Antman (45 page)

*  *  *

Tom was in one of the laboratories, in deep discussion with Luis Deakin about some of the peculiar features of the current forensic investigation.

'These are by no means the most populous nests,' said Tom, enjoying the luxury of being carried away by his pet obsession. 'It's bizarre, as though our mystery entomologist has been using tropical ants for another purpose and wants to test them on this gruesome job. In a way, if speed of execution were important to him, I'd have thought the size of the colony would be his main aim. In the tropics ants can live in great communes of linked nests, colonies of several square kilometres in extent, comprising maybe a trillion individuals – who knows? No-one has ever calculated. In the average square hectare, perhaps as many as twenty million.'

Tom was speculating in response to a question from Luis about the predatory power of different species of tropical ants.

'Sheer colony size could smother a victim long before death through injuries such as haemorrhages. Take Atta, they're leaf cutters. They tend to be vegetarian. They specialise in growing fungi, which they feed on the vegetation they collect. They have fungus gardens in their nests. New colonies of Atta being established in South America, which is their usual habitat, can strip hillsides of all their growth from scratch in three years. They wouldn't be the obvious choice against out and out carnivores, but they could overwhelm by force of numbers.'

At that moment the phone rang in the office. One of the technicians called Tom to say it was the police. When he picked up the receiver Chris answered and the call turned into a detailed discussion of the latest developments in the investigation. By the time Tom returned from taking the rather lengthy call Deakin had gone.

*  *  *

Chris was waiting outside Tom’s office, having phoned him on his mobile and agreed to wait till he arrived. Less than five minutes later she sat down gratefully in one of his easy chairs and slit open the large manilla envelope that had arrived in her post.

'I shouldn't be doing this,' she said, mostly to herself, 'but what the hell.' She put on a pair of protective gloves, passed Tom a pair and began flicking through the sheaf of A4 sheets she'd slipped from the envelope.

'This is ridiculous. Today's post, pages of the stuff. It's so self-indulgent of him to assume that we're going to have time and the motivation to read it.'

In spite of this, she sat and read. As she finished each sheet she passed it across to Tom to read. ‘We have to face the fact that someone gets to know who we interview and targets them with very little time-lapse, if any. And at each stage, we're left with more autobiographical material.'

She read from the top page: 'It's easy to grow up, as the memory of each horror disappears from your life, blotted out completely.

'It was only some years later that I realised the shadows of the happenings had not gone away entirely, but still lingered at the edges of my mind. What matters now is inability as I grow older to control and curb the unpleasant feelings I'm left with in growing strength.

'I withdrew from the violence and unhappiness of the household into the more endurable world of my imagination.

'At about the same time I started to read books in earnest. I began with a few of the books on the children's shelves in the school library. I found them very unsatisfying, though I was not inclined to seek out any alternatives. Instead, I found solace in piles of books stuffed in corners and on an ill assorted collection of bookshelves in different rooms, along landings, in corridors and generally anywhere which provided a suitable surface. Many of these books were unintelligible to me. But a few claimed my attention more than the rest. Among these was a companion to music, in which summaries of the lives of great composers stirred my interest. It was some time before I discovered the lives of German and Austrian composers of the late nineteenth centuries and, because I had nobody to guide me, even longer before I found my way to the music of Bruckner and Mahler, those wonderful, complex scores – cities of sound.

'I became completely absorbed by the music and the ants. Practical circumstances tended to divide my attentions – poring over the comings and goings of the ants by day and the musical scores by night. The resonance between the complexities of the parts and the creation of a whole – the myriads of actions contributing to the grand order of the colony, the thousands of individual squiggles on the score, distributed across a hundred music stands and wrought by the conductor into a single, magnificent whole. Together, from the age at which close interaction with other people became too painful, they filled my ears and eyes, my entire consciousness. They obliterated the testing of my being against the disharmony of the household. They offered a world in which I was more and more cut off from that other world about me. I would re-engage later, but only at the most superficial level – to make the arrangements, to realise my goal of becoming the conductor.

'All this was a long time before I took the laboratory job which seemed to offer an escape from the chaotic, unreasonable, hateful domesticity which still boiled around me. I liked the idea of working in the lab, with equipment and computers rather than with people. My problems had derived from the people I knew and lived with. I had been the victim of so much from those who should have been my friends and protectors. I wanted to feel safe. Perhaps safety lay in retreating from direct interaction with people – the potential attackers.'

'He worked as lab assistant at the University,' said Tom.

'Seemingly.'

‘
Why doubt it?'

'There are a number of possibilities. He could have worked for a commercial company. He could be trying to put us off the scent, or to implicate someone else.'

She carried on reading.

'Outwardly of course, there was nothing. Nothing to suggest anything was different from the pictures on the wall of the sitting room. That little cluster of photographs which summed up three generations of weddings, christenings and family reunions. The sitting room they only let us use on high days and holidays. The coldest room in the house – apart from the bedrooms, that is. In winter they needed overcoats on their beds and I still coughed every night. There was still condensation, and sometimes frost, on the inside of every window pane, encrusting each metal frame with a kind of stale, black rust which stank like that water butt at Uncle Harry's.

'From four to twelve years old, those photographs held the family together. It was the power of the camera and the power of the photographer that showed it. Grandfather and Father, who took the pictures, they were the only ones not on the wall. But they stood apart from the rest of us, invisible, somewhere else in the foreground, pushing everyone into line, insisting on a frozen smile.

