Antman (64 page)

Regel gave a loud cry. 'No, no.'

'It's no good, Herr Regel. Brandt's father was in Poland and recognised you when he visited you. You weren't a victim, but one of the ethnic Germans recruited to the side of the SS. You needed job security and somewhere to live, so you tricked Marko into offering hospitality and killed him.'

'I never killed Marko. He was dying.'

'Okay, so you waited until Marko died, ensuring he thought you were his saviour and nurse. In gratitude he left you the house. You probably hoped you'd buried the past with Marko, but we know quite a lot about it, because we found Marko's diary in the War Museum. It was in the attic after you left the house. You weren't too steady on your feet, even in those days and you didn't look in the attic for any of his private papers. You knew he had a son named Detlev and that he'd moved out but kept in touch with dad and probably knew all about you. All those years you lived and worked in fear of being exposed. Forty years on, your son was working in Hull. You visited him. You'd already been to Hessle. It was all a sham with Morrison a few days ago. You travelled back last year and killed Detlev Brandt.'

Regel gave no reaction to all of this and Chris showed irritation.

'Tell me, how did you manage it with your heart condition? Or is your heart condition a sham as well?'

After a long pause, Regel responded. 'My heart is bad. The doctor says I have to avoid stress. I came to Hull by train. It was not how you think. I had to put the past to rights. You do not know how it is to live with fear for fifty years, that my son might be revealed as the son of a – well, a war criminal. It was a terrible coincidence that Brandt came to work at the same university. I knew one day he would recognise my son. I did not kill him. I paid a man to do it.' Regel's words came out in short phrases and he gasped several times to take a breath between each.

'You didn't avoid stress last year when Brandt was killed. You were there. Well, well, that was brave. We can tell. It's the details that give us away, Herr Regel. You're a ritualist. You haven't quite equalled the obsession of your son for ants, but you know about it. You made Detlev Brandt pay for the past by forcing him to chew and swallow a live ant before he died. Pay for the past which had nothing to do with him, or the deep disturbance of your own son which had everything to do with your treatment of him. Nobody else but you would have bothered to go to those lengths. Your murderous background knowledge came in useful. You made it look like suicide. They say an SS officer never forgets his skills.'

'I was never an SS officer.' Regel was panting, as though under severe stress.

'It wasn't as though you didn't try. You were a sympathiser.'

‘
We were all indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth. We had no knowledge outside it. We were brainwashed.'

'The difference was you took to it like a duck to water. You worshipped Himmler. When he visited you couldn't get enough attention. My colleague DC Morrison has recovered some useful footage from the Imperial War Museum archives. You were Artur Greise's right hand man. He was in charge of your region of Poland.'

'I had to survive, for my family's sake.'

'Oh, your family. All this was for your family. We forgot them.'

'While you were clambering up over junior staff in the SS, your parents were receiving short shrift at the hands of the SS in Berlin. You had to distance yourself from them, didn't you, because your father didn't like Hitler. He was a printer and he became mixed up in a group wanting him to print a newsletter detailing the nasty things Hitler and his cronies were doing. So what did you do? You didn't try to persuade him to stop. Instead, you made sure the SS knew about him and that you had cut yourself off from the family. They didn't bother to distinguish the rest of the family. They strung up your mother as well, your younger sister, your aunt and uncle and your grandmother, all living at the same address. It was a bit tricky, though, at the end of the war. You had to do a quick disappearing act and re-invent yourself as a persecuted Pole, possibly a Polish Jew, if you could get away with it.'

'Many of us suffered under the Nazis and we did not want to suffer again under the Allies.'

'Except that you didn't suffer under the Nazis. You rose through the ranks and did rather well. In fact, you did so well that your name was mud among Poles and other victims after the war. Fortunately, you were well practised in changing your identity.'

Regel nodded. He was straining for breath.

Chris called Sergeant Brill over. 'Make sure Mr Regel doesn't come to any harm. Use whatever means you need to protect him. Keep two officers with him at all times.'

Brill smiled. 'It'll be a pleasure.' Tom turned his attention to a little group of officers who stood round a figure of authority who had appeared from nowhere, so it seemed.

'Apthorpe,' said Tom. ‘What an amazing coincidence you've turned up.'

'At the invitation of Chief Superintendent Bradshaw,' said Apthorpe with a smug smile.

'No less.' Tom glanced around at the equipment on the ground.

'You're in time to see us blast the formicas out of the ground,' said Apthorpe, 'once we've confirmed there are no people left in the buildings.'

'All accounted for,' said Bradshaw.

‘
What about our killer?' asked Tom.

'Confirmed dead by our officers. The body has been removed for forensic analysis. He seems to have decided to offer himself to his own ants for dinner.'

There were signs of pleasure among those standing round and one or two muttered remarks which provoked sniggers. Bradshaw appeared unaware and turned to Apthorpe. 'You were saying?'

Tom interrupted. 'Without wishing to spread despondency, I have to say that the very last strategy for dealing with ants of this type is any kind of explosive.'

'Fine,' said Apthorpe who, Tom realised now, was the self-appointed expert in this group. He squinted his piggy eyes at Tom through a pair of diminutive half lens spectacles. 'Then how do you suggest we contain them, Fortius? Invite them to a seminar?'

'It would be preferable,' said Bradshaw in a rare moment of conciliation, 'if we weren't at loggerheads in the command team at the start of this operation.'

