The Plague Dogs: A Novel Read online

  Indeed, his hunger had now become an unendurable torment. His instincts were cloudy with hunger; he smelt the scree and the tarn as though through a drifting smoke of hunger, saw them as though through a sheet of hunger-coloured glass. He took a paw between his teeth and for a moment seriously wondered whether he could eat it. The pain of biting answered him.

  He tried to gnaw a stone, then laid his head back on his paws and began to think of all the enemies he would have been ready to fight, if only fighting could have saved Snitter’s life and his own. If nothing else, he had always been a fighter. Might it not be possible, in some way or other, to go down fighting? To bite, to bite, to sink the teeth in, aarrgh!—if only I hadn’t driven the tod away, perhaps we might have learned at last how to be wild animals. Men—how I hate men! I wish I’d killed one, like Snitter. Oh, I’d rip his throat out, tear open his stomach and eat it, shloop, shloop!

  Suddenly he felt a stinging pain in his neck, like the bite of a horse-fly but sharper, fiercer. As he leapt up, the sound of the shot reached him, magnified in the gully walls. Tearing over the loose stones, he could hear Snitter yapping somewhere far above and then a shriek—a human shriek—of fear. He stopped, confused. Where was Snitter? Pebbles were falling, yes and something else, something much heavier than pebbles. He could hear it, whatever it was, slithering, bumping, thudding to rest behind him in the gully. Holding himself ready to run, he watched to see what would emerge, but now there was complete stillness. He waited some time. Nothing moved. Not a sound. He could hear his own blood dripping on the stones.

  He returned cautiously round the buttress to the foot of the gully. A little way off, sprawled on the scree, lay a man’s body, the head bent grotesquely sideways, one outstretched arm ending in a gashed and bleeding hand. The smell of blood was warm and strong. Rowf began to salivate. Slowly he moved nearer, drooling, licking his chops, urinating over the stones. The body smelt of sweat and fresh, meaty flesh. The smell obliterated the sky, the tarn, the stones, the wind, Rowf’s own fear. There was nothing else in the world—only toothy, doggy Rowf and the meaty smell of the body. He went nearer still.

  Snitter could not make out where the man had gone. Beyond doubt, however, he had disappeared, and further than round the rock too, for even the smell of his presence—his fear and his sweat and breath-had vanished. For a little while Snitter pattered ineffectively about in the top of the gully, but then gave up and climbed out. As he was doing so, he heard Rowf barking below him—an excited, exciting sound. Something must have happened; something had changed.

  Poor old Rowf! thought Snitter. I can’t really leave him, just to go down to a farm and get myself killed. Killed! Oh, good heavens, oh, the tod! That settles it! I shall have to go back and tell Rowf about the poor tod. What was it he said I was to say? “Reet mazer wi’ yows”—I can’t just ignore the poor tod’s last message to Rowf.

  Still bemused with shock and hunger, he made his way back to the Hause and so down to Goat’s Water. Stopping to bark as he crossed the infall beck, he heard a curiously muffled reply from Rowf, coming, apparently, from deep in one of the gullies. It was not until he got nearer that he heard also the sounds of dragging and worrying, smelt blood and began to salivate in his turn. Yet upon entering the gully itself, he was altogether unprepared for what he saw.

  Wednesday the 24th November

  Punctually at five minutes to three on the afternoon of the following day, Digby Driver presented himself at the front door of Animal Research. It was warmer, pleasant weather, with a pale-blue, windy sky, the becks running brown and strong with the thaw and a smell of resinous larch trees in the air. Down on Coniston Water a flock of Canada geese had come in and the big, brown-breasted, black-necked birds could be seen and heard, trumpeting and honking as they hustled across the surface of the lake. They were, one would have thought, worth a glance; but if they had been anhingas and black-browed albatrosses, Digby Driver would not have taken a single step aside, since he would not have been aware of anything unusual. He stubbed out his cigarette on the porch wall, threw it down on the step, rang the bell and shortly found himself in a stuffy interview room, facing Dr. Boycott, Mr. Powell and a cup of thin tea.

