Knowledge of the snake was his one weapon. He had thought of telling Marion that it was safely locked away in the cellar but something stopped him. It seemed to him that if he was to have any chance at all of getting out alive he needed every weapon he could grab. The knowledge of the snake was his entire armoury. Jacmel would think that wherever it was in the house it must be close to death by now. Or at least inactive. But he couldn’t be sure. Not absolutely. And therein lay Howard’s only chance. Only chance of what? His mind kept picking at the problem but nothing came. Then he heard Bulloch’s voice through the open window.
“Can you hear me?”
The shoes in front of Howard’s face turned sharply and Jacmel crossed to the window. He stood behind the heavy curtain in his usual place. “I can hear you,” he said.
For Bulloch the walk from his car to the front of the house had been a very long one, not physically but emotionally.
His mind still surged with Rich’s angry outburst. Phrases zoomed in and out of his thoughts unwanted, and where he blocked some, others popped up to harass him. It was all so unfamiliar. The carapace of anger which for so many years he had been able to draw over him like a shield, was now curiously missing. He had not been able to use it when Rich spoke to him nor, as he walked towards the house, was he able to reawaken it for his own protection.
“He’s out-thought you all along the line,” Rich had said. It wasn’t true.
“It’s more convenient,” Rich had said. “Just like the Nazis.” It wasn’t true.
“It’s still a game to you. You can’t stand the thought that he might win and you might lose.” No. It wasn’t true.
And the pictures that Rich had evoked. The woman’s body. The child’s body. The man’s body.
As he walked he shook his head, trying to clear it of thoughts like those.
Rich was a kid. He didn’t understand. But the rationalization did not work. It wasn’t true either.
Other pictures rose unwanted in his mind. His flat. The loneliness. The desperation that last time after the Sutherland Street siege, when he’d felt as empty as a paper bag. And Rich had stayed with him. He’d needed him then, no one would ever know how much. Now he’d flung it back in Bulloch’s face.
Where was the anger? Where?
He stopped in front of the house and raised his head and shoulders. The effort was enormous. “Can you hear me?” he called.
The pause before Jacmel answered was like eternity. Bulloch had begun the walk towards the house with the knowledge inside him that the Frenchman was not the man he had taken him for. Deep down there was a soft core and it was this knowledge that had refurbished his own confidence. But as he walked, as Rich’s words came back to him, the whole complex structure of his attack crumbled, all the confidence that had reawakened in him, seemed to seep away, draining out of his body like old bathwater. As he waited for Jacmel’s reply he did not know how to play the game any longer.
“Yes, I hear you,” Jacmel said.
He heard a different quality in the voice. There was anger, but cold and deep. Was there fear? Was there a slight edge? The Frenchman was alone now. He must already know that the chauffeur was dead. And if Bulloch was right, Louise was also dead. It was then that he admitted what he had not been able to before, what he had never acknowledged before –the similarity between the two of them. He asked himself what he, Bulloch, would do if he were in the Frenchman’s situation: it was when he had answered the question to himself that he knew what to say.
“The money has come,” he called.
Again there was the slight pause. “Good. Do you have it?”
“In the car.”
“Bring it.”
But the factors that had made Bulloch the man he was still lurked to influence his thoughts. He was incapable, inherently unable, to let things go; at the last he was ineluctably held by his own character, fastened by the web of his own life, and now, against his own wishes almost, he played out the final moves.
“It’s all there,” he said.
“Do you hear me? Bring it.”
“There’s something I’ve got to do first.”
“What is that?”
“I want to see the boy.”
Even as he said it he knew the Frenchman would never agree. He, Bulloch, would never have agreed. He didn’t even know why he was asking except that it delayed, it wasted time, it added seconds, minutes perhaps.
“No,” Jacmel said.
“The woman, then. Dr Stowe.” Bulloch hardly recognized his own voice. He tried to sound in charge. “There’ll be no hand-over unless I see that Dr Stowe is all right.”
Again the pause.
“All right,” Jacmel said. What had he to lose now? It was simply a matter of speed. Bulloch heard the growing confidence.
“You know what will happen to her if your men try anything.”
“Yes.”
“No lights.”
“All right.”
“No questions.”
“How will we know she’s okay?”
“She will tell you so.”
Pause. “All right.” The tone was tinged by hopelessness. “Stay there.”
In the house Dick Howard heard Jacmel turn from the window and felt the vibration of his steps across the carpet. The black shoes stoped near his head.
“Did you hear?” Jacmel said.
Howard knew Jacmel wasn’t talking to him and felt Marion’s body move closer. “Yes,” she said.
“Get up.”
She got to her haunches and then straightened. “Give me your scarf.” There was a pause. “So,” he said.
“Why?” Marion asked.
“Because I say so.”
Howard craned sideways and looked up, seeing first Marion’s legs disappearing up into the dark recesses of her skirt and then above that one of her arms being tied in a sling across the front of her body.
“You heard what I told him?”
“Yes.”
“He will ask no questions. You say you are all right. That is all. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“If you make to climb the railing, if I think you are trying to jump, I shoot. You understand?” He turned to Howard. “If you move I shoot her. Understand?”