'Also,' said Tom, 'I can't see how gas will be effective, for three reasons. It risks affecting any civilians in the area. Its penetrating strength is limited as at least some colonies in the woodland enclosure are likely to be dug in anything up to three metres in depth. And finally, the metabolism of ants is such that they are only likely to ingest it slowly.'

'Little beggars,' said Bradshaw, whose moment of conciliation had passed. 'Carry spades, do they?'

'Or pneumatic drills presumably, on this rock,' said Apthorpe sarcastically.

'Something like that,' said Tom. 'Or more simply, where the soil overlies loose aggregates of a tip, ants are as capable as people of finding passages to underground cavities, only more easily because they're so small.'

He could see from Bradshaw's face that the point had gone home.

'What's the weather doing to windward?' asked Tom, his voice trembling slightly. 'The thunderstorm is imminent.'

'Weather? Why worry at a time like this.'

Tom's impatience showed. 'I thought I had explained the tight correlation between temperature, humidity and the metabolism of the ant. Our killer will ride on the back of it.'

'Balderdash!'

'Not only through the trees,' said Tom. 'There must be tunnels all over this area. Our antman probably triggered some automatic timing device to let the remainder of the colonies of marauding ants loose after he was dead.'

Bradshaw turned to Apthorpe. 'Now then, what have you to make of all this?'

'Not a lot.'

'In what way?'

‘
Well, from my experience with rodents, I would predict that you can use flamethrowers to clear the bulk of them from surface vegetation, a couple of stun grenades to destroy the brood nest and then a whiff of gas to snuff out any underground survivors.'

'Ridiculous!' exclaimed Tom.

Bradshaw glanced at Apthorpe then fixed his stare on Tom.

'You were about to say?'

'That's a prescription for total disaster,' said Tom.

'The man's an eccentric, right up his own arse,' said Apthorpe quickly.

'Hang on,' said Bradshaw. 'Before we go any further, let's have this clarified one way or the other. What is your view, Professor?'

Tom took a deep breath. 'My view is that irrespective of the method of extermination adopted, it's absolutely essential that I go in first, to try to identify which species we're dealing with, in the singular or the plural. Only then can we begin to guess how they might respond to the changed conditions we create. We should bear in mind that ants can survive environmental extremes partly through their enormous capacity for adaptation in the face of adversity.'

'For more delays, call on Professor Muddle,' Apthorpe interposed.

'You're wrong,' said Tom. 'By using explosives, you won't eliminate the problem; you'll simply spread it out.'

'Rubbish,' retorted Apthorpe. 'The pressure waves will blanket and kill every living thing within a fifty metre radius.'

Tom shook his head in disbelief. 'Fine if we're talking about human beings. But ants are different, particularly in this case, with ants living many metres underground.'

'All this fuss over a pile of insects which have dug out a few bucketfuls of soil.'

'Hardly bucketfuls. Lorry loads more like. You'll find their nest extends a good few metres further down than your explosives can reach. They're extremely resilient. Short of direct exposure to heat such as flames, they can resist most forms of military attack, including nuclear bombs. They're immune to radiation, although they're as liable to mutate subsequently as any other living beings.'

'Scientific claptrap,' snorted Apthorpe.

Tom leaned forward. 'You'd stand a chance if there was only one queen and you scored a direct hit on the heart of the nest. But some of these will be in a composite colony. There will be many federated nest sites, which means hundreds of thousands of brood chambers, thousands of fertilized queens already laying and probably tens of thousands of alates – winged queens and males ready to be transported in a blast wave to mate miles away and found further nests, God knows where.'

Apthorpe looked taken aback, but only momentarily. 'The pressure wave from the explosion will kill them.'

'If only,' said Tom. ‘We don't know how much pressure an ant's body will need to withstand, given the muffling effect of many metres of soil between it and the blast. The stuff you're using – remember it's a quick blast rather than a blanket – will probably create a hurricane effect at ground level and up to a few metres. But from, say, three metres in depth, you'll suck up like a vacuum cleaner bucketfuls of soil, nest materials and ants, and redistribute them over as wide an area as you can see the clouds in the sky. Except for the winged ants, as I've said. Once liberated and blown to a sufficient height to catch some decent thermals, there's no telling where they will eventually land.'

Bradshaw saw this was going nowhere. He held up his hand. 'Can you summarise the implications of this for me, Professor?'

'For pity's sake don't detonate anything at this stage. The brood nest in the area of primary detonation will be destroyed, but from the peripheral chambers and passages you'll have thousands of newly mated queens scattered over half the country.'

'It's what I told you,' said Apthorpe. 'Remember, I'm not just an academic, but a major in the Territorials. It's horses for courses, Fortius. I've never met a pure academic yet who has an accurate idea of the damage scientifically calculated explosives can inflict. There isn't much time though. We can agree about that, can't we?'

Tom nodded wearily. Apthorpe's naivety was astonishing. He wasn't motivated to push it further.

'Yes,' he said. 'I can vouch for that.'

Almost simultaneously, there was a streak of lightning and a second later an enormous clap of thunder. Rain deluged from the clouds overhead. For a few seconds, it was like a wall of water falling from the sky. Then, as quickly as it had started, the cloudburst ended and gentle rain fell.

The explosion resulting from Apthorpe's efforts couldn't be heard above the thunder. The roof of the barn seemed to lift then settle back and fire spurted from the windows. Regel saw the flames and in his mind’s eye could see only the flames which consumed so many of his generation in the Third Reich. He stood up, his clothes hanging off his fleshless frame like garments on a scarecrow whose arms and legs were no more than broom handles.