  Digby Driver had, in a manner of speaking, his back to the wall, and was beginning to realize that the Research Station’s policy of sitting tight and saying as little as possible was proving, from their point of view, more effective than he had originally supposed that it would. A press campaign, like a drama, has got to be dynamic. It has to be kept moving. It is vital that it should go on finding fresh grist to its mill. The wretch who on Monday was helping the police with their inquiries must be arrested on Tuesday, tried on Wednesday, sentenced on Thursday and finally kicked when he is down with a calumnious and slanted biography on Friday. Otherwise the newspaper is slipping as a democratic organ and readership is likely to fall off. Ever since the death of Mr. Ephraim, Digby Driver, in accordance with his masters’ instructions, had trailed his coat in front of Animal Research as resourcefully as he knew how. Being a clever, energetic journalist, he had managed to keep the story of the dogs very much alive. Nevertheless, none of his ploys had succeeded in provoking the scientists. Those within the castle had declined to come out and fight, reckoning, accurately enough, that in time the public were likely to lose interest in a pair of stray dogs who did no more than raid farms and kill a few sheep and of whom—whatever might be bawled to the contrary—it would ultimately have to be admitted that they were not in fact carrying bubonic plague. Some other topic would eventuate elsewhere, as it always does, and the newspaper would detach itself from the dogs and cease from troubling. As a matter of fact Driver, from his telephone calls to the London office, had already begun to have an unpleasant inkling that the inception of the said detachment might, indeed, be only just around the corner. Yet he himself, from the point of view of his own profit and career, had a strong interest in keeping the dogs’ story going, if he could. Should he be recalled now and the story allowed to fizzle out, the whole thing would not have concluded with that feather in his cap which his employers, relying on his journalistic acumen to boost circulation and further their own political ends, had sent him up to the Lakes to acquire. The plain truth was that Digby Driver did not know what the hell to do next. By this time the dogs ought to have been dramatically shot, after a colourful and exciting hunt spontaneously organized by enraged farmers. Or better still, the countryside should have risen up in public protest and terror of the pestilence. These things had not happened. People had merely taken in their dustbins at night and hoped that the dogs would be found dead elsewhere. Unless Animal Research could be provoked into some kind of indiscretion on the eve of the forthcoming House of Commons’ Supply Day debate on the cost of research establishments, the whole thing was likely to come to a lame conclusion for lack of a Pelion to pile on Ossa. Digby Driver, if not yet up a tree, was beyond argument gripping a lower branch with one hand.

  Dr. Boycott, who was perfectly well aware of all this, greeted him with appropriately courteous urbanity.

  “I’m very glad,” said Dr. Boycott, offering Driver a cigarette, “that you’ve at last come along to see us this afternoon. Better late than never, you know. Now do tell us how you think we can help you. I’m sure well be delighted to do so if we can.”

  It took a lot more than this sort of thing to put Digby Driver off his stroke. As a professional bastard, he would not have been unduly troubled by the most adroit manipulation of chairs, ashtrays and lights within the capacity of Mr. Michael Korda himself. Like the great image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, his belly and thighs were as of brass and his legs as of iron.

  “Well, I’d like to ask you to tell me a little more about these dogs,” he began.

  “Now, let me see, which particular dogs are we talking about?” asked Dr. Boycott with a warm smile.

  “Come, Mr.—er—Boycott,” said Driver (and now, indeed, they were both smiling away like a couple of hyenas), “I can’t h
elp feeling that that’s just a shade lacking in—well, in frankness and honesty, if you don’t mind my saying so. You know quite well which dogs.”

  “Well, I think I do,” replied Dr. Boycott, “but what I’m trying to get at is how and in what terms you identify them: your attributions, if one may use the term. So can I, once again, begin as the idiot boy and ask you, ‘Which dogs?”

  “The dogs that escaped from here and have been causing all this trouble locally.”

  “Ah,” said Dr. Boycott triumphantly, with the air of a Q.C. who has now in very sooth extracted from a witness for the other side the fundamental piece of disingenuous bilge which he intended to extract. “Now that’s precisely the point. What locality and what trouble?”

