Tooth and Claw (4 page)

He rarely, if ever, saw anyone else on his wanderings. The salt marshes were anything but picturesque, and those few people who walked their dogs in the area almost always encroached only a mile or so from the border and then turned around again. The centre was practically deserted. Apart from him. Him and the birds and the various animals that lived out there.

‘Carl!’

He turned. Kev Dabinett was walking along the road holding a bag of shopping in his hand.

‘Kev,’ he called back, ‘how’s things?’

‘Yeah, fine. How’s your dad?’

‘Dad’s good. Still finding it difficult to get around.’

Kev nodded in sympathy. ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

‘Sure. Donna okay?’

‘She’s got a job. Working in Waitrose in Chelmsford.’

Carl forced a smile across his face. ‘That’s great. All the tapas and goat’s milk you could ever want.’

Kev frowned. ‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing. Just a joke.’

‘Okay.’ Kev paused awkwardly. ‘Look, sorry about the cars and stuff outside the house. It’s only a temporary thing. I can get them moved, if you want.’

Carl could feel the rage boiling within him, hot and volcanic, but he forced it down. Kev apologised half-heartedly like that, as regular as clockwork, every couple of weeks but it didn’t change anything. He seemed to think that an apology was a replacement for a change, not a precursor to it. ‘It’s not a problem. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Thanks. See you later.’ Kev waved vaguely and headed towards his front door, past the litter of engine parts and tools spread across his scrappy lawn.

When Kev had shut the door behind him, Carl moved too, approaching his own front door, alert in case something unexpected happened. Nothing moved behind him, and he cautiously reached into his pocket with his free hand for the key. This was the danger point; this was when anyone would strike – if they were there. While his attention was momentarily distracted, and before he could achieve the safety of his home.

He slid the key into the lock, holding his breath. No sound. Nothing. The key
snick
ed into the mechanism and he turned it
slowly, head slightly twisted so that his peripheral vision would detect anything that suddenly appeared behind him.

He could feel an itch between his shoulder blades, as if someone was watching him, but it was caution rather than a specific warning. He pushed the door open. Just inside the door he had screwed a full-length mirror to the wall, and he now switched his gaze to the silvered glass, sweeping the area behind him to see whether someone had betrayed themselves.

Nothing. He was safe.

He pushed the door shut behind him and leaned against it for a moment. It sometimes seemed to him that he spent much of his waking life these days wondering if someone was watching him. When had it started? He never used to be like this. There were times he wondered why he was letting paranoia etch his life away, but there were other times when he knew with heavy certainty that one day there would be someone there behind him, and he would have to be ready.

He took a moment to regard himself critically in the mirror. He was young – still under twenty-five – and his body was fit and muscular from the regular walks he took, but his expression was grim and his hairline was receding. He was getting old before his time.

He pushed his way into the house, past the grey metal crutches and the rucksack that sat by the front door, beneath the mirror. Inside, the house was dark, shadowed, smelling of pine, varnish and books. The furniture was sparse and wooden, the pictures that lined the walls landscapes and abstracts rather than portraits. Motes of dust glittered in the shards of light that knifed their way between the closed curtains.

‘Eleanor? Is that you?’ The voice drifted weakly down the stairs.

‘It’s me, Dad,’ he called back. ‘It’s Carl. I went out before you woke up.’

‘You’ve been gone for hours.’ The unspoken comment hung in the air:
I was worried about you. How am I supposed to do anything without your help?

‘Sorry. Lost track of the time. Saw a couple of badgers out in the marshes. If I’m lucky I can find their sett and then get some really good photographs. Do you want a cup of tea?’

‘Tea would be nice. And some food. I didn’t have any breakfast.’

‘I left a tray by the side of the bed before I went out. Cereal, and a jug of milk.’

A pause. ‘Oh. I wondered what that was.’

