Deathwatch (2 page)

Anyway, if he’d ever been some macho tough guy, he certainly wasn’t now. Her parents had both tried to go running with her one evening recently, after her mum had spent about half an hour deciding what to wear. Her dad had pulled a muscle on the corner of the main road and her mum, already out of breath, had said she’d go back with him. Yeah, right – as though he needed her help to go fifty metres. And Cat had carried on and returned an hour later to find them in the sitting room, most of the way through a bottle of red.

No, Cat McPherson wasn’t afraid of being chased by anyone.

She checked that her bag was properly fastened, hoisted it onto her shoulders, and set off at an easy jog. She looked over her shoulder once – in the murky glow of the dim lights, two people were visible, one with a dog, the other a man walking quickly in the same direction as her.

Cat was not worried. Not then. Of course, she would keep her senses alert. That patch of trees would be a great place for someone to hide before jumping out on an unsuspecting walker. She narrowed her eyes, peering into the shadows. Her heart began to beat a little faster and she quickened her stride. There was a figure standing there. Just standing. He had a hood up but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe he was waiting for someone and he was cold. She found that her hands were open at her sides, ready, waiting.

Cat could see the main road in the distance ahead of her, its lights and cars comforting. Not far away.

She focused on her pace. This was good, how she felt comfortable. In control.

That was when the lights went out. All the park lights. She could still see the lights of the cars in the distance but surrounding her was blackness. Unable to see the ground, she slowed to a walk.

Still, Cat was not really frightened. Annoyed, perhaps – another power cut. They’d had two or three during the hot summer. Some said it was the Council cutting the power off deliberately so that people would stop and think before using electricity.

She began to jog towards the lights of the cars ahead. She more or less knew where the path was anyway. Fear of tripping seemed less than the fear of … well, whatever might be in the darkness. Fear of the dark was something normal, ancient, something you couldn’t explain.

Footsteps behind her. Someone else trying to reach the road. Quite normal, quite easily explained. But she hurried, pushing herself beyond a steady stride, into something more pounding, her breathing faster, made faster by what was definitely now fear.

In the darkness, she couldn’t run too quickly. She needed to see the ground.

She didn’t look over her shoulder. One of the first rules of competitive running – don’t look behind you – just
sense
your opponent.

Her phone rang. She couldn’t answer it. It rang five times and stopped. She imagined her dad leaving a message, some instruction about where he’d meet her. He’d wonder why she didn’t answer.

A noise behind her, sudden and strange, made her turn her head. A cyclist, the wavering light coming towards her fast. It swerved round her and sped on. Cyclists weren’t allowed on this path, but people often disobeyed the sign – besides, in a power cut maybe normal rules didn’t apply.

She could still hear the footsteps.

Her phone rang again. Logic took over: if someone wanted to attack her, they probably wouldn’t do it while she was on the phone. And if they only wanted to steal her phone, they could have it. She stopped, pulled the bag off her shoulders, and fumbled desperately inside it. Grabbed the phone and pressed the button, peering into the darkness, eyes strained, every muscle alert. There was the figure coming towards her, with no more detail than a shadow. A bad runner, ungainly – but close to her now. She was ready to run again.

“Catriona, where are you?” Her dad’s voice was sharp.

“I’m nearly at the road but…” She spoke loudly so that the other runner could hear.

“You said you were at the road! For God’s sake, there’s a power cut! And why are you out of breath?”

“Yes, I know there’s a power cut! I’m in it!” The figure was close now. She still had no reason to believe he – she assumed it was a he – was actually following her or meant any harm, but the darkness was doing things to her mind. Her heart was racing and she
really
wanted to run. She had an idea. She whispered into the phone, “I have to go, Dad. I’ll be home really soon.” She pressed the button, ending the call, but shouted as though still speaking to him, “Yes! I can see your car!” Surely the man would not attack her if he thought her father’s car was within sight? She began to run now, holding the phone as a torch.

