Deception (6 page)

She could see that Sam was starting to lose the battle. It looked as if he was beginning to tire and might fall over at any moment. When a third rat appeared on the path, Moira’s concern for the puppy overcame her dread of rats. She moved in, swinging her feet at them and screaming abuse at the top of her voice as a way of neutralising her fear. When her foot connected with the third rat and sent it flying, she yelled out in pleasure and tried stamping on the one attached to Sam’s paw. Frustration started to play a role when she found that just wasn’t quick enough to keep up with Sam’s twists and turns. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ she screamed. ‘Get off him, you filth! Leave him alone!’

Help appeared in the form of a cyclist coming along the towpath. He’d seen the woman ahead of him with what appeared to be a dog scampering round her feet and had rung his bell as an early warning of his approach.

‘
Help me!’ screamed Moira. ‘Please help me! Get them off him!’

The cyclist, a tall man wearing dungarees and working boots got off his bike and snatched the tyre pump from the frame. He lashed out at the rat on Sam’s paw and made good enough contact to make it release its grip. To deal with the other one he had to wrestle Sam to the ground and hold him still while he beat at the rat on his snout with the barrel of the pump. Sam was finally freed of his tormentors and whimpered pitifully as Moira examined his wounds. He was bleeding profusely. ‘My poor baby,’ she cooed, cradling him in her arms.

‘
What the hell happened?’ asked the cyclist.

Moira shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she gasped. ‘He was looking down at the water. The next thing I knew one of these vile things was on his face.’

‘
He must have stumbled on their nest,’ said the man. ‘They can be bloody vicious when they feel threatened.’ He walked over to the edge of the bank and examined the area. ‘No sign of any rat holes, mind you.’ He pushed down the reeds around the area with the pump he still held in his hand but without finding anything. ‘Strange,’ he muttered. ‘A laddie got bitten along in Blackbridge by the buggers the other week there: mind you, he was swimming in the bloody canal. Talk about shit for brains.'

Moira wasn’t really interested in why it had happened. She felt weak and cold and anxious. The front of her blouse was covered in Sam’s blood and she was becoming increasingly angry with this man who seemed to be ignoring her and Sam in favour of conducting some kind of forensic investigation. She had to remind herself that he had also been the one to come to their rescue and if he hadn’t come along, at that particular time, God alone knew what might have happened. ‘Could you possibly give me a hand?’ she asked, trying to get to her feet, still cradling Sam in her arms.

‘
Nae hassle,’ said the man. He took Sam from her and asked, ‘Where are we going?’

‘
My house is about half a mile away.’

‘
If you wheel ma bike for me, I’ll take care o’ the dug. He needs help. What are you going to do about him?’

‘
There’s a vet over in Blackbridge. My husband will drive us over.’

The man looked at his watch. ‘It’s after nine,’ he said. ‘If he’s no there, there’s a vet wi’ a twenty-four hour call out in Edinburgh. You’ll find it in Yellow Pages.’

‘
Thanks, we’ll try Blackbridge first,’ said Moira.

The pair of them attracted quite a bit of attention when they left the towpath and started to walk down the road to Moira’s house, the man beginning to weave a bit under Sam’s weight and Moira, shocked, dejected, the front of her blouse covered in Sam’s blood. Several neighbours came out to ask what was wrong but Moira couldn’t face telling them the story. She had to look past them. She was close to mental exhaustion. She propped up the man’s bicycle on the garden wall and opened her front door to call out, ‘Andrew!’

Andrew, her husband, hearing the note of anxiety in her voice came to the door, newspaper in hand, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Good God, what on earth’s happened?’

‘
Sam’s hurt bad. We have to get him to a vet.’

Moira’s husband went to get his jacket and she turned to the man holding Sam. ‘Mr? . . . ’

‘
McDougal. Lawrie McDougal.’

‘
Mr McDougal, I can’t begin to thank you for all you’ve done. I just don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along.’

The man shuffled uncomfortably under the weight of praise and handed over the dog to her. ‘Don’t mention it. I just hope your dug’s going to be all right, missus.’

