Guy Smith - Snakes

He stood beneath the shade of a leafy oak tree, rolled a cigarette with unsteady fingers. He needed a few minutes to calm himself, to think clearly. If you jump in, do it with both feet, no half measures. In other words, don't fuck it up. Go the whole hog and be prepared to take the consequences.

His tidy mind began to put everything in order, formulate a hypothetical plan of action. If it was to be mongooses then they had to be brought here secretly and released under the cover of darkness. Point number two, where in hell do you find a mongoose?

Bill Arkwright might still have one! John Price's pulses pounded again. Bill had been at university with him, had got his degree and gone back to Scotland to work on snakebite serums, had his own private collection of reptiles, had had the necessary licence to keep dangerous animals granted on research grounds. Arkwright had kept a pair of mongooses as pets; John remembered that rumpus with the RSPCA when some busybody had written and claimed that Bill was organising mongoose-snake fights and was taking bets on the outcome. The case was disproved and it had all died down.

John wondered if Bill still had his place up in Edinburgh, if he still had those mongooses, and if he would be prepared to help. All bloody ifs again, but there was only one way to find out.

Aunt Elsie really should have had a telephone installed. She might have been alive now if she had had some means of summoning help. And John Price would have been able to sit down in comfort and privacy and attempt to track down Bill Arkwright. As it was he found himself in the oven-like telephone box on the Green, keeping the door propped open with one foot whilst he tried to persuade a Directory Enquiries operator to locate a Mr W. Arkwright in Edinburgh. No, I'm afraid I don't know his address but I can't tell you how urgent it is. Normally we don't look for numbers without an address, sir, but on this occasion ...

He hoped three pounds' worth of ten-pence pieces would be enough—another few hours and it would have been a lot cheaper. There was a saying that time was money; it was also lives.

'Arkwright speaking.'

'Bill, this is John Price.'

'Who?'

'Bleep . . . bleep . . . bleep . . .

It took him another ten pence to establish his identity.

'Why, John, of course. How are you? Look, old boy, let me ring you back or we'll never put two words together without that bloody thing interrupting.'

Briefly John told Arkwright the story, most of which the other had read in the newspapers anyway; his own involvement, the death of his aunt.

'What you need is a bloody mongoose to hunt 'em out.' John's hopes soared as Bill came back at him with his own theory. 'Soon sort the buggers out.'

'That's what I'm ringing you about, Bill.'

'You mean have I still got Rick and Tick and can you borrow them? Sure I have, and if you take the responsibility and fetch 'em you're welcome to 'em. I still get the ruddy RSPCA poking round from time to time to check that I'm not snake-fighting with them. You'll have to fetch 'em, though, and if you get caught with 'em they're not mine.'

'Oh sure.' John did some mental calculations, a round trip of something like four hundred miles. Twelve hours in the Mini if she didn't play up. Back in Stainforth before dark.

'I'll see you early afternoon then.' He replaced the receiver, stepped gratefully outside into the hot sunshine.

Twelve hours' driving in this bloody heat! Twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six—he'd do it if it meant death to the killer snakes. And tomorrow afternoon as he sat head bowed in the cool of the church at Aunt Elsie's funeral he would have the secret satisfaction of knowing that he had made the snakes pay for their killings. He would never have believed during those long years of studying for his degree that he would ever come to hate reptiles the way he did now.

Twenty minutes later he was in the old Mini, both windows wound down in the hope of a cool breeze, driving out of Stainforth; down past the church, past the track leading to the old disused quarry where he used to play on his visits here as a boy. He wondered if it was still there. Probably partly filled in by its own avalanches and overgrown with vegetation. He would not have any regrets about that, remembered the time when he had gone there after butterflies for his collection, had scaled one of the steep sand walls in an attempt to catch a Red Admiral and had fallen fifteen feet. Fortunately the soft sand in the bottom had broken his fall otherwise he might have broken a leg, or worse.

It used to be a damned dangerous place.

His thoughts returned to Keith Doyle. Somehow he did not believe that the gardener had left Stainforth and that made it all the more worrying. Because PC Aylott had vanished into thin air also.

John Price filtered on to the motorway, moved into the middle lane and jammed his foot down on the accelerator as far as it would go. Suddenly he was aware that he did not have that 'unemployed feeling' any more.

'WE'RE BALING that sandpit field today no matter what the army, the police or any other bugger says,' Jack Jervis informed his son when he came in to breakfast after doing the early morning round of the stock field. 'You can't waste bloody weather like this and I won't be happy till all that hay is under cover.'

'Blimey, Dad,' said Sam Jervis, splashing milk on to his cereals, knowing that his earlier suspicions were correct and that the old man was in one of his moods. 'It ain't goin' to rain for weeks, if it ever rains again.' Not just a bad mood, a very bad mood.

'We can't chance it.' Jervis senior chewed noisily, took a swallow of tea to help the stringy bacon down. 'We can't just sit around doin' now't, this bloody nonsense could go on for weeks.'

'I don't like the idea o' you and Sam goin' up there.' Dora Jervis shuffled across the room, deposited a plate of toast on the table. 'Them snakes are dangerous.'

Silence, just a smacking of greasy lips as the Jervis family meditated on the perils of snakes.

Jack and Dora had rented their scattered smallholding for the past twenty years, a kind of 'getting-away-from-lorry-driving' move. It had been a messy venture, made all the more disorganised by the fact that their rented land was scattered around Stainforth; fifteen acres of meadowland that Phil Burton was only too pleased to find a tenant for, rough tussocks of unpalatable grazing, two more tracts of eleven and nine acres, and finally the 'sandpit field' leased from the council. All run from their existing tumbledown dwelling and the few acres that they actually owned.

In the beginning Jack had had to rely on casual farm work to make ends meet. Rumour had it that his 'capital investment' had come from equipment stolen from his various employers; nothing serious enough to warrant police investigation, a roll or two of sheep-netting from one place, a few stakes and staples from another. Jack's mechanical knowledge from his haulage days came in handy, enabled him to keep their old 1962 Ferguson tractor going, and, with some very untidy improvisations, they managed to scrape a meagre living. Sam was an accident, set them back a bit, but they got by in their own slovenly fashion. Their shortcomings were many but all were agreed that the one thing they did not shirk was work.

Sam was not at all keen on the idea of lugging the bales off the sandpit field, but if the old man said that that was what they were going to do today then that was what they would do. He had learned many years ago not to argue with his father.

Dora watched the two of them file out of the room, and sighed loudly. Jack worked the boy too hard, never gave him any time off. Sam was a hired labourer on a pittance of a wage, not a son. The boy was bright enough, would in all probability have done well at school if Jack had not persistently kept him at home to help with the harvest, the lambing, every seasonal job as it came round. 'Tell, 'em you've 'ad the 'eadache, boy,' he would say at every period of absenteeism from school. Sometimes it was "the bellyache' just to ring the changes. Sam might have gone on to sixth-form college if his school attendances had not been so inconsistent, but Jack Jervis wouldn't have stood for that. 'Work is what you do with yer 'ands, boy, not sittin' at a desk thinkin' about it.'