‘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 craft 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 nothin’ 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 He had withdrawn into himself and was brooding in silence over his failure, the eyes veiled and wicked, the little tongue darting out to one side of the two yellow teeth,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?’
‘Want to see somethin’ amazin’?’ As he said this he put his right hand into the deep poacher’s pocket of his jacket and brought out a large live rat clasped tight between his fingers.
‘Good God!’
‘Ah! That’s it, y’see!’ He was crouching slightly now and craning his neck forward and leering at us and holding this enormous brown rat in his hands, one finger and thumb making a tight circle around the creature’s neck, clamping its head rigid so it couldn’t turn and bite.
‘D’you usually carry rats around in your pockets?’
‘Always got a rat or two about me somewhere.’
With that he put his free hand into the other pocket and produced a small white ferret.
‘Ferret,’ he said, holding it up by the neck.
The ferret seemed to know him and stayed still in his grasp.
‘There’s nothin’ll kill a rat quicker’n a ferret. And there’s nothin’ a rat’s more frightened of either.’
He brought his hands close together in front of him so that the ferret’s nose was within six inches of the rat’s face. The pink beady eyes of the ferret stared at the rat. The rat struggled, trying to edge away from the killer.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Watch!’
His khaki shirt was open at the neck and he lifted the rat and slipped it down inside his shirt, next to his skin. As soon as his hand was free, he unbuttoned his jacket at the front so that the audience could see the bulge the body of the rat made under his shirt. His belt prevented it from going down lower than his waist.
Then he slipped the ferret in after the rat.