Moira smiled and waved to him as he cycled off and her husband appeared with the car keys in his hand. Moira sat with Sam on her knee as they drove along to Blackbridge less than two miles away. ‘Let’s hope he hasn’t gone out for the evening,’ said Andrew.

‘
If he has, Mr McDougal said there’s a vet in Edinburgh with a round the clock call-out service.’ said Moira.

They drew up outside the vet’s house in Blackbridge, an old sandstone building in a street running parallel to the main one. The vet, James Binnie, worked from home, his surgery being a low concrete extension tacked on to the back of the house. As most of his work was concerned with farm animals, this sufficed for the few domestic pets he had to deal with.

Andrew knocked on the front door, cradling the dog in his arms. Moira stood by his side, still wearing her bloodstained blouse. The door was opened by Binnie himself, a small man in his early forties slipping into the bespectacled, bald anonymity of middle age. He was wearing slippers and had a glass of something in his hand. ‘What the dickens . . .’ he exclaimed at the sight that met him.

‘
It’s my dog, Sam,’ said Moira, speaking in the flat monotone that shock had induced in her. ‘Rats went for him.’

‘
You’d better come round,’ said Binnie, pausing to put his glass down on some surface behind the door and lifting his jacket from a hook there. He led the way round the back of the house, squeezing between a wall and a mud-spattered Volvo estate that was parked there. Andrew followed, lifting Sam up to clear the Volvo’s door mirror. Moira brought up the rear.

The fluorescent lights of the surgery stuttered up to full illumination and Sam was laid gently down on Binnie’s examination table. Moira patted his flank reassuringly while Binnie started to take a look at his injuries.

‘
You’ve certainly been in the wars, wee man,’ he said, examining Sam’s snout and getting a whimper of protest from the puppy. ‘We’re going to have to stitch these cuts, I’m afraid. He moved on to Sam’s paw, getting louder protests this time as he sought to establish any bone damage. ‘Well, I think you’ve been lucky there, wee man. Nothing broken but we may have to send you into the vet school to have these tendons properly seen to. In the meantime we’ll get you cleaned up, stitched and I’ll give you a couple of jabs against infection.’

Moira breathed a sigh of relief at what the vet was saying. It all translated into a simple truth. Sam was going to be all right.

‘
I think you better sit down, said Binnie to her as he noticed her wobble slightly and clutch the side of the table.

‘
I think maybe you’re right,’ agreed Moira, now smiling for the first time. She sat down beside Andrew who was leaning forward, elbows on his knees as he watched the proceedings.

‘
I take it, he went for the rats,’ said Binnie as he cleaned Sam’s wounds.

‘
I don’t know. I’m not absolutely sure,’ said Moira. ‘I threw a stick for him and it went into the canal. One minute he was standing at the edge, looking at it, the next thing I knew, one of the things was biting his face.’

‘
The canal?’ said Binnie. ‘They were water rats?’

‘
Yes, we were walking along the towpath.’

‘
I didn’t realise that. I sort of assumed that he must have cornered some rats in a barn. I guess he must have found their hole in the bank.’

‘
That’s what the man who helped me thought,’ said Moira. ‘He had a look afterwards but he didn’t see anything.’

Binnie looked at her. ‘Where was this exactly?’

Moira thought for a moment before replying, ‘The far side of Mossgiel, near the boundary with Peat Ridge Farm.’

Binnie looked at her again as if he was about to make some comment. Instead, he asked. ‘This man who helped you, did he kill any of the rats?’

‘
Both,’ replied Moira. ‘He hit them with his bicycle pump.’

‘
You’re sure they were dead?’

‘
I’m not sure about the one I kicked away but the two Mr McDougal hit with the pump looked dead enough.’

‘
Good, said the vet.’ He offered no further explanation but went on to complete dressing Sam’s injuries. ‘There we are, my wee man’ he announced. ‘I don’t think you’ll be chasing any rats for a while but you’ll live to fight another day.’