“Yes,” he said. Jacmel turned back to Marion.
“You go out. Very slowly. You stand where the policeman can see you. You come back very slowly. Understand?”
“Yes.”
Howard watched her legs as she began to move. He knew that if there was a moment, any moment at all when he might do something, it was while she was on the balcony. Jacmel’s attention would be on her almost wholly. If Howard tried to get up or fling himself at Jacmel the Frenchman would have ample time not only to shoot Marion but Howard as well, for Howard was near the fireplace some ten feet away from the window. In any case, he knew he had neither the strength nor the nerve.
He heard Jacmel say, “All right,” and saw Marion’s feet step over the sill.
It had to be now. But what?
The TV aerial cable was hurting his chest and he moved slightly to a new position. He could no longer see what was happening. He turned and lowered his hands, rolling over so that both Jacmel and the window were visible. He could just see the Frenchman squatting by the curtain, completely hidden by its folds. Again he moved from the discomfort of the cable and in doing so rolled it underneath him and he heard the faint plop as its end fell from the input socket at the back of the TV set.
What happened next was without conscious thought but seemed to be born not so much in his mind but directly into his muscles. He found himself acting without thought. Just as his mind had directed his legs to run when the lion attacked, now, by-passing the decoding device in his brain which would have made them subject to delay and scrutiny and possibly rejection, the thoughts first appeared as impulses in the muscles of his arms.
He pulled the end of the thick cable towards him and as he did so his mind seemed to split
: one part guiding the action; one part trying to stop it; one part screaming at him that no one could be fooled by such a thing; the other that he had been fooled by it himself, that he had seen what he had expected to see. Then, even as he heard Marion’s voice on the balcony saying what Jacmel had told her to say, his thoughts were cartwheeling ahead: it wasn’t the thing, not the substance, but the symbol; not reality, but shadow. It was the shadow that had terrified Dave; the shadow they had seen in the cellar.
His hands grasped the end of the cable, bent it in a crook, then he looked round wildly for somewhere to place it, somewhere it could stand upright with the light behind it. Next to him was a big bowl of stiff dry grass, beech twigs and honesty. He leant sideways and placed the cable in the bowl. It caught in one of the beech twigs and by pushing slightly he managed to get the crooked end above the display.
“Come back now,” Jacmel was saying to Marion.
Howard heard her steps on the tiny balcony. Behind him on the floor and to his right, out of reach, was the second big lamp in the rough glass carboy. Again his muscles reacted seemingly without conscious thought; for this time the realization of what might happen to Marion would have stopped him. As she came through the windows and stepped between himself and Jacmel he slithered the few feet to his right and felt for the light switch. At the precise second she moved past Jacmel, Howard switched on the light. He had wanted to shout something. Anything. But he crouched frozen in the brightness and the cry died in his throat. He found himself looking, with terror, into the barrel of Jacmel’s gun. Then it shifted briefly to the left as the Frenchman saw the rearing, snakelike shadow. He fired, swung the gun back towards Howard as though realizing he had been cheated. At that moment there was a tinkling of glass as the top of one of the big windows shattered. Jacmel fell forward. As he did so Howard saw a small jet of blood spurting from the back of his head.
The last thing Jacmel ever saw was the huge shadow on the wall; the shadow of the snake, head curved, waiting to strike.
* * *
There was complete silence in the room. Marion stood quite still. Howard crouched on the floor. In the midst of the carpet
Jacmel lay on his face, the small jet of blood pumping up six inches in the air, then, like a hosepipe after a tap has been switched off, drooping, stopping. They stared at him, unable to believe him dead, yet knowing that he was. The silence, which had rushed in from the walls after the loud explosion of Jacmel’s gun, seemed almost as loud as the noise of the gun itself. Then it too was broken. The weight of the aerial cable was finally too much for the beech twig which had been supporting it. The twig bent, snapped, and the aerial fell with a plop on to the floor. The shadow vanished. The slight movement brought life back into the room. Howard rose to his feet. Marion moved towards him. He stepped over Jacmel’s body. She put out both her hands and he took them. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right now.”
She touched him on the cheek. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
She looked down at Jacmel. “How did it happen?”
Howard shook his head. “They said they wanted the light on. Must have been a police marksman.” He waved a hand at the night. “On one of the roofs probably.”
“Can you hear me?” Bulloch’s voice floated up into the room.
This time it was Howard who answered. “Yes,” he said. “I’m coming to the window.”
He held Marion’s hand and took her with him. They stepped out on to the balcony. Bulloch waved his arm at them and first one then another car switched on its lights and the front of the house was lit up.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes,” she called. Others were coming towards the house now and some were running.
“And the boy?” Bulloch called.
“He’s asleep,” Marion said. “Fast asleep in his room.”
“Is the snake still in the cellar?”
“Yes,” Howard said.
“Right. We’re coming up.”
“I’ll let you in.” He felt for the door-key in Jacmel’s suit then went downstairs. Marion came half way with him as though unwilling to be parted. Bulloch and Rich came into the hall.
“Who’s that?” Bulloch said, pointing to the covered lump on the floor. “Maid?”
“Yes.”
