Antman (46 page)

'I realised a person who is pinioned and subjected to additional psychological stresses, such as fear, can quite quickly succumb. Probably that's why people who fall into mud flows or quicksand lose their calm and, ignoring the objective possibility of clambering out, die quickly if rescue isn't on hand.'

*  *  *

'I could tell something was up,' said Chris, raising her head briefly from the papers. 'All these communications from the person we assume is our killer, they amount to a cauldron of unholy loves.'

'You're a teeny bit ahead of me there,' said Tom.

'Isn't that what St Augustine found when he reached Carthage?'

'I'll pass,' said Tom. 'Your Oxbridge education's been broader than mere science.'

*  *  *

I was drawn to the local University after reading about the German composers and the German Universities. I took to day dreaming about the University I walked past in my nocturnal journeying. One evening, I was out earlier than usual and I passed the science block a few minutes before the night porter locked up. I slipped into the foyer and made it down the corridor and into one of the laboratories without being seen. It wasn't long before someone in the porter's lodge picked me up on the closed circuit television and I was ejected. I pretended I had taken a wrong turning and luckily they were in a generous mood. They could see I was harmless and I escaped with nothing more than a stiff lecture on the consequences of trespass. But from my point of view it had been worth it. In the ten minutes or so before two night staff appeared with the porter, I had darted swiftly from bench to bench, peering at this experiment and that demonstration, drinking in the details of a world I felt excluded from. If life choices can be made in a moment, this was my moment of decision.

I went back to the University during the daytime. I walked into the foyer of the main hall, open to public access. I pored over the photographs of the University open day. I found out the date of the next annual open day was in three weeks’ time. It was a Saturday at the beginning of June and turned out to be brilliant sunshine.

This time I could wander where I wished. I found myself in the science block. This time I gained entry to the area where they conducted experiments on insects, particularly ants. I spent more than an hour in that area. I took two reels of film.

Outside, in the corridor, I was intrigued by the notice-boards. There were postcards from staff on holiday in other places – Spain, France and Bournemouth. There were several pictures of adults and children. Were these members of staff? Which were the children of which staff?

When I reached home I found that by one of those flukes I had taken several snaps of what I assumed were academic staff explaining various experimental set-ups to visitors. I had plenty of material to feed into my search. But what was I looking for? I didn't quite know. I had a selection of the photographs enlarged. Those on which I eventually identified as the key people, through collecting brochures and prospectuses whenever I visited the University, joined the ever growing number on the big pinboard on one wall of my large farmhouse kitchen, which I dubbed HQ.

There was a time later when I used computer games to strengthen my expertise in the mass control of populations. I tried all the war games, from the ancient civilisations and the military campaigns of the Greeks and Alexander the Great through to Napoleon and the two great wars of the twentieth century. Nothing excited me like the ants, though.

While I studied the photos, I switched on the CD player. Not Mahler's First symphony. I wanted to save that for moments of consummation. I would take the third movement of the Second symphony. Every time I heard those woodwind passages, I imagined the formicidae in their convoluted tunnels, making their way up to the surface and bursting out into the sunlight. The urgency of the rhythm accentuated the frantic rush of the army. Then the fortissimo brass bursting out over the top of the strings as the soldiers advanced, their mandibles more than quadruple the size of the worker ants. Timpani and triangles now, as a small group of winged queens emerged, floating around the entrance as though in a daze before being gently coaxed back into the safety of the limitless darkness below ground. Then the restless rhythm starting again, as the urge to hunt and kill infected the host, and waves of excitement visibly moved half a million bodies in unison at the moment of advance. I did not heed the tears running down my face as the burst of sound faded into diminuendo strings and timpani, and they came to rest, sated with meat from fifty thousand insects – small mammals, injured birds and infant animals too small and slow to get out of their hunting field. As the contralto entered with the solo, I could hear nothing beyond the words
Die elt ist tief
- that surely was the superiority of the ants, to penetrate the depth of the world. Deep was the suffering and the joy.
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit – Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigheit
. All manner of joys sought Eternity, the deep Eternity. I couldn't bear my own response to the words, in the face of the urge to seek to place the power of the denouement with the ants. To take the life of people back into the deep earth with them. 

J

*  *  *

Chris finished reading the few lines on the last sheet and tossed it down on the low table between them. Tom picked it up and scanned it. She stood up and brushed her hands down her blouse and skirt, as though trying to cleanse herself of any connection with the man they sought.

There was a faint rumble, as though deep in the distant Pennines rock strata were moving along ancient fault lines.

'Damn,' said Tom. He glanced at the ornate Edwardian brass-mounted barometer in its polished mahogany case. It hung on the wall behind Chris, curiously out of place with the modern paraphernalia of filing cabinets and bookshelves stuffed with box files and books.

‘
What's the matter?'