  Deliberately, Driver knocked the ash off his cigarette and sipped some of his foul tea.

  “Well, O.K., let’s start from scratch, then, if that’s the way you want it. You’re not denying that some time ago two dogs got out of this place and that they’ve been running wild on the fells?”

  “We’re certainly not denying that two dogs got out. As I think you know, we said as much in an early press statement we issued. What happened to them after that I’m afraid I can’t tell you. They may very well have been dead for some time.”

  “And it can’t be denied that these dogs may quite likely have been in contact with bubonic plague?”

  “It’s improbable in the last degree that they were” said Dr. Boycott.

  “But you can’t give a definite assurance that they weren’t?”

  “When we say something here” answered Dr. Boycott, with radiant cordiality, “it’s always one hundred per cent reliable. That’s why we haven’t given any such assurance. But I repeat, for all practical purposes it’s improbable in the last degree that—”

  “Would you like to amplify that a little? Explain why?”

  It did not escape Dr. Boycott that Digby Driver had been stung into interrupting him.

  “No, I—er—don’t think I—er—would” he said reflectively and with a musing frown, as though giving a lunatic suggestion every possible benefit of fair consideration, “because, you see, that’s really a matter between the local health authority and the responsible Government Department. We have, of course, been in close touch with those bodies and complied with the appropriate statutory requirements. And if they’re not bothered, then I think it follows—”

  “You say they’re not bothered? That you let two dogs escape?”

  “I say they’re not bothered about any public health risk of bubonic plague. If you want to know more than that, I should ask them. They’re the statutorily appointed custodians of public health, after all.”

  Digby Driver, fuming inwardly, decided to come in on another beam.

  “What experiments were these dogs being used for?” he asked.

  Oddly enough, this took Dr. Boycott unawares. It was plain that he had not expected the question and was unable to decide, all in a moment, whether or not there was likely to be any harm in answering it.

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t know that” he replied at length, thereby inadvertently suggesting that there were things which he thought Digby Driver should not know. “One was taking part in certain tests connected with physiological and psychological reactions to stress; and the other was a brain surgery subject.”

  “What specific benefits were expected to result from these tests-experiments—whatever you call them?”

  “I think the best way I can answer that,” replied Dr. Boycott, “is to refer you to paragraph—er—270, I think—yes, here it is—of the 1965 Report of the Littlewood Committee, the Home Office Departmental Committee on Experiments on Animals. ‘From our study of the evidence about unnecessary experiments and the complexity of biological science, we conclude that it is impossible to tell what practical applications any new discovery in biological knowledge may have later for the benefit of man or animal. Accordingly, we recommend that there should be no general barrier to the use of animal experimentation in seeking new biological knowledge, even if it cannot be shown to be of immediate or foreseeable value.’ ”

  “In other words there wasn’t any specific purpose. You just do these things to animals to see what’s going to happen?”

  “The specific purpose of a test,” said Dr. Boycott, with an air of grave responsibility, “is always the advancement of knowledge with a view to the ultimate benefit both of man and of animals.”

  “Such as forcing animals to smoke to see how safely humans can?”

  Like George Orwell’s inquisitor O’Brien, when Winston Smith burst out that he must have tortured his mistress, Dr. Boycott shrugged this irrelevant remark aside. In any case Driver did not want to pursue it.

  “So anyway, these dogs get out,” he said, “and you do nothing about it—”

  “We haven’t got people to spare to go chasing all over the countryside looking for dogs on spec,” replied Dr. Boycott crisply. “We’ve complied with the law. We told the police and the local authorities. For the matter of that, dogs round here sometimes run away from farmers who own them, and those farmers sometimes lose track of them altogether. We’ve done the same as a farmer does.”