Carl headed for the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water from the tap. The liquid slaked his thirst and he drank greedily, then poured himself another one. When that too was finished he leaned against the old porcelain sink, letting its solidity support him. He felt dizzy, disconnected.

Pushing himself upright again with some effort, he switched on the kettle and then, while it was boiling, unlocked the kitchen door and walked out into the back garden. The herb garden could do with some pruning – especially the rosemary bush, which was threatening to run wild – but the rest of the plants were looking reasonably healthy.

At the end of the garden was a wooden building that he’d had built a year or so back. He told his father that it was where he kept his bird- and animal-watching stuff – his cameras, his files, his reference books. That was true, but it was more than that. It was his refuge. His burrow. His sett.

Returning to the kitchen he walked across to where the fridge sat, humming, in one corner and opened the door. Sterile light illuminated the tiled floor. He reached inside and took out a raw chicken breast, pink and naked, wrapped in cling film. For a moment he weighed it in his hand, then he slipped it into
another pocket of his anorak. A ‘poacher’s pocket’ it was called; big enough to take a rabbit. Or perhaps even a badger.

He left the kitchen, kettle steaming gently, walked down the garden and, passing the coiled mass of the hosepipe, unlocked the door of the outbuilding with a key from his keyring. The building was connected for electricity and water, and he switched the light on as he entered. There were two rooms, one leading off the other, and the rough pine walls of the first room were lined with glass-fronted cabinets. Each cabinet contained an animal, posed in some naturalistic way: standing on its hind legs and sniffing the air; lying curled in a hollow between some rocks; poised, alert, looking for prey. Foxes, ferrets, voles, mice and rats. Not stuffed, though. That would have been too artificial. No, these animals were natural in all senses – sunken holes where their eyes should be, dull pelts, skin drawn sharply over the underlying bone, they were posed using wire that had been wrapped around their limbs, and the landscapes they were posed in were decaying as well: the grass dry and brown, the branches withered.

A plain pine table was positioned in the centre of the room. On it were six boxes containing mobile phones that he had bought in Ipswich the last time he had visited the town to buy food and other supplies. They were pay-as-you-go phones; the price included ten pounds of free airtime with the provider whose logo was plastered all over the boxes. The limit could be topped up using a credit card or debit card, but Carl had no intention of ever drawing attention to himself by doing that. No, the reason he had chosen the pay-as-you-go phones in the first place was that they didn’t require a contract or any kind of standing order or direct debit in order for them to work: they could make calls straight out of the box, once the SIM cards were pushed out of their little holders and inserted inside
them. There would be no way to connect the calls made back to the person who had bought them, and that was exactly what he wanted.

Next to the phones was a plastic box with a transparent lid. The inside of the box was subdivided into smaller sections of varying sizes and shapes. Each section had something different inside: nuts; bolts; screws; lengths of wire; capacitors; fuses; wire strippers; a roll of insulating tape and another roll of silvery solder; a soldering iron; and several small screwdrivers of the kind that jewellers and watchmakers used. Usually the tools were for making his animal sculptures. Now he was going to use them for something entirely different.

Placing the plastic-wrapped package that he had been carrying down on the table, Carl pulled out a chair and sat down. Watched by the sunken eye-sockets of the animals around the room, he selected two of the mobile phone boxes from the pile and compared the phone numbers printed on stickers on the outside with each other. He had already made sure that none of the phones had consecutive numbers, but diligence and repeated safety checks paid their own rewards. Having two or three numbers separated by a single digit meant that a simple misdial could have serious consequences.

Having established that the mobiles were safe, he opened the boxes and sorted out the items he would need – the SIM cards and the mobiles themselves – from the rest of the detritus that filled the space: CD-ROMs, manuals, chargers, several leaflets and slips of paper and two faux-leather pouches which could clip to belts with the mobiles protected inside.

