McQueen looked across his desk at the new applicant for a job with some scepticism. He had never employed such a one before. But he was not an unkind man, and if the job-seeker needed the money and was prepared to work, McQueen was not averse to giving him a chance.
‘You know it’s damn hard work?’ he said in his broad Belfast accent.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the applicant.
‘It’s a quick in-and-out job, ye know. No questions, no pack drill. You’ll be working on the lump. Do you know what that means?’
‘No, Mr McQueen.’
‘Well, it means you’ll be paid well but you’ll be paid in cash. No red tape. Geddit?’
What he meant was there would be no income tax paid, no National Health contributions deducted at source. He might also have added that there would be no National Insurance cover and that the Health and Safety standards would be completely ignored. Quick profits for all were the order of the day, with a fat slice off the top for himself as the contractor. The job-seeker nodded his head to indicate he had ‘goddit’ though in fact he had not. McQueen looked at him speculatively.
‘You say you’re a medical student, in your last year at the Royal Victoria?’ Another nod. ‘On the summer vacation?’
Another nod. The applicant was evidently one of those students who needed money over and above his grant to put himself through medical school. McQueen, sitting in his dingy Bangor office running a hole-and-corner business as a demolition contractor with assets consisting of a battered truck and a ton of second-hand sledgehammers, considered himself a self-made man and heartily approved of the Ulster Protestant work ethic. He was not one to put down another such thinker, whatever he looked like.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘you’d better take lodgings here in Bangor. You’ll never get from Belfast and back in time each day. We work from seven in the morning until sundown. It’s work by the hour, hard but well paid. Mention one word to the authorities and you’ll lose the job like shit off a shovel. OK?’
‘Yes, sir. Please, when do I start and where?’
‘The truck picks the gang up at the main station yard every morning at six-thirty. Be there Monday morning. The gang foreman is Big Billie Cameron. I’ll tell him you’ll be there.’
‘Yes, Mr McQueen.’ The applicant turned to go.
‘One last thing,’ said McQueen, pencil poised. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Harkishan Ram Lal,’ said the student. McQueen looked at his pencil, the list of names in front of him and the student.
‘We’ll call you Ram,’ he said, and that was the name he wrote down on the list.
The student walked out into the bright July sunshine of Bangor, on the north coast of County Down, Northern Ireland.
By that Saturday evening he had found himself cheap lodgings in a dingy boarding house halfway up Railway View Street, the heart of Bangor’s bed-and-breakfast land. At least it was convenient to the main station from which the works truck would depart every morning just after sun-up. From the grimy window of his room he could look straight at the side of the shored embankment that carried the trains from Belfast into the station.
It had taken him several tries to get a room. Most of those houses with a B-and-B notice in the window seemed to be fully booked when he presented himself on the doorstep. But then it was true that a lot of casual labour drifted into the town in the height of summer. True also that Mrs McGurk was a Catholic and she still had rooms left.
He spent Sunday morning bringing his belongings over from Belfast, most of them medical textbooks. In the afternoon he lay on his bed and thought of the bright hard light on the brown hills of his native Punjab. In one more year he would be a qualified physician, and after another year of intern work he would return home to cope with the sicknesses of his own people. Such was his dream. He calculated he could make enough money this summer to tide himself through to his finals and after that he would have a salary of his own.
On the Monday morning he rose at a quarter to six at the bidding of his alarm clock, washed in cold water and was in the station yard just after six. There was time to spare. He found an early-opening café and took two cups of black tea. It was his only sustenance. The battered truck, driven by one of the demolition gang, was there at a quarter past six and a dozen men assembled near it. Harkishan Ram Lal did not know whether to approach them and introduce himself, or wait at a distance. He waited.
At twenty-five past the hour the foreman arrived in his own car, parked it down a side road and strode up to the truck. He had McQueen’s list in his hand. He glanced at the dozen men, recognized them all and nodded. The Indian approached. The foreman glared at him.
‘Is youse the darkie McQueen has put on the job?’ he demanded.
Ram Lal stopped in his tracks. ‘Harkishan Ram Lal,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
There was no need to ask how Big Billie Cameron had earned his name. He stood 6 feet and 3 inches in his stockings but was wearing enormous nail-studded, steel-toed boots. Arms like tree trunks hung from huge shoulders and his head was surmounted by a shock of ginger hair. Two small, pale-lashed eyes stared down balefully at the slight and wiry Indian. It was plain he was not best pleased. He spat on the ground.
‘Well, get in the fecking truck,’ he said.
On the journey out to the work site Cameron sat up in the cab which had no partition dividing it from the back of the lorry, where the dozen labourers sat on two wooden benches down the sides. Ram Lal was near the tailboard next to a small, nut-hard man with bright blue eyes, whose name turned out to be Tommy Burns. He seemed friendly.
‘Where are youse from?’ he asked with genuine curiosity.
‘India,’ said Ram Lal. ‘The Punjab.’
‘Well, which?’ said Tommy Burns.
Ram Lal smiled. ‘The Punjab is part of India,’ he said.
Burns thought about this for a while. ‘You Protestant or Catholic?’ he asked at length.
‘Neither,’ said Ram Lal patiently. ‘I am a Hindu.’
‘You mean you’re not a Christian?’ asked Burns in amazement.
‘No. Mine is the Hindu religion.’
‘Hey,’ said Burns to the others, ‘your man’s not a Christian at all.’ He was not outraged, just curious, like a small child who has come across a new and intriguing toy.
