they do their feeding, as I think you know.’

‘I’ve read the books,’ she mocked him drily, but she looked up at his smile and was conscious of the emptiness of parting. ‘You’d better go, darling. Lesley will be waiting.’

He gave her one more brother-in-law kiss on the corner of her mouth, then got into the car. ‘You’ll move into the cottage tomorrow morning then?’

She shook her head. ‘I went there this morning to clean the place up. It’ll be all right. In any case, it’s my day for visiting the agent tomorrow. I’m off to the station first thing.’

His mouth twitched with amusement through the open window, acknowledging that whatever he – or any man – might suggest, she’d always do the opposite out of sheer obstinacy. And he was right, she thought: give a man an inch, as the old saying went…

She watched as he drove off, then went back into the house to tidy things up a little ready for Lesley.

Bernie was right in saying that they had to think of the
life cycle of these insects, she decided as she steered the vacuum cleaner around the lounge carpet. As caterpillars the dangers were only too obvious. They spent day and night gorging themselves until they literally burst out of their skins. But then came the metamorphosis. After a couple of weeks as chrysalids they emerged in all their beauty as butterflies or moths, and it was in this final stage that they were really most dangerous, for it was now that they sought out a suitable food plant on which to lay their eggs. It needed only a couple of generations – a single summer in fact if the weather was warm – to increase the population of these creatures many times over.

No one believed it would happen, that was the problem. Not even Bernie who took the caterpillars seriously enough in every other way, but refused to accept that the attacks were more than isolated incidents. ‘It’s been a freak spring,’ he always insisted when she brought the subject up. ‘Wait till the weather changes. They’re forecasting a cold summer, so you won’t be seeing many caterpillars then.’

But he was wrong, she could swear to it.

Lesley’s homecoming was a success. Her loud, joyful laugh rang through the house from the moment she set foot inside the front door. The children plied her with their eager questions and demands, competing with each other to be heard, until at last she collapsed laughing into a chair and kissed each of them in turn. Bernie looked on, beaming with a quiet, self-confident air of happiness that his family was complete again.

Ginny felt she was very much the outsider. With Phuong’s help she finished setting the large kitchen table and served the meal. It wasn’t much – cold ham and pickles with mashed potatoes and a bit of salad – but she’d bought a variety of scones and cakes from the
village baker to follow.

‘I’ve found a caterpillar on my lettuce!’ Caroline announced in a highly satisfied tone of voice. ‘Ooh, it’s wiggling about on the leaf. Bet you haven’t got one, Frankie.’

The reaction was electric. Lesley’s chair crashed down behind her as she stood up despite her bandaged foot, but Bernie was quicker. He grabbed the plate away from her while Ginny lifted her off her seat and retreated to the far side of the room.

‘It’s a tiny one,’ Bernie said with an unmistakable note of relief in his voice. ‘And it’s brown, not green.’

‘Not one of ours then.’ To reassure the children, Ginny tried to speak lightly, but the shock still showed on their faces. Caroline was crying quietly to herself. ‘Come on, let’s all sit down again! I’ve got some jelly over here. Anybody want jelly?’

Lesley let out one of her laughs and said she was sure they would all prefer jelly after that, but it was obvious she was shaken. Bernie put an arm around her and kissed her cheek. Ten minutes later the incident might never have happened.

The longer she stayed, the harder Ginny found it to make her excuses and slip away. It was eight o’clock before she stood up and said she had quite a bit to do in preparation for her trip to London the next day. Bernie made no further attempt to persuade her to stay. Lesley even smiled gratefully, obviously wanting to be alone with her family on her first night back from hospital.

They had been deceiving themselves, she and Bernie – that much was obvious, she realised bitterly as she drove back to her dark, lonely cottage. Conned themselves into imagining he was free, when clearly he was not. She should have seen that from the beginning: she
had
seen it, but ignored it. And where did that leave her?

She parked the car on its usual spot and went inside.
Instinctively she checked the room for caterpillars, even lifting her potted plants’ leaves with a Chinese chopstick just to make sure. In the middle of her round table to her surprise was a large vase of the most exquisite tulips she had ever seen. Two dozen of them at least, with elegantly striped petals in mauve, black and ochre.