The man was running too. She ran faster, faster and faster, her bag bouncing on her back, the phone light flashing to and fro as her arms pumped the air. The street was not far away, and she sped through the darkness, her muscles like springs, her fitness, speed and training the only things that would save her now. A horrible crawling sensation ran down her back, at the thought of him behind her.

Whoever he was, he didn’t stand a chance, not against Cat’s trained fitness. Soon she was at the main road, protected by the headlights and the people.

As she set off quickly towards home, heart still thumping and the cold air harsh in her throat, she looked round her, glancing behind, searching in all directions. But no one was following her. She stopped for a moment, staring at the few people walking along the pavements. A tall, thin woman, wearing a leather jacket, hurried towards a parked motorbike, climbed on it and sped round the corner with a practised roar. There was a young man, thickly coated, scruffy, a woollen hat pulled down over his straggly hair, his collar up, walking quickly away. Was it him? And even if it was, had he been following her?

No, silly idea, she thought. There’s no way he was following me. It’s just the darkness playing tricks. He would have had the same desire to get to the road as she’d had. Nothing to be suspicious about.

A cyclist, wearing a coat and hood but no helmet, came suddenly from behind the old police phone box a few metres ahead. He set off in the same direction as she was going, disappearing into the distance.

A few minutes later, Cat was in her small street. A loud motorbike went past the end of the street, briefly shattering the peace, but the noise quickly faded.

She turned her key in the lock. The familiar warmth and smells drew her in and she pulled the door shut behind her. A cyclist could be heard passing as she did so. A shiver ran down her neck before she closed the door firmly, and put from her mind all thoughts of her earlier fear.

Cat McPherson was safe.

THE
following day, an innocent September Wednesday. In the flickering unnatural twilight of the insect room of the National Museum of Scotland, a hand gently strokes the glass above the rows of beetles:
Coleoptera
. Beneath his fingers are legs, many legs. Thin, jointed, some of them long, some hunched as if ready to pounce.

Cerambycidae
: long-horned beetles, with impossibly long antennae. Here, small and unobtrusive, is
Xestobium rufovillosum
: the deathwatch beetle. Some people say that it warns of approaching death. He hovers his hand above it, closes his eyes a little, tries to imagine. They are silly people who say this: it’s a myth. The real reason for its name, he knows, is that this wood-boring beetle is often heard tapping in the floorboards and walls during the quietness around death, as people wait and watch in unusual silence.

Mind you, insects are clever enough: they
could
know when death was approaching. He wonders what it would feel like to know.

As he moves to the next cabinet, there is a commotion. Through the door at the far end come some schoolkids with their teacher. Their silly, high-pitched voices grate, the girls squealing at an enormous model of a beetle. He clenches his teeth.

He must do what he has come to do. Replace the light bulbs in all cabinets where there is the sign: “Lighting failure reported by Visitor Services.”

He doesn’t need light. He’s spent a lot of time here and could reel off the names easily. These are dragonflies, in serried ranks like army tanks or Chinese soldiers. Odonata Anisoptera.

Taking a special key from his toolbag, he opens the glass lid of the cabinet. He cannot stop a small smile, which seems to start from the pit of his stomach. It’s a melting feeling, a softening as edges blur. When he has a cup of tea, he always holds the sugar-lump on the surface of the liquid and watches the tea rise into the sugar and dissolve it out of his fingers – this feeling is like that.

He needs to touch. And slowly, gently, hesitantly, he stretches his fingers towards his beautiful dragonflies.

He strokes them so softly that their dead gossamer wings barely shiver. With his eyes closed, he focuses all his senses into the surface of his fingers, feeling the invisible film of the insect fibres, his skin almost hearing rather than touching, the sensation as soft as breath.

Now he opens his eyes. It’s a poor display, he often thinks. Just the names, no information, and so much unsaid. So much more he knows. You can not tell from his brown coat, or from the fact that his task seems merely to be to change light bulbs, but he has been a professor of entomology – insects, to the rest of us. It has been his passion and life’s work. He was once at the top of his profession, though not any longer.

