Tooth and Claw (5 page)

Carl reached out and placed his finger against it, pushing until his fingernail indented the explosive in a shallow crescent. It was like modelling clay: inert and malleable. He got up from the table and walked back down the garden to the kitchen. The kettle had switched itself off, and he flicked the switch back on to reheat it. There was silence from upstairs.

The phone rang as he was about to leave the kitchen. He quickly picked it up before it could disturb his father.

‘I called earlier on,’ his mother’s voice said. No greetings. No small talk. ‘Nobody answered. Is everything all right?’

‘I was out, and Dad was asleep,’ Carl replied. ‘Sorry.’

‘Saying “sorry” does not provide an automatic absolution. Anything could have happened to your father up there. He might have fallen out of bed. He might have had a stroke. You
have
to be there for him.’

Because you’re not
, Carl thought, then buried the thought. ‘I went down to the shed to check something. I lost track of time.’

‘You can’t lose track of something you never had to begin with. You’ve always had a tenuous grasp of priority and timing. You got that from him.’

‘He’s fine. We both are.’

‘I suppose it’s too much to ask if you were out looking for a job?’

‘Make up your mind,’ Carl snapped. ‘I can either stay at home looking after him every minute of the day or I can go out looking for work. You can’t have it both ways.’

He could imagine his mother’s lips twisting at his momentary rebellion. ‘Don’t be argumentative; you haven’t got the intellect. If you had a job we could afford to hire a nurse to look after him. As it is, the incapacity benefit, the consultancy work, and the advance on my next book is only just enough to keep paying the mortgages and buy the food.’

Mortgages. Plural. Half their financial problems would be solved if Eleanor Whittley moved back into the family home, but she and Carl had gone through that argument many times before. She needed peace and quiet to do her work, she said. Living in the house, being at Nicholas Whittley’s beck and call, she would never get anything done. She and Carl had to split the work between them: she would pay the bills and he would look after his father.

So why did she keep pressing him to get a job? So she could disengage from the family completely, Carl suspected, and that
was why he was holding back on applying for jobs and going to interviews. His mother’s will was an unstoppable force – he’d known that since childhood – and so he had to be an immoveable object, whether he wanted to or not.

‘Dad was asking about you,’ he said, twisting the truth slightly. ‘When are you going to come over and see us? If you came tonight I could fix us some food. A proper family dinner.’

‘Not tonight,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve got a dinner party to go to.’ A pause, then a concession. ‘I’ll come over tomorrow. I can spare an hour or so.’

‘Thanks. Dad’ll be pleased. See you tomorrow.’

‘Goodbye.’

He put the phone down and stood for a moment, not thinking, not moving. Just existing, independently of everything and everyone else. Eventually, without making any sounds that would give him away, he retrieved a steak knife from the kitchen, then walked back down the garden to the outbuilding. Sitting at the table again, he used the knife to separate the explosive into two equal blocks. He wrapped one of the blocks back up in the spare plastic sheeting that he had left on one side, then retrieved the modified mobile phone from over by the fridge and placed it on top of the other block. The first phone – the intact, unmodified one – was still charging, but he didn’t need this one to have a full charge: just enough for it to receive a call and send the call tone to where it thought the loudspeaker was. He pushed the ‘on’ button, and watched as the mobile’s screen lit up. A few messages cycled past as it looked for a service provider. Finally it managed to lock onto a signal.

He waited for three minutes, breathing shallowly, for any stray currents, error bleeps or ‘welcome’ messages to cycle their way through the phone. Then, hesitating only slightly, he pushed the detonator inside the block, meeting some resistance. It was
like pushing a skewer into a side of beef. When it was three-quarters of the way in, he stopped.

There was a roll of weatherproof electricians’ tape in the tool tray – ‘black nasty’ it was called in the building industry – and he quickly pulled a length off, cutting it with the wire strippers. With a deft, well-practised movement he wound the tape around the mobile and explosive, anchoring them together, then wrapped the whole package in the other plastic sheet and made it secure with rubber bands.

