‘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.
‘Exackly 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.’