With them was a fold of paper bearing a message tapped out, she suspected, on her own typewriter. It read simply,
Tried to get red roses but the shop hadn’t any
.

It would have to stop, she told herself firmly.

Now – before it went too far.

The last thing she wanted was to destroy Lesley’s happiness. She would rather suffer herself than risk doing that. Somehow she’d have to make Bernie understand that the flirtation was over. That’s all it had been really: a mild flirtation. Under any other circumstances she would not even have let it get that far.

She allowed herself to read his note once more before crumpling it up and throwing it away. Then she moved the tulips to the sideboard, rearranging them a little, and sat down to do some sensible work. Two newspapers had so far reported the caterpillar attacks, the local weekly which carried an item headed DOCTOR’S WIFE BITTEN and
The Times
which mentioned the deaths at the Bull in a single column inch. There would be more, she was convinced. She cut them out and pasted them on to separate sheets of A4.

Her TV proposal kept her up late into the night. She had already talked over her doubts with Bernie who had said it would be a pity to abandon it after all that effort. Yet it seemed wrong to be devising an entertainment about giant moths after all that had happened. Of course she couldn’t be sure there was any connection between her moths and these caterpillars. Not yet.

‘Why worry?’ Bernie had commented cheerfully. ‘Most television is about other people’s misfortunes, isn’t
it? That’s why it’s so popular.’

In the end she decided to follow his advice and at least let the agent see the material. She secured the loose sheets into a neat little folder and dropped it into her briefcase. Before going to bed, she raised her bedroom window and looked out. The countryside was never silent. There was always that faint sighing among the trees, the indistinct movements and muffled calls. No moths, though from this window she had watched them assemble on her first evening.

But they would return in their own time. She was beginning to understand – and she must explain this to the agent – that it was the insects who held the winning cards, not humankind after all.

She drove into Lingford and parked at the station in time for the ten o’clock train, the first after the daily commuter rush. Her compartment was full of Lingford University lecturers – so she gathered from their conversation – on their way to lobby their MPs at the House of Commons about the latest round of Government cuts. At first she ignored them and stared out at the passing fields, but soon she grew tired of hearing their soap-box arguments and went into the corridor for a bit of quiet.

‘Hello!’

‘Oh!’ She was startled, not having noticed the man approach. ‘Oh, it’s you!’

‘Lads an’ lasses, remember? You were with Dr Rendell, weren’t you?’

Now she looked at him closely, she realised this lean-jawed man she’d first encountered at the hotel was not unattractive. He did not have Bernie’s height, nor any of his charm, but that rugged set of his face bespoke the man of action rather than an academic. Fairly muscular too, she judged from the cut of his tropical business suit. That must have cost several hundred pounds.

‘Is this your usual train?’

‘Heaven forbid!’ he laughed deprecatingly. ‘No, I have to go up to London for a meeting today. And you?’

‘The same.’

‘My name’s Jeff Pringle, by the way,’ he introduced himself. ‘And you must be Ginny Andrewes. Oh, after that evening at the hotel I made a few enquiries about you.’

‘So it seems.’

‘Nothing sinister!’ Another laugh: easy and confident. ‘We have a mutual friend in the lovely Dr Jameela Roy. Look, what about a coffee? I think we’ve one or two things to talk about, you and I.’

‘Such as?’ she asked coolly. She’d always disliked men who tried to sweep her off her feet at their first meeting.

‘Caterpillars.’

‘What about them?’

‘I’ll tell you over coffee. It
is
important.’

Ginny retrieved her briefcase from the compartment in which a lively political debate now appeared to be in progress, and followed Jeff Pringle along the swaying corridor towards the buffet car. She tried to remember where she had heard his name before. Not from Bernie, she was sure of that. Nor from Jameela whom she’d only met that once.

The coffee came in paper cups which they had to fetch themselves from the bar. There was nowhere to sit down, so he suggested going back to his compartment. She agreed, and led the way.