Cameron turned from the cab up front. ‘Aye,’ he snarled, ‘a heathen.’
The smile dropped off Ram Lal’s face. He stared at the opposite canvas wall of the truck. By now they were well south of Bangor, clattering down the motorway towards Newtownards. After a while Burns began to introduce him to the others. There was a Craig, a Munroe, a Patterson, a Boyd and two Browns. Ram Lal had been long enough in Belfast to recognize the names as being originally Scottish, the sign of the hard Presbyterians who make up the backbone of the Protestant majority of the Six Counties. The men seemed amiable and nodded back at him.
‘Have you not got a lunch box, laddie?’ asked the elderly man called Patterson.
‘No,’ said Ram Lal, ‘it was too early to ask my landlady to make one up.’
‘You’ll need lunch,’ said Burns, ‘aye, and breakfast. We’ll be making tay ourselves on a fire.’
‘I will make sure to buy a box and bring some food tomorrow,’ said Ram Lal.
Burns looked at the Indian’s rubber-soled soft boots. ‘Have you not done this kind of work before?’ he asked.
Ram Lal shook his head.
‘You’ll need a pair of heavy boots. To save your feet, you see.’
Ram Lal promised he would also buy a pair of heavy ammunition boots from a store if he could find one open late at night. They were through Newtownards and still heading south on the A21 towards the small town of Comber. Craig looked across at him.
‘What’s your real job?’ he asked.
‘I’m a medical student at the Royal Victoria in Belfast,’ said Ram Lal. ‘I hope to qualify next year.’
Tommy Burns was delighted. ‘That’s near to being a real doctor,’ he said. ‘Hey, Big Billie, if one of us gets a knock young Ram could take care of it.’
Big Billie grunted. ‘He’s not putting a finger on me,’ he said.
That killed further conversation until they arrived at the work site. The driver had pulled north-west out of Comber and two miles up the Dundonald road he bumped down a track to the right until they came to a stop where the trees ended and saw the building to be demolished.
It was a huge old whiskey distillery, sheer-sided, long derelict. It had been one of two in these parts that had once turned out good Irish whiskey but had gone out of business years before. It stood beside the River Comber, which had once powered its great waterwheel as it flowed down from Dundonald to Comber and on to empty itself in Strangford Lough. The malt had arrived by horse-drawn cart down the track and the barrels of whiskey had left the same way. The sweet water that had powered the machines had also been used in the vats. But the distillery had stood alone, abandoned and empty for years.
Of course the local children had broken in and found it an ideal place to play. Until one had slipped and broken a leg. Then the county council had surveyed it, declared it a hazard and the owner found himself with a compulsory demolition order.
He, scion of an old family of squires who had known better days, wanted the job done as cheaply as possible. That was where McQueen came in. It could be done faster but more expensively with heavy machinery; Big Billie and his team would do it with sledges and crowbars. McQueen had even lined up a deal to sell the best timbers and the hundreds of tons of mature bricks to a jobbing builder. After all, the wealthy nowadays wanted their new houses to have ‘style’ and that meant looking old. So there was a premium on antique sun-bleached old bricks and genuine ancient timber beams to adorn the new-look-old ‘manor’ houses of the top executives. McQueen would do all right.
‘Right, lads,’ said Big Billie as the truck rumbled away back to Bangor. ‘There it is. We’ll start with the roof tiles. You know what to do.’
The group of men stood beside their pile of equipment. There were great sledgehammers with 7-pound heads; crowbars 6 feet long and over an inch thick; nailbars a yard long with curved split tips for extracting nails; short-handled, heavy-headed lump hammers and a variety of timber saws. The only concessions to human safety were a number of webbing belts with dogclips and hundreds of feet of rope. Ram Lal looked up at the building and swallowed. It was four storeys high and he hated heights. But scaffolding is expensive.
One of the men unbidden went to the building, prised off a plank door, tore it up like a playing card and started a fire. Soon a billycan of water from the river was boiling away and tea was made. They all had their enamel mugs except Ram Lal. He made a mental note to buy that also. It was going to be thirsty, dusty work. Tommy Burns finished his own mug and offered it, refilled, to Ram Lal.
‘Do they have tea in India?’ he asked.
Ram Lal took the proffered mug. The tea was ready-mixed, sweet and off-white. He hated it.
They worked through the first morning perched high on the roof. The tiles were not to be salvaged, so they tore them off manually and hurled them to the ground away from the river. There was an instruction not to block the river with falling rubble. So it all had to land on the other side of the building, in the long grass, weeds, broom and gorse which covered the area round the distillery. The men were roped together so that if one lost his grip and began to slither down the roof, the next man would take the strain. As the tiles disappeared, great yawning holes appeared between the rafters. Down below them was the floor of the top storey, the malt store.
At ten they came down the rickety internal stairs for breakfast on the grass, with another billycan of tea. Ram Lal ate no breakfast. At two they broke for lunch. The gang tucked into their piles of thick sandwiches. Ram Lal looked at his hands. They were nicked in several places and bleeding. His muscles ached and he was very hungry. He made another mental note about buying some heavy work gloves.
Tommy Burns held up a sandwich from his own box. ‘Are you not hungry, Ram?’ he asked. ‘Sure, I have enough here.’
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ asked Big Billie from where he sat across the circle round the fire.
Burns looked defensive. ‘Just offering the lad a sandwich,’ he said.
‘Let the darkie bring his own fecking sandwiches,’ said Cameron. ‘You look after yourself.’