He lifted the blanket and he and Rich looked underneath.
“You were right,” Rich said.
Bulloch turned. “Yes, I was, wasn’t I? Let’s have a look at the other one.”
Marion and Howard went into the room which had been their prison for less than twelve hours but which seemed like twelve days. Bulloch turned Jacmel over, then shook his head. “Doesn’t mean a thing to me. Rich?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now. Let’s have a look at the boy.”
As he said it, the air was cut by a scream.
“What the hell’s that?”
As Howard followed Bulloch from the room he saw Ruth in the passageway. She was holding back the curtain that covered the passage window looking into Phillip’s room and scream after scream was coming from her throat.
Bulloch put his arm around her and said, “What’s happening?” Then he saw what she had seen and said, “Oh, Jesus!” Howard, coming up beside him. also looked through the window and felt his body freeze with shock.
Philip lay on the bed fast asleep. He was on his side, facing them, knees curled up. Beside him lay the mamba. It too was curled up. Its head was on its coils facing the foot of the bed. Below it, on the floor, stood the fan-heater, sending waves of warmth over both the reptile and the boy. The vibration of their feet in the passage had unsettled the snake and its head came up from its resting place and hovered in the air.
The screams had also unsettled the boy, penetrating the cells of his mind which had been curtained by the drug. He opened his eyes. It took him some moments to focus, to realize where and who he was, and then, as the drug left him, he saw his mother in the passage window. And Dick. And other faces. He was about to shove himself up on his elbow when he felt an unaccustomed weight on the blankets next to him. He heard a low, warning hiss. Then he saw the snake.
Howard put his lips to the glass. “Don’t move,” he said. “Please don’t move.”
“For God’s sake do something,” Ruth said.
Bulloch lifted her in his strong arms and carried her bodily away from the window. “Leave me,” she shouted. “You’ve got no right . . . ! ” She struggled in his arms for a moment as Marion came to her.
“He’s all right, as long as the snake isn’t frightened,” Marion said, taking her arm. “We’re making too much noise.”
Ruth said, “Why doesn’t someone do something?”
“Rich, get Mr Beale up here,” Bulloch said. “Tell him what’s happening.” He turned to Ruth. “I’ve got an expert down in the street. Mr Beale from the Zoo. He knows there’s a snake in the house. Got everything he needs to catch it.”
Then Marion said, “Where’s the main switch? If you switch off the electricity the heater will stop. Can you get the outside window open?”
“What’ll that do?”
“Make the room cold. Immobilize the snake.”
“All right.” He turned to Howard. “Where’s the fuse box?”
“In the cellar.”
“Glaister, you get down there and switch off the mains.” Then back to Marion. “What if the window’s locked? What about the noise it’ll make?”
“Couldn’t you cut out the panes?”
Bulloch paused, then trotted heavily down to the street where a constable was on guard. “Tell Rich I want someone with a glass-cutter, fast as you can.”
“Right, sir.” Upstairs they heard the hard crash of the constable’s running footsteps.
Ruth had returned to the window. She was quiet now, her face set in a mask of horror.
Howard said softly, “Don’t wo
rry, Ruth. We’ll get him out. If the room gets cold enough the snake–”
“You did it!” she said. “It was your idea, wasn’t it, to bring this thing into the house. Philip would never have thought of it by himself.” Howard quailed before her ferocity.
Marion, standing next to him, said, “It wasn’t his fault. They made a mistake. He’d ordered a harmless–”
But Ruth had turned away and leant her forehead on the glass pane, staring through it, cutting herself off from the others, letting her eyes lock with the terrified eyes of her child, trying to send through her vision love and strength and courage.
Now all they could do was wait; watch and wait for the air in the room to grow cold, wait for Mr Beale; wait for the glass-cutter; wait . . . and at any moment the snake might rear up. Howard looked at his watch. It was showing a few minutes to seven. It would be an hour at the very least before the room got really cold. Less if they could cut open the windows. But say an hour. He glanced at Ruth, could she last that long without breaking? Could Philip? Wouldn’t the cold start him coughing and fighting for breath? Wouldn’t that make him move? No one had thought of that. But what else was there? Anyway, Mr Beale was on his way. He was the expert.
Just then Ruth turned away from the window and he felt her hand grip his. Her long nails sank deeply into his flesh. He looked into her face and saw a skull.
“The clock,” she whispered.
She did not have to explain. The alarm clock on the bedside table was usually set for seven o’clock so Philip could clean the animals’ cages before he had breakfast and went to school. Howard could see the clock’s Mickey Mouse face, could see the hands pointing a little before seven, could even see the smaller dial set into the large one. And on top of the clock he could see the two brass bells and the little brass striker that would, in a matter of a minute or two, vibrate between the bells, setting up the clanging that would echo through the house.
“Did you set it?” Ruth said.
Had he? Tomorrow was Saturday, no need to get up early. But that was in normal times. Everything was abnormal. Had he set it without thinking? He could not remember. All he could recall was winding it after Philip had mentioned it. It was just done to reassure the boy. Had he done something more? Had he actually set the alarm? He looked round desperately. Bulloch was still downstairs. Mr Beale had not arrived.
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