The Plague Dogs: A Novel Read online

  “Ye-es, I’m fairly sure now that I must have seen one of those dogs crossing the Duddon on the very morning it escaped from Miss Dawson’s,” said Bob, pouring sherry for Digby Driver and himself. “At least, if it wasn’t, I’m sure I don’t know what a strange fox terrier was doing swimming the Duddon on its own in quite a lonely spot. Wasn’t it a black-and-white fox terrier that Miss Dawson caught in her yard?”

  “So I believe,” said Driver. “So if you’re right, that’s the dog that’s been killing sheep in the hills east of the Duddon, and it returned there as soon as it escaped. But why hasn’t anyone seen it up there? Where’s it hiding, d’you think?”

  “Hard to say, really,” replied Bob reflectively.

  “Are there any lonely barns or sheds up that way?”

  “None at all,” said Bob, deftly concluding the manufacture of a black gnat with two fragments of a starling’s feather. “All the same, it would be very unlikely to be living in the open, I’d think, for two reasons. One’s simply the time of year and the weather; and the other is that if it were, someone—Dennis Williamson or somebody—would have seen it up there by now.”

  “So?”

  “So it must have found some sort of underground refuge.”

  “Like?”

  “We-ell, let’s think; perhaps an old shaft or slate working of some kind; or the old coppermines—somewhere like that.”

  “What are the actual likeliest places, d’you know?”

  “I think it’s hardly possible to be comprehensive about that,” replied Bob, who in his time had been first a schoolmaster and then a town planner in Whitehall, and was accustomed to answer questions with precision. “But if it were anything to do with me, which thank goodness it isn’t, I’d be inclined to have a look at the old Seathwaite coppermine shaft, up beyond Seathwaite Tarn, and then, perhaps, over the top, at the area of the quarries south of the summit of Coniston Old Man; yes, and the Paddy End mining area too.”

  “Where are they, exactly?”

  Digby Driver spread out his map and Bob showed him. Not long afterwards, Driver refused Mrs. Taylor’s hospitable offer of luncheon and took his leave.

  He returned up the Duddon valley, left his car in the lane near Long House, took a torch with him and set out for Seathwaite Tarn. Having rounded the tarn along the north shore, he reached and entered the coppermine shaft; and here he smoked a cigarette, throwing down the empty packet as deftly as any Islington yob at the Angel. Like Dennis before him, he drew blank, but did not fail, nevertheless, to observe the gnawed bones, excreta and other evidence of relatively recent canine occupation. He was too ignorant to be able to tell whether the occupants had left some time ago or whether they had merely gone out and might be returning.

  “H’m,” mused Digby Driver thoughtfully. “What’s to be done now, I wonder? This mustn’t leak out. No, no. It would never do, would it, if that dog—if those dogs—were to be caught too soon? Never, never. They’re lucky to have me, they are indeed.”

  Monday the 15th November

  “Good God!” said Dr. Boycott, aghast.

  He sat staring at the front page of the Orator with a kind of stupefaction. Mr. Powell, behind his shoulder, also stared, lips compressed and eyes moving from side to side as he read.

  ARE RUNAWAY DOGS

  CARRYING BUBONIC PLAGUE?

  (From Digby Driver, the Orator’s Man-on-the-Spot)

  The tranquil inhabitants of Lakeland, England’s celebrated rural area of natural beauty, got a shock yesterday. The reason? It has now at last been revealed that, contrary to the bureaucratic silence hitherto preserved by Whitehall’s Animal Research Station at Lawson Park, near Coniston, the mystery dogs who for some days past have been playing cops-and-robbers among the sheep and hens of local farmers, are in fact escapees from the Station’s experimental pens. An official statement, issued two days ago by Animal Research, typically concealing as much as it informs the public, now says that on a date last month two dogs escaped. That tells little enough. But would they have told the public that much without the Orator? There are, therefore, THREE dogs involved, the third being—yes, you’ve guessed it! The public’s watchdog, the London Orator, Britain’s highest-selling daily paper.