And now he had a fully primed and working bomb in front of him. One wrong number and his limbs and internal organs would be spread across the smoking remains of the outbuilding, but only he and the service providers knew the number.

With a cold feeling in his limbs and a dry mouth, he slipped it carefully into a pocket inside his anorak.

Carl crossed over to the power sockets and detached the second mobile phone – the unmodified one – from its charger. This one had more charge in its battery, but this was the one that would need to actually make a call, rather than just receive one. He slipped it into an outside pocket, on the opposite side to where the explosive was located. No point in tempting fate.

He took a last look around the outbuilding. The tools and pieces of wire were still spread out across the table, and he spent a few minutes tidying them away. There was no point in leaving evidence scattered around. The chances of his father making his way painfully downstairs and out into the garden while he was away were vanishingly small, but people bet on the National Lottery with even smaller odds of winning, and sometimes they did win. Unlikely things sometimes came to pass.

Back in the kitchen, with the mobile phones, Semtex and chicken breast secreted in various pockets around his anorak, he set a mug on the counter and slid a tea bag into it from the
container by the sink. He poured boiling water into the cup and watched as brown fluid swirled out of the tea bag, gradually darkening the water to the colour of the brackish puddles and rivulets that made the Essex salt marshes into the unique environment they were. When he couldn’t see the bottom of the mug any more, he retrieved the tea bag and placed it into the small rubbish bin that he kept beside the sink for that very purpose, then carefully poured some milk into the mug.

Retrieving a cling-film-covered plate of mince and rice from the fridge, Carl set off up the stairs. Each step brought his heart a little lower. He could feel his pace slowing as he got closer to the bedroom.

His father was sitting up in bed. He was wearing his reading glasses low on his nose; the black rims prominent against his pale skin. The newspaper that the paperboy had delivered that morning was still folded on the duvet beside him. The tuft of chest-hair that emerged from the top of the jacket was as grey as the hair on his head.

‘I brought you some lunch.’ He placed the plate on the bed where his father could reach it.

‘Mince.’ Nicholas Whittley looked dubiously at the plate. ‘How thoughtful.’

‘Does your … colostomy bag need changing?’

His father winced and looked away. ‘No. Not yet.’

‘And what about your urine bottle? Does it need emptying?’

‘No. It’s fine.’

‘I’ll check again after you’ve finished your cup of tea and your lunch. How are you feeling?’

‘I had a dream. I think it was a dream.’ His father’s gaze fastened on Carl’s anorak. ‘You’re leaving me alone again?’

‘You know you get more rest when you can’t hear me moving around. I’ll be a couple of hours.’

‘A couple of …’ His father took a deep breath. ‘I’ll see you later.’ He turned his attention to the plate, looking over the top of his reading glasses at it. ‘What kind of mince is this? Beef? Turkey?’

Carl hesitated. ‘Pork, for a change,’ he said eventually. ‘What was your dream about?’

‘I thought that Eleanor was here. I thought she’d come back.’ His face was pathetically hopeful. ‘Did she call?’

Carl took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She didn’t call.’ Before his father could respond, Carl turned and went downstairs. Picking up the rucksack that sat by the front door, he left, locking the door behind him.

Outside the house, the rain still loitered as a fine mist in the air as if it wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to fall to the ground or not. Carl locked the door behind him and walked off, hands in pockets, feeling the dull edges of the packet of explosive through the thick, waxy material. It banged against his legs as he walked, head down and hood up. Past the other houses, through the alleyway, past the garages on the edge of the Creeksea estate and into the Essex wetlands which spread away into the distance; a plain of grasses and low bushes fading away into the grey mist, broken up by meandering streams whose steep-banked sides dropped away without warning and raised dykes and banks that hid the horizon in most directions. Surreptitiously he looked around, checking for anyone nearby – hikers, perhaps, or someone making a delivery – but he was apparently alone.