The men looked down at their lunch boxes and ate in silence. It was obvious no-one argued the toss with Big Billie.
‘Thank you, I am not hungry,’ said Ram Lal to Burns. He walked away and sat by the river where he bathed his burning hands.
By sundown when the truck came to collect them half the tiles on the great roof were gone. One more day and they would start on the rafters, work for saw and nailbar.
Throughout the week the work went on, and the once proud building was stripped of its rafters, planks and beams until it stood hollow and open, its gaping windows like open eyes staring at the prospect of its imminent death. Ram Lal was unaccustomed to the arduousness of this kind of labour. His muscles ached endlessly, his hands were blistered, but he toiled on for the money he needed so badly.
He had acquired a tin lunch box, enamel mug, hard boots and a pair of heavy gloves, which no-one else wore. Their hands were hard enough from years of manual work. Throughout the week Big Billie Cameron needled him without let-up, giving him the hardest work and positioning him on the highest points once he had learned Ram Lal hated heights. The Punjabi bit on his anger because he needed the money. The crunch came on the Saturday.
The timbers were gone and they were working on the masonry. The simplest way to bring the edifice down away from the river would have been to plant explosive charges in the corners of the side wall facing the open clearing. But dynamite was out of the question. It would have required special licences in Northern Ireland of all places, and that would have alerted the tax man. McQueen and all his gang would have been required to pay substantial sums in income tax, and McQueen in National Insurance contributions. So they were chipping the walls down in square-yard chunks, standing hazardously on sagging floors as the supporting walls splintered and cracked under the hammers.
During lunch Cameron walked round the building a couple of times and came back to the circle round the fire. He began to describe how they were going to bring down a sizeable chunk of one outer wall at third-floor level. He turned to Ram Lal.
‘I want you up on the top there,’ he said. ‘When it starts to go kick it outwards.’
Ram Lal looked up at the section of wall in question. A great crack ran along the bottom of it.
‘That brickwork is going to fall at any moment,’ he said evenly. ‘Anyone sitting on top there is going to come down with it.’
Cameron stared at him, his face suffusing, his eyes pink with rage where they should have been white. ‘Don’t you tell me my job; you do as you’re told, you stupid fecking nigger.’ He turned and stalked away.
Ram Lal rose to his feet. When his voice came, it was in hard-edged shout. ‘Mister Cameron …’
Cameron turned in amazement. The men sat open-mouthed. Ram Lal walked slowly up to the big ganger.
‘Let us get one thing plain,’ said Ram Lal, and his voice carried clearly to everyone else in the clearing. ‘I am from the Punjab in northern India. I am also a Kshatria, member of the warrior caste. I may not have enough money to pay for my medical studies, but my ancestors were soldiers and princes, rulers and scholars, two thousand years ago when yours were crawling on all fours dressed in skins. Please do not insult me any further.’
Big Billie Cameron stared down at the Indian student. The whites of his eyes had turned a bright red. The other labourers sat in stunned amazement.
‘Is that so?’ said Cameron quietly. ‘Is that so, now? Well, things are a bit different now, you black bastard. So what are you going to do about that?’
On the last word he swung his arm, open-palmed, and his hand crashed into the side of Ram Lal’s face. The youth was thrown bodily to the ground several feet away. His head sang. He heard Tommy Burns call out, ‘Stay down, laddie. Big Billie will kill you if you get up.’
Ram Lal looked up into the sunlight. The giant stood over him, fists bunched. He realized he had not a chance in combat against the big Ulsterman. Feelings of shame and humiliation flooded over him. His ancestors had ridden, sword and lance in hand, across plains a hundred times bigger than these six counties, conquering all before them.
Ram Lal closed his eyes and lay still. After several seconds he heard the big man move away. A low conversation started among the others. He squeezed his eyes tighter shut to hold back the tears of shame. In the blackness he saw the baking plains of the Punjab and men riding over them; proud, fierce men, hook-nosed, bearded, turbaned, black-eyed, the warriors from the Land of Five Rivers.
Once, long ago in the world’s morning, Iskander of Macedon had ridden over these plains with his hot and hungry eyes; Alexander, the young god, whom they called The Great, who at twenty-five had wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. These riders were the descendants of his captains, and the ancestors of Harkishan Ram Lal.
He was lying in the dust as they rode by, and they looked down at him in passing. As they rode each of them mouthed one single word to him. Vengeance.
Ram Lal picked himself up in silence. It was done, and what still had to be done had to be done. That was the way of his people. He spent the rest of the day working in complete silence. He spoke to no-one and no-one spoke to him.
That evening in his room he began his preparations as night was about to fall. He cleared away the brush and comb from the battered dressing table and removed also the soiled doily and the mirror from its stand. He took his book of the Hindu religion and from it cut a page-sized portrait of the great goddess Shakti, she of power and justice. This he pinned to the wall above the dressing table to convert it into a shrine.
He had bought a bunch of flowers from a seller in front of the main station, and these had been woven into a garland. To one side of the portrait of the goddess he placed a shallow bowl half-filled with sand, and in the sand stuck a candle which he lit. From his suitcase he took a cloth roll and extracted half a dozen joss sticks. Taking a cheap, narrow-necked vase from the bookshelf, he placed them in it and lit the ends. The sweet heady odour of the incense began to fill the room. Outside, big thunderheads rolled up from the sea.
