Antman (24 page)

'That's a new angle.'

'Only a tiny quantity of sweetener would suffice. They respond extremely quickly to minute quantities of liquid sugar.'

'There'd be traces.'

'Indeed, if they left any.'

'Then again, once we examine the abrasions closely, we can distinguish ant attack from injuries caused by a ligature. Insect bites often produce tiny wounds with scalloped, serpiginous margins.'

Chris looked puzzled. He explained: 'They aren't tidy eaters. They leave the marks of their mandibles along the edges of the wound.'

'You keep talking about insects. I'm not sure which insects you're on about. Grasshoppers, locusts, flies?'

'I'm talking about a coordinated attack by a swarm of ants.'

'You have to be joking. How many ants make a swarm in a case like this?'

'Difficult to say. Perhaps ten to fifty thousand.'

Chris shuddered.

'How long would it take – you know – how long would it take, if the victim was lying down?'

'Depends how securely he or she was bound. In optimum conditions, I'd say asphyxiation would be quite slow, anything between twenty minutes and half an hour.' He paused. 'That's if the shock didn't lead to death first.'

Chris gasped and squirmed as though her battle with the ants had already begun.

*  *  *

'Bloody chaos this investigation, chaos it bloody is,' said Livesey. 'The right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.'

'Correction,' said Morrison. 'The right hand knows bugger all and ignores the left; the left, meanwhile, ignores bugger all and knows what's right.'

Livesey pulled a face at this. 'Too profound for me lad. I'm for a coffee. What about you?'

'I'll have one,' said Morrison, 'but I'm washing the cup first.'

'Choosy bastard,' said Livesey. They walked out of the office towards the scullery.

Down the corridor, Chris was in her office, on the phone to Tom.

'I've been re-reading that message – if that's what it was – from our person.'

'And?'

'He leaves nothing to chance. It's a serious attempt to communicate. I thought at first he was hiding his diary from us. Despite what he says about,
it must never fall into their hands
.'

'I think this is a diary, or parts of it.'

'Our man likes to keep in touch,' said Morrison. 'More than that, he signs his letters.'

'Hardly a signature,' said Livesey.

'G, that's quite an unusual initial,' said Morrison.

'Plenty of surnames begin with G.'

'But not so many first names. George, Ginger. P'raps it's a surname.'

'Gormless,' said Livesey.

'Speak for yourself,' said Morrison.

Morrison jumped as though bitten. 'Hang on, the latest one was signed J.'

He rushed out of the office.

Morrison was in Chris's office.

'You're right,' said Chris. 'To be consistent, it should be G.' She picked up the phone. 'We'll see what Mary Threadgold thinks about this.'

Chapter 16

For a long time, I have wanted to control people, which meant restricting their ability to choose, and channelling their behaviour. The labyrinth. L-A-B-Y-R. Labyr, labile, labyrinthine. THE LAByrinth. Pigs can fly. Putrid pigs. Putrid pigs picking people's parts. Piles of Ponera perched on their petioles pecking at people's pubes. Peter Piper picked a petiole of pickled people. I hate people. Not all people but those picking at my brain. The larvae PUTRID LARVAE in my brain are responsible, not me. In the passages, in the remotest labyrinths of my brain. The maze of memory.

J

Maze was the key to it, as every behavioural scientist knows. The beautiful, convergent idea of the maze. Ever since my earliest games with the ants, the idea has cropped up. I followed the first attempts of Sir John Lubbock, later Lord Avebury, in the late nineteenth century – the inventor of bank holidays – to keep colonies between sheets of glass, with particles of soil. When my first crude attempts failed, the bodies of dead ants filled the passageways, bloated and spread mould through the sodden nest, I went to the garden centre. I experimented using nodules of soil-free compost as a way of warding off disease and moulds. The ants could arrange the soil and compost so as to create their complex patterns of tunnels and chambers. The maze became the stock image of this period. The significance of the imagery of the maze also grew for me, as I realised its other associations, notably with demeaning non-human life forms, by treating them wholly or largely as the objects of rigid laws governing behaviour. The maze symbolised for me the activities of the experiments with rats and other vulnerable animals of those scientists addicted to cruder, that is reductionist, versions of behaviourism.

G

*  *  *

On top of everything else, Tom had to prepare for his keynote lecture at Peterborough University. It was beginning to bug him. Thank God for Powerpoint. He'd burned the midnight oil and finished the draft, but wasn't happy with it. He walked through into Jean's office and left with her the notes to type up and a sheaf of stills to prepare.

Chris phoned five minutes later and caught Tom in his office. It was a bad moment. His head was in this lecture and he was impatient.

'I've been looking at this list of staff. You didn't go through them one by one with me. Tell me about Luis Deakin.'

'I told you, he's my deputy in Robin's absence. Surely you don't think he's anything to do with all this?'