Carl struck out across the marshes, letting his legs settle into a steady rhythm as he walked. He knew the area where he wanted to test the device, and it would take him about twenty minutes to get there. He consciously kept his mind from thinking about what he intended to do when he arrived. All
the preparations were made; now he had to make sure that the various components worked in the way he intended. And then he could proceed with the next phase of his plan; a plan which, like the landscape around him, went on and on until it faded into the mist.

After some indeterminate time, Carl knew that he had arrived at the right spot. Some minor variation in the grassy mounds, some small difference in the colour of the leaves on the bushes told him that he had reached his goal. He looked around. The rain had thinned out and the mist had lifted, and he could see for probably a mile or more. There was nobody around. He put the rucksack down and reached into his pocket for the block of explosive and the mobile phone that he had attached to it. They felt almost exactly like a brick, weighing down his hand. Walking forward to an area where the ground fell away slightly and the bushes thinned out, he placed the explosive and the mobile phone on the ground. The plastic sheet that it was wrapped in would protect it against the rain; after all, it had protected the explosive from the elements for the many months that it had been hidden, buried out in the marshes.

He took the chicken breast from his anorak and unwrapped the cling film from it. The flesh was warm and tacky beneath his fingertips. He balled the cling film up and put it back into his pocket. No point leaving any traces around if he could help it. He would dispose of it later.

Kneeling down, he brushed the chicken breast over the plastic wrapping of the bomb, leaving smears of watery blood over the slick surface. He draped the breast across the top of the bomb and then backed away to where he had left the rucksack. Kneeling again, he opened the rucksack and pulled out two green canvas camping groundsheets, their edges perforated with metal-edged holes, some cord, a hammer and a handful of metal
coils. With swift, economical motions he spread one of the groundsheets out, wove the cord in and out of the holes around the edge and then anchored the groundsheet to the grassy surface using four of the coils which he twisted into the ground in a square, larger than the sheet.

He did the same to the second groundsheet, placing it over the first and attaching it to the ground. Together, the two sheets formed a cocoon, an envelope inside which he could remain dry and unseen. A hide. A sett.

A couple of handfuls of earth and grass thrown over the sheets completed the illusion.

And then, with his rucksack held in one hand, he dropped to the ground and wriggled beneath the top groundsheet, fingers pulling at the rough weave of the canvas.

The smell of wet grass and disturbed earth prickled his nostrils. He felt dissociated, detached from reality. How many times in how many different places had he taken up that position, sandwiched between two sheets of canvas, waiting for an animal to come by?

His hand groped in his pocket for the second mobile phone. He switched it on, and in the meagre light from the display screen he typed, using his thumb, the number of the other phone, the one connected to the bomb. A few button presses and the number was committed to the mobile’s memory, able to be recalled with the press of just two buttons.

Outside his hide, in the thin slice of marshland that he could see from between the two sheets, the bomb sat innocently in the centre of its hollow. The chicken breast on top drooped over the block of explosive like a Salvador Dali watch.

Time passed; seconds, minutes, perhaps hours. Carl’s mind slipped into a reverie that was not quite a dream and not quite a waking stream of consciousness; a slow progression of mem
ories that slipped over and around each other like the dappled bodies of trout in a stream.

Eventually, there was movement. It might have been a fox, it might conceivably have been a badger, but it was in fact a polecat; a sinuous streak of dirty grey with a pointed head and two beady black eyes set in a mask of fur that made it look as if it was wearing glasses. Reading glasses. It placed its forepaws, almost like tiny human hands, on top of the explosive and looked around suspiciously. Carl held his breath, willing the polecat not to see him. Its black eyes seemed to pass over him and then return, as if it knew there was something, some
one
, out there, watching, but it couldn’t quite work out where.

Carl’s thumb caressed the button that would route a call to the mobile phone connected to the bomb.

The polecat bent its pointed head to the chicken breast. Its mouth opened, small teeth ready to tear at the flesh.

Carl pressed the button.

The polecat, the chicken breast and the wrapped block of explosive vanished in a flash and an expanding cloud of flesh and blood and dust and burning gas. Disconnected from the flash, a few microseconds later, Carl heard a loud blast. The ground shuddered beneath his prone body.