'I used those photographs, and others in the pile of magazines in the cupboard under the stairs, to build up my picture of what the world was like. All those days, weeks and months, on and off, convalescing from whatever illness it was. They never named it, which made me feel even more as though I was the person in brackets, the child without a label, who for all those hours spent alone in my bedroom while the blackbirds sang outside and the street bustled with life, was away somewhere else, in suspended animation. Or in my coffin. That was the way I used to think of it. I used it to build up my picture of the world. Or rather, two pictures. One concerning everything inside my head and the other, what remained outside. The trick was to make day to day life bearable by learning to move between one and the other. I practised this trick until I had it developed to a fine art. It meant that when I was in my head nothing, no matter how bad, could get to me. The other trick was to make sure that I controlled everything. I did this by taking total charge of whatever I undertook. In my dreams I became the ruler, the generalissimo. People came and went at my orders. Anyone who didn't carry them out completely, and immediately, to my satisfaction, was punished as I thought fit.

'My head was filled with a mixture of German war films and books about crime.

'After the experience of travelling to the USA, I shunned moving from the immediate locality. I took to watching videos, not able to go to the expense of borrowing from a shop, but having no need, since I drew on an extensive collection of particularly violent and sexually explicit tapes I found stacked in bin liners in the cellar of the house, evidently forgotten about when father went abroad.

'The plots of these fed my imagination. I became a Colonel on the Eastern Front in the early 1940s. I had responsibility for punishing defaulters, boosting morale, and destroying the myth of the enemy's invincibility. I came to believe I was upholding the values of the German Wermacht. I would make promises, swear oaths of allegiance, make speeches and drink toasts. I drank on my own. I drank my own health and cursed others freely. On one occasion, I slit my right wrist, read some passages from Nietzsche's Zarathustra whilst sipping my own blood.

'Now and again, in lighter vein (I like that pun!) I found myself dreaming of summer holidays spent in a lighter world with shadowy figures and wraiths too vague and ethereal to be recognisable from my past.

'The destiny to which I aspired was beyond the world of domesticity and feelings. It lay in the world of men and action, not women and emotions.

'I returned repeatedly to the more earthy and satisfying images. This was my war and to fight it I stayed dirty. I took to living in the same battle-scarred clothes day after day until they and my body stank. After watching and living the Stalingrad campaign I learned that natural body odours and dirt keep a man waterproof. I sat for hours drinking in the details, peeling back the photo-stills and pausing, frame by frame, on the explosions, the bodies flying through the air in the wake of exploding mortars and grenades. A thousand deaths were given action replays every day. I fed on a diet of campaigns of destruction. My senses reeled after several hours of detonations. They induced a kind of drunkenness. I went into a stupor. My head ached with it. I would lie down on the carpet and close my eyes while the images catapulted across my inner vision before finally slowing down and collapsing into a daytime doze.

'Out of my room, the security of aloneness broke down. The bedsit near the railway was a tiny room and the landlady ruled with iron. I was too shy to stand up for myself at the time. I stored my resentment in the vast reservoir of anger which had accumulated for several decades.

'She told me, “I want no waste. If you have my meals, you eat them. Nothing worse than a man who won't eat.”'

'I sat in front of my dinner, night after night. Night after night, when she had left the room, I fought back waves of nausea and forced myself to pick at the edges of the plate. Then I shovelled the bulk of it into a newspaper, rolled it up, hid it under the table and waited for her to return. After she'd cleared the empty plates and I'd smilingly thanked her for her marvellous cooking, I went for a walk with the packets of newspaper hidden under my coat, dreading the juices would leak out and betray me by dripping onto the carpet. Once in the street, I would head for the opposite pavement, with its succession of litter bins spaced at intervals on the street lamps, and stuff one packet down the gaping mouth of each, as casually as I could as I strolled along. Inside, I was shaking with nervousness that I might be found out, and strangely weak from hunger. It wasn't the physical hunger for food though, more a hunger of the whole body and mind for some quality absent from my life, which only the sight of the ant masses, and the Bruckner and Mahler, could begin to supply.

'I watched the ants hunting and eating. It was difficult to focus my mind on the problem of how to kill. I knew it would involve the ants, but even so, there were so many ways of doing it. I read in a magazine I picked up in the street that Mongol bandits buried their enemies up to their necks in sand and let ants eat them alive. The lucky ones, their chests compressed by the weight of sand, suffocated first. I couldn't believe in the fact of suffocation until one day walking along the beach, I watched a group of lads burying one of them almost up to his shoulders in sand. Then, ten minutes later, I returned along the same stretch of beach to a scene of frantic activity, with neighbouring adults all scrabbling away to release that very frightened boy from his sand prison. His face was purple. He gasped for breath until they freed his arms and eventually sufficient of his torso for him to lever himself out. Then he lay panting on the sand whilst they laid blankets over him and waited for medical aid. I wasn't affected by the state of the lad, but the impact on him of this brief burying did surprise me. It wasn't as though he had even been covered in sand up to his neck. I hadn't realised until that moment the claustrophobic impact on a person of even partial burying in sand. It clearly caused psychological traumas as well as being potentially fatal. Up till then I'd assumed it was similar to being ducked in a pool of water.