When his shrine was ready he stood before it, head bowed, the garland in his fingers, and began to pray for guidance. The first rumble of thunder rolled over Bangor. He used not the modern Punjabi but the ancient Sanskrit, language of prayer. ‘Devi Shakti … Maa … Goddess Shakti … great mother …’
The thunder crashed again and the first raindrops fell. He plucked the first flower and placed it in front of the portrait of Shakti.
‘I have been grievously wronged. I ask vengeance upon the wrongdoer …’ He plucked the second flower and put it beside the first.
He prayed for an hour while the rain came down. It drummed on the tiles above his head, streamed past the window behind him. He finished praying as the storm subsided. He needed to know what form the retribution should take. He needed the goddess to send him a sign.
When he had finished, the joss sticks had burned themselves out and the room was thick with their scent. The candle guttered low. The flowers all lay on the lacquered surface of the dressing table in front of the portrait. Shakti stared back at him unmoved.
He turned and walked to the window to look out. The rain had stopped but everything beyond the panes dripped water. As he watched a dribble of rain sprang from the guttering above the window and a trickle ran down the dusty glass, cutting a path through the grime. Because of the dirt it did not run straight but meandered sideways, drawing his eye farther and farther to the corner of the window as he followed its path. When it stopped he was staring at the corner of his room, where his dressing gown hung on a nail.
He noticed that during the storm the dressing-gown cord had slipped and fallen to the floor. It lay coiled upon itself, one knotted end hidden from view, the other lying visible on the carpet. Of the dozen tassels only two were exposed, like a forked tongue. The coiled dressing-gown cord resembled nothing so much as a snake in the corner. Ram Lal understood. The next day he took the train to Belfast to see the Sikh.
Ranjit Singh was also a medical student, but he was more fortunate. His parents were rich and sent him a handsome allowance. He received Ram Lal in his well-furnished room at the hostel.
‘I have received word from home,’ said Ram Lal. ‘My father is dying.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Ranjit Singh, ‘you have my sympathies.’
‘He asks to see me. I am his first-born. I should return.’
‘Of course,’ said Singh. The first-born son should always be by his father when he dies.
‘It is a matter of the air fare,’ said Ram Lal. ‘I am working and making good money. But I do not have enough. If you will lend me the balance I will continue working when I return and repay you.’
Sikhs are no strangers to money lending if the interest is right and repayment secure. Ranjit Singh promised to withdraw the money from the bank on Monday morning.
That Sunday evening Ram Lal visited Mr McQueen at his home at Groomsport. The contractor was in front of his television set with a can of beer at his elbow. It was his favourite way to spend a Sunday evening. But he turned the sound down as Ram Lal was shown in by his wife.
‘It is about my father,’ said Ram Lal. ‘He is dying.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, laddie,’ said McQueen.
‘I should go to him. The first-born son should be with his father at this time. It is the custom of our people.’
McQueen had a son in Canada whom he had not seen for seven years.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘that seems right and proper.’
‘I have borrowed the money for the air fare,’ said Ram Lal. ‘If I went tomorrow I could be back by the end of the week. The point is, Mr McQueen, I need the job more than ever now; to repay the loan and for my studies next term. If I am back by the weekend, will you keep the job open for me?’
‘All right,’ said the contractor. ‘I can’t pay you for the time you’re away. Nor keep the job open for a further week. But if you’re back by the weekend, you can go back to work. Same terms, mind.’
‘Thank you,’ said Ram, ‘you are very kind.’
He retained his room in Railway View Street but spent the night at his hostel in Belfast. On the Monday morning he accompanied Ranjit Singh to the bank where the Sikh withdrew the necessary money and gave it to the Hindu. Ram took a taxi to Aldergrove airport and the shuttle to London where he bought an economy-class ticket on the next flight to India. Twenty-four hours later he touched down in the blistering heat of Bombay.
On the Wednesday he found what he sought in the teeming bazaar at Grant Road Bridge. Mr Chatterjee’s Tropical Fish and Reptile Emporium was almost deserted when the young student, with his textbook on reptiles under his arm, wandered in. He found the old proprietor sitting near the back of his shop in half-darkness, surrounded by his tanks of fish and glass-fronted cases in which his snakes and lizards dozed through the hot day.
Mr Chatterjee was no stranger to the academic world. He supplied several medical centres with samples for study and dissection, and occasionally filled a lucrative order from abroad. He nodded his white-bearded head knowledgeably as the student explained what he sought.
‘Ah yes,’ said the old Bengali merchant, ‘I know the snake. You are in luck. I have one, but a few days arrived from Rajputana.’
He led Ram Lal into his private sanctum and the two men stared silently through the glass of the snake’s new home.
Echis carinatus, said the textbook, but of course the book had been written by an Englishman, who had used the Latin nomenclature. In English, the saw-scaled viper, smallest and deadliest of all his lethal breed.
Wide distribution, said the textbook, being found from West Africa eastwards and northwards to Iran, and on to India and Pakistan. Very adaptable, able to acclimatize to almost any environment, from the moist bush of western Africa to the cold hills of Iran in winter to the baking hills of India.
Something stirred beneath the leaves in the box.
In size, said the textbook, between 9 and 13 inches long and very slim. Olive brown in colour with a few paler spots, sometimes hardly distinguishable, and a faint undulating darker line down the side of the body. Nocturnal in dry, hot weather, seeking cover during the heat of the day.
The leaves in the box rustled again and a tiny head appeared.
