The Doomsday Carrier

by Victor Canning

  “I should point out, my lady,” said the Inspector, “that I have with me a sworn search warrant and, while I don’t doubt your word —” she was well known in the county and not without influence so he trod carefully, “—we shall be obliged to search the house and all the outbuildings.”

  “You are very welcome to do so. But it will be a waste of your time. It is true that I had Charlie here, and kept him here for good and humane reasons for which I am ready to answer to anyone. But Charlie has gone. When I visited him this morning I stupidly, when I left, forgot to lock the padlock on his door.” Not to any of them would she have dreamt of saying why she had had this lapse. They were here clearly because Horace Simbath had betrayed her. The man was contemptible. Never would she ever mention his Judas name to anyone.

  Rimster moved forward, and said, “Lady Cynthia, I can assure you that none of us doubt your word. But would you be kind enough to tell us how long ago it was that you left the door unlocked.”

  “Around nine-thirty this morning. He must have climbed out of the open window in the corridor outside the billiard room in which we . . . I was keeping him.”

  “All right, Rimster,” said the Colonel turning to move to his car, “I’ll get my men around the place and call the helicopters down.”

  Lady Cynthia said, “You have my permission to move about the grounds as much as you like. The only thing I would like to say to you is that I have nothing but contempt for people like you who wantonly and cruelly use God’s innocent creatures for wicked and evil purposes. You are all beneath contempt!” It was said proudly and with sincerity and, although it was far, far from being the long and noble call to the conscience of the nation which she had seen herself giving in Regent’s Park, the few words were a balm to her disappointment and gave her the strength to stem the movement of tears into her eyes.

  As she began to turn away to enter the house, Lily Harkness came around the corner of the terrace and said, “Oh, my lady, there you are. Could I have a word —”

  “Not now, Lily.” Lady Cynthia waved her away.

  “But my lady, that there Charlie’s down in the chapel. He came in while I was cleaning and dusting round like I always do once a week. So I shut him in and came up here to tell you.”

  Lady Cynthia said, “Thank you, Lily, I’m sure these gentlemen will be delighted to hear that.”

  She went into the house to the morning room. Without even a glance out of the window at the activity beginning outside she poured herself a large glass of sherry, lit a cheroot, and then sat down to read the Daily Telegraph. One thing the Chickleys had never lacked over the centuries was dignity in defeat.

  * * * *

  Three helicopters, flying low, circled at a few hundred yards radius round the chapel. On the ground soldiers at close intervals were posted around the outside of the overgrown churchyard. By the entrance lychgate the special van was drawn up and close to it stood an army radio truck in touch with the operations centre and through it to London.

  Rimster, wearing white protective overalls, a close-fitting hood and gloves, adjusted the goggles over his eye slits and then checked the nembutal pistol. It held three darts which could be fired rapidly. The moment Charlie was hit it would take anything from five to ten seconds to knock him out, according to which part of his body the dart struck. Nobody, he thought wryly, knew for sure about these things. What the books and the boffins said could always be conditioned by Nature. He had used poison, the same poison on more than one man, and some died fast and some died slow.

  Behind him Jean reached round to adjust his mouth mask and said, “You don’t have to worry. All the odds are that Charlie won’t be infective until tomorrow.”

  Rimster made no answer. She was the same as the rest of them. Oh, they knew . . . they’d worked it all out, formulae and calculations, millions of bacilli and what-havc-you growing to maturity in the blood stream. Science was their god—but they could never be sure whether heaven or hell was their destination, so they put the thought from their minds. Well, his face hidden now from them all, only his eyes showing through the goggles, he knew his destination and, no matter how long the years might stretch out before he died, knew that he wouldn’t be the first parson’s son the Devil had made warmly welcome.

  He walked up the path towards the closed church door. Dense growths of hemp agrimony made a dusty pink border for the weed and moss-patched path. They let the outside go to hell, he thought, but tidied and cleaned the chapel once a week. No escape for Charlie now. No sanctuary for him within the altar rails.

  He pushed the door open, slipped through quickly and shut it. He stood with his back to it and let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom.

  A simple chapel. Four rows of short pews on either side, big flagged paving stones running between them up to the raised altar. A door to the right, the vestry; a door to the left leading up to the tower. Behind the altar was a narrow stained glass window carrying the Chickley arms at the top and below a seated Madonna with the Child on her lap, bearded saints on either side. The blue of her robe was as clear as a cloudless cold Spring sky. On the far side of the pews against the thick, stone walls were the Chickley tombs and memorials. Knights lying in armour with their toes turned stiffly up, mailed hands crossed . . . one of them had a woman, long robed and kirtled lying on either side of him. Two wives . . . would that, he wondered, ensure discord in the hereafter?

