'Ah! There you are! That's exactly where you're wrong, see. This powder swells. When you wet it, it swells. Gets into the rat's tubes and swells right up and kills him quicker'n anythin' in the world.'
'That's where you got to know rats.'
The ratman's face glowed with a stealthy pride, and he rubbed his stringy fingers together, holding the hands up close to the face. Claud watched him, fascinated.
'Now—where's them rats?' The word 'rats' came out of his mouth soft and throaty, with a rich fruity relish as though he were gargling with melted butter. 'Let's take a look at them rraats.'
'Over there in the hayrick across the road.'
'Not in the house?' he asked, obviously disappointed.
'No. Only around the hayrick. Nowhere else.'
'I'll wager they're in the house too. Like as not gettin' in all your food in the night and spreadin' disease and sickness. You got any disease here?' he asked, looking first at me, then at Claud.
'Everyone fine here.'
'Quite sure?'
'Oh yes.'
'You never know, you see. You could be sickenin' for it weeks and weeks and not feel it. Then all of a sudden—bang!—and it's got you. That's why Dr Arbuthnot's so particular. That's why he sent me out so quick, see. To stop the spreadin' of disease.'
He had now taken upon himself the mantle of the Health Officer. A most important rat he was now, deeply disappointed that we were not suffering from bubonic plague.
'I feel fine,' Claud said, nervously.
The ratman searched his face again, but said nothing.
'And how are you goin' to catch 'em in the hayrick?'
The ratman grinned, a crafty toothy grin. He reached down into his knapsack and withdrew a large tin which he held up level with his face. He peered around one side of it at Claud.
'Poison!' he whispered. But he pronounced it pye-zn, making it into a soft, dark, dangerous word. 'Deadly pye-zn, that's what this is!' He was weighing the tin up and down in his hands as he spoke. 'Enough here to kill a million men!'
'Terrifying,' Claud said.
'Exactly it! They'd put you inside for six months if they caught you with even a spoonful of this,' he said, wetting his lips with his tongue. He had a habit of craning his head forward on his neck as he spoke.
'Want to see?' he asked, taking a penny from his pocket, prising open the lid. 'There now! There it is!' He spoke fondly, almost lovingly of the stuff, and he held it forward for Claud to look.
'Corn? Or barley is it?'
'It's oats. Soaked in deadly pye-zn. You take just one of them grains in your mouth and you'd be a gonner in five minutes.'
'Honest?'
'Yep. Never out of me sight, this tin.'
He caressed it with his hands and gave it a little shake so that the oat grains rustled softly inside.
'But not today. Your rats don't get this today. They wouldn't have it anyway. That they wouldn't. There's where you got to know rats. Rats is suspicious. Terrible suspicious, rats is. So today they gets some nice clean tasty oats as'll do 'em no harm in the world. Fatten 'em, that's all it'll do. And tomorrow they gets the same again. And it'll taste so good there'll be all the rats in the districk comin' along after a couple of days.'
'Rather clever.'
'You got to be clever on this job. You got to be cleverer'n a rat and that's sayin' something.'
'You've almost got to be a rat yourself,' I said. It slipped out in error, before I had time to Stop myself, and I couldn't really help it because I was looking at the man at the time. But the effect upon him was surprising.
'There!' he cried. 'Now you got it! Now you really said something! A good ratter's got to be more like a rat than anythin' else in the world! Cleverer even than a rat, and that's not an easy thing to be, let me tell you!'
'Quite sure it's not.'
'All right, then let's go. I haven't got all day, you know. There's Lady Leonora Benson asking for me urgent up there at the Manor.'
'She got rats, too?'
'Everybody's got rats,' the ratman said, and he ambled off down the driveway, across the road to the hayrick and we watched him go. The way he walked was so like a rat it made you wonder—that slow, almost delicate ambling walk with a lot of give at the knees and no sound at all from the footsteps on the gravel. He hopped nimbly over the gate into the field, then walked quickly round the hayrick scattering handfuls of oats on to the ground.
The next day he returned and repeated the procedure.
The day after that he came again and this time he put down the poisoned oats. But he didn't scatter these; he placed them carefully in little piles at each corner of the rick.
'You got a dog?' he asked when he came back across the road on the third day after putting down the poison.
'Yes.'
'Now if you want to see your dog die an 'orrible twistin' death, all you got to do is let him in that gate some time.'
'We'll take care,' Claud told him. 'Don't you worry about that.'
The next day he returned once more, this time to collect the dead.
'You got an old sack?' he asked. 'Most likely we goin' to need a sack to put 'em in.'
He was puffed up and important now, the black eyes gleaming with pride. He was about to display the sensational results of his catch to the audience.
Claud fetched a sack and the three of us walked across the road, the ratman leading. Claud and I leaned over the gate, watching. The ratman prowled around the hayrick, bending over to inspect his little piles of poison.
'Somethin' wrong here,' he muttered. His voice was soft and angry.
He ambled over to another pile and got down on his knees to examine it closely.
'Somethin' bloody wrong here.'
'What's the matter?'
He didn't answer, but it was clear that the rats hadn't touched his bait.
'These are very clever rats here,' I said.
'Exactly what I told him, Gordon. These aren't just no ordinary kind of rats you're dealing with here.'
The ratman walked over to the gate. He was very annoyed and showed it on his face and around the nose and by the way the two yellow teeth were pressing down into the skin of his lower lip. 'Don't give me that crap,' he said, looking at me. 'There's nothing wrong with these rats except somebody's feedin'
'em. They got somethin' juicy to eat somewhere and plenty of it. There's no rats in the world'll turn down oats unless their bellies is full to burstin'.'
'They're clever,' Claud said.
The man turned away, disgusted. He knelt down again and began to scoop up the poisoned oats with a small shovel, tipping them carefully back into the tin. When he had done, all three of us walked back across the road.
The ratman stood near the petrol-pumps, a rather sorry, humble ratman now whose face was beginning to take on a brooding aspect. He had withdrawn into himself and was brooding in silence over his failure, the eyes veiled and wicked, the little tongue darting out to one side of the two yellow teeth, keeping the lips moist. It appeared to be essential that the lips should be kept moist. He looked up at me, a quick surreptitious glance, then over at Claud. His nose-end twitched, sniffing the air. He raised himself up and down a few times on his toes, swaying gently, and in a voice soft and secretive, he said: 'Want to see somethin'?' He was obviously trying to retrieve his reputation.
'What?'
