The Plague Dogs: A Novel Read online

  “What rubbish! Well, now, come and help me with the press statement—I want to make sure I get the details right—and then we really must get on with those monkeys. What’s the present position on them?”

  “Well, the entire group’s been paralysed by lumbar injections of pure OX-Dapro, as you instructed.”

  “Excellent. Any results yet?”

  “Well, the four with flaccid areflexic paraplegia show no response at all, either to stamping on their tails or to pins applied to the lower limbs.”

  “All right, but be careful how you intensify tests like that. They mustn’t die. Monkeys are getting increasingly hard to obtain, you know—apparently there’s a world shortage. I wonder why? Anyway, we shall be needing to use these again for something else. What’s the score now on the monkey in the cylinder, by the way?”

  “Twenty-seven days plus,” answered Mr. Powell. “It seems almost comatose. To tell you the truth, I shan’t be sorry when it’s time to take it out.”

  Digby Driver trod out his cigarette on the step, pressed the bell firmly and turned his back on the door while he waited. Certainly the door was mean enough to make the distant, moonlit view of Coniston Water appear a great deal more attractive, even to him. Just as he was about to ring again, the hall beyond the undulant glass panels became lit, the door was partially opened and he found himself looking into the shadow-obscured face of an elderly, grey-haired man standing defensively behind it.

  “Dr. Goodner?”

  “I am, yes.” Both the voice and the look were hesitant, nervous. Digby Driver put one foot on the door-sill and noticed the other noticing him do so.

  “I’m a pressman. May I talk to you for a minute, please?”

  “We don’t—we don’t talk vith the press unless it is happening vith an official appointment at the station.”

  “Dr. Goodner, believe me, I’ve only got your best interests at heart, and I won’t take up ten minutes of your time—not five. You’d do much better to see me now, privately and entirely off the record. You would, I assure you. Want me to tell you why?”

  Dr. Goodner hesitated a moment longer, looking down at the door-mat. Then he shrugged his shoulders, let go of the door, turned his back, led the way into a small, unheated drawing-room, which was obviously not the room he had been sitting in, closed its door behind Digby Driver as he entered, and stood looking at him without a word.

  Driver, standing by the sofa, opened the folder he was carrying, took out a typed sheet of paper and began looking at it intently.

  “What is it you want?”

  Driver looked up. “I want the answer to just one question, Dr. Goodner, and I give you my word that I shan’t say where that answer came from. What is the special work you are doing in your locked laboratory at Lawson Park?”

  Dr. Goodner deliberately opened the drawing-room door and was half-way across the narrow hall before Driver could speak again, this time in sharper tones, which the authorities of his former university would have recognized at once.

  “You’d better look at this sheet of paper, Dr. Goodner—Dr. Geutner, I should say, Flat 4, Tillierstrasse 9043. Come on, you have a good look at it before you go rushing off to call the bouncer.”

  Dr. Goodner returned and took in one hand the paper which Driver handed to him. As Driver let go of it, the upper end began to tremble. Dr. Goodner put on his spectacles and held it horizontally beneath the ill-shaded central bulb.

  “What is this that you show me?”

  Driver paused a moment. Then he said quietly, “You can see what it is. It’s a biographical sketch—or the notes for one. My newspaper’s planning a series, to be published shortly, on naturalized ex-enemy scientists and doctors working in this country. An article based on those particular notes is due to appear in two weeks’ time.”

  Dr. Goodner shrugged.

  “These things that have happened are all finished very long time ago. I am not a war criminal.”

  “You won’t be far short of one in the public mind, Dr. Geutner of München, when this gets published. We’re in touch with a man who remembers your visit to Buchenwald early in 1945—’”

  “I haff done nothing there. I go in, I go avay again—”

  “Very likely, but you went. And the work for the Wehrmacht on disease warfare potential? Oh, and Trudi—I forgot her. Come on, Dr. Geutner. Have a good think about it.”

  Dr. Goodner clenched one hand by his side, but said nothing.