“The most successful animals on earth” says a sign at the entrance to the room. And those kids, they know none of it. Do they know, for example, that dragonflies stalk their prey? Or that the male of the species is so well able to mimic the movements of its rival that its enemy doesn’t even know it’s being stalked?

He smiles. Such things make life rich and wonderful.

The kids are all assembled now and the teacher’s strident voice breaks any chance he might have had to concentrate. He tries to shut out her words. And now the kids are coming nearer. They are so loud, so clumsy, so ignorant, so THERE. He glares in their direction, willing them to come nowhere near. Concentrating, needing to protect his insects now that their glass cover has been removed, he turns his body to shield them from prying eyes and fingers. Deftly he unscrews the faulty bulb and replaces it with one from his toolbag.

He is about to close the lid when, “Cool!” says a voice beside him. He jumps, his hand jerking away. A bitter juice of anger rises into his mouth. He snaps his head to the left and sees a boy standing there, sticky hair spiked, sweaty Biro-stained hands touching the cabinet edges.

“Be careful!” says the man.

But the boy has gone, laughing. “Chill, mister!”

The man takes several deep breaths. He closes the lid, carefully. He wants to apologize to the dragonflies, for disturbing their rest, but that would be foolish and so he does not. But he thinks it. He wishes everyone could appreciate them as he does. People should not be so ignorant of the astonishing cleverness of insects.

He goes to the next cabinet with a broken light. The kids are moving quickly from place to place, never focusing for long, interested only in how big, or how ugly, or how gruesome each insect is.

“They’ve got them bigger than that in London, Miss!”

“Look at its LEGS!”

“Oh wow, that one’s EVIL!”

“Imagine finding that inside your shower!”

“I saw one like that in Thailand, Miss!”

And the squealing – God, the squealing! Won’t they just shut up? He feels the rising of panic. His hands suddenly slip with sweat.

Two are looking at the cabinet next to him. He can smell them: washing powder and fried food. One hits the green button to turn the light on. Nothing happens, of course. Can’t they read, the ignorant brats? The kid hits the button again. “It’s not working, Miss!” And the kid hits it again.

He wants to tell the boy that hitting the button won’t help, but the boy has run off to another display. The boy doesn’t care what he looks at as long as he doesn’t have to look at it for long. He has the attention span of a gnat.

But the other kid, a girl, is still standing there. He glimpses her and then forces his gaze to his insects, as he unlocks the cabinet lid. He repeats silently in his head, forcing his panic away with calming words, “Odonata Anisoptera.
Libellula forensis.
Odonata Epiophlebiidae.”

Blonde hair, big hair, kind of swept back. Too much make-up. She is at least silent. She does not shriek and squeal like the others. He steals a glance again and that is when he sees it on her face.

Two things: hate and fear. She hates his insects. And she fears them.

He wants to tell her that she has nothing to fear, but he can’t. He doesn’t know how to talk to kids. Besides, nowadays, you talk to a kid and suddenly you’re being accused of something horrible. And there’s nothing horrible in his mind. Except a dislike of people. He likes insects more than people, much more. He understands and respects the creatures.

Ignoring the girl, he wipes his hands and gets on with replacing the bulb. And locks the lid again, wrapping his insects up. Protecting them, that’s all he wants to do.

He concentrates on finishing his work, replacing all the light bulbs and removing the signs put there by Visitor Services. He has done a good job. He is not ashamed that this is his job, even though he has spent his life researching insects, has lectured in America and Australia in his time, has travelled the world with his work. But after his illness – nervous exhaustion or breakdown it used to be called; stress they call it nowadays – he just didn’t feel like going back to it, the lecturing, the constant demands to publish research. Then his wife died, and he’d opted out of life, and what a relief that was.

Now he spends his days quietly, caring for the collection, and other things in the museum, just to be there, just to breathe the air, with its faint and probably imaginary tang of formaldehyde. Occasionally he gives a talk to the nice ladies of the Women’s Guild. Things like that. It’s a soft and gentle life. And he likes it. Away from the pressure and expectation of success.