  “But these dogs—first they kill sheep: then they actually cause the death of a man; then they begin attacking shops and farmyards—”

  “Ah,” said Dr. Boycott again, “I thought you might be going to say something like that. Do they? I need convincing. With regard to the death of poor Ephraim, it’s the merest conjecture that any dog was involved—ours or anybody else’s. A dog—no one knows what dog—was seen running away in the distance; and that’s all. Put two and two together and make five. Again, no one’s ever actually identified these particular dogs in the act of worrying sheep—”

  “The Miss Dawsons at Seathwaite saw their green collars—”

  “Certainly. That is almost the only occasion on which dogs wearing green collars have been indisputably identified. Tipping over a dustbin is not the same thing as sheep-worrying. And on that occasion we had an officer at the premises within two hours,” added Dr. Boycott, conveniently forgetting that he had originally blamed Mr. Powell for going on his own initiative.

  “What about the farmer at Glenridding and the attack on Westcott’s car near Dunmail Raise? Have you forgotten that this matter is going to be raised in a Parliamentary debate in the House tomorrow night? If I may say so, Mr. Boycott, you’re being grossly irresponsible!”

  “If anyone is being irresponsible,” replied Dr. Boycott gravely, “it is popular newspapers who alarm the public with totally unfounded tales about bubonic plague—”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Powell, weighing in for the first time, “and with regard to that, I think we’d like to ask by what unauthorized means you obtained information about work being done here on bubonic plague which you later twisted and used all wrong for sensational purposes—”

  “Why, you told me yourself!” answered Driver instantly, with raised eyebrows and an air of surprise.

  “I told you?” cried Mr. Powell, with a great deal too much indignation in his voice. Dr. Boycott turned and looked at him. “I most certainly did not!”

  “Come, come, Mr. Powell, you won’t have forgotten that I gave you a lift back from Seathwaite on the morning you went over to see the Miss Dawsons, and that on the way we went to the bar of the Manor Hotel in Broughton and met your friend Mr. Gray over a few pints of beer. And then later, you told me all about Dr. Goodner and his secret defence work.”

  Dr. Boycott was frowning, his face expressing surprise and perplexity. As Mr. Powell drew fresh breath to struggle and splash, the telephone rang. Dr. Boycott nodded to him and he picked it up.

  “Hallo? Yes. Yes, I’m an officer at Animal Research. O.K., carry on, then.” There was a pause as he listened. “Under the Dow Crag? He’s dead? I see. The dogs—you—you say they’d what? They’d—oh, my God! A green collar? You’re sure? You’ve got it down at the station now? Oh, my God! Ye
s, all right—oh, God, how awful!—Yes, I’ll ring you back—anyway, someone will—very quickly. Yes, very quickly indeed. Yes, I’m sure someone will come straight down. Good-bye.”

  Mr. Powell, staring and open-mouthed, put down the receiver.

  “Chief,” he said, half-whispering, “I think you and I had better have a word outside.”

  Five minutes later Digby Driver was belting on his way to the police station.

  FIT 10

  Thursday the 25th November

  PLAGUE DOGS DEVOUR SECOND VICTIM! APPALLING TRAGEDY OF YOUNG HILLWALKER BODY DESECRATED ON MOUNTAINSIDE

  The Plague Dogs—escapees from the Government-owned Animal Research Station near Coniston—who for some time past have been terrorizing Lakeland with their ruthless sheep-killing and poultry raids on farms and domestic premises, have committed a culminating deed of horror at which the whole British public will shudder, wondering whether this country has been plunged back into the Dark Ages. If you are squeamish DO NOT READ ON!

  Yesterday, in the early afternoon, the body of Geoffrey Westcott, 28, a bank employee of Windermere, Westmorland, was found at the foot of one of the steep gullies below the east face of the Dow Crag, near Coniston, famed mecca of Lakeland mountaineers. Mr. Westcott had evidently fallen to his death from the top of the gully, three hundred feet above, for on the grass not far from the summit of the Crag were found his binoculars and prismatic compass, customary equipment of the hillwalker.

  THE BODY HAD BEEN TORN TO PIECES AND LARGELY DEVOURED BY CARNIVOROUS ANIMALS.

  NEAR IT WAS FOUND A SEVERED DOG COLLAR MADE OF GREEN PLASTIC.