'Thunder. I've had a look at the weather reports. The main band of rain is still twenty miles away and thunderstorms are notoriously fickle in these parts. We may escape one altogether, while on the North Yorkshire Moors they're flooded out. We can't count on it, though. The pressure's down to twenty-nine and still falling.'

'Thunder doesn't bother you?'

'It's the ants I'm concerned about.'

Chris's mobile rang and she answered it. Even though she wasn't saying much, Tom could tell the call wasn't going well. She was tense when she came off the phone.

'That was Bradshaw,' she said. 'Sister Ruth's been found dead.'

All thoughts of the storm were driven from Tom's mind.

‘
What the hell!'

'There's a man's body as well, but they're still trying to confirm the identity of that.'

'Do we have any idea –?'

'There are insects all round the body and mouth parts buried in it.'

'Do they know what insects they are?'

She shrugged. 'It hardly matters what they think. You and I can guess.'

'How did he find her so quickly after we interviewed her?'

'Perhaps he knew we were going and had time to plan.'

'He couldn't – that would mean an insider –'

She looked serious. ‘Who knew we were going? Bradshaw, members of the team, Morrison? Bradshaw's doing his nut and wants me back immediately.'

Tom shook his head, as though he found this incredible. Chris's mobile rang again. She turned to Tom. ‘We need to be at the scene of crime. Bring whatever you need to identify ants.'

‘
What about the University?' Chris asked, while he was gathering his things and locking up. ‘Who knew where you were going?'

'Apart from me, in effect, nobody of any consequence.'

'Of any consequence,' she said. 'Thereby hangs the crucial tale.'

*  *  *

Ahead of them on the road from Beverley to Bainton, there were blue lights flashing. Chris's car slowed and an officer waved them off the road. She climbed out and Tom followed her. DC Morrison walked across to them,

'Boss, we found this in a canvas bag near the bodies.'

'That'll be so the ants don't get at it and destroy the paper,' said Tom. 'Leave me to read this in the car.' He didn't have the stomach for going any closer to the scene of the crime, unless she demanded it of him.

Chris saw him about to open the bag. 'Don't touch it,' she said and ran across to a group of officers in protective clothing. She returned with a pair of gloves in a packet and tossed them onto his knee. 'You'll get me shot,' she said.

Chapter 31

Colleagues: It's my privilege to let you into my secret.

The ninth symphony of Mahler occupies the high ground between individual entities and the larger reality. Through it, I enter a dream state with the entrance of the dance motif at the start of the first movement. The swinging rhythms of the violins creates a lullaby, in which I imagine being swung gently in a hammock by my mother.

Within five minutes, of course, all is loudness and disturbance. I am tipped out and the timpani with some brass and muted woodwind and strings impose their sinister echoes on my attempted relaxation. An even more subversive plot is hatched in the awesome shadow of this steadily darkening dance. The harp still accompanies, but an irresistible burst of harmonies reminiscent of Richard Strauss makes it ever less likely that the warm, sandy surface of the soil will stay quiescent.

I delicately pull the remote and the hole which forms the main entrance to the nest opens a few millimetres. A cascade of ants surges through the tiny gap, which I quickly close.

Now the music is louder as the first movement gains velocity, the few straggling themes surfacing louder than the dark accompaniment to the plot.

The foragers soon lose their extreme excitement and slow to a more deliberate quartering of their territory, criss-crossing each other's path repeatedly in their search for prey.

Suddenly there's a person there, a living body, tightly bound. A woman. I check and double check that her hands and legs are secured and that the gag is in place. Only just in time, for the second movement is beginning. I have so much to say and can't risk her interrupting.

This lyricism in the music always takes me back to a childhood which repeated itself – the dance-like motif which recurs in light and darker sound tones reminds me of the picture in my head of walking on open heathland, with sandy banks running alongside the track and isolated clumps of gorse. The heather is scattered on the banks, by no means covering them. The most striking feature to me as a young child was the brilliant orange and black colouring of the large ants darting among smaller black ones, along the length of the bank. I know now these were the workers of Formica Sanguinea, known as the slave-making ant for its habit of raiding nests of the smaller, matt-black Formica Fusca, carrying off grubs and pupae to rear as “slaves” in its own nests. In fact, these so called slaves do no more than add to the labour force of the colony, in contrast with the continental Polyergus Rufescens which still raids other nests but has degenerated to the point where it is totally dependent on being fed by the captured workers from these raids – an invidious situation to be in. It's the sharpness of the remembered emotion, though, to which I'm drawn repeatedly: a hypnotic mood, almost of exaltation in the sunlight drowning out all emotions other than rustic happiness at the complex simplicity of the unending activity and drama of the ants. It means to me the lost world of childhood, a fiction to which I feel entitled, but know I've been denied access.