  Cagey

  What the statement did NOT say was that the dogs are identical with those who have been killing sheep in the Lake District and were discovered by Dunnerdale shopkeeper Phyllis Dawson red-handed in a daring raid on her premises, as reported in these pages. Yet this is virtually certain. What kind of time is this to be cagey, when public safety is at stake? Yet this is what the scientists of Lawson Park, who are paid with the taxpayer’s money, are doing. To them the Orator says, “Wake up, gentlemen, among your teacups and clanking inventions. If not, we shall have to wake you up, in the public interest.”

  Sinister

  Yet a more sinister reason, as it seems, looms in the background to the story. The Orator is now able to purvey to its readers the exclusive information that at the time of the dogs’ escape, when, as is now known, they were alone and at large in the Station’s laboratories for long hours on the “night of the crime,” investigations were taking place in those very laboratories into bubonic PLAGUE. This terrible killer-disease, which once decimated the London of merry monarch Charles II three hundred years ago, has now been unknown in this country for many years past, being carried by flea-parasites of the common rat.

  Did They?

  Could the escapee dogs, before their getaway, have met up with the deadly infected fleas? We know that dogs like rats, and fleas like dogs. But does the British public like secrets, deception and silence? That is why the Orator says today, to the men of Lawson Park, “Open your doors, gentlemen, open your minds and learn to TRUST THE PEOPLE.”

  “Coo-er!” said Mr. Powell. “And what exactly does A do now, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know what the Director will do,” replied Dr. Boycott, “but I know what I’d do in his place. I’d get Whitehall to issue a categorical statement immediately that the dogs couldn’t possibly have had any contact.”

  “And what about the dogs? Do we have to go out and try to catch them now?”

  “If it was me, I’d take instructions from Whitehall on that. This is one situation where Whitehall might be some help to us. The dogs’ll have to be shot now, obviously—not just caught, but shot dead, and the quicker the better. What I want to know is, how did the Orator man get hold of all this?”

  “Goodner, d’you suppose?” asked Mr. Powell.

  “Goodner’s always been as canny as they come. A man of his age and experience—if he was prone to indiscretion he’d have fallen down a long time before now. I dare say discretion was one of the assets he’d already shown he possessed before he got the job. Not just anybody gets put on germ warfare, you know. There’s too much at stake.”

  Mr. Powell picked up the Orator and re-read it with a demure travel of regard, frowning the while. He was at a cold scent, but it was certainly rank; and sure enough, after another half-minute, Dr. Boycott cried upon it.

  “Have you said anything to anyone?” asked Dr. Boycott suddenly and sharply.

  Mr. Powell started. “Me? No, not a thing, chief, straight up.”

  “You’re absolutely certain? Not to anyone? How about that fellow you said gave you a lift back from Dunnerdale?”

  “I can’t remember what we talked about. Nothing that’s security, that’s for sure.”

  “But he couldn’t help knowing you were from here and that you’d gone over to Dunnerdale after the dogs. Did he ask you any questions?”

  “I said something about the dogs, I believe—nothing much—but certainly nothing about Goodner’s work or bubonic plague. Well, I couldn’t, could I? I don’t know anything. I didn’t even know he was doing plague, come to that.”

  “Well, all right. It’s a matter for the Director now. Save it for the judge, as the Americans say. It’s possible that nothing more will come of it. Dogs can’t contract
bubonic plague, you know. If they could, and those dogs had had any contact, they’d be dead by now. Presumably we’ve only got to say so and the whole thing’ll die down. But all the same, the quicker they’re shot the better.”

  “You know, chief,” said Mr. Powell, “something tells me that that press release of ours may not have been terribly fortunately timed.”

  Tuesday the 16th November

  “A major disaster,” said the Under Secretary, “I would imagine, though it’s early to tell as yet. It could hardly have come at a worse time, with criticism running so high over public expenditure to implement the Sablon Committee recommendations.”