Moira and Andrew thanked Binnie profusely and offered to pay there and then but Binnie said that he would send a bill. His wife dealt with the paperwork and she was over at her sister’s tonight. He personally didn’t know where to find anything. Andrew and Moira drove off and Binnie clicked off the lights of the surgery to return to the main house. He felt a little troubled. This was the second case of rat bite he’d had to deal with in the past week and then there was that young boy who’d been swimming in the canal and got himself bitten. He knew from recent reports that there had been a general increase in the rat population all over the country but he was beginning to find the current situation alarming. He drained his glass and decided to take a walk along the towpath.

He knew that if he walked west along the back of, Peat Ridge Farm, he must come to the place where Sam had been attacked. Unless nature had beaten him to it, he would come across the bodies of the rats that the cyclist had killed. His idea was to send one up to Vet. Pathology at the university and ask them to carry out a general forensic examination of it. He left a note for his wife, saying where he’d gone in case she returned in his absence, collected a torch from a drawer in the kitchen and put on his Barbour jacket against a chill in the night air.

It took him just under fifteen minutes to reach the spot where Peat Ridge Farm ended and Mossgiel began. The sky was clear and the stars were out but the moon wasn’t up yet so he had to use the torch in a slow, sweeping search for the bodies of the rats. He would have preferred to do this in the morning but the chances of the bodies still being there after a night on the towpath would be remote. He wasn’t afraid of the dark – at least, he didn’t think he was, but he did find himself feeling distinctly uneasy. He reminded himself that noises that would be ignored or taken for granted during daylight hours seemed to assume a greater significance after dark. The hedgerows by the side of the canal seemed to be alive with the rustling feet and claws of the night.

Binnie gasped and paused as the torch beam picked out a rat running across the towpath a few feet in front of him. It was quickly followed by another. ‘What the? . . .’ he exclaimed as he watched yet another join the procession. He looked to the north, the direction from which the rats were coming and found himself looking at the gently waving silhouettes of the oilseed rape crop on Peat Ridge Farm.

A distant unearthly howl was carried to him on the night air and Binnie recognised it as Tom Rafferty’s dog, Khan, over on Crawhill Farm. A shiver of apprehension rippled down his spine at the sound. Please God, the animal was securely tethered and wouldn’t be roaming the banks. He’d had to deal with Khan before in his professional capacity and was therefore no stranger to the dog, but he wouldn’t like his safety to depend on such a tenuous acquaintance. Khan was one bad-tempered beast by any criterion. What was it about big dogs and inadequate people? he wondered, thinking about Khan’s owner, Tom Rafferty. Was it a simple mathematical relationship? The weaker the human character, the fiercer the dog? He continued further along the towpath, continuing his search for the bodies of the rats, although he no longer thought this such a good idea.

He was almost on the point of giving up when he saw them. The first one had been badly gnawed at – presumably by its fellows, but the second corpse seemed to be in better condition. He took out the plastic bag he’d brought with him for the purposes of transporting it and made to pick the animal up by the tail. He let out an involuntary yell when it suddenly turned its head and bit him on the finger. He snatched his hand away, wisely resisting – but only at the last moment - the temptation to put his finger in his mouth. Rat bite fever he could do without.

Instead, he forced the wound to bleed, allowing the blood to clean it out. At least he now understood why this rat was in better condition than the other: it was still alive!

In the torch beam he could now see that the animal’s back had been broken by blows from the bicycle pump but it was still breathing, although unable to move anything save its head. He didn’t want to cause any further physical damage to it, mainly because it might interfere with pathological examination he was going to request, so he resolved to put it out of its misery by asphyxiation. He unwrapped the handkerchief that he’d put round his finger and used it to cut off air to the animal’s mouth and nose until it was dead. It was a very unpleasant few minutes and Binnie felt nauseous throughout. When the rat was dead, he held it up by the tail and dropped it into the plastic bag before starting back for home. By now, he was wishing that he’d never set out on this course at all. He could have been sitting at home, watching television with a whisky in his hand.