Exceptionally dangerous to handle, said the textbook, causing more deaths than even the more famous cobra, largely because of its size which makes it so easy to touch unwittingly with hand or foot. The author of the book had added a footnote to the effect that the small but lethal snake mentioned by Kipling in his marvellous story ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavy’ was almost certainly not the krait, which is about 2 feet long, but more probably the saw-scaled viper. The author was obviously pleased to have caught out the great Kipling in a matter of accuracy.
In the box, a little black forked tongue flickered towards the two Indians beyond the glass.
Very alert and irritable, the long-gone English naturalist had concluded his chapter on Echis carinatus. Strikes quickly without warning. The fangs are so small they make a virtually unnoticeable puncture, like two tiny thorns. There is no pain, but death is almost inevitable, usually taking between two and four hours, depending on the bodyweight of the victim and the level of his physical exertions at the time and afterwards. Cause of death is invariably a brain haemorrhage.
‘How much do you want for him?’ whispered Ram Lal.
The old Gujerati spread his hands helplessly. ‘Such a prime specimen,’ he said regretfully, ‘and so hard to come by. Five hundred rupees.’
Ram Lal clinched the deal at 350 rupees and took the snake away in a jar.
For his journey back to London Ram Lal purchased a box of cigars, which he emptied of their contents and in whose lid he punctured twenty small holes for air. The tiny viper, he knew, would need no food for a week and no water for two or three days. It could breathe on an infinitesimal supply of air, so he wrapped the cigar box, resealed and with the viper inside it among his leaves, in several towels whose thick sponginess would contain enough air even inside a suitcase.
He had arrived with a handgrip, but he bought a cheap fibre suitcase and packed it with clothes from market stalls, the cigar box going in the centre. It was only minutes before he left his hotel for Bombay airport that he closed and locked the case. For the flight back to London he checked the suitcase into the hold of the Boeing airliner. His hand baggage was searched, but it contained nothing of interest.
The Air India jet landed at London Heathrow on Friday morning and Ram Lal joined the long queue of Indians trying to get into Britain. He was able to prove he was a medical student and not an immigrant, and was allowed through quite quickly. He even reached the luggage carousel as the first suitcases were tumbling onto it, and saw his own in the first two dozen. He took it to the toilet, where he extracted the cigar box and put it in his handgrip.
In the Nothing-to-Declare channel he was stopped all the same, but it was his suitcase that was ransacked. The customs officer glanced in his shoulder bag and let him pass. Ram Lal crossed Heathrow by courtesy bus to Number One Building and caught the midday shuttle to Belfast. He was in Bangor by teatime and able at last to examine his import.
He took a sheet of glass from the bedside table and slipped it carefully between the lid of the cigar box and its deadly contents before opening wide. Through the glass he saw the viper going round and round inside. It paused and stared with angry black eyes back at him. He pulled the lid shut, withdrawing the pane of glass quickly as the box top came down.
‘Sleep, little friend,’ he said, ‘if your breed ever sleep. In the morning you will do Shakti’s bidding for her.’
Before dark he bought a small screw-top jar of coffee and poured the contents into a china pot in his room. In the morning, using his heavy gloves, he transferred the viper from the box to the jar. The enraged snake bit his glove once, but he did not mind. It would have recovered its venom by midday. For a moment he studied the snake, coiled and cramped inside the glass coffee jar, before giving the top a last, hard twist and placing it in his lunch box. Then he went to catch the works truck.
Big Billie Cameron had a habit of taking off his jacket the moment he arrived at the work site, and hanging it on a convenient nail or twig. During the lunch break, as Ram Lal had observed, the giant foreman never failed to go to his jacket after eating, and from the right-hand pocket extract his pipe and tobacco pouch. The routine did not vary. After a satisfying pipe, he would knock out the dottle, rise and say, ‘Right, lads, back to work,’ as he dropped his pipe back into the pocket of his jacket. By the time he turned round everyone had to be on their feet.
Ram Lal’s plan was simple but foolproof. During the morning he would slip the snake into the right-hand pocket of the hanging jacket. After his sandwiches the bullying Cameron would rise from the fire, go to his jacket and plunge his hand into the pocket. The snake would do what great Shakti had ordered that he be brought halfway across the world to do. It would be he, the viper, not Ram Lal, who would be the Ulsterman’s executioner.
Cameron would withdraw his hand with an oath from the pocket, the viper hanging from his finger, its fangs deep in the flesh. Ram Lal would leap up, tear the snake away, throw it to the ground and stamp upon its head. It would by then be harmless, its venom expended. Finally, with a gesture of disgust he, Ram Lal, would hurl the dead viper far into the River Comber, which would carry all evidence away to the sea. There might be suspicion, but that was all there would ever be.
Shortly after eleven o’clock, on the excuse of fetching a fresh sledgehammer, Harkishan Ram Lal opened his lunch box, took out the coffee jar, unscrewed the lid and shook the contents into the right-hand pocket of the hanging jacket. Within sixty seconds he was back at his work, his act unnoticed.
During lunch he found it hard to eat. The men sat as usual in a circle round the fire; the dry old timber baulks crackled and spat, the billycan bubbled above them. The men joshed and joked as ever, while Big Billie munched his way through the pile of doorstep sandwiches his wife had prepared for him. Ram Lal had made a point of choosing a place in the circle near to the jacket. He forced himself to eat. In his chest his heart was pounding and the tension in him rose steadily.