  The Assistant Secretary stood gazing out of the window. It was T. S. Eliot’s violet hour, when the eyes turn upward from the desk, and the street below was full of clerks, typists and executive officers hurrying to St. James’s Park underground and the buses of Victoria Street. The starlings had already come in and, after their usual cackling and squabbling, more or less settled down along the cornices. There had been a kestrel over the park that afternoon. Did the kestrels ever take starlings, he wondered. Hardly; but they probably took sparrows. It was to be hoped so, for there was something disappointing and undignified about the idea of their coming into London merely to pick up rubbish. Sate itself in a celestial bed and prey on garbage. Come to think of it, Shakespeare must have seen them taking garbage. Then that line might be a kind of unconscious extension of the iterative image of hawking in Hamlet. “When the wind is southerly—”

  “If you’ve had time to reflect, could I have the benefit of your views, Michael?”

  (Could you?)

  “Well, I think it might be extremely awkward all round, Maurice, if the papers are intent on making a meal of this plague business.”

  “Let us see whether our respective minds are in accord. Why do you?”

  “Well, we can’t deny that the dogs escaped and that initially the station kept quiet about them. We can’t deny that the station have got a bloke on germ warfare and that inter alia he’s working on bubonic plague. And apparently we can’t deny that the dogs, while escaping, may have gone somewhere near where that work’s being done.”

  “I agree. But now, tell me two things. Could the dogs in fact have had any contact?”

  “Well, almost certainly not. Boycott says it’s out of the question.”

  “And is it?”

  “I honestly can’t tell, Maurice, unless I were to go up there myself and have a look round. But apparently the plague lab’s kept locked and it can be proved that it was locked that night.”

  “But fleas—cracks—doors—”

  “Precisely. Of course the fleas weren’t loose, but how can anyone swear for certain—how can the Secretary of State stand up in the House and say that one might not have been?”

  “And secondly, can dogs in fact carry bubonic plague?”

  “Well, I’m advised not. But it’s like all this advice you get from technical officers, you know. When you get right down to it and lean on them, they begin qualifying. ‘Well, they conceivably could, but it’s very unlikely.’ ‘We can’t positively say it could never happen in any circumstances,’ and so on.”

  “So for all practical purposes there’s nothing to worry about, but nevertheless it’s gone sour on us to the extent of providing nuisance value to a hostile and malicious press?”

  “That’s the way I see it.”

  “Oh, dear.” The Under Secretary drew meditatively on his blotting-pad. “Gone to the demnition bow-wows.”

  “I don’t think even Mr. Mantolini could give us much help in this case.”

  “Well, you may perhaps have to go up there, depending on how things develop.”

  (At twelve hours’ notice, I bet, in the event.)

  “I’ll be seeing the Parliamentary Secretary about it, though I’m not sure when—probably Friday. Perhaps you’d better come along too, Michael. I’m afraid it may be going to be difficult to convince him that all this couldn’t have been avoided. How close is our liaison with Lawson Park? Shouldn’t we have been told at once about these dogs having escaped?”

  “Hardly. They have a great many projects and experiments up there and the dogs weren’t particularly important until this press attack started.”

  “Yes, I know, I know, Michael” (O God, here we go again!), “but you must try to see things from a Minister’s point of view. I can’t help feeling that very often you seem unable to appreciate—oh well, never mind.” (I do mind, damn you, and why don’t you either say something I can answer or else keep quiet?) “You see, what’s really so very unfortunate is this press release that the station appear to have put out unilaterally, without reference to us. They issue a statement admitting that two dogs escaped, as though there were now nothing more to be said, and in the event this virtually coincides with a piece in the Orator accusing them of trying to keep quiet about the plague work. It looks bad.”

  “I know. It’s a pity they did that.”

  “But should they have, Michael? Shouldn’t there have been an agreed drill under which they referred their proposed statement to you before releasing it?”