'What more do you know about him?' she insisted.

Tom was stressed. His response was rapid, minimal. 'A very hard worker.'

Chris persisted. She was used to pursuing people for information. 'In what sense?'

'In the sense he does his job and more.'

'What about his private life?'

'I don't know.'

'You must know something.'

'Oh I don't know,' said Tom, more rattled. 'We don’t employ people’s families. He lives with his mother.'

'Have you met her?'

'Some time ago, a couple of years maybe. I dropped him off at home.'

'And?' Chris was aware she was scratching round in desperation.

'I went into the kitchen and met her. She seemed a normal mother to me.'

'Anything odd about him?'

'Nothing that comes to mind. By definition normality doesn't jump out at you. I can't be on intimate terms with all the staff. I simply don't know much about his personal life. I don't think there's much to know. He comes to work, goes home and looks after his mum. She's not too steady on her legs, from the little he's said. Spends all her time indoors. He's not talkative about it and I'm not inquisitive. That doesn't make him a criminal.'

'It doesn't,' Chris admitted. 'Who is Apthorpe? You have him down as an entomologist. What's his specialism?'

'Social insects.'

'You'll have to translate. Does it include ants?'

'Yes, but you must be joking. Apthorpe! If you met him. He's right out of it.'

'Does he have a motive? Is there anyone he doesn't get on with?'

'Apthorpe doesn't get on with anybody. He's a completely asocial being, works alone, lives alone.'

'We need to talk at more depth about that man.'

'This is stupid,' said Tom. He saw the slim window of opportunity to prepare for the lecture slipping away.

'What about Robin?'

'Now you're being ridiculous. He can't possibly be a suspect. He isn't even in the country. He was away when these latest killings took place.'

'I've told you before, leave the policing to me.'

After Chris rang off Tom dithered about while he turned the arguments of his Peterborough lecture over and over. All the time he was worrying away at the huge bank of his memories of Robin, from their many years of living and working close to each other. When Chris had gone the gaps in his knowledge began to eat away at him. When he arrived home later that night, he decided to contact Robin at the first opportunity.

*  *  *

The following day Tom was due to take an early train to attend a brief mid-morning research meeting at a hotel in central Newcastle. Instead of driving straight to the Station, he decided to call at the University at 8:00 a.m. and ask Jean to locate Robin while he was at his meeting.

It was seven fifty-nine when Tom reached the University. Jean was in on the dot of eight. Within a couple of minutes, she rang through from her office. 'Here's the number and address for where Robin's based. You don't need a local street map. He's linked with a local university and they will act as a conduit for messages during his fieldwork.' Tom didn't want the details. He left Jean with the task of chasing up Robin with a list of questions.

A couple of minutes later, there was a knock. Chris put her head round the door.

'I caught you. Your secretary predicted you'd call in early. I know you're busy. I'm in a hurry, too, on my way to work.'

Tom felt guilty about his impatience the previous day. 'I wanted to say –'

She held up a hand. 'Forget it.' She passed him a copied sheet. 'We've had this fresh note. I assume it's from our killer. It's strange but if all these notes have been written by the killer – and at present I'm reserving judgement on that – we know more about the killer than the victims.'

Tom studied the sheet. Chris continued: 'Morrison pointed out how the latest note is signed with a G rather than J.'

Tom shrugged. 'He could have two initials.' A thought struck him. 'I want to show you this in the first note from our mystery person.' He scrabbled for the file and pulled out the photocopied sheets.

'I've marked the lines.' He read in silence, making occasional marks with his pencil in a jabbing action. 'There,' he said, 'I've marked some phrases. " ... at which point I became the conductor". This man reached a turning point with the pig. We didn't find him before he killed again.'

'The notes were a cry for help? He wanted us to catch him in time?'

'Not quite or he'd have sent us a message about how to prevent him killing again. At present he only seems keen to inform us of his existence.'

'And his strange thoughts.'

'It's damn lonely, going mad on your own. Better to take the world with you, or that bit of it over which you can exercise total – life or death – control.'

'Hmm, could be.'

'Look at that line on the next sheet. "Don't pigeon-hole me." No, sorry, "Don't go pigeon-holing me as like the rest of them in here." Who are the rest? I don't think he means the office or the pub on the corner. More likely, he's been locked up – prison, mental hospital, special hospital perhaps?'

'Perhaps he's referring to a report someone wrote,' said Chris.

'Yes, a psychiatrist, could be. Someone's videoed this man during assessment, so now he's using video for his own purposes.'

'To get his own back.'

Tom shrugged. 'Who knows? Further down that same page, see where I've highlighted
laboratory.
'

'Can't be many of those.'

'Over the page. Makes him sick. See that? Look at the language. This isn't your average Alf. He's been where they observe and describe.'