Finally Big Billie crumpled the paper of his eaten sandwiches, threw it in the fire and belched. He rose with a grunt and walked towards his jacket. Ram Lal turned his head to watch. The other men took no notice. Billie Cameron reached his jacket and plunged his hand into the right-hand pocket. Ram Lal held his breath. Cameron’s hand rummaged for several seconds and then withdrew his pipe and pouch. He began to fill the bowl with fresh tobacco. As he did so he caught Ram Lal staring at him.
‘What are youse looking at?’ he demanded belligerently.
‘Nothing,’ said Ram Lal, and turned to face the fire. But he could not stay still. He rose and stretched, contriving to half turn as he did so. From the corner of his eye he saw Cameron replace the pouch in the pocket and again withdraw his hand with a box of matches in it. The foreman lit his pipe and pulled contentedly. He strolled back to the fire.
Ram Lal resumed his seat and stared at the flames in disbelief. Why, he asked himself, why had great Shakti done this to him? The snake had been her tool, her instrument brought at her command. But she had held it back, refused to use her own implement of retribution. He turned and sneaked another glance at the jacket. Deep down in the lining at the very hem, on the extreme left-hand side, something stirred and was still. Ram Lal closed his eyes in shock. A hole, a tiny hole in the lining, had undone all his planning. He worked the rest of the afternoon in a daze of indecision and worry.
On the truck ride back to Bangor, Big Billie Cameron sat up front as usual, but in view of the heat folded his jacket and put it on his knees. In front of the station Ram Lal saw him throw the still-folded jacket onto the back seat of his car and drive away. Ram Lal caught up with Tommy Burns as the little man waited for his bus.
‘Tell me,’ he asked, ‘does Mr Cameron have a family?’
‘Sure,’ said the little labourer innocently, ‘a wife and two children.’
‘Does he live far from here?’ said Ram Lal. ‘I mean, he drives a car.’
‘Not far,’ said Burns, ‘up on the Kilcooley estate. Ganaway Gardens, I think. Going visiting are you?’
‘No, no,’ said Ram Lal, ‘see you Monday.’
Back in his room Ram Lal stared at the impassive image of the goddess of justice.
‘I did not mean to bring death to his wife and children,’ he told her. ‘They have done nothing to me.’
The goddess from far away stared back and gave no reply.
Harkishan Ram Lal spent the rest of the weekend in an agony of anxiety. That evening he walked to the Kilcooley housing estate on the ring road and found Ganaway Gardens. It lay just off Owenroe Garden and opposite Woburn Walk. At the corner of Woburn Walk there was a telephone kiosk, and here he waited for an hour, pretending to make a call, while he watched the short street across the road. He thought he spotted Big Billie Cameron at one of the windows and noted the house.
He saw a teenage girl come out of it and walk away to join some friends. For a moment he was tempted to accost her and tell her what demon slept inside her father’s jacket, but he dared not.
Shortly before dusk a woman came out of the house carrying a shopping basket. He followed her down to the Clandeboye shopping centre, which was open late for those who took their wage packets on a Saturday. The woman he thought to be Mrs Cameron entered Stewart’s supermarket and the Indian student trailed round the shelves behind her, trying to pluck up the courage to approach her and reveal the danger in her house. Again his nerve failed him. He might, after all, have the wrong woman, even be mistaken about the house. In that case they would take him away as a madman.
He slept ill that night, his mind racked by visions of the saw-scaled viper coming out of its hiding place in the jacket lining to slither, silent and deadly, through the sleeping council house.
On the Sunday he again haunted the Kilcooley estate, and firmly identified the house of the Cameron family. He saw Big Billie clearly in the back garden. By mid-afternoon he was attracting attention locally and knew he must either walk boldly up to the front door and admit what he had done, or depart and leave all in the hands of the goddess. The thought of facing the terrible Cameron with the news of what deadly danger had been brought so close to his children was too much. He walked back to Railway View Street.
On Monday morning the Cameron family rose at a quarter to six, a bright and sunny August morning. By six the four of them were at breakfast in the tiny kitchen at the back of the house, the son, daughter and wife in their dressing gowns, Big Billie dressed for work. His jacket was where it had spent the weekend, in a closet in the hallway.
Just after six his daughter Jenny rose, stuffing a piece of marmaladed toast into her mouth.
‘I’m away to wash,’ she said.
‘Before ye go girl, get my jacket from the press,’ said her father, working his way through a plate of cereal. The girl reappeared a few seconds later with the jacket, held by the collar. She proffered it to her father. He hardly looked up.
‘Hang it behind the door,’ he said. The girl did as she was bid, but the jacket had no hanging tab and the hook was no rusty nail but a smooth chrome affair. The jacket hung for a moment, then fell to the kitchen floor. Her father looked up as she left the room.
‘Jenny,’ he shouted, ‘pick the damn thing up.’
No-one in the Cameron household argued with the head of the family. Jenny came back, picked up the jacket and hung it more firmly. As she did, something thin and dark slipped from its folds and slithered into the corner with a dry rustle across the linoleum. She stared at it in horror.
‘Dad, what’s that in your jacket?’
Big Billie Cameron paused, a spoonful of cereal halfway to his mouth. Mrs Cameron turned from the cooker. Fourteen-year-old Bobby ceased buttering a piece of toast and stared. The small creature lay curled in the corner by a row of cabinets, tight-bunched, defensive, glaring back at the world, tiny tongue flickering fast.
‘Lord save us, it’s a snake,’ said Mrs Cameron.
‘Don’t be a bloody fool, woman. Don’t you know there are no snakes in Ireland? Everyone knows that,’ said her husband. He put down the spoon. ‘What is it, Bobby?’