  “I’ve repeatedly tried to arrange one, but as you know, these chaps always put up a great deal of resistance to anything that suggests to them that they’re being controlled and restricted by Whitehall.”

  “H’m. No doubt they do.” (And you’re thinking that I ought to have been able to push them off it if I had any ability.) “Well, let us trust that the hope is not drunk wherein we dress ourselves—”

  “Well, I dare do all that may become a man.” The Assistant Secretary’s goat was not altogether ungot.

  “I’m sure you do, Michael. And now, good night. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind asking James to look in for a moment, would you?”

  (What’s your P.A. for, you sod?)

  “Together both, ere the high lawns appeared

  Under the opening eye-lids of the morn,

  We drove afield …”

  Wednesday the 17th November

  Rowf, raising his muzzle cautiously above the bracken, had time to glimpse nothing more than the distant bar of moonlight twinkling and gleaming across Ullswater before ducking quickly down again at the sound of men’s voices a good deal closer than he cared for. He glanced at the tod, crouched small, tense and watchful among the fronds, and at Snitter gnawing on a stick to contain his hunger and wagging his head like some crazy, ill-made scarecrow in a high wind.

  It was now the fourth night since they had come to the Helvellyn range. They had killed two sheep, but with greater difficulty than before, and tonight Rowf had refused to attempt another, insisting instead on a farmyard raid. The tod had demurred, pointing out that the weather was too fine, still and clear for hunting round human dwellings, but in the face of Rowf’s angry impatience had finally given in. To Snitter it was plain that the tod was unable to make head or tail of Rowf’s total lack of its own natural bent for coldly weighing one consideration against another and then acting to the best advantage. At the time when it had first joined them, it had never known a creature like Rowf and accordingly had not reckoned with his ways, but now it had come to distrust and fear his impulsive nature and above all his impetuous anger, which it could not understand. Snitter hoped that it was not beginning to regret the bargain it had struck with them. He would have liked to ask it, and to try to smooth things over, but discussion was not the tod’s strong point.

  The wind was carrying plainly the smell of poultry from the henhouse in the farmyard. Rowf lifted his off-side front paw and tried his weight on it. It was as tender as ever and, cursing, he lay down again. His hunger moved sluggishly in his belly, dulling his spirit as drifting clouds obscure the sun.

  His companions in desperation, he thought: the one, whose very talk he could barely understand, more crafty and self-interested than any cat, whom he now knew he hated for its sly, calculating cunning; who would desert them both without the least compunction whenever it m
ight decide that it would suit it to do so; the other his friend, the only creature in the world who cared a fly for him, but who seemed to grow more addle-pated and more of a liability with every precarious day they survived. It was for these that he had to go on, night after night, mustering his diminishing strength for yet another plunging, battering encounter, using up what little was left of his courage and endurance, until the time when there would be none left—whereupon the tod would depart and Snitter and himself would either starve or be cornered and killed. No, he thought, the tod had been right enough; he was no wild animal, nor, after all, had it proved possible for him to become one. Though he might never have had a master, yet by his nature he needed the friendship of other creatures as the tod did not.

  The reek of the tod excited him, in his hunger, to a slavering rage. Why couldn’t I have died in the tank? thought Rowf. That was what my pack leaders wanted: at least, I suppose they did; and I let them down. Now I’m neither a decent dog nor a thorough-going thief like the tod. Oh, blast this leg! If it goes on hurting like this I shan’t even be up to breaking into a hen-roost. The two of us could try to eat this damned tod, I suppose, come to that. Then there’s cats. Cats run loose in farmyards. You could eat a cat at a pinch. I wonder whether I could kill one and get it out before the place came round our ears?

  He turned again to Snitter. “Are you ready, Snitter?”

  “Oh, yes,” answered Snitter, with a grisly pretence of jaunty carelessness, “but why not wait a bit? There’s a flood of sleep coming to cover the houses, you know. Blue and deep—a deep sleep. I’m calling it, actually. You see—” He stopped.