He chose one of the phones at random, took the back panel off and unclipped the battery from inside, exposing the tiny clip where the SIM card went. The SIM card was separate, attached to a credit-card sized piece of plastic by two small tabs.
He pushed it out of the plastic and slipped it into the clip in the phone, then replaced the battery and the back panel. Retrieving one of the chargers from the pile of stuff on the edge of the table, he got up and plugged the phone in to one of the sockets that were mounted chest-high on the wall on one side of the building.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he was aware that the kettle would have finished boiling in the kitchen by now, and his father would be working himself up into a tizzy about his cup of tea. But that could wait.

Returning to the table and working methodically, he opened up the back of the second mobile, removed the battery and set it safely to one side. Then he slid his fingernails beneath the label that was affixed under the battery and peeled it off. The glue was strong but the label was laminated and gradually came off in one piece. Underneath, set into the baseplate, were two tiny screws. Using one of the jewellers’ screwdrivers he carefully undid them, setting them to one side where they would not roll off the table and where he could find them again.

The inside of the second mobile phone was now vulnerable, and he lifted the two halves apart, keeping the side with the keypad on the back and setting the other down next to the two screws. His gaze catalogued the various components in the inner casing: the loudspeaker, the microphone, the tiny offset motor that worked as a vibrating alarm, the circuit board and, crucially, the programmed integrated computer chip that sat in the centre of the board like an electronic spider.

It was the wires that led away from the circuit board and towards the loudspeaker that he wanted. Delicately, he used the wire strippers to sever the wires just before they made their connection to the loudspeaker, and then splayed them in different directions so they wouldn’t inadvertently touch each
other if he knocked one of them. Selecting two lengths of narrow wire from the plastic box of parts, he plugged the soldering iron in and, when it had heated up enough, gently melted a bead of solder on first one wire coming from the mobile phone and then the other, and then carefully attached the new lengths of wire to them. A few seconds of soft blowing to cool them down, and the connection was made.

The mobile phone sat there on the table with its innards exposed, twin wires trailing out and quivering like the antennae of some bizarre robotic beetle.

Reaching again into the tray, Carl removed a cylindrical object about the size of a cigarette. It was a detonator. With the greatest care, he again used the solder and the soldering iron, but this time to attach the detonator to the pair of wires that emerged from the disassembled mobile phone. Then, using a small file from the tray of components, he etched away two notches in the edge of the phone cover, just large enough to take the wires. Once he had done that, it was the work of a few moments to put the other half of the inner casing back on and fasten it into place with the two small screws, leaving the two wires emerging from the notches he had cut. The battery slotted straight back in to the case, and the rear panel slipped back on, leaving the phone whole again. Carl retrieved the second of the chargers from where he had left the contents of the boxes, plugged it into the phone and then, holding his breath, plugged the whole thing into a second wall socket. The phone was off, but even if something had gone wrong and a spare flicker of charge had got to the detonator, all that would have happened would have been a small explosion, barely enough to scorch the Formica counter. Detonators were just means of charging a larger chunk of explosive. They were pretty harmless by themselves, unless you happened to be holding them at the time.

The device was almost complete. Only a few steps left, and then he could test it out.

Carl turned his attention to the plastic-wrapped package that he had retrieved from the salt marshes and which he had left to one side of the table. He removed the rubber bands, one by one, and set them to one side, then carefully unwrapped the grey plastic wrapping. It crinkled between his fingers. There were two separate layers, and they had been wrapped several times around the contents in order to protect them from rain and ground water; necessary, since the package had spent several months buried beneath a stone out in the salt marshes, far enough from the house that it would not have implicated him immediately if it had been found but close enough that he could retrieve it with no difficulty when he needed it.

Carl unwrapped the first layer and set it to one side, then unwrapped the final layer, pulled it stickily from the object it surrounded and flattened it on the table as a safe base.

There, on the table before him, was a half-kilogram block of explosive, manufactured in Czechoslovakia back in the early 1990s but still just as dangerous as the day it had left the factory. It was grey, slightly moist, and smelled oily and comforting, like linseed.