Though a tyrant inside and outside his house, Big Billie had a grudging respect for the knowledge of his young son, who was good at school and was being taught many strange things. The boy stared at the snake through his owlish glasses.
‘It must be a slowworm, Dad,’ he said. ‘They had some at school last term for the biology class. Brought them in for dissection. From across the water.’
‘It doesn’t look like a worm to me,’ said his father.
‘It isn’t really a worm,’ said Bobby. ‘It’s a lizard with no legs.’
‘Then why do they call it a worm?’ asked his truculent father.
‘I don’t know,’ said Bobby.
‘Then what the hell are you going to school for?’
‘Will it bite?’ asked Mrs Cameron fearfully.
‘Not at all,’ said Bobby. ‘It’s harmless.’
‘Kill it,’ said Cameron senior, ‘and throw it in the dustbin.’
His son rose from the table and removed one of his slippers, which he held like a flyswat in one hand. He was advancing, bare-ankled, towards the corner, when his father changed his mind. Big Billie looked up from his plate with a gleeful smile.
‘Hold on a minute, just hold on there, Bobby,’ he said, ‘I have an idea. Woman, get me a jar.’
‘What kind of jar?’ asked Mrs Cameron.
‘How should I know what kind of a jar? A jar with a lid on it.’
Mrs Cameron sighed, skirted the snake and opened a cupboard. She examined her store of jars.
‘There’s a jamjar, with dried peas in it,’ she said.
‘Put the peas somewhere else and give me the jar,’ commanded Cameron. She passed him the jar.
‘What are you going to do, Dad?’ asked Bobby.
‘There’s a darkie we have at work. A heathen man. He comes from a land with a lot of snakes in it. I have in mind to have some fun with him. A wee joke, like. Pass me that oven glove, Jenny.’
‘You’ll not need a glove,’ said Bobby. ‘He can’t bite you.’
‘I’m not touching the dirty thing,’ said Cameron.
‘He’s not dirty,’ said Bobby. ‘They’re very clean creatures.’
‘You’re a fool, boy, for all your school learning. Does the Good Book not say: “On thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat …”? Aye, and more than dust, no doubt. I’ll not touch him with me hand.’
Jenny passed her father the oven glove. Open jamjar in his left hand, right hand protected by the glove, Big Billie Cameron stood over the viper. Slowly his right hand descended. When it dropped, it was fast; but the small snake was faster. Its tiny fangs went harmlessly into the padding of the glove at the centre of the palm. Cameron did not notice, for the act was masked from his view by his own hands. In a trice the snake was inside the jamjar and the lid was on. Through the glass they watched it wriggle furiously.
‘I hate them, harmless or not,’ said Mrs Cameron. ‘I’ll thank you to get it out of the house.’
‘I’ll be doing that right now,’ said her husband, ‘for I’m late as it is.’
He slipped the jamjar into his shoulder bag, already containing his lunch box, stuffed his pipe and pouch into the right-hand pocket of his jacket and took both out to the car. He arrived at the station yard five minutes late and was surprised to find the Indian student staring at him fixedly.
I suppose he wouldn’t have the second sight, thought Big Billie as they trundled south to Newtownards and Comber.
By mid-morning all the gang had been let into Big Billie’s secret joke on pain of a thumping if they let on to ‘the darkie’. There was no chance of that; assured that the slowworm was perfectly harmless, they too thought it a good leg-pull. Only Ram Lal worked on in ignorance, consumed by his private thoughts and worries.
At the lunch break he should have suspected something. The tension was palpable. The men sat in a circle around the fire as usual, but the conversation was stilted and had he not been so preoccupied he would have noticed the half-concealed grins and the looks darted in his direction. He did not notice. He placed his own lunch box between his knees and opened it. Coiled between the sandwiches and the apple, head back to strike, was the viper.
The Indian’s scream echoed across the clearing, just ahead of the roar of laughter from the labourers. Simultaneously with the scream, the lunch box flew high in the air as he threw it away from himself with all his strength. All the contents of the box flew in a score of directions, landing in the long grass, the broom and gorse all around them.
Ram Lal was on his feet, shouting. The gangers rolled helplessly in their mirth, Big Billie most of all. He had not had such a laugh in months.
‘It’s a snake,’ screamed Ram Lal, ‘a poisonous snake. Get out of here, all of you. It’s deadly.’
The laughter redoubled; the men could not contain themselves. The reaction of the joke’s victim surpassed all their expectations.
‘Please, believe me. It’s a snake, a deadly snake.’
Big Billie’s face was suffused. He wiped tears from his eyes, seated across the clearing from Ram Lal, who was standing looking wildly around.
‘You ignorant darkie,’ he gasped, ‘don’t you know? There are no snakes in Ireland. Understand? There aren’t any.’
His sides ached with laughing and he leaned back in the grass, his hands behind him to support him. He failed to notice the two pricks like tiny thorns, that went into the vein on the inside of the right wrist.
The joke was over and the hungry men tucked into their lunches. Harkishan Ram Lal reluctantly took his seat, constantly glancing round him, a mug of steaming tea held ready, eating only with his left hand, staying clear of the long grass. After lunch they returned to work. The old distillery was almost down, the mountains of rubble and savable timbers lying dusty under the August sun.
At half past three Big Billie Cameron stood up from his work, rested on his pick and passed a hand across his forehead. He licked at a slight swelling on the inside of his wrist, then started work again. Five minutes later he straightened up again.
‘I’m not feeling so good,’ he told Patterson, who was next to him. ‘I’m going to take a spell in the shade.’