  “Now listen, that article won’t be published, now or at any future time, I promise you—certainly not by my paper, and not by any other British paper that I know of—provided you simply answer yes or no truthfully to one question and then forget that you ever did. After that, I’m gone for good and I’ve never been here. Easy, isn’t it? Now, here’s the question. From last month up to the present, has the work you’ve been doing in your locked laboratory been research into bubonic plague?”

  After a short pause, Dr. Goodner shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Yes.”

  “Thank you. I know I said one question, but there’s just one more related one, I’m afraid, and then I’m gone. Were there, last month, infected fleas in that laboratory capable of transmitting plague?”

  This time there was a longer pause. Dr. Goodner was looking down at the empty fireplace with one open hand laid flat on top of the glazed, putty-coloured bricks of the cheap mantelpiece. When at length he looked up, his spectacles flashed in the cold light. But Digby Driver was before him.

  “Don’t bother to speak. If the answer’s yes just nod.” By this time he had reached the door and turned, Dr. Goodner was once more looking at the fireplace. He nodded almost imperceptibly and Digby Driver let himself out into the peaceful night.

  Saturday the 13th November

  “It’s a bad world for animals,” said Rowf grimly.

  “Does that include the caterpillars you ate?”

  “It includes you.”

  “I’m the brainy zany with the drainy crany. It smells like that, anyway.”

  “Let me lick the mud out. Keep still.”

  “Ow—look out! I say, what would you call this—brain-washing?”

  “All right, I’ve finished. It’s clean enough now.”

  “Fine—I feel much cleverer, too. You could say you’ve cleared my mind. I’ll walk on my hind legs if you like. It used to make Annie Mossity as cross as two sticks, only she never dared to say so. One day I pretended to slip and clawed at her stockings. Ho ho!”

  “Didn’t do you any good, did it? Anyway, why are you so cheerful? You’ve got no reason that I can see.”

  “It’s the mouse, actually. When the moon shines like this, he sings songs inside my head; like Kiff, you know. Kiff’s all right. He’s up on that cloud of his.”

  “Maybe; but I can’t hear your mouse.”

  “That’s only because you’re hungry. Didn’t you know hunger mays yeff?” “What?”

  Snitter made no reply.

  “What did you say?”

  Snitter jumped up and barked in his ear. “I said, didn’t you know hunger makes you DEAF?”

  Rowf snapped at him and he ran, yelping.

  “Haald yer whisht!” The tod, padding ahead up the steeply falling beck, looked round angrily.

  The truth was that Rowf, like everyone with an accomplishment admired or relied upon by those about him, was wondering how long he would be able to keep it up and afraid that he might already be finished. For the past thirty hours they had had a hard time. On the previous day, urged on relentlessly by the tod, who seemed tireless compared even with the hulking Rowf, they had travelled the length of the Crinkle Crags along their eastern side, skirted Bow Fell, sneaking through the top of Rossett Gill in thinner but still persistent mist (within earshot of a burly young man whose girl was begging him to turn back), passed below Angle Tarn, trotted down the upper part of Langstrath Beck and by evening had reached the tod’s promised refuge among the rocks of Bull Crag. Though not a true earth, i
t was spacious enough and, with no more than a light east wind blowing, reasonably warm with three bodies crowded into it. But this, as it turned out, was cold comfort. Rowf, already tired, and still plagued by the pad which he had cut on Harter Fell, failed again and again to pull down the marked-out sheep until at last, flinging himself exhausted and cursing on the ground in the moonlit solitude, he allowed Snitter to persuade him to give up for the night. His temper was nothing improved by the marked manner in which the tod refrained from comment and began hunting among the heather for beetles and anything else that might be edible. Both dogs, swallowing their pride, copied him and Rowf, when he nosed out two hairy, chestnut-striped, three-inch caterpillars of the fox moth, snapped them up without hesitation.