  He reached out to his right and found the switches. Pale yellow tongues of light came from the imitation candles on their hanging roundels, and the Madonna’s gown lost some of its cerulean glow. He began to move slowly forward, checking the rows of pews and the hidden spaces behind the standing catafalques and memorials. No Charlie. The bust of a high-coiffured, eighteenth-century woman stared down at him from a wall niche, long-nosed, horse-faced she looked just like Lady Cynthia. A woman of character . . . standing at the top of the steps and speaking her mind and the truth. What had gone wrong there? Had one of the servants betrayed her? Hardly likely. But something had gone wrong. Betrayal . . .

  In tall brass holders a pair of half-burned candles flanked the altar, guarding the tall black marble cross from which hung the ivory-carved Christ. He went round behind the altar to check the space there. Dead leaves and dust on the ground. Lily clearly had her lapses.

  He opened the vestry door. The room was bare except for a small table, a little hanging cupboard and a row of hooks down one wall. The small window was barred and festooned with old cobwebs. He came out and, seeing the door to the tower partly open, he checked the main body of the chapel again in case Charlie had come down while he was in the vestry. Meticulous. Take no chances. Years of special training—with Grandison unforgiving over the smallest mistake. One moment of stupidity and you were killed instead of killing. How much, he wondered, had his father guessed, before he died, of the real nature of his son’s career? Something in the Ministry of Defence . . . a lot of travel and a lot of secrecy.

  Inside the door he had expected to find the bellringers’ floor and hanging ropes, but there was only a wide, circular wooden stairway that coiled around an immense solid pillar of stone. No bells to ring out for the Chickleys.

  A small wooden door at the penthouse head of the stairs was hanging half off its hinges. He squeezed through it, hearing the drone of the helicopters, and found himself on the top of the tower, its surrounding parapet crenellated, the masonry weathered and broken and overgrown with a tangle of Virginia creeper. Lead sheeting covered the ground, and the gutters to carry off rainwater were blocked with dead leaves and broken stone.

  He moved away from the small, wooden pent structure which held the door and guarded the top of the stairs and saw Charlie. He was squatting in a far angle of the parapet wall and had in his hands a tattered old hymn book which he could have carried up from the chapel. He was slowly ripping out the pages letting them float from him in the morning breeze. Now and again he put one into his mouth to add to the wad he was slowly chewing. />
  Seeing Rimster, Charlie raised his head and opening his mouth, stretched it wide, his big lips pulling back over his teeth, exposing the wad of paper. Then pulling it from his mouth, he began to clap his hands on it, flattening the pulp to a moist pad, and cried waa waa waa gently.

  Rimster moved slowly to lessen the wide angle between himself and Charlie until he faced him squarely across the top of the tower. Charlie watched his movements, his dark eyes shining, the sunlight burnishing his brown pelt and, perhaps nervous at the sight of this white-clad, white-hooded, goggled creature, pouted his lips and gave a thin series of whimpers.

  Rimster raised the pistol and took aim. For a moment or two he was aware through the embrasure behind Charlie of the lake far below, a strengthening breeze ruffling it into rough, polished pewter, a mallard duck taking off, the tall tops of the reeds swaying. This was his last job. A country cottage, a garden . . . maybe do a little fishing. No shooting. He never wanted to touch a gun again.

  He fired and, almost before he heard the hiss of the discharge, saw the dart hit Charlie just below his right shoulder. Charlie’s reaction did not surprise him. Charlie screamed, jumped to all fours, panicked, and began to run towards him. He stepped quickly aside and then backwards as he fired again. As he did so his foot caught the raised edge of a jagged tear in the lead covering of the tower top and he stumbled backwards out of balance. His right shoulder hit the rotten masonry of the parapet close to an embrasure and it collapsed outwards behind him. As he began to fall he saw Charlie suddenly collapse in his run and slew sideways like an untidy sack to the ground.

  He went down followed by cascading masonry and tom lengths of Virginia creeper and death took him as, head first, he hit the stone paving of the path at the foot of the tower. He went without time for a prayer or a plea or even a moment of ironical thought that he had not noticed the broken lead when he first came on to the roof as he would have done in the prime of his powers. He went, as he had sent many others in his time, from sunlight and summertime into darkness and eternity.

  ENVOI

  THE PRE-RECORDED announcement about Charlie was never made. Nobody retired from political life, though considerable changes in staff and methods were made at Fadledean. And Charlie went back to Fadledean but only until he had passed through his infective stage and eventually became no plague danger. A popular national figure, he was handed over to a wild-life park to spend the rest of his days in honourable and, presumably, happy retirement. But since one swallow does not make a summer, the successful plague-carrying test on Charlie had to be confirmed and reconfirmed to make it safe for men and women to be used as carriers, so another chimpanzee took his place. Everyone was happy, particularly the apes in dark suits who might one day for political or military reasons decide to use the silent weapon of plague to avoid the open and honest brutality of the sword.