He sat under a tree for a while and then held his head in his hands. At a quarter past four, still clutching his splitting head, he gave one convulsion and toppled sideways. It was several minutes before Tommy Burns noticed him. He walked across and called to Patterson.
‘Big Billie’s sick,’ he called. ‘He won’t answer me.’
The gang broke and came over to the tree in whose shade the foreman lay. His sightless eyes were staring at the grass a few inches from his face. Patterson bent over him. He had been long enough in the labouring business to have seen a few dead ones.
‘Ram,’ he said, ‘you have medical training. What do you think?’
Ram Lal did not need to make an examination, but he did. When he straightened up he said nothing, but Patterson understood.
‘Stay here all of you,’ he said, taking command. ‘I’m going to phone an ambulance and call McQueen.’ He set off down the track to the main road.
The ambulance got there first, half an hour later. It reversed down the track and two men heaved Cameron onto a stretcher. They took him away to Newtownards General Hospital, which had the nearest casualty unit, and there the foreman was logged in as DOA – dead on arrival. An extremely worried McQueen arrived thirty minutes after that.
Because of the unknown circumstances of the death an autopsy had to be performed and it was, by the North Down area pathologist, in the Newtownards municipal mortuary to which the body had been transferred. That was on the Tuesday. By that evening the pathologist’s report was on its way to the office of the coroner for North Down, in Belfast.
The report said nothing extraordinary. The deceased had been a man of forty-one years, big-built and immensely strong. There were upon the body various minor cuts and abrasions, mainly on the hands and wrists, quite consistent with the job of navvy, and none of these were in any way associated with the cause of death. The latter, beyond a doubt, had been a massive brain haemorrhage, itself probably caused by extreme exertion in conditions of great heat.
Possessed of this report, the coroner would normally not hold an inquest, being able to issue a certificate of death by natural causes to the registrar at Bangor. But there was something Harkishan Ram Lal did not know.
Big Billie Cameron had been a leading member of the Bangor council of the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force, the hard-line Protestant para-military organization. The computer at Lurgan, into which all deaths in the province of Ulster, however innocent, are programmed, threw this out and someone in Lurgan picked up the phone to call the Royal Ulster Constabulary at Castlereagh.
Someone there called the coroner’s office in Belfast, and a formal inquest was ordered. In Ulster death must not only be accidental; it must be seen to be accidental. For certain people, at least. The inquest was in the Town Hall at Bangor on the Wednesday. It meant a lot of trouble for McQueen, for the Inland Revenue attended. So did two quiet men of extreme Loyalist persuasion from the UVF council. They sat at the back. Most of the dead man’s workmates sat near the front, a few feet from Mrs Cameron.
Only Patterson was called to give evidence. He related the events of the Monday, prompted by the coroner, and as there was no dispute none of the other labourers was called, not even Ram Lal. The coroner read the pathologist’s report aloud and it was clear enough. When he had finished, he summed up before giving his verdict.
‘The pathologist’s report is quite unequivocal. We have heard from Mr Patterson of the events of that lunch break, of the perhaps rather foolish prank played by the deceased upon the Indian student. It would seem that Mr Cameron was so amused that he laughed himself almost to the verge of apoplexy. The subsequent heavy labour with pick and shovel in the blazing sun did the rest, provoking the rupture of a large blood vessel in the brain or, as the pathologist put it in more medical language, a cerebral hameorrhage. This court extends its sympathy to the widow and her children, and finds that Mr William Cameron died of accidental causes.’
Outside on the lawns that spread before Bangor Town Hall McQueen talked to his navvies.
‘I’ll stand fair by you, lads,’ he said. ‘The job’s still on, but I can’t afford not to deduct tax and all the rest, not with the Revenue breathing down my neck. The funeral’s tomorrow, you can take the day off. Those who want to go on can report on Friday.’
Harkishan Ram Lal did not attend the funeral. While it was in progress at the Bangor cemetery he took a taxi back to Comber and asked the driver to wait on the road while he walked down the track. The driver was a Bangor man and had heard about the death of Cameron.
‘Going to pay your respects on the spot, are you?’ he asked.
‘In a way,’ said Ram Lal.
‘That the manner of your people?’ asked the driver.
‘You could say so,’ said Ram Lal.
‘Aye, well, I’ll not say it’s any better or worse than our way, by the graveside,’ said the driver, and prepared to read his paper while he waited.
Harkishan Ram Lal walked down the track to the clearing and stood where the camp fire had been. He looked around at the long grass, the broom and the gorse in its sandy soil.
‘Visha serp,’ he called out to the hidden viper. ‘O venomous snake, can you hear me? You have done what I brought you so far from the hills of Rajputana to achieve. But you were supposed to die. I should have killed you myself, had it all gone as I planned, and thrown your foul carcass in the river.
‘Are you listening, deadly one? Then hear this. You may live a little longer but then you will die, as all things die. And you will die alone, without a female with which to mate, because there are no snakes in Ireland.’
The saw-scaled viper did not hear him, or if it did, gave no hint of understanding. Deep in its hole in the warm sand beneath him, it was busy, totally absorbed in doing what nature commanded it must do.
At the base of a snake’s tail are two overlapping plate-scales which obscure the cloaca. The viper’s tail was erect, the body throbbed in ancient rhythm. The plates were parted, and from the cloaca, one by one, each an inch long in its transparent sac, each as deadly at birth as its parent, she was bringing her dozen babies into the world.