  Next morning Snitter woke to find Rowf already vanished into the wet, still mist. As he and the tod were about to set out on the scent—plain enough on the damp ground—they met him returning, bloody-mouthed, swollen with his kill but lamer than ever. Nearly an hour before, in the dark before dawn, he had pulled down his quarry alone, lying in ambush under a crag and leaping straight at a yow’s throat as she wandered too close. The battering he had suffered from her, fresh and unfatigued by the usual pursuit, had winded and hurt him until only his rage at the previous night’s failure had given him the determination to hold on. After the kill he had ripped off and gorged the flesh of an entire flank, lain for a time belching and licking his paws; and so come back to his friends. The mercurial Snitter danced and gambolled about him as they all three returned to the body. The tod, however, said nothing beyond a surly, “Yer not se femmer t’day, then?”

  “Tod,” said Snitter sharply, “that remark’s in very poor smell. You mean he was no good yesterday, and you’ve no business to say it. I’ll set the flies on you, I will—huge ones—men riding on them—oh, whatever am I talking about?—”

  “Nivver said nowt aboot yisterday. Said he were none se femmer t’day.”

  Nevertheless, the tod returned to gnawing its bloody share without further speech. A rebuke from Snitter was so unusual that perhaps even its ladrone, hit-and-run mind felt something akin to abashment.

  Later in the day Snitter, unaided, succeeded in catching a lean, wandering rat and ate it alone, without telling. The feat raised his spirits as June the mayfly and when they came to set out in the dusk he was in tearing form. Throughout the four miles over Greenup and down to Dunmail Raise he was irrepressible, coming and going like a scent on the breeze and glittering like shards of broken looking-glass.

  The sound of car engines and the sight of headlights, moving on the broad road south of Thirlmere excited him with memories.

  “I remember those lights at night, Rowf! And the cars growl, you can hear them—that’s why young dogs often rush out and try to chase them. Waste of time; they never take any notice. The lights are pieces of old moons, you know.”

  “What d’you mean?” asked Rowf, interested in spite of himself to watch the long beams approaching, dazzling into the eyes for a second and humming away again into the moonlit dimness.

  “Well, once the moon gets to be full somebody—some man or other—goes up every day and slices bits off one side—you’ve noticed?—until there isn’t any more, and then after a bit a new one grows. Men do that with all sorts of things, actually—rose-bushes, for instance; my master used to cut them almost down to the ground in winter, and then they grew again. Come to that, I dare say it was something of the kind the whitecoats were up to with me. Perhaps I’ll grow a new Snitter one day, you never know. Anyway, by the time it gets to be full the moon’s all pitted and rifted with cracks and holes—to make it easier to break bits off, obviously. Well, my dam told me that moons are actually huge—enormous—only they don’t look it because they’re so high in the sky. The man who slices the bits off brings them down here, and then they’re used for making those lights on the cars. Clever, isn’t it?”

  “Do they last long—when they’re lights, I mean?”

  “Not very long—only about a night, I should think, because you hardly ever see them shining by day. They must keep changing them. You can tell they’re quite different from the still sort of lights men make indoors by lifting up their hands. Sn’ff! Sn’ff! How that car smell takes me back, too! It’s a cheerful, natural sort of smell, isn’t it?—-not like these foul rocks. Let’s stay here and rest a bit, tod.”

  “Nay, git ower, ye gowk. Bide aboot o’ th’ road an’ ye’ll be gud an’ deed.”

  Snitter scuttled across in an interval of darkness, joined the tod in the bed of Birkside Gill and looked up at the long Helvellyn ridge fading into distance and moonlight above them.

  “O for the wings of a sheep!” sighed Snitter, as they began once more to follow the inexorable tod up the gill’s pools and cascades towards Willie Wife Moor.

  “Wings of a sheep, Snitter?”

  “Yes—they had them once, you know. What happened was that one flew up into the sky, so naturally they all followed. Then they took off their wings and began feeding and as the sun moved on across the sky they went with it, to keep warm. Well, towards evening a wind got up and blew all their wings away from the place where they’d left them. They never got them back—you can see them all up there, blowing along in the blue to this day.”

  “But how did the sheep get back to the ground?”

  “Why, a long way off the sky curves down and touches the land—you can see it does. They had to walk round the long way—took them ages.”

  “Well, I never knew that. You are a clever little chap, Snitter. He’s clever, isn’t he, tod?”

  “Ay, clever as th’ north end of a sooth-boond jackass.” The tod lay down. “Ye kin bide a while noo, lad. It’s a canny bit run yit an’ Aa haven’t the list t’ do it.”

  When at length they had passed Nethermost Pike, reached the western end of Striding Edge and were looking down the almost sheer six hundred feet to Red Tarn shining smooth in the moonlight, Rowf curled his lip and swore.

  “My teeth in your neck, tod, you never told me we’d be living on the edge of one of these blasted drowning-tanks! And no men, you said—why, the whole place smells of men like a rubbish-tip—tobacco, old bread—what are those other smells, Snitter—”

  “Oo—potato crisps, women, chocolate, ice-cream squishy squish. That was another of Kiff’s songs. ‘O mutton-bones, chicken and cheese, they’re things that are certain to please, but what I like the most is a jolly lamp-post—’ ”

  “Shut up! Tod, scores of men must come here—”

  “Why ay, but not in winter an’ not where vor gannin’.”

  “I’m not going down to that tank,” said Rowf.

  “Nay, divven’t fash yersel’, hinny.” The tod seemed almost conciliatory.

  Snitter, sitting back on the stones, raised his muzzle to the cloudy, sailing moon. With as little reason and almost as much delight as the migrant blackcap in May, which sings on the outskirts of an English copse, heedless that in six months’ time some hirsute swine in Italy or Cyprus, with call-pipe and quicklime, will murder it for some other swine in Paris to eat in aspic, Snitter gave tongue in the moonlight.

  Greenup and Eagle Crag

  “O friendly moon,As bright as bone,

  Up in the skyYou rot alone.

  The cracks and marksThat I can see

  Are no great mys—Tery to me.

  It’s plain to myObservant snout,

  Maggots go in And flies come out!

  “Now if a fly, On pleasure bent,

  Sat down on my Warm excrement,

  I wouldn’t mind One little bit.

  I’m really kind—”

  “Oh, come on, Snitter!” said Rowf. “What’s the use of sitting there, singing rubbish?”

  “A lot,” answered Snitter. “When I sing, people in the sky throw bits down to me. Or Kiff does, or someone. You don’t believe me, do you? Look!”

  He pattered away a few yards among the rocks and a moment later they could hear and smell him rou
ting out and munching the damp remains of an abandoned packet of crisps. He ran back to them with the plastic bag stuck over his muzzle.

  “Woff floffle floof.” He snudged it off with one front paw. “Would you like it, tod? I’m afraid it’s not really what it was just now.”

  Without a word the tod set off northward along the summit, towards Low Man.

  Half an hour later they had descended a thousand feet and come to the ruined flue below the eastern slopes of Raise—an ugly, enseared landscape, riven with the scars of old industry—and here, in a kind of little cave formed by part of the ruin, they went to ground and dozed restlessly for two or three hungry hours. At moonset the tod roused them and led them a mile down the beck to the hamlet of Glenridding where, under its shrewd guidance, they foraged among the dustbins for what little they could get.

  “Dustbins is as dangerous as owt else—thet’s why ye were nigh booggered i’ Doonerd’l: ye took ne heed. Ye’ve to push th’ lid off, grab whit ye can an’ away while they’re still thinkin’ what wez yon. Nivver hang aboot.”

  They returned to their lair in the darkness before dawn, half-filled and half-poisoned, Rowf stopping repeatedly to excrete a foul fluid over the stones along the beck. Snitter’s high spirits had evaporated and he felt tired out. Once in the chilly hole, he curled up beside the tod and fell asleep at once.

  Digby Driver, having made a telephone call to Mr. Simpson in London and dictated his second article to the Orator, returned into Dunnerdale. He certainly did not intend to be in or near Coniston when the article appeared. Having reconnoitred from the bar of the Traveller’s Rest to the bar of the Newfield, he proceeded to follow the kindly advice of Jack Longmire (landlord of the latter) to the effect that Mr. Bob Taylor knew a great deal about the whole valley, being up and down Duddon at nearly all times of year, fishing. He was lucky enough to find Bob in